“Choses in action.”
Logically related to movable property are the so-called “incorporeal things.” When Napoleon, for example, appropriated the debts due to the Elector of Hesse and thus compelled the Elector’s debtors to pay their debts to him; when he furthermore in 1807 allowed the debts owed by the inhabitants of the Duchy of Warsaw to Prussian banks and other public institutions, and indeed even to private persons in Prussia, to be assigned by the King of Prussia, and then sold them to the King of Saxony for 200 million francs, this was, according to the modern view, nothing better than robbery.
Plundering is wicked.
Plundering is to be regarded as the worst form of appropriation of a stranger’s property. By this is to be understood the robbing of inhabitants by the employment of terror and the abuse of a military superiority. The main point of the offense thus consists in the fact that the perpetrator, finding himself in the presence of the browbeaten owner, who feels defenseless and can offer no opposition, appropriates things, such as food and clothing, which he does not want for his own needs. It is not plundering but downright burglary if a man pilfers things out of uninhabited houses or at times when the owner is absent.
Plundering is by the law of nations to-day to be regarded as invariably unlawful. If it may be difficult sometimes in the very heat of the fight to restrain excited troops from trespasses, yet unlawful plundering, extortion, or other violations of property, must be most sternly punished, it matters not whether it be done by members of unbroken divisions of troops or by detached soldiers, so-called marauders, or by the “hyenas of the battlefield.” To permit such transgressions only leads, as experience shows, to bad discipline and the demoralization of the Army.[101]
In the Franco-Prussian War, plundering and taking of booty were on the German side sternly forbidden. The Articles of War in question were repeatedly recalled to every soldier just as in time of peace, also numerous orders of the day were issued on the part of the higher authorities. Transgressions were ruthlessly punished, in some cases even after the War.
CHAPTER IV
REQUISITIONS AND WAR LEVIES
Requisitions.