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CHAPTER IX.
THE LIMITS OF MILITARY DUTY

‘I confess when I went into arms at the beginning of this war, I never troubled myself to examine sides; I was glad to hear the drums beat for soldiers, as if I had been a mere Swiss, that had not cared which side went up or down, so I had my pay.’– Memoirs of a Cavalier.

The old feeling of the moral stain of bloodshed – Military purificatory customs – Modern change of feeling about warfare – Descartes on the profession of arms – The old-world sentiment in favour of piracy – The central question of military ethics – May a soldier be indifferent to the cause of war? – The right to serve made conditional on a good cause, by St. Augustine, Bullinger, Grotius, and Sir James Turner – Old Greek feeling about mercenary service – Origin of our mercenary as opposed to gratuitous service – Armies raised by military contractors – The value of the distinction between foreign and native mercenaries – Original limitation of military duty to the actual defence of the realm – Extension of the notion of allegiance – The connection of the military oath with the first Mutiny Act – Recognised limits to the claims on a soldier’s obedience – The falsity of the common doctrine of duty illustrated by the devastation of the Palatinate by the French and by the bombardment of Copenhagen by the English – The example of Admiral Keppel – Justice between nations – Its observation in ancient India and Rome – St. Augustine and Bayard on justice in war – Grotius on good grounds of war – The military claim to exemption from moral responsibility – The soldier’s first duty to his conscience – The admission of this principle involves the end of war.

It must needs be that new questions arise, or old perplexities in a fresh form; and of these one that has risen again in our time is this: Does any moral stain attach to bloodshed committed upon the battle-field? Or is the difference between military and ordinary homicide a real one, and does the plea of duty sanction any act, however atrocious in the abstract, provided it be committed under the uniform of the State?

The general opinion is, of course, that no soldier in his military capacity can be guilty of crime; but opinion has not always been so fixed, and it is worth noticing that in the forms of civilisation that preceded our own, and in some existing modern races of lower type than our own, traces clearly appear of a sense of wrong attaching to any form of bloodshed whatever, whether of fair battle or of base treachery, calling alike for the purifying influences of expiation and cleansing. In South Africa, for instance, the Basuto returning from war proceeds with all his arms to the nearest stream, to purify not only his own person but his javelins and his battle-axe. The Zulu, too, practises ablutions on the same occasion; and the Bechuana warrior wears a rude kind of necklace, to remind him of the expiation due from him to the slain, and to disperse the dreams that might otherwise trouble him, and perhaps even drive him to die of remorse.³⁰⁸

The same feelings may be detected in the old world. The Macedonians had a peculiar form of sacrificatory purification, which consisted in cutting a dog in half and leading the whole army, arrayed in full armour, between the two parts.³⁰⁹ As the Bœotians had the same custom, it was probably for the same reason. At Rome, for the same purpose, a sheep, and a bull, and a pig or boar, were every year led three times round the army and then sacrificed to Mars. In Jewish history the prohibition to King David to build the temple was expressly connected with the blood he had shed in battle. In old Greek mythology Theseus held himself unfit, without expiation, to be admitted to the mysteries of Ceres, though the blood that stained his hands was only that of thieves and robbers. And in the same spirit Hector refused to make a libation to the gods before he had purified his hands after battle. ‘With unwashen hands,’ he said, ‘to pour out sparkling wine to Zeus I dare not, nor is it ever the custom for one soiled with the blood and dust of battle to offer prayers to the god whose seat is in the clouds.’³¹⁰

For the cause of this feeling we may perhaps choose between an almost instinctive reluctance to take human life, and some such superstition as explains the necessity for purification among the Basutos, – the idea, namely, of escaping the revenge of the slain by the medium of water.³¹¹ The latter explanation would be in keeping with the not uncommon notion in savage life of the inability of a spirit to cross running water, and would help to account for the necessity there was for a Hebrew to flee, or for a Greek to make some expiation, even though only guilty of an act of unintentional homicide. And in this way it is possible that the sanctity of human life, which is one of the chief marks, and should be one of the chief objects, of civilisation, originated in the very same fear of a post-mortem vengeance, which leads some savage tribes to entreat pardon of the bear or elephant they have slain after a successful chase.

But, account as we like for the origin of the feeling, its undoubted existence is the point of interest, for it is easy to see that under slightly more favourable conditions of history it might have ripened into a state of thought which would have held the soldier and the manslayer in equal abhorrence. Christianity in its primitive form certainly aimed at and very nearly effected the transition. In the Greek Church a Christian soldier was debarred from the Eucharist for three years if he had slain an enemy in battle; and the Christian Church of the first three centuries would have echoed the sentiment expressed by St. Cyprian in his letter to Donatus: ‘Homicide when committed by an individual is a crime, but a virtue when committed in a public war; yet in the latter case it derives its impunity, not from its abstract harmlessness, but solely from the scale of its enormity.’

The education of centuries has long since effaced the earlier scruple; but there are tens of thousands of Englishmen to whom the military profession is the last they would voluntarily adopt, and it would be rash to predict the impossibility of the revival of the older feeling, or the dimensions it may ultimately assume. The greatest poet of our time, who more than any other living man has helped to lead European opinion into new channels, may, perhaps, in the following lines have anticipated the verdict of the coming time, and divined an undercurrent of thought that is beginning to flow even now amongst us with no inconsiderable force of feeling: —

 
La phrase, cette altière et vile courtisane,
Dore le meurtre en grand, fourbit la pertuisane,
Protège les soudards contre le sens commun,
Persuade les niais que tous sont faits pour un,
Prouve que la tuerie est glorieuse et bonne,
Déroute la logique et l’évidence, et donne
Un sauf-conduit au crime à travers la raison.³¹²
 

The destruction of the romance of war by the greater publicity given to its details through the medium of the press clearly tends to strengthen this feeling, by tempering popular admiration for military success with a cooling admixture of horror and disgust. Take, for instance, the following description of the storming of the Egyptian trenches at Tel-el-Kebir, by an eye-witness of it: – ‘In the redoubts into which our men were swarming the Egyptians, throwing away their arms, were found cowering, terror-stricken, in the corners of the works, to hide themselves from our men. Although they had made such a contemptible exhibition, from a soldierly point of view, it was impossible to help pitying the poor wretches as they huddled together; it seemed so much like rats in a pit when the terrier has set to work.’ And some 2,500 of them were afterwards buried on the spot, most of them killed by bayonet wounds in the back.

This is an instance of the tuerie that Victor Hugo speaks of, which we all call glorious when we meet in the streets, reserving, some of us, another opinion for the secret chamber. Still, when it comes to comparing the work of a victory to that of a terrier in a rat-pit, it must be admitted that the realism of war threatens to become more repellent than its romance was once attractive, and to deter men more and more from the choice of a profession of which similar disgusting scenes are the common and the probable episodes.

Descartes, the father of modern philosophy and of free thought, who, from a youthful love for arms and camp-life, which he attributed to a certain heat of liver, began life in the army, actually gave up his military career for the reasons which he thus expressed in a letter to a friend: ‘Although custom and example render the profession of arms the noblest of all, I, for my own part, who only regard it like a philosopher, value it at its proper worth, and, indeed, I find it very difficult to give it a place among the honourable professions, seeing that idleness and licentiousness are the two principal motives which now attract most men to it.’³¹³

Of course no one in modern times would come to the same conclusions as Descartes for the same reasons, the discipline of our armies being somewhat more serious than it was in the first half of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is impossible to read of the German campaign in France without hoping, for the good of the world, that the inevitable association of war with the most revolting forms of crime therein displayed, may some day produce a general state of sentiment similar to that anticipated by Descartes.

It may be, said that the example of Descartes proves and indicates nothing; and we may feel pretty sure that his scruples seemed extravagantly absurd to his contemporaries, if he suffered them to know them. Nevertheless, he might have appealed to several well-known historical facts as a reason against too hasty a condemnation of his apparent super-sensitiveness. He might have argued that the profession of a pirate once reflected no more moral discredit than that of a soldier did in his days; that the pirate’s reply to Alexander, that he infested the seas by the same right wherewith the conqueror devastated the land, conveyed a moral sentiment once generally accepted, nor even then quite extinct; that in the days of Homer it was as natural to ask a seafarer whether he were a freebooter as whether he were a merchant; that so late in Greek history as the time of Thucydides, several tribes on the mainland of Greece still gloried in piracy, and accounted their plunder honourably won; and that at Rome the Cilician pirates, whom it devolved on Pompey to disperse, were joined by persons of wealth, birth, and education, ‘as if,’ says Plutarch, ‘their employment were worthy of the ambition of men of honour.’

Remembering, therefore, these things, and the fact that not so very many centuries ago public opinion was so lenient to the practice of bishops and ecclesiastics taking an active part in warfare that they commonly did so in spite of canons and councils to the contrary, it is a fair subject for speculation whether the moral opinion of the future may not come to coincide with the feeling of Descartes, and it behoves us to keep our minds alive to possibilities of change in this matter, already it would seem in process of formation. Who will venture to predict what may be the effect of the rise of the general level of education, and of the higher moral life of our time, on the popular judgment of even fifty years hence regarding a voluntarily adopted military life?

We may, perhaps, attribute it to the extreme position taken up with regard to military service by the Quakers and Mennonites that the example of Descartes had so slight a following. That thick phalanx of our kind who fondly mistake their own mental timidity for moderation, perpetually make use of the doctrines of extremists as an excuse for tolerating or even defending what in the abstract they admit to be evil; and it was unfortunately with this moderate party that Grotius elected to throw in his lot. No one admitted more strongly the evils of war. The reason he himself gave for writing his ‘De Jure Pacis et Belli’ was the licence he saw prevailing throughout Christendom in resorting to hostilities; recourse had to arms for slight motives or for none; and when war was once begun an utter rejection of all reverence for divine or human law, just as if the unrestrained commission of every crime became thenceforth legitimate. Yet, instead of throwing the weight of his judgment into the scale of opinion which opposed the custom altogether (though he did advocate an international tribunal that should decide differences and compel obedience to its decisions), he only tried to shackle it with rules of decency that are absolutely foreign to it, with the result, after all, that he did very little to humanise wars, and nothing to make them less frequent.

Nevertheless, though Grotius admitted the abstract lawfulness of military service, he made it conditional on a thorough conviction of the righteousness of the cause at issue. This is the great and permanent merit of his work, and it is here that we touch on the pivot or central question of military ethics. The orthodox theory is, that with the cause of war a soldier has no concern, and that since the matter in contention is always too complicated for him to judge of its merits, his only duty is to blindfold his reason and conscience, and rush whithersoever his services are commanded. Perhaps the best exposition of this simple military philosophy is that given by Shakespeare in his scene of the eve of Agincourt, where Henry V., in disguise, converses with some soldiers of the English army. ‘Methinks,’ says the king, ‘I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable.’

William. ‘That’s more than we know.’

Bates. ‘Ay, or more than we should seek after, for we know enough if we know we are the king’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’

Yet the whisper of our own day is, Does it? For a soldier, nowadays, enjoys equally with the civilian, who by his vote contributes to prevent or promote hostilities, the greater facilities afforded by the spread of knowledge for the exercise of his judgment; and it is to subject him to undeserved ignominy to debar him from the free use of his intellect, as if he were a minor or an imbecile, incompetent to think for himself. Putting even the difficulty of decision at its worst, it can never be greater for the soldier than it is for the voter; and if the former is incompetent to form an opinion, whence does the peasant or mechanic derive his ability? Moreover, the existence of a just and good cause has always been the condition insisted on as alone capable of sanctioning military service by writers of every shade of thought – by St. Augustine as representing the early Catholic Church, by Bullinger or Becon as representatives of the early Reformed Church, and by Grotius as representative of the modern school of publicists. Grotius contends that no citizen or subject ought to take part in an unjust war, even if he be commanded to do so. He openly maintains that disobedience to orders is in such a case a lesser evil than the guilt of homicide that would be incurred by fighting. He inclines to the opinion that, where the cause of war seems doubtful, a man would do better to refrain from service, and to leave the king to employ those whose readiness to fight might be less hampered by questions of right and wrong, and of whom there would always be a plentiful supply. Without these reservations he regards the soldier’s task as so much the more detestable than the executioner’s, as manslaughter without a cause is more heinous than manslaughter with one,³¹⁴ and thinks no kind of life more wicked than that of men who, without regard for the cause of war, fight for hire, and to whom the question of right is equivalent to the question of the highest wage.³¹⁵

These are strong opinions and expressions, and as their general acceptance would logically render war impossible, it is no small gain to have in their favour so great an authority as Grotius. But it is an even greater gain to be able to quote on the same side an actual soldier. Sir James Turner at the end of his military treatise called ‘Pallas Armata,’ published in 1683, came to conclusions which, though adverse to Grotius, contain some remarkable admissions and show the difference that two centuries have made on military maxims with regard to this subject. ‘It is no sin for a mere soldier,’ he says, ‘to serve for wages, unless his conscience tells him he fights in an unjust cause.’ Again, ‘That soldier who serves or fights for any prince or State for wages in a cause he knows to be unjust, sins damnably.’ He even argues that soldiers whose original service began for a just cause, and who are constrained by their military oaths to continue in service for a new and unjust cause of war, ought to ‘desert their employment and suffer anything that could be done to them before they draw their swords against their own conscience and judgments in an unjust quarrel.’³¹⁶

These moral sentiments of a military man of the seventeenth century are absolutely alien to the military doctrines of the present day; and his remarks on wages recall yet another important landmark of ancient thought that has been removed by the progress of time. Early Greek opinion justly made no distinction between the mercenary who served a foreign country and the mercenary who served his own. All hired military service was regarded as disgraceful, nor would anyone of good birth have dreamt of serving his own country save at his own expense. The Carians rendered their names infamous as the first of the Greek race who served for pay; whilst at Athens Pericles introduced the custom of supporting the poorer defenders of their country out of the exchequer.³¹⁷ Afterwards, of course, no people ever committed itself more eagerly to the pursuit of mercenary warfare.

In England also gratuitous military service was originally the condition of the feudal tenure of land, nor was anyone bound to serve the king for more than a certain number of days in the year, forty being generally the longest term. For all service in excess of the legal limit the king was obliged to pay; and in this way, and by the scutage tax, by which many tenants bought themselves off from their strict obligations, the principle of a paid military force was recognised from the time of the Conquest. But the chief stipendiary forces appear to have been foreign mercenaries, supported, not out of the commutation tax, but out of the king’s privy purse, and still more out of the loot won from their victims in war. These were those soldiers of fortune, chiefly from Flanders, Brabançons, or Routers, whose excesses as brigands led to their excommunication by the Third Lateran Council (1179), and to their destruction by a crusade three years later.³¹⁸

But the germ of our modern recruiting system must rather be looked for in those military contracts or indentures, by which from about the time of Edward III. it became customary to raise our forces: some powerful subject contracting with the king, in consideration of a certain sum, to provide soldiers for a certain time and task. Thus in 1382 the war-loving Bishop of Norwich contracted with Richard II. to provide 2,500 men-at-arms and 2,500 archers for a year’s service in France, in consideration of the whole fifteenth that had been voted by Parliament for the war.³¹⁹ In the same way several bishops indented to raise soldiers for Henry V. And thus a foreign war became a mere matter of business and hire, and armies to fight the French were raised by speculative contractors, very much as men are raised nowadays to make railways or take part in other works needful for the public at large. The engagement was purely pecuniary and commercial, and was entirely divested of any connection with conscience or patriotism. On the other hand, the most obviously just cause of war, that of national defence in case of invasion, continued to be altogether disconnected with pay, and remained so much the duty of the militia or capable male population of the country, that both Edward III. and Richard II. directed writs even to archbishops and bishops to arm and array all abbots, priors, and monks, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, for the defence of the kingdom.³²⁰

Originally, therefore, the paid army of England, as opposed to the militia, implied the introduction of a strictly mercenary force consisting indifferently of natives or foreigners, into our military system. But clearly there was no moral difference between the two classes of mercenaries so engaged. The hire, and not the cause, being the main consideration of both, the Englishman and the Brabançon were equally mercenaries in the ordinary acceptation of the term. The prejudice against mercenaries either goes too far or not far enough. If a Swiss or an Italian hiring himself to fight for a cause about which he was ignorant or indifferent was a mercenary soldier, so was an Englishman who with equal ignorance and indifference accepted the wages offered him by a military contractor of his own nation. Either the conduct of the Swiss was blameless, or the Englishman’s moral delinquency was the same as his.

The public opinion of former times regarded both, of course, as equally blameless, or rather as equally meritorious. And it is worth noticing that the word mercenary was applied alike to the hired military servant of his own as of another country. Shakespeare, for instance, applies the term mercenary to the 1,600 Frenchmen of low degree slain at Agincourt, whom Monstrelet distinguishes from the 10,000 Frenchmen of position who lost their lives on that memorable day —

 
In this ten thousand they have lost,
There are but sixteen hundred mercenaries.
 

And even so late as 1756, the original signification of the word had so little changed, that in the great debate in the House of Lords on the Militia Bill of that year Lord Temple and several other orators spoke of the national standing army as an army of mercenaries, without making any distinction between the Englishmen and the Hessians who served in it.³²¹

The moral distinction that now prevails between the paid service of natives and of foreigners is, therefore, of comparatively recent origin. It was one of the features of the Reformation in Switzerland that its leaders insisted for the first time on a moral difference between Swiss soldiers who served their own country for pay, and those who with equal bravery and credit sold their strength to the service of the highest foreign bidder.

Zwingli, and after him his disciple Bullinger, effected a change in the moral sentiment of Switzerland equivalent to that which a man would effect nowadays who should persuade men to discountenance or abandon military service of any kind for pay. One of the great obstacles to Zwingli’s success was his decided protest against the right of any Swiss to sell himself to foreign governments for the commission of bloodshed, regardless of any injury in justification; and it was mainly on that account that Bullinger succeeded in 1549 in preventing a renewal of the alliance or military contract between the cantons and Henry II. of France. ‘When a private individual,’ he said, ‘is free to enrol himself or not, and engages himself to fight against the friends and allies of his sovereign, I know not whether he does not hire himself to commit homicide, and whether he does not act like the gladiators, who, to amuse the Roman people, let themselves to the first comer to kill one another.’

But it is evident that, except with a reservation limiting a man’s service to a just national cause, Bullinger’s argument will also apply to the case of a hired soldier of his own country. The duty of every man to defend his country in case of invasion is intelligible enough; and it is very important to notice that originally in no country did the duty of military obedience mean more. In 1297 the High Constable and Marshal of England refused to muster the forces to serve Edward I. in Flanders, on the plea that neither they nor their ancestors were obliged to serve the king outside his dominions;³²² and Sir E. Coke’s ruling in Calvin’s case,³²³ that Englishmen are bound to attend the king in his wars as well without as within the realm, and that their allegiance is not local but indefinite, was not accepted by writers on the constitution of the country. The existing militia oath, which strictly limits obedience to the defence of the realm, covered the whole military duty of our ancestors; and it was only the innovation of the military contract that prepared the way for our modern idea of the soldier’s duty as unqualified and unlimited with regard to cause and place and time. The very word soldier meant originally stipendiary, his pay or solde (from the Latin solidum) coming to constitute his chief characteristic. From a servant hired for a certain task for a certain time the steps were easy to a servant whose hire bound him to any task and for the whole of his life. The existing military oath, which binds a recruit and practically compels him as much to a war of aggression as of defence at the bidding of the executive, owes its origin to the revolution of 1689, when the refusal of Dumbarton’s famous Scotch regiment to serve their new master, William III., in the defence of Holland against France, rendered it advisable to pass the Mutiny Act, containing a more stringent definition of military duty by an oath couched in extremely general terms. Such has been the effect of time in confirming this newer doctrine of the contract implied by the military status, that the defence of the monarch ‘in person, crown, and dignity against all enemies,’ to which the modern recruit pledges himself at his attestation, would be held to bind the soldier not to withhold his services were he called upon to exercise them in the planet Mars itself.

Hence it appears to be an indisputable fact of history that the modern military theory of Europe, which demands complete spiritual self-abandonment and unqualified obedience on the part of a soldier, is a distinct trespass outside the bounds of the original and, so to speak, constitutional idea of military duty; and that in our own country it is as much an encroachment on the rights of Englishmen as it is on the wider rights of man.

But what is the value of the theory itself, even if we take no account of the history of its growth? If military service precludes a man from discussing the justice of the end pursued in a war, it can hardly be disputed that it equally precludes him from inquiries about the means, and that if he is bound to consider himself as fighting in any case for a lawful cause he has no right to bring his moral sense to bear upon the details of the service required of him. But here occurs a loophole, a flaw, in the argument; for no subject nor soldier can be compelled to serve as a spy, however needful such service may be. That proves that a limit does exist to the claims on a soldier’s obedience. And Vattel mentions as a common occurrence the refusal of troops to act when the cruelty of the deeds commanded of them exposed them to the danger of savage reprisals. ‘Officers,’ he says, ‘who had the highest sense of honour, though ready to shed their blood in a field of battle for their prince’s service, have not thought it any part of their duty to run the hazard of an ignominious death,’ such as was involved in the execution of such behests. Yet why not, if their prince or general commanded them? By what principle of morality or common sense were they justified in declining a particular service as too iniquitous for them and yet in holding themselves bound to the larger iniquity of an aggressive war? What right has a machine to choose or decide between good and bad any more than between just and unjust? Its moral incompetence must be thoroughgoing, or else in no case afford an extenuating plea. You must either grant it everything or nothing, or else offer a rational explanation for your rule of distinction. For it clearly needs explaining, why, if there are orders which a soldier is not bound to obey, if there are cases where he is competent to discuss the moral nature of the services required of him, it should not also be open to him to discuss the justice of the war itself of which those services are merely incidents.

Let us turn from the abstract to the concrete, and take two instances as a test of the principle. In 1689, Marshal Duras, commander of the French army of the Rhine, received orders to destroy the Palatinate, and make a desert between France and Germany, though neither the Elector nor his people had done the least injury to France. Did a single soldier, did a single officer quail or hesitate? Voltaire tells us that many officers felt shame in acting as the instrument of this iniquity of Louis XIV., but they acted nevertheless in accordance with their supposed honour, and with the still orthodox theory of military duty. They stopped short at no atrocity. They cut down the fruit-trees, they tore down the vines, they burnt the granaries; they set fire to villages, to country-houses, to castles; they desecrated the tombs of the ancient German emperors at Spiers; they plundered the churches; they reduced well-nigh to ashes Oppenheim, Spiers, Worms, Mannheim, Heidelberg, and other flourishing cities; they reduced 400,000 human beings to homelessness and destruction – and all in the name of military duty and military honour! Yet, of a truth, those were dastardly deeds if ever dastardly deeds have been done beneath the sun; and it is the sheerest sophistry to maintain that the men who so implicitly carried out their orders would not have done more for their miserable honour, would not have had a higher conception of duty, had they followed the dictates of their reason and conscience rather than those of their military superiors, and refused to sacrifice their humanity to an overstrained theory of their military obligation, and their memory to everlasting execration.