MILITARY REPRISALS.
_Si quis clamet iniquum non dare pœnas qui peccavit, respondeo
multo esse iniquius tot innocentium millia citra meritum in
extremam vocari calamitatem._--ERASMUS.
International law on legitimate reprisals--The Brussels Conference
on the subject--Illustrations of barbarous reprisals--Instances
of non-retaliation--Savage reprisals in days of chivalry--Hanging
the commonest reprisals for a brave defence, as illustrated by the
warfare of the fifteenth century--Survival of the custom to our own
times--The massacre of a conquered garrison still a law of war--The
shelling of Strasburg by the Germans--Brutal warfare of Alexander
the Great--The connection between bravery and cruelty--The
abolition of slavery in its effects on war--The storming of
Magdeburg, Brescia, and Rome--Cicero on Roman warfare--The
reprisals of the Germans in France in 1870--Their revival of the
custom of taking hostages--Their resort to robbery as a plea
of reprisals--General Von Moltke on perpetual peace--The moral
responsibility of the military profession--The Press as a potent
cause of war--Plea for the abolition of demands for unconditional
surrender, such as led to the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882.
On no subject connected with the operations of war has International
Law come as yet to lamer conclusions than concerning Military
Reprisals, or the revenge that may be fairly exacted by one belligerent
from the other for violation of the canons of honourable warfare.
General Halleck, for instance, whilst as against an enemy who puts in
force the extreme rights of war he justifies a belligerent in following
suit, denies the right of the latter to do so against an enemy who
passes all bounds and conducts war in a downright savage fashion.
Whilst therefore, according to him, the law of retaliation would never
justify such acts as the massacre of prisoners, the use of poison, or
promiscuous slaughter, he would consider as legitimate reprisals acts
like the sequestration by Denmark of debts due from Danish to British
subjects in retaliation for the confiscation by England of the Danish
fleet in 1807, or Napoleon’s seizure of all English travellers in
France in retaliation for England’s seizure and condemnation of French
vessels in 1803.[108] And a French writer, in the same spirit, denies
that the French Government would have been justified in retaliating on
Russia, when the Czar had his French prisoners of war consigned to the
mines of Siberia.[109]
The distinction is clearly untenable on any rational theory of the laws
of retributive justice. You may retaliate for the lesser, but not for
the greater injury! You may check resort to infamous hostilities by the
threat of reprisals, but must fold your hands and submit, if your enemy
becomes utterly barbarous! You may restrain him from burning your crops
by burning his, but must be content to go without redress if he slays
your wives and children!
How difficult the question really is appears from the attempt made
to settle it at the Brussels Conference of 1874, when the following
clauses formed part of the original Russian project submitted to the
consideration of that meeting:
_Section IV._ 69. ‘Reprisals are admissible in extreme cases only, due
regard being paid as far as possible to the laws of humanity when it
shall have been unquestionably proved that the laws and customs of war
have been violated by the enemy, and that they have had recourse to
measures condemned by the law of nations.’
70. ‘The selection of the means and extent of the reprisals should be
proportionate to the degree of the infraction of the law committed by
the enemy. Reprisals that are disproportionately severe are contrary to
the rules of international law.’
71. ‘Reprisals should be allowed only on the authority of the
commander-in-chief, who shall likewise determine the degree of their
severity and their duration.’
The delicacy of dealing with such a subject, when the memories of
the Franco-German war were still fresh and green, led ultimately to
a unanimous agreement to suppress these clauses altogether, and to
leave the matter, as the Belgian deputy expressed it, in the domain
of unwritten law till the progress of science and civilisation should
bring about a completely satisfactory solution. Nevertheless, the
majority of men will be inclined, in reference to this resolution,
to say with the Russian Baron Jomini, the skilful President of that
Military Council: ‘I regret that the uncertainty of silence is to
prevail with respect to one of the most bitter necessities of war.
If the practice could be suppressed by this reticence, I could not
but approve of this course; but if it is still to exist among the
necessities of war, this reticence and this obscurity may, it is to be
feared, remove any limits to its existence.’
The necessity of some regulation of reprisals, such as that contained
in the clauses suggested at Brussels, is no less attested by the events
of the war of 1870 than by the customs in this respect which have at
all times prevailed, and which, as earlier in time, form a fitting
introduction to those later occurrences.
That the fear of reprisals should act as a certain check upon the
character of hostilities is too obvious a consideration not to have
always served as a wholesome restraint upon military licence. When, for
instance, Philip II. of Spain in his war with the Netherlands ordered
that no prisoners of war should be released or exchanged, nor any
contributions be accepted as an immunity from confiscation, the threat
of retaliation led to the withdrawal of his iniquitous proclamation.
Nor would other similar instances be far to seek.
Nevertheless, it is evident that, as seldom as war itself is prevented
by consideration of the forces in opposition, will its peculiar
excesses, which constitute its details, be restrained by the fear of
retaliatory measures; and inasmuch as the primary offence is more
often the creation of rumour than a proved fact, the usual result
of reprisals is, not that one belligerent amends its ways, but that
both belligerents become more savage and enter on a fatal career of
competitive atrocities. In the wars of the fifteenth century between
the Turks and Venetians, ‘Sultan Mahomet would not suffer his
soldiers to give quarter, but allowed them a ducat for every head, and
the Venetians did the same.’[110] When the Duke of Alva was in the
Netherlands, the Spaniards, at the siege of Haarlem, threw the heads of
two Dutch officers over the walls. The Dutch in return beheaded twelve
Spanish prisoners, and sent their heads into the Spanish trenches.
The Spaniards in revenge hung a number of prisoners in sight of the
besieged; and the latter in return killed more prisoners; and so it
went on during all the time that Alva was in the country, without the
least improvement resulting from such sanguinary reprisals.[111] At
the siege of Malta, the Grand Master, in revenge for some horrible
Turkish barbarities, massacred all his prisoners and shot their heads
from his cannon into the Turkish camp.[112] In one of the wars of Louis
XIV., the Imperialist forces having put to death a French lieutenant
and thirty troopers a few hours after having promised them quarter,
Feuquières, for reprisals, slew the whole garrison of two towns that he
won by surprise, though the number so slain in each instance amounted
to 650 men (1689).[113]
To all these cases the question asked by Vattel very pertinently
applies: ‘What right have you to cut off the nose and ears of the
ambassador of a barbarian who has treated your ambassador in that
manner?’ The question is not an easy one to answer, for we have no more
right in war than in civil life to punish the innocent for the guilty
apart from the ordinary accidents of hostilities, even if otherwise
we must dispense with redress altogether. To do so by intention and
in cold blood is ferocious, whatever the pretext of justification,
and is never worth the passing gratification it affords. The citizens
of Ghent, in their famous war with the Earl of Flanders, not only
destroyed his house, but the silver cradle and bathing tub he had used
as a child and the very font in which he had been baptized; but such
reprisals are soon regretted, and read very pitiably in the eyes of the
after-world.
It is pleasanter to record some instances where abstinence from
reprisals has not been without its reward. It is said that Cæsar in
Iberia, when, in spite of a truce, the enemy killed many of his men,
instead of retaliating, released some of his prisoners and thereby
brought the foe to regard him with favour. We read in Froissart that
the Lisboners refrained from retaliating on the Castilians, when the
latter mutilated their Portuguese prisoners; and the English Government
acted nobly when it refused to reciprocate the decree of the French
Convention (though that also was meant as a measure of reprisals) that
no English or Hanoverian prisoner should be allowed any quarter.[114]
But the best story of this kind is that told by Herodotus of Xerxes
the Persian. The Spartans had thrown into a well the Persian envoys who
had come to demand of them earth and water. In remorse they sent two of
their nobles to Xerxes to be killed in atonement; but Xerxes, when he
heard the purport of their visit, answered them that he would not act
like the Spartans, who by killing his heralds had broken the laws that
were regarded as sacred by all mankind, and that, of such conduct as he
blamed in them, he would never be guilty himself.[115]
But the most curious feature in the history of reprisals is the fact
that they were once regarded as justly exacted for the mere offence
of hostile opposition or self-defence. Grotius states that it was the
almost constant practice of the Romans to kill the leaders of an enemy,
whether they had surrendered or been captured, on the day of triumph.
Jugurtha indeed was put to death in prison; but the more usual practice
appears to have been to keep conquered potentates in custody, after
they had been led in triumph before the consul’s chariot. This was the
fate of Perseus, king of Macedonia, who was also allowed to retain
his attendants, money, plate, and furniture;[116] of Gentius, king of
Illyria;[117] of Bituitus, king of the Arvernians. Prisoners of less
distinction were sold as slaves, or kept in custody till their friends
paid their ransom.
But in the mediæval history of Europe, in the so-called times of
chivalry, a far worse spirit prevailed with regard to the treatment
of captives. Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the brightest memories of
chivalry, was responsible for the promiscuous slaughter of three days
which the Crusaders exacted for the six weeks’ siege which it had cost
them to take Jerusalem (1099). The Emperor Barbarossa had 1,190 Swabian
prisoners delivered to the executioner at Milan, or shot from military
engines.[118] Charles of Anjou reserved many prisoners, taken at the
battle of Beneventum, to be killed as criminals on his entrance into
Naples. When the French took the castle of Pesquière from the Venetians
by storm, they slew all but three who surrendered to the pleasure of
the king; and Louis XII., who counted for a humane monarch, though his
victims offered 100,000 ducats for their lives, swore that he would
neither eat nor drink till they were hanged (1509).[119]
The indignation of the Roman Senate on one occasion with a consul
who had sold as slaves 10,000 Ligurian prisoners, though they had
surrendered at discretion,[120] was a sentiment that never affected the
warriors of mediæval Christendom. A surrender at discretion ceased to
constitute a claim for mercy. Where the pagan held it wrong to enslave,
the Christian never hesitated to kill. Froissart’s story of the six
citizens of Calais, whom Edward III. was with difficulty restrained
from hanging for the obstinate siege which their town had resisted,
throws a light over the war customs of that time, which other incidents
of history abundantly confirm. The record of the capitulations of
cities or garrisons is no pleasant one, but it is a record which must
be touched upon, in order that war and its still prevalent maxims may
be judged at their proper value. We need scarcely travel further than
the fifteenth century alone in search of facts to place in its proper
light this aspect of martial atrocities.
When the town of Rouen surrendered to Henry V. of England, the latter
stipulated for three of the citizens to be left to his disposal, of
whom two purchased their lives, and the third was beheaded (1419).[121]
When the same king the year following was besieging the castle of
Montereau, he sent some twenty prisoners to treat with the governor
for a surrender; but when the governor refused to treat, even to save
their lives, and when, after a fearful leave-taking with their wives
and relatives, they had been escorted back to the English army, ‘the
King of England ordered a gallows to be erected and had them all hanged
in sight of those within the castle.’[122] When the English took the
castle of Rougemont by storm, and some sixty of its defenders alive,
with the loss of only one Englishman, Henry V., in revenge for his
death, caused all the prisoners to be drowned in the Loire.[123] When
Meaux surrendered to the same king, it was stipulated that six of
its bravest defenders should be delivered up to _justice_, four of
whom were beheaded at Paris, and its commander at once hung to a tree
outside the walls of the city (1422).[124]
Not that there was any special cruelty in the English mode of warfare.
They simply conformed to the customs of the time, as we may see by
reference to the French and Burgundian wars into which they allowed
themselves to be drawn. In 1434, the garrison of Chaumont ‘was soon
so hardly pressed that it surrendered at discretion to the Duke of
Burgundy (Philip the Good), who had upwards of 100 of them hanged;’ and
as with the townsmen, so with those in the castle.[125] Bournonville,
who commanded Soissons for the Duke of Burgundy, and whom Monstrelet
calls ‘the flower of the warriors of all France,’ was beheaded at
Paris, after the capture of the town, by order of the king and council,
and his body hung to a gibbet, like a common malefactor’s (1414).[126]
When Dinant was taken by storm by the Burgundians, the prisoners,
about 800, were drowned before Bovines (1466).[127] When the town of
Saint-frou surrendered to the Duke of Burgundy, ten men, left to the
disposal of that warrior, were beheaded; and so it fared also with
the town of Tongres (1467).[128] After the storming and slaughter at
Liège, before the Duke of Burgundy (Charles the Bold) left the city,
‘a great number of those poor creatures who had hid themselves in the
houses when the town was taken and were afterwards made prisoners, were
hanged’ (1468).[129] At Nesle, most of those who were taken alive were
hung, and some had their hands cut off (1472).[130] After the battle
of Granson, the Swiss retook two castles from the French, and hung
all the Burgundians they found in them. They then retook the town and
castle of Granson, and ordered 512 Germans whom the Burgundians had
hung to be cut down, and as many of the Burgundians as were still in
Granson to be suspended on the same halters (1476). In the skirmishes
that occurred in a time of truce on the frontiers of Picardy, between
the French king’s forces and those of the Duke of Austria, ‘all the
prisoners that were taken on both sides were immediately hanged,
without permitting any, of what degree or rank soever, to be ransomed’
(1481). And as a climax to these facts, let us recall the decree of the
Duke of Anjou, who, when Montpellier was taken by siege, condemned 600
prisoners to be put to death, 200 by the sword, 200 by the halter, and
200 by fire, and who, but for the remonstrances of a cardinal and a
friar, would undoubtedly have executed his sentence.
Ghastly facts enough these! and a strange insight they afford us into
the real character of a profession which, in the days when these things
were its commonest occurrences, was held to be the noblest of all, but
of which it is only too patent that its mainsprings were simply the
brigand’s love of plunder and of bloodshed. One story may be quoted
to show that in this respect the sixteenth century was no improvement
on the fifteenth. In the war between the Dutch and the Spaniards, the
captain of Weerd Castle, having previously refused to surrender to Sir
Francis de Vere, begged at last for a capitulation with the honours
of war; Vere’s answer was, that the honours of war were halters for a
garrison that had dared to defend such a hovel against artillery. The
commandant was killed first, and the remaining 26 men, having been
made to draw black and white straws, the 12 who drew the white straws
were hanged, the thirteenth only escaping by consenting to act as
executioner of the rest![131]
It is clear, therefore, that in the wars of the past the axe and the
halter have played as conspicuous a part as the sword or the lance;
a fact to which its due prominence has not always been given in the
standard histories of military antiquities. It is surprising to find
how close to the glories of war lie the sickening vulgarities of murder.
To the Duke of Somerset, the regent of England for Edward VI., appears
to be due the credit of instituting a milder treatment of a besieged
but surrendered garrison than had been previously customary. For De
Thou, the historian, speaks of the admiration the Duke received for
sparing the lives of a Scotch garrison, contrary to that ‘ancient maxim
in war which declares that a weak garrison forfeits all claim to mercy
on the part of the conquerors, when, with more courage than prudence,
they obstinately persevere in defending an ill-fortified place against
the royal army,’ or refuse reasonable conditions.
But the ancient maxim lasted, in spite of this better example,
throughout the seventeenth and till late into the eighteenth century,
for we find Vattel even then thus protesting against it: ‘How could it
be conceived in an enlightened age that it was lawful to punish with
death a governor who has defended his town to the last extremity, or
who in a weak place had the courage to hold out against a royal army?
In the last century this notion still prevailed; it was looked upon as
one of the laws of war, and is not even at present totally exploded.
What an idea! to punish a brave man for having performed his duty.’[132]
But not even yet is the notion definitely expunged from the unwritten
code of martial etiquette. The original Russian project, submitted
to the Brussels Conference, proposed to exclude, among other illicit
means of war, ‘the threat of extermination towards a garrison that
obstinately holds a fortress.’ The proposal was unanimously rejected,
and that clause was carefully excluded from the published modified
text! But as the execution of a threat is morally of the same value
as the threat itself, it is evident that the massacre of a brave but
conquered garrison still holds its place among the laws of Christian
warfare!
This peculiar and most sanguinary law of reprisals has always been
defended by the common military sophism, that it shortens the horrors
of war. The threat of capital punishment against the governor or
defenders of a town should naturally dispose them to make a conditional
surrender, and so spare both sides the miseries of a siege. But
arguments in defence of atrocities, on the ground of their shortening
a war, and coming from military quarters, must be viewed with the
greatest suspicion, and, inasmuch as they provoke reprisals and so
intensify passion, with the greatest distrust. It was to such an
argument that the Germans resorted in defence of their shelling the
town of Strasburg, in order to intimidate the inhabitants and drive
them to force General Uhrich to a surrender. ‘The abbreviation,’ said
a German writer, ‘of the period of actual fighting and of the war
itself is an act of humanity towards both parties;’[133] although the
savage act failed in its purpose and General Werder had to fall back,
after his gratuitous destruction of life and property, on the slower
process of a regular siege. If their tendency to shorten a war be the
final justification of military proceedings, the ground begins to slip
from under us against the use of aconitine or of clothes infected
with the small-pox. Therefore such a pretext should meet with prompt
condemnation, notwithstanding the efforts of the modern military school
to render it popular upon the earth.
In respect, therefore, to this law of reprisals, the comparison is
not to the credit of modern times as compared with the pagan era. A
surrender, which in Greek and Roman warfare involved as a rule personal
security, came in Christianised Europe to involve capital punishment
out of motives of pure vindictiveness. The chivalry so often associated
with the battle-field as at least a redeeming feature fades on closer
inspection into the veriest fiction of romance. Bravery under any form
has been the constant pretext for capital reprisals. Edward I. had
William Wallace, the brave Scotch leader, executed on Tower Hill;
and it has been observed by one writer, as the facts already quoted
prove, that the custom of thus killing defeated generals ‘may be traced
through a series of years so connected and extensive that we are not
able to point out the exact time when it ceased.’[134]
A characteristic incident of this sort is connected with the famous
pacification of Guienne by Montluc in 1562. Montluc had won Montsegur
by storm, and its commander had been taken alive. The latter was a man
of notorious valour, and in a previous campaign had been Montluc’s
fellow-soldier and friend. For that reason many interceded for his
life, but Montluc decided to hang him, and simply on account of his
valour. ‘I well knew his courage,’ he says, ‘which made me hang him....
I knew him to be valiant, but that made me the rather put him to
death.’ What of your chivalry after that?
But Alexander the Great, whose career has been the ideal of all
succeeding aspirants to military fame, dealt even more severely than
Montluc with Betis, the gallant defender of Gaza. When Gaza was at last
taken by storm, Betis, after fighting heroically, had the misfortune to
be taken alive and to be brought into the presence of the conqueror.
Alexander addressed him thus: ‘You shall not die, Betis, in the manner
you wished; but make up your mind to suffer whatever torture can be
thought of against a prisoner;’ and when Betis for all answer returned
him but the silence of disdain, Alexander had thongs fixed to his
ankles, and, himself acting as charioteer, drove his yet living victim
round the city, attached to his chariot wheels; priding himself that by
such conduct he rivalled Achilles’ treatment of Hector.[135]
A valiant resistance was with Alexander always a sufficient motive
for the most sanguinary reprisals. Arimages, who defended a fortified
rock in Sogdia, thought his position so strong that when summoned to
surrender, he asked tauntingly whether Alexander could fly; and for
this offence, when, unable to hold out any longer, Arimages and his
relations descended to Alexander’s camp to beg for quarter, Alexander
had them first of all flogged and then crucified at the foot of the
rock they had so bravely defended.[136] After the long siege of Tyre,
Alexander had 2,000 Tyrians, over and above the 6,000 who fell during
the storming of that city, nailed to crosses along the shore,[137]
perhaps in reprisal for a violation of the laws of war--for Quintus
Curtius declares that the Tyrians had murdered some Macedonian
ambassadors, and Arrian, who makes no mention of the crucifixion,
declares that they slew some Macedonian prisoners and threw them from
their walls--but more probably (since there were evidently different
stories of the Tyrians’ offence) on account simply of the obstinate
resistance they had offered to Alexander’s attack.
The Macedonian conqueror regarded his whole expedition against Persia
as an act of reprisals for the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, 150
years before his own time. When he set fire to the Persian capital
and palace, Persepolis, he justified himself against Parmenio’s
remonstrances on the ground that it was in revenge for the destruction
of the temples in Greece during the Persian invasion;[138] and this
motive was constantly present with him, in justification both of the
war itself and of particular atrocities connected with it. In the
course of his expedition, he came to a city of the Branchidæ, whose
ancestors at Miletus had betrayed the treasures of a temple in their
charge to Xerxes, and had by him been removed from Miletus to Asia.
As Greeks they met Alexander’s army with joy, and at once surrendered
their city to him. The next day, after reflection given to the matter,
Alexander had every single inhabitant of the city slain, in spite of
their powerlessness, in spite of their supplications, in spite of their
community of language and origin. He even had the walls of the city
dug up from their foundation, and the trees of their sacred groves
uprooted, that not a trace of their city might remain.[139]
Nor can doubt be thrown on these deeds by the fact that they are
only mentioned by Quintus Curtius and not by Arrian. The silence of
the one is no proof of the falsity or credulity of the other. Both
writers lived many centuries after Alexander, and were dependent for
their knowledge on the writings, then extant but long since lost, of
contemporaries and eye-witnesses of the expedition to Asia. That those
witnesses often gave conflicting accounts of the same event we have the
assurance of either writer; but since it is impossible to determine
the degree of discretion with which each made their selections from
the original authorities, it is only reasonable to regard them both as
of the same and equal validity. Seneca, who lived before Arrian and
who therefore was equally conversant with the original authorities,
hardly ever mentions Alexander without expressions of the strongest
reprobation.
Cruelty, in fact, is revealed to us by history as the most conspicuous
trait in the character of Alexander, though not in his case nor in
others inconsistent with occasional acts of magnanimity and the gleams
of a higher nature. This cruelty, however, taken in connection with
his undoubted bravery, calls in question the truth of a remark made by
Philip de Commines, and supported, he affirmed, by all historians, that
no cruel man is ever courageous. The popular theory, that inhumanity is
more likely to be the concomitant of a timid than of a daring nature,
ignores altogether the teaching of history and the conclusions of _à
priori_ reasoning. For if our regard for the sufferings of others is
proportioned to our regard for our own sufferings, inasmuch as our
self-love is the foundation and measure of our powers of sympathy,
a man’s disregard for the sufferings of others--in other words his
cruelty--is likely to be the exact reflection of his disregard for
suffering in his own person, or, in other words, of his physical
courage. Men, moreover, like Cicero, of whom it was said by Livy that
he was better calculated for anything than for war, by their very
incapacity for positions where their humanity is likely to be tested,
are rarely exposed to those temptations of cruelty in which men of a
more daring temperament naturally find themselves placed.
And accordingly we find, by reference to instances which lie on the
surface of history, that great bravery and great cruelty have more
often been united than separate. In French history there is the cruelty
of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy; of Montluc and Des Adretz,
the latter of whom made 30 soldiers and their captain leap from the
precipice of a strong place they had defended, and of both of whom
Brantôme remarks that they were very brave but very cruel.[140] In
Scotch history, it was David I. who, though famed for his courage and
humanity, suffered the sick and aged to be slain in their beds, even
infants to be killed and priests murdered at the very altars.[141] In
English history, it was Richard Cœur-de-Lion who had 5,000 Saracen
prisoners led out to a large plain to be massacred (1191).[142] In
Jewish history, it was King David who, when he took Rabbah of the
Ammonites, ‘brought forth the people that were therein and put them
under saws and harrows of iron and under axes of iron, and made them
pass through the brick kiln; and thus did he unto all the cities of the
children of Ammon.’[143] It is not therefore more probable that a man
famed for his intrepidity will not lend himself to counsels or actions
of cruelty than that another deficient in personal courage will not be
humane.
And here one cause is deserving of attention as helping to explain the
greater barbarity practised by the modern nations in the matter of
reprisals, than that which was permitted by the code of honour which
acted in restraint of them in the better periods of pagan antiquity;
and that is the change that has occurred with regard to slavery.
The abolition of slavery, which in Western Europe has been the greatest
achievement of modern civilisation, did not unfortunately tend to
greater mildness in the customs of war. For in ancient times the sale
of prisoners as slaves operated to restrain that indiscriminate and
objectless slaughter which has been, even to cases within this century,
the marked feature of the battle-field, and more especially where
cities or places have been taken by storm. Avarice ceased to operate,
as it once did, in favour of humanity. In one day the population of
Magdeburg, taken by storm, was reduced from 25,000 to 2,700; and an
English eye-witness of that event thus described it: ‘Of 25,000, some
said 30,000 people, there was not a soul to be seen alive, till the
flames drove those that were hid in vaults and secret places to seek
death in the streets rather than perish in the fire; of these miserable
creatures some were killed too by the furious soldiers, but at last
they saved the lives of such as came out of their cellars and holes,
and so about 2,000 poor desperate creatures were left.’[144] ‘There
was little shooting, the execution was all cutting of throats and
mere house murders.... We could see the poor people in crowds driven
down the streets, flying from the fury of the soldiers, who followed
butchering them as fast as they could, and refused mercy to anybody;
till, driving them down to the river’s edge, the desperate wretches
would throw themselves into the river, where thousands of them
perished, especially women and children.’[145]
It is difficult to read this graphic description of a stormed city
without the suspicion arising in the mind that a sheer thirst for blood
and love of murder is a much more potent sustainer of war than it is
usual or agreeable to believe. The narratives of most victories and
of taken cities support this theory. At Brescia, for instance, taken
by the French from the Venetians in 1512, it is said that 20,000 of
the latter fell to only 50 of the former.[146] When Rome was sacked in
1527 by the Imperialist forces, we are told that ‘the soldiery threw
themselves upon the unhappy multitude, and, without distinction of age
or sex, massacred all who came in their way. Strangers were spared as
little as Romans, for the murderers fired indiscriminately at everyone,
from a mere thirst of blood.’[147]
But this thirst of blood was checked in the days of slavery by the
counteracting thirst of money; there having been an obvious motive
for giving quarter when a prisoner of war represented something of
tangible value, like any other article of booty. The sack of Thebes
by Alexander, and its demolition to the sound of the lute, was bad
enough; but after the first rage for slaughter was over, there remained
30,000 persons of free birth to be sold as slaves. And in Roman
warfare the rule was to sell as slaves those who were taken prisoners
in a stormed city; and it must be remembered that many so sold were
slaves already.[148] All who were unarmed or who laid down their arms
were spared from destruction, as well as from plunder;[149] and for
exceptions to this rule, as for instance for the indiscriminate and
cruel massacre committed at Illiturji in Spain, there was always at
least the pretext of reprisals, or some special military motive.[150]
Cicero, who lived to see the Roman arms triumphant over the world and
the conversion of the Roman republic into a military despotism, found
occasion to deplore at the same time the debased standard of military
honour. He believed that in cruel vindictiveness and rapacity his
contemporaries had degenerated from the customs of their ancestors, and
he contrasted regretfully the utter destruction of Carthage, Numantia,
and Corinth, with the milder treatment of their earlier enemies, the
Sabines, Tusculans, and others. He adduced as a proof of the greater
ferocity of the war spirit of his day the fact that the only term
for an enemy was originally the milder term of stranger, and that it
was only by degrees that the word meaning stranger came to have the
connotation of hostility. ‘What,’ he asks, ‘could have been added
to this mildness, to call him with whom you are at war by so gentle
a name as stranger? But now the progress of time has given a harder
signification to the word; for it has ceased to apply to a stranger,
and has remained the proper term for an actual enemy in arms.’[151]
Is a similar process taking place in modern warfare with regard to
the law of reprisals? It is a long leap from ancient Rome to modern
Germany; but to Germany, as the chief military Power now in existence,
we must turn, in order to understand the law of reprisals as it is
interpreted by the practice of a country whose power and example will
make her actions precedents in all wars that may occur in future.
The worst feature in reprisals is that they are indiscriminate and
more often directed against the innocent than the guilty. To murder
women and children, old men, or any one else, on the ground of their
connection with an enemy who has committed an action calling for
retribution, can be justified by no theory that would not equally apply
to a similar parody of justice in civil life. It is a return to the
theory and practices of savages, who, if they cannot revenge themselves
on a culprit, revenge themselves complacently on some one else. For
bodies of peasants to resist a foreign invader by forming ambuscades or
making surprises against him, though his advance is marked by fire and
pillage and outrage, may be contrary to the laws of war (though that
point has never been agreed upon); but to make such attacks the pretext
for indiscriminate murder and robbery is an extension of the law of
reprisals that was only definitely imported into the military code of
Europe by the German invaders of France in 1870.
The following facts, offered in proof of this statement, are taken
from a small pamphlet, published during the war by the International
Society for Help to the Wounded, and containing only such facts as were
attested by the evidence of official documents or of persons whose
positions gave them an exceptional title to credit.[152] At one place,
where twenty-five francs-tireurs had hidden in a wood and received the
Germans with a fusillade, reprisals were carried so far that the curé,
rushing into the streets, seized the Prussian captain by the shoulders
and entreated mercy for the women and children. ‘No mercy’ was the
only reply.[153] At another place twenty-six young men had joined the
francs-tireurs; the Baden troops took and shot their fathers.[154] At
Nemours, where a body of Uhlans had been surprised and captured by
some mobiles, the floors and furniture of several houses were first
saturated with petroleum and then fired with shells.[155]
The new theory also was imported into the military code, that a
village, by the mere fact of trying to defend itself, constituted
itself a place of war which might be legitimately bombarded and, when
taken, subjected to the rights of war which still govern the fate of
places taken by assault.[156] Nor let it be supposed that those rights
were not exercised as rigorously as they ever have been by victorious
troops. At Nogent-sur-Seine, the Wurtemburg troops carried their fury
to the slaughter of women and children and even of the wounded. And if
the belief still lingers that the German troops of the Emperor William
behaved otherwise towards the weaker sex than their ancestors in Rome
and Italy under the Constable of Bourbon, let the reader refer to the
experiences of Clermont, Andernay, or Neuville.[157]
Reprisals beget, of course, reprisals; and had the French and German
war been by any accident prolonged, it is appalling to think of the
barbarities that would have occurred. ‘Threat for threat,’ wrote
Colonel R. Garibaldi to the Prussian commander at Châtillon, in
reference to the latter’s resolve to punish the inhabitants of that
place for the acts of some francs-tireurs; ‘I give you my assurance
that I will not spare one of the 200 Prussians whom you know to be in
my hands.’[158] ‘We will fight,’ wrote General Chanzy to the Prussian
commander at Vendôme, ‘without truce or mercy, because it is a question
now not of fighting loyal enemies, but hordes of devastators.’[159]
Under the theory of legitimate reprisals, the Germans resuscitated
the custom of taking hostages. The French having (in accordance with
the still recognised but barbarous rule of war) taken prisoners the
captains of some German merchant vessels, the Germans retaliated
by taking twenty persons of respectable position at Dijon, and nine
at Vesoul, and detaining them as hostages. Nor was this an uncommon
episode in the campaign: though the sending to Germany as prisoners
of war of French merchants, magistrates, lawyers, and doctors, and
the making them answerable with their lives and fortunes for actions
of their countrymen which they could neither prevent nor repress, was
a revival in its worst form of the theory of vicarious punishment,
and a direction of hostilities against non-combatants, which was a
gross violation of the proclamation of the Prussian king, made at
the beginning of the campaign (after the common cant of the leaders
of armies), that his forces had no war to wage with the peaceable
inhabitants of France.
Even plunder enters into the German law of reprisals. Remiremont in
the Vosges had to pay 8,000_l._ because two German engineers and one
soldier had been taken prisoners by the French troops. The usual forced
military contributions which the victors exacted did not exclude a
system of pillage and devastation that the present age fondly believed
to belong only to a past state of warfare. On December 5, 1870, a
German soldier wrote to the _Cologne Gazette_: ‘Since the war has
entered upon its present stage it is a real life of brigands we lead.
For four weeks we have passed through districts entirely ravaged; the
last eight days we have passed through towns and villages where there
was absolutely nothing left to take.’ Nor was this plunder only the
work of the common military serfs or conscripts, whose miserable
poverty might have served as an excuse, but it was conducted by
officers of the highest rank, who, for their own benefit, robbed farms
and stables of their sheep and horses, and sacked country houses of
their works of art, their plate, and even of their ladies’ jewels.[160]
The world, therefore, at least owes this to the Germans, that they have
taught us to see war in its true light, by removing it from the realm
of romance, where it was decked with bright colours and noble actions,
to the region of sober judgment, where the soldier, the thief, and
the murderer are seen in scarcely distinguishable colours. They have
withdrawn the veil which blinded our ancestors to the evils of war,
and which led dreamy humanitarians to believe in the possibility of
_civilised warfare_; so that now the deeds of shame threaten to obscure
the deeds of glory. In the middle ages it was the custom to declare a
war that was intended to be waged with special fury by sending a man
with a naked sword in one hand and a burning torch in the other, to
signify that the war so begun was to be one of blood and fire. We have
since learnt that there is no need to typify by any peculiar ceremony
the character of any particular war; for that the characteristics of
all are the same.
The German general Von Moltke, in a published letter wherein he
maintained that Perpetual Peace was a dream and not even a beautiful
one, went on to say, in defence of war, that in it the noblest virtues
of mankind were developed--courage, self-abnegation, faithfulness to
duty, the spirit of sacrifice; and that without wars the world would
soon stagnate and lose itself in materialism.[161] We have no data from
which to judge of the probable state of a warless world, but we do
know that the brightest samples of these virtues have been ever given
by those who in peace and obscurity, and without looking for lands, or
titles, or medals for their reward, have laboured not to destroy life
but to save it, not to lower the standard of morality but to raise it,
not to preach revenge but mercy, not to spread misery and poverty and
crime but to increase happiness, wealth, and virtue. Is there or will
there be no scope for courage, for self-sacrifice, for duty, where
fever and disease are the foes to be combated, where wounds and pain
need to be cured or soothed, or where sin and ignorance and poverty are
the forces to be assailed? But apart from this there is another side to
the picture of war, of which Von Moltke says not a word, but of which,
in the preceding pages, some indication has been given. Now that we are
no longer satisfied with the dry narratives of strategical operations,
but are beginning to search into the details of military proceedings;
into the fate of the captured, of the wounded, of the pursued; into
the treatment of hostages, of women, of children; into the statistics
of massacre and spoliation that are the penalties of defeat; into the
character of stratagems; and into the justice of reprisals, we see war
in another mirror, and recognise that the old one gave but a distorted
reflection of its realities. No one ever denied but that great
qualities are displayed in war; but the doubt is spreading fast, not
only whether it is the worthiest field for their display, but whether
it is not also the principal nursing-bed of the crimes that are the
greatest disgrace to our nature.
It is idle to think that our humanity will fail to take its colouring
from our calling. Marshal Montluc, the bravest yet most cruel of
French soldiers, was fond of protesting that the inhumanity he was
guilty of was in corruption of his original and better nature; and at
the close of his book and of his life, he consoled himself for the
blood he had caused to flow like water by the consideration, that the
sovereigns whose servant he had been were (as he told one of them)
really responsible for the misery he had caused. But does the excuse
avail him, or the millions who have succeeded to his trade? A king or a
government can commission men to execute its policy or its vengeance;
but is a free agent, who accepts a commission that he believes to be
iniquitous, morally acquitted of his share of culpability? Is his
responsibility no greater than that of the sword, the axe, or the
halter with which he carries out his orders; or does the plea of
military discipline justify him in acting with no more moral restraint
than a slave, or than a horse that has no understanding? The Prussian
officer who at Dijon blew out his brains rather than execute some
iniquitous order[162] showed that he understood the dignity of human
nature as it was understood in the days of the bygone moral grandeur
of Rome. Such a man deserved a monument far more than most to whom
memorial monuments are raised.
Recent events lend an additional interest to the question of
reprisals, and add emphasis to the necessity of placing them, as it
was sought to do at Brussels, on the footing of an International
Agreement. It is sometimes said that dynastic wars belong to the past,
and that kings have no longer the power to make war, as they once did,
for their own pleasure or pastime. There may be truth in this, though
the last great war in Europe but one had its immediate cause in an
inter-dynastic jealousy; but a far more potent agency for war than
ever existed in monarchical power is now wielded by the Press. War in
every country is the direct pecuniary interest of the Daily Press. ‘I
know proprietors of newspapers,’ said Cobden during the Crimean war,
‘who have pocketed 3,000_l._ or 4,000_l._ a year through the war as
directly as if the money had been voted to them in the Parliamentary
estimates.’[163] The temptation, therefore, is great, first to justify
any given war by irrelevant issues or by stories of the enormities
committed by the enemy, or even by positive false statements (as when
the English Press, with the _Times_ at its head, with almost one voice
taught us that the Afghan ruler had insulted our ambassador, and left
us to find out our mistake when a too ready credulity had cost us a
war of some 20,000,000_l._); 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.