[The above paragraph, it will be observed, completely throws over Article II of the Hague Regulations extending protection to the defenders of their country.—J. H. M.]
[47] Notoriously resorted to very often in the war of the Spanish against Napoleon.
[48] Napoleon was, in the year 1815, declared an outlaw by the Allies. Such a proceeding is not permissible by the International Law of to-day since it involves an indirect invitation to assassination. Also the offer of a reward for the capture of a hostile prince or commander as occurred in August, 1813, on the part of the Crown Prince of Sweden in regard to Napoleon, is no longer in harmony with the views of to-day and the usages of war. [But to hire a third person to assassinate one’s opponent is claimed by the German General Staff (see II, b, below) as quite legitimate.—J. H. M.]
[49] As against this there have been many such offenses committed in the wars of recent times, principally on the Turkish side in the Russo-Turkish War.
[50] This prohibition was often sinned against by the French in the war of 1870–71. Cp. Bismarck’s despatches of Jan. 9th and Feb. 7th, 1871; also Bluntschli in Holtzendorff’s Jahrbuch, I, p. 279, where a similar reproach brought against the Baden troops is refuted.
[51] If we have principally in view the employment of uncivilized and barbarous troops on a European seat of war, that is simply because the war of 1870 lies nearest to us in point of time and of space. On a level with it is the employment of Russo-Asiatic nationalities in the wars of emancipation, of Indians in the North-American War, of the Circassians in the Polish Rising, of the Bashi-bazouks in the Russo-Turkish War, etc. As regards the Turcos, a Belgian writer Rolin-Jacquémyns said of them in regard to the war of 1859, “les allures et le conduite des Turcos avaient soulevé d’universels dégoûts.” On the other side it is not to be forgotten that a section of the French Press in 1870 praised them precisely because of their bestialities and incited them to such things, thus in the Independance algerienne: “Arrière la pitié! arrière les sentiments d’humanité! Mort, pillage et incendie!”
[52] Recent examples: the capture of the King of Saxony by the Allies after the Battle of Leipzig, and also of Napoleon, that of the Elector of Hesse, 1866, Napoleon III, 1870, Abdel-Kader, 1847, and Schamyl, 1859.
[53] In this light must be judged the measures taken in 1866 by General Vogel von Falckenstein against certain Hanoverian citizens although these measures have often been represented in another light.
[54] Thus the French prisoners in 1870–1 were very thankful to find employment in great numbers as harvest workers, or in the counting houses of merchants or in the factories of operatives or wherever an opportunity occurred, and were thereby enabled to earn extra wages.
[55] Thus General von Falckenstein in 1870, in order to check the prevalent escaping of French officers, commanded that for every escape ten officers whose names were to be determined by drawing lots should be sent off, with the loss of all privileges of rank, to close confinement in a Prussian fortress, a measure which was, indeed, often condemned but against which nothing can be said on the score of the law of nations.