CURIOSITIES OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE.
_La discipline n’est que l’art d’inspirer aux soldats plus de peur
de leurs officiers que des ennemis._--HELVETIUS.
Increased severity of discipline--Limitation of the right of
matrimony--Compulsory Church parade, and its origin--Atrocious
military punishments--Reasons for the military love of
red--The origin of bear-skin hats--Different qualities of
bravery--Historical fears for the extinction of courage--The
conquests of the cause of peace--Causes of the unpopularity of
military service--The dulness of life in the ranks--The prevalence
of desertion--Articles of war against malingering--Military
artificial ophthalmia--The debasing influence of discipline
illustrated from the old flogging system--The discipline of the
Peninsular army--Attempts to make the service more popular,
by raising the private’s wages, by shortening his term of
service--The old recruiting system of France and Germany--The
conscription imminent in England--The question of military service
for women--The probable results of the conscription--Militarism
answerable for Socialism.
Two widely different conceptions of military discipline are contained
in the words of an English writer of the seventeenth century, and in
those of the French philosopher, Helvetius, in the eighteenth century.
There is a fine ring of the best English spirit in the sentence of
Gittins: ‘A soldier ought to fear nothing but God and dishonour.’
And there is the true French wit and insight in that of Helvetius:
‘Discipline is but the art of inspiring soldiers with more fear for
their own officers than they have for the enemy.’[275]
But the difference involved lies less in the national character of the
writers than in the lapse of time between them, discipline having by
degrees gained so greatly in severity that a soldier had come to be
regarded less as a moral free agent than as a mechanical instrument,
who, if he had any fear left for God and dishonour, felt it in a very
minor degree to that which he cherished for his colonel or commander.
This is the broad fact which explains and justifies the proposition of
Helvetius; though no one, recollecting the evils of the days of looser
discipline, might see cause to regret the change which deprived a
soldier almost entirely of the moral liberty that naturally belonged to
him as a man.
The tendency of discipline to become more and more severe has of course
the effect of rendering military service less popular, and consequently
recruiting more difficult, without, unhappily, any corresponding
diminution in the frequency of wars, which are independent of the
hirelings who fight them. Were it otherwise, something might be said
for the military axiom, that a soldier enjoys none of the common rights
of man. There is therefore no gain from any point of view in denying
to the military class the enjoyment of the rights and privileges of
ordinary humanity.
The extent of this denial and its futility may be shown by reference
to army regulations concerning marriage and religious worship. In the
Prussian army, till 1870, marriages were legally null and void and the
offspring of them illegitimate in the case of officers marrying without
royal consent, or of subordinate officers without the consent of the
commander of their regiments. But after the Franco-German war so great
was the social disorder found to be consequent upon these restrictions,
that a special law had to be made to remove the bar of illegitimacy
from the marriages in question.[276] In the English army the inability
of privates to marry before the completion of seven years’ service, and
the possession of at least one badge, and then only with the consent
of the commanding officer, is a custom so entirely contrary to the
liberty enjoyed in other walks of life, that, whatever its incidental
advantages, it can scarcely fail to act as a deterring motive when the
choice of a career becomes a subject of reflection.
The custom of what is known in the army as Church Parade affords
another instance of the unreasonable curtailments of individual
liberty that are still regarded as essential to discipline. A soldier
is drummed to church just as he is drummed to the drill-ground or the
battle-field. His presence in church is a matter of compulsion, not of
choice or conviction; and the general principle that such attendance is
valueless unless it is voluntary is waived in his case as in that of
very young children, with whom, in this respect, he is placed on a par.
If we inquire for the origin of the practice, we shall probably find it
in certain old Saxon and imperial articles of war, which show that the
prayers of the military were formerly regarded as equally efficacious
with their swords in obtaining victories over their enemies; and
therefore as a very necessary part of their duty.[277] The American
articles of war, since 1806, enact that ‘it is earnestly recommended
to all officers and soldiers to attend divine service,’ thus obviating
in a reasonable way all the evils inevitably connected with a purely
compulsory, and therefore humiliating, church parade.[278]
It may be that these restrictions of a soldier’s liberty are necessary;
but if they are, and if, as Lord Macaulay says, soldiers must, ‘for the
sake of public freedom, in the midst of public freedom, be placed under
a despotic rule,’ ‘must be subject to a sharper penal code and to a
more stringent code of procedure than are administered by the ordinary
tribunals,’ so that acts, innocent in the citizen or only punished
slightly, become crimes, capitally punishable, when committed by them,
then at least we need no longer be astonished that it should be almost
as difficult to entrap a recruit as to catch a criminal.
But over and above the intrinsic disadvantages of military service,
it would almost seem as if the war-presiding genii had of set purpose
essayed to make it as distasteful as possible to mankind. For they have
made discipline not merely a curtailment of liberty and a forfeiture of
rights, but, as it were, an experiment on the extreme limits of human
endurance. There has been no tyranny in the world, political, judicial,
or ecclesiastical, but has had its parent and pattern in some military
system. It has been from its armies more than from its kings that
our world has learnt its lesson of arbitrary tribunals, tortures, and
cruel punishments. The Inquisition itself could scarcely have devised
a more excruciating punishment than the old English military one of
riding the Wooden Horse, when the victim was made to sit astride planks
nailed together in a sharp ridge, so as roughly to resemble a horse,
with his hands tied behind him, and muskets fixed to his legs to drag
them downwards; or again, than the punishment of the Picket, in which
the hand was fastened to a hook in a post above the head, and the
man’s suspended body left to be supported by his bare heel resting on
a wooden stump, of which the end was cut to the sharpness of a sword
point.[279] The punishment of running the gauntlet (from the German
_Gassenlaufen_, street running, because the victim ran through the
street between two lines of soldiers who tormented him on his course)
is said to have been invented by Gustavus Adolphus; and is perhaps,
from the fact of thus bringing the cruelty of many men to bear on a
single comrade, the most cowardly form of torture that has ever yet
found favour among military authorities.[280]
But the penal part of military discipline, with its red-hot irons,
its floggings, and its various forms of death, is too repulsive to do
more than glance at as testimony of the cruelty and despotism that
have never been separated from the calling of arms. The art of the
disciplinarian has ever been to bring such a series of miseries to
bear upon a man’s life that the prospect of death upon the battle-field
should have for him rather charms than terrors; and the tale of the
soldier who, when his regiment was to be decimated, drew a blank
without the fatal D upon it, and immediately offered it to a comrade,
who had not yet drawn, for half-a-crown, shows at how cheap a rate men
may be reduced to value their lives after experience of the realities
of a military career.
Many of the devices are curious by which this indifference to life has
been matured and sustained. In ancient Athens the public temples were
closed to those who refused military service, who deserted their ranks
or lost their bucklers; whilst a law of Charondas of Catana constrained
such offenders to sit for three days in the public forum dressed in the
garments of women. Many a Spartan mother would stab her son who came
back alive from a defeat; and such a man, if he escaped his mother, was
debarred not only from public offices but from marriage; exposed to
the blows of all who chose to strike him; compelled to dress in mean
clothing, and to wear his beard negligently trimmed. And in the same
way a Norse soldier who fled, or lost his shield, or received a wound
in any save the front part of his body, was by law prevented from ever
afterwards appearing in public.[281]
There are, indeed, few military customs but have their origin and
explanation in the artificial promotion of courage in the minds of
the combatants. This is true even to the details and peculiarities
of costume. English children are, perhaps, still taught that French
soldiers wear red trousers in order that the sight of blood may not
frighten them in war-time; and doubtless French children imbibe a
similar theory regarding the red coats of the English. The same reason
was given by Julius Ferretus in the middle of the sixteenth century
for the short red frock then generally worn by the military.[282] The
first mention of red as a special military colour in England is said to
have been the order issued in 1526 for the coats of all yeomen of the
household to be of red cloth.[283] But the colour goes, at least, as
far back as Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, who chose it, according to
Xenophon, because red is most easily taken by cloth and most lasting;
according to Plutarch, that its brightness might help to raise the
spirits of its wearers; or, according to Ælian and Valerius Maximus,
in order to conceal the sight of blood, that raw soldiers might not be
dispirited and the enemy proportionately encouraged.
The bear-skin hats, which still make some English regiments so
ridiculous and unsightly, were originally no doubt intended to inspire
terror. Evelyn, writing of the year 1678, says: ‘Now were brought into
service a new sort of soldiers called Grenadiers, who were dexterous
in flinging hand-grenades, every man having a handful. They had furred
caps with coped crowns like Janizaries, which made them look very
fierce; and some had long hoods hanging down behind as we picture
fools.’ We may fairly identify the motive of such headgear with the
result; and the more so since the looking fierce with the borrowed
skins of bears was a well-known artifice of the ancient Romans. Thus
Vegetius speaks of helmets as covered with bear-skins in order to
terrify the enemy,[284] and Virgil has a significant description of a
warrior as
Horridus in jaculis et pelle Libystidis ursæ.
We may trace the same motive again in the figures of fierce birds or
beasts depicted on flags and shields and helmets, whence they have
descended with less harmful purpose to crests and armorial bearings.
Thus the Cimbri, whom Marius defeated, wore on their plume-covered
helmets the head of some fierce animal with its mouth open, vainly
hoping thereby to intimidate the Romans. The latter, before it became
customary to display the images of their emperors on their standards,
reared aloft the menacing representations of dragons, tigers, wolves,
and such like; and the figure of a dragon in use among the Saxons
at the time of the Conquest, and after that event retained by the
early Norman princes among the ensigns of war,[285] may reasonably
be attributed to the same motive. The legend of St. George killing
the Dragon, if it is not a survival of Theseus and the Minotaur, very
likely originated as a myth, intended to be explanatory of the custom.
Lastly, under this head should be mentioned Villani’s account of the
English armour worn in the thirteenth century, where he describes how
the pages studied to keep it clean and bright, so that when their
masters came to action their armour shone like looking glass and gave
them a more terrifying appearance.[286] Was the result here again the
motive, and must we look for the primary cause of the great solicitude
still paid to the brightness of accoutrements to the hope thereby to
add a pang the more to the terror desirable to instil into an enemy?
Such were some of the artificial supports supplied to bravery in former
times. But there is all the difference in the world between the bravery
appealed to by our ancestors and that required since the revolution
effected in warfare by the invention of gunpowder. Before that epoch,
the use of catapults, bows, or other missiles did not deduct from the
paramount importance of personal valour. The brave soldier of olden
times displayed the bravery of a man who defied a force similar or
equal to his own, and against which the use of his own right hand and
intellect might help him to prevail; but his modern descendant pits his
bravery mainly against hazard, and owes it to chance alone if he escape
alive from a battle. However higher in kind may be the bravery required
to face a shower of shrapnel than to contend against swords and spears,
it is assuredly a bravery that involves rather a blind trust in luck
than a rational trust in personal fortitude.
So thoroughly indeed was this change foreseen and appreciated that at
every successive advance in the methods of slaughter curious fears
for the total extinction of military courage have haunted minds too
readily apprehensive, and found sometimes remarkable expression.
When the catapult[287] was first brought from Sicily to Greece, King
Archidamus saw in it the grave of true valour; and the sentiment
against firearms, which led Bayard to exclaim, ‘C’est une honte qu’un
homme de cœur soit exposé à périr par une miserable friquenelle,’ was
one that was traceable even down to the last century in the history of
Europe. For Charles XII. of Sweden is declared by Berenhorst to have
felt keenly the infamy of such a mode of fighting; and Marshal Saxe
held musketry fire in such contempt that he even went so far as to
advocate the reintroduction of the lance, and a return to the close
combats customary in earlier times.[288]
But our military codes contain no reflection of the different aspects
under which personal bravery enters into modern, as compared with
ancient, warfare; and this omission has tended to throw governments
back upon pure force and compulsion, as the only possible way of
recruiting their regiments. The old Roman military punishments, such as
cruelly scourging a man before putting him to death, afford certainly
no models of a lenient discipline; but when we read of companies who
lost their colours being for punishment only reduced to feed on barley
instead of wheat, and reflect that death by shooting would be the
penalty under the discipline of most modern nations[289] for an action
bearing any complexion of cowardice, it is impossible to admit that
a rational adjustment of punishments to offences is at all better
observed in the war articles of the moderns than in the military codes
of pagan antiquity.
This, at least, is clear, from the history of military discipline,
that only by the most repressive laws, and by a tyranny subversive
of the commonest rights of men, is it possible to retain men in the
fighting service of a country, after forcing or cajoling them into
it. And this consideration fully meets the theory of an inherent love
of fighting dominating human nature, such as that contended for in a
letter from Lord Palmerston to Cobden, wherein he argues that man is
by nature a fighting and quarrelling animal. The proposition is true
undoubtedly of some savage races, and of the idle knights of the days
of chivalry, but, not even in those days, of the lower classes, who
incurred the real dangers of war, and still less of the unfortunate
privates or conscripts of modern armies. Fighting is only possible
between civilised countries, because discipline first fits men for war
and for nothing else, and then war again necessitates discipline. Nor
is anything gained by ignoring the conquests that have already been
won over the savage propensity to war. Single States no longer suffer
private wars within their boundaries, like those customary between
the feudal barons; we decide most of our quarrels in law courts, not
upon battle-fields, and wisely prefer arguments to arms. A population
as large as that of Ireland and about double as large as that of all
our colonies in Australia put together lives in London alone, not only
without weapons of defence in their hands, but with so little taste
for blood-encounters that you may walk for whole days through its
length and breadth without so much as seeing a single street-fight.
If then this miracle of social order has been achieved, why not the
wider one of that harmony between nations which requires but a little
common-sense and determination on the part of those most concerned in
order to become an accomplished reality?
The limitations of personal liberty already alluded to would of
themselves suffice in a country of free institutions to render the
military profession distasteful and unpopular. The actual perils
of war, at no time greater than those of mines, railways, or
merchant-shipping, would never alone deter men from service; so that
we must look for other causes to explain the difficulty of recruiting
and the frequency of desertion, which are the perplexity of military
systems still based, as our own is, on the principle of voluntary not
compulsory enlistment.
What then makes a military life so little an object of desire in
countries where it can be avoided is more than its dangers, more even
than its loss of liberty, its irredeemable and appalling dulness. The
shades in point of cheerfulness must be few and fine which distinguish
a barrack from a convict prison. In none of the employments of civil
life is there anything to compare with the unspeakable monotony of
parades, recurring three or four times every day, varied perhaps in
wet weather by the military catechism, and with the intervals of time
spent in occupations of neither interest nor dignity. The length of
time devoted to the mere cleaning and polishing of accoutrements is
such, that the task has actually come to have the name ‘soldiering’;
and the work which comes next in importance to this soldiering is the
humble one of peeling potatoes for dinner. Even military greatcoats
require on a moderate estimate half a hour or more every day to be
properly folded, the penalty of an additional hour’s drill being the
probable result of any carelessness in this highly important military
function. But for the attention thus given to military dress the author
of the ‘Soldier’s Pocket Book’ supplies us with a reason: ‘The better
you dress a soldier, the more highly he will be thought of by women and
consequently by himself.’
Still less calculated to lend attractiveness to the life of the ranks
are the daily fatigue works, or extra duties which fall in turn on the
men of every company, such as coal carrying, passage cleaning, gutter
clearing, and other like menial works of necessity.
But it is the long hours of sentry duty, popularly called ‘Sentry-go,’
which constitute the soldier’s greatest bane. Guard duty in England,
recurring at short periods, lasts a whole day and night, every four
hours of the twenty-four being spent in full accoutrements in the
guard-room, and every intervening two hours on active sentry, thus
making in all--sixteen hours in the guard-room, and eight on the sentry
post. The voluntary sufferings of the saints, the tortures devised by
the religious orders of olden days, or the self-inflicted hardships of
sport, pale before the two hours’ sentry-go on a winter’s night. This
it is that kills our soldiers more fatally than an enemy’s cannon, and
is borne with more admirable patience than even the hardships of a
siege. ‘After about thirty-one or thirty-two years of age,’ says Sir
F. Roberts, ‘the private soldier usually ages rapidly, and becomes a
veteran both in looks and habits;’[290] and this distinguished military
commander points to excessive sentry duty as the cause.
But, possible as it thus is, by rigour of discipline, to produce in a
soldier total indifference to death, by depriving him of everything
that makes life desirable, it is impossible to produce indifference to
tedium; and a policy is evidently self-destructive which, by aiming
exclusively at producing a mechanical character, renders military
service itself so unpopular that only the young, the inexperienced,
or the ill-advised will join the colours at all; that 10 per cent. of
those who do join them will desert; and that the rest will regard it as
the gala day of their lives when they become legally entitled to their
discharge from the ranks.
In England about 10 per cent. of the recruits desert every year, as
compared with 50 per cent. from the small army of the United States.
The reason for so great a difference is probably not so much that the
American discipline is more severe or dull than the English, as that in
the newer country, where subsistence is easier, the counter-attractions
of peaceful trades offer more plentiful inducements to desertion.
Desertion from the English ranks has naturally diminished since the
introduction of the short-service system has set a visible term to
the hardships of a military life. Adherence to the colours for seven
or eight years, or even for twelve, which is now the longest service
possible at the time of enlistment, and adherence to them for life,
clearly place a very different complexion on the desirability of an
illegal escape from them. So that considering the reductions that
have been made in the term of service, and the increase of pay made
in 1867, and again in 1873, nothing more strongly demonstrates the
national aversion of the English people to arms than the exceeding
difficulty with which the ranks are recruited, and the high average
of the percentage of desertions. If of recent years recruiting has
been better, the explanation is simply that trade has been worse;
statistics of recruiting being the best possible barometer of the state
of the nation, since the scarcity or abundance of recruits varies
concomitantly with the brisk or slack demand for labour in other
employments.
In few things has the world grown more tolerant than in its opinion and
treatment of Desertion. Death was once its certain penalty, and death
with every aggravation that brutal cruelty could add. Two of Rome’s
most famous generals were Scipio Æmilianus and Paulus Æmilius; yet the
former consigned deserters to fight wild beasts at the public games,
and the latter had them trodden to death by elephants.
A form of desertion, constituting one of the most curious but least
noticed chapters in the history of military discipline, is that
of Malingering, or the feigning of sickness, and self-mutilation,
disabling from service. The practice goes far back into history.
Cicero tells of a man who was sold for a slave for having cut off a
finger, in order to escape from a campaign in Sicily. Vegetius, the
great authority on Roman discipline, speaks of soldiers who simulated
sickness being punished as traitors;[291] and an old English writer on
the subject says of the Romans: ‘Whosoever mutilated their own or their
children’s bodies so as thereby designedly to render them unfit to
carry arms (a practice common enough in those elder times when all were
pressed to the wars), were adjudicated to perpetual exile.’[292]
The writer here referred to lived long before the days of the
conscription, with which he fancied self-mutilation to be connected.
And it certainly seems that whereas all the military codes of modern
nations contain articles dealing with that offence, and decreeing
penalties against it, there was less of it in the days before
compulsory service. There is, for instance, no mention of it in the
German articles of war of the seventeenth century, though the other
military crimes were precisely those that are common enough still.[293]
But even in England, where soldiers are not yet military slaves, it
has been found necessary to deal, by specific clauses in the army
regulations, with a set of facts of which there is no notice in the war
articles of the seventeenth or eighteenth century.[294] The inference
therefore is, that the conditions of military service have become
universally more disagreeable. The clauses in the actual war articles
deserve to be quoted, that it may appear, by the provisions against it,
to what lengths the arts of self-mutilation are carried by despairing
men. The 81st Article of War provides punishment against any soldier
in Her Majesty’s army ‘who shall malinger, feign or produce disease or
infirmity, or shall wilfully do any act or wilfully disobey any orders
whether in hospital or otherwise, thereby producing or aggravating
disease or infirmity or delaying his cure, ... or who shall maim or
injure himself or any other soldier, whether at the instance of such
other soldier or not, or cause himself to be maimed or injured by
any other person with intent thereby to render himself or such other
soldier unfit for service, ... or who shall tamper with his eyes with
intent thereby to render himself unfit for service.’
That it should be necessary thus to provide against self-inflicted
injuries is surely commentary enough on the condition of life in the
ranks. The allusion to tampering with the eyes may be illustrated from
a passage in the ‘Life of Sir C. Napier,’ wherein we are told how in
the year 1808 a private of the 28th Regiment taught his fellow-soldiers
to produce artificial ophthalmia by holding their eyelids open, whilst
a comrade in arms would scrape some lime from the barrack ceiling into
their eyes.[295] For a profession of which such things are common
incidents, surely the wonder is, not that it should be difficult, but
that it should be possible at all, to make recruits. In the days of
Mehemet Ali in Egypt, so numerous were the cases in which the natives
voluntarily blinded themselves, and even their children, of one eye in
order to escape the conscription, that Mehemet Ali is said to have
found himself under the necessity of raising a one-eyed regiment.
Others for the same purpose would chop off the trigger finger of the
right hand, or disable themselves from biting cartridges by knocking
out some of their upper teeth. Scarcely a peasant in the fields but
bore the trace of some such voluntarily inflicted disfigurement. But
with such facts it seems idle to talk of any inherent love for fighting
dominating the vast majority of mankind.
The severity of military discipline has even a worse effect than those
yet alluded to in its tendency to demoralise those who are long subject
to it, by inducing mental habits of servility and baseness. After
Alexander the Great had killed Clitus in a fit of drunken rage, the
Macedonian soldiery voted that Clitus had been justly slain, and prayed
that he might not enjoy the rites of sepulture.[296] Military servility
could scarcely go further than that, but such baseness is only possible
under a state of discipline which, to make a soldier, unmakes a man,
by depriving him of all that distinguishes his species. Under no other
than military training, and in no other than the military class, would
the atrocities have been possible which used to be perpetrated in the
barrack riding-school in the old flogging days. Officers and privates
needed the debasing influence of discipline to enable them to look on
as patient spectators at the sufferings of a helpless comrade tortured
by the cat-o’-nine tails. Sir C. Napier said that as a subaltern
he ‘frequently saw 600, 700, 800, 900, and 1,000 lashes sentenced
by regimental courts-martial and generally every lash inflicted;’
a feeling of horror would run through the ranks at the first blows
and some recruits would faint, but that was all.[297] Had they been
men and not soldiers, they would not have stood such iniquities.
A typical instance of this martial justice or law (to employ the
conventional profanation of those words) was that of a sergeant who in
1792 was sentenced to 1,000 lashes for having enlisted two drummers
for the East India Company whom he knew to belong already to the Foot
Guards; but the classical description of an English flogging will
always be Somerville’s account of its infliction upon himself in his
‘Autobiography of a Working Man.’[298] There you may read how the
regiment was drawn up four-deep inside the riding-school; how the
officers (men of gentle birth and breeding) stood within the lines of
the men; how the basin of water and towels were ready prepared in case
the victim should faint; how the hands and feet of the latter were
fastened to a ladder by a rope; and how the regimental sergeant-major
stood with book and pencil coolly counting each stroke as it was
delivered with slow and deliberate torture till the full complement of
a hundred lashes had been inflicted. The mere reading of it even now
is enough to make the blood boil, but that men, brave and freeborn,
should have stood by in their hundreds and seen the actual reality
without stirring, proves how utterly all human feeling is eradicable by
discipline, and how sure is the training it supplies in disregard for
the common claims of humanity.
Happily, floggings in the English army now count among the curiosities
of military discipline, like the wooden horse or the thumb-screw;
but the striking thing is that the discipline, in the sense of the
good conduct of the army in the field, was never worse than in the
days when 1,000 lashes were common sentences. It was precisely when
courts-martial had the legal power to exercise such tyranny that
the Duke of Wellington complained to Lord Castlereagh that the law
was not strong enough to maintain discipline in an army upon actual
service.[299] Speaking of the army in the Peninsula he says: ‘It is
impossible to describe to you the irregularities and outrages committed
by the troops; ... there is not an outrage of any description which
has not been committed on a people who have received us as friends
by soldiers who never yet for one moment suffered the slightest want
or the smallest privation.... We are an excellent army on parade, an
excellent one to fight, but we are worse than an enemy in a country.’
And again a few months later: ‘I really believe that more plunder and
outrage have been committed by this army than by any other that was
ever in the field.’ In the general order of May 19, 1809, are these
words: ‘The officers of companies must attend to the men in their
quarters as well as on the march, or the army will soon be no better
than a banditti.’[300]
Whence it is fair to infer that severity of discipline has no necessary
connection with the good behaviour or easy control of troops in
the field, such discipline under the Iron Duke himself having been
conspicuous for so lamentable a failure. The real fact would seem
to be, that troops are difficult to manage just in proportion to the
rigour, the monotony, and the dulness of the discipline imposed upon
them in time of peace; the rebound corresponding to the compression,
by a moral law that seems to follow the physical one. This fact is
nowhere better noticed than in Lord Wolseley’s narrative of the China
war of 1860, where he says, in allusion to the general love of pillage
and destruction that characterises soldiers and was so conspicuously
displayed at the shameful burning of the beautiful palaces in and
round Pekin: ‘Soldiers are nothing more than grown-up schoolboys.
The wild moments of enjoyment passed in the pillage of a place live
long in a soldier’s memory.... Such a time forms so marked a contrast
with the ordinary routine of existence passed under the tight hand of
discipline that it becomes a remarkable event in life and is remembered
accordingly.’[301]
The experience of the Peninsular war proves how slender is the
link between a well-drilled and a well-disciplined army. The best
disciplined army is the one which conducts itself with least excess
in the field and is least demoralised by victory. It is the hour of
victory that is the great test of the value of military regulations;
and so well aware of this was the best disciplined State of antiquity,
that the soldiers of Sparta desisted from pursuit as soon as victory
was assured to them, partly because it was deemed ungenerous to destroy
those who could make no further resistance (a sentiment absolutely
wanting from the boasted chivalry of Christian warfare), and partly
that the enemy might be tempted to prefer flight to resistance. It is a
reproach to modern generalship that it has been powerless to restrain
such excesses as those which have made the successful storming of
cities rather a disgrace than an honour to those who have won them.
The only way to check them is to make the officers responsible for
what occurs, as might be done, for instance, by punishing a general
capitally for storming a city with forces so badly disciplined as
to nullify the advantages of success. An English military writer,
speaking of the storming of Ismail and Praga by the Russians under
Suwarrow, says truly that ‘posterity will hold the fame and honour of
the commander responsible for the life of every human being sacrificed
by disciplined armies beyond the fair verge of battle;’ but it is idle
to speak as if only Russian armies were guilty of such excesses, or
to say that nothing but the prospect of them could tempt the Russian
soldier to mount the breach or the scaling-ladder. The Russian soldier
in history yields not one whit to the English or French in bravery, nor
is there a grain of difference between the Russian storming of Ismail
and Praga and the English storming of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, or San
Sebastian, that tarnished the lustre of the British arms in the famous
Peninsular war.
And should we be tempted to think that successes like these associated
with the names of these places may be so important in war as to
outweigh all other considerations, we must also not forget that the
permanent military character of nations, for humanity or the reverse,
counts for more in the long run of a people’s history than any
advantage that can possibly be gained in a single campaign.
Enough has, perhaps, been said of the unpopularity of military service,
and of the obvious causes thereof, to make it credible that, had the
system of conscription never been resorted to in Europe, and the
principle of voluntary enlistment remained intact and universal, the
difficulty of procuring the human fighting material in sufficient
quantities would in course of time have rendered warfare impossible. As
other industries than mere fighting have won their way in the world,
the difficulty of hiring recruits to sell their lives to their country
has kept even pace with the facility of obtaining livelihoods in more
regular and more lucrative as well as less miserable avocations. In the
fourteenth century soldiers were very highly paid compared with other
classes, and the humblest private received a daily wage equivalent to
that of a skilled mechanic;[302] but the historical process has so
far reversed matters that now the pay of the humblest mechanic would
compare favourably with that of all the fighting grades lower than
the commissioned and warrant ranks. Consequently, every attempt to
make the service popular has as yet been futile, no amelioration of
it enabling it to compete with pacific occupations. The private’s pay
was raised from sixpence to a shilling during the wars of the French
Revolution;[303] and before that it was found necessary, about the
time of the war with the American colonies, to bribe men to enlist
by the system (since abolished) of giving bounties at the time of
enlistment. Previous to the introduction of the bounty system, a guinea
to provide the recruit with necessaries and a crown wherewith to drink
the king’s health was all that was given upon enlistment, the service
itself (with the chances of loot and the allied pleasures) having been
bounty enough.[304] Even the system of bounties proved attractive only
to boys; for as the English statesman said, whose name is honourably
associated with the first change in our system from enlistment for
life to enlistment for a limited period, ‘men grown up with all the
grossness and ignorance and consequent want of consideration incident
to the lower classes’ were too wary to accept the offers of the
recruiting department.[305]
The shortening of the term of service in 1806 and subsequently
the increase of pay, the mitigation of punishments, must all be
understood as attempts to render the military life more attractive
and more capable of competing with other trades; but that they have
all signally failed is proved by the chronic and ever-increasing
difficulty of decoying recruits. The little pamphlet, published by
authority and distributed gratis at every post-office in the kingdom,
showing forth ‘the Advantages of the Army’ in their rosiest colours,
cannot counteract the influence of the oral evidence of men, who,
after a short period of service, are dispersed to all corners of the
country, with their tales of military misery to tell, confirming and
propagating that popular theory of a soldier’s life which sees in it a
sort of earthly purgatory for faults of character acquired in youth, a
calling only to be adopted by those whose antecedents render industry
distasteful to them, and unfit them for more useful pursuits.
The same difficulty of recruiting was felt in France and Germany in the
last century, when voluntary enlistment was still the rule. In that
curious old military book, Fleming’s ‘Volkommene Teutsche Soldat,’ is a
picture of the recruiting officer, followed by trumpeters and drummers,
parading the streets, and shaking a hat full of silver coins near a
table spread with the additional temptations of wine and beer.[306] But
it soon became necessary to supplement this system by coercive methods;
and when the habitual neglect of the wounded and the great number of
needless wars made it difficult or impossible to fill up the ranks with
fresh recruits, the German authorities resorted to a regular system of
kidnapping, taking men as they could get them from their ploughs, their
churches, or even from their very beds.
In France, too, Louis XIV. had to resort to force for filling his ranks
in the war of the Spanish Succession; although the system of recruiting
remained nominally voluntary till very much later. The total cost of
a French recruit amounted to ninety-two livres; but the length of his
service, though it was changed from time to time from periods varying
from three to eight years, never exceeded the latter limit, nor came to
be for life as it did practically in England.
The experience of other countries proves, therefore, that England
will sooner or later adopt the principle of conscription or cease to
waste blood and money in Continental quarrels. The conscription will
be for her the only possible way of obtaining an army at all, or one
at all commensurate with those of her possible European rivals. We
should not forget that in 1878, when we were on the verge of a war with
Russia (and we live always on the verge of a war with Russia), our
best military experts met and agreed that only by means of compulsory
service could we hope to cope with our enemy with any chance of
success. And the conscription, whether under a free government or
not, means a tyranny compared to which the tyrannies of the Tudors
or Stuarts were as a yoke of silk to a yoke of iron. It would matter
little that it should lead to or involve a political despotism, for
the greater despotism would ever be the military one, crushing out
all individuality, moral liberty, and independence, and consigning to
the soul-destroying routine of petty military details all the talent,
taste, knowledge, and wealth of our country, which have hitherto given
it a distinctive character in history, and a foremost place among the
nations of the earth.
In the year 1702 a woman served as a captain in the French army with
such signal bravery that she was rewarded with the Order of St. Louis.
Nor was this the only result; for the episode roused a serious debate
in the world, whether, or not, military service might be expected of,
or exacted from, the female sex generally.[307] Why, then, should the
conscription be confined to one half only of a population, in the face
of so many historical instances of women who have shown pre-eminent,
or at least average, military capacity? And if military service is so
ennobling and excellent a thing, as it is said to be, for the male
population of a country, why not also for the female? Or as we may be
sure that it would be to the last degree debasing for the latter half
of the community, may we not suspect that the reasoning is altogether
sophistical which claims other effects as the consequence of its
operation on the stronger sex?
What those effects are likely to be on the further development of
European civilisation, we are as yet scarcely in a position to judge.
We are still living only on the threshold of the change, and can
hardly estimate the ultimate effect on human life of the transference
to the whole male population of a country of the habits and vices
previously confined to only a section of it. But this at least is
certain, that at present every prediction which ushered in the change
is being falsified from year to year. This universal service which
we call the conscription was, we were told, to usher in a sort of
millennium; it was to have the effect of humanising warfare; of
raising the moral tone of armies; and of securing peace, by making
the prospect of its alternative too appalling to mankind. Not only
has it done none of these things, but there are even indications of
consequences the very reverse. The amenities that cast occasional
gleams over the professional hostilities of the eighteenth century, as
when, for instance, Crillon besieging Gibraltar sent a cart-load of
carrots to the English governor, whose men were dying of scurvy, have
passed altogether out of the pale of possibility, and given place to
a hatred between the combatant forces that is tempered by no courtesy
nor restrained by the shadow of humanity. Whole nations, instead of
a particular class, have been familiarised with deeds of robbery and
bloodshed, and parted with a large part of their leisure once available
for progress in industry. War itself is at any given moment infinitely
more probable than it used to be, from the constant expectation of it
which comes of constant preparation; nothing having been proved falser
by history than the popular paradox which has descended to us from
Vegetius that the preparation for war is the high road to peace.[308]
When, one may ask, has the world not been prepared for war, and how
then has it had so much of it? And as to the higher moral tone likely
to spring from universal militarism, of what kind may we expect it to
be, when we read in a work by the greatest living English general,
destined, Carlyle hoped, one day to make short work of Parliament, such
an exposition as the following of the relation between the moral duties
of a soldier and those of a civilian: ‘He (the soldier) must be taught
to believe that his duties are the noblest which fall to a man’s lot.
He must be taught to despise all those of civil life. Soldiers, like
missionaries, must be fanatics.’[309]
Erasmus once observed in a letter to a friend how little it mattered
to most men to what nationality they belonged, seeing that it was only
a question of paying taxes to Thomas instead of to John, or to John
instead of to Thomas; but it becomes a matter of even less importance
when it is only a question of being trained for murder and bloodshed in
the drill-yards of this or that government. What is it to a conscript
whether it is for France or Germany that he is forced to undergo drill
and discipline, when the insipidity of the drill and the tyranny of the
discipline is the same in either case? If the old definition of a man
as a reasoning animal is to be exchanged for that of a fighting animal,
and the claims of a country upon a man are to be solely or mainly in
respect of his fighting utility, it is evident that the relation is
altered between the individual and his country, and that there is no
longer any tie of affection between them, nor anything to make one
nationality different from or preferable to another. This is clearly
the tendency of the conscription; and it is already remarkable how it
has lessened those earlier and narrower views of patriotism which were
the pretext formerly for so many trials of strength between nations.
What, then, are the probable ultimate effects of this innovation on the
development and maintenance of the peace in Europe?
The conscription, by reducing the idea of a country to that merely of
a military despotism, has naturally caused the differences between
nations to sink into a secondary place, and to be superseded by those
differences of class, opinions, and interests which are altogether
independent of nationality, and regardless of the barriers of language
or geography. Thus the artisan of one country has learnt to regard
his fellow-worker of another country as in a much truer sense his
countryman than the priest or noble who, because he lives in the same
geographical area as himself, pays his taxes to the same central
government; and the different political schools in the several
countries of Europe have far more in common with one another than with
the opposite party of their own nationality. So that the first effect
of that great military engine, the conscription, has been to unloosen
the bonds of the idea of nationality which has so long usurped the
title to patriotism; to free us from that notion of our duty towards
our neighbour which bids us hate him because he is our neighbour; and
to diminish to that extent the chances of war by the undermining of the
prejudice which has ever been its mainstay.
But the conscription in laying one spectre has raised another; for over
against Nationalism, the jealousy of nations, it has reared Socialism,
the jealousy of classes. It has done so, not only by weakening the old
national idea which kept the rivalry of classes in abeyance, but by
the pauperism, misery, and discontent which are necessarily involved
in the addition it causes to military expenditure. The increase caused
by it is so enormous as to be almost incredible. In France the annual
military expenditure is now about twenty-five million pounds, whereas
in 1869, before the new law of universal liability to service, the
total annual cost of the army was little over fifteen millions, or the
average annual cost of the present army of Great Britain. ‘Nothing,’
said Froissart, ‘drains a treasury like men-at-arms;’ and it is
probably below the truth to say that a country is the poorer by a
pound for every shilling it expends upon its army. Thus by the nature
of things is Socialism seen to flow from the conscription; and we have
only to look at the recent history of Europe to see how the former has
grown and spread in exact ratio to the extension of the latter. That it
does not yet prevail so widely in England as in France, or Germany, or
Russia is because as yet we have not that compulsory military service
for which our military advisers are beginning to clamour.
The growth of Socialism in its turn is not without an effect that
may prove highly beneficial as a solvent of the militarism which is
the uncompensated evil of modern times. For it tends to compel the
governments of our different nationalities to draw closer together,
and, adopting some of the cosmopolitanism of their common foe, to enter
into league and union against those enemies to actual institutions for
whom militarism itself is primarily responsible, owing to the example
so long set by it in methods of lawlessness, to the sanction so long
given by it to crime. With Socialistic theories permeating every
country, but more especially those that groan under the conscription,
international jealousies are smothered and kept down, and must, if the
cause continues, ultimately die out. Hence the curious result, but
a result fraught with hopefulness for the future, that the peace of
the world should owe itself now, in an indirect but clearly traceable
manner, to the military system which of all others that was ever
invented is the best calculated to prevent and endanger it. But since
this is merely to say that the danger of foreign war is lessened by
the imminent fear of civil war, little is gained by the exchange of
one peril for another. Socialism can only be averted by removing the
cause which gives birth to it--namely, that unproductive expenditure on
military forces which intensifies and perpetuates pauperism. So that
the problem of the times for us in England is not how we may obtain
a more liberal military expenditure, still less how we may compass
compulsory service; but rather how most speedily we can disband our
army--an ever-growing danger to our peace and liberty--and how we can
advance elsewhere the cause of universal disarmament.