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.

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.[310]

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.[311] 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.’[312]

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.[313] 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:—

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.’[315]

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,[316] 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.[317]

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.’[318]

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.[319] 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.[320]

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.[321] 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.[322]

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—