Military Manners and Customs

In the case of these destroyers military duty meant simply military servility, and it was this reckless servility that led Voltaire in his ‘Candide’ to put into the mouth of his inimitable philosopher, Martin, that definition of an army which tales like the foregoing suggested and justified: ‘A million of assassins, in regiments, traversing Europe from end to end, and committing murder and brigandage by rules of discipline for the sake of bread, because incompetent to exercise any more honest calling.’³²⁴

An English case of this century may be taken as a parallel one to the French of the seventeenth, and as an additional test of the orthodox military dogma that with the cause of war a soldier has no concern. It is the Copenhagen expedition of 1807, than which no act of might within this century was more strongly reprobated by the public opinion of Europe, and by all but the Tory opinion of England. A fleet and army having been sent to the Danish capital, and the Danish Government having refused to surrender their fleet, which was demanded as the alternative of bombardment, the English military officials proceeded to bombard the city, with infinite destruction and slaughter, which were only stayed at last by the surrender of the fleet as originally demanded. There was no quarrel with Denmark at the time, there was no complaint of injury; only the surrender of the fleet was demanded. English public opinion was both excited and divided about the morality of this act, which was only justified on the plea that the Government was in possession of a secret article of the Treaty of Tilsit between Napoleon and the Czar of Russia, by which the Danish fleet was to be made use of in an attack upon England. But this secret article was not divulged, according to Alison, till ten years afterwards,³²⁵ and many disbelieved in its existence altogether, even supposing that its existence would have been a good case for war. Many military men therefore shared in the feeling that condemned the act, yet they scrupled not to contribute their aid to it. Were they right? Read Sir C. Napier’s opinion of it at the time, and then say where, in the case of a man so thinking, would have lain his duty: ‘This Copenhagen expedition – is it an unjust action for the general good? Who can say that such a precedent is pardonable? When once the line of justice has been passed, there is no shame left. England has been unjust… Was not our high honour worth the danger we might perhaps have risked in maintaining that honour inviolate?’³²⁶

These opinions, whether right or wrong, were shared by many men in both services. Sir C. Napier himself says: ‘Were there not plenty of soldiers who thought these things wrong? … but would it have been possible to allow the army and navy … to decide upon the propriety of such attacks?’³²⁷ The answer is, that if they did, whether allowed or not, such things would be impossible, or, at all events, less probable: which is the best reason possible for the contention that they should. Had they done so in this very instance, our historians would have been spared the explanation of an episode that is a dark blot upon our annals.

A more pleasing precedent, therefore, than that of the French officers in the Palatinate, or of the English at Copenhagen, is the case of Admiral Keppel, who, whilst numbers of naval officers flocked to the Admiralty to offer their services or to request employment, steadily declined to take part in the war of England against her American colonies, because he deemed her cause a bad one.³²⁸ He did no violence to his reason or conscience nor tarnished his fame by acting a part, of which in his individual capacity he disapproved. His example is here held up as illustrating the only true doctrine, and the only one that at all accords with the most rudimentary principles of either religion or morality. The contrary doctrine bids a man to forswear the use of both his reason and his conscience in consideration for his pay, and deprives him of that liberty of thought and moral action compared with which his civil and political liberty are nothing worth. For what indeed is this contrary time-honoured doctrine when stripped of all superfluities, and displayed in the outfit of common sense and common words? What is it but that the duty of military obedience overrides all duty of a man towards himself; that, though he may not voluntarily destroy his body, he cannot do too much violence to his soul; that it is his duty to annihilate his moral and intellectual being, to commit spiritual suicide, to forego the use of the noblest faculties which belong to him as a man; that to do all this is a just cause of pride to him, and that he is in all respects the nobler and better for assimilating himself to that brainless and heartless condition which is that also of his charger or his rifle?

If this doctrine is true and sound, then it may be asked whether there has ever been or exists upon the earth any tyranny, ecclesiastical or political, comparable to this military one; whether any but the baser forms of priestcraft have ever sought to deprive a man so completely of the enjoyment of his highest human attributes, or to absolve him so utterly from all moral responsibility for his actions.

This position can scarcely be disputed, save by denying the reality of any distinction between just and unjust in international conduct; and against this denial may be set not only the evidence of every age, but of every language above the stage of mere barbarism. Disregard of the difference is one of the best measures of the civilisation of a people or epoch. We at once, for instance, form a higher estimate of the civilisation of ancient India, when we read in Arrian that her kings were so apprehensive of committing an unjust aggression that they would not lead their armies out of India for the conquest of other nations.³²⁹ One of the best features in the old pagan world was the importance attached to the justice of the motives for breaking the peace. The Romans appear never to have begun a war without a previous consultation with the College of Fecials as to its justice; and in the same way, and for the same purpose, the early Christian emperors consulted the opinion of the bishops. If a Roman general made an unjust attack upon a people his triumph was refused, or at least resisted; nor are the instances infrequent in which the senate decreed restitution where a consul, acting on his own responsibility, had deprived a population of its arms, its lands, or its liberties.³³⁰ Hence the Romans, with all their apparent aggressiveness, won the character of a strict regard to justice, which was no small part of the secret of their power. ‘You boast,’ the Rhodians said to them, ‘that your wars are successful because they are just, and plume yourselves not so much on the victory which concludes them as on the fact that you never begin them without good cause.’³³¹ Conquest corrupted the Romans in these respects as it has done many another people; but even to the end of the Republic the tradition of justice survived; nor is there anything finer in the history of that people than the attempt of the party headed by Ateius the tribune to prevent Crassus leaving Rome when he was setting out to make war upon the Parthians, who not only had committed no injury, but were the allies of the Republic; or than the vote of Cato, that Cæsar, who, in time of peace, had slain or routed 300,000 Germans, should be given up to the people he had injured in atonement for the wrong he had done to them.

The idea of the importance of a just cause of war may be traced, of course, in history, after the extinction of the grand pagan philosophy in which it had its origin. It was insisted on even by Christian writers who, like St. Augustine, did not regard all military service as wicked. What, he asked, were kingdoms but robberies on a vast scale, if their justice were put out of the reckoning.³³² A French writer of the time of Charles V. concluded that while soldiers who fell in a just cause were saved, those who died for an unjust cause perished in a state of mortal sin.³³³ Even the Chevalier Bayard, who accompanied Charles VIII. without any scruple in his conquest of Naples, was fond of saying that all empires, kingdoms, and provinces were, if without the principle of justice, no better than forests full of brigands;³³⁴ and the fine saying is attributed to him, that the strength of arms should only be employed for the establishment of right and equity. But on the whole the justice of the cause of war became of less and less importance as time went on; nor have our modern Christian societies ever derived benefit in that respect from the instruction or guidance of their churches at all equal to that which the society of pagan Rome derived from the institution of its Fecials, as the guardians of the national conscience.

It was among the humane endeavours of Grotius to try to remedy this defect in modern States by establishing certain general principles by which it might be possible to test the pretext of any given war from the side of its justice. At first sight it appears obvious that a definite injury is the only justification for a resort to hostilities, or, in other words, that only a defensive war is just; but then the question arises how far defence may be anticipatory, and an injury feared or probable give the same rights as one actually sustained. The majority of wars, that have not been merely wars of conquest and robbery, may be traced to that principle in history, so well expressed by Livy, that men’s anxiety not to be afraid of others causes them to become objects of dread themselves.³³⁵ For this reason Grotius refused to admit as a good casus belli the fact that another nation was making warlike preparations, building garrisons and fortresses, or that its power might, if unchecked, grow to be dangerous. He also rejected the pretext of mere utility as a good ground for war, or such pleas as the need of better territory, the right of first discovery, or the improvement or punishment of barbarous nations.

A strict adherence to these principles, vague as they are, would have prevented most of the bloodshed that has occurred in Europe since Grotius wrote. The difficulty, however, is, that, as between nations, the principle of utility easily overshadows that of justice; and although the two are related as the temporary to the permanent expediency, and therefore as the lesser to the greater expediency, the relation between them is seldom obvious at the time of choice, and it is easy beforehand to demonstrate the expediency of a war of which time alone can show both the inexpediency and the injustice. Any war, therefore, however unjust it may seem, when judged by the canons of Grotius, is easily construed as just when measured by the light of an imperious and magnified passing interest; and the absence of any recognised definition or standard of just dealing between nations affords a salve to many a conscience that in the matters of private life would be sensitive and scrupulous enough. The story of King Agesilaus is a mirror in which very few ages or countries may not see their own history reflected. When Phœbidas, the Spartan general, seized the Cadmeia of Thebes in the time of peace, the greater part of Greece and many Spartans condemned it as a most iniquitous act of war; but Agesilaus, who at other times was wont to talk of justice as the greatest of all the virtues, and of valour without it as of little worth, defended his officer’s action, on the plea that it was necessary to regard the tendency of the action, and to account it even as glorious if it resulted in an advantage to Sparta.

But when every allowance is made for wars of which the justice is not clearly defined from the expediency, many wars have occurred of so palpably unjust a character, that they could not have been possible but for the existence of the loosest sentiments with regard to the responsibility of those who took part in them. We read of wars or the pretexts of wars in history of which we all, whether military men or civilians, readily recognise the injustice; and by applying the same principles of judgment to the wars of our own country and time we are each and all of us furnished for the direction of our conscience with a standard which, if not absolutely scientific or consistent, is sufficient for all the practical purposes of life, and is completely subversive of the excuse which is afforded by occasional instances of difficult and doubtful decision. The same facilities which exist for the civilian when he votes for or against taxation for a given war, or in approval or disapproval of the government which undertakes it, exist also for the soldier who lends his active aid to it; nor is it unreasonable to claim for the action of the one the same responsibility to his own conscience which by general admission attaches to the other.

It is surely something like a degradation to the soldier that he should not enjoy in this respect the same rights as the civilian; that his merit alone should be tested by no higher a theory of duty than that which is applied to the merit of a horse; and that his capacity for blind and unreasoning obedience should be accounted his highest attainable virtue. The transition from the idea of military vassalage to that of military allegiance has surely produced a strange conception of honour, and one fitter for conscripts than for free men, when a man is held as by a vice to take part in a course of action which he believes to be wrong. Not only does no other profession enforce such an obligation, but in every other walk of life a man’s assertion of his own personal responsibility is a source rather of credit to him than of infamy. That in the performance of any social function a man should be called upon to make an unconditional surrender of his free will, and yield an obedience as thoughtless as a dummy’s to superior orders, would seem to be a principle of conduct pilfered from the Society of Jesus, and utterly unworthy of the nobility of a soldier. As a matter of history, the priestly organisation took the military one for its model: which should lead us to suspect that the tyranny we find fault with in the copy is equally present in the original, and that the latter is marked by the same vices that it transmitted to the borrowed organisation.

The principle here contended for, that the soldier should be fully satisfied in his own mind of the justice of the cause he fights for, is the condition that Christian writers, from Augustine to Grotius, have placed on the lawfulness of military service. The objection to it, that its adoption would mean the ruin of military discipline, will appear the greatest argument of all in its favour when we reflect that its universal adoption would make war itself, which is the only reason for discipline, altogether impossible. Where would have been the wars of the last two hundred years had it been in force? Or where the English wars of the last six, with their thousands of lives and their millions of money spent for no visible good nor glory in fighting with Afghans, Zulus, Egyptians, and Arabs? Once restrict legitimate warfare to the limits of national defence, and it is evident that the refusal of men to take part in a war of aggression would equally put an end to the necessity of defensive exertion. If no government could rely on its subjects for the purposes of aggression and injustice, it goes without saying that the just cause of war would perish simultaneously. It is therefore altogether to be wished that that reliance should be weakened and destroyed.

The reasoning, then, which contains the key that is alone capable of closing permanently the portals of Janus is this: that there exists a distinction between a just and an unjust war, between a good and a bad cause, and that no man has a right either to take part knowingly and wilfully in a cause he believes to be unjust, nor to commit himself servilely to a theory of duty which deprives him, at the very outset, of his inalienable human birthright of free thought and free will. This is the principle of personal responsibility which has long since won admission everywhere save in the service of Mars, and which requires but to be extended there to free the world from the custom that has longest and most ruinously afflicted it. For it attacks that custom where it has never yet been seriously attacked before, at its real source – namely, in the heart, the brain, and the conscience, that, in spite of all warping and training, still belong to the individual units who alone make it possible. It behoves all of us, therefore, who are interested in abolishing military barbarism, not merely to yield a passive assent to it ourselves, but to claim for it assent and assertion from others. We must ask and reask the question: What is the title by which a man, through the mere fact of his military cloth, claims exemption from the moral law that is universally binding upon his fellows?

For this principle of individual military responsibility is of such power, that if carried to its consequences, it must ultimately prove fatal to militarism; and if it has not yet the prescription of time and common opinion in its favour, it is sealed nevertheless with the authority of many of the best intellects that have helped to enlighten the past, and is indissolubly contained in the teaching alike of our religious as of our moral code. It can, in fact, only be gainsaid by a denial of the fundamental maxims of those two guides of our conduct, and for that reason stands absolutely proof against the assaults of argument. Try to reconcile with the ordinary conceptions of the duties of a man or a Christian the duty of doing what his conscience condemns, and it may be safely predicted that you will try in vain. The considerations that may occur of utility and expediency beat in vain against the far greater expediency of a world at peace, freed from the curse of the warrior’s destructiveness; nor can the whole armoury of military logic supply a single counter-argument which does not resolve itself into an argument of supposed expediency, and which may not therefore be effectually parried, even on this narrower debating ground, by the consideration of the overwhelming advantages which could not but flow from the universal acceptance of the contrary and higher principle – the principle that for a soldier, as for anyone else, his first duty is to his conscience.

Or, to put the conclusion in the fewest words: The soldier claims to be a non-moral agent. That is the corner-stone of the whole military system. Challenge then the claimant to justify his first principle, and the custom of war will shake to its foundation, and in time go the way that other evil customs have gone before it, when once their moral support has been undermined or shattered.