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Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including inconsistent hyphenation. Some changes have been made. They are listed at the end of the text.

Military Manners and Customs

LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET

MILITARY MANNERS
AND CUSTOMS

BY

JAMES ANSON FARRER

AUTHOR OF
‘PRIMITIVE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS’ ‘CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS’ ETC.

‘Homo homini res sacra’—Seneca

London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1885

[The right of translation is reserved.]

[PREFACE.]

In the present volume I have attempted within the limits of the historical period and of our European civilisation, and without recognising any hard and fast line between ancient and modern, Christian and Pagan, to allude, in the places that seemed most appropriate, to all points in the history of war that appeared to be either of special interest or of essential importance. As examples of such points I may refer to the treatment of prisoners of war, or of surrendered garrisons; the rules about spies and surprises; the introduction of, and feeling about, new weapons; the meaning of parts of military dress; the origin of peculiar customs like the old one of kissing the earth before a charge; the prevalent rules of honour, as displayed in notions of justice in regard to reprisals, or of fairness in stratagems and deception. The necessity of observing in so vast a field the laws of proportion has enforced resort to such condensation, that on subjects which deserve or possess their tomes upon tomes, I have in many cases been unable to spend more than a page or a chapter. It is easier, however, to err on the side of length than of brevity, but on whichever side I have exceeded, I can only hope that others, who may feel the same interest with myself in the subject without having the same time to give to it, may derive a tithe of the pleasure from reading the following nine chapters that I have found in putting them together.

The study, of course, is no new one, but there can be no objection to calling it by the new name of Bellology—a convenient term, quite capable of holding its own with Sociology or its congeners. The only novelty I have aimed at is one of treatment, and consists in never losing sight of the fact that to all military customs there is a moral and human side which has been only too generally ignored in this connection. To read books like Grose’s ‘Military Antiquities,’ one would think their writers were dealing with the manners, not of men but of ninepins, so utterly do they divest themselves of all human interest or moral feeling, in reference to the customs they describe with so laudable but toneless an accuracy.

The starting-point of modern bellological studies will, undoubtedly, always be the Parliamentary Blue Book, containing the reports (less full than one might wish) of the Military International Conference that met at Brussels in 1874, to discuss the existing laws and customs of war, and to consider whether any modification of them were either possible or desirable. Most of the representatives appointed to attend by the several Powers were military men, so that we are carried by their conversation into the actual realities of modern warfare, with an authority and sense of truth that one is conscious of in no other military book. It is to be regretted that such a work, instructive as it is beyond any other on the subject, has never been printed in a form more popular than its official dress. It was from it that I first conceived the idea of the following pages, and in the sequel frequent reference will be made to it, as the source of the most trustworthy military information we possess, and as certain to be for some time to come the standard work on all the actual laws and customs of contemporary warfare.

[CONTENTS.]

[MILITARY MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.]

[CHAPTER I.]
THE LAWS OF WAR.

Ce sont des lois de la guerre. Il faut estre bien cruel bien souvent pour venir au bout de son ennemi; Dieu doit estre bien miséricordieux en nostre endroict, qui faisons tant de maux.—Marshal Montluc.

The prohibition of explosive bullets in war—The importance of the Declaration of St. Petersburg of 1868—The ultimate triumph of more destructive methods—Illustrated by history of the cross-bow or the musket; or of cannons, torpedoes, red-hot shot, or the bayonet—Numbers slain in modern and earlier warfare—The laws of war at the Brussels Conference of 1874—Do the laws of war tend to improve?—A negative answer suggested from reference: (1) to the use of poison in war; (2) to the bombardment of towns; (3) to the destruction of public buildings; (4) to the destruction of crops and fruit trees; (5) to the murder of prisoners or the wounded; (6) to the murder of surrendered garrisons; (7) to the destruction of fishing boats; (8) to the disuse of the declaration of war; (9) to the torture and mutilation of combatants and non-combatants; (10) to the custom of contributions—The futile attempts of Grotius and Vattel to humanise warfare—The rights of war in the time of Grotius—The futility of international law with regard to laws of war—The employment of barbarian troops—The taking of towns by assault—The laws of war contrasted with the practice—War easier to abolish than to humanise.

It is impossible to head a chapter ‘The Laws of War’ without thinking of that famous chapter on Iceland headed ‘The Snakes of Iceland,’ wherein the writer simply informed his readers that there were none in the country. ‘The laws of war’ make one think of the snakes of Iceland.

Nevertheless, a summary denial of their existence would deprive the history of the battle-field of one of its most interesting features; for there is surely nothing more surprising to an impartial observer of military manners and customs than to find that even in so just a cause as the defence of your own country limitations should be set to the right of injuring your aggressor in any manner you can.

What, for instance, can be more obvious in such a case than that no suffering you can inflict is needless which is most likely permanently to disable your adversary? Yet, by virtue of the International Declaration of St. Petersburg, in 1868, you may not use explosive bullets against him, because it is held that they would cause him needless suffering. By the logic of war, what can be clearer than that, if the explosive bullet deals worse wounds, and therefore inflicts death more readily than other destructive agencies, it should be used? or else that those too should be excluded from the rules of the game—which might end in putting a stop to the game altogether?

The history of the explosive bullet is worth recalling, for its prohibition is a straw to clutch at in these days of military revival. Like the plague, and perhaps gunpowder, it had an Eastern origin. It was used originally in India against elephants and tigers. In 1863 it was introduced into the Russian army, and subsequently into other European armies, for use against ammunition-waggons. But it was not till 1867 that a slight modification in its construction rendered it available for the destruction of mankind. The world owes it to the humanity of the Russian Minister of War, General Milutine, that at this point a pause was made; and as the Czar, Alexander II., was no less humane than his minister, the result was the famous Declaration, signed in 1868 by all the chief Powers (save the United States), mutually foregoing in their future wars by land or sea the use of projectiles weighing less than 400 grammes (to save their use for artillery), either explosive or filled with inflammable substances. The Court of Berlin wished at the time for some other destructive contrivances to be equally excluded, but the English Government was afraid to go further; as if requiring breathing time after so immense an effort to diminish human suffering, before proceeding in so perilous a direction.

The Declaration of St. Petersburg, inasmuch as it is capable of indefinite expansion, is a somewhat awkward precedent for those who in their hearts love war and shield its continuance with apologetic platitudes. How, they ask, can you enforce agreements between nations? But this argument begins to totter when we remember that there is absolutely no superior power or tribunal in existence which can enforce the observance of the St. Petersburg Declaration beyond the conscience of the signatory Powers. It follows, therefore, that if international agreements are of value, there is no need to stop short at this or that bullet: which makes the arbitration-tribunal loom in the distance perceptibly nearer than it did before.

At first sight, this agreement excluding the use of explosive bullets would seem to favour the theory of those who see in every increase in the peril of war the best hope of its ultimate cessation. A famous American statesman is reported to have said, and actually to have appealed to the invention of gunpowder in support of his statement, that every discovery in the art of war has, from this point of view, a life-saving and peace-promoting influence.[1] But it is difficult to conceive a greater delusion. The whole history of war is against it; for what has that history been but the steady increase of the pains and perils of war, as more effective weapons of destruction have succeeded one another? The delusion cannot be better dispelled than by consideration of the facts that follow.

It has often seemed as if humanity were about to get the better of the logical tendency of the military art. The Lateran Council of 1139 (a sort of European congress in its day) not only condemned Arnold of Brescia to be burnt for heresy, but anathematised the cross-bow for its inhumanity. It forbade its use in Christian warfare as alike hateful to God and destructive of mankind.[2] Several brave princes disdained to employ cross-bow shooters, and Innocent III. confirmed the prohibition on the ground that it was not fair to inflict on an enemy more than the least possible injury.[3] The long-bow consequently came into greater use. But Richard I., in spite of Popes or Councils or Chivalry, revived the use of the cross-bow in Europe; nor, though his death by one himself was regarded as a judgment from Heaven, did its use from that time decline till the arquebus and then the musket took its place.

Cannons and bombs were at first called diabolical, because they suggested the malice of the enemy of mankind, or serpentines, because they seemed worse than the poison of serpents.[4] But even cannons were at first only used against fortified walls, and there is a tradition of the first occasion when they were directed against men.[5] And torpedoes, now used without scruple, were called infamous and infernal when, under the name of American Turtles, they were first tried by the American Colonies against the ships of their mother country.

In the sixteenth century, that knight ‘without fear or reproach,’ the Chevalier Bayard, ordered all musketeers who fell into his hands to be slain without mercy, because he held the introduction of fire-arms to be an unfair innovation on the rules of lawful war. So red-hot shot (or balls made red hot before insertion in the cannon) were at first objected to, or only considered fair for purposes of defence, not of attack. Yet, what do we find?—that Louis XIV. fired some 12,000 of them into Brussels in 1694; that the Austrians fired them into Lille in 1792; and that the English batteries fired them at the ships in Sebastopol harbour, which formed part of the Russian defences. Chain-shot and bar-shot were also disapproved of at first, or excluded from use by conventions applying only to particular wars; now there exists no agreement precluding their use, for they soon became common in battles at sea.

The invention of the bayonet supplies another illustration. The accounts of its origin are little better than legends: that it was invented so long ago as 1323 by a woman of Bayonne in defence of the ramparts of that city against the English; or by Puséygur, of Bayonne, about 1650; or borrowed by the Dutch from the natives of Madagascar; or connected with a place called the Redoute de la Baïonnette in the Eastern Pyrenees, where the Basques, having exhausted their ammunition against the Spaniards, are said to have inserted their knives into the muzzles of their guns. But it is certain that as soon as the idea was perfected by fixing the blade by rings outside the muzzle (in the latter quarter of the seventeenth century), battles became more murderous than ever, though the destruction of infantry by cavalry was diminished. The battle of Neerwinden in 1693, in which the French general, Luxembourg, defeated the Prince of Orange, is said to have been the first battle that was decided by a charge with a bayonet, and the losses were enormous on both sides.[6]

History, in fact, is full of such cases, in which the victory has uniformly lain ultimately with the legitimacy of the weapon or method that was at first rejected as inhumane. For the moment, the law of nations forbids the use of certain methods of destruction, such as bullets filled with glass or nails, or chemical compounds like kakodyl, which could convert in a moment the atmosphere round an army into one of deadly poison;[7] yet we have nothing like certainty—we have not even historical probability—that these forbidden means, or worse means, will not be resorted to in the wars of the future, or that reluctance to meet such forms of death will in the least degree affect either their frequency or their duration.

It is easy to explain this law of history. The soldier’s courage, as he faces the mitrailleuse with the same indifference with which he would face snow-balls or bread-pellets, is a miracle of which discipline is the simple explanation; for whether the soldier be hired or coerced to face death, it is all one to him against what kind of bullet he rushes, so long as discipline remains—as Helvetius the French philosopher once defined it, the art of making soldiers more afraid of their own officers than of their enemy.[8] To Clearchus, the Lacedæmonian, is attributed the saying that a soldier should always fear his own general more than the enemy: a mental state easily produced in every system of military mechanism. Whatever form of death be in front of a man, it is less certain than that in his rear. The Ashantees as they march to battle sing a song which is the soldier’s philosophy all the world over: ‘If I go on, I shall die; if I stay behind I shall be killed; it is better to go on.’[9]

How often is it said, in extenuation of modern warfare, that it is infinitely less destructive than that of ancient or even mediæval times; and that the actual loss of life in battle has not kept pace with the development of new and more effective life-taking implements! Yet it is difficult to imagine a stranger paradox, or a proposition that, if true, would reflect greater descredit on our mechanical science. If our Gatling guns, or Nordenfeldt 5-barrels capable of firing 600 rounds a minute, are less effective to destroy an enemy than all the paraphernalia of a mediæval army, why not in that case return to weapons that by the hypothesis better fulfilled the purposes of war? This question is a reductio ad absurdum of this soothing delusion; but as a matter of fact, there is no comparison in destructiveness between our modern warfare and that of our ancestors. The apparent difference in our favour arises from a practice alluded to by Philip de Commines, which throws a flood of light upon the subject: ‘There were slain in this battle about 6,000 men, which, to people that are unwilling to lie, may seem very much; but in my time I have been in several actions, where for one man that was really slain they have reported a hundred, thinking by such an account to please their masters; and they sometimes deceive them with their lies.’ That is to say, as a rule the number of the slain should be divided by a hundred.

This remark applies even to battles like Crecy or Agincourt, where the numbers slain were unusually high, and where they are said to have been accurately ascertained by counting after the victory. When Froissart on such authority quotes 1,291 as the total number of warriors of knightly or higher rank slain at Crecy, it is possible of course that he is not the victim of deception; but what of the 30,000 common soldiers for whose death he also vouches? A monk of St. Albans, also a contemporary, speaks only of an unknown number (et vulgus cujus numerus ignoratur); which in the account of the Abbot Hugo was put definitely at more than 100,000. It is evident from this that the greatest laxity prevailed in reference to chronicling the numbers of the slain; so that if we take 3,000 instead of 30,000 as the sum total of common soldiers slain at Crecy, it is probable that we shall be nearer the truth than if we implicitly accept Froissart’s statement.

The same scepticism will of course hold good of the battles of the ancient world. Is it likely, for instance, that in a battle in which the Romans are said only to have lost 100 men, the Macedonians should have lost 20,000?[10] Or again, is it possible, considering the difficulty of the commissariat of a large army, even in our own days of trains and telegraphs and improved agriculture, that Marius in one battle can have slain 200,000 Teutons, and taken 90,000 prisoners? But whilst no conclusion is possible but that the figures of the older histories are altogether too untrustworthy to afford any basis for comparison, the calculation rests on something more like fair evidence, that in the fortnight between August 4, 1870, the date of the battle of Wissembourg, and August 18, that of Gravelotte, including the battles of Woerth and Forbach on August 6, of Courcelles on the 14th, and of Vionville on the 16th more than 100,000 French and Germans met their death on the battle-field, to say nothing of those who perished afterwards in agonies in the hospitals. Recent wars have been undoubtedly shorter than they often were in olden times, but their brevity is founded on no reason that can ensure its recurrence: nor, if 100,000 are to be miserably cast out of existence, is the gain so very great, if the task, instead of being spread over a number of years, requires only a fortnight for its accomplishment.

For the nearest approach to a statement of what the laws of war in our own time really are, we must turn to the Brussels Conference, which met in 1874 at the summons of the same great Russian to whom the world owes the St. Petersburg Declaration, and which constituted a genuine attempt to mitigate the evils of war by an international agreement and definition of their limits. The idea of such a plan was originally suggested by the Instructions published in 1863 by President Lincoln for the government of the armies of the United States in the civil war.[11] The project for such an international agreement, originally submitted by the Russian Government for discussion, was very much modified before even a compromise of opinion could be arrived at on the several points it contained. And the project so modified, as a preliminary basis for future agreement, owing to the timid refusal of the English Government to take further part in the matter, never, unfortunately, reached its final stage of a definite code;[12] but it remains nevertheless the most authoritative utterance extant of the laws generally thought to be binding in modern warfare on the practices and passions of the combatants. The following articles from the project as finally modified are undoubtedly the most important:—

Art. 12. The laws of war do not allow to belligerents an unlimited power as to the choice of means of injuring the enemy.

Art. 13. According to this principle are strictly forbidden—

• a. The use of poison or poisoned weapons.
• b. Murder by treachery of individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army.
• c. Murder of an antagonist who, having laid down his arms, or having no longer the means of defending himself, has surrendered at discretion.
• d. The declaration that no quarter will be given.
• e. The use of arms, projectiles, or substances which may cause unnecessary suffering, as well as of those prohibited by the Declaration of St. Petersburg in 1868.
• f. Abuse of the flag of truce, the national flag, or the military insignia or uniform of the enemy, as well as the distinctive badges of the Geneva Convention.
• g. All destruction or seizure of the enemy’s property which is not imperatively required by the necessity of war.

Art. 15. Fortified places are alone liable to be besieged. Towns, agglomerations of houses or villages which are open or undefended, cannot be attacked or bombarded.

Art. 17. ... All necessary steps should be taken to spare as far as possible buildings devoted to religion, arts, sciences, and charity, hospitals and places where sick and wounded are collected, on condition that they are not used at the same time for military purposes.

Art. 18. A town taken by storm shall not be given up to the victorious troops for plunder.

Art. 23. Prisoners of war ... should be treated with humanity.... All their personal effects except their arms are to be considered their own property.

Arts. 36, 37. The population of an occupied territory cannot be compelled to take part in military operations against their own country, nor to swear allegiance to the enemy’s power.

Art. 38. The honour and rights of the family, the life and property of individuals, as well as their religious convictions and the exercise of their religion, should be respected.

Private property cannot be confiscated.

Art. 39. Pillage is expressly forbidden.

There is at first sight a pleasing ring of humanity in all this, though, as yet, it only represents the better military spirit, which is always far in advance of actual military practice. In the monotonous history of war there are always commanders who wage it with less ferocity than others, and writers who plead for the mitigation of its cruelties. As in modern history a Marlborough, a Wellington, or a Villars forms a pleasant contrast to a Feuquières, a Belleisle, or a Blücher, so in ancient history a Marcellus or a Lucullus helps us to forget a Marius or an Alexander; and the sentiments of a Cicero or Tacitus were as far in advance of their time as those of a Grotius or Vattel were of theirs. According to the accident of the existence of such men, the laws of war fluctuate from age to age; but, the question arises, Do they become perceptibly milder? do they ever permanently improve?

It will be said that they do, because it will be said that they have; and that the annals of modern wars present nothing to resemble the atrocities that may be collected from ancient or mediæval history. Yet such statements carry no conviction. Deterioration seems as likely as improvement; and unless the custom is checked altogether, the wars of the twentieth century may be expected to exceed in barbarity anything of which we have any conception. A very brief inquiry will suffice to dispel the common assurances of improvement and progress.

Poison is forbidden in war, says the Berlin Conference; but so it always was, even in the Institutes of Menu, and with perhaps less difference of opinion in ancient than in modern times. Grotius and Vattel and most of their followers disallow it, but two publicists of grave authority defend it, Bynkershoeck and Wolff. The latter published his ‘Jus Gentium’ as late as 1749, and his argument is worth translating, since it can only be met by arguments which equally apply to other modes of military slaughter. ‘Naturally it is lawful to kill an enemy by poison; for as long as he is our enemy, he resists the reparation of our right, so that we may exercise against his person whatever suffices to avert his power from ourselves or our possessions. Therefore it is not unfair to get rid of him. But, since it comes to the same thing whether you get rid of him by the sword or by poison (which is self-evident, because in either case you get rid of him, and he can no longer resist or injure you), it is naturally lawful to kill an enemy by poison.’ And so, he argues with equal force, of poisoned weapons.[13] That poison is not in use in our day we do not therefore owe to our international lawyers, but to the accident of tradition. In Roman history the theory appears to have been unanimous against it. ‘Such conduct,’ says the Roman writer Florus of a general who poisoned some springs in order to bring some cities in Asia to a speedier surrender, ‘although it hastened his victory, rendered it infamous, since it was done not only against divine law, but against ancestral customs.’[14] Our statesman Fox refused indignantly to avail himself of an offer to poison Napoleon, but so did the Roman consuls refuse a similar proposal with regard to Pyrrhus; and Tiberius and the Roman senate replied to a plan for poisoning Arminius, that the Roman people punished their enemies not by fraud or in secret, but openly and in arms.

The history of bombarding towns affords an instance of something like actual deterioration in the usages of modern warfare. Regular and simple bombardment, that is, of a town indiscriminately and not merely its fortresses, has now become the established practice. Yet, what did Vattel say in the middle of the last century? ‘At present we generally content ourselves with battering the ramparts and defences of a place. To destroy a town with bombs and red-hot balls is an extremity to which we do not proceed without cogent reasons.’ What said Vauban still earlier? ‘The fire must be directed simply at the defences and batteries of a place ... and not against the houses.’ Then what of the English bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, when the cathedral and some 300 houses were destroyed; what of the German bombardment of Strasburg in 1870, where rifled mortars were used for the first time,[15] and the famous library and picture gallery destroyed; and what lastly of the German bombardment of Paris, about which, strangely enough, even the military conscience of the Germans was struck, so that in the highest circles doubts about the propriety of such a proceeding at one time prevailed from a moral no less than from a military point of view?[16]

With respect again to sacred or public buildings, warfare tends to become increasingly destructive. It was the rule in Greek warfare to spare sacred buildings, and the Romans frequently spared sacred and other buildings, as Marcellus, for instance, at Syracuse.[17] Yet when the French ravaged the Palatinate in 1689 they not only set fire to the cathedrals, but sacked the tombs of the ancient Emperors at Spiers. Frederick II. destroyed some of the finest buildings at Dresden and Prague. In 1814 the English forces destroyed the Capitol at Washington, the President’s house, and other public buildings;[18] and in 1815 the Prussian general, Blücher, was with difficulty restrained from blowing up the Bridge of Jena at Paris and the Pillar of Austerlitz. Military men have always the excuse of reprisals or accident for these acts of Vandalism. Yet Vattel had said (in language which but repeated the language of Polybius and Cicero): ‘We ought to spare those edifices which do honour to human society, and do not contribute to the enemy’s strength, such as temples, tombs, public buildings, and all works of remarkable beauty.’

Of as little avail has been the same writer’s observation that those who tear up vines and cut down fruit trees are to be looked upon as savage. The Fijian islanders were barbarians enough, but even they used as a rule to spare their enemies’ fruit trees; so did the ancient Indians; and the Koran forbids the wanton destruction of fruit trees, palm trees, corn and cattle. Then what shall we think of the armies of Louis XIV. in the Palatinate not only burning castles, country-houses, and villages, but ruthlessly destroying crops, vines, and fruit trees?[19] or of the Prussian warrior, Blücher, destroying the ornamental trees at Paris in 1815?

It is said that the Germans refused to let the women and children leave Strasburg before they began to bombard it in 1870.[20] Yet Vattel himself tells us how Titus, at the siege of Jerusalem, suffered the women and children to depart, and how Henri IV., besieging Paris, had the humanity to let them pass through his lines.

It was in a campaign of this century, 1815, that General Roquet collected the French officers, and bade them tell the grenadiers that the first man who should bring him in a Prussian prisoner should be shot; and it was in reprisals for this that a few days later the Prussians killed the French wounded at Genappe.[21]

Grotius, after quoting the fact that a decree of the Amphictyons forbade the destruction of any Greek city in war, asserts the existence of a stronger bond between the nations of Christendom than between the states of ancient Greece. And then we remember how the Prussians bombarded the Danish town of Sönderborg, and almost utterly destroyed it, though it lay beyond the possibility of their possession; and we think of Peronne in France reduced to ruins, with the greater part of its fine cathedral, in 1870; and of the German shells directed against the French fire-engines that endeavoured to save the Strasburg Library from the flames that consumed it; and we wonder that so great a jurist could have been capable of so grievous a delusion.

To murder a garrison that had made an obstinate defence, or in order to terrorise others from doing the same, was a right of modern war disputed by Grotius, but admitted by Vattel not to be totally exploded a century later. Yet they both quote cases which prove that to murder enemies who had made a gallant defence was regarded in ancient times as a violation of the laws of war.

To murder enemies who had surrendered was as contrary to Greek or Roman as it ever was to Christian warfare. The general Greek and Roman practice was to allow quarter to an enemy who surrendered, and to redeem or exchange their prisoners.[22] There was indeed, by the laws of war, a right to slay or enslave them, and though both rights were sometimes exercised with great barbarity, the extent to which the former right was exercised has been very much exaggerated. Otherwise, why should Diodorus Siculus, in the century preceding our era, have spoken of mercy to prisoners as the common law (τὰ κοινὰ νόμιμα), and of the violation of such law as an act of exceptional barbarity?[23] It may be fairly doubted whether the French prisoners in the English hulks during the war with Napoleon suffered less than the Athenian prisoners in the mines of Syracuse; and as to quarter, what of the French volunteers or Franc-tireurs who in 1870 fell into the hands of the Germans, or of the French peasants, who, though levied and armed by the local authorities under the proclamation of Napoleon, were, if taken, put to death by the Allies in 1814?

Some other illustrations tend further to show that there is no real progress in war, and that many of the fancied mitigations of it are merely accidental and ephemeral features.

The French and English in olden time used to spare one another’s fishing boats and their crews. ‘Fishermen,’ said Froissart, ‘though there may be war between France and England, never injure one another; they remain friends, and assist each other in case of need, and buy and sell their fish whenever one has a larger quantity than the other, for if they were to fight we should have no fresh fish.’[24] Yet in the Crimean war, the English fleets in the Baltic seized or burnt the fishing boats of the Finns, and destroyed the cargoes of fish on which, having been salted in the summer months, they were dependent for their subsistence during the winter.[25]

Polybius informs us that the Œtolians were regarded as the common outlaws of Greece, because they did not scruple to make war without declaring it. Invasions of that sort were regarded as robberies, not as lawful wars. Yet declarations of war may now be dispensed with, the first precedent for doing so having been set by Gustavus Adolphus.

Gustavus Adolphus, in 1627, issued some humane Articles of War, which forbade, among other things, injuries to old men, women, and children. Yet within a few years the Swedish soldiery, like other troops of their time, made the gratuitous torture and mutilation of combatants or non-combatants a common episode of their military proceedings.[26]

When Henry V. of England invaded France, early in the fifteenth century, he forbade in his General Orders the wanton injury of property, insults to women, or gratuitous bloodshed. Yet four centuries later the character of war had so little changed that we find the Duke of Wellington, when invading the same country, lamenting in a General Order that, ‘according to all the information which the Commander of the Forces had received, outrages of all descriptions’ had been committed by his troops, ‘in presence even of their officers, who took no pains whatever to prevent them.’[27]

The French complain that their last war with Germany was not war, but robbery; as if pillage and war had ever been distinct in fact or were distinguishable in thought. There appears to have been very little limit to the robbery that was committed under the name of contributions; yet Vattel tells us that, though in his time the practice had died out, the belligerent sovereigns, in the wars of Louis XIV., used to regulate by treaty the extent of hostile territory in which each might levy contributions, together with the amount which might be levied, and the manner in which the levying parties were to conduct themselves.[28]

Is it not proved then by the above facts, that the laws of war rather fluctuate from age to age within somewhat narrow limits than permanently improve, and that they are apt to lose in one direction whatever they gain in another? Humanity in warfare now, as in antiquity, remains the exception, not the rule; and may be found now, as at all times, in books or in the finer imaginations of a few, far more often than in the real life of the battle-field. The plea of shortening the horrors of war is always the plea for carrying them to an extreme; as by Louvois for devastating the Palatinate, or by Suchet, the French general, for driving the helpless women and children into the citadel of Lerida, and for then shelling them all night with the humane object of bringing the governor to a speedier surrender.[29]

Writers on the Law of Nations have in fact led us into a Fool’s Paradise about war (which has done more than anything else to keep the custom in existence), by representing it as something quite mild and almost refined in modern times. Vattel, the Swiss jurist, set the example. He published his work on the rights of nations two years after the Seven Years’ War had begun, and he speaks of the European nations in his time as waging their wars ‘with great moderation and generosity,’ the very year before Marshal Belleisle gave orders to make Westphalia a desert. Vattel too it was who first appealed to the amenities that occasionally interrupt hostilities in support of his theory of the generosity of modern warfare.

But what after all does it come to, if rival generals address each other in terms of civility or interchange acceptable gifts? At Sebastopol, the English Sir Edmond Lyons sent the Russian Admiral Machinoff the present of a fat buck, the latter acknowledging the compliment with the return of a hard Dutch cheese. At Gibraltar, when the men of Elliot’s garrison were suffering severely from scurvy, Crillon sent them a cartload of carrots. These things have always occurred even in the fiercest times of military barbarism. At the siege of Orleans (1429) the Earl of Suffolk sent the French commander Dunois a present of dessert, consisting of figs, dates, and raisins; and Dunois in return sent Suffolk some fur for his cloak; yet there was little limit in those days to the ferocity shown in war by the French and English to one another. A ransom was extorted even for the bodies of the slain. The occasional gleams of humanity in the history of war count for nothing in the general picture of its savagery.

The jurists in this way have helped to give a totally false colour to the real nature of war; and scarcely a day passes in a modern campaign that does not give the lie to the rules laid down in the ponderous tomes of the international-law writers. It is said that Gustavus Adolphus always had with him in camp a copy of ‘Grotius,’ as Alexander is said to have slept over Homer. The improbability of finding a copy of ‘Grotius’ in a modern camp may be taken as an illustration of the neglect that has long since fallen on the restraints with which our publicists have sought to fetter our generals, and of the futility of all such endeavours.

All honour to Grotius for having sought to make warfare a few degrees less atrocious than he found it; but let us not therefore deceive ourselves into an extravagant belief in the efficacy of his labours. Kant, who lived later, and had the same problem to face, cherished no such delusion as to the possibility of humanising warfare, but went straight to the point of trying to stop it altogether; and Kant was in every point the better reasoner. Either would doubtless have regarded the other’s reasoning on the subject as Utopian; but which with the better reason?

Grotius took the course of first stating what the extreme rights of war were, as proved by precedent and usage, and of then pleading for their mitigation on the ground of religion and humanity. In either case he appealed to precedent, and only set the better against the worse; leaving thereby the rights of war in utter confusion, and quite devoid of any principle of measurement.

Let us take as an illustration of his method the question of the slaughter of women and children. This he began with admitting to be a strict right of war. Profane history supplied him with several instances of such massacres, and so more especially did Biblical history. He refrained, he expressly tells us, from adducing the slaying of the women and children of Heshbon by the Hebrews, or the command given to them to deal in the same way with the people of Canaan, for these were the works of God, whose rights over mankind were far greater than those of man over beasts. He preferred, as coming nearer to the practice of his own time, the testimony of that verse in the Psalms which says, ‘Blessed shall he be who shall dash thy children against a stone.’ Subsequently he withdrew this right of war, by reference to the better precedents of ancient times. It does not appear to have occurred to him that the precedents of history, if we go to them for our rules of war, will prove anything, according to the character of the actions we select. Camillus (in Livy) speaks of childhood as inviolable even in stormed cities; the Emperor Severus, on the other hand, ordered his soldiers to put all persons in Britain to the sword indiscriminately, and in his turn appealed to precedent, the order, namely, of Agamemnon, that of the Trojans not even children in their mothers’ womb should be spared from destruction. The children of Israel were forbidden in their wars to cut down fruit trees; yet when they warred against the Moabites, ‘they stopped all the wells of water and felled all the good trees.’ It was only possible in this way to distinguish the better custom from the worse, not the right from the wrong; either being equally justifiable on a mere appeal to historical instances.

The rules of war which prevailed in the time of Grotius—the early time of the Thirty Years’ War—may be briefly summarised from his work as follows. The rights of war extended to all persons within the hostile boundaries, the declaration of war being essentially directed against every individual of a belligerent nation. Any person of a hostile nation, therefore, might be slain wherever found, provided it were not on neutral territory. Women and children might be lawfully slain (as it will be shown that they were also liable to be in the best days of chivalry); and so might prisoners of war, suppliants for their lives, or those who surrendered unconditionally. It was lawful to assassinate an enemy, provided it involved no violation of a tacit or express agreement; but it was unlawful to use poison in any form, though fountains, if not poisoned, might be made undrinkable. Anything belonging to an enemy might be destroyed: his crops, his houses, his flocks, his trees, even his sacred edifices, or his places of burial.

That these extreme rights of war were literally enforced in the seventeenth century admits of no doubt; nor if any of them have at all been mitigated, can we attribute it so much to the humane attempt of Grotius and his followers to set restrictions on the rightful exercise of predominant force, as to the accidental influence of individual commanders. It has been well remarked that the right of non-combatants to be unmolested in war was recognised by generals before it was ever proclaimed by the publicists.[30] And the same truth applies to many other changes in warfare, which have been oftener the result of a temporary military fashion, or of new ideas of military expediency, than of obedience to Grotius or Vattel. They set themselves to as futile a task as the proverbial impossibility of whitening the negro; with this result—that the destructiveness of war, its crimes, and its cruelties, are something new even to a world that cannot lose the recollection of the sack of Magdeburg in 1631, or the devastation of the Palatinate in 1689.[31]

The publicists have but recognised and reflected the floating sentiments of their time, without giving us any definite principle by which to separate the permissible from the non-permissible practice in war. We have seen how much they are at issue on the use of poison. They are equally at issue as to the right of employing assassination; as to the extent of the legitimate use of fraud; as to the right of beginning a war without declaration; as to the limits of the invader’s rights of robbery; as to the right of the invaded to rise against his invader; or as to whether individuals so rising are to be treated as prisoners of war or hanged as assassins. Let us consider what they have done for us with regard to the right of using savages for allies, or with regard to the rights of the conqueror over the town he has taken by assault.

The right to use barbarian troops on the Christian battle-field is unanimously denied by all the modern text-writers. Lord Chatham’s indignation against England’s employment of them against her revolted colonies in America availed as little. Towards the end of the Crimean war Russia prepared to arm some savage races within her empire, and brought Circassians into Hungary in 1848.[32] France employed African Turcos both against Austria in 1859 and against Prussia in 1870; and it is within the recollection of the youngest what came of the employment by Turkey of Bashi-Bazouks. Are they likely not to be used in future because Bluntschli, Heffter, or Wheaton prohibits them?

To take a town by assault is the worst danger a soldier can have to face. The theory therefore had a show of reason, that without the reward of unlimited licence he could never be brought to the breach. Tilly is said to have replied, when he was entreated by some of his officers to check the rapine and bloodshed that has immortalised the sack of Magdeburg in 1631: ‘Three hours’ plundering is the shortest rule of war. The soldier must have something for his toil and trouble.’[33] It is on such occasions, therefore, that war shows itself in its true character, and that M. Girardin’s remark, ‘La guerre c’est l’assassinat, la guerre c’est le vol,’ reads like a revelation. The scene never varies from age to age; and the storming of Badajoz and San Sebastian by the English forces in the Peninsular War, or of Constantine in Algeria by the French in 1837, teaches us what we may expect to see in Europe when next a town is taken by assault, as Strasburg might have been in 1870. ‘No age, no nation,’ says Sir W. Napier, ‘ever sent forth braver troops to battle than those who stormed Badajoz’ (April 1812). Yet for two days and nights there reigned in its streets, says the same writer, ‘shameless rapacity, brutal intemperance, savage lust, cruelty, and murder.’[34] And what says he of San Sebastian not a year and a half later? A thunderstorm that broke out ‘seemed to be a signal from hell for the perpetration of villany which would have shamed the most ferocious barbarians of antiquity.’ ... ‘The direst, the most revolting cruelty was added to the catalogue of crime: one atrocity ... staggers the mind by its enormous, incredible, indescribable barbarity.’[35] If officers lost their lives in trying to prevent such deeds—whose very atrocity, as some one has said, preserves them from our full execration, because it makes it impossible to describe them—is it likely that the gallant soldiers who crowned their bravery with such devilry would have been one whit restrained by the consideration that in refusing quarter, or in murdering, torturing, or mutilating non-combatants, they were acting contrary to the rules of modern warfare?

If, then, we temper theory with practice, and desert our books for the facts of the battle-field (so far as they are ever told in full), we may perhaps lay down the following as the most important laws of modern warfare:

1. You may not use explosive bullets; but you may use conical-shaped ones, which inflict far more mutilation than round ones, and even explosive bullets if they do not fall below a certain magnitude.

2. You may not poison your enemy, because you thus take from him the chance of self-defence: but you may blow him up with a fougass or dynamite, from which he is equally incapable of defending himself.

3. You may not poison your enemy’s drinking-water; but you may infect it with dead bodies or otherwise, because that is only equivalent to turning the stream.

4. You may not kill helpless old men, women, or children with the sword or bayonet; but as much as you please with your Congreve rockets, howitzers, or mortars.

5. You may not make war on the peaceable occupants of a country; but you may burn their houses if they resist your claims to rob them of their uttermost farthing.

6. You may not refuse quarter to an enemy; but you may if he be not equipped in a particular outfit.

7. You may not kill your prisoners of war; but you may order your soldiers not to take any.

8. You may not ask a ransom for your prisoners; but you may more than cover their cost in the lump sum you exact for the expenses of the war.

9. You may not purposely destroy churches, hospitals, museums, or libraries; but ‘military exigencies’ will cover your doing so, as they will almost anything else you choose to do in breach of any other restrictions on your conduct.

And it is into these absurdities that the reasonings of Grotius and his followers have led us. The real dreamers, it appears, have been, not those who, like Henri IV., Sully, St. Pierre, or Kant, have dreamed of a world without wars, but those who have dreamed of wars waged without lawlessness, passion, or crime. On them be thrown back the taunts of Utopianism which they have showered so long on the only view of the matter which is really logical and consistent. On them, at least, rests the shadow, and must rest the reproach, of an egregious failure, unless recent wars are of no account and teach no lesson. And if their failure be real and signal, what remains for those who wish for better things, and for some check on deeds that threaten our civilisation, but to turn their backs on the instructors they once trusted; to light their fires rather than to load their shelves with Grotius, Vattel, and the rest; and to throw in their lot for the future with the opinion, hitherto despised, though it was Kant’s, and the endeavour hitherto discredited, though it was Henry the Great’s, Sully’s, and Elizabeth’s—the opinion, that is, that it were easier to abolish war than to humanise it, and that only in the growth of a spirit of international confidence lies any possible hope of its ultimate extinction?

[CHAPTER II.]
WARFARE IN CHIVALROUS TIMES.

Voi m’avete fatto tornare quest’arte del soldo quasi che nulla, ed io ne l’aveva presupposta la più eccellente e la più onorevole che si facesse.—Machiavelli, Dell’Arte della Guerra.

Delusion about character of war in days of chivalry—The common slaughter of women and children—The Earl of Derby’s sack of Poitiers—The massacres of Grammont and Gravelines—The old poem of the Vow of the Heron—The massacre of Limoges by Edward the Black Prince—The imprisonment of ladies for ransom—Prisoners of war starved to death; or massacred, if no prospect of ransom; or blinded or otherwise mutilated—The meaning of a surrender at discretion, as illustrated by Edward III. at Calais; and by several instances in the same and the next century—The practice of burning in aid of war; and of destroying sacred buildings—The practice of poisoning the air—The use of barbarous weapons—The influence of religion on war—The Church in vain on the side of peace—Curious vows of the knights—The slight personal danger incurred in war by them—The explanation of their magnificent costume—Field-sports in war-time—The desire of gain the chief motive to war—The identity of soldiers and brigands—The career and character of the Black Prince—The place of money in the history of chivalry—Its influence as a war-motive between England and France—General low character of chivalrous warfare.

For an impartial estimate of the custom of war, the best preparation is a study of its leading features in the days of chivalry. Not only are most of our modern military usages directly descended from that period, though many claim a far remoter ancestry, and go back to the days of primitive savagery, but it is the tradition of chivalry that chiefly keeps alive the delusion that it is possible for warfare to be conducted with humanity, generosity, and courtesy.

Hallam, for instance, observes that in the wars of our Edward III., ‘the spirit of honourable as well as courteous behaviour towards the foe seems to have arrived at its highest point;’ and he refers especially to the custom of ransoming a prisoner on his parole, and to the generous treatment by the Black Prince of the French king taken captive at Poitiers.

In order to demonstrate the extreme exaggeration of this view, and to show that with war, as with the greater crimes, moral greatness is only connected accidentally, occasionally, or in romance, it is necessary to examine somewhat closely the warfare of the fourteenth century. Chivalry, according to certain historians, was during that century in process of decline; but the decline, if any, was rather in the nature of its forms and ceremonies than of its spirit or essence. It was the century of the most illustrious names in chivalry, in France of Bertrand du Guesclin, in England of the Black Prince, Sir Walter Manny, Sir John Chandos. It was the century of the battles of Crecy, Poitiers, Avray, and Navarette. It was the century of the Order of the Star in France, of the Garter and the Bath in England. Above all, it was the century of Froissart, who painted its manners and thoughts with a vividness so surpassing that to read his pages is almost to live in his time. So that the fourteenth century may fairly be taken as the period in which chivalry reached its highest perfection, and in which the military type of life and character attained its noblest development. It is the century of which we instinctively think when we would imagine a time when the rivalry of brave deeds gave birth to heroism, and the rivalry of military generosity invested even the cruelties of the battle-field with the halo of romance.

Imagination, however, plays us false here as elsewhere. Froissart himself, who described wars and battles and noble feats of arms with a candour equal to his honest delight in them, is alone proof enough that there seldom was a period when war was more ferociously conducted; when the laws in restraint of it, imposed by the voice of morality or religion, were less felt; when the motives for it as well as the incentives of personal courage, were more mercenary; or when the demoralisation consequent upon it were more widely or more fatally spread. The facts that follow in support of this conclusion come, in default of any other special reference, solely from that charming chronicler; allusions to other sources being only necessary to prove the existence of a common usage, and to leave no room for the theory that the cases gathered from Froissart were but occasional or accidental occurrences.

Even savage tribes, like the Zulus, spare the lives of women and children in war, and such a restraint is the first test of any warfare claiming to rank above the most barbarous. But in the fourteenth century such indiscriminate slaughter was the commonest episode of war: a fact not among the least surprising when we remember that the protection of women and the defenceless was one of the special clauses of the oath taken by knights at the ceremony of investiture. Five days after the death of Edward III., and actually during negotiations between France and England, the admirals of France and Spain, at the command of the King of France, sailed for Rye, which they burnt, slaying the inhabitants, whether men or women (1377); and it is a reasonable supposition that the same conduct marked their further progress of pillage and incendiarism in the Isle of Wight.

Nor were such acts only the incidents of maritime warfare, and perpetrated merely by the pirates of either country; for they occurred as frequently in hostilities by land, and in connection with the noblest names of Christendom. At Taillebourg, in Saintonge, the Earl of Derby had all the inhabitants put to the sword, in reprisals for the death of one knight, who during the assault on the town had met with his death. So it fared during the same campaign with three other places in Poitou, the chronicler giving us more details with reference to the fate of Poitiers. There were no knights in the town accustomed to war and capable of organising a defence; and it was only people of the poorer sort who offered a brave but futile resistance to the army. When the town was won, 700 people were massacred; ‘for the Earl’s people put every one to the sword, men, women, and little children.’ The Earl of Derby took no steps to stop the slaughter, but after many churches and houses had been destroyed, he forbade under pain of death any further incendiarism, apparently for no other reason than that he wished to stay there for ten or twelve days. A few years later, when the French had recovered Poitiers, the English knights, who had been there, marched away to Niort, which, on the refusal of the inhabitants to admit them, they forthwith attacked and speedily won, owing to the absence, as at Poitiers, of any knights to direct the defence. The male and female inhabitants alike were put to the sword. All these instances occur in one short chapter of Froissart.

Sometimes this promiscuous slaughter even raised its perpetrators to higher esteem. An episode of this sort occurred in the famous war between the citizens of Ghent and the Earl of Flanders. The Lord d’Enghien, with 4,000 cavaliers and a large force of foot, besieged the town of Grammont, which was attached to Ghent. About four o’clock one fine Sunday in June, the besiegers gained the town, and the slaughter, says Froissart, was very great of men, women, and children, for to none was mercy shown. Upwards of 500 of the inhabitants were killed; numbers of old people and women were burnt in their beds; and the town being then set on fire in more than two hundred places, was speedily reduced to ashes. ‘Fair son,’ said the Earl of Flanders, greeting his returning relative, ‘you are a valiant man, and if it please God will be a gallant knight, for you have made a handsome beginning.’ History, however, may rejoice that so promising a career was checked in the bud; for the young nobleman’s death in a skirmish within a few days made his first feat of arms also his last.

A similar story is connected with the memory of the fighting Bishop of Norwich, famous in those days. Having been authorised by Pope Urban VI. to make war on Pope Clement VII., he went and besieged the town of Gravelines with shot and wild-fire, ‘till in the end our men entered the town with their Bishop, when they at his commandment destroying both man, woman, and child, left not one alive of all those who remained in the town.’[36] This was in 1383; and it will be observed how then, just as in later days, the excuse of superior orders served as an excuse for the perpetration of any crime, provided only it were committed in war.

It would be an error to suppose that these things were the mere accident of war, due to the passion of the moment, or to the feeble control of leaders over their men. In a very curious old French poem, called ‘The Vow of the Heron,’ indisputable evidence exists that the slaughter of women and children was not only often premeditated before the opening of hostilities, but that an oath binding a man to it was sometimes given and accepted as a token of commendable bravery. The poem in question deals with historical events and persons; and if not to be taken as literal history, undoubtedly keeps within the limits of probability, as proved by other testimony of the manners of those times. Robert, Count of Artois, exiled from France, comes to England, and bringing a roasted heron before Edward III. and his court, prays them to make vows by it before eating of it (in accordance with the custom which attached to such oaths peculiar sanctity) concerning the deeds of war they would undertake against the kingdom of France. Edward III., the Earl of Salisbury, Sir Walter Manny, the Earl of Derby, Lord Suffolk, having all sworn according to the Count’s wishes, Sir Fauquemont, striving to outdo them in the profession of military zeal, swore that if the king would cross the sea to invade France, he would always appear in the van of his troops, carrying devastation and fire and slaughter, and sparing not altars, nor relations, nor friends, neither helpless women nor children.[37]

Let the reader reflect that these things occurred in war, not of Christians against infidels, but of Christians with one another, and in a period commonly belauded for its advance in chivalrous humanity. The incidents related were of too common occurrence to call for special remark by their chronicler; but the peculiar atrocities of the famous sack of Limoges, by the express orders of Edward the Black Prince, were too much even for Froissart. It is best to let him tell his own story from the moment of the entry of the besieging force: ‘The Prince, the Duke of Lancaster, the Earls of Cambridge and of Pembroke, Sir Guiscard d’Angle, and the others, with their men, rushed into the town. You would then have seen pillagers active to do mischief, running through the town, slaying men, women, and children, according to their commands. It was a most melancholy business, for all ranks, ages, and sexes cast themselves on their knees before the Prince, begging for mercy; but he was so inflamed with passion and revenge that he listened to none, but all were put to the sword, wherever they could be found, even those who were not guilty; for, I know not why, the poor were not spared, who could not have had any part in this treason; but they suffered for it, and indeed more than those who had been the leaders of the treachery. There was not that day in the city of Limoges any heart so hardened or that had any sense of religion, who did not deeply bewail the unfortunate events passing before their eyes; for upwards of 3,000 men, women, and children were put to death that day. God have mercy on their souls, for they were veritable martyrs.’ Yet the man whose memory is stained with this crime, among the blackest in history, was he whom not his own country alone, but the Europe of his day, dubbed the Mirror of Knighthood; and those who blindly but (according to the still prevalent sophistry of militarism) rightly carried out his orders counted among them at least three of the noblest names in England.

The absence in chivalry of any feeling strong enough to save the lives of women from the sword of the warrior renders improbable à priori any keen scruples against making them prisoners of war. In France such scruples were stronger than in England. The soldiers of the Black Prince took captive the Duchess of Bourbon, mother to the King of France, and imprisoned her in the castle of Belleperche; whence she was afterwards conducted into Guyenne, and ransom exacted for her liberty. Similar facts mark the whole period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. When the Crusaders under Richard I. took Messina by assault, they carried off with their other lawful spoils all the noblest women belonging to the Sicilians.[38] Edward I. made prisoners of the queen of Robert Bruce and her ladies, and of the Countess of Buchan, who had crowned Bruce. The latter, he said, as she had not used the sword, should not perish by it; but for her lawless conspiracy she should be shut up in a chamber of stone and iron, circular as the crown she gave; and at Berwick she should be suspended in the open air, a spectacle to travellers, and for her everlasting infamy. Accordingly, a turret was fitted up for her with a strong cage of lattice-work, made of strong posts and bars of iron.[39] In the fifteenth century, the English, in their war upon the French frontier, according to Monstrelet, ‘made many prisoners, and even carried off women, as well noble as not, whom they kept in close confinement until they ransomed themselves.’[40] The notion, therefore, that in those times any special courtesy was shown in war to the weaker sex must be received with extreme latitude. In 1194, Henry, Emperor of the Romans, having taken Salerno in Apulia by storm, actually put up for auction to his troops the wives and children of the chief citizens whom he had slain and exiled.

To pass to the treatment of prisoners of war, who, be it remembered, were only those who could promise ransom. The old historian Hoveden, speaking of a battle that was fought in 1173, says that there fell in it more than 10,000 Flemings; the remainder, who were taken captive, being thrown into prison in irons, and there starved to death. There is no evidence whether, or for how long, starving remained in vogue; but the iron chains were habitual, down even to the fourteenth century or later, among the Germans and Spaniards, the extortion of a heavier ransom being the motive for increasing the weight of chain and the general discomfort of prison. To let a prisoner go at large on parole for his ransom was an advance initiated by the French, that sprang naturally out of a state of hostilities in which most of the combatants became personally acquainted, but it was still conduct so exceptional that Froissart always speaks of it in terms of high eulogy. It was also an advance that often sprang out of the plainest necessities of the case, as when, after the battle of Poitiers, the English found their prisoners to be double their own numbers, wherefore in consideration of the risk they ran, they either received ransom from them on the spot or gave them their liberty in exchange for a promise to bring their ransom-money at Christmas to Bordeaux. Bertrand du Guesclin did the same by the English knights after their defeat at Pontvalin; and it was in reference to this last occasion that Froissart calls attention to the superiority of the French over the Germans in not shackling their prisoners with a view to a heavier ransom. ‘Curses on them for it,’ he exclaims of the Germans; ‘they are a people without pity or honour, and they ought never to receive quarter. The French entertained their prisoners well and ransomed them courteously, without being too hard upon them.’

Nevertheless we must suspect that this sort of courtesy was rather occasional than habitual. Of this same Du Guesclin, whom St.-Palaye calls the flower of chivalry,[41] two stories are told that throw a different but curious light on the manners of those times. Having on one occasion defeated the English and taken many of them prisoners, Du Guesclin tried to observe the rules of distributive justice in the partition of the captives, but failing of success and unable to discover to whom the prisoners really belonged, he and Clisson (who were brothers in arms) in order to terminate the differences which the victorious French had with one another on the subject, conceived that the only fair solution was to have them all massacred, and accordingly more than 500 Englishmen were put to death in cold blood outside the gates of Bressière.[42] So, on a second occasion, such a quantity of English were taken that ‘there was not, down to the commonest soldier, anyone who had not some prisoner of whom he counted to win a good ransom; but as there was a dispute between the French to know to whom each prisoner belonged, Du Guesclin, to put them all on a level, ordered them to put all to the sword, and only the English chiefs were spared.’[43] This ferocious warrior, the product and pride of his time, and the favourite hero of French chivalry, was hideous in face and figure; and if we think of him, with his round brown face, his flat nose, his green eyes, his crisp hair, his short neck, his broad shoulders, his long arms, short body, and badly made legs, we have evidently one of the worst specimens of that type which was for so long the curse of humanity, the warrior of mediæval Europe.

In respect, therefore, of Hallam’s statement that the courtesy of chivalry gradually introduced an indulgent treatment of prisoners which was almost unknown to antiquity, it is clear that it would be unwise to press too closely the comparison on this head between pre-Christian and post-Christian warfare. At the siege of Toledo, the Besque de Vilaines, a fellow-soldier of Du Guesclin in the Spanish war, in order to intimidate the besieged into a surrender, had as many gallows erected in front of the city as he had taken prisoners, and actually had more than two dozen hung by the executioner with that object. In the pages of Livy or Thucydides there may be many a bad deed recorded, but at least there is nothing worse than the deeds of the Besque de Vilaines, or of Du Guesclin, Constable of France, or of Edward the Black Prince of England.

There is another point besides the fettering of prisoners in which attention is drawn in Froissart to the exceptional barbarity of the Spaniards; and in no estimate of the military type of life in the palmiest days of chivalry would it be reasonable to omit all consideration of Spain. In the war between Castile and Portugal, the forces under Don John of Castile laid siege to Lisbon, closely investing it; and if any Portuguese were taken prisoners in a skirmish or otherwise, their eyes were put out, their legs, arms, or other members torn off, and in such plight they were sent back to Lisbon with the message that when the town was taken mercy would be shown to none. Such was the story told by the Portuguese ambassador to the Duke of Lancaster, and repeated on his authority by Froissart. For the credit of humanity, to say nothing of chivalry, one would fain disbelieve the tale altogether, or regard it as an episode that stood by itself and apart from the general practice of the age, since it is the only one of the kind related by Froissart. But the frequency as much as the rarity of a practice may account for the silence of an annalist, and there is little doubt that mutilation of the kind described was common in the chivalrous period, even if obsolete or nearly so in the fourteenth century. Blinding and castration were not only punishments inflicted for offences against the forest laws of the Norman kings of England, but were the common fate of captive enemies in arms throughout Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This, for instance, was the treatment of their Welsh prisoners by the Earls of Shrewsbury and Chester in 1098; as also of William III., King of Sicily, at the hands of Henry, Emperor of the Romans, in 1194. At the close of the twelfth century, in the war between Richard I. of England and Philip Augustus of France, blinding was resorted to on both sides; for Hoveden expressly says: ‘The King of France had the eyes put out of many of the English king’s subjects whom he had made prisoners, and this provoked the King of England, unwilling as he was, to similar acts of impiety.’ And to take a last instance, in 1225, the Milanese having taken prisoners 500 Genoese crossbowmen, deprived each of them of an eye and an arm, in revenge for the injury done by their bows.[44] So that it would be interesting, if possible, to learn from some historian the date and cause of the cessation of customs so profoundly barbarous and brutal.

By the rules, again, of chivalrous warfare all persons found within a town taken by assault were liable, and all the male adults likely, to be killed. Bertrand du Guesclin made it a maxim before attacking a place to threaten its commander with the alternative of surrender or death; a military custom perhaps as old as war itself, and one that has descended unchanged to our own times. Only by a timely surrender could the besieged cherish any hope for their lives or fortunes; and even the offer of a surrender might be refused, and an unconditional surrender be insisted upon instead. This is proved by the well-known story of Edward III. at the siege of Calais, a story sometimes called in doubt merely for resting solely on the authority of Froissart. The governor of Calais offered to surrender the town and all things in it, in return for a simple permission to leave it in safety. Sir Walter Manny replied that the king was resolved that they should surrender themselves solely to his will, to ransom or kill them as he pleased. The Frenchman retorted that they would suffer the direst extremities rather than submit to the smallest boy in Calais faring worse than the rest. The king obstinately refused to change his mind, till Sir Walter Manny, pressing upon him the reluctance of his officers to garrison his castles with the prospect of reprisals which such an exercise of his war-right would render probable, Edward so far relented as to insist on having six citizens of Calais left to the absolute disposal of his revenge. When the six who offered themselves as a sacrifice for the rest of their fellow-citizens reached the presence of the king, the latter, though all the knights around him were moved even to tears, gave instant orders to behead them. All who were present pleaded for them, and above all, Sir Walter Manny, in accordance with his promise to the French governor; but it was all in vain, and but for the entreaties of the queen, those six citizens would have fallen victims to the savage wrath of the pitiless Edward.

Two facts support the probable truth of the above narrative from Froissart. In the first place, it is in perfect keeping with the conduct of the same warrior at the taking of Caen. When the king heard what mischief the inhabitants had inflicted on his army by their vigorous defence, he gave orders that all the rest of the inhabitants should be slain and the town burnt;[45] and had it not been for the remonstrances of Sir Godfrey de Harcourt, there is little reason to doubt but that he would thus have glutted, as he craved to do, the intense native savagery of his soul. In the second place, the story is in perfect keeping with the common war-rule of that and later times, by virtue of which a conqueror might always avail himself of the distress of his enemy to insist upon a surrender at discretion, which of course was equivalent to a surrender to death or anything else.

How commonly death was inflicted in such cases may be shown from some narratives of capitulations given by Monstrelet. When Meaux surrendered to Henry V., six of the defenders were reserved by name to be delivered up to justice (such was the common expression), and four were shortly after beheaded at Paris.[46] When Meulan surrendered to the regent, the Duke of Bedford, numbers were specially excepted from those to whom the Duke granted their lives, ‘to remain at the disposal of the lord regent.’[47] When some French soldiers having taken refuge in a fort were so closely besieged by the Earl Marshal of England as to be obliged to surrender at discretion, many of them were hanged.[48] When the garrison of Guise capitulated to Sir John de Luxembourg, a general pardon was granted to all, except to certain who were to be delivered up to justice.[49] When the same captain, with about one thousand men, besieged the castle of Guetron, wherein were some sixty or eighty Frenchmen, the latter proposed to surrender on condition of the safety of their lives and fortunes; ‘they were told they must surrender at discretion. In the end, however, it was agreed to by the governor that from four to six of his men should be spared by Sir John. When this agreement had been settled and pledges given for its performance, the governor re-entered the castle, and was careful not to tell his companions the whole that had passed at the conference, giving them to understand in general that they were to march away in safety; but when the castle was surrendered all within it were made prisoners. On the morrow, by the orders of Sir John de Luxembourg, they were all strangled and hung on trees hard by, except the four or six before mentioned—one of their companions serving for the executioner.’[50] One more of these black acts, so common among the warriors of chivalry, and this point perhaps will be accepted as proved. The French had gained possession of the castle of Rouen, but after twelve days were obliged to surrender at discretion to the English; ‘they were all made prisoners, and put under a good guard; and shortly after, one hundred and fifty were beheaded at Rouen.’[51]

Let us pass next from the animate to the inanimate world as affected by warfare. The setting on fire of Grammont in more than two hundred places is a fair sample of the normal use of arson as a military weapon in the chivalrous period. To burn an undefended town or village was accounted no meanness; and was as frequent as the destruction of crops, fruit trees, or other sources of human subsistence. The custom of tearing up vines or fruit trees contrasts strongly with the command of Xerxes to his forces to spare the groves of trees upon their march; and any reader of ancient history will acknowledge the vast deterioration from the pagan laws of war which every page of the history of Christian chivalry reveals and exposes.

But little as was the forbearance displayed in war towards defenceless women and children, or to the crops and houses that gave them food and shelter, it might perhaps have been expected that, at a time when no serious dissent had come to divide Christianity, and when the defence of religion and religious ceremonies were among the professed duties of knighthood, churches and sacred buildings should have enjoyed especial immunity from the ravages of war. Even in pagan warfare the temples of the enemy as a rule were spared; such an act as the destruction of the sacred edifices of the Marsi by the Romans under Germanicus being contrary to the better traditions of Roman military precedent.

Permissible as it was by the rules of war, says Polybius, to destroy an enemy’s garrisons, cities, or crops, or anything else by which his power might be weakened, it was the part of mere rage and madness to destroy such things as their statues or temples, by which no benefit or injury accrued to one side or the other; nor are allusions to violations of this rule numerous in pre-Christian warfare.[52] The practice of the Romans and Macedonians to meet peaceably together in time of war on the island of Delos, on account of its sanctity as the reputed birthplace of Apollo,[53] has no parallel in the history of war among the nations of Christendom. The most that can be said for the fourteenth century in this respect is that slightly stronger scruples protected churches and monasteries than the lives of women and children. This is implied in Froissart’s account of the storming of Guerrande: ‘Men, women, and children were put to the sword, and fine churches sacrilegiously burnt; at which the Lord Lewis was so much enraged, that he immediately ordered twenty-four of the most active to be hanged on the spot.’

But the slightest embitterment of feeling removed all scruples in favour of sacred buildings. Richard II., having with his army crossed the Tweed, took up his quarters in the beautiful abbey of Melrose; after which the monastery, though spared in all previous wars with Scotland, was burnt, because the English had determined, says Froissart, to ruin everything in Scotland before returning home, in revenge for the recent alliance entered into by that country with France. The abbey of Dunfermline, where the Scotch kings used to be buried, was also burnt in the same campaign; and so it fared with all other parts of Scotland that the English overran; for they ‘spared neither monasteries nor churches, but put all to fire and flame.’

Neither did any greater degree of chivalry display itself in the matter of the modes and weapons of warfare. Although reason can urge no valid objection against the means of destruction resorted to by hostile forces, whether poisoned arrows, explosive bullets, or dynamite, yet certain things have been generally excluded from the category of fair military practices, as for example the poisoning of an enemy’s water. But the warriors of the fourteenth century, even if they stand acquitted of poisoning rivers and wells, had no scruples about poisoning the air: which perhaps is nearly equivalent. The great engines they called Sows or Muttons, like that one, 120 feet wide and 40 feet long, from which Philip von Artefeld and the men of Ghent cast heavy stones, beams of wood, or bars of hot copper into Oudenarde, must have made life inside such a place unpleasant enough; but worse things could be injected than copper bars or missiles of wood. The Duke of Normandy, besieging the English garrison at Thin-l’Evêque, had dead horses and other carrion flung into the castle, to poison the garrison by the smell; and since the air was hot as in midsummer, it is small wonder that the dictates of reason soon triumphed over the spirit of resistance. And at the siege of Grave the chivalry of Brabant made a similar use of carrion to empoison the garrison into a surrender.

Even in weapons different degrees of barbarity are clearly discernible, according as they are intended to effect a disabling wound, or a wound that will cause needless laceration and pain by the difficulty of their removal. A barbed arrow or spear betokens of course the latter object, and it is worth visiting the multi-barbed weapons in Kensington Museum from different parts of the world, to learn to what lengths military ingenuity may go in this direction. The spear heads of the Crusaders were barbed;[54] and so were the arrows used at Crecy and elsewhere, as may be seen on reference to the manuscript pictures, the object being to make it impossible to extract them without laceration of the flesh. The sarbacane or long hollow tube was in use for shooting poisoned arrows at the enemy;[55] and pictures remain of the vials of combustibles that were often attached to the end of arrows and lances.[56]

The above facts clearly show the manner and spirit with which our ancestors waged war in the days of what Hallam calls chivalrous virtue: one of the most stupendous historical impostures that has ever become an accepted article of popular belief. The military usages of the Greeks and Romans were mild and polished, compared to the immeasurable savagery which marked those of the Christians of Froissart’s day. As for the redeeming features, the rare generosity or courtesy to a foe, they might be cited in almost equal abundance from the warfare of the Red Indians; but what sheds a peculiar stain on that of the Chevaliers is the ostentatious connection of religion with the atrocities of those blood-seeking marauders. The Church by a peculiar religious service blessed and sanctified both the knight and his sword; and the most solemn rite of the Christian faith was profaned to the level of a preliminary of battle. At Easter and Christmas, the great religious festivals of a professedly peace-loving worship, the Psalm that was deemed most appropriate to be sung in the chapels of the Pope and the King of France was that beginning, ‘Benedictus Dominus Deus meus, qui docet manus meas ad bellum et digitos meos ad prœlia.’

It was a curious feature of this religion of war that, when Edward III.’s forces invaded France, so strict was the superstition that led them to observe the fast of Lent, that among other things conveyed into the country were vessels and boats of leather wherewith to obtain supplies of fish from the lakes and ponds of the enemy.

It is indeed passing strange that Christianity, which could command so strict an observance of its ordinances as is implied in the transport of boats to catch fish for Lent, should have been powerless to place any check whatever on the ferocious militarism of the time; and the very little that was ever done by the Church to check or humanise warfare is an eternal reflection on the so-called conversion of Europe to Christianity. Nevertheless the Church, to do her justice, used what influence she possessed on the side of peace in a manner she has long since lost sight of; nor was the Papacy in its most distracted days ever so indifferent to the evils of war as the Protestant Church has been since, and is still. Clement VI. succeeded in making peace between France and England, just as Alexander III. averted a war between the two countries in 1161. Innocent VI. tried to do the same; and Urban V. returned from Rome to Avignon, hoping to effect the same good object. Gregory XI. was keenly distressed at the failure of efforts similar to those of his predecessors. The Popes indeed endeavoured to stop wars, as they endeavoured to stop tournaments, or the use of the crossbow; but they were defeated by the intense barbarism of chivalry; nor can it be laid to the charge of the Church of Rome, as it can to that of the Church of the Reformation, that she ever folded her hands in despairful apathy before a custom she admitted to be evil. The cardinals and archbishops of those days were constantly engaged in pacific, nor always futile, embassies. And the prelates would frequently preach to either side arguments of peace: a fact that contrasts badly with the almost universal silence and impotence of the modern pulpit, either to stay a war or to mitigate its barbarities.

But it is true that they knew equally well how to play on the martial as on the pacific chord in their audiences; for the eloquence of an Archbishop of Toulouse turned sixty towns and castles to the interest and rights of the French king in his quarrel with England; and the preaching of prelates and lawyers in Picardy had a similar effect in other large towns. Nor were the English clergy slower than the French to assert the rights of their king and country, for Simon Tibald, Bishop of London, made several long and fine sermons to demonstrate (as always is demonstrated in such cases) that the King of France had acted most unjustly in renewing the war, and that his conduct was at total variance both with equity and reason.

But these appeals to the judgment of their congregations by the clergy are also a proof that in the fourteenth century the opinion of the people did not count for so little as is often supposed in the making of peace and war. Yet the power of the people in this respect was doubtless as insignificant as it still is in our own days: nothing being more remarkable, even in the free government of modern England, than the influence of the people in theory and their influence in fact on the most important question that regards their destinies.

Nor are the moral causes difficult to trace which in those times made wars break out so frequently and last so long, that those who now read of them can only marvel how civilisation ever emerged at all, even to the imperfect degree to which it is given to us to enjoy it. The love of adventure and the hope of fame were of course among the principal motives. The saying of Adam Smith, that the great secret of education is the direction of personal vanity to proper objects, contains the key to all advance that has ever been made in civilisation, and to every shortcoming. The savagery of the middle ages was due to the direction of personal vanity exclusively into military channels, so that the desire for distinction often displayed itself in forms of perfect absurdity, as in the case of the young English knights who went abroad with one eye veiled, binding themselves by a vow to their ladies neither to see with their eyes nor to reply to anything asked of them till they had signalised themselves by the performance of some wondrous deed in France. The gradual opening up in later days of other paths to distinction than that of arms has very much diminished the danger to the public peace involved in the worthless education of our ancestors.

Nor was the personal distinction of the warrior gained at any great risk of personal danger. The personal danger in war decreased in exact ratio with the rank of the combatant, and it was only the lower orders of the social hierarchy who unreservedly risked their lives. In case of defeat they had no ransom to offer for mercy, and appear almost habitually to have been slain without any. If it was a common thing for either side to settle before a battle the names of those on the other who should be admitted to ransom, it was no uncommon thing to determine, as the English did before Crecy, to give no quarter to the enemy at all. But as a rule the battle-field was of little more peril to the knight than the tournament; and though many perished when powerless to avert the long thin dagger, called the miséricorde, from the interstices of their armour or the vizor of their helmets, yet the striking fact in Froissart is the great number of battles, skirmishes, and sieges in which the same names occur, proving how seldom their bearers were wounded, disabled, or killed. This of course was due mainly to the marvellous defensive armour they wore, which justifies the wonder not merely how they fought but even how they moved. Whether encased in coats of mail, sewn upon or worn over the gambeson or thick undergarment of cloth or leather, or in plates of solid steel, at first worn over the mail and then instead of it, and often with the plastron or breastplate of forged iron beneath both hauberk and gambeson, they evidently had little to fear from arrow, sword, or lance, unless when they neglected to let down the vizor of the helmet, as Sir John Chandos did, when he met with his death from a lance wound in the eye (1370). Their chief danger lay in the hammering of battle-axes on their helmets, which stunned or wounded, but seldom killed them. But the foot soldiers and light cavalry, though generally well equipped, were less well protected by armour than the knights, the hauberk or coat of mail being allowed in France only to persons possessed of a certain estate; so that the knights were formidable less to one another than to those who by the conditions of the combat could not be so formidable to themselves.

The surcoat was also a defence to the knight, as indicating the ransom he could pay for his life. Otherwise it is impossible to account for his readiness to go into action with this long robe flowing over his plate of steel and all his other accoutrements. Had Sir John Chandos not been entangled in his long surcoat when he slipped, he might have lived to fight many another battle to the honour of English chivalry. Richness of armour served also the same purpose as the surcoat. At the battle of Nicopoli, when the flower of the French nobility met with so disastrous a defeat at the hands of the Turks, the lords of France were, says Froissart, so richly dressed out in their emblazoned surcoats as to look like little kings, and many for a time owed their lives to the extreme richness of their armour, which led the Saracens to suppose them greater lords than they could really boast to be. So again the elaborate gold necklaces worn by distinguished officers in the seventeenth century were probably rather symbols of the ransom their wearers could pay, than worn merely for ostentation and vanity. It was to carelessness on this score that the Scotch owed their great losses at the battle of Musselborough in 1548: for (to put the words of Patin in modern dress) their ‘vileness of port was the cause that so many of the great men and gentlemen were killed and so few saved. The outward show, the semblance and sign whereby a stranger might discern a villain from a gentleman, was not among them to be seen.’

War under these conditions chiefly affected the lives of the great by pleasantly relieving the monotony of peaceful days. In time of peace they had few occupations but hawking, hunting, and tilting, and during hostilities those amusements continued. Field sports, sometimes spoken of by their eulogists as the image of war, were not absent during its reality. Edward III. hunted and fished daily during his campaign in France, having with him thirty falconers on horseback, sixty couples of staghounds, and as many greyhounds. And many of his nobles followed his example in taking their hawks and hounds across the Channel.

But the preceding causes of the frequency of war in the days of chivalry are quite insignificant when compared with that motive which nowadays mainly finds vent in the peaceful channels of commerce—namely, the common desire of gain. The desire for glory had far less to do with it than the desire of lucre; nor is anything from the beginning to the end of Froissart more conspicuously displayed than the merely mercenary motive for war. The ransom of prisoners or of towns, or even ransom for the slain,[57] afforded a short and royal road to wealth, and was the chief incentive, as it was also the chief reward of bravery. The Chevalier Bayard made by ransoms in the course of his life a sum equal to 4,000l., which in those days must have been a fortune;[58] and Sir Walter Manny in a single campaign enriched himself by 8,000l. in the same way.[59] So that the story is perfectly credible of the old Scotch knight, who in a year of universal peace prayed, ‘Lord, turn the world upside down that gentlemen may make bread of it.’ Loot and rapine, the modern attractions of the brigand, were then in fact the main temptations of the knight or soldier; and the distinction between the latter and the brigand was far less than it had been in the pre-Christian period, or than it is in more modern times. Indeed the very word brigand meant, originally, merely a foot-soldier who fought in a brigade, in which sense it was used by Froissart; and it was only the constant addiction of the former to the occupations of the highwayman that lent to the word brigand its subsequent evil connotation.

But it was not merely the common soldier to whom the first question in a case of war was the profit to be gained by it; for men of the best families of the aristocracy were no less addicted to the land piracy which then constituted war, as is proved by such names as Calverly, Gournay, Albret, Hawkwood, and Guesclin. The noble who was a soldier in war often continued to fight as a robber after peace was made, nor thought it beneath him to make wretched villagers compound for their lives; and in spite of truces and treaties, pillage and ransom afforded his chief and often his sole source of livelihood. The story of Charles de Beaumont dying of regret for the ransom he had lost, because by mistake he had slain instead of capturing the Duke of Burgundy at the battle of Nancy, is a fair illustration of the dominion then exercised by the lowest mercenary feelings over the nobility of Europe.

This mercenary side of chivalrous warfare has been so lost sight of in the conventional descriptions of it, that it is worth while to bring into prominence how very little the cause of war really concerned those who took part in it, and how unfounded is the idea that men troubled to fight for the weak or the oppressed under fine impulses of chivalry, and not simply in any place or for any object that held out to them the prospect of gain. How otherwise is it possible to account for the conduct of the Black Prince, in fighting to restore Pedro the Cruel to the throne of Castile, from which he had been displaced in favour of Henry of Trastamare not merely by the arms of Du Guesclin and the French freebooters, but by the wishes and consent of the people? Any thought for the people concerned, or of sympathy for their liberation, as little entered into the mind of the Black Prince as if the question had concerned toads or rabbits. Provided it afforded an occasion for fighting, it mattered nothing that Pedro had ruled oppressively; that he had murdered, or at least was believed to have murdered, his wife, the sister of the reigning King of France: nor that he had even been condemned by the Pope as an enemy to the Christian Church. Yet before the battle of Navarette (1367), in which Henry was completely defeated, the Prince did not hesitate in his prayers for victory to assert that he was waging war solely in the interests of justice and reason; and it was for his success in this iniquitous exploit (a success which only awaited his departure from the country to be followed by a rising in favour of the monarch he had deposed) that the Prince won his chief title to fame; that London exhausted itself in shows, triumphs, and festivals in his honour; and that Germans, English, and Flemish with one accord entitled him ‘the mirror of knighthood.’ The Prince was only thirteen when he fought at Crecy, and he fought with courage: he was only ten years older when he won the battle of Poitiers, and he behaved with courtesy to the captive French king, from whom he looked for an extortionate ransom: but the extravagant eulogies commonly heaped upon him prove how little exalted in reality was the military ideal of his age. His sack of Limoges, famous among military atrocities, has already been spoken of; nor should it be forgotten, as another indication of his character, that when two messengers brought him a summons from the King of France to answer the appeal of the Gascons of Aquitaine, he actually imprisoned them, showing himself however in this superior to his nobles and barons, who actually advised capital punishment as the fittest salary to the envoys for their pains.

The Free Companies, or hordes of robbers, who ravaged Europe through all the period of chivalry and constituted the greatest social difficulty of the time, were simply formed of knights and men-at-arms, who, when a public war no longer justified them in robbing and murdering on behalf of the State, turned robbers and murderers on their own account. After the treaty of Bretigny had put a stop to hostilities between France and England (1360), 12,000 of these men, men of rank and family as well as needy adventurers, and under leaders of every nationality, resolved sooner than lay down their arms to march into Burgundy, there to relieve by the ransoms they might levy the poverty they could not otherwise avert. Many a war had no other justification than the liberation of one people from their outrages by turning them upon another. Thus Du Guesclin led his White Company into Spain on behalf of Henry the Bastard, less to avenge the cruelties of Pedro than to free France from the curse of her unemployed chivalry; and Henry the Bastard, when by such help he had wrested the kingdom of Castile from his brother Pedro, designed an invasion of Granada simply to divert from his own territories the allies who had placed him in possession of them. This was a constant source of war in those days, just as in our own the existence of large armies leads of necessity to wars for their employment; and even the Crusades derive some explanation from the operation of the motive indicated.

No historical microscope, indeed, will detect any difference between the Free Companies and the regular troops, since not only the latter merged into the former, but both were actuated by the sole pursuit of gain, and equally indifferent to ideas of honour or patriotism. The creed of both was summed up in the following regretful speech, attributed to Aymerigot Marcel, a great captain of the pillaging bands: ‘There is no pleasure in the world like that which men such as ourselves enjoyed. How happy were we when, riding out in search of adventures, we met a rich abbot, a merchant, or a string of mules, well laden with draperies, furs, or spices, from Montpellier, Beziers, and other places! All was our own, or ransomed according to our will. Every day we gained money, ... we lived like kings, and when we went abroad the country trembled; everything was ours both in going and returning.’

In the days of chivalry, this desire of gain, however gotten, pervaded and vitiated all classes of men from the lowest to the highest. Charles IV. of France, when his sister Isabella, queen of Edward II., fled to him, promised to help her with gold and silver, but secretly, lest it should bring him into war; and then when messengers from England came with gold and silver and jewels for himself and his ministers, both he and his council became in a short time as cold to the cause of Isabella as they had been warm, the king even going so far as to forbid any of his subjects under pain of banishment to help his sister in her projected return. And again, when Edward III. was about to make war with France, was he not told that his allies were men who loved to gain wealth, and whom it was necessary to pay beforehand? And did he not find that a judicious distribution of florins was as effective in winning over to his interests a duke, a marquis, an archbishop, and the lords of Germany, as the poorer citizens of the towns of Flanders?

Money, therefore, or its equivalent, and not the title to the crown of France, was at the root of the wars waged abroad by the English under Edward III. The question of title simply served as pretext, covering the baser objects of the invasion. No historical fact is clearer, ignored though it has been in the popular histories of England, than that the unpopularity of his successor, Richard II., arose from his marriage with the daughter of the King of France, and from his desire for peace between the two kingdoms, of which the marriage was the proof and the security. When his wish for peace led to the formation of a war and a peace party among the English nobility, Froissart says: ‘The poorer knights and archers were of course for war, as their sole livelihood depended upon it.[60] They had learnt idleness and looked to war as a means of support.’ In reference to the great peace conference held at Amiens in 1391, he observes: ‘Many persons will not readily believe what I am about to say, though it is strictly true, that the English are fonder of war than of peace. During the reign of Edward, of happy memory, and in the lifetime of his son the Prince of Wales, they made such grand conquests in France, and by their victories and ransoms of towns, castles, and men gained such wealth, that the poorest knights became rich; and those who were not gentlemen by birth, by gallantly hazarding themselves in these wars, were ennobled by their valour and worth. Those who came after them were desirous of following the same road.... Even the Duke of Gloucester, son of King Edward, inclined to the opinion of the commons, as did many other knights and squires who were desirous of war to enable them to support their state.’[61]

No other country, indeed, pleased these English brigand knights so well as France for the purpose of military plunder. Hence the English who returned from the expedition to Castile complained bitterly that in the large towns where they expected to find everything, there was nothing but wines, lard, and empty coffers; but that it was quite otherwise in France, where they had often found in the cities taken in war such wealth and riches as astonished them; it was in a war with France therefore that it behoved them to hazard their lives, for it was very profitable, not in a war with Castile or Portugal, where there was nothing but poverty and loss to be suffered.[62]

With this evidence from Froissart may be compared a passage from Philip de Commines, where he says, in speaking of Louis XI. towards the end of the following century: ‘Our master was well aware that the nobility, clergy, and commons of England are always ready to enter upon a war with France, not only on account of their old title to its crown, but by the desire of gain, for it pleased God to permit their predecessors to win several memorable battles in this kingdom, and to remain in possession of Normandy and Guienne for the space of 350 years, ... during which time they carried over enormous booty into England. Not only in plunder which they had taken in the several towns, but in the richness and quality of their prisoners, who were most of them great princes and lords, and paid them vast ransoms for their liberty; so that every Englishman afterwards hoped to do the same thereby and return home laden with spoils.’[63]

Such, then, were the antecedents of the evil custom of war which has descended to our own time; and we shall have taken the first step to its abolition when we have thus learnt to read its real descent and place in history, and to reject as pure hallucination the idea that in the warfare of the past any more than of the present there was anything noble or great or glorious. That brave deeds were often done and noble conduct sometimes displayed in it must not blind us to its other and darker features. It was a warfare in which not even women and children were safe from the sword or lance of the knight or soldier; nor sacred buildings exempt from their rage. It was a warfare in which the occasional mercy shown had a mercenary taint; in which the defeated were only spared for their ransom; and in which prisoners were constantly liable to torture, mutilation, and fetters. Above all, it was a warfare in which men fought more from a sordid greed of gain than from any love or attachment to their king or country, so that all sense of loyalty would speedily evaporate if a king like Richard II. chanced to wish to live peaceably with his neighbours.

It is not unimportant to have thus shown the warfare of chivalry in its true light. For it is the delusion with regard to it, which more than anything else keeps alive those romantic notions about war and warriors that are the most fatal hindrance to removing both from the face of the earth. We clearly drive militarism to its last defences, if we deprive it of every period and of almost every name on which it is wont to rely as entitling it to our admiration or esteem.

[CHAPTER III.]
NAVAL WARFARE.

Una et ea vetus causa bellandi est profunda cupido imperii et divitiarum.—Sallust.

Robbery the first object of maritime warfare—The piratical origin of European navies—Merciless character of wars at sea—Fortunes made by privateering in England—Privateers commissioned by the State—Privateers defended by the publicists—Distinction between privateering and piracy—Failure of the State to regulate privateering—Privateering condemned by Lord Nelson—Privateering abolished by the Declaration of Paris in 1856—Modern feeling against seizure of private property at sea—Naval warfare in days of wooden ships—Unlawful methods of maritime war—The Emperor Leo VI.’s ‘Treatise on Tactics’—The use of fire-ships—Death the penalty for serving in fire-ships—Torpedoes originally regarded as ‘bad’ war—English and French doctrine of rights of neutrals—Enemy’s property under neutral flag secured by Treaty of Paris—Shortcomings of the Treaty of Paris with regard to:—(1) A definition of what is contraband; (2) The right of search of vessels under convoy; (3) The practice of embargoes; (4) The jus angariæ—The International Marine Code of the future.

The first striking difference between military and naval warfare is that, while—in theory, at least—the military forces of a country confine their attacks to the persons and power of their enemy, the naval forces devote themselves primarily to the plunder of his property and commerce. If on land the theory of modern war exempts from spoliation all of an enemy’s goods that do not contribute to his military strength, on sea such spoliation is the professed object of maritime warfare. And the difference, we are told, is ‘the necessary consequence of the state of war, which places the citizens or subject of the belligerent states in hostility to each other, and prohibits all intercourse between them,’[64] although the very reason for the immunity of private property on land is that war is a condition of hostility between the military forces of two countries, and not between their respective inhabitants.[64]

Writers on public law have invented many ingenious theories to explain and justify, on rational grounds, so fundamental a difference between the two kinds of warfare. ‘To make prize of a merchant ship,’ says Dr. Whewell, ‘is an obvious way of showing (such a ship) that its own State is unable to protect it at sea, and thus is a mode of attacking the State;’[65] a reason that would equally justify the slaughter of nonagenarians. According to Hautefeuille, the differences flows naturally from the conditions of hostilities waged on different elements, and especially from the absence at sea of any fear of a rising en masse which, as it may be the result of wholesale robbery on land, serves to some extent as a safeguard against it.[66]

A simpler explanation may trace the difference to the maritime Piracy which for many centuries was the normal relation between the English and Continental coasts, and out of which the navies of Europe were gradually evolved. Sir H. Nicolas, describing the naval state of the thirteenth and early part of the fourteenth century, proves by abundant facts the following picture of it: ‘During a truce or peace ships were boarded, plundered, and captured by vessels of a friendly Power as if there had been actual war. Even English merchant ships were attacked and robbed as well in port as at sea by English vessels, and especially by those of the Cinque Ports, which seem to have been nests of robbers; and, judging from the numerous complaints, it would appear that a general system of piracy existed which no government was strong enough to restrain.’[67]

The governments of those days were, however, not only not strong enough to restrain, but, as a rule, only too glad to make use of these pirates as auxiliaries in their wars with foreign Powers. Some English ships carrying troops to France having been dispersed by a storm, the sailors of the Cinque Ports were ordered by Henry III., in revenge, to commit every possible injury on the French; a commission undertaken with such zeal on their part that they slew and plundered not only all the foreigners they could catch, but their own countrymen returning from their pilgrimages (1242). During the whole reign of Henry IV. (1399-1413), though there existed a truce between France and England, the ordinary incidents of hostilities continued at sea just as if the countries had been at open war.[68] The object on either side was plunder and wanton devastation; nor from their landing on each other’s coasts, burning each other’s towns and crops, and carrying off each other’s property, did the country of either derive the least benefit whatever. The monk of St. Denys shows that these pirates were really the mariners on whom the naval service of England chiefly depended in time of war, for he says, in speaking of this period: ‘The English pirates, discontented with the truce and unwilling to abandon their profitable pursuits, determined to infest the sea and attack merchant ships. Three thousand of the most skilful sailors of England and Bayonne had confederated for that purpose, and, as was supposed, with the approbation of their king.’ It was not till the year 1413 that Henry V. sought to put a stop to the piratical practices of the English marine, and he then did so without requiring a reciprocal endeavour on the part of the other countries of Europe.[69]

Maritime warfare being thus simply an extension of maritime piracy, the usages of the one naturally became the usages of the other; the only difference being that in time of war it was with the licence and pay of the State, and with the help of knights and squires, that the pirates carried on their accustomed programme of incendiarism, massacres, and robberies.

From this connection, therefore, a lower character of warfare prevailed from the first on sea than on land, and the spirit of piracy breathed over the waters. No more mercy was shown by the regular naval service than was shown by pirates to the crew of a captured or surrendered vessel, for wounded and unwounded alike were thrown into the sea. When the fleet of Breton pirates defeated the English pirates in July 1403, and took 2,000 of them prisoners, they threw overboard the greater part of them;[70] and in the great sea-fight between the English and Spanish fleets of 1350, the whole of the crew of a Spanish ship that surrendered to the Earl of Lancaster were thrown overboard, ‘according to the barbarous custom of the age.’[71]

Two other stories of that time still further display the utter want of anything like chivalrous feeling in maritime usages. A Flemish ship, on its way to Scotland, having been driven by a storm on the English coast, near the Thames, and its crew having been slain by the inhabitants, the king rewarded the assassins with the whole of the cargo, and kept the ship and the rigging for himself (1318).[72] In 1379, when a fleet of English knights, under Sir John Arundel, on its way to Brittany, was overtaken by a storm, and the jettison of other things failed to relieve the vessels, sixty women, many of whom had been forced to embark, were thrown into the sea.[73]

The piratical origin, therefore, of the navies of Europe sufficiently explains the fact that plunder, which is less the rule than an incident of war on land, remains its chief object and feature at sea. The fact may further be explained by the survival of piracy long sanctioned by the States under the guise of Privateering. If we would understand the popularity of wars in England in the old privateering days, we must recall the magnificent fortunes which were often won as prize-money in the career of legalised piracy. During the war which was concluded in 1748 by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, England captured of French and Spanish ships collectively 3,434, whilst she herself lost 3,238; but, small compensation as this balance of 196 ships in her favour may seem after a contest of some nine years, the pecuniary balance in her favour is said to have amounted to 2,000,000l.[74]

We now begin to see why our forefathers rang their church bells at the announcement of war, as they did at the declaration of this one against Spain. War represented to large classes what the gold mines of Peru represented to Spain—the best of all possible pecuniary speculations. In the year 1747 alone the English ships took 644 prizes; and of what enormous value they often were! Here is a list of the values which the cargoes of these prizes not unfrequently reached:

• That of the ‘Héron,’ a French ship, 140,000l.
• That of the ‘Conception,’ a French ship, 200,000l.
• That of ‘La Charmante,’ a French East Indiaman, 200,000l.
• That of the ‘Vestal,’ a Spanish ship, 140,000l.
• That of the ‘Hector,’ a Spanish ship, 300,000l.
• That of the ‘Concordia,’ a Spanish ship, 600,000l.[75]

Two Spanish register ships are recorded to have brought in 350l. to every foremast man who took part in their capture. In 1745 three Spanish vessels returning from Peru having been captured by three privateersmen, the owners of the latter received to their separate shares the sum of 700,000l., and every common seaman 850l. Another Spanish galleon was taken by a British man-of-war with a million sterling in bullion on board.

These facts suffice to dispel the wonder we might otherwise feel at the love our ancestors had for mixing themselves up, for any pretext or for none, in hostilities with Continental Powers. Our policy was naturally spirited, when it meant chances like these for all who lacked either the wit or the will to live honestly, and returns like these on the capital invested in the patriotic equipment of a few privateers. But what advantage ultimately accrued to either side, after deduction made for all losses and expenses, or how far these national piracies contributed to the speedier restoration of peace, were questions that apparently did not enter within the range of military reasoning to consider.

Everything was done to make attractive a life of piracy spent in the service of the State. Originally every European State claimed some interest in the prizes it commissioned its privateers to take; but the fact that each in turn surrendered its claim proves the difficulty there was in getting these piratical servants to submit their plunder to the adjudication of the prize-courts. Originally all privateers were bound to deliver captured arms and ammunition to their sovereign, and to surrender a percentage of their gains to the State or the admiral; but it soon came to pass that sovereigns had to pay for the arms they might wish to keep, and that the percentage deducted was first diminished and then abolished altogether. At first 30 per cent. was deducted in Holland, which fell successively to 18 per cent., to 10 per cent., to nothing; and in England the 10 per cent. originally due to the admiral was finally surrendered.[76] The crew also enjoyed an additional prize of money for every person slain or captured on an enemy’s man-of-war or privateer, and for every cannon in proportion to its bore.[77]

Of all the changes of opinion that have occurred in the world’s history, none is more instructive than that which gradually took place concerning privateering, and which ended in its final renunciation by most of the maritime Powers in the Declaration of Paris in 1856.

The weight of the publicists’ authority was for long in its favour. Vattel only made the proviso of a just cause of war the condition for reconciling privateering with the comfort of a good conscience.[78] Valin defended it as a patriotic service, in that it relieved the State from the expense of fitting out war-vessels. Emerigon denounced the vocation of pirates as infamous, while commending that of privateers as honest and even glorious. And for many generations the distinction between the two was held to be satisfactory, that the privateer acted under the commission of his sovereign, the pirate under no one’s but his own.

Morally, this distinction of itself proved little. Take the story of the French general Crillon, who, when Henri III. proposed to him to assassinate the Duc de Guise, is said to have replied, ‘My life and my property are yours, Sire; but I should be unworthy of the French name were I false to the laws of honour.’ Had he accepted the commission, would the deed have been praiseworthy or infamous? Can a commission affect the moral quality of actions? The hangman has a commission, but neither honour nor distinction. Why, then, should a successful privateer have been often decorated with the title of nobility or presented with a sword by his king?[79]

Historically, the distinction had even less foundation. In olden times individuals carried on their own robberies or reprisals at their own risk; but their actions did not become the least less piratical when, about the thirteenth century, reprisals were taken under State control, and became only lawful under letters of marque duly issued by a sovereign or his admirals. In their acts, conduct, and whole procedure, the commissioned privateers of later times differed in no discernible respects from the pirates of the middle ages, save in the fact of being utilised by the State for its supposed benefit: and this difference, only dating as it did from the time when the prohibition to fit out cruisers in time of war without public authority first became common, was evidently one of date rather than of nature.

Moreover, the attempt of the State to regulate its piratical service failed utterly. In the fourteenth century it was customary to make the officers of a privateer swear not to plunder the subjects of the commissioning belligerent, or of friendly Powers, or of vessels sailing under safe-conducts; in the next century it became necessary, in addition to this oath, to insist on heavy pecuniary sureties;[80] and such sureties became common stipulations in treaties of peace. Nearly every treaty between the maritime Powers after about 1600 contained stipulations in restraint of the abuses of privateering; on the value of which, the complaints that arose in every war that occurred of privateers exceeding their powers are a sufficient comment. The numerous ordinances of different countries threatening to punish as pirates all privateers who were found with commissions from both belligerents, give us a still further insight into the character of those servants of the State.

In fact, so slight was the distinction founded on the possession of a commission, that even privateers with commissions were sometimes treated as actual pirates and not as legitimate belligerents. In the seventeenth century, the freebooters and buccaneers who ravaged the West Indies, and who consisted of the outcasts of England and the Continent, though they were duly commissioned by France to do their utmost damage to the Spanish colonies and commerce in the West Indies, were treated as no better than pirates if they happened to fall into the hands of the Spaniards. And especially was this distinction disallowed if there were any doubt concerning the legitimacy of the letters of marque. England, for instance, refused at first to treat as better than pirates the privateers of her revolted colonists in America; and in the French Revolution she tried to persuade the Powers of Europe so to deal with privateers commissioned by the republican government. Russia having consented to this plan, its execution was only hindered by the honourable refusal of Sweden and Denmark to accede to so retrograde an innovation.[81]

An illusory distinction between the prize of a pirate and that of a privateer was further sustained by the judicial apparatus of the prize-court. The rights of a captor were not complete till a naval tribunal of his own country had settled his claims to the ships or cargo of an enemy or neutral. By this device confiscation was divested of its likeness to plunder, and a thin veneer of legality was laid on the fundamental lawlessness of the whole system. Were it left to the wolves to decide on their rights to the captured sheep, the latter would have much the same chance of release as vessels in a prize-court of the captor. A prize-court has never yet been equally representative of either belligerent, or been so constituted as to be absolutely impartial between either.

But, even granted that a prize-court gave its verdicts with the strictest regard to the evidence, of what nature was that evidence likely to be when it came chiefly from the purser on board the privateer, whose duty it was to draw up a verbal process of the circumstances of every visit or capture, and who, as he was paid and nominated by the captain of the privateer, was dependent for his profits in the concern on the lawfulness of the prizes? How easy to represent that a defenceless merchant vessel had offered resistance to search, and that therefore by the law of nations she and her cargo were lawful prize! How tempting to falsify every circumstance that really attended the capture, or that legally affected the captors’ rights to their plunder!

These aspects of privateering soon led unbiassed minds to a sounder judgment about it than was discernible in received opinion. Molloy, an English writer, spoke of it, as long ago as 1769, as follows: ‘It were well they (the privateers) were restrained by consent of all princes, since all good men account them but one remove from pirates, who without any respect to the cause, or having any injury done them, or so much as hired for the service, spoil men and goods, making even a trade and calling of it.’[82] Martens, the German publicist, at the end of the same century, called privateering a privileged piracy; but Nelson’s opinion may fairly count for more than all; and of his opinion there remains no doubt whatever. In a letter dated August 7, 1804, he wrote: ‘If I had the least authority in controlling the privateers, whose conduct is so disgraceful to the British nation, I would instantly take their commissions from them.’ In the same letter he spoke of them as a horde of sanctioned robbers;[83] and on another occasion he wrote: ‘The conduct of all privateering is, as far as I have seen, so near piracy, that I only wonder any civilised nation can allow them. The lawful as well as the unlawful commerce of the neutral flag is subject to every violation and spoliation.’[84] Yet it was for the sake of such spoliation, which England chose to regard as her maritime right and to identify with her maritime supremacy, that, under the pretext of solicitude for the liberties of Europe, she fought her long war with France, and made herself the enemy in turn of nearly every other civilised Power in the world.

The Declaration of Paris, the first article of which abolished privateering between the signatory Powers, was signed by Lord Clarendon on behalf of England; but on the ground that it was not formally a treaty, never having been ratified by Parliament or the Crown, it has actually been several times proposed in the English Parliament to violate the honour of England by declaring that agreement null and void.[85] Lord Derby, in reference to such proposals, said in 1867: ‘We have given a pledge, not merely to the Powers who signed with us, but to the whole civilised world.’ This was the language of real patriotism, which esteems a country’s honour its highest interest; the other was the language of the plainest perfidy. In November 1876, the Russian Government was also strongly urged, in the case of war with England, to issue letters of marque against British commerce, in spite of the international agreement to the contrary.[86] It is not likely that it would have done so; but these motions in different countries give vital interest to the history of privateering as one of the legitimate modes of waging war.

Moreover, since neither Spain, the United States, nor Mexico signed the Declaration of Paris, war with any of them would revive all the atrocities and disputes that have embittered previous wars in which England has been engaged. The precedent of former treaties, such as that between Sweden and the United Provinces in 1675, the United States and Prussia in 1785, and the United States and Italy in 1871, by which either party agreed in the event of war not to employ privateers against the other, affords an obvious sample of what diplomacy might yet do to diminish the chances of war between the signatory and the non-signatory Powers.

The United States would have signed the Declaration of Paris if it had exempted the merchant vessels of belligerents as well from public armed vessels as from privateers: and this must be looked to as the next conquest of law over lawlessness. Russia and several other Powers were ready to accept the American amendment, which, having at first only fallen through owing to the opposition of England, was subsequently withdrawn by America herself. Nevertheless, that amendment remains the wish not only of the civilised world, but of our own merchants, whose carrying trade, the largest in the world, is, in the event of England becoming a belligerent, in danger of falling into the hands of neutral countries. In 1858 the merchants of Bremen drew up a formal protest against the right of ships of war to seize the property and ships of merchants.[87] In the war of 1866 Prussia, Italy, and Austria agreed to forego this time-honoured right of mutual plunder; and the Emperor of Germany endeavoured to establish the same limitation in the war of 1870. The old maxim of war, of which the custom is a survival, has long since been disproved by political economy—the doctrine, namely, that a loss to one country is a gain to another, or that one country profits by the exact extent of the injury that it effects against the property of its adversary. Having lost its basis in reason, it only remains to remove it from practice.

If we turn for a moment from this aspect of naval warfare to the actual conduct of hostilities at sea, the desire to obtain forcible possession of an enemy’s vessels must clearly have had a beneficial effect in rendering the loss of life less extensive than it was in battles on land. To capture a ship, it was desirable, if possible, to disable without destroying it; so that the fire of each side was more generally directed against the masts and rigging than against the hull or lower parts of the vessel. In the case of the ‘Berwick,’ an English 74-gun ship, which struck her colours to the French frigate, the ‘Alceste,’ only four sailors were wounded, and the captain, whose head was taken off by a bar-shot, was the only person slain; and ‘so small a loss was attributed to the high firing of the French, who, making sure of the ‘Berwick’s’ capture, and wanting such a ship entire in their fleet, were wise enough to do as little injury as possible to her hull.’[88] The great battle between the English and Dutch fleets off Camperdown (1795) was exceptional both for the damage inflicted by both on the hulls of their adversaries, and consequently for the heavy loss of life on either side. ‘The appearance of the British ships at the close of the action was very unlike what it generally is when the French or Spaniards have been the opponents of the former. Not a single mast nor even a top-mast was shot away; nor were the rigging and sails of the ships in their usual tattered state. It was at the hulls of their adversaries that the Dutchmen had directed their shot.’[89] As the English naturally retaliated, though ‘as trophies the appearance of the Dutch prizes was gratifying,’ as ships of war ‘they were not the slightest acquisition to the navy of England.’[90]

When this happened, as it could not but often do in pitched naval battles, the Government sometimes made good to the captors the value of the prizes that the serious nature of the conflict had caused them to lose. Thus in the case of the six French prizes made at the Battle of the Nile, only three of which ever reached Plymouth, the Government, ‘in order that the captors might not suffer for the prowess they had displayed in riddling the hulls of the captured ships, paid for each of the destroyed 74s, the “Guerrier,” “Heureux,” and “Mercure,” the sum of 20,000l., which was as much as the least valuable of the remaining 74s had been valued at.’

It is curious to notice distinctions in naval warfare between lawful and unlawful methods similar to those conspicuous on land. Such projectiles as bits of iron ore, pointed stones, nails, or glass, are excluded from the list of things that may be used in good war; and the Declaration of St. Petersburg condemns explosive bullets as much on one element as on the other. Unfounded charges by one belligerent against another are, however, always liable to bring the illicit method into actual use on both sides under the pretext of reprisals; as we see in the following order of the day, issued at Brest by the French Vice-Admiral Marshal Conflans (Nov. 8, 1759): ‘It is absolutely contrary to the law of nations to make bad war, and to shoot shells at the enemy, who must always be fought according to the rules of honour, with the arms generally employed by polite nations. Yet some captains have complained that the English have used such weapons against them. It is, therefore, only on these complaints, and with an extreme reluctance, that it has been resolved to embark hollow shells on vessels of the line, but it is expressly forbidden to use them unless the enemy begin.’[91]

So the English in their turn charged the French with making bad war. The wound received by Nelson at Aboukir, on the forehead, was attributed to a piece of iron or a langridge shot.[92] And the wounds that the crew of the ‘Brunswick’ received from the ‘Vengeur’ in the famous battle between the French and English fleets in June 1794, are said to have been peculiarly distressing, owing to the French employing langridge shot of raw ore and old nails, and to their throwing stinkpots into the portholes, which caused most painful burnings and scaldings.[93] It is safest to discredit such accusations altogether, for there is no limit to the barbarities that may come into play, in consequence of too ready a credulity.

Red-hot shot, legitimate for the defence of land forts against ships, used not to be considered good war in the contests of ships with one another. In the three hours’ action between the ‘Lively’ and the ‘Tourterelle,’ a French privateer, the use by the latter of hot-shot, ‘not usually deemed honourable warfare,’ was considered to be wrong, but a wrong on the part of those who equipped her for sea more than on the part of the captain who fired them.[94] The English assailing batteries that fired red-hot shot against Glückstadt in 1813 are said to have resorted to ‘a mode of warfare very unusual with us since the siege of Gibraltar.’[95]

The ‘Treatise on Tactics,’ by the Emperor Leo VI., carries back the record of the means employed against an enemy in naval warfare to the ninth century. The things he recommends as most effective are: cranes, to let fall heavy weights on the enemy’s decks; caltrops, with iron spikes, to wound his feet;[96] jars full of quicklime, to suffocate him; jars containing combustibles, to burn him; jars containing poisonous reptiles, to bite him; and Greek fire with its noise like thunder, to frighten as well as burn him.[97] Many of these methods were of immemorial usage; for Scipio knew the merits of jars full of pitch, and Hannibal of jars full of vipers.[98] Nothing was too bad for use in those days; nor can it be ascertained when or why they ceased to be used. Greek fire was used with great effect in the sea-battles between the Saracens and Christians; and it is a fair cause for wonder that the invention of gunpowder should have so entirely superseded it as to cause its very manufacture to have been forgotten. Neither does history record the date of, nor the reason for, the disuse of quicklime, which in the famous fight off Dover in 1217 between the French and English contributed so greatly to the victory of the latter.[99]

It is difficult to believe that sentiments of humanity should have caused these methods to be discarded from maritime hostilities; but that such motives led to a certain mitigation in the use of fire-ships appears from a passage in Captain Brenton’s ‘Naval History,’ where he says: ‘The use of fire-ships has long been laid aside, to the honour of the nation which first dispensed with this barbarous aggravation of the horrors of war.’ That is to say, as he explains it, though fire-ships continued to accompany the fleets, they were only used in an anchorage where there was a fair chance of the escape of the crew against which they were sent; they ceased to be used, as at one time, to burn or blow up disabled ships, which the conqueror dared not board and carry into port, and which were covered with the wounded and dying. The last instance in which they were so used by the English was in the fight off Toulon, in 1744; and their use on that occasion is said to have received merited reproach from an historian of the day.[100]

As the service of a fire-ship was one that required the greatest bravery and coolness—since it was, of course, attacked in every possible way, and it was often difficult to escape by the boat chained behind it—it displays the extraordinary inconsistency of opinion about such matters that it should have been accounted rather a service of infamy than of honour. Molloy, in 1769, wrote of it as the practice of his day to put to death prisoners made from a fire-ship: ‘Generally the persons found in them are put to death if taken.’[101] And another writer says: ‘Whether it be from a refined idea, or from the most determined resentment towards those who act in fire-ships, may be difficult to judge; but there is rarely any quarter given to such as fall into the enemy’s power.’[102]

Clock-machines, or torpedoes, were introduced into European warfare by the English, being intended to destroy Napoleon’s ships at Boulogne in 1804. It is remarkable that the use of them was at first reprobated by Captain Brenton, and by Lord St. Vincent, who foresaw that other Powers would in turn adopt the innovation.[103] The French, who picked up some of them near Boulogne, called them infernal machines. But at present they seem fairly established as part of good warfare, in default of any international agreement against them, such as that which exists against explosive bullets.

The same International Act which abolished privateering between the signatory Powers settled also between them two other disputed points which for centuries were a frequent cause of war and jealousy—namely, the liability of the property of neutrals to be seized when found in the ships of an enemy, and of the property of an enemy to be seized when found in the ships of a neutral.

Over the abstract right of belligerents so to deal with the ships or property of neutral Powers the publicists for long fought a battle-royal, contending either that a neutral ship should be regarded as neutral territory, or that an enemy’s property was lawful prize anywhere. Whilst the French or Continental theory regarded the nationality of the vessel rather than of its cargo, so that the goods of a neutral might be fairly seized on an enemy’s vessel, but those of an enemy were safe even in a neutral ship; the English theory was diametrically the opposite, for the Admiralty restored a neutral’s property taken on an enemy’s vessel, but confiscated an enemy’s goods if found on a neutral vessel. This difference between the English rule and that of other countries was a source of endless contention. Frederick II. of Prussia, in 1753, first resisted the English claim to seize hostile property sailing under a neutral flag. Then came against the same claim the first Armed Neutrality of 1780, headed by Russia, and again in 1801 the second armed coalition of the Northern Powers. The difference of rule was, therefore, as such differences always must be, a source of real weakness to England, on account of the enemies it raised against her all over the world. Yet the Continental theory of free ships making free goods was considered for generations to be so adverse to the real interests of England, that Lord Nelson, in 1801, characterised it in the House of Lords as ‘a proposition so monstrous in itself, so contrary to the law of nations, and so injurious to the maritime interests of England, as to justify war with the advocates of such a doctrine, so long as a single man, a single shilling, or a single drop of blood remained in the country.’[104] The Treaty of Paris has made binding the Continental rule, and in spite of Lord Nelson free ships now make free goods.

The fact, therefore, that if England were now at war with France she could not take French property (unless it were contraband) from a Russian or American ship, we owe not to the publicists who were divided about it, nor to naval opinion which was decided against it, but to the accidental alliance between France and England in the Crimean war. In order to co-operate together, each waived its old claim, according to which France would have been free to seize the property of a neutral found on Russian vessels, and England to seize Russian property on the vessels of a neutral. As the United States and other neutral Powers as well would probably have resisted by arms the claim of either so to interfere with their neutrality, the mutual concession was one of common prudence; and as the same opposition would have been perennial, it was no great sacrifice on the part of either to perpetuate and extend by a treaty at the close of the war the agreement that at first was only to last for its continuance.

Much, however, as that treaty has done for the peace of the world, by assimilating in these respects the maritime law of nations, it has left many customs unchanged to challenge still the attention of reformers. It is therefore of some practical interest to consider of what nature future changes should be, inasmuch as, if we cannot agree to cease from fighting altogether, the next best thing we can do is to reduce the pretexts for it to as few as possible.

The reservation, then, in favour of confiscating property that is contraband of war has left the right of visiting and searching neutral or hostile merchantmen for contraband untouched; though nothing has been a more fruitful source of quarrel than the want of a common definition of what constitutes contraband. Anything which, without further manipulation, adds directly to an enemy’s power, as weapons of war, are contraband by universal admission; but whether corn and provisions are, as some text-writers assert and others deny; whether coined money, horses, or saddles are, as was decided in 1863 between the Northern Powers of Europe; whether tar and pitch for ships are, as was disputed between England and Sweden for 200 years; whether coal should be, as Prince Bismarck claimed against England in 1870; or whether rice is a war-threatening point of difference between England and France in this very year of grace; these are questions that remain absolutely undecided, or are left to the treaties between the several Powers or the arbitrary caprice of belligerents.

The Declaration of Paris was equally silent as to the right (demanded by all the Powers save England) for ships of war, which have always been exempt from search, to exempt from search also the merchant vessels sailing under their convoy. So fundamental a divergence between the maritime usages of different countries can only be sustained under the peril of incurring hostility and war, without any corresponding advantage in compensation.

The Declaration of Paris has also left untouched the old usage of embargoes. A nation wronged by another may still seize the vessels of that other which may be in its ports, in order to secure attention to its claims; restoring them in the event of a peaceable settlement, but confiscating them if war ensues. The resemblance of this practice of hostile embargo to robbery, ‘occurring as it does in the midst of peace ... ought,’ says an American jurist, ‘to make it disgraceful and drive it into disuse.’[105] It would be as reasonable to seize the persons and property of all the merchants resident in the country, as used to be done by France and England. In 1795, Holland, having been conquered by France, became thereby an enemy of England. Accordingly, ‘orders were issued to seize all Dutch vessels in British ports;’ in virtue of which, several gun-ships and between fifty and sixty merchant vessels in Plymouth Sound were detained by the port admiral.[106] It is difficult to conceive anything less defensible as a practice between civilised States.

It equally descends from the barbarous origin of maritime law that all ships of an enemy wrecked on our coast, or forced to take refuge in our harbours by stress of weather or want of provisions, or in ignorance of the existence of hostilities, should become ours by right of war. There are generous instances to the contrary. The Spanish Governor of Havana in 1746, when an English vessel was driven into that hostile port by stress of weather, refused to seize the vessel and take the captain prisoner; and so did another Spanish governor in the case of an English vessel whose captain was ignorant that Honduras was hostile territory. But these cases are the exception; the rule being, that a hostile Power avails itself of a captain’s ignorance or distress to make him a prisoner and his ship a prize of war; another proof, if further needed, how very little magnanimity really enters into the conduct of hostilities.

It is a still further abuse of the rights of war that a belligerent State may do what it pleases, not only with all the vessels of its own subjects, but with all those of neutrals as well which happen to be within its jurisdiction at the beginning of a war; that it may, on paying the owners the value of their freight beforehand, confiscate such vessels and compel them to serve in the transport of its troops or its munitions of war. Yet this is the so-called jus angariæ, to which Prince Bismarck appealed when in the war with France the Germans sank some British vessels at the mouth of the Seine.[107] It is true we received liberal compensation, but the right is none the less one which all the Powers are interested in abolishing.

If, then, from the preceding retrospect it appears that whatever advance we have made on the maritime usages of our ancestors has been due solely to international agreement, and to a friendly concert between the chief Powers of the world, acting with a view to their permanent and collective interests, the inference is evidently in favour of any further advance being only possible in the same way. The renunciations of each Power redound to the benefit of each and all; nor can the gain of the world involve any real loss for the several nations that compose it. We shall therefore, perhaps, not err far from the truth, if we imagine the following articles, in complement of those formulated in Paris in 1856, to constitute the International Marine Code which will be found in the future to be most calculated to remove sources of contention between nations, and best adapted, therefore, to the permanent interests of the contracting parties:

1. Privateering is and remains abolished.
2. The merchant vessels and cargoes of belligerents shall be exempted from seizure and confiscation.
3. The colonies of either belligerent shall be excluded from the field of legitimate hostilities, and the neutrality of their territory shall extend to their ships and commerce.
4. The right of visiting and searching neutral or hostile merchantmen for contraband of war shall be abolished.
5. Contraband of war shall be defined by international agreement; and to deal in such contraband shall be made a breach of the civil law, prohibited and punished by each State as a violation of its proclamation of neutrality.
6. Except in the case of contraband as aforesaid, all trade shall be lawful between the subjects of either belligerent, since individuals are no more involved in the quarrel between their respective governments at sea than they are on land.
7. The only limitation to commerce shall be so effective a blockade of an enemy’s ports as shall render it impossible for ships to enter or leave them; and the mere notification that a port is blockaded shall not justify the seizure of ships that have sailed from, or are sailing to, them in any part of the world.
8. The right to lay hostile embargoes on the ships of a friendly Power, by reason of a dispute arising between them, shall be abolished.
9. The right to confiscate or destroy the ships of a friendly Power for the service of a belligerent State, the jus angariæ, shall be abolished.

What, then, would remain for the naval forces of maritime Powers to do? Everything, it may be replied, which constitutes legitimate warfare, and conforms to the elementary conception of a state of hostility; the blockading of hostile ports, and all the play of attack and defence that may be imagined between belligerent navies. Whatsoever is more than this—the plunder of an enemy’s commerce, embargoes on his ships, the search of neutral vessels—not only cometh of piracy, as has been shown, but is in fact piracy itself, without any necessary connection with the conduct of legitimate hostilities.

[CHAPTER IV.]
MILITARY REPRISALS.

Si quis clamet iniquum non dare pœnas qui peccavit, respondeo multo esse iniquius tot innocentium millia citra meritum in extremam vocari calamitatem.—Erasmus.

International law on legitimate reprisals—The Brussels Conference on the subject—Illustrations of barbarous reprisals—Instances of non-retaliation—Savage reprisals in days of chivalry—Hanging the commonest reprisals for a brave defence, as illustrated by the warfare of the fifteenth century—Survival of the custom to our own times—The massacre of a conquered garrison still a law of war—The shelling of Strasburg by the Germans—Brutal warfare of Alexander the Great—The connection between bravery and cruelty—The abolition of slavery in its effects on war—The storming of Magdeburg, Brescia, and Rome—Cicero on Roman warfare—The reprisals of the Germans in France in 1870—Their revival of the custom of taking hostages—Their resort to robbery as a plea of reprisals—General Von Moltke on perpetual peace—The moral responsibility of the military profession—The Press as a potent cause of war—Plea for the abolition of demands for unconditional surrender, such as led to the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882.

On no subject connected with the operations of war has International Law come as yet to lamer conclusions than concerning Military Reprisals, or the revenge that may be fairly exacted by one belligerent from the other for violation of the canons of honourable warfare.

General Halleck, for instance, whilst as against an enemy who puts in force the extreme rights of war he justifies a belligerent in following suit, denies the right of the latter to do so against an enemy who passes all bounds and conducts war in a downright savage fashion. Whilst therefore, according to him, the law of retaliation would never justify such acts as the massacre of prisoners, the use of poison, or promiscuous slaughter, he would consider as legitimate reprisals acts like the sequestration by Denmark of debts due from Danish to British subjects in retaliation for the confiscation by England of the Danish fleet in 1807, or Napoleon’s seizure of all English travellers in France in retaliation for England’s seizure and condemnation of French vessels in 1803.[108] And a French writer, in the same spirit, denies that the French Government would have been justified in retaliating on Russia, when the Czar had his French prisoners of war consigned to the mines of Siberia.[109]

The distinction is clearly untenable on any rational theory of the laws of retributive justice. You may retaliate for the lesser, but not for the greater injury! You may check resort to infamous hostilities by the threat of reprisals, but must fold your hands and submit, if your enemy becomes utterly barbarous! You may restrain him from burning your crops by burning his, but must be content to go without redress if he slays your wives and children!

How difficult the question really is appears from the attempt made to settle it at the Brussels Conference of 1874, when the following clauses formed part of the original Russian project submitted to the consideration of that meeting:

Section IV. 69. ‘Reprisals are admissible in extreme cases only, due regard being paid as far as possible to the laws of humanity when it shall have been unquestionably proved that the laws and customs of war have been violated by the enemy, and that they have had recourse to measures condemned by the law of nations.’

70. ‘The selection of the means and extent of the reprisals should be proportionate to the degree of the infraction of the law committed by the enemy. Reprisals that are disproportionately severe are contrary to the rules of international law.’

71. ‘Reprisals should be allowed only on the authority of the commander-in-chief, who shall likewise determine the degree of their severity and their duration.’

The delicacy of dealing with such a subject, when the memories of the Franco-German war were still fresh and green, led ultimately to a unanimous agreement to suppress these clauses altogether, and to leave the matter, as the Belgian deputy expressed it, in the domain of unwritten law till the progress of science and civilisation should bring about a completely satisfactory solution. Nevertheless, the majority of men will be inclined, in reference to this resolution, to say with the Russian Baron Jomini, the skilful President of that Military Council: ‘I regret that the uncertainty of silence is to prevail with respect to one of the most bitter necessities of war. If the practice could be suppressed by this reticence, I could not but approve of this course; but if it is still to exist among the necessities of war, this reticence and this obscurity may, it is to be feared, remove any limits to its existence.’

The necessity of some regulation of reprisals, such as that contained in the clauses suggested at Brussels, is no less attested by the events of the war of 1870 than by the customs in this respect which have at all times prevailed, and which, as earlier in time, form a fitting introduction to those later occurrences.

That the fear of reprisals should act as a certain check upon the character of hostilities is too obvious a consideration not to have always served as a wholesome restraint upon military licence. When, for instance, Philip II. of Spain in his war with the Netherlands ordered that no prisoners of war should be released or exchanged, nor any contributions be accepted as an immunity from confiscation, the threat of retaliation led to the withdrawal of his iniquitous proclamation. Nor would other similar instances be far to seek.

Nevertheless, it is evident that, as seldom as war itself is prevented by consideration of the forces in opposition, will its peculiar excesses, which constitute its details, be restrained by the fear of retaliatory measures; and inasmuch as the primary offence is more often the creation of rumour than a proved fact, the usual result of reprisals is, not that one belligerent amends its ways, but that both belligerents become more savage and enter on a fatal career of competitive atrocities. In the wars of the fifteenth century between the Turks and Venetians, ‘Sultan Mahomet would not suffer his soldiers to give quarter, but allowed them a ducat for every head, and the Venetians did the same.’[110] When the Duke of Alva was in the Netherlands, the Spaniards, at the siege of Haarlem, threw the heads of two Dutch officers over the walls. The Dutch in return beheaded twelve Spanish prisoners, and sent their heads into the Spanish trenches. The Spaniards in revenge hung a number of prisoners in sight of the besieged; and the latter in return killed more prisoners; and so it went on during all the time that Alva was in the country, without the least improvement resulting from such sanguinary reprisals.[111] At the siege of Malta, the Grand Master, in revenge for some horrible Turkish barbarities, massacred all his prisoners and shot their heads from his cannon into the Turkish camp.[112] In one of the wars of Louis XIV., the Imperialist forces having put to death a French lieutenant and thirty troopers a few hours after having promised them quarter, Feuquières, for reprisals, slew the whole garrison of two towns that he won by surprise, though the number so slain in each instance amounted to 650 men (1689).[113]

To all these cases the question asked by Vattel very pertinently applies: ‘What right have you to cut off the nose and ears of the ambassador of a barbarian who has treated your ambassador in that manner?’ The question is not an easy one to answer, for we have no more right in war than in civil life to punish the innocent for the guilty apart from the ordinary accidents of hostilities, even if otherwise we must dispense with redress altogether. To do so by intention and in cold blood is ferocious, whatever the pretext of justification, and is never worth the passing gratification it affords. The citizens of Ghent, in their famous war with the Earl of Flanders, not only destroyed his house, but the silver cradle and bathing tub he had used as a child and the very font in which he had been baptized; but such reprisals are soon regretted, and read very pitiably in the eyes of the after-world.

It is pleasanter to record some instances where abstinence from reprisals has not been without its reward. It is said that Cæsar in Iberia, when, in spite of a truce, the enemy killed many of his men, instead of retaliating, released some of his prisoners and thereby brought the foe to regard him with favour. We read in Froissart that the Lisboners refrained from retaliating on the Castilians, when the latter mutilated their Portuguese prisoners; and the English Government acted nobly when it refused to reciprocate the decree of the French Convention (though that also was meant as a measure of reprisals) that no English or Hanoverian prisoner should be allowed any quarter.[114] But the best story of this kind is that told by Herodotus of Xerxes the Persian. The Spartans had thrown into a well the Persian envoys who had come to demand of them earth and water. In remorse they sent two of their nobles to Xerxes to be killed in atonement; but Xerxes, when he heard the purport of their visit, answered them that he would not act like the Spartans, who by killing his heralds had broken the laws that were regarded as sacred by all mankind, and that, of such conduct as he blamed in them, he would never be guilty himself.[115]

But the most curious feature in the history of reprisals is the fact that they were once regarded as justly exacted for the mere offence of hostile opposition or self-defence. Grotius states that it was the almost constant practice of the Romans to kill the leaders of an enemy, whether they had surrendered or been captured, on the day of triumph. Jugurtha indeed was put to death in prison; but the more usual practice appears to have been to keep conquered potentates in custody, after they had been led in triumph before the consul’s chariot. This was the fate of Perseus, king of Macedonia, who was also allowed to retain his attendants, money, plate, and furniture;[116] of Gentius, king of Illyria;[117] of Bituitus, king of the Arvernians. Prisoners of less distinction were sold as slaves, or kept in custody till their friends paid their ransom.

But in the mediæval history of Europe, in the so-called times of chivalry, a far worse spirit prevailed with regard to the treatment of captives. Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the brightest memories of chivalry, was responsible for the promiscuous slaughter of three days which the Crusaders exacted for the six weeks’ siege which it had cost them to take Jerusalem (1099). The Emperor Barbarossa had 1,190 Swabian prisoners delivered to the executioner at Milan, or shot from military engines.[118] Charles of Anjou reserved many prisoners, taken at the battle of Beneventum, to be killed as criminals on his entrance into Naples. When the French took the castle of Pesquière from the Venetians by storm, they slew all but three who surrendered to the pleasure of the king; and Louis XII., who counted for a humane monarch, though his victims offered 100,000 ducats for their lives, swore that he would neither eat nor drink till they were hanged (1509).[119]

The indignation of the Roman Senate on one occasion with a consul who had sold as slaves 10,000 Ligurian prisoners, though they had surrendered at discretion,[120] was a sentiment that never affected the warriors of mediæval Christendom. A surrender at discretion ceased to constitute a claim for mercy. Where the pagan held it wrong to enslave, the Christian never hesitated to kill. Froissart’s story of the six citizens of Calais, whom Edward III. was with difficulty restrained from hanging for the obstinate siege which their town had resisted, throws a light over the war customs of that time, which other incidents of history abundantly confirm. The record of the capitulations of cities or garrisons is no pleasant one, but it is a record which must be touched upon, in order that war and its still prevalent maxims may be judged at their proper value. We need scarcely travel further than the fifteenth century alone in search of facts to place in its proper light this aspect of martial atrocities.

When the town of Rouen surrendered to Henry V. of England, the latter stipulated for three of the citizens to be left to his disposal, of whom two purchased their lives, and the third was beheaded (1419).[121] When the same king the year following was besieging the castle of Montereau, he sent some twenty prisoners to treat with the governor for a surrender; but when the governor refused to treat, even to save their lives, and when, after a fearful leave-taking with their wives and relatives, they had been escorted back to the English army, ‘the King of England ordered a gallows to be erected and had them all hanged in sight of those within the castle.’[122] When the English took the castle of Rougemont by storm, and some sixty of its defenders alive, with the loss of only one Englishman, Henry V., in revenge for his death, caused all the prisoners to be drowned in the Loire.[123] When Meaux surrendered to the same king, it was stipulated that six of its bravest defenders should be delivered up to justice, four of whom were beheaded at Paris, and its commander at once hung to a tree outside the walls of the city (1422).[124]

Not that there was any special cruelty in the English mode of warfare. They simply conformed to the customs of the time, as we may see by reference to the French and Burgundian wars into which they allowed themselves to be drawn. In 1434, the garrison of Chaumont ‘was soon so hardly pressed that it surrendered at discretion to the Duke of Burgundy (Philip the Good), who had upwards of 100 of them hanged;’ and as with the townsmen, so with those in the castle.[125] Bournonville, who commanded Soissons for the Duke of Burgundy, and whom Monstrelet calls ‘the flower of the warriors of all France,’ was beheaded at Paris, after the capture of the town, by order of the king and council, and his body hung to a gibbet, like a common malefactor’s (1414).[126] When Dinant was taken by storm by the Burgundians, the prisoners, about 800, were drowned before Bovines (1466).[127] When the town of Saint-frou surrendered to the Duke of Burgundy, ten men, left to the disposal of that warrior, were beheaded; and so it fared also with the town of Tongres (1467).[128] After the storming and slaughter at Liège, before the Duke of Burgundy (Charles the Bold) left the city, ‘a great number of those poor creatures who had hid themselves in the houses when the town was taken and were afterwards made prisoners, were hanged’ (1468).[129] At Nesle, most of those who were taken alive were hung, and some had their hands cut off (1472).[130] After the battle of Granson, the Swiss retook two castles from the French, and hung all the Burgundians they found in them. They then retook the town and castle of Granson, and ordered 512 Germans whom the Burgundians had hung to be cut down, and as many of the Burgundians as were still in Granson to be suspended on the same halters (1476). In the skirmishes that occurred in a time of truce on the frontiers of Picardy, between the French king’s forces and those of the Duke of Austria, ‘all the prisoners that were taken on both sides were immediately hanged, without permitting any, of what degree or rank soever, to be ransomed’ (1481). And as a climax to these facts, let us recall the decree of the Duke of Anjou, who, when Montpellier was taken by siege, condemned 600 prisoners to be put to death, 200 by the sword, 200 by the halter, and 200 by fire, and who, but for the remonstrances of a cardinal and a friar, would undoubtedly have executed his sentence.

Ghastly facts enough these! and a strange insight they afford us into the real character of a profession which, in the days when these things were its commonest occurrences, was held to be the noblest of all, but of which it is only too patent that its mainsprings were simply the brigand’s love of plunder and of bloodshed. One story may be quoted to show that in this respect the sixteenth century was no improvement on the fifteenth. In the war between the Dutch and the Spaniards, the captain of Weerd Castle, having previously refused to surrender to Sir Francis de Vere, begged at last for a capitulation with the honours of war; Vere’s answer was, that the honours of war were halters for a garrison that had dared to defend such a hovel against artillery. The commandant was killed first, and the remaining 26 men, having been made to draw black and white straws, the 12 who drew the white straws were hanged, the thirteenth only escaping by consenting to act as executioner of the rest![131]

It is clear, therefore, that in the wars of the past the axe and the halter have played as conspicuous a part as the sword or the lance; a fact to which its due prominence has not always been given in the standard histories of military antiquities. It is surprising to find how close to the glories of war lie the sickening vulgarities of murder.

To the Duke of Somerset, the regent of England for Edward VI., appears to be due the credit of instituting a milder treatment of a besieged but surrendered garrison than had been previously customary. For De Thou, the historian, speaks of the admiration the Duke received for sparing the lives of a Scotch garrison, contrary to that ‘ancient maxim in war which declares that a weak garrison forfeits all claim to mercy on the part of the conquerors, when, with more courage than prudence, they obstinately persevere in defending an ill-fortified place against the royal army,’ or refuse reasonable conditions.

But the ancient maxim lasted, in spite of this better example, throughout the seventeenth and till late into the eighteenth century, for we find Vattel even then thus protesting against it: ‘How could it be conceived in an enlightened age that it was lawful to punish with death a governor who has defended his town to the last extremity, or who in a weak place had the courage to hold out against a royal army? In the last century this notion still prevailed; it was looked upon as one of the laws of war, and is not even at present totally exploded. What an idea! to punish a brave man for having performed his duty.’[132]

But not even yet is the notion definitely expunged from the unwritten code of martial etiquette. The original Russian project, submitted to the Brussels Conference, proposed to exclude, among other illicit means of war, ‘the threat of extermination towards a garrison that obstinately holds a fortress.’ The proposal was unanimously rejected, and that clause was carefully excluded from the published modified text! But as the execution of a threat is morally of the same value as the threat itself, it is evident that the massacre of a brave but conquered garrison still holds its place among the laws of Christian warfare!

This peculiar and most sanguinary law of reprisals has always been defended by the common military sophism, that it shortens the horrors of war. The threat of capital punishment against the governor or defenders of a town should naturally dispose them to make a conditional surrender, and so spare both sides the miseries of a siege. But arguments in defence of atrocities, on the ground of their shortening a war, and coming from military quarters, must be viewed with the greatest suspicion, and, inasmuch as they provoke reprisals and so intensify passion, with the greatest distrust. It was to such an argument that the Germans resorted in defence of their shelling the town of Strasburg, in order to intimidate the inhabitants and drive them to force General Uhrich to a surrender. ‘The abbreviation,’ said a German writer, ‘of the period of actual fighting and of the war itself is an act of humanity towards both parties;’[133] although the savage act failed in its purpose and General Werder had to fall back, after his gratuitous destruction of life and property, on the slower process of a regular siege. If their tendency to shorten a war be the final justification of military proceedings, the ground begins to slip from under us against the use of aconitine or of clothes infected with the small-pox. Therefore such a pretext should meet with prompt condemnation, notwithstanding the efforts of the modern military school to render it popular upon the earth.

In respect, therefore, to this law of reprisals, the comparison is not to the credit of modern times as compared with the pagan era. A surrender, which in Greek and Roman warfare involved as a rule personal security, came in Christianised Europe to involve capital punishment out of motives of pure vindictiveness. The chivalry so often associated with the battle-field as at least a redeeming feature fades on closer inspection into the veriest fiction of romance. Bravery under any form has been the constant pretext for capital reprisals. Edward I. had William Wallace, the brave Scotch leader, executed on Tower Hill; and it has been observed by one writer, as the facts already quoted prove, that the custom of thus killing defeated generals ‘may be traced through a series of years so connected and extensive that we are not able to point out the exact time when it ceased.’[134]

A characteristic incident of this sort is connected with the famous pacification of Guienne by Montluc in 1562. Montluc had won Montsegur by storm, and its commander had been taken alive. The latter was a man of notorious valour, and in a previous campaign had been Montluc’s fellow-soldier and friend. For that reason many interceded for his life, but Montluc decided to hang him, and simply on account of his valour. ‘I well knew his courage,’ he says, ‘which made me hang him.... I knew him to be valiant, but that made me the rather put him to death.’ What of your chivalry after that?

But Alexander the Great, whose career has been the ideal of all succeeding aspirants to military fame, dealt even more severely than Montluc with Betis, the gallant defender of Gaza. When Gaza was at last taken by storm, Betis, after fighting heroically, had the misfortune to be taken alive and to be brought into the presence of the conqueror. Alexander addressed him thus: ‘You shall not die, Betis, in the manner you wished; but make up your mind to suffer whatever torture can be thought of against a prisoner;’ and when Betis for all answer returned him but the silence of disdain, Alexander had thongs fixed to his ankles, and, himself acting as charioteer, drove his yet living victim round the city, attached to his chariot wheels; priding himself that by such conduct he rivalled Achilles’ treatment of Hector.[135]

A valiant resistance was with Alexander always a sufficient motive for the most sanguinary reprisals. Arimages, who defended a fortified rock in Sogdia, thought his position so strong that when summoned to surrender, he asked tauntingly whether Alexander could fly; and for this offence, when, unable to hold out any longer, Arimages and his relations descended to Alexander’s camp to beg for quarter, Alexander had them first of all flogged and then crucified at the foot of the rock they had so bravely defended.[136] After the long siege of Tyre, Alexander had 2,000 Tyrians, over and above the 6,000 who fell during the storming of that city, nailed to crosses along the shore,[137] perhaps in reprisal for a violation of the laws of war—for Quintus Curtius declares that the Tyrians had murdered some Macedonian ambassadors, and Arrian, who makes no mention of the crucifixion, declares that they slew some Macedonian prisoners and threw them from their walls—but more probably (since there were evidently different stories of the Tyrians’ offence) on account simply of the obstinate resistance they had offered to Alexander’s attack.

The Macedonian conqueror regarded his whole expedition against Persia as an act of reprisals for the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, 150 years before his own time. When he set fire to the Persian capital and palace, Persepolis, he justified himself against Parmenio’s remonstrances on the ground that it was in revenge for the destruction of the temples in Greece during the Persian invasion;[138] and this motive was constantly present with him, in justification both of the war itself and of particular atrocities connected with it. In the course of his expedition, he came to a city of the Branchidæ, whose ancestors at Miletus had betrayed the treasures of a temple in their charge to Xerxes, and had by him been removed from Miletus to Asia. As Greeks they met Alexander’s army with joy, and at once surrendered their city to him. The next day, after reflection given to the matter, Alexander had every single inhabitant of the city slain, in spite of their powerlessness, in spite of their supplications, in spite of their community of language and origin. He even had the walls of the city dug up from their foundation, and the trees of their sacred groves uprooted, that not a trace of their city might remain.[139]

Nor can doubt be thrown on these deeds by the fact that they are only mentioned by Quintus Curtius and not by Arrian. The silence of the one is no proof of the falsity or credulity of the other. Both writers lived many centuries after Alexander, and were dependent for their knowledge on the writings, then extant but long since lost, of contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the expedition to Asia. That those witnesses often gave conflicting accounts of the same event we have the assurance of either writer; but since it is impossible to determine the degree of discretion with which each made their selections from the original authorities, it is only reasonable to regard them both as of the same and equal validity. Seneca, who lived before Arrian and who therefore was equally conversant with the original authorities, hardly ever mentions Alexander without expressions of the strongest reprobation.

Cruelty, in fact, is revealed to us by history as the most conspicuous trait in the character of Alexander, though not in his case nor in others inconsistent with occasional acts of magnanimity and the gleams of a higher nature. This cruelty, however, taken in connection with his undoubted bravery, calls in question the truth of a remark made by Philip de Commines, and supported, he affirmed, by all historians, that no cruel man is ever courageous. The popular theory, that inhumanity is more likely to be the concomitant of a timid than of a daring nature, ignores altogether the teaching of history and the conclusions of à priori reasoning. For if our regard for the sufferings of others is proportioned to our regard for our own sufferings, inasmuch as our self-love is the foundation and measure of our powers of sympathy, a man’s disregard for the sufferings of others—in other words his cruelty—is likely to be the exact reflection of his disregard for suffering in his own person, or, in other words, of his physical courage. Men, moreover, like Cicero, of whom it was said by Livy that he was better calculated for anything than for war, by their very incapacity for positions where their humanity is likely to be tested, are rarely exposed to those temptations of cruelty in which men of a more daring temperament naturally find themselves placed.

And accordingly we find, by reference to instances which lie on the surface of history, that great bravery and great cruelty have more often been united than separate. In French history there is the cruelty of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy; of Montluc and Des Adretz, the latter of whom made 30 soldiers and their captain leap from the precipice of a strong place they had defended, and of both of whom Brantôme remarks that they were very brave but very cruel.[140] In Scotch history, it was David I. who, though famed for his courage and humanity, suffered the sick and aged to be slain in their beds, even infants to be killed and priests murdered at the very altars.[141] In English history, it was Richard Cœur-de-Lion who had 5,000 Saracen prisoners led out to a large plain to be massacred (1191).[142] In Jewish history, it was King David who, when he took Rabbah of the Ammonites, ‘brought forth the people that were therein and put them under saws and harrows of iron and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick kiln; and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon.’[143] It is not therefore more probable that a man famed for his intrepidity will not lend himself to counsels or actions of cruelty than that another deficient in personal courage will not be humane.

And here one cause is deserving of attention as helping to explain the greater barbarity practised by the modern nations in the matter of reprisals, than that which was permitted by the code of honour which acted in restraint of them in the better periods of pagan antiquity; and that is the change that has occurred with regard to slavery.

The abolition of slavery, which in Western Europe has been the greatest achievement of modern civilisation, did not unfortunately tend to greater mildness in the customs of war. For in ancient times the sale of prisoners as slaves operated to restrain that indiscriminate and objectless slaughter which has been, even to cases within this century, the marked feature of the battle-field, and more especially where cities or places have been taken by storm. Avarice ceased to operate, as it once did, in favour of humanity. In one day the population of Magdeburg, taken by storm, was reduced from 25,000 to 2,700; and an English eye-witness of that event thus described it: ‘Of 25,000, some said 30,000 people, there was not a soul to be seen alive, till the flames drove those that were hid in vaults and secret places to seek death in the streets rather than perish in the fire; of these miserable creatures some were killed too by the furious soldiers, but at last they saved the lives of such as came out of their cellars and holes, and so about 2,000 poor desperate creatures were left.’[144] ‘There was little shooting, the execution was all cutting of throats and mere house murders.... We could see the poor people in crowds driven down the streets, flying from the fury of the soldiers, who followed butchering them as fast as they could, and refused mercy to anybody; till, driving them down to the river’s edge, the desperate wretches would throw themselves into the river, where thousands of them perished, especially women and children.’[145]

It is difficult to read this graphic description of a stormed city without the suspicion arising in the mind that a sheer thirst for blood and love of murder is a much more potent sustainer of war than it is usual or agreeable to believe. The narratives of most victories and of taken cities support this theory. At Brescia, for instance, taken by the French from the Venetians in 1512, it is said that 20,000 of the latter fell to only 50 of the former.[146] When Rome was sacked in 1527 by the Imperialist forces, we are told that ‘the soldiery threw themselves upon the unhappy multitude, and, without distinction of age or sex, massacred all who came in their way. Strangers were spared as little as Romans, for the murderers fired indiscriminately at everyone, from a mere thirst of blood.’[147]

But this thirst of blood was checked in the days of slavery by the counteracting thirst of money; there having been an obvious motive for giving quarter when a prisoner of war represented something of tangible value, like any other article of booty. The sack of Thebes by Alexander, and its demolition to the sound of the lute, was bad enough; but after the first rage for slaughter was over, there remained 30,000 persons of free birth to be sold as slaves. And in Roman warfare the rule was to sell as slaves those who were taken prisoners in a stormed city; and it must be remembered that many so sold were slaves already.[148] All who were unarmed or who laid down their arms were spared from destruction, as well as from plunder;[149] and for exceptions to this rule, as for instance for the indiscriminate and cruel massacre committed at Illiturji in Spain, there was always at least the pretext of reprisals, or some special military motive.[150]

Cicero, who lived to see the Roman arms triumphant over the world and the conversion of the Roman republic into a military despotism, found occasion to deplore at the same time the debased standard of military honour. He believed that in cruel vindictiveness and rapacity his contemporaries had degenerated from the customs of their ancestors, and he contrasted regretfully the utter destruction of Carthage, Numantia, and Corinth, with the milder treatment of their earlier enemies, the Sabines, Tusculans, and others. He adduced as a proof of the greater ferocity of the war spirit of his day the fact that the only term for an enemy was originally the milder term of stranger, and that it was only by degrees that the word meaning stranger came to have the connotation of hostility. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘could have been added to this mildness, to call him with whom you are at war by so gentle a name as stranger? But now the progress of time has given a harder signification to the word; for it has ceased to apply to a stranger, and has remained the proper term for an actual enemy in arms.’[151]

Is a similar process taking place in modern warfare with regard to the law of reprisals? It is a long leap from ancient Rome to modern Germany; but to Germany, as the chief military Power now in existence, we must turn, in order to understand the law of reprisals as it is interpreted by the practice of a country whose power and example will make her actions precedents in all wars that may occur in future.

The worst feature in reprisals is that they are indiscriminate and more often directed against the innocent than the guilty. To murder women and children, old men, or any one else, on the ground of their connection with an enemy who has committed an action calling for retribution, can be justified by no theory that would not equally apply to a similar parody of justice in civil life. It is a return to the theory and practices of savages, who, if they cannot revenge themselves on a culprit, revenge themselves complacently on some one else. For bodies of peasants to resist a foreign invader by forming ambuscades or making surprises against him, though his advance is marked by fire and pillage and outrage, may be contrary to the laws of war (though that point has never been agreed upon); but to make such attacks the pretext for indiscriminate murder and robbery is an extension of the law of reprisals that was only definitely imported into the military code of Europe by the German invaders of France in 1870.

The following facts, offered in proof of this statement, are taken from a small pamphlet, published during the war by the International Society for Help to the Wounded, and containing only such facts as were attested by the evidence of official documents or of persons whose positions gave them an exceptional title to credit.[152] At one place, where twenty-five francs-tireurs had hidden in a wood and received the Germans with a fusillade, reprisals were carried so far that the curé, rushing into the streets, seized the Prussian captain by the shoulders and entreated mercy for the women and children. ‘No mercy’ was the only reply.[153] At another place twenty-six young men had joined the francs-tireurs; the Baden troops took and shot their fathers.[154] At Nemours, where a body of Uhlans had been surprised and captured by some mobiles, the floors and furniture of several houses were first saturated with petroleum and then fired with shells.[155]

The new theory also was imported into the military code, that a village, by the mere fact of trying to defend itself, constituted itself a place of war which might be legitimately bombarded and, when taken, subjected to the rights of war which still govern the fate of places taken by assault.[156] Nor let it be supposed that those rights were not exercised as rigorously as they ever have been by victorious troops. At Nogent-sur-Seine, the Wurtemburg troops carried their fury to the slaughter of women and children and even of the wounded. And if the belief still lingers that the German troops of the Emperor William behaved otherwise towards the weaker sex than their ancestors in Rome and Italy under the Constable of Bourbon, let the reader refer to the experiences of Clermont, Andernay, or Neuville.[157]

Reprisals beget, of course, reprisals; and had the French and German war been by any accident prolonged, it is appalling to think of the barbarities that would have occurred. ‘Threat for threat,’ wrote Colonel R. Garibaldi to the Prussian commander at Châtillon, in reference to the latter’s resolve to punish the inhabitants of that place for the acts of some francs-tireurs; ‘I give you my assurance that I will not spare one of the 200 Prussians whom you know to be in my hands.’[158] ‘We will fight,’ wrote General Chanzy to the Prussian commander at Vendôme, ‘without truce or mercy, because it is a question now not of fighting loyal enemies, but hordes of devastators.’[159]

Under the theory of legitimate reprisals, the Germans resuscitated the custom of taking hostages. The French having (in accordance with the still recognised but barbarous rule of war) taken prisoners the captains of some German merchant vessels, the Germans retaliated by taking twenty persons of respectable position at Dijon, and nine at Vesoul, and detaining them as hostages. Nor was this an uncommon episode in the campaign: though the sending to Germany as prisoners of war of French merchants, magistrates, lawyers, and doctors, and the making them answerable with their lives and fortunes for actions of their countrymen which they could neither prevent nor repress, was a revival in its worst form of the theory of vicarious punishment, and a direction of hostilities against non-combatants, which was a gross violation of the proclamation of the Prussian king, made at the beginning of the campaign (after the common cant of the leaders of armies), that his forces had no war to wage with the peaceable inhabitants of France.

Even plunder enters into the German law of reprisals. Remiremont in the Vosges had to pay 8,000l. because two German engineers and one soldier had been taken prisoners by the French troops. The usual forced military contributions which the victors exacted did not exclude a system of pillage and devastation that the present age fondly believed to belong only to a past state of warfare. On December 5, 1870, a German soldier wrote to the Cologne Gazette: ‘Since the war has entered upon its present stage it is a real life of brigands we lead. For four weeks we have passed through districts entirely ravaged; the last eight days we have passed through towns and villages where there was absolutely nothing left to take.’ Nor was this plunder only the work of the common military serfs or conscripts, whose miserable poverty might have served as an excuse, but it was conducted by officers of the highest rank, who, for their own benefit, robbed farms and stables of their sheep and horses, and sacked country houses of their works of art, their plate, and even of their ladies’ jewels.[160]

The world, therefore, at least owes this to the Germans, that they have taught us to see war in its true light, by removing it from the realm of romance, where it was decked with bright colours and noble actions, to the region of sober judgment, where the soldier, the thief, and the murderer are seen in scarcely distinguishable colours. They have withdrawn the veil which blinded our ancestors to the evils of war, and which led dreamy humanitarians to believe in the possibility of civilised warfare; so that now the deeds of shame threaten to obscure the deeds of glory. In the middle ages it was the custom to declare a war that was intended to be waged with special fury by sending a man with a naked sword in one hand and a burning torch in the other, to signify that the war so begun was to be one of blood and fire. We have since learnt that there is no need to typify by any peculiar ceremony the character of any particular war; for that the characteristics of all are the same.

The German general Von Moltke, in a published letter wherein he maintained that Perpetual Peace was a dream and not even a beautiful one, went on to say, in defence of war, that in it the noblest virtues of mankind were developed—courage, self-abnegation, faithfulness to duty, the spirit of sacrifice; and that without wars the world would soon stagnate and lose itself in materialism.[161] We have no data from which to judge of the probable state of a warless world, but we do know that the brightest samples of these virtues have been ever given by those who in peace and obscurity, and without looking for lands, or titles, or medals for their reward, have laboured not to destroy life but to save it, not to lower the standard of morality but to raise it, not to preach revenge but mercy, not to spread misery and poverty and crime but to increase happiness, wealth, and virtue. Is there or will there be no scope for courage, for self-sacrifice, for duty, where fever and disease are the foes to be combated, where wounds and pain need to be cured or soothed, or where sin and ignorance and poverty are the forces to be assailed? But apart from this there is another side to the picture of war, of which Von Moltke says not a word, but of which, in the preceding pages, some indication has been given. Now that we are no longer satisfied with the dry narratives of strategical operations, but are beginning to search into the details of military proceedings; into the fate of the captured, of the wounded, of the pursued; into the treatment of hostages, of women, of children; into the statistics of massacre and spoliation that are the penalties of defeat; into the character of stratagems; and into the justice of reprisals, we see war in another mirror, and recognise that the old one gave but a distorted reflection of its realities. No one ever denied but that great qualities are displayed in war; but the doubt is spreading fast, not only whether it is the worthiest field for their display, but whether it is not also the principal nursing-bed of the crimes that are the greatest disgrace to our nature.

It is idle to think that our humanity will fail to take its colouring from our calling. Marshal Montluc, the bravest yet most cruel of French soldiers, was fond of protesting that the inhumanity he was guilty of was in corruption of his original and better nature; and at the close of his book and of his life, he consoled himself for the blood he had caused to flow like water by the consideration, that the sovereigns whose servant he had been were (as he told one of them) really responsible for the misery he had caused. But does the excuse avail him, or the millions who have succeeded to his trade? A king or a government can commission men to execute its policy or its vengeance; but is a free agent, who accepts a commission that he believes to be iniquitous, morally acquitted of his share of culpability? Is his responsibility no greater than that of the sword, the axe, or the halter with which he carries out his orders; or does the plea of military discipline justify him in acting with no more moral restraint than a slave, or than a horse that has no understanding? The Prussian officer who at Dijon blew out his brains rather than execute some iniquitous order[162] showed that he understood the dignity of human nature as it was understood in the days of the bygone moral grandeur of Rome. Such a man deserved a monument far more than most to whom memorial monuments are raised.

Recent events lend an additional interest to the question of reprisals, and add emphasis to the necessity of placing them, as it was sought to do at Brussels, on the footing of an International Agreement. It is sometimes said that dynastic wars belong to the past, and that kings have no longer the power to make war, as they once did, for their own pleasure or pastime. There may be truth in this, though the last great war in Europe but one had its immediate cause in an inter-dynastic jealousy; but a far more potent agency for war than ever existed in monarchical power is now wielded by the Press. War in every country is the direct pecuniary interest of the Daily Press. ‘I know proprietors of newspapers,’ said Cobden during the Crimean war, ‘who have pocketed 3,000l. or 4,000l. a year through the war as directly as if the money had been voted to them in the Parliamentary estimates.’[163] The temptation, therefore, is great, first to justify any given war by irrelevant issues or by stories of the enormities committed by the enemy, or even by positive false statements (as when the English Press, with the Times at its head, with almost one voice taught us that the Afghan ruler had insulted our ambassador, and left us to find out our mistake when a too ready credulity had cost us a war of some 20,000,000l.); and then, when war has once begun, to fan the flame by demanding reprisals for atrocities that have generally never been committed nor established by anything like proof. In this way the French were charged at the beginning of the last German war with bombarding the open town of Saarbrück, and with firing explosive bullets from the mitrailleuse; and the belief, thus falsely and purposely propagated, covered of course with the cloak of reprisals a good deal of all that came afterwards.

In this way has arisen the modern practice of justifying every resort to war, not as a trial of strength or test of justice between enemies, but as an act of virtuous and necessary chastisement against criminals. Charges of violated faith, of the abuse of flags of truce, of dishonourable stratagems, of the ill-treatment or torture of prisoners, are seized upon, regardless of any inquiry into their truth, and made the pretext for the indefinite prolongation of hostilities. The lawful enemy is denounced as a rebel or a criminal, whom it would be wicked to treat with or trust; and only an unconditional surrender, which drives him to desperation, and so embitters the war, is regarded as a possible preliminary to peace. The time has surely come when such a demand, on the ground of reprisals, should cease to operate as a bar to peace. One of the proposals at the Brussels Conference was that no commander should be forced to capitulate under dishonourable conditions, that is to say, without the customary honours of war. It should be one of the demands of civilisation that an unconditional surrender, such as was insisted upon from Arabi in 1882 and led to the bombardment of Alexandria with all the subsequent troubles, should under no circumstances be insisted on in treating with an enemy; and that no victorious belligerent should demand of a defeated one what under reversed conditions it would consider dishonourable to grant itself.

[CHAPTER V.]
MILITARY STRATAGEMS.

Hé! qu’il y a de tromperie au monde! et en nostre mestier plus qu’en autre qui soit.—Marshal Montluc.

Grotius’ theory of fair stratagems—The teaching of international law—Ancient and modern naval stratagems—Early Roman dislike of such stratagems as ambuscades, feigned retreats, or night attacks—The degenerate standard of Frontinus and Polyænus—The conference-stratagem of modern Europe—The distinction between perfidy and stratagem—The perfidy of Francis I.—Vattel’s theory about spies—Frederick the Great’s military instructions about spies—Lord Wolseley on spies and truth in war—The custom of hanging or shooting spies—Better to keep them as prisoners of war—Balloonists regarded as spies—The practice of military surprises—Death formerly the penalty for capture in a surprise—Stratagems of uncertain character, such as forged despatches or false intelligence—The use of the telegraph in deceiving the enemy—May prisoners of war be compelled to propagate lies?—General character of the military code of fraud.

One of the most interesting aspects of the state of war is that of its connection with fraud, deceit, and guile. If we may seek to obtain our ends by force, we may surely, it is argued, do so by fraud; for what is the moral difference between overcoming by superiority of muscle and the same result obtained by dint of brain? Lysander the Spartan went so far as to say that boys were to be cheated with dice, but an enemy with oaths; and if the world has professed horror at his sentiment, it has not altogether despised his authority.

Among military stratagems the older writers used to include every kind of deception practised by generals in war, not only against the enemy, but against their own troops; as, for instance, devices for preventing or suppressing a mutiny, for stopping the spread of a panic, or for encouraging them with false news before or during an engagement.

But in modern use the term stratagem has almost exclusive reference to artifices of deception practised against an enemy; and the greater interest that attaches to the latter kind of guile justifies the narrowed denotation of the word. No one, for instance, would now regard as a stratagem the clever behaviour of that Thracian general Cosingas, who, acting also as priest to his forces, brought them back to obedience by the report he artfully propagated that certain long ladders which he had caused to be made and fastened together were intended to enable him to climb to heaven, there to complain to Juno of their misconduct. The false pretence that is involved in a stratagem is addressed to the leaders of a hostile force, in order that their fear or confidence, unduly raised by it, may be played upon to the advantage of their more artful opponents. In the consideration, therefore, of military stratagems, or ruses de guerre, it is best to conform entirely to the more restricted sense in which they are understood in modern parlance.

The following stratagem is a good one to start with. During the Franco-German War of 1870, twenty-five franc-tireurs clothed themselves in Prussian uniform, and by the help of that disguise killed several Prussians at Sennegy near Troyes; and the deed was made a subject of open boast in a French journal.[164] Was the boast a justifiable or a shameful one?

Distinctly justifiable, if at least Grotius, the father of our international law, is of any authority. The reasoning of Grotius runs in this wise. There is a distinction between conventional signs that are established by the general consent of all the world and those which are only established by particular societies or by individuals; deception directed against the former involves the violation of a mutual obligation, and is therefore unlawful, whereas that against the latter is lawful, because it involves no such violation. Therefore, whilst it is wrong to deceive an enemy by words or signs which by general consent are universally understood in a given sense, it is not wrong to overcome an enemy by conduct which involves no violation of a generally recognised and universally binding custom. Under conduct of the latter type fall such acts as a simulated flight, or the use of an enemy’s arms, his standards, uniform, or sails. A flight is not an instituted sign of fear, nor have the arms or colours of a particular country any universally established meaning.[165]

And in spite of the sound of sophistry that accompanies this reasoning, the teaching of international law has not substantially swerved on this point from the direction given to it by Grotius. In Cicero’s opinion, although both force and fraud were resources most unworthy of rational humanity, the one pertaining rather to the nature of the lion and the other to that of the fox, fraud was an expedient deserving of more hatred than the other.[166] But the teaching of later times has tended to overlook this distinction. Bynkershoek, that celebrated Dutch jurist who advocated the use of poison as one of the fair modes of employing force, declares it to be a matter of perfect indifference whether stratagem or open force be employed against an enemy, provided perfidy be absent from the former. And Bluntschli, who is the German publicist of greatest authority in our own day, expressly includes among the lawful stratagems of war the use of an enemy’s uniform or flag.[167]

If, then, we test the received military theory by some actual experience, the following episodes of history must challenge rather our admiration than our blame, and stand justified by the most advanced theories of modern international law.

Cimon, the Athenian admiral, having captured some Persian ships, made his own men step into them and dress themselves in the clothes of the Persians; and then, when the ships reached Cyprus, and the inhabitants of that island came out joyfully to welcome their friends, they were of course more easily defeated by their enemies.[168]

Aristomachus, having taken some Cardian ships, placed his own rowers in them and towed his own ships behind them, as if they were being conducted in triumph. When the Cardians came out to greet their supposed victorious crews, Aristomachus and his men fell upon them and succeeded in committing great carnage.[169]

Modern history supplies analogous cases. In September 1800 an English crew attacked two ships that lay at anchor at Barcelona, by forcing a Swedish vessel to take on board some English officers, soldiers, and sailors, and so obtaining a means of approach that was otherwise impossible.[170] And English naval historians tell with pride, rather than with shame, how in 1798 two English ships, the ‘Sibylle’ and the ‘Fox,’ by sailing under false colours captured three Spanish gunboats in Manilla Roads. When the Spanish guard-boat was sent to inquire what the ships were, the pilot of the ‘Fox’ replied that they belonged to the French squadron, and that they wished to put into Manilla, for the recovery of the crews from sickness. The English Captain Cooke was introduced under the French name of Latour; and a conversation ensued in which the ceremony of wishing success to the united exertions of the Spaniards and French against the English was not forgotten. Two Spanish boats having then come to visit the vessels, their crews were quickly handed below; and a party of British sailors having changed clothes with them and got into their boat, advanced to the gunboats, which they captured without pulling a trigger.[171]

On another occasion the same ‘Sibylle,’ which had been taken from the French by Romney in 1794, captured a large French vessel that lay at anchor, by standing in under French colours, and only hoisting her real ones when within a cable’s length of her prize;[172] the only limit to such a stratagem on the sea being the necessity for a ship to hoist her real flag before proceeding to actual hostilities. A state of war must surely play strange tricks with our minds to make it possible for us to approve such infamous actions as those quoted. There can be no greater proof of the utter demoralisation it causes than that such devices should have ever come to be thought honourable; and that no scruples should have ever intervened against the prostitution of a country’s flag, the symbol of her independence, her nationality, and her pride, to the shame of open falsehood. Antiquaries dispute the correctness of the statement of Polyænus that Artemisia, the Queen of Caria and ally of Xerxes against Greece, hoisted Persian colours when in pursuit of Greek ships, but a Greek flag to prevent Greek ships from pursuing herself, because they say that flags were not then in use; but undoubtedly the custom is a very old one on the seas of having a number of different flags on board a ship, for the purpose either of more easily capturing a weaker or of more easily escaping from a stronger vessel than herself. The French, for instance, in 1337 plundered and burnt Portsmouth, after having been suffered to land under the cover of English banners.[173] Not only the vessels of pirates and privateers, but the war vessels of the State, learned to sail under colours that belied their nationality.[174] The only limit to the stratagem of the false flag (to which international custom gradually came to give the force of law) came to be the necessity of hoisting the real flag before proceeding to fire, a limitation that was not of much moment after the successful deception had brought a defenceless merchant vessel within the reach of easy capture. And with regard to ships of war, the cannon-shot by which one vessel replied to the challenge of its suspected nationality by the other came to be equivalent to the captain’s word of honour that the flag which floated above the cannon he fired represented the nationality of which it professed to be the symbol. The flag itself might tell a lie, therefore the cannon-shot oath must redeem it from suspicion. Such are the extraordinary ideas of honour and morality that the system of universal fear, distrust, and hostility, by many thought to be so surpassingly glorious, has caused to become prevalent upon the ocean.

In spite, therefore, of Grotius, the above stratagems must be considered as dishonourable; and that so they are beginning to be considered is indicated by the fact that at the Brussels Conference of 1874 the use of an enemy’s flag or uniform was expressly rejected from the category of fair military stratagems. But the improvement is in spite of international law, not in consequence of it.

There is an obvious distinction indeed between the above method of overcoming an enemy and such favourite devices as ambuscades, feigned retreats, night attacks, or the diversion of a defence to the wrong point. But perhaps nothing in the history of moral opinion is more curious than that even these modes of deceit should have been, not by one people or an unwarlike people, but by several people, and one among them the most warlike nation known to history, deliberately rejected as unfair and dishonourable modes of warfare. The historical evidence on this point appears to be quite conclusive, and is worth recalling for the interest that cannot but attach to one of the strangest but most neglected chapters in the history of human ethics.

The Achæans, says Polybius, disdained even to subdue their enemies with the help of deceit. In their opinion a victory was neither honourable nor secure that was not obtained in open combat by superior courage. Therefore they esteemed it a kind of law among them never to use any concealed weapons, nor to throw darts from a distance, being persuaded that an open and close conflict was the only fair method of combat. For the same reason they not only made a declaration of war, but sent notice each to the other of their resolution to try the fortune of a battle, and of the place where they were determined to engage.[175]

And in Ternate, one of the Molucca Islands, which suffered such untold miseries after the Europeans had discovered its spices and its heathenism, not only was war never begun without being first declared, but it was also customary to inform the enemy of the number of men and the amount and kind of weapons with which it was intended to conduct hostilities.[176]

But the case of the Romans is by far the most remarkable. Polybius, Livy, and Ælian all agree in their testimony that for a long period of their history the Romans refrained from all kinds of stratagem as from a sort of military meanness; and their evidence is corroborated by Valerius Maximus, who says that the Romans, having no word in their language to express a military ruse, were forced to borrow the Greek word, from which our own word stratagem is derived.[177] Polybius, who lived and wrote as late as the second century before Christ, after complaining that artifice was then so prevalent among the Romans that their chief study was to deceive one another in war and in politics, adds that, in spite of this degeneracy, they still declared war solemnly beforehand, seldom formed ambuscades, and preferred to fight man to man in close engagement. So late as the year 172 B.C. the elder senators regretted the lost virtue of their ancestors, who refrained from such stratagems as night attacks, counterfeit flights, and sudden returns, and who sometimes even appointed the day of battle and fixed the field of combat, looking for victory not from fraud, but only from superiority in personal bravery.[178] Ælian, too, declares that the Romans never resorted to stratagems till about the end of the Second Punic War; and truly the great Roman general, Scipio, who took the name of Africanus, displayed a thorough African skill in the use he made of spies and surprises to bring that war to a successful issue.

With regard to night attacks the Macedonians appear to have cherished similar feelings, since we find Alexander refusing to attack Darius by night on the ground that he did not wish to gain a stolen victory. And with regard to close combat, something of the old Roman and Achæan feeling was displayed in Europe when first the crossbow, and in later times the musket, rendered personal prowess of lesser importance. Before the time of Richard I., when the crossbow became the chief weapon in war, warriors, says the Abbé Velley, were so free and brave that they would only owe victory to their lance and their sword, and everybody detested those perfidious arms with which a coward under shelter was enabled to slay the bravest.[179] So said Montluc of the musket, which in 1523 had not yet, he says, superseded in France the use of the crossbow: ‘Would to God this accursed instrument had never been invented.... So many brave and valiant men would not have met their deaths at the hands very often of the greatest cowards, who would not so much as dare look at the man whom they knock down from a distance with their accursed balls.’[180] And in the same spirit Charles XII. of Sweden once bade his soldiers to come to close quarters with the enemy without shooting, on the ground that it was only for cowards to shoot.

Such ideas are, of course, dead beyond the hope of recovery; but they are an odd commentary on our conceit in the improved tone of our military code of honour. We have long since learned to despise these old-world notions of honour and courage, and to make very few exceptions indeed to the newer doctrine of Christendom, that in war anything and everything is fair. But it is worth the pause of a moment to reflect that such moral sentiments in restraint of the use of fraud in war should have once had a real existence in the world; that they should once have swayed the minds of the most successful military nation that ever existed, and stood by them till they had attained that high degree of power which was theirs at the time of the Second Punic War (217-199 B.C.) In comparing the code of military honour prevalent in pagan antiquity with that of more recent times, it is but fair to remember that the pagan nations of old recognised some principles of action which were never dreamt of in the best days of Christian chivalry; and that the generals of the people who we are sometimes told were a mere robber community would have had as strong a feeling against the righteousness of a night attack, a feigned retreat, or a surprise, as our modern generals would have of an open violation of a truce or convention.

The downward path in this matter is easy, and the history of Rome after Scipio Africanus is associated with a change of opinion concerning stratagems that in no degree fell short of that subtlety of the Greeks, Gauls, or Africans, which the Romans once regarded as perfidy. Frontinus, who wrote a book on stratagems in the reign of Trajan, and still more Polyænus, who wrote a large book on the same subject for the Emperors Verus and Antoninus, appear to have thought that no deceit was too bad to serve as a good precedent for the conduct of war. Polyænus not merely made a collection of some nine hundred stratagems, but collected them for the express purpose of their being of service to the Roman Emperors in the war then undertaken against Parthia. To the rulers of a people who had once regarded even an ambuscade as beneath their chivalry he brought as worthy of their recollection and study actions which are an eternal stain on the memory of those who committed them. Let us take for example the devices he records for obtaining possession of besieged places, remembering that from the moment the chamade has been beaten, or any other sign been given for a conference or parley between the contending forces, a truce by tacit agreement is held to suspend their mutual hostilities.

1. Thibron persuaded the governor of a fort in Asia to come out to arrange terms, under an oath that he should return if they failed to agree. During the relaxation of guard that naturally ensued, Thibron’s men took the fort by assault: and Thibron, reconducting the governor according to his word, forthwith put him to death.[181]

2. In the same way behaved Paches, the Athenian general at Notium. Having got Hippias, the governor, into his power under the same promise that Thibron made, he took the place by storm, massacred all he found in it, reconducted Hippias according to his oath, and had him killed upon the spot.[182]

3. Autophrodates proposed a parley with the chiefs of the Ephesian army, having previously ordered his cavalry officers and other troops to attack the Ephesians during the conference. The result was a signal victory, and the capture or slaughter of a great number of Ephesians.[183]

4. Philip of Macedon sent some envoys into a Thracian city, and whilst the people all met in assembly to hear the proposals of the enemy the King of Macedon attacked and took the city.[184]

5. The Thracians, having been defeated by the Bœotians, made a truce with them, for a certain number of days, and attacked them one night, whilst the enemy were engaged in making sacrifices. And so dealt Cleomenes with the Argives; he made a truce with them for seven days, and attacked them the second night.

All these things are told by Polyænus, not only without a word of disapproval, but apparently as good examples for the conduct of a war actually in progress. Such was the state of moral debasement in which their long career of military success ultimately landed the great Roman people.

Nevertheless, it is not for modern history to cast stones at Paches or at Thibron. The Conference-stratagem attained its highest development in the practice of warfare in Christendom; so that Montaigne declares it to have become a fixed maxim among the military men of his time (the sixteenth century) never in time of siege to go out to a parley. That great French soldier Montluc, whose autobiography contained in his Commentaries displays so curious a mixture of bravery and cruelty, of loyalty and cunning, and is perhaps the best military book by a military man that has been written since Cæsar, tells us how once, whilst he was bargaining with the governor of Sarvenal about the terms of a capitulation, his men entered the place by a window on the other side and compelled the governor to surrender at discretion, and how on another occasion he sent his soldiers to enter Mont de Marsan and put all they met to the sword, whilst he himself was deluding the governor with a parley. ‘The moments of a parley are dangerous,’ he justly observes, ‘and then more than ever should the besieged be careful in guarding their walls, for it is the time when the besiegers, fearful of losing by a capitulation the booty that would be theirs if they took the place by storm, study to avail themselves of the relaxation of vigilance promoted by the truce to approach the walls with greater facility and success.’ And the man who wrote this as the experience of his time, and illustrated it by the above accounts of his own practice, rose to be a Marshal of France!

Some other examples of the same stratagem prove how widely the custom entered into the warfare of the European nations. The governor of Terouanne, besieged by the forces of the Emperor Charles V., having forgotten in a negotiation for a capitulation to stipulate for a suspension of arms, the town was surprised during the conference, pillaged, and utterly destroyed.[185] And Feuquières, a French general of Louis XIV., and the writer of a book of military memoirs which ran through several editions, tells us how he surprised a place called Kreilsheim in 1688: ‘I could not have taken this place by force, surrounded as it was with a wall and a strong enough castle; but the colonel in command having been imbecile enough to come outside the place to parley with me, without exacting a promise from me to let him return, I retained him and compelled him to order his garrison to surrender itself prisoner of war.’[186] And he actually quotes this to show that when it is necessary to take a post, all sorts of means should be employed, provided they do not dishonour the general who resorts to them, as would the failure of his word to the colonel have dishonoured himself had the colonel demanded it of him.

A sounder sense of military honour was displayed by the English general, Lord Peterborough, at the siege of Barcelona in 1705. Don Velasco had promised to capitulate within a certain number of days, in the event of no succour arriving, and he surrendered one gate as a proof of his sincerity. During the truce involved in this proceeding, the German and Catalonian allies of the English entered the town and began that career of plunder and outrage which is the constant reward and crown of such military successes. Lord Peterborough undertook to prevent disorder in the town, expel the allied soldiery, and return to his position. He was taken at his word, acted up to his word, and saved the honour of England. But what of that of his allies?

It is a fine line that divides a stratagem from an act of perfidy. Valerius Maximus denounces as an act of perfidy the conduct of Cnæus Domitius, who, having received the King of the Arverni as a guest under the pretence of a colloquy, sent him by sea a prisoner to Rome;[187] but it is not easy to distinguish it from the actions of Montluc or Feuquières. Vattel lays down the following doctrine on the subject: As humanity compels us to prefer the gentlest means in the prosecution of our rights, if we can master a strong place, surprise or overcome an enemy by a stratagem or a feint void of perfidy, it is better to do so than to have resort to a bloody siege or the carnage of a battle. He expressly excludes perfidy; but might not Polyænus have defended it on precisely the same humanitarian grounds as those by which Vattel justifies the more ordinary stratagems? Might not an act of perfidy equally prevent a siege or a battle? If we are justified in contending for our rights by force, it is hard to say that we may not do so by fraud; but it is still harder to distinguish the kinds and the limits of such fraud, or to say where it ceases to be lawful.

And to this length did Polyænus apparently go, as we see in the cases of downright perfidy which he includes in his collection of stratagems. The Locrians swore to observe a treaty with the Sicilians so long as they trod the earth they then walked on, or carried their heads on their shoulders: the next day they threw away the heads of garlic which they had carried under their cloaks on their shoulders, and the earth they had strewn in their shoes, and began a general massacre of the Sicilians.[188] The Campanians, having agreed to surrender half their arms, cut them in half, and so virtually surrendered nothing.[189] Paches, the Athenian, says Frontinus, having promised personal safety to his enemies on condition of their laying down their arms, or as he termed it, their iron, slew all those who, having laid down their arms, still retained the iron clasps in their cloaks.[190]