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 1803.106 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.107
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.’108 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.109 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.110 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).111
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.112 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.113
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;114 of Gentius, king of Illyria;115 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.116 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).117
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,118 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).119 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.’120 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.121 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).122
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.123 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).124 When Dinant was taken by storm by the Burgundians, the prisoners, about 800, were drowned before Bovines (1466).125 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).126 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).127 At Nesle, most of those who were taken alive were hung, and some had their hands cut off (1472).128 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!129
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.’130
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;’131 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.’132
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.133
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.134 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,135 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;136 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.137
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.138 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.139 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).140 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.’141 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.’142 ‘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.’143