[37] June 3rd, 1906, in a remarkable article entitled “Holstein,” which is a close study of the inner organization of the German Foreign Office and its traditions.
[38] [The word used is “geistig,” as to the exact meaning of which see translator’s [footnote to page 72]. What the passage amounts to is that the belligerent should seek to break the spirit of the civil population, terrorize them, humiliate them, and reduce them to despair.—J. H. M.]
[39] Moltke, in his well-known correspondence with Professor Bluntschli, is moved to denounce the St. Petersburg Convention which designs as “le seul but légitime” of waging war, “l’affaiblissement des forces militaires,” and this he denies most energetically on the ground that, on the contrary, all the resources of the enemy, country, finances, railways, means of subsistence, even the prestige of the enemy’s government, ought to be attacked. [This, of course, means the policy of “Terrorismus,” i.e., terrorization.—J. H. M.]
[40] [“Den geistigen Strömungen.” “Intellectual” is the nearest equivalent in English, but it barely conveys the spiritual aureole surrounding the word.—J. H. M.]
[41] [The General Staff always refers to the war of 1870 as “the German-French War.”—J. H. M.]
[42] Art. 9 (1).
[43] The necessity of an adequate mark of distinction was not denied even on the part of the French in the violent controversy which blazed up between the German and French Governments on the subject of the Franctireurs in the war of 1870–1. The dispute was mainly concerned with the question whether the marks worn by the Franctireurs were sufficient or not. This was denied on the German side in many cases with all the greater justification as the usual dress of the Franctireurs, the national blue, was not to be distinguished from the customary national dress, as it was merely a blouse furnished with a red armlet. Besides which, on the approach of German troops, the armlet was often taken off and the weapons were concealed, thereby offending against the principle of open bearing. These kind of offenses, as also the lack of a firm organization and the consequent irregularities, were the simple reason why stern treatment of the Franctireurs in the Franco-Prussian War was practised and had necessarily to be practised.
[44] The effacement of the distinction between fighting forces and peaceful population on the part of the Boers no doubt made many of the severities practised by the English necessary.
[45] [i.e., the condition as to having a distinctive mark. So too, the Hague Regulations dispense with the other condition (of having a responsible leader and an organization) in such a case of a levée en masse. See Regulations, Art. II.—J. H. M.]
[46] Professor Dr. C. Lüder, Das Landkriegsrecht, Hamburg, 1888. [This is the amiable professor who writes in Holtzendorff’s Handbuch des Völkerrechts (IV, 378) of “the terrorism so often necessary in war.”—J. H. M.]