The only difference between Clausewitz and his lineal successors is not that they are less brutal but that they are more disingenuous. When he comes to discuss that form of living on the country which is dignified by the name of requisitions, he roundly says they should be enforced.
“by the fear of responsibility, punishment, and ill-treatment which in such cases presses like a general weight on the whole population.... This resource has no limits except those of the exhaustion, impoverishment, and devastation of the whole country.”[9]
Our War Book is more discreet but not more merciful. Private property, it begins by saying, should always be respected. To take a man’s property when he is present is robbery; when he is absent it is “downright burglary.” But if the “necessity of war” makes it advisable, “every sequestration, every appropriation, temporary or permanent, every use, every injury and all destruction are permissible.”
It is, indeed, unfortunate that the War Book when it inculcates “frightfulness” is never obscure, and that when it advises forbearance it is always ambiguous. The reader must bear in mind that the authors, in common with their kind in Germany, always enforce a distinction between Kriegsmanier and Kriegsraison,[10] between theory and practise, between the rule and the exception. That in extreme cases such distinctions may be necessary is true; the melancholy thing is that German writers make a system and indeed a virtue of them. In this respect the jurists are not appreciably superior to their soldiers. Brutality is bad, but a pedantic brutality is worse in proportion as it is more reflective. Holtzendorff’s Handbuch des Völkerrechts, than which there is no more authoritative book in the legal literature of Germany, after pages of sanctification of “the natural right” to defend one’s fatherland against invasion by a levée en masse, terminates the argument for a generous recognition of the combatant status of the enemy with the melancholy qualification, “unless the Terrorism so often necessary in war does not demand the contrary.”[11]
To “terrorize” the civil population of the enemy is, indeed, a first principle with German writers on the Art of War. Let the reader ponder carefully on the sinister sentence in the third paragraph of the War Book and the illuminating footnote from Moltke with which it is supported. The doctrine—which is at the foundation of all such progress as has been made by international law in regularizing and humanizing the conduct of war—that the sole object of it should be to disable the armed forces of the enemy, finds no countenance here. No, say the German staff, we must seek just as much (in gleicher Weise) to smash (zerstören) the total “intellectual” (geistig), and material resources of the enemy. It is no exaggeration to interpret this as a counsel not merely to destroy the body of a nation, but to ruin its soul. The “Geist” of a people means in German its very spirit and finer essence. It means a good deal more than intellect and but a little less than religion. The “Geist” of a nation is “the partnership in all science, the partnership in all art, the partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection,” which Burke defined as the true conception of the State. Hence it may be no accident but policy which has caused the Germans in Belgium to stable their horses in churches, to destroy municipal palaces, to defile the hearth, and bombard cathedrals. All this is scientifically calculated “to smash the total spiritual resources” of a people, to humiliate them, to stupefy them, in a word to break their “spirit.”
Let the reader also study carefully a dark sentence in that section of the War Book which deals with “Cunning and Deceit.” There the German officer is instructed that “there is nothing in international law against” (steht völkerrechtlich nichts entgegen) the exploitation of the crimes of third persons, “such as assassination, incendiarism, robbery and the like,” to the disadvantage of the enemy. “There is nothing in international law against it!” No, indeed. There are many things upon which international law is silent for the simple reason that it refuses to contemplate their possibility. It assumes that it is dealing not with brutes but with men. International law is the etiquette of international society, and society, as it has been gravely said, is conducted on the assumption that murder will not be committed. We do not carry revolvers in our pockets when we enter our clubs, or finger them when we shake hands with a stranger. Nor, to adopt a very homely illustration, does any hostess think it necessary to put up a notice in her drawing-room that guests are not allowed to spit upon the floor. But what should we think of a man who committed this disgusting offense, and then pleaded that there was nothing to show that the hostess had forbidden it? Human society, like political society, advances in proportion as it rests on voluntary morality rather than positive law. In primitive society everything is “taboo,” because the only thing that will restrain the undisciplined passions of men is fear. Can it be that this is why the traveler in Germany finds everything “verboten,” and that things which in our own country are left to the good sense and good breeding of the citizen have to be officiously forbidden? Can it be that this people which is always making an ostentatious parade of its “culture” is still red in tooth and claw? When a man boasts his breeding we instinctively suspect it; indeed the boast is itself ill-bred. If the reader thinks these reflections uncharitable, let him ponder on the treatment of Belgium.
It will be seen therefore that the writers of the War Book have taken to heart the cynical maxim of Machiavelli that “a Prince should understand how to use well both the man and the beast.” We shall have occasion to observe later in this introduction that the same maxim runs like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of German diplomacy. Machiavelli’s dark counsel finds a responsive echo in Bismarck’s cynical declaration that a diplomatic pretext can always be found for a war when you want one. When these things are borne in mind the reader will be able to understand how it is that the nation which has used the strongest language[12] about the eternal inviolability of the neutrality of Belgium should be the first to violate it.
The reader may ask, What of the Hague Conventions? They are international agreements, to which Germany was a party, representing the fruition of years of patient endeavor to ameliorate the horrors of war. If they have any defect it is not that they go too far but that they do not go far enough. But of them and the humanitarian movement of which they are the expression, the German Staff has but a very poor opinion. They are for it the crest of a wave of “Sentimentalism and flabby emotion.” (Sentimentalität und weichlicher Gefühlsschwärmerei.) Such movements, our authors declare, are “in fundamental contradiction with the nature and object of war itself.” They are rarely mentioned in this book and never respectfully. The reader will look in vain for such an incorporation of the Hague Regulations in this official text-book as has been made by the English War Office in our own Manual of Military Law. Nor is the reason far to seek. The German Government has never viewed with favor attempts to codify the laws and usages of war. Amiable sentiments, prolegomenous resolutions, protestations of “culture” and “humanity,” she has welcomed with evangelical fervor. But the moment attempts are made to subject these volatile sentiments to pressure and liquefy them in the form of an agreement, she has protested that to particularize would be to “enfeeble humane and civilizing thoughts.”[13] Nothing is more illuminating as to the respective attitudes of Germany and England to such international agreements than the discussions which took place at the Hague Conference of 1907 on the desirability of imposing in express terms restrictions upon the laying of submarine mines in order to protect innocent shipping in neutral waters. The representatives of the two Powers agreed in admitting that it did not follow that because the Convention had not prohibited a certain act it thereby sanctioned it. But whereas the English representatives regarded this as a reason why the Convention could never be too explicit,[14] the spokesman of Germany urged it as a reason why it could never be too ambiguous. In the view of the latter, not international law but “conscience, good sense, and the sentiment of duties imposed by the principles of humanity will be the surest guides for the conduct of soldiers and sailors and the most efficacious guarantees against abuse.”[15] Conscience, “the good German Conscience,” as a German newspaper has recently called it, is, as we have seen, an accommodating monitor, and in that forum there are only too many special pleaders. If the German conscience is to be the sole judge of the lawfulness of German practises, then it is a clear case of “the right arm strikes and the left arm is called upon to decide the lawfulness of the blow.” It is, indeed, difficult to see, if Baron von Bieberstein’s view of international agreements be the right one, why there should be any such agreements at all. The only rule which results from such an Economy of Truth would be: All things are lawful but all are not expedient. And such, indeed, is the conclusion of the German War Book.
The cynicism of this book is not more remarkable than its affectation. There are pages in it of the most admirable sentiment—witness those about the turpitude of plundering and the inviolability of neutral territory. Taken by themselves, they form the most scathing denunciation of the conduct of the German army in Belgium that could well be conceived. Let the reader weigh carefully the following:
Movable private property which in earlier times was the incontestable booty of the victor is held by modern opinion to be inviolable. The carrying away of gold, watches, rings, trinkets, or other objects of value is therefore to be regarded as robbery, and correspondingly punishable.
No plundering but downright burglary is it for a man to take away things out of an unoccupied house or at a time when the occupant happens to be absent.