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One may well wonder that such a tissue of irrelevant arguments could have been addressed by any man in a spirit of seriousness to an assembly of his fellows. Imagine such utterances being the last word of Christianity! Surely a son of the Church were more recognisable under the fighting Bishop of Beauvais’ coat of mail than under the disguise of such language as this. Why should it be assumed, one might ask, that the existence of distinct nations, each enjoying the power, and therefore the right to make war upon its neighbours, is incompatible with the existence of an international morality which should render the exercise of the war-right impossible, or very difficult; or that the Church, had she tried, could have contributed nothing to so desirable a result? It is begging the question altogether to contend that a state of things is impossible which has never been attempted, when the very point at issue is whether, had it been attempted, it might not by this time have come to be realised. The right of the mediæval barons and their vassals to wage private war together belonged once as much to the system, or want of system, of the world as the right of nations to attack one another in our own or an earlier period of history; yet so far was the Church, even in those days, from shrinking from contact with so barbarous a custom as something beyond her power or her mission, that she was herself the main social instrument that brought it to an end. The great efforts made by the Church to abolish the custom of private war have already been mentioned: a point which Canon Mozley, perhaps, did wisely to ignore. Yet there is, surely, no sufficient reason why the peace of the world should be an object of less interest to the Church in these days than it was in those; or why her influence should be less as one chief element in the natural progress of society than it was when she fought to release human society from the depraving custom of the right of private war. It is impossible to contend that, had the Church inculcated the duties of the individual to other nations as well as to his own, in the way to which human reason would naturally respond, such a course would have had no effect in solving the problem of enabling separate nationalities to coexist in a state of peace as well as of independence. It is at least the reverse of self-evident that the promotion of feelings of international fraternity, the discouragement of habits of international jealousy, the exercise of acts of international friendship, the teaching of the real identity of international interests, in all of which the pulpit might have lent, or might yet lend, an invaluable aid, would have had, or would still have any detrimental effect on the political system of distinct nationalities, or on the motives and actions of a rational patriotism. It is difficult to believe that the denunciations of a Church whose religious teaching had power to restrain the military fury of an Alaric or a Genseric would have been altogether powerless over the conduct of those German hordes whose military excesses in France, in 1870, have left a lasting blot on their martial triumph and the character of their discipline; or that her efforts on behalf of peace, which more than a thousand years ago effectually reconciled the Angles and Mercians, the Franks and Lombards, would be wasted in helping to remove any standing causes of quarrel that may still exist between France and Germany, England and Russia, Italy and Austria.

There are, indeed, hopeful signs, in spite of Canon Mozley’s apology of despair, that the priesthood of Christendom may yet reawake to a sense of its power and opportunities for removing from the world an evil custom which lies at the root of almost every other, and is the main cause and sustenance of crime and pauperism and disease. It is possible that we have already passed the worst period of indifference in this respect, or that it may some day prove only to have been connected with the animosities of rival sects, ever ready to avail themselves of the chances that war between different nations might severally bring to their several petty interests. With the subsidence of such animosities, it were reasonable to expect the Church to reassert the more genuine principle of her action and attitude – that no evil incident to human society is to be regarded as irremediable till every resource has been exhausted to cope with it, and every outlet of escape from it been proved to be a failure. Then, but not till then, is it becoming in Christian priests to utter the language of helplessness; then, but not till then, should the Church fold her hands in despair.

CHAPTER VIII.
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.’²⁷³

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.²⁷⁴ 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.²⁷⁵ 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.²⁷⁶

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.²⁷⁷ 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.²⁷⁸

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.²⁷⁹

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.²⁸⁰ 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.²⁸¹ 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,²⁸² 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,²⁸³ 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.²⁸⁴ 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 catapult²⁸⁵ 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.²⁸⁶

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 nations²⁸⁷ 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;’²⁸⁸ 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;²⁸⁹ 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.’²⁹⁰

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.²⁹¹

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.²⁹² 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.’