Military Manners and Customs. Farrer James Anson

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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

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