Military Manners and Customs
In some other respects the Brussels Conference displayed the vagueness of sentiment that prevails about the use of spies in war. It was agreed between all the Powers that no one should be considered as a spy but one who secretly or under false pretences sought to obtain information for the enemy in occupied districts; that military men collecting such information within the zone of hostile operations should not be regarded as spies if it were possible to recognise their military character; and that military men, and even civilians, if their proceedings were open, charged with despatches, should not, if captured, be treated as spies; nor individuals who carried despatches or kept up communications between different parts of an army through the air in balloons. The German delegate proposed, with regard to balloons, that those who sailed in them might be first of all summoned to descend, then fired at if they refused, and if captured be treated as prisoners, not as spies. The rejection of his proposal implies that by the laws of modern war a balloonist is liable to be shot as a spy; so that, from the point of view of personal danger, the service of a balloon becomes doubly heroic. The Brussels Conference settled nothing, owing to the withdrawal of England from that attempt to settle by agreement between the nations the laws that should govern their relations in war-time; but from what was on that occasion agreed to or rejected may be gathered the prevalent practice of European warfare. Is it not then a little remarkable that for the dangerous service of espionage a different justice should be meted out to civilians and to military men; and that a patriot who risks his life in a balloon should also risk it in the same way as a spy, a deserter, or a traitor?
But whatever be the fate of a spy, and in spite of distinguished precedents to the contrary, men of honour will always instinctively shrink from a service which involves falsehood from beginning to end. The sentiment is doubtless praiseworthy: but what is the moral difference between entering a town as a spy and the military service of winning it by surprise? What, for instance, shall we think of the Spanish officers and soldiers who, dressed as peasants and with baskets of nuts and apples on their arms, gained possession of Amiens in 1597 by spilling the contents of their baskets and then slaying the sentinels as they scrambled to pick them up?195 What of the officers who, in the disguise of peasants and women, and concealing daggers and pistols, got possession of Ulm for the Elector of Bavaria? What of the French who, in Dutch costume, and by supplications in Dutch to be granted a refuge from a pursuing enemy, surprised a fort in Holland in 1672?196 What of Prince Eugene, who took the fortress of Breysach by sending in a large force concealed in hay-carts under the conduct of two hundred officers disguised as peasants?197 What of the Chevalier Bayard, that favourite of legendary chivalry, who, having learnt from a spy the whereabouts of a detachment of Venetian infantry, went by night to the village where they slept, and with his men slew all but three out of some three hundred men as they ran out of their houses?198 What of Callicratidas the Cyrenæan, who begged the commander of a fort to receive four sick soldiers, and sent them in on their beds with an escort of sixteen soldiers, so that they easily overpowered the guards and won the place for their general?199 What of Phalaris, who, having petitioned for the hand of a commandant’s daughter, overcame the garrison by sending in soldiers dressed as women servants, and purporting to bear presents to his betrothed?200 What of Feuquières, who, whilst pretending to lead a German force and praying for shelter from a snowstorm, affixed his pétards to the gates of Neuborg, and, having taken the town, put the whole of the garrison of 650 men to the sword?201
In what respect do such actions which are the everyday stratagems of a campaign, and count as perfectly fair, differ from the false pretences which constitute the iniquity of the spy? In this respect only – that whilst he bears his danger alone, in the case of a surprise the danger is distributed among numbers.
And, in point of fact, there was a time when the service of a surprise and that of espionage were so far regarded as the same that by the laws of war death was not only the allotted portion of the captured spy but of all who were caught in an endeavour to take a place by surprise. The rule, according to Vattel, was not changed, nor the soldiers who were captured in a surprise regarded or treated as prisoners of war, till the year 1597, when, Prince Maurice having failed in an attempt to take Venloo by surprise, and having lost some of his men, who were put to death for that offence, the new rule that has since prevailed was agreed upon by both sides for the sake of their future mutual immunity from that peril.
The usual rule laid down to distinguish a bad from a good stratagem is that in the latter there is no violation of an expressly or tacitly pledged faith. The violation of a conference, a truce, or a treaty has always therefore been reprobated, however commonly practised. But certain occurrences of history suggest the feasibility of corresponding stratagems which cannot be judged by so simple a formula and which therefore are of still uncertain right.
The first stratagem of this kind that suggests itself is that of forgery. Hannibal, having defeated and slain the Roman general Marcellus, and thereby become possessed of his seal, the Romans found it necessary to despatch messages to all their garrison towns that no more attention should be paid to orders purporting to come from Marcellus. The precedent suggests the use of forged despatches as a weapon of war. To obtain in time of peace, for use in time of war, the signatures of men likely to be hostile commanders, would obviously be of immense military service for purposes either of defence or aggression. The stratagem would be dishonourable in the highest degree; but, unfortunately, the standard of measurement in such cases is rather their effectiveness than their abstract morality.
The second stratagem of the sort is the stratagem of false intelligence. To what extent is it lawful to deceive an enemy by downright falsehood? The Chevalier Bayard, ‘without fear or reproach,’ when besieged by the Imperialists in Mézières, contrived to make the enemy raise the siege by sending a messenger with letters containing false information destined to fall into the hands of the enemy. The invention of the telegraph has increased the means of deceiving the enemy by false intelligence, and was freely so used in the Civil War of the United States. It is said to be better to secure the services of a few telegraph operators in a hostile country than to have dozens of ordinary spies; and for this reason, according to the eminent author of the ‘Soldier’s Pocket-Book’: ‘Before or during an action an enemy may be deceived to any extent by means of such men; messages can be sent ordering him to concentrate upon wrong points, or, by giving him false information, you may induce him to move as you wish.’
Another stratagem is suggested by the conduct of the Prince of Orange, who, having detected in one of his own secretaries a spy in the service of the Prince of Luxembourg, forced him to write a letter to the latter containing such information as enabled himself to effect a march he wished to conceal. Might not, then, prisoners of war be used for the same compulsory service? For a spy just as much as a soldier is a recognised and accredited military agent, and, if the former may be made the channel of falsehood, why not the prisoner of war? The Romans made use of the latter to acquire information about their enemy’s plans, if in no other way, by torture or the threat of it; the Germans forced some of their French prisoners to perform certain military services connected with carrying on their campaign – would it be therefore unfair to make use of them as the Prince of Orange made use of his secretary?
To such questions there is no answer from the international law writers. Still less is there any authoritative military doctrine concerning them, and, if the stratagems in debate are excluded from ‘good’ war by the military honour of to-day, the above study of warlike artifices has been made to little purpose if it has not taught us how changeable and capricious that standard is, and of what marvellous adjustment it is capable.
It were a treat at which the gods themselves might smile to see and hear a moral philosopher and a military officer brought into conference together concerning the stratagems permissible in war. Let the reader imagine them trying to distribute in just and equal parts the due share of blame attaching severally to the following agents – to the man who betrays his country or his cause for gold, and the general who tempts him to his crime or accepts it gladly; to the man who serves as a spy, to the general who on the one side sends or employs him as a spy, and to the general who on the other side hangs him as a spy; to the man who discovers the strength of a town in the disguise of a butcher, and to his fellow-soldiers who enter it disguised as peasants or under the plea of shelter from sickness or a snowstorm; to the man who gains an advantage by propagating false intelligence, and the man who does so by the use of forged despatches; the man who, like Scipio, plays at negotiations for peace in order the better to spy out and avail himself of an enemy’s weakness, and the man who makes offers of treason to an enemy in order the more easily to take him at a disadvantage – and the conclusion will be not unlikely to occur to him, when he shudders at the possible length and futility of that imaginary disputation, that, whatever havoc is caused by a state of war to life, to property, to wealth, to family affections, to domestic honour, it is a havoc absolutely incomparable to that which it produces among the received moral principles of mankind. The military code regarding the fair and legitimate use of fraud and deception has nothing whatever in common with the ordinary moral code of civil life, the principles openly professed in it being so totally foreign to our simplest rules of upright and worthy conduct that in any other than the fighting classes of our civilised societies they would not be advocated for very shame, nor listened to for a moment without resentment.
CHAPTER VI.
BARBARIAN WARFARE
Non avaritia, non crudelitas modum novit… Quæ clam commissa capite luerentur, quia paludati fecere laudamus.– Seneca.
Variable notions of honour – Primitive ideas of a military life – What is civilised warfare – Advanced laws of war among several savage tribes – Symbols of peace among savages – The Samoan form of surrender – Treaties of peace among savages – Abeyance of laws of war in hostilities with savages – Zulus blown up in caves with gun-cotton – Women and men kidnapped for transport service on the Gold Coast – Humane intentions of the Spaniards in the New World contrasted with the inhumanity of their actions – Wars with natives of English and French in America – High rewards offered for scalps – The use of bloodhounds in war – The use of poison and infected clothes – Penn’s treaty with the Indians – How Missionaries come to be a cause of war – Explanation of the failure of modern Missions – The Mission Stations as centres of hostile intrigue – Plea for the State-regulation of Missions – Depopulation under Protestant influences – The prevention of false rumours, Tendenzlügen– Civilised and barbarian warfare – No real distinction between them.
A missionary, seeing once a negro furrowing his face with scars, asked him why he put himself to such needless pain, and the reply was: ‘For honour, and that people on seeing me may say, There goes a man of heart.’
Ridiculous as this negro’s idea of honour must appear to us, it bears a sufficient resemblance to other notions of the same kind that have passed current in the world at different times to satisfy us of the extreme variability of the sentiment in question. Cæsar built with difficulty a bridge across the Rhine, chiefly because he held it beneath his own dignity, or the Roman people’s, for his army to cross it in boats. The Celts of old thought it as ignominious to fly from an inundation, or from a burning or falling house, as to retreat from an enemy. The Spartans considered it inglorious to pursue a flying foe, or to be killed in storming a besieged city. The same Gauls who gloried in broadsword-wounds would almost go mad with shame if wounded by an arrow or other missile that only left an imperceptible mark. The use of letters was once thought dishonourable by all the European nations. Marshal Montluc, in the sixteenth century, considered it a sign of abnormal overbookishness for a man to prefer to spend a night in his study than to spend it in the trenches, though, now, a contrary taste would be thought by most men the mark of a fool.
Such are some of the curious ideas of honour that have prevailed at different times. Wherein we seem to recognise not merely change but advance; one chief difference between the savage and civilised state lying in the different estimates entertained in either of martial prowess and of military honour. We laugh nowadays at the ancient Britons who believed that the souls of all who had followed any other pursuit than that of arms, after a despised life and an unlamented death, hovered perforce over fens and marshes, unfit to mingle with those of warriors in the higher and brighter regions; or at the horsemen who used before death to wound themselves with their spears, in order to obtain that admission to Walhalla which was denied to all who failed to die upon a battle-field; or at the Spaniards, who, when Cato disarmed them, preferred a voluntary death to a life destined to be spent without arms.202 No civilised warrior would pride himself, as Fijian warriors did, on being generally known as the ‘Waster’ or ‘Devastator’ of such-and-such a district; the most he would look for would be a title and perhaps a perpetual pension for his descendants. We have nothing like the custom of the North American tribes, among whom different marks on a warrior’s robe told at a glance whether his fame rested on the slaughter of a man or a woman, or only on that of a boy or a girl. We are inferior in this respect to the Dacota tribes, among whom an eagle’s feather with a red spot on it denoted simply the slaughter of an enemy, the same feather with a notch and the sides painted red, that the said enemy had had his throat cut, whilst according as the notches were on one side or on both, or the feather partly denuded, anyone could tell after how many others the hero had succeeded in touching the dead body of a fallen foe. The stride is clearly a great one from Pyrrhus, the Epirot king, who, when asked which of two musicians he thought the better, only deigned to reply that Polysperchon was the general, to Napoleon, the French emperor, who conferred the cross of the Legion of Honour on Crescentini the singer.
And as the pursuit of arms comes with advancing civilisation to occupy a lower level as compared with the arts of peace, so the belief is the mark of a more polished people that the rapacity and cruelty which belong to the war customs of a more backward nation, or of an earlier time, are absent from their own. They invent the expression civilised warfare to emphasise a distinction they would fain think inherent in the nature of things; and look, by its help, even on the mode of killing an enemy, with a moral vision that is absurdly distorted. How few of us, for example, but see the utmost barbarity in sticking a man with an assegai, yet none whatever in doing so with a bayonet? And why should we pride ourselves on not mutilating the dead, while we have no scruples as to the extent to which we mutilate the living? We are shocked at the mention of barbarian tribes who poison their arrows, or barb their darts, yet ourselves think nothing of the frightful gangrenes caused by the copper cap in the Minié rifle-ball, and reject, on the score of the expense of the change, the proposal that bullets of soft lead, which cause needless pain, should no longer be used among the civilised Powers for small-arm ammunition.203
But whilst the difference in these respects between barbarism and civilisation is thus one that rather touches the surface than the substance of war, the result is inevitably in either state a different code of military etiquette and sentiment, though the difference is far less than in any other points of comparison between them. When the nations of Christendom therefore came in contact with unknown and savage races, whose customs seemed different from their own and little worthy of attention, they assumed that the latter recognised no laws of war, much as some of the earlier travellers denied the possession or faculty of speech to people whose language they could not interpret. From which assumption the practical inference followed, that the restraints which were held sacred between enemies who inherited the same traditions of military honour had no need to be observed in hostilities with the heathen world. It is worth while, therefore, to show how baseless was the primary assumption, and how laws of war, in no way dissimilar to those of Europe, may be detected in the military usages of barbarism.
To spare the weak and helpless was and is a common rule in the warfare of the less civilised races. The Guanches of the Canary Islands, says an old Spanish writer, ‘held it as base and mean to molest or injure the women and children of the enemy, considering them as weak and helpless, therefore improper objects of their resentment; neither did they throw down or damage houses of worship.’204 The Samoans considered it cowardly to kill a woman:205 and in America the Sioux Indians and Winnebagoes, though barbarous enough in other respects, are said to have shown the conventional respect to the weaker sex.206 The Basutos of South Africa, whatever may be their customs now, are declared by Casalis, one of the first French Protestant missionaries to their country, to have respected in their wars the persons of women, children, and travellers, and to have spared all prisoners who surrendered, granting them their liberty on the payment of ransom.207
Few savage races were of a wilder type than the Abipones of South America; yet Dobritzhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, assures us not only that they thought it unworthy of them to mangle the bodies of dead Spaniards, as other savages did, but that they generally spared the unwarlike, and carried away boys and girls uninjured. The Spaniards, Indians, negroes, or mulattoes whom they took in war they did not treat like captives, but with kindness and indulgence like children. Dobritzhoffer never saw a prisoner punished by so much as a word or a blow, but he bears testimony to the compassion and confidence often displayed to captives by their conquerors. It is common to read of the cruelty of the Red Indians to their captives; but Loskiel, another missionary, declares that prisoners were often adopted by the victors to supply the place of the slain, and that even Europeans, when it came to an exchange of prisoners, sometimes refused to return to their own countrymen. In Virginia notice was sent before war to the enemy, that in the event of their defeat, the lives of all should be spared who should submit within two days’ time.
Loskiel gives some other rather curious testimony about the Red Indians. ‘When war was in contemplation they used to admonish each other to hearken to the good and not to the evil spirits, the former always recommending peace. They seem,’ he adds with surprise, ‘to have had no idea of the devil as the prince of darkness before the Europeans came into the country.’ The symbol of peace was the burial of the hatchet or war-club in the ground; and when the tribes renewed their covenants of peace, they exchanged certain belts of friendship which were singularly expressive. The principal belt was white, with black streaks down each side and a black spot at each end: the black spots represented the two people, and the white streak between them signified, that the road between them was now clear of all trees, brambles, and stones, and that every hindrance was therefore removed from the way of perfect harmony.
The Athenians used the same language of symbolism when they declared war by letting a lamb loose into the enemy’s country: this being equivalent to saying, that a district full of the habitations of men should shortly be turned into a pasture for sheep.208
The Fijians used to spare their enemy’s fruit trees; the Tongan islanders held it as sacrilege to fight within the precincts of the burial place of a chief, where the greatest enemies were obliged to meet as friends.
Most of the lower races recognise the inviolability of ambassadors and heralds, and have well-established emblems of a truce or armistice. The wish for peace which the Zulu king in vain sought from his English invaders by the symbol of an elephant’s tusk (1879), was conveyed in the Fiji Islands by a whale’s tooth, in the Sandwich by a young plantain tree or green branch of the ti plant, and among most North American tribes by a white flag of skin or bark. The Samoan symbol for an act of submission in deprecation of further hostilities conveys some indication of the possible origin of these pacific symbols. The conquered Samoan would carry to his victor some bamboo sticks, some firewood, and some small stones; for as a piece of split bamboo was the original Samoan knife, and small stones and firewood were used for the purpose of roasting pigs, this symbol of submission was equivalent to saying: ‘Here we are, your pigs, to be cooked if you please, and here are the materials wherewith to do it.’209 In the same way the elephant’s tusk or the whale’s tooth may be a short way of saying to the victor: ‘Yours is the strength of the elephant or the whale; we recognise the uselessness of fighting with you.’
In the same way many savage tribes take the greatest pains to impress the terms of treaties as vividly as possible on the memory of the contracting parties by striking and intelligible ceremonies. In the Sandwich Islands a wreath woven conjointly by the leaders of either side and placed in a temple was the chief symbol of peace. On the Fiji Islands, the combatant forces would meet and throw down their weapons at one another’s feet. The Tahitians wove a wreath of green boughs, furnished by each side; exchanged two young dogs; and having also made a band of cloth together, deposited the wreath and the band in the temple, with imprecations on the side which should first violate so solemn a treaty of peace.210 On the Hervey Islands, the token of the cessation of war was the breaking of a number of spears against a large chestnut tree; the almost imperishable coral tree was planted in the valleys to signify the hope that the peace might last as long as the tree; and after the drum of peace had been solemnly beaten round the island, it was unlawful for any man to carry a weapon, or to cut down any iron-wood, which he might turn into an implement of destruction.
Even our custom of proclaiming that a war is not undertaken against a people but against its rulers is not unknown in savage life. The Ashantee army used to strew leaves on their march, to signify that their hostility was not with the country they passed through but only with the instigators of the war; they told the Fantees that they had no war with them collectively, but only with some of them.211 How common a military custom this appeal to the treason of an enemy is, notwithstanding the rarity of its success, everybody knows. When, for instance, the Anglo-Zulu war began, it was solemnly proclaimed that the British Government had no quarrel with the Zulu people; it was a war against the Zulu king, not against the Zulu nation. (Jan. 11, 1879.) So were the Ashantees told by the English invading force; so were the Afghans; so were the Egyptians; and so were the French by the Emperor William before his merciless hordes laid waste and desolate some of the fairest provinces of France; so, no doubt, will be told the Soudan Arabs. And yet this appeal to treason, this premium on a people’s disloyalty, is the regular precursor of wars, wherein destruction for its own sake, the burning of grain and villages for the mere pleasure of the flames, forms almost invariably the most prominent feature. The military view always prevails over the civil, of the meaning of hostilities that have no reference to a population but only to its government. In the Zulu war, for instance, in spite of the above proclamation, the lieutenant-general ordered raids to be made into Zululand for the express purpose of burning empty kraals or villages; defending such procedure by the usual military logic, that the more the natives at large felt the strain of the war, the more anxious they would be to see it concluded; and it was quite in vain for the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal to argue that the burning of empty kraals would neither do much harm to the Zulus nor good to the English; and that whereas the war had been begun on the ground that it was waged against the Zulu king and not against his nation, such conduct was calculated to alienate from the invaders the whole of the Zulu people, including those who were well disposed to them. Such arguments hardly ever prevail over that passion for wanton destruction and for often quite unnecessary slaughter, which finds a ready and comprehensive shelter under the wing of military exigencies.
