We believe it can be shown, on the contrary, that the direct opposite
is true; that the warfare waged by primitive peoples and in ancient
times was a far more horrible procedure than is that waged by
civilized nations today. It may be taken as axiomatic that the horrors
of battle, like the transports of love, increase as the distance
between the parties concerned diminishes. All savage warfare, and all
civilized warfare as well, until a very recent date, was waged at
close range. In ancient and in medieval times men battled hand to hand
with spear and sword and ax. The vanquished found slight opportunity
to escape and the hand of the conqueror was stayed by no
considerations of twentieth century humanity. The chronicles of the
Hebrews, the Lord’s anointed, and the narratives of Alexander the
Great and Julius Cæsar tell alike the same general tale of slaughter
of the opposing warriors and the slaughter, rapine, or enslavement, as
the case might be, of their dependents. In medieval times, it is true,
under the influence of the institution of knighthood, certain rules
foreshadowing the modern rules of war were developed. But these more
humane rules applied only to the aristocracy, the commoner being
excluded from their operation and benefits.
With the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries came two developments of
much importance for their bearing upon our subject. The one was the
application of gunpowder to the art of war, as the result of which war
was democratized; the business of knighthood soon became as dead as
Cæsar’s ghost, and as firearms improved, the distances at which
opposing armies fought slowly widened. The other was an indirect
result of the Dutch war for independence. Meditating upon the terrible
brutalities to which his people were subjected by it, Hugo Grotius
evolved the treatise on the laws of war and peace which by common
consent has ever since been regarded as the foundation of modern
international law. Grotius sought, in a word, to humanize warfare by
securing the establishment by common agreement of rules calculated to
prohibit its more debasing and awful manifestations. In the three
hundred years ending with August, 1914, much progress was made, both
along the lines laid down by Grotius and in other ways, looking to the
minimizing of the horrors of war. At the same time, ever more
ingenious and powerful death-dealing appliances were being devised for
the waging of such combat as the rules of international law still
rendered permissible.