Aggressive war

“ The 1930s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. ”

“ This war cry had the effect not only to stop the enemy's firing but its advance, thinking probably it was a counter-assault to meet theirs, and it saved many a poor fellow from being captured, as the enemy ceased its aggressive tactics in order to reform and be prepared to meet our anticipated assault. ”

“ To watchers of the present conflict it seems an intolerable thought that, after the fighting is done, we should once more return to a condition of “armed peace,” with jealous, distrustful, and revengeful Powers piling up armaments and plotting singly or in groups against their neighbors until Europe is plunged into another war more terrible, more bloody, and more costly than this. ”

“ How mad, how hopelessly mad, it all seems I With fifteen to twenty million soldiers already mobilized, and more than half that number in the fighting lines; with engines of appalling destruction by land and sea, and over the land and under the sea; with Northern France, Belgium, and parts of Germany, Poland, Russia, Servia, and Austria drenched in blood; the nations exhausting their human and material resources in savage conflict—this war, marking the climax, and (let us hope) the finale of our commercial civilization, is the most monstrous the old Earth has ever seen. ”

“ In the ordinary course of affairs the invasion of the territory of one Empire by the troops of another is, and can be nothing else than, an act of war, necessitating hostilities as a measure of defence on the part of the Power invaded. ”

“ Every nation is fighting in self-defence, every nation is fighting to destroy the tyranny of armaments, every nation is fighting to show that unprovoked aggression cannot be practised with impunity. Every nation pays homage to peace by maintaining that its enemies began the war. ”

“ Whether we shall drive the enemy from their posts with a strong body of regular troops, or whether we shall permit them to extend their devastations, while, with our battalions and fluctuating corps of militia, we protract a weak defensive war, till our allies are discouraged, and some unfavorable change takes place in the system of Europe. ”

“ Then will come the catastrophe. All Europe will be called to arms, and sixteen to eighteen million men, the flower of the nations, armed with the best instruments of murder will make war upon each other. ”

“ In a moral and political view, the offensive is nearly always advantageous: it carries the war upon foreign soil, saves the assailant's country from devastation, increases his resources and diminishes those of his enemy, elevates the morale of his army, and generally depresses the adversary. It sometimes happens that invasion excites the ardor and energy of the adversary,—particularly when he feels that the independence of his country is threatened. ”

“ If the enemy be repulsed in one attack, he would have nothing to do but to retreat to his own side of the line, and, being in no fear of a pursuing army, may reenforce himself at leisure for another attack on the same or some other post. He may, too, cross the line between our posts, make rapid incursions into the country which we hold, murder the inhabitants, commit depredations on them, and then retreat to the interior before a sufficient force can be concentrated to pursue him. Such would probably be the harassing character of a mere defensive war on our part. ”

“ The destruction even of an army momentarily shocks; but in the one breath the people will cry, 'war is hell; let us have war, for peace sake.' And when war comes it never affects the cowards, the usurers, the rogues; they stay at a safe distance from the scenes of action, and, with the instinct of the hyena, they profit on the nation's calamity. ”

“ It used to be possible, even for men whose hands dripped with enemy blood, to sign magnanimous truces; but science has made another kind of warfare possible, and the civilian population of the modern State, totally involved in a catastrophe beyond all reckoning, falls from its complacency into a depth of panic and everywhere believes that the enemy is inhuman in this war. ”

“ But as the powerful princes failed to support him he was compelled to subsist his troops by pillage, an example which was followed by all the leaders during that dreadful contest.
And now began a frightful struggle, a game of war on the chess-board of a nation, in which the people were the helpless pawns and suffered alike from friends and foes. Neither side gained any decisive victory, but both sides plundered and ravaged, the savage soldiery, unrestrained and unrestrainable, committing cruel excesses wherever they came. ”

“ That, since as between the advanced peoples we are dealing with in this matter, one party is as able in the long run to pile up armaments as the other, we cannot get nearer to solution by armaments alone; we must get at the original provoking cause—the motive making for aggression.
4. That if that motive results from a true judgment of the facts; if the determining factor in a nation's well-being and progress is really its power to obtain by force advantage over others, the present situation of armament rivalry tempered by war is a natural and inevitable one. ”

“ This power to repel invasion, and, upon just cause, to invade and destroy the natives, authorizes offensive as well as defensive war, but only "on just cause." The very terms imply the existence of a country to be invaded, and of an enemy who has given just cause of war. ”

“ Not content with rejecting all proposals for a peaceful settlement of the controversy, a cruel war of invasion was commenced, which, in its progress, has been marked by a brutality and disregard of the rules of civilized warfare that stand out in unexampled barbarity in the history of modern wars. ”

“ But as between nations, who can redress themselves only by war, such transfer is in itself an aggression. He who renders me insecure; he who hazards my peace, and exposes me to imminent danger, commits an act of hostility against me, and gives me the rights consequent on that act. ”

“ In the meantime envoys extraordinary may be sent to other powers by each party to enlist their aid,—most of whom are already prepared for war,—and each one selects his side according to his interests and feelings. At length the ultimatum is given and refused, and the dreadful conflict commences. Few wars, however, begin in this slow and progressive mode; a trifling aggression is sufficient to blow up the flame with nations already prepared. ”

“ But if there be often a difficulty in discerning between aggressive and defensive wars, and if, moreover, there is reason to suppose, that most of the modern wars are aggressive, or that both patties become aggressors in the course of the dispute, it becomes the rulers of nations to pause, and to examine their own consciences with fear and trembling, before they allow the Sword to bedrawn, lest a dreadful responsibility should fall upon their heads for all the destruction of happiness, all the havoc of life, and all the slaughter of morals that may ensue. ”

“ It seems to be a measure of war, and retaliation for wrongs done; it is a measure which, we are told, is necessary to save our frontiers from aggression, and to protect them against violence and warfare. ”

“ For, according to modern militarism, war aims at annihilation of the enemy, and the enemy includes not only the combatants—these are the least offensive element—but the non-combatants, the men who represent the rival commerce, the women who represent the rival culture, and the men and women who represent codes of honour and humanity which are the beacons of the rival civilisation—at one and all of these, is aimed the blow which is delivered through the medium of the proxies in the field. ”

“ After this war, deep-planted in the heart of every people, whether fighting or looking on, will be the loathing of national aggressiveness! Such a feeling has never existed before because men have never before been so stirred, so injured, and so frightened. ”

“ Modern wars are not internecine wars, in which the killing of the enemy is the object. The destruction of the enemy in modern war, and, indeed, modern war itself, are means to obtain that object of the belligerent which lies beyond the war. ”

“ If the terrible instruments of destruction now possessed by the nations seem to shorten wars, will not, on the other hand, the battles be more deadly? And in this century, when the unexpected plays such an important role, may not war bring about the most sudden and unforseen results? ”

“ If you shoot your neighbor, you will be committing mere murder; but if you gather twenty or thirty friends, together, tie a red handkerchief around the left arm of each man, announce that you are out to overthrow the government of the United States, and then shoot your neighbor as a counterrevolutionary impediment to the new order of things, you can have the satisfaction of having waged war. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But in that case we shall want an army for foreign service as well as for home defence.
The other point needs rather more explanation because it is constantly misunderstood by people who will not try to comprehend the nature of war. Such persons are always confusing aggression in the political sense as the cause of war with aggression in the strategic sense as a method of conducting it. A war may be waged solely for defensive [Pg 81] purposes, yet it may be the right course from a military point of view to take the offensive. ”

“ In fact, if the operation is arranged in a systematic manner, and all the precautions and rules observed as are usual in cases of attacks premeditated against European and civilized establishments, there is no reason to expect any other than a flattering and decisive result, since, in reality, the whole would be directed against an enemy contemptible on account of his barbarism and his comparative ignorance of the art of war. ”

“ To strike with explosives and fires simultaneously over the entire width and breadth of America with a two-fold object—first to cut off the supplies for the Allies by destroying the means for their manufacture and secondly to create such a reign of terror in America that a declaration of war against Imperial Germany will be too fearful a thing to even contemplate. ”

“ The defensive army, on the contrary, should endeavor, by all means, to neutralize the first forward movement of its adversary, protracting operations as long as possible while not compromising the fate of the war, and deferring a decisive battle until the time when a portion of the enemy's forces are either exhausted by labors, or scattered for the purpose of occupying invaded provinces, masking fortified places, covering sieges, protecting the line of operations, depots, &c. ”

“ They did not know, many of them, whether they were attacking French, British or Turk, but unquestioning, unthinking, they came on with a fearlessness of life deserving of a better cause, leaping into our trenches and falling back dead with a bullet in the throat or a bayonet wound in the breast or with head blown off by one of our shells.
But it was, "for all our grim resistance," a hopeless kind of struggle. Sooner or later that unceasing stream of men issuing out of the narrow defile must sweep us back. ”

“ And painful as the reflection is, this duty is particularly enforced by the spirit and manner in which the war continues to be waged by the enemy, who, uninfluenced by the unvaried examples of humanity set them, are adding to the savage fury of it on one frontier a system of plunder and conflagration on the other, equally forbidden by respect for national character and by the established rules of civilized warfare. ”

“ The overthrow of the enemy is the aim in war; destruction of the hostile military forces, the means both in attack and defence. By the destruction of the enemy’s military force, the defensive is led on to the offensive, the offensive is led by it to the conquest of territory. ”

“ And thus I prove to your majesty that to change our plan now, without warning our allies, would be at once unskillful and dishonest. We should make war with the aggression on our side; we should make it, deserving to have it made against us; and we should have the appearance of fearing it whilst provoking it, for a permission granted to five hundred men, to two hundred men, to fifty men, to ten men, is still a permission. ”

“ They are at present strong enough, they suppose, in their domestic resources, and in the difficulties presented to a hostile force by the nature of the country, to bid defiance to invasion, or, at all events, to inflict a very severe chastisement on the invaders, and their excited manner of speech so acts upon the minds that they begin to think they can defy, not merely the United States, but the world. ”

“ If we may shoot rebel enemies in battle, if we may shut them up in fortresses or prisons, if we may bombard their forts, if we may occupy their fields, if we may appropriate their crops, if we may blockade their ports, if we may seize their vessels, if we may capture their cities, it is vain to say that we may not exercise against them the other associate prerogatives of war. ”

“ Let us see, finally, what a prominent military theoretician, General Bernhardi, says, in his great work "Vom Heutigen Kriege." "Thus modern mass armies make war difficult for a variety of reasons. Moreover they constitute, in and of themselves, a danger that must never be underestimated. ”

“ It aims to disintegrate political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and economic existence as well as at wholesale murder of individuals. By weakening enemies, it is designed to win the peace even if the war is lost. ”