There are, however, extreme cases in which the violation of the military oath and disobedience to military discipline are justified. More than once in French history an usurper or his agent has ordered soldiers to coerce or fire upon the representatives of the nation. In such cases it has been said 'the conscience of the soldier is the liberty of the people,' and the refusal of private soldiers to obey a plainly illegal order will be generally though not universally applauded. In all such cases, however, there is much obscurity and inconsistency of judgment. The rule that the moral responsibility falls exclusively on the person who gives the order, and that the private has no voice or responsibility, will even here be maintained by some. Ought a private soldier to have refused to take part in such an execution as that of the Duc d'Enghien, or in the Coup d'État of Napoleon III.? Ought he to refuse to fire on a mob if he doubts the legality of the order of his superior officer? In such cases there is sometimes a direct conflict between the civil and the military law, and there have been instances in which a soldier might be punishable before the first for acts which were absolutely enforced by the second.[30]
Perhaps the strongest case of justifiable disobedience that can be alleged is when a soldier is ordered to do something which involves apostasy from his faith, though even here it would be difficult to show, in the light of pure reason, that this is a graver thing than to kill innocent men in an unrighteous cause. In the Early Church there were some soldier martyrs who suffered death because they believed it inconsistent with their faith to bear arms, or because they were asked to do some acts which savoured of idolatry. The story of the Thebæan legion which was said to have been martyred under Diocletian rests on no trustworthy authority, but it illustrates the feeling of the Church on the subject. Josephus tells how Jewish soldiers refused in spite of all punishments to bring earth with the other soldiers for the reparation of the Temple of Belus at Babylon. Conflicts between military duty and religious duty must have not unfrequently arisen during the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and in our own century and in our own army there have been instances of soldiers refusing through religious motives to escort or protect idolatrous processions in India, or to present arms in Catholic countries when the Host was passing. Quaker opinions about war are absolutely inconsistent with the compulsory service which prevails in nearly all European countries, and religious scruples about conscription have been among the motives that have brought the Russian Raskolniks into collision with the civil power.
One of the most serious instances of the collision of duties in our time is furnished by the great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. From the days of Clive, Sepoy soldiers have served under the British flag with an admirable fidelity, and the Mutiny of Vellore in 1806, which was the one exception, was due, like that of 1857, to a belief that the British Government were interfering with their faith. Few things in the history of the great Mutiny are so touching as the profound belief of the English commanders of the Sepoy regiments in the unalterable loyalty of their soldiers. Many of them lost their lives through this belief, refusing even to the last moment and in spite of all evidence to abandon it. They were deceived, and, in the fierce outburst of indignation that followed, the conduct of the Sepoy soldiers was branded as the blackest and the most unprovoked treachery.
Yet assuredly no charge was less true. Agitators for their own selfish purposes had indeed acted upon the troops, but recent researches have fully proved that the real as well as the ostensible cause of the Mutiny was the greased cartridges. It was believed that the cartridges which had been recently issued for the Sepoy regiments were smeared with a mixture of cow's fat and pig's fat, one of these ingredients being utterly impure in the eyes of the Hindoo, and the other in the eyes of the Mussulman. To bite these cartridges would destroy the caste of the Hindoo and carry with it the loss of everything that was most dear and most sacred to him both in this world and in the next. In the eyes both of the Moslem and the Hindoo it was the gravest and the most irreparable of crimes, destroying all hopes in a future world, and yet this crime, in their belief, was imposed upon them as a matter of military duty by their officers. It was as if the Puritan soldiers of the seventeenth century had been ordered by their commanders to abjure their hopes of salvation and to repudiate and insult the Christian faith.
It is true that the existence of these obnoxious ingredients in the new cartridges was solemnly denied, but the sincerity of the Sepoy belief is incontestable, and General Anson, the commander-in-chief, having examined the cartridges, was compelled to admit that it was very plausible.[31] 'I am not so much surprised,' he wrote to Lord Canning, 'at their objections to the cartridges, having seen them. I had no idea they contained, or rather are smeared with such a quantity of grease, which looks exactly like fat. After ramming down the ball, the muzzle of the musket is covered with it.'
Unfortunately this is not a complete statement of the case. It is a shameful and terrible truth that, as far as the fact was concerned, the Sepoys were perfectly right in their belief. In the words of Lord Roberts, 'The recent researches of Mr. Forrest in the records of the Government of India prove that the lubricating mixture used in preparing the cartridges was actually composed of the objectionable ingredients, cow's fat and lard, and that incredible disregard of the soldiers' religious prejudices was displayed in the manufacture of these cartridges.'[32] This was certainly not due, as the Sepoys imagined, to any desire on the part of the British authorities to destroy caste or to prepare the way for the conversion of the Sepoys to Christianity. It was simply a glaring instance of the indifference, ignorance and incapacity too often shown by British administrators in dealing with beliefs and types of character wholly unlike their own. They were unable to realise that a belief which seemed to them so childish could have any depth, and they accordingly produced a Mutiny that for a time shook the English power in India to its very foundation.
The horrors of Cawnpore—which were due to a single man—soon took away from the British public all power of sanely judging the conflict, and a struggle in which no quarter was given was naturally marked by extreme savageness; but in looking back upon it, English writers must acknowledge with humiliation that, if mutiny is ever justifiable, no stronger justification could be given than that of the Sepoy troops.
Many of my readers will remember an exquisite little poem called 'The Forced Recruit,' in which Mrs. Browning has described a young Venetian soldier who was forced by the conscription to serve against his fellow-countrymen in the Austrian army at Solferino, and who advanced cheerfully to die by the Italian guns, holding a musket that had never been loaded in his hand. Such a figure, such a violation of military law, will claim the sympathy of all, but a very different judgment should be passed upon those who, having voluntarily entered an army, betray their trust and their oath in the name of patriotism. In the Fenian movement in Ireland, one of the chief objects of the conspirators was to corrupt the Irish soldiers and break down that high sense of military honour for which in all times and in many armies the Irish people have been conspicuous. 'The epidemic' [of disaffection], boasts a writer who was much mixed in the conspiracies of those times, 'was not an affair of individuals, but of companies and of whole regiments. To attempt to impeach all the military Fenians before courts martial would have been to throw England into a panic, if not to precipitate an appalling mutiny and invite foreign invasion.'[33]
I do not quote these words as a true statement. They are, I believe, a gross exaggeration and a gross calumny on the Irish soldiers, nor do I doubt that most, if not all, the soldiers who may have been induced over a glass of whiskey, or through the persuasions of some cunning agitator, to take the Fenian oath would, if an actual conflict had arisen, have proved perfectly faithful soldiers of the Queen. The perversion of morals, however, which looks on such violations of military duty as praiseworthy, has not been confined to writers of the stamp of Mr. O'Brien. A striking instance of it is furnished by a recent American biography. Among the early Fenian conspirators was a young man named John Boyle O'Reilly. He was a genuine enthusiast, with a real vein of literary talent; in the closing years of his life he won the affection and admiration of very honourable men, and I should certainly have no wish to look too harshly on youthful errors which were the result of a misguided enthusiasm if they had been acknowledged as such. As a matter of fact, however, he began his career by an act which, according to every sound principle of morality, religion, and secular honour, was in the highest degree culpable. Being a sworn Fenian, he entered a regiment of hussars, assumed the uniform of the Queen, and took the oath of allegiance for the express purpose of betraying his trust and seducing the soldiers of his regiment. He was detected and condemned to penal servitude, and he at last escaped to America, where he took an active part in the Fenian movement. After his death his biography was written in a strain of unqualified eulogy, but the biographer has honestly and fully disclosed the facts which I have related. This book has an introduction written by Cardinal Gibbons, one of the most prominent Catholic divines in the United States. The reader may be curious to see how the act of aggravated treachery and perjury which it revealed was judged by a personage who occupies all but the highest position in a Church which professes to be the supreme and inspired teacher of morals. Not a word in this Introduction implies that O'Reilly had done any act for which he should be ashamed. He is described as 'a great and good man,' and the only allusion to his crime is in the following terms: 'In youth his heart agonises over that saddest and strangest romance in all history—the wrongs and woes of his motherland—that Niobe of the Nations. In manhood, because he dared to wish her free, he finds himself a doomed felon, an exiled convict, in what he calls himself the Nether World.... The Divine faith implanted in his soul in childhood flourished there undyingly, pervaded his whole being with its blessed influences, furnished his noblest ideals of thought and conduct.... The country of his adoption vies with the land of his birth in testifying to the uprightness of his life.... With all these voices I blend my own, and in their name I say that the world is brighter for having possessed him.'[34]