James Anson Farrer

“ 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. ”

“ But over and above the intrinsic disadvantages of military service, it would almost seem as if the war-presiding genii had of set purpose essayed to make it as distasteful as possible to mankind. For they have made discipline not merely a curtailment of liberty and a forfeiture of rights, but, as it were, an experiment on the extreme limits of human endurance. There has been no tyranny in the world, political, judicial, or ecclesiastical, but has had its parent and pattern in some military system. ”

“ Yet it is difficult to imagine a stranger paradox, or a proposition that, if true, would reflect greater descredit on our mechanical science. If our Gatling guns, or Nordenfeldt 5-barrels capable of firing 600 rounds a minute, are less effective to destroy an enemy than all the paraphernalia of a mediæval army, why not in that case return to weapons that by the hypothesis better fulfilled the purposes of war? This question is a reductio ad absurdum of this soothing delusion; but as a matter of fact, there is no comparison in destructiveness between our modern warfare and that of our ancestors. ”

“ Such are some of the curious ideas of honour that have prevailed at different times. Wherein we seem to recognise not merely change but advance; one chief difference between the savage and civilised state lying in the different estimates entertained in either of martial prowess and of military honour. We laugh nowadays at the ancient Britons who believed that the souls of all who had followed any other pursuit than that of arms, after a despised life and an unlamented death, hovered perforce over fens and marshes, unfit to mingle with those of warriors in the higher and brighter regions ”

“ A king or a government can commission men to execute its policy or its vengeance; but is a free agent, who accepts a commission that he believes to be iniquitous, morally acquitted of his share of culpability? Is his responsibility no greater than that of the sword, the axe, or the halter with which he carries out his orders; or does the plea of military discipline justify him in acting with no more moral restraint than a slave, or than a horse that has no understanding? ”

“ It is not contrary to the law of nations to seduce one of the hostile side to turn spy, nor to bribe a governor to deliver a town, because such actions do not, like the use of poison or assassination, strike at the common welfare and safety of mankind. Such actions are the common episodes of every war. But that they are not in themselves honourable or compatible with a good conscience is proved by the fact that generals who resort to such means never boast of them ”

“ 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 ”

“ For a spy just as much as a soldier is a recognised and accredited military agent, and, if the former may be made the channel of falsehood, why not the prisoner of war? The Romans made use of the latter to acquire information about their enemy’s plans, if in no other way, by torture or the threat of it; the Germans forced some of their French prisoners to perform certain military services connected with carrying on their campaign—would it be therefore unfair to make use of them as the Prince of Orange made use of his secretary? ”

“ 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. ”

“ We have no data from which to judge of the probable state of a warless world, but we do know that the brightest samples of these virtues have been ever given by those who in peace and obscurity, and without looking for lands, or titles, or medals for their reward, have laboured not to destroy life but to save it, not to lower the standard of morality but to raise it, not to preach revenge but mercy, not to spread misery and poverty and crime but to increase happiness, wealth, and virtue. ”

“ Between a general and a spy the common-law rule of principal and agent plainly holds good: ‘He who acts through another acts through himself.’ In a case of espionage either both principal and agent are guilty of a criminal act, or neither is. If the spy as such violates the laws of war, so does the general who employs him; and either deserves the same punishment. Were it not so, a general who should hire a bravo to assassinate an enemy would incur no moral blame, nor could be held to act outside the boundary of lawful and honourable hostilities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Since, therefore, we have the authority of Vattel, of Frederick the Great, and of Lord Wolseley that spies may or even must be employed in war, and that, be the trickery or bribery never so mean that procures their services, no discredit reflects itself upon those generals who use them—it is impossible not to notice it as one of the chief anomalies in existing military usages that, although a general has an unlimited right to avail himself of the services of a spy or a traitor, the penalty for acting in either of the latter capacities is death. ”

“ But, however much the frequency and ferocity of the wars waged by barbarian races as compared with those waged by civilised nations has been exaggerated, there is no doubt but that in warfare, more than in anything else, there is most in common between civilisation and savagery, and that the distinction between them most nearly disappears. In art and knowledge and religion the distinction between the two is so wide that the evolution of one from the other seems still to many minds incredible ”

“ 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 ”

“ A state of war must surely play strange tricks with our minds to make it possible for us to approve such infamous actions as those quoted. There can be no greater proof of the utter demoralisation it causes than that such devices should have ever come to be thought honourable; and that no scruples should have ever intervened against the prostitution of a country’s flag, the symbol of her independence, her nationality, and her pride, to the shame of open falsehood. ”

“ They invent the expression civilised warfare to emphasise a distinction they would fain think inherent in the nature of things; and look, by its help, even on the mode of killing an enemy, with a moral vision that is absurdly distorted. How few of us, for example, but see the utmost barbarity in sticking a man with an assegai, yet none whatever in doing so with a bayonet? And why should we pride ourselves on not mutilating the dead, while we have no scruples as to the extent to which we mutilate the living? ”

“ There is at first sight a pleasing ring of humanity in all this, though, as yet, it only represents the better military spirit, which is always far in advance of actual military practice. In the monotonous history of war there are always commanders who wage it with less ferocity than others, and writers who plead for the mitigation of its cruelties. As in modern history a Marlborough, a Wellington, or a Villars forms a pleasant contrast to a Feuquières, a Belleisle, or a Blücher, so in ancient history a Marcellus or a Lucullus helps us to forget a Marius or an Alexander ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This, at least, is clear, from the history of military discipline, that only by the most repressive laws, and by a tyranny subversive of the commonest rights of men, is it possible to retain men in the fighting service of a country, after forcing or cajoling them into it. And this consideration fully meets the theory of an inherent love of fighting dominating human nature, such as that contended for in a letter from Lord Palmerston to Cobden, wherein he argues that man is by nature a fighting and quarrelling animal. ”

“ The 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. ”