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.144 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.’145
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.146 All who were unarmed or who laid down their arms were spared from destruction, as well as from plunder;147 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.148
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.’149
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.150 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.151 At another place twenty-six young men had joined the francs-tireurs; the Baden troops took and shot their fathers.152 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.153
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.154 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.155
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.’156 ‘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.’157
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.158
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.159 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 order160 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.’161 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.162 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.163
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.164 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.165
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.166
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.167
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.168 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.169
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;170 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.171 Not only the vessels of pirates and privateers, but the war vessels of the State, learned to sail under colours that belied their nationality.172 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.173
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.174
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.175 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.176 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.