Having taken our general study of warfare from 7000 B. c. up to the mid-twentieth century, it may be valuable to look more closely at the moral aspect of war. In all these ages of fighting, has mankind made any progress?
Sometimes in history principles of morality were translated into rules of conduct; at other times they remained as a climate of opinion. But it would seem, in fact, that as men have become more ‘civilized’, so their wars have become more horrible. In modern times it must be admitted that agreed rules of conduct have often been shamelessly and flagrantly violated. Crimes against humanity were committed during the 1939/45 war, and in later days, for example in the Congo, which force us to the conclusion that war and murder may be synonymous terms; passions can be aroused which turn men into fiends. Happily this tendency is not universal; but the past, and particularly the more recent past, has proved the need for political and military leaders to keep a firm grip on moral principles - which can so easily be lost.
We are now going to look back at history and try to discover the facts which concern progress and failure in this matter of the ethics of war. Let us consider some of the fundamental aspects of the question - such things as honour, methods in the taking of life, surrender and the treatment of prisoners and wounded, conduct in the area of operations and the idea of total war, and international regulations of war. We must then try and reach some conclusions which will help us to discern the future, however inscrutable it may seem.
During the years 500 to 400 B. c., in the early days of the Greek wars, treachery, poisoned wells and poisoned weapons were all used in warfare. Later, in medieval sieges, the carcases of dead animals would be thrown across the defence works so that putrefaction would spread disease; this might be called the first example of bacteriological warfare. This particular form of warfare was declared illegal at a conference in Washington in 1925 - which has always seemed to me a mistake. This was very much in my mind when the armies under my command had crossed the Rhine in March 1945 and were moving across the North German plain towards the Elbe and the Baltic Sea. Hamburg with its enemy garrison presented a problem, and I arranged with the British Bomber Command to bomb the city; a fleet of a thousand bombers was sent; thousands of Germans were killed and tremendous damage was done to buildings and public services. It would have been less horrible, and produced the same strategic results, to have put the entire population out of action for forty-eight hours with the use of suitable ‘bugs’ or even gas. To disable temporarily large numbers of the enemy is surely better than using weapons of mass-slaughter and destroying the inanimate property of non-
Combatants. There are great possibilities in the use of nerve gases to produce shortterm disablement, without killing — and political leaders might well examine this question.
From the time of the Normans right through the Middle Ages the influence of the Christian Church gradually imposed on western Europe an elaborate code in which treason and treachery were regarded as contemptible crimes, and courage in battle and loyalty to one’s feudal master were cardinal virtues. Within the narrow’ conflnes of the hereditary warrior class the ideal of chivalry, with its fldelity to vows, and magnanimity towards one’s defeated enemies, took the place of what Sir Arthur Bryant has called ‘the old suicidal law of tribal vengeance and the bloody anarchy of might is right’.
We learn that as the years passed there grew up, gradually, a sort of brotherhood of arms even between opponents, however savagely they had previously been flghting one another. In the eighteenth century a considerable degree of mutual esteem existed between European enemies. Generals exchanged courteous letters, ranging from the exchange of wounded prisoners of equal rank to the offer of domestic hospitality for commanders who had been captured. The Napoleonic wars show examples of fraternization - British and French in Spain, and French and Russian troops outside Smolensk and Moscow. Nicknames for the enemy, like ‘Johnny Crappo’ or ‘John Bull’, came into friendly use, and even in the 1939/45 war terms like ‘Jerry’ persisted (in the 1914/18 war it had been ‘the Hun’). In 1810 we find a British captain in Portugal writing home: - I was at our posts yesterday. The French vedette saluted us, not with a shot, but by kissing his hand. Is not this civilized warfare?’ One day, when the hounds belonging to another British officer followed a hare into the French lines, they were politely returned. This gentlemanly type of warfare was evident in the Macedonian campaign of 1915-18. In the upper Struma Valley the British 28th Division ran a pack of beagles; when hounds penetrated the enemy lines on several occasions, the Bulgars always returned them to their owners.
Codes of chivalry were not restricted to Europe. In Japan, from the eighth century onwards, a prolonged period of family feuds and civil war produced a recognized code of behaviour in the military class. Known as ‘the way of the horse and the bow’, it was based upon the unquestioned loyalty of a man to his superior. This Japanese equivalent of chivalry lasted for close on a thousand years. Then, in the eighteenth century, the government replaced it with the cult named bushido, meaning ‘the warrior’s way’. This ethical system, while retaining the traditional principles of fidelity in time of war, was adapted ro the needs of a more peaceful society by the infusion of moderation, conservatism, and certain elements of Confucian teaching. However, this ‘moderation’ had little effect on the behaviour of the Japanese soldiery during the 1939/45 war, when their brutal treatment of prisoners of war in the Far East was past all belief and broke all accepted rules of civilized conduct - under the cloak of bushido.
As Christian principles spread, so to varying degrees they affected the customs of waging war. But morality, while requiring the courteous treatment of prisoners, for some time set no limits to the methods of taking life. However, in the eighteenth century, the age of‘enlightenment’, endeavours were made to impose certain restrictions. Louis XIV of France and Louis XV both refused to employ ‘infernal liquids’ offered to them by chemists. And in 1855 when Lord Dundonald secretly proposed that asphyxiating smoke-clouds be used at the siege of Sebastopol, his plan was rejected by the British
Government; ten years later Napoleon III stopped trials with asphyxiating shells being made on dogs, declaring that such barbarous methods would never be used by the French army - being against ‘the law of nations’.
Then came the first Hague Conference in 1899. This prohibited the use of poison and poisonous arms, but did not condemn gas warfare nor ihe emission of cloud gas, although it forbade ‘the use of projectiles the only object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating gases’ - which presumably meant gas shelling, but overall left the issue far from clear. The Conference did, however, definitely prohibit the use of expanding bullets. -
The seventeenth century saw the custom of allowing the defenders of a fortress to surrender with ‘the honours of war’ - to march out bearing arms, with flags flying and bands playing, and then to lay down arms. This custom remained a feature of the sieges in Marlborough’s day and also in Wellington’s - Flushing in 1809, San Sebastian in 1813 are examples. In the 1939/45 war there was the case, in May 1941, of the Italian garrison of Amba Alagi in Abyssinia and the viceroy of the Italian East African empire, the Duke of Aosta, being granted ‘Surrender with Honour’ as an inducement to hand over the battlefield without sabotage, booby-traps and destruction - a policy which saved many Bridsh and Indian army lives.
Some progress can be seen when we consider the treatment of wounded. For long it has been customary in Europe for opposing sides to arrange a suspension of hostilities to allow the wounded to be brought in and the dead to be buried; but when no such truce occurred arrangements for the wounded were generally inadequate, haphazard and partisan - the enemy’s wounded being inevitably the last to be tended. In 1862 a Swiss philanthropist, Henri Dunant, published a book in which he described the sufferings of the wounded at the battle of Solferino so vividly that the subject aroused widespread public attention and concern. Dunant urged that voluntary aid societies should be formed and, as a result, sixteen European countries were represented at a conference assembled in Geneva the following year.
In 1864 the first Geneva Convention, since revised three times, was signed. An International Red Cross Committee was formed to improve the condition of wounded soldiers in the field, and later it became responsible also for the supervision of prisoner-of-war camps. In time of war sick and wotmded combatants are now to be respected and cared for, whatever their nationality. The ambulances and hospital ships which transport them, the hospitals which shelter them, the doctors, nurses, chaplains and administrators who look after them, are to be respected and protected under all circumstances - provided they use the distinguishing marks of a flag and an arm-badge bearing a Red Cross. So in this matter all is now well, provided the Red Cross is respected. But it should be recorded that the Red Cross flag and badge were disgracefully abused by the Japanese soldiery in the Far East during the 1939/45 war.
For many centuries the lot of prisoners-of-war was, on the whole, terrible. At sea they were massacred or else turned into galley slaves; so long as small warships were in use, there was very Uttle room in which to stow prisoners, and even less food and water to spare for them; the inducement to take prisoners was therefore small. But as ships became larger so accommodation was improved; the codes of reasonable treatment of prisoners which had gradually prevailed on land then came into use at sea. In 15873 3 year before the defeat of the Armada, the Spanish commander-in-chief had orders to kill
Every man found on board an English ship. But the victorious Queen Elizabeth I sent home all Spanish sailors who had been wrecked on the coasts of Ireland and had been fortunate enough to fall into the hands of her soldiers rather than be killed by the Irish. As regards the treatment of prisoners by the Germans and Japanese in the 1939/45 war, I think I have already made my views clear.
In 1907 the Hague Regulations set out to codify some of the better principles which have prevailed, in the hope that all nations would adopt these principles of conduct towards prisoners-of-war.
It was laid down that all personal belongings of a prisoner, except his weapons, horses and military papers, were to remain his property. Prisoners-of-war had to be treated, in respect of food, quarters and clothing, on the same footing as the troops of the nation which had captured them. Opinions varied sharply as to what clothing was adequate, and several countries considered boots to be part of a soldier’s military equipment rather than of his uniform. A belligerent state might use the labour of prisoners, except officers, but the tasks given to them must have nothing to do with military operations, must not be excessive, and must be paid for. These regulations were to be disgracefully contravened by the Japanese during the 1939/45 war, particularly on the notorious ‘Railway of Death’ in Siam. During the two great wars, 1914/18 and 1939/45, Britain and Germany reached agreement that neither side would employ prisoners within nineteen miles of the firing line. -
Belligerents who took refuge in neutral countries such as Switzerland had to be interned, though officers could be granted parole. At a later date it was laid down that no prisoner was obliged to divulge to his captors any information except his number, rank and name. But a new treatment for prisoners called brain-washing has been introduced by communist peoples in the twentieth century, and in the Korean War which began in July 1950 British and American prisoners were subjected to varying degrees of this treatment.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the attempt to limit the general impact of warfare, begun as we have seen after the Thirty Years’ War, was helped by the institution of disciplined standing armies. Looting was prohibited; this had always been one of the inducements held out to the adventurers who formed part of the fighting forces. For a time battles were avoided on account of the very high rate of casualties, and the overall aim of strategy tended to be to exhaust rather than to annihilate the enemy. But the mass levies of the French revolutionary wars led to a renewal of unlimited warfare. Hostilities against civilians resulted in reprisals in the form of partisan and guerrilla activities, as in Russia and Spain, and these led to more atrocities and sharply increased the savagery and the horror. One has only to look at Goya’s series of etchings, ‘The Disasters of War’, to appreciate this. I have several times used the expression ‘unlimited war’, and that term was used in those days; in the mid-twentieth century we use the expression ‘total war’.
Good conduct by troops has generally reaped handsome military dividends, whereas unbridled cruel behaviour against civilians can bring just the reverse. An example of the first is Wellington’s army. The duke always insisted that his troops should behave themselves, and should pay for all they used; this had the result that when he led his men into southern France at the end of 1813, expecting to be faced with hostile French partisans, he found instead that his army was welcomed — because its conduct was so much better than that of France’s own soldiers. An instance of the second dividend is the
Decision by Germany in 1917 to carry out a policy of unrestricted U-boat warfare; this aroused world-wide anger and horror, and eventually brought America into the 1914/18 war. The German invasion of Russia in 1941-2, Operation ‘Barbarossa’, shows the same. The leading troops were in many places welcomed by Russian villagers when they first marched in. But the follow-up ‘occupation forces’ behaved so abominably that the same Russians who had waved to welcome the leading German troops then disappeared into the woods, and fought as partisans and saboteurs against the ‘liberators’ - who were hated with a deadly hatred.
During the American Civil War, General Sherman’s order for all private citizens to leave Atlanta, because he had decided to convert the city into a purely military base, aroused the outcry of ‘barbarism’. But in reply to a local petition he wrote: ‘You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.’ Sherman’s famous ‘march to the sea’ left in its wake a belt of country, 300 miles long and 50 wide, swept clean of food and supplies. People likened it to the worst excesses of the Thirty Years’ War, or even to those of Attila, the ‘scourge of God’(fifth century A. D.). (In fact no non-combatants were harmed unless they actively interfered with the advance. Some soldiers exceeded their orders, but most private property was respected, beyond animals and supplies required by the Union forces.) This was an example of total war, ruthlessly conducted. ‘If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty,’ declared Sherman, ‘I will answer that war is war.’ He was waging war against the enemy’s civilian population just as much as against the armed forces of that enemy. In 1914 the arrest as hostages of notables such as landowners, mayors and priests, was part of German poUcy to intimidate the hostile Belgian population. A whole community was held responsible for acts of hostility - although the principle of collective responsibility had been expressly outlawed by the Hague Convention.
The borderline between soldiers and civilians is further blurred in the instance of guerrilla warfare, for example the francs-tireurs of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1. Those peasants who fired on German troops were, if caught, hanged. The Crown Prince declared: ‘Nothing is left for us to do but to adopt retaliatory measures by burning down the house from which the shots came or else employ the help of the lash and forced contributions.’ And Bismarck said: ‘They are not soldiers. We are treating them as murderers.’ This is a pattern which has been repeated many times, since one side’s resistance hero is the other side’s terrorist or bandit. Anyone committing hostilities without belonging to the organized hostile army is not entitled to the privileges of a prisoner-of-war, in much the same way as spies in wartime.
It will now have become clear that in spite of efforts to make war more humane there have been cruel relapses into barbarism. Following the age of chivalry came the Renaissance, when the principles set forth by Machiavelli were a potent influence in politics. Nevertheless, factors have operated towards improvement, principally stimulated by the sufferings in war of non-combatants and civil populations. Perhaps the most important of these has been the development of international regulations of war. In Europe the appalling anarchy, destruction and starvation caused by the Thirty Years’ War (161848), which cost the lives of, possibly, eight million people in addition to those killed in battle, led jurists, following Grotius, to urge that war’s violence should be moderated, and that soldiers should be distinguished from civilians. Events such as the sack of Magdeburg horrified Europe. It was seen that some limits had to be set to war.
The Second Hague Conference in 1907 agreed resolutions for the ‘humane conduct of war’. It was forbidden to declare that no quarter would be given, to kill or wound an enemy who had surrendered, and to attack or bombard cities, towns and villages which were not defended (the term ‘open city’ came into use).
The Conference of 1907 also laid down that no hostilities were to begin ‘without previous and explicit warning in the form of a reasoned declaration of war or an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war’. This regulation was necessary because, as we know, in 1904 Japan opened her war with Russia without prior ultimatum or declaration, just as she had done against China in 1895 and was to do against America in December 1941 at Pearl Harbour. The 1939/45 war also saw various deliberately fabricated frontier incidents, designed to provide an apparently valid pretext for declaring war - when the victim-designate had inconveniently failed to furnish one.
In 1922 some ‘Rules of Warfare’ were agreed at the Washington Conference on the limitation of armaments. In particular, aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of a military character, or of injuring non-combatants, was prohibited. So, too, in 1925, was the employment of asphyxiating and poisonous gases (and these were not used in the 1939/45 war). Bacteriological warfare was also declared illegal, as I have already mentioned. But in spite of these well-intentioned rules, both the Spanish Civil War which began in 1936 and the 1939/45 war saw many instances of terror bombing and the killing of civilians; even the most careful air raids were liable to damage private property, and all too many bombing raids were indiscriminate, inaccurate or wilfully destructive. Lastly, I will consider neutrality. This is defined in the Encyclopaedia Britarmica as
The legal status arising from the abstention of a state from all participation in a war between other states, the maintenance by it of an attitude of impartiality in its dealings with the belligerent states, and the recognition by the latter of this abstention and impartiality.
That status of neutrality as defined above is of comparatively recent origin. By the seventeenth century it had become recognized that neutral states should afford no help to belligerents; but considerations as to whether neutrals could prevent their territory being used for hostile purposes were in those days ill-defined.
Neutrality gained nothing for Belgium in the two great wars of the twentieth century; that country was unable to defend its policy, and this is surely the acid test as to whether neutrality is worth while. Switzerland, for different reasons, has managed to maintain a neutral status. In the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9, Germany, Italy and Russia, all nominally neutral, sent troops or air forces to help one side or the other, in order to gain experience in modern techniques of waging war.
Under the Hague Convention of 1907 no neutral power may supply warships, supplies or war material to a belligerent, or refuse to one belligerent any facility which she had granted to another. However, the American Lend-Lease Act of 1941 authorized the manufacture or procurement of ‘any defense article for the government of any country whose defense the president deemed vital to the defense of the United States’, and to permit such articles, which included agricultural and industrial commodities as well as armaments, weapons, munitions and ships, to be sold, exchanged, leased or lent to such governments.
What lessons can we learn from this short examination of the ethics of war?
I have said that the Hague Convention of 1907 agreed certain resolutions for the ‘humane conduct of war’. But we should get out of our heads once and for all that there is, or can ever be, anything humane about war. Unfortunately, the time has not yet arrived when we can say that war has been abolished and we have ‘Peace on Earth’; therefore, political leaders and service chiefs must continue their efforts to make war less horrible. This chapter shows what has been achieved in that respect, but it has to be admitted that total war has brought about a decline in moral standards far beyond anything known before. *
During the years immediately following the 1914/18 war, the slogan used to be, ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ Nations should learn that such thinking will not get them very far, because with all nations following this counsel the world must be an armed camp, with explosive situations liable to develop. A more positive slogan was coined by Liddell Hart: ‘If you want peace, understand war;’ this knowledge should prompt nations to avoid its inhumanity. Clausewitz taught that the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces is the first aim of generalship - by which many thought that he meant the use of the utmost violence to achieve complete annihilation. That idea has been the cause of much unnecessary, tragic loss of life in warfare, and is responsible for a good deal of the unrest which exists in the distracted world of politics and war in which we find ourselves in the mid-twentieth century. But the remark was taken out of its context; Clausewitz also wrote that war is ‘a continuation of political transactions intermingled with other means’, and I read that statement to be a sound argument for the supremacy of political over narrow military policies, and for the exercise of moderation once victory has been ensured.
The responsibility of statesmen and politicians is very great. The higher direction of war is in their hands and they must see to it that they give clear political directives to the service chiefs. Unless they understand that the object of Grand Strategy must be a peace in which true values may be preserved, and unless they direct all military effort in war to the attainment of a favourable, controlling position at the end of it, they will throw away the fruits of tremendous sacrifices and all the slaughter will have been useless - more than ever in a nuclear age. In the 1939/45 war this principle was badly ignored, and the most humane intentions and sentiments about war cannot cover up the mischief that was wrought.
Military commanders who implement political policy carry a different responsibility. Success is vital; but battles must be won with the least possible loss of life. Nothing rots morale quicker than the suspicion that a commander is careless of his men, which can grow from such sensitive feelings as those aroused by indiscriminate burials of the dead and the sight of scattered graves neglected and bodies lying in ditches. No commander can afford to overlook the reverent and fitting burial of the dead - including enemy dead.
While the major conflicts of the twentieth century have shown that there is still much to be done in making war less horrible, most of mankind have, I hope, progressed some way since Blaise de Montluc, Marshal of France, wrote in the sixteenth century:
Towards an Enemy all advantages are good, and for my part (God forgive me) if I could call all *the devils in Hell to beat out the brains of an Enemy that would beat out mine, I would do it with all my heart.
World History
