Transcriber’s Note:
In some versions of this eBook, sidenotes are shown in boldface, above the paragraphs, rather than next to them.

THE WAR BOOK OF THE
GERMAN GENERAL STAFF

THE WAR BOOK OF THE
GERMAN GENERAL STAFF

BEING “THE USAGES OF WAR ON LAND”
ISSUED BY THE GREAT GENERAL
STAFF OF THE GERMAN ARMY

TRANSLATED WITH A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

BY
J. H. MORGAN, M.A.
PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AT UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE, LONDON, LATE SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL
COLLEGE, OXFORD; JOINT AUTHOR OF
“WAR: ITS CONDUCT AND ITS
LEGAL RESULTS”

NEW YORK
McBRIDE, NAST & COMPANY
1915

Copyright, 1915, by
McBride, Nast & Co.

Published March, 1915

TO
THE LORD FITZMAURICE
IN TOKEN OF
FOURTEEN YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP
AND OF
MUCH WISE COUNSEL IN THE STUDY
OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

PREFATORY NOTE

The text of this book is a literal and integral translation of the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege issued and re-issued by the German General Staff for the instruction of German officers. It is the most authoritative work of its kind in Germany and takes precedence over all other publications whether military or legal, alike over the works of Bernhardi the soldier and of Holtzendorff the jurist. As will be shown in detail in the critical introduction, The Hague Conventions are treated by the authors as little more than “scraps of paper”—the only “laws” recognized by the German Staff are the military usages laid down in the pages of the Manual, and resting upon “a calculating egotism” and injudicious “form of reprisals.”

I have treated the original text with religious respect, seeking neither to extenuate nor to set down aught in malice. The text is by no means elegant, but, having regard to the profound significance of the views therein expressed or suggested, I have thought it my duty as a translator to sacrifice grace to fidelity. Text, footnotes, and capital headlines are all literally translated in their entirety. When I have added footnotes of my own they are enclosed in square brackets. The marginal notes have been added in order to supply the reader with a continuous clue. In the Critical Introduction which precedes the text I have attempted to show the intellectual pedigree of the book as the true child of the Prussian military tradition, and to exhibit its degrees of affinity with German morals and with German policy—with “Politik” and “Kultur.” I have therefore attempted a short study of German diplomacy, politics, and academic teaching since 1870, with some side glances at the writings of German soldiers and jurists. All these, it must be remembered, are integrally related; they all envisage the same problem. That problem is War. In the German imagination the Temple of Janus is never closed. Peace is but a suspension of the state of war instead of war being a rude interruption of a state of peace. The temperament of the German is saturated with this belligerent emotion and every one who is not with him is against him. An unbroken chain links together Clausewitz, Bismarck, Treitschke, von der Goltz, Bernhardi, and the official exponents of German policy to-day. The teaching of Clausewitz that war is a continuation of policy has sunk deeply into the German mind, with the result that their conception of foreign policy is to provoke a constant apprehension of war.

The first part of the Introduction appears in print for the first time. In the second and third parts I have incorporated a short essay on Treitschke which has appeared in the pages of the Nineteenth Century (in October last), a criticism of German diplomacy and politics which was originally contributed to the Spectator in 1906 and a study of the German professors which was published, under the title of “The Academic Garrison,” in the Times Supplement of Sept. 1st, 1914. I desire to thank the respective Editors for their kindness in allowing me to reproduce here what I had already written there.

J. H. M.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS
OF EDITOR’S MARGINAL COMMENTARY

THE WAR BOOK OF THE
GERMAN GENERAL STAFF

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I
THE GERMAN VIEW OF WAR

The ideal Prince, so Machiavelli has told us, need not, and indeed should not, possess virtuous qualities, but he should always contrive to appear to possess them.[1] The somber Florentine has been studied in Germany as he has been studied nowhere else and a double portion of his spirit has descended on the authors of this book. Herein the perfect officer, like the perfect Prince, is taught that it is more important to be thought humane than to practise humanity; the former may probably be useful but the latter is certainly inconvenient.

Hence the peculiar logic of this book which consists for the most part in ostentatiously laying down unimpeachable rules and then quietly destroying them by debilitating exceptions. The civil population of an invaded country—the young officer is reminded on one page—is to be left undisturbed in mind, body, and estate, their honor is to be inviolate, their lives protected, and their property secure. To compel them to assist the enemy is brutal, to make them betray their own country is inhuman. Such is the general proposition. Yet a little while and the Manual descends to particulars. Can the officer compel the peaceful inhabitants to give information about the strength and disposition of his country’s forces?[2] Yes, answers the German War Book, it is doubtless regrettable but it is often necessary. Should they be exposed to the fire of their own troops?[3] Yes; it may be indefensible, but its “main justification” is that it is “successful.” Should the tribute of supplies levied upon them be proportioned to their ability to pay it?[4] No; “this is all very well in theory but it would rarely be observed in practise.” Should the forced labor of the inhabitants be limited to works which are not designed to injure their own country?[5] No; this is an absurd distinction and impossible. Should prisoners of war be put to death? It is always “ugly” but it is sometimes expedient. May one hire an assassin, or corrupt a citizen, or incite an incendiary? Certainly; it may not be reputable (anständig), and honor may fight shy of it, but the law of war is less “touchy” (empfindlich). Should the women and children—the old and the feeble—be allowed to depart before a bombardment begins? On the contrary; their presence is greatly to be desired (ein Vortheil)—it makes the bombardment all the more effective. Should the civil population of a small and defenseless country be entitled to claim the right, provided they carry their arms openly and use them honorably, to defend their native land from the invader?[6] No; they act at their peril and must, however sudden and wanton the invasion, elaborate an organization or they will receive no quarter.[7]

We might multiply examples. But these are sufficient. It will be obvious that the German Staff are nothing if not casuists. In their brutality they are the true descendants of Clausewitz, the father of Prussian military tradition.

“Laws of war are self-imposed restrictions, almost imperceptible and hardly worth mentioning, termed ‘usages of war.’ Now philanthropists may easily imagine that there is a skilful method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the art of war. However plausible this may appear, still it is an error which must be extirpated, for in such dangerous things as war the errors which proceed from the spirit of benevolence are the worst.... To introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity.... War is an act of violence which in its application knows no bounds.”[8]

The only difference between Clausewitz and his lineal successors is not that they are less brutal but that they are more disingenuous. When he comes to discuss that form of living on the country which is dignified by the name of requisitions, he roundly says they should be enforced.

“by the fear of responsibility, punishment, and ill-treatment which in such cases presses like a general weight on the whole population.... This resource has no limits except those of the exhaustion, impoverishment, and devastation of the whole country.”[9]

Our War Book is more discreet but not more merciful. Private property, it begins by saying, should always be respected. To take a man’s property when he is present is robbery; when he is absent it is “downright burglary.” But if the “necessity of war” makes it advisable, “every sequestration, every appropriation, temporary or permanent, every use, every injury and all destruction are permissible.”

It is, indeed, unfortunate that the War Book when it inculcates “frightfulness” is never obscure, and that when it advises forbearance it is always ambiguous. The reader must bear in mind that the authors, in common with their kind in Germany, always enforce a distinction between Kriegsmanier and Kriegsraison,[10] between theory and practise, between the rule and the exception. That in extreme cases such distinctions may be necessary is true; the melancholy thing is that German writers make a system and indeed a virtue of them. In this respect the jurists are not appreciably superior to their soldiers. Brutality is bad, but a pedantic brutality is worse in proportion as it is more reflective. Holtzendorff’s Handbuch des Völkerrechts, than which there is no more authoritative book in the legal literature of Germany, after pages of sanctification of “the natural right” to defend one’s fatherland against invasion by a levée en masse, terminates the argument for a generous recognition of the combatant status of the enemy with the melancholy qualification, “unless the Terrorism so often necessary in war does not demand the contrary.”[11]

To “terrorize” the civil population of the enemy is, indeed, a first principle with German writers on the Art of War. Let the reader ponder carefully on the sinister sentence in the third paragraph of the War Book and the illuminating footnote from Moltke with which it is supported. The doctrine—which is at the foundation of all such progress as has been made by international law in regularizing and humanizing the conduct of war—that the sole object of it should be to disable the armed forces of the enemy, finds no countenance here. No, say the German staff, we must seek just as much (in gleicher Weise) to smash (zerstören) the total “intellectual” (geistig), and material resources of the enemy. It is no exaggeration to interpret this as a counsel not merely to destroy the body of a nation, but to ruin its soul. The “Geist” of a people means in German its very spirit and finer essence. It means a good deal more than intellect and but a little less than religion. The “Geist” of a nation is “the partnership in all science, the partnership in all art, the partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection,” which Burke defined as the true conception of the State. Hence it may be no accident but policy which has caused the Germans in Belgium to stable their horses in churches, to destroy municipal palaces, to defile the hearth, and bombard cathedrals. All this is scientifically calculated “to smash the total spiritual resources” of a people, to humiliate them, to stupefy them, in a word to break their “spirit.”

Let the reader also study carefully a dark sentence in that section of the War Book which deals with “Cunning and Deceit.” There the German officer is instructed that “there is nothing in international law against” (steht völkerrechtlich nichts entgegen) the exploitation of the crimes of third persons, “such as assassination, incendiarism, robbery and the like,” to the disadvantage of the enemy. “There is nothing in international law against it!” No, indeed. There are many things upon which international law is silent for the simple reason that it refuses to contemplate their possibility. It assumes that it is dealing not with brutes but with men. International law is the etiquette of international society, and society, as it has been gravely said, is conducted on the assumption that murder will not be committed. We do not carry revolvers in our pockets when we enter our clubs, or finger them when we shake hands with a stranger. Nor, to adopt a very homely illustration, does any hostess think it necessary to put up a notice in her drawing-room that guests are not allowed to spit upon the floor. But what should we think of a man who committed this disgusting offense, and then pleaded that there was nothing to show that the hostess had forbidden it? Human society, like political society, advances in proportion as it rests on voluntary morality rather than positive law. In primitive society everything is “taboo,” because the only thing that will restrain the undisciplined passions of men is fear. Can it be that this is why the traveler in Germany finds everything “verboten,” and that things which in our own country are left to the good sense and good breeding of the citizen have to be officiously forbidden? Can it be that this people which is always making an ostentatious parade of its “culture” is still red in tooth and claw? When a man boasts his breeding we instinctively suspect it; indeed the boast is itself ill-bred. If the reader thinks these reflections uncharitable, let him ponder on the treatment of Belgium.

It will be seen therefore that the writers of the War Book have taken to heart the cynical maxim of Machiavelli that “a Prince should understand how to use well both the man and the beast.” We shall have occasion to observe later in this introduction that the same maxim runs like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of German diplomacy. Machiavelli’s dark counsel finds a responsive echo in Bismarck’s cynical declaration that a diplomatic pretext can always be found for a war when you want one. When these things are borne in mind the reader will be able to understand how it is that the nation which has used the strongest language[12] about the eternal inviolability of the neutrality of Belgium should be the first to violate it.

The reader may ask, What of the Hague Conventions? They are international agreements, to which Germany was a party, representing the fruition of years of patient endeavor to ameliorate the horrors of war. If they have any defect it is not that they go too far but that they do not go far enough. But of them and the humanitarian movement of which they are the expression, the German Staff has but a very poor opinion. They are for it the crest of a wave of “Sentimentalism and flabby emotion.” (Sentimentalität und weichlicher Gefühlsschwärmerei.) Such movements, our authors declare, are “in fundamental contradiction with the nature and object of war itself.” They are rarely mentioned in this book and never respectfully. The reader will look in vain for such an incorporation of the Hague Regulations in this official text-book as has been made by the English War Office in our own Manual of Military Law. Nor is the reason far to seek. The German Government has never viewed with favor attempts to codify the laws and usages of war. Amiable sentiments, prolegomenous resolutions, protestations of “culture” and “humanity,” she has welcomed with evangelical fervor. But the moment attempts are made to subject these volatile sentiments to pressure and liquefy them in the form of an agreement, she has protested that to particularize would be to “enfeeble humane and civilizing thoughts.”[13] Nothing is more illuminating as to the respective attitudes of Germany and England to such international agreements than the discussions which took place at the Hague Conference of 1907 on the desirability of imposing in express terms restrictions upon the laying of submarine mines in order to protect innocent shipping in neutral waters. The representatives of the two Powers agreed in admitting that it did not follow that because the Convention had not prohibited a certain act it thereby sanctioned it. But whereas the English representatives regarded this as a reason why the Convention could never be too explicit,[14] the spokesman of Germany urged it as a reason why it could never be too ambiguous. In the view of the latter, not international law but “conscience, good sense, and the sentiment of duties imposed by the principles of humanity will be the surest guides for the conduct of soldiers and sailors and the most efficacious guarantees against abuse.”[15] Conscience, “the good German Conscience,” as a German newspaper has recently called it, is, as we have seen, an accommodating monitor, and in that forum there are only too many special pleaders. If the German conscience is to be the sole judge of the lawfulness of German practises, then it is a clear case of “the right arm strikes and the left arm is called upon to decide the lawfulness of the blow.” It is, indeed, difficult to see, if Baron von Bieberstein’s view of international agreements be the right one, why there should be any such agreements at all. The only rule which results from such an Economy of Truth would be: All things are lawful but all are not expedient. And such, indeed, is the conclusion of the German War Book.

The cynicism of this book is not more remarkable than its affectation. There are pages in it of the most admirable sentiment—witness those about the turpitude of plundering and the inviolability of neutral territory. Taken by themselves, they form the most scathing denunciation of the conduct of the German army in Belgium that could well be conceived. Let the reader weigh carefully the following:

Movable private property which in earlier times was the incontestable booty of the victor is held by modern opinion to be inviolable. The carrying away of gold, watches, rings, trinkets, or other objects of value is therefore to be regarded as robbery, and correspondingly punishable.

No plundering but downright burglary is it for a man to take away things out of an unoccupied house or at a time when the occupant happens to be absent.

Forced contributions (Kriegschatzungen) are denounced as “a form of plundering” rarely, if ever, to be justified, as requisitions may be, by the plea of necessity. The victor has no right, the Book adds, to practise them in order to recoup himself for the cost of the war, or to subsidize an operation against the nation whose territory is in his occupation. To extort them as a ransom from the violence of war is equally unjustifiable: thus out of its own mouth is the German staff condemned and its “buccaneering levies” upon the forlorn inhabitants of Belgium held up to reprobation.

Still more significant are the remarks on the right and duty of neutrals. The inviolability of neutral territory and the sanctity of the Geneva Convention are the only two principles of international law which the German War Book admits to be laws of perfect obligation. A neutral State, it declares, not only may, but must forbid the passage of troops to the subjects of both belligerents. If either attempts it, the neutral State has the right to resist “with all the means in its power.” However overwhelming the necessity, no belligerent must succumb to the temptation to trespass upon the neutral territory. If this be true of a neutral State it is doubly true of a neutralized State. No one has been so emphatic on this point as the German jurists whose words the War Book is so fond of praying in aid. The Treaty of London guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium is declared by them to be “a landmark of progress in the formation of a European polity” and “up till now no Power has dared to violate a guarantee of this kind.”[16]

“He who injures a right does injury to the cause of right itself, and in these guarantees lies the express obligation to prevent such things.... Nothing could make the situation of Europe more insecure than an egotistical repudiation by the great States of these duties of international fellowship.”[17]

The reader will, perhaps, hardly need to be cautioned against the belligerent footnotes with which the General Staff has illuminated the text. They are, as he will observe, mainly directed towards illustrating the peculiar depravity of the French in 1870. They are certainly suspect, and all the more so, because the notorious malpractices of the Germans in that campaign are dismissed, where they are noticed at all, with the airy remark that there were peculiar circumstances, or that they were unauthorized, or that the “necessity of war” afforded sufficient justification. All this is ex parte. So too, to a large extent, is the parade of professors in the footnotes. They are almost always German professors and, as we shall see later, the German professor is, and is compelled to be, a docile instrument of the State.

The book has, of course, a permanent value apart from the light it throws upon contemporary issues. Some of the chapters, such as that on the right and duties of neutrals, represent a carefully considered theory, little tainted by the cynicism which disfigures the rest of the book. It should be of great interest and value to those of us who are engaged in studying the problem of bringing economic pressure to bear upon Germany, by enclosing her in the meshes of conditional contraband. So, too, the chapter on the treatment of Prisoners of War will have a special, and for some a poignant, interest just now. The chapter on the treatment of occupied territory is, of course, of profound significance in view of the present state of Belgium.

CHAPTER II
GERMAN DIPLOMACY AND STATECRAFT

Bismarck, wrote Hohenlohe, who ultimately succeeded him as Imperial Chancellor, “handles everything with a certain arrogance (Uebermut), and this gives him a considerable advantage in dealing with the timid minds of the older European diplomacy.” This native arrogance became accentuated after the triumphs of 1870 until, in Hohenlohe’s words, Bismarck became “the terror” of all European diplomatists. That word is the clue to German diplomacy. The terrorism which the Germans practise in war they indoctrinate in peace. It was a favorite saying of Clausewitz, whose military writings enjoy an almost apostolic authority in Germany, that War and Peace are but a continuation of one another—“War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means.”[18] The same lesson is written large on every page of von der Goltz[19] and Bernhardi.[20] In other words, war projects its dark shadow over the whole of German diplomacy. The dominant postures in “shining armor” at critical moments in the peace of Europe, and the menacing invocations of the “mailed fist” are not, as is commonly supposed, a passionate idiosyncrasy of the present Emperor. They are a legacy of the Bismarckian tradition. To keep Europe in a perpetual state of nervous apprehension by somber hints of war was, as we shall see, the favorite method by which Bismarck attained his diplomatic ends. For the German Chancellerie rumors of wars are of only less political efficacy than wars themselves. After 1870, metaphors of war became part of the normal vocabulary of the German Government in times of peace. Not only so but, as will be seen in the two succeeding chapters, a belligerent emotion suffused the temperament of the whole German people, and alike in the State Universities, and the stipendiary Press, there was developed a cult of War for its own sake. The very vocabulary of the Kaiser’s speeches has been coined in the lecture-rooms of Berlin University.

Now War is at best but a negative conception and its adoption as the Credo of German thinkers since 1870 explains why their contributions to Political Science have been so sterile. More than that, it accounts for the decline in public morality. Politically, Germany, as we shall see, has remained absolutely stagnant. She is now no nearer self-government than she was in 1870; she is much farther removed from it than she was in 1848. The inevitable result has been, that politics have for her come to mean little more than intrigues in high places, the deadly struggle of one contending faction at court against another, with the peace of Europe as pawns in the game. The German Empire, like the Prussian kingdom, has little more than a paper constitution, a lex imperfecta as Gneist called it. The Reichstag has little power and less prestige, and its authority as a representative assembly has been so enervated by the shock tactics practised by the Government in forcing, or threatening to force, a series of dissolutions to punish contumacious behavior, that it is little better than a debating society. A vote of censure on the Government has absolutely no effect. Of the two powers, the Army and the Reichstag, the Army is infinitely the stronger; there is no law such as our Army Annual Act which subjects it to Parliamentary control. Even the Bundesrath[21] (or Federal Council), strong as it is, is hardly stronger than the German General Staff, for the real force which welds the German Empire together is not so much this council of plenipotentiaries from the States as the military hegemony of Prussia and the military conventions between her and the Southern States by which the latter placed their armies under her supreme control. In this shirt of steel the body politic is enclosed as in a vice.

* * * * *

Nothing illustrates the political lifelessness of Germany, the arrogance of its rulers and the docility of its people (for whom, as will be seen, the former have frequently expressed the utmost contempt) more than the tortuous course of German diplomacy during the years 1870–1900. I shall attempt to sketch very briefly the political history of those years, particularly in the light of the policy of calculated Terrorism by which the German Chancellerie sought to impose its yoke upon Europe. Well did Lord Odo Russell say that “Bismarck’s sayings inspired respect” (he might, had he not been speaking as an ambassador, have used, like Hohenlohe, a stronger word) “and his silences apprehension.”[22] If it be true, as von der Goltz says it is, that national strategy is the expression of national character and that the German method is, to use his words, “a brutal offensive,” nothing could bring out that amiable characteristic more clearly than the study of Bismarck’s diplomacy. The German is brutal in war just because he is insolent in peace. Count Herbert “can be very insolent,” wrote the servile Busch of Bismarck’s son, “which in diplomacy is very useful.”[23]

Bismarck’s attitude towards treaty obligations is one of the chief clues to the history of the years 1870–1900. International policy, he once wrote, is “a fluid element which under certain conditions will solidify, but on a change of atmosphere reverts to its original condition.”[24] The process of solidification is represented by the making of treaties; that of melting is a euphemism for the breaking of them. To reinsure Germany’s future by taking out policies in different countries in the form of secret treaties of alliance while concealing the existence of other and conflicting treaties seemed to him not only astute but admirable. Thus having persuaded Austria-Hungary to enter into a Triple Alliance with Germany and Italy by holding out as the inducement the promise of protection against Russia, Bismarck by his own subsequent confession concluded a secret treaty with Russia against Austria. To play off each of these countries against the other by independent professions of exclusive loyalty to both was the Leit-motif of his diplomacy. Nor did he treat the collective guarantees of European treaties with any greater respect. Good faith was a negotiable security. Hence his skilful exploitation of the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris (1856) when he wished to secure the friendly neutrality of Russia during the Franco-Prussian War. Russia, it will be remembered, suddenly and to every one’s surprise, denounced those clauses. The European Powers, on the initiative of England, disputed Russia’s claim to denounce motu proprio an international obligation of so solemn a character, and Bismarck responded to Lord Granville’s initiative in words of ostentatious propriety:

“That the Russian Circular of the 19th October [denouncing the clauses in question] had taken him by surprise. That while he had always held that the Treaty of 1856 pressed with undue severity upon Russia, he entirely disapproved of the manner adopted and the time selected by the Russian Government to force the revision of the Treaty.”[25]

Nearly a generation later Bismarck confessed, and prided himself on the confession, in his Reminiscences,[26] that he had himself instigated Russia to denounce the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty; that he had not only instigated this repudiation but had initiated it as affording “an opportunity of improving our relations with Russia.” Russia succumbed to the temptation, but, as Bismarck cheerfully admits, not without reluctance.

This, however, is not all: Europe “saved her face” by putting on record in the Conference of London (1871) a Protocol, subscribed by the Plenipotentiaries of all the Powers, in which it was laid down as

“an essential principle of the law of nations that no Power can repudiate treaty engagements or modify treaty provisions, except with the consent of the contracting parties by mutual agreement.”

This instrument has been called, not inaptly, the foundation of the public law of Europe. It was in virtue of this principle that Russia was obliged to submit the Russo-Turkish Treaty of San Stefano, and with it the fruits of her victories in 1877–8 to the arbitrament of the Congress of Berlin. At that Congress Bismarck played his favorite rôle of “honest broker,” and there is considerable ground for believing that he sold the same stock several times over to different clients and pocketed the “differences.” What kind of conflicting assurances he gave to the different Powers will never be fully known, but there is good ground for believing that in securing the temporary occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina he had in mind the ultimate Germanization of the Adriatic, and that domination of the Mediterranean at the expense of England which has long been the dream of German publicists from Treitschke onward.[27] What, however, clearly emerged from the Congress, and was embodied in Article XXV of the Berlin Treaty, was, that Austria was to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina under a European mandate. She acquired lordship without ownership; in other words, the territory became a Protectorate. Her title, as it originated in, so it was limited by, the Treaty of Berlin. Exactly thirty years later, in the autumn of 1908, Austria, acting in concert with Germany, abused her fiduciary position and without any mandate from the Powers annexed the territory of which she had been made the guardian. This arbitrary action was a violation of the principle to which she and Germany had subscribed at the London Conference, and Sir Edward Grey attempted, as Lord Granville had done before him, to preserve the credit of the public law of Europe by a conference which should consider the compensation due to Servia for an act which so gravely compromised her security. Russia, France, and Italy joined with Great Britain in this heroic, if belated, attempt to save the international situation. It was at this moment (March; 1909) that Germany appeared on the scene “in shining armor,” despatched a veiled ultimatum to Russia, with a covert threat to mobilize, and forced her to abandon her advocacy of the claims of Servia and, with them, of the public law of Europe.

Thus did History repeat itself. Germany stood forth once again as the chartered libertine of Europe whom no faith could bind and no duty oblige. May it not be said of her what Machiavelli said of Alexander Borgia: “E non fu mai uomo che avesse maggiore efficacia in asseveraie, e che con maggiori giuramenti affermasse una cosa, e che l’osservasse meno.”[28]

* * * * *

It would carry me far beyond the limits of this Introduction to trace in like detail the German policy of Scharfmacherei which consisted, to use the mordant phrase of M. Hanotaux, in putting up to auction that which is not yours to sell and, not infrequently, knocking it down to more than one bidder. That Bismarck encouraged Russian ambitions in Asia and French ambitions in Africa with the view of making mischief between each of them and England is notorious.[29] In his earlier attitude he was content to play the rôle of tertius gaudens; in his later he was an active agent provocateur—particularly during the years 1883–1885, when he joined in the scramble for Africa. The earlier attitude is well indicated in Hohenlohe’s revelations, that Bismarck regarded French colonial operations as a timely diversion from the Rhine, and would not be at all sorry “to see the English and French locomotives come into collision,” and a French annexation of Morocco would have had his benevolent approval. After 1883 his attitude was less passive but not less mischievous. Ten years earlier he had told Lord Odo Russell that colonies “would only be a cause of weakness” to Germany. But by 1883 he had been slowly and reluctantly converted to the militant policy of the Colonial party and the cry of Weltpolitik was as good as a war scare for electioneering purposes. It was in these days that hatred of England, a hatred conceived in jealousy of her world-Empire, was brought forth, and the obstetrics of Treitschke materially assisted its birth. Bismarck, however, as readers of his Reminiscences are well aware, had an intellectual dislike of England based on her forms of government. He loved the darker ways of diplomacy and he thought our Cabinet system fatal to them. He had an intense dislike of Parliamentarism, he despised alliances “for which the Crown is not answerable but only the fleeting cabinet of the day,” and above all he hated plain dealing and publicity. “It is astonishing,” wrote Lord Ampthill, “how cordially Bismarck hates our Blue Books.”

* * * * *

The story of Bismarck’s diplomatic relations with England during these years exhibits the same features of duplicity tempered by violence as marked his relations with the rest of Europe. He acquired Samoa by a deliberate breach of faith, and his pretense of negotiations with this country to delimit the frontiers of English and German acquisitions while he stole a march upon us were properly stigmatized by the Colonial Office as “shabby behavior.” Whether he really egged on France to “take Tunis” in order to embroil her with England will perhaps never be really known,[30] but it was widely suspected in France that his motives in supporting, if not instigating,[31] the colonial policy of Jules Ferry would not bear a very close examination. That he regarded it as a timely diversion from the Rhine is certain; that he encouraged it as a promising embarrassment to England is probable. There can be no doubt that much the same construction is to be put on his attitude towards Russia’s aspirations in Asia; that they should divert Russia from Europe was necessary; that they might entangle her with England was desirable.

Fear of Russia has, in fact, always been an obsession of the German Government. That fear is the just Nemesis of Frederick the Great’s responsibility for the infamous Partition of Poland. The reader, who wants to understand the causes of this, cannot do better than study an old map of the kingdom of Poland, and compare it with a map of Poland after the first and second Partitions. The effect of those cynical transactions was to extinguish an ancient “buffer state,” separating Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and by extinguishing it to bring them into menacing contiguity with each other. Never has any crime so haunted its perpetrators. Poland has been the permanent distraction of the three nations who dismembered her, each perpetually suspicious of the other two, and this fact is the main clue to the history of Eastern Europe.[32] The fear of Russia, and of a Russo-French or a Russo-Austrian Alliance, is the dominant feature of Bismarck’s diplomacy. He was, indeed, the evil genius of Russia for, by his own confession,[33] he intrigued to prevent her from pursuing a liberal policy towards Poland, for fear that she would thereby be drawn into friendship with France. To induce her to break faith with Russia, her Polish subjects in one case, and with Europe in another—the former by suppressing the Polish constitutional movement; the latter by repudiating the Black Sea clauses—was to isolate her from Europe. German writers to-day affect to speak of “Muscovite barbarism” and “Oriental despotism,” but it has been the deliberate policy of Germany to cut Russia off from the main stream of European civilization—to turn her face Eastwards, thereby Bismarck hoped, to quote his own words, to “weaken her pressure on our Eastern frontiers.”

But Bismarck’s contempt for treaties and his love for setting other Powers by the ears were venial compared with his policy of Terrorism. His attitude to France from 1870 to the day of his retirement from office—and it has been mis-stated many times by his successors—was very much that which Newman ascribed to the Erastian view of the treatment of the church—“to keep her low” and in a perpetual state of terror-stricken servility. That this is no exaggeration will be apparent from what follows here about the war scares with which he terrified France, and with France Europe also, in the years 1873–5, the years, when, as our ambassador at Paris, Lord Lytton, has put it, he “played with her like a cat with a mouse.”[34] Perhaps the most illuminating account of these tenebrous proceedings is to be derived from Hohenlohe, who accepted the offer of the German Embassy at Paris in May, 1874. The post was no easy one. There had already been a “scare” in the previous December, when Bismarck menaced the Duc de Broglie with war, using the attitude of the French Bishops as a pretext;[35] and, although Hohenlohe’s appointment was at first regarded as an eirenicon, there followed a period of extreme tension, when, as the Duc Decazes subsequently confessed, French Ministers were “living at the mercy of the smallest incident, the least mistake.”

The truth about the subsequent war scare of 1875 is still a matter of speculation, but the documents published of late years by de Broglie and Hanotaux, and the despatches of Lord Odo Russell, have thrown considerable suspicion of a very positive kind on Bismarck’s plea that it was all a malicious invention of Gontaut-Biron, the French Ambassador, and of Gortchakoff. A careful collation of the passages in Hohenlohe’s Memoirs goes far to confirm these suspicions, and, incidentally, to reveal Bismarck’s inner diplomacy in a very sinister light. Hohenlohe was appointed to succeed the unhappy Arnim, who had made himself obnoxious to Bismarck by his independence, and he was instructed by the Chancellor, that it was to the interest of Germany to see that France should become “a weak Republic and anarchical,” so as to be a negligible quantity in European politics, on which the Emperor William I remarked to Hohenlohe that “that was not a policy,” and was not “decent,” subsequently confiding to Hohenlohe that Bismarck was trying “to drive him more and more into war”; whereupon Hohenlohe confidently remarked: “I know nothing of it, and I should be the first to hear of it.” Hohenlohe soon found reason to change his opinion. As Gortchakoff remarked to Decazes, “they have a difficult way with diplomatists at Berlin,” and Hohenlohe was instructed to press the French Ministry for the recall of Gontaut-Biron, against whom Bismarck complained on account of his Legitimist opinions and his friendship with the Empress Augusta. Thereupon, that supple and elusive diplomat, the Duc Decazes, parried by inviting an explanation of the menacing words which Gontaut-Biron declared had been uttered to him by Radowitz, a Councilor of Legation in Berlin, to the effect that “it would be both politic and Christian to declare war at once,” the Duke adding shrewdly: “One doesn’t invent these things.” Hohenlohe in his perplexity tried to get at the truth from Bismarck, and met with what seems to us a most disingenuous explanation. Bismarck said Radowitz denied the whole thing, but added that, even if he had said it, Gontaut-Biron had no right to report it. He admitted, however, that Radowitz made mischief and “egged on” Bülow, the Foreign Secretary. “You may be sure,” he added, “that these two between them would land us in a war in four weeks if I didn’t act as safety-valve.” Hohenlohe took advantage of this confession to press for the despatch of Radowitz to some distant Embassy “to cool himself.” To this Bismarck assented, but a few days later declared that Radowitz was indispensable. When Hohenlohe attempted to sound Bismarck on the subject the Chancellor showed the utmost reserve. After the war scare had passed, Decazes related to Hohenlohe an earlier example of Imperial truculence on the part of Arnim, who, on leaving after a call, turned round as he reached the door and called out: “I have forgotten one thing. Recollect that I forbid you to get possession of Tunis”; and when Decazes affected to regard the matter as a jest, Arnim repeated with emphasis: “Yes, I forbid it.” Hohenlohe adds that an examination of his predecessor’s papers convinced him that Arnim did not speak without express authorization. When the elections for the French Chamber are imminent in the autumn of 1877, Bismarck informs Hohenlohe that Germany will adopt “a threatening attitude,” but “the scene will be laid in Berlin, not in Paris.” The usual Press campaign followed, much to the vexation of the Emperor, who complained to Hohenlohe that the result of these “pin-pricks” (Nadelstiche) would provoke the French people beyond endurance.

In studying this calculated truculence we have to remember that in Germany foreign and domestic policy are inextricably interwoven. A war scare is with the German Government a favorite method of bringing the Reichstag to a docile frame of mind and diverting it from inconvenient criticism of the Government’s policy at home. Moreover, just as war is, in von der Goltz’s words, a reflection of national character, so is diplomacy. A nation’s character is revealed in its diplomacy just as a man’s breeding is revealed in his conversation.[36] We must therefore take into account the polity of Germany and its political standards.

The picture of the Prussian autocracy in the later days of Bismarck’s rule which we can reconstruct from different entries in Hohenlohe’s Journal from the year 1885 onwards is a very somber one. It is a picture of suspicion, treachery, vacillation, and calumny in high places which remind one of nothing so much as the Court of the later Bourbons. It is a régime of violence abroad and dissensions at home. Bismarck’s health was failing him, and with his health his temper. He complained to Hohenlohe that his head “grew hot” the moment he worked, and the latter hardly dared to dispute with him on the gravest matters of State. Readers of Busch will remember his frank disclosures of the anarchy of the Foreign Office when Bismarck was away: “if the Chief gives violent instructions, they are carried out with still greater violence.” In Hohenlohe we begin to see all the grave implications of this. Bismarck, with what Lord Odo Russell called his passion for authority, was fond of sneering at English foreign policy as liable to be blown about with every wind of political doctrine; but if Parliamentary control has its defects, autocracy has defects more insidious still. Will becomes caprice, and foreign relations are at the mercy of bureaucrats who have no sense of responsibility so long as they can adroitly flatter their master. When a bureaucrat trained under this system arrives at power, the result may be nothing less than disastrous. This was what happened when Bismarck’s instrument, Holstein, concentrated power into his own hands at the Foreign Office; and as the Neue Freie Presse[37] pointed out in its disclosures on his fall (1906), the results are writ large in the narrowly averted catastrophe of a war with France in 1905. Bismarck’s disciples had all his calculated violence without its timeliness. In the Foreign Office, Hohenlohe discovered a kind of anarchical “republicanism”—“nobody,” in Bismarck’s frequent absence “will own responsibility to any one else.” “Bismarck is nervously excitable,” writes Hohenlohe in March, 1885, “and harasses his subordinates and frightens them, so that they see more behind his expression than there really is.” Like most small men, in terror themselves, they terrorized others. Moreover, the disinclination of the Prussian mind, which Bismarck himself once noted, to accept any responsibility which is not covered by instructions, tended to reduce the German Ambassadors abroad to the level of mere aides-de-camp. Hohenlohe found himself involved in the same embarrassments at Paris as Count Münster did in London. Any one who has studied the inner history of German foreign policy must have divined a secret diplomacy as devious of its kind as that of Louis XV. Of its exact bearings little is known, but a great deal may reasonably be suspected. There is always the triple diplomacy of the Court, the Imperial Chancery, and lastly the Diplomatic Service, which is not necessarily in the confidence of either.

The same debilitating influences of a dictatorship were at work in Ministerial and Parliamentary life. Bismarck had an equal contempt for the collective responsibility of Ministers and for Parliamentary control. Having done his best to deprive the Members of the Reichstag of power, he was annoyed at their irresponsibility. He called men like Bennigsen and Windhorst silly schoolboy politicians (Karlchen-Miesnick-Tertianen) or “lying scoundrels” (verlogene Halunken). He was surprised that representation without control resulted in faction. It is the Nemesis of his own political doctrines. When he met with opposition he clamored for repressive measures, and could not understand some of the scruples of the Liberals as to the exceptional laws against the Socialists. Moreover, having tried, like another Richelieu, to reduce his fellow-Ministers to the position of clerks, he was annoyed at their want of corporate spirit, and when they refused to follow him into his retirement, he declaimed against their apostasy in having “left him in the lurch.” He talked at one time of abolishing the Reichstag; at another of having a special post created for himself as “General-Adjutant.” He complained of overwork—and his energy was Titanic—but he insisted on keeping his eye on everything, conscientiously enough, because, he tells Hohenlohe, “he could not put his name to things which did not reflect his own mind.” But perhaps the gravest moral of it all is the Nemesis of deception. It is difficult to be both loved and feared, said Machiavelli. There is a somber irony in the remark of the Czar to the Emperor in 1892, which the latter repeated to Hohenlohe. Bismarck had been compelled to retire because he had failed to induce the Emperor to violate Germany’s contractual obligations to Austria by renewing his secret agreement with Russia, and he consoled himself in his retirement with the somewhat unctuous reflection that he was a martyr to the cause of Russo-German friendship, betrayed, according to him, by Caprivi. “Do you know,” said the young Emperor (in August, 1892), “the Czar has told me he has every trust in Caprivi; whereas when Bismarck has said anything to him he has always had the conviction that ‘he is tricking me.’” We are reminded of the occasion when Talleyrand told the truth so frankly that his interlocutor persisted in regarding it as an elaborate form of deception. After all, there are advantages, even in diplomacy, in being what Schuvaloff called Caprivi, a “too honest man.” It was the same with the domestic atmosphere. Bismarck, an adept at deceiving, is always complaining of deception; a master of intrigue, he is always declaiming against the intrigues of others. He inveighs against the Empress Augusta: “for fifty years she has been my opponent with the Emperor.” He lived in an atmosphere of distrust, he was often insolent, and always suspicious. It affected all his diplomatic intercourse, and was not at all to Hohenlohe’s taste. “He handles everything with a certain arrogance (Uebermut),” once wrote Hohenlohe (as we have already said) of a discussion with him over foreign affairs. “This has always been his way.”

All these tendencies came to a head when the scepter passed from the infirm hands of William I to those of a dying King, around whose death-bed the military party and the Chancellor’s party began to intrigue for influence over the young Prince whose advent to empire was hourly expected. Of these intrigues Hohenlohe, who was now Statthalter of Alsace-Lorraine, soon began to feel the effects without at first discovering the cause. He loved the people of the Reichsland, was a friend of France, and an advocate of liberal institutions, and in this spirit he strove to administer the incorporated territories. But the military party worked against him, hoping to secure the abolition of the moderate measure of local government and Reichstag representation which the Provinces possessed; and when the latter returned a hostile majority to the Reichstag they redoubled their efforts for a policy of “Thorough.” Bismarck gave but a lukewarm support to Hohenlohe and insisted on the enforcement of drastic passport regulations, which, combined with the Schnaebele affair (on which the Memoirs are very reticent), almost provoked France to War—naturally enough, in the opinion of Hohenlohe, and inevitably, according to the forebodings of the German Military Attaché at Paris. To Hohenlohe’s imploring representations Bismarck replied with grim jests about Alva’s rule in the Netherlands, adding that it is all done to show the French “that their noise doesn’t alarm us.” Meanwhile Switzerland was alienated, France injured, and Austria suspicious. But Hohenlohe, after inquiries in Berlin and Baden, began to discover the reason. Bismarck feared the influence of the military party over the martial spirit of Prince William, and was determined to show himself equally militant in order to secure his dynasty. “His sole object is to get his son Herbert into the saddle,” said Bleichroder; “so there is no hope of an improvement in Alsace-Lorraine,”—although Prince Herbert alienated everybody by his insolence, which was so gross that the Prince of Wales (King Edward), at this time in Berlin, declared that he could scarcely restrain himself from showing him the door. The leader of the military party, Waldersee, was hardly more public-spirited. He had, according to Bismarck, been made Chief of Staff by Moltke, over the heads of more competent men, because he was more docile than they. Between these military and civil autocracies the struggle for the possession of the present Emperor raged remorselessly, and with appalling levity they made the peace of two great nations the pawns in the game. The young Emperor is seen in Hohenlohe’s Memoirs feeling his way, groping in the dark; but those who, like the Grand Duke of Baden, knew the strength of his character, foresaw the end. At first, he “doesn’t trust himself to hold a different opinion from Bismarck”; but, “as soon as he perceives that Bismarck doesn’t tell him everything,” predicted the Grand Duke, “there will be trouble.” Meanwhile Waldersee was working for war, for no better reason than that he was getting old, and spoiling for a fight before it was too late for him to take the field.

For Bismarck’s dismissal there were various causes: differences in domestic policy and in foreign, and an absolute impasse on the question whether Bismarck’s fellow-Ministers were to be treated as colleagues or subordinates. “Bismarck,” said Caprivi afterwards, “had made a treaty with Russia by which we guaranteed her a free hand in Bulgaria and Constantinople, and Russia bound herself to remain neutral in a war with France. That would have meant the shattering of the Triple Alliance.” Moreover, the relations of Emperor and Chancellor were, at the last, disfigured by violent scenes, during which the Kaiser, according to the testimony of every one, showed the most astonishing dignity and restraint. But it may all be summed up in the words of the Grand Duke of Baden, reechoed by the Emperor to Hohenlohe, it had to be a choice between the dynasties of Hohenzollern and Bismarck. The end came to such a period of fear, agony, irony, despair, recrimination, and catastrophic laughter as only the pen of a Tacitus could adequately describe. Bismarck’s last years, both of power and retirement, were those of a lost soul. Having tried to intrigue with foreign Ambassadors against his Sovereign before his retirement, he tried to mobilize the Press against him after he had retired, and even stooped to join hands with his old rival, Waldersee, for the overthrow of his successor, Caprivi, being quite indifferent, complained the Kaiser bitterly, to what might happen afterwards. “It is sad to think,” said the Emperor of Austria to Hohenlohe, “that such a man can sink so low.”

When Bismarck was dismissed every one raised his head. It seemed to Hohenlohe to be at last a case of the beatitude: “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Holstein, the Under-Secretary, who, to the disgust of Bismarck, refused to follow his chief and who now quietly made himself the residuary legatee of the whole political inheritance of the Foreign Office, intended by Bismarck for his son, freely criticized his ex-chief’s policy in a conversation with Hohenlohe:

“He adduced as errors of Bismarck’s policy: The Berlin Congress, the mediation in China in favor of France, the prevention of the conflict between England and Russia in Afghanistan, and the whole of his tracasseries with Russia. As to his recent plan of leaving Austria in the lurch, he says we should then have made ourselves so contemptible that we should have become isolated and dependent on Russia.”

Bismarck, whom Hohenlohe visited in his retirement, with a strange want of patriotism and of perspicuity, pursued “his favorite theme” and inveighed against the envy (der Neid) of the German people and their incurable particularism. He never divined how much his jealous autocracy had fostered these tendencies. One may hazard the opinion that the Germans are no more wanting in public spirit and political capacity than any other nation; but if they are deprived of the rights of private judgment and the exercise of political ability, they are no more likely to be immune from the corresponding disabilities. Certainly, in no country where public men are accustomed to the exercise of mutual tolerance and loyal cooperation by the practise of Cabinet government, and where public opinion has healthy play, would such an exhibition of disloyalty and slander as is here exhibited be tolerated, or even possible. When in 1895 Caprivi succumbed to the intrigues of the military caste and the Agrarian Party, Hohenlohe, now in his seventy-sixth year, was entreated to come to the rescue, his accession being regarded as the only security for German unity. To his eternal credit, Hohenlohe accepted; but, if we may read between the lines of the scanty extracts here vouchsafed from the record of a Ministerial activity of six years, we may conjecture that it was mostly labor and sorrow. He was opposed to agrarianism and repressive measures, and anxious “to get on with the Reichstag,” seeing in the forms of public discussion the only security for the public peace. But “the Prussian Junkers could not tolerate South German Liberalism,” and the most powerful political caste in the world, with the Army and the King on their side, appear to have been too much for him. His retirement in 1900 marks the end of a fugitive attempt at something like a liberal policy in Germany, and during the fourteen years which have elapsed since that event autocracy has held undisputed sway in Germany. The history of these latter years is fresh in the minds of most students of public affairs, and we will not attempt to pursue it here.

CHAPTER III
GERMAN CULTURE
THE ACADEMIC GARRISON

Nothing is so characteristic of the German nation as its astonishing single-mindedness—using that term in a mental and not a moral sense. Since Prussia established her ascendency the nation has developed an immense concentration of purpose. If the military men are not more belligerent than the diplomatists, the diplomatists are not more belligerent than the professors. A single purpose seems to animate them: it is to proclaim the spiritual efficacy, and the eternal necessity, of War.

Already there are signs that the German professors are taking the field. Their mobilization is apparently not yet complete, but we may expect before long to see their whole force, from the oldest Professor Emeritus down to the youngest Privat-dozent, sharpening their pens against us. Professors Harnack, Haeckel, and Eucken have already made a reconnaissance in force, and in language which might have come straight from the armory of Treitschke have denounced the mingled cupidity and hypocrisy with which we, so they say, have joined forces with Muscovite “barbarism” against Teutonic culture. This, we may feel sure, is only the beginning.

German professors have a way of making history as well as writing it, and the Prussian Government has always attached the greatest importance to taking away its enemy’s character before it despoils him of his goods. Long before the wars of 1866 and 1870 the seminars of the Prussian universities were as busy forging title-deeds to the smaller German states and to Alsace-Lorraine as any medieval scriptorium, and not less ingenious. In the Franco-Prussian War the professors—Treitschke, Mommsen, Sybel—were the first to take the field and the last to quit it. Theirs it was to exploit the secular hatreds of the past. Even Ranke, the nearest approach to “a good European” of which German schools of history could boast, was implacable. When asked by Thiers on whom, the Third Empire having fallen, the Germans were continuing to make war, he replied, “On Louis XIV.”

Hardly were the results achieved before a casuistry was developed to justify them. Sybel’s apologetics in “Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs” began it; others have gone far beyond them. “Blessed be the hand that traced those lines,” is Professor Delbrück’s benediction on the forgery of the Ems telegram; and in language which is almost a paraphrase of Bismarck’s cynical declaration that a diplomatic pretext for a war can always be found when you want one, he has laid it down that “a good diplomat” should always have his quiver full of such barbed arrows. So, too, Sybel on Frederick’s complicity in the Second Partition of an inoffensive Poland anticipates in almost so many words the recent sophistry of the Imperial Chancellor on the violation of the neutrality of Belgium. “Wrong? I grant you—a violation of law in the most literal sense of the word.” But, he adds, necessity knows no law, and, “to sum it up,” after all, Prussia “thereby gained a very considerable territory.” And thus Treitschke on the question of the duchies, or again, to go farther afield, Mommsen on the inexorable “law” that the race is always to the swift and the battle to the strong. Frederick the Great surely knew his fellow-countrymen when he said with characteristic cynicism: “I begin by taking; I can always find pedants to prove my rights afterwards.” Not the Chancelleries only, but even the General Staff has worked hand in glove with the lecture-room. When Bernhardi and von der Goltz exalt the spiritual efficacy of war they are repeating almost word for word the language of Treitschke. Not a faculty but ministers to German statecraft in its turn. The economists, notably von Halle and Wagner, have been as busy and pragmatical as the historians—theirs is the doctrine of Prussian military hegemony upon a basis of agrarianism, of the absorption of Holland, and of “the future upon the water.” The very vocabulary of the Kaiser’s speeches has been coined in the lecture-rooms of Berlin University.

To understand the potency of these academic influences in German policy one must know something of the constitution of the German universities. In no country is the control of the Government over the universities so strong; nowhere is it so vigilant. Political favor may make or mar an academic career; the complaisant professor is decorated, the contumacious is cashiered. German academic history is full of examples. Treitschke, Sybel, even Mommsen all felt the weight of royal displeasure at one period or another. The present Emperor vetoed the award of the Verdun prize to Sybel because in his history of Prussian policy he had exalted Bismarck at the expense of the Hohenzollerns, and he threatened to close the archives to Treitschke. Even Mommsen had at one time to learn the steepness of alien stairs.

On the other hand, no Government recognizes so readily the value of a professor who is docile—he is of more value than many Pomeranian Grenadiers. Bismarck invited Treitschke to accompany the army of Sadowa as a writer of military bulletins, and both he and Sybel were, after due caution, commissioned to write those apologetics of Prussian policy which are classics of their kind. Most German professors have at one time or another been publicists, and the Grenzboten and the Preussische Jahrbücher maintain the polemical traditions of Sybel’s “Historische Zeitschrift.” Moreover, the German university system, with the singular freedom in the choice of lectures and universities, which it leaves to the student, tends to make a professor’s classes depend for their success on his power of attracting a public by trenchant oratory. Well has Acton said that the “garrison” of distinguished historians that prepared the Prussian supremacy, together with their own, “hold Berlin like a fortress.” They still hold it and their science of fortification has not changed.

It is not necessary to recapitulate here the earlier phases of this politico-historical school whose motto found expression in Droysen’s aphorism, “The statesman is the historian in practise,” and whose moral was “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,” or, to put it less pretentiously, “Nothing succeeds like success.” All of them, Niebuhr, Mommsen, Droysen, Häusser, Sybel, Treitschke, have this in common: that they are merciless to the rights of small nationalities. This was no accident; it was due to the magnetism exercised upon their minds by the hegemony of Prussia and by their opposition to the idea of a loose confederation of small States. They were almost equally united in a common detestation of France and could find no word too hard for her polity, her literature, her ideals, and her people. “Sodom” and “Babylon” were the best they could spare her. “Die Nation ist unser Feind” wrote Treitschke in 1870, and “we must draw her teeth.” Even Ranke declared that everything good in Germany had risen by way of opposition to French influences. The intellectual war was carried into every field and epoch of history, and all the institutions of modern civilization were traced by writers like Waitz and Maurer to the early German tribes uncorrupted by Roman influences. The same spirit was apparent in Sybel’s hatred of the French Revolution and all its works.

This is not the place to expound the intellectual revenge which French scholars like Fustel de Coulanges in the one sphere, and Albert Sorel in the other, afterwards took upon this insensate chauvinism of the chair. Sufficient to say that this cult of war and gospel of hate have narrowed the outlook of German thought ever since, as Renan warned Strauss they would, and have left Germany in an intellectual isolation from the rest of Europe only to be paralleled by her moral isolation of to-day. It was useless for Renan to remind German scholars that pride is the only vice which is punished in this world. “We Germans,” retorted Mommsen, “are not modest and don’t pretend to be.” The words are almost the echo of that “thrasonic brag” with which Bismarck one day electrified the Reichstag.

In the academic circles of to-day much of the hate formerly vented upon France is now diverted to England. In this, Treitschke set the fashion. Nothing delighted him more than to garnish his immensely popular lectures with uproarious jests at England—“the hypocrite who, with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other, scatters over the universe the benefits of civilization.” But there was always method in his madness. Treitschke was one of the first to demand for Germany “a place in the sun”—this commonplace of Imperial speeches was, I believe, coined by Sybel—and to press for the creation of a German Navy which should do what “Europe” had failed to do—set bounds to the crushing domination of the British Fleet and “restore the Mediterranean to the Mediterranean peoples” by snatching back Malta, Corfu, and Gibraltar. The seed fell on fruitful soil. A young economist, the late Professor von Halle, whose vehement lectures I used to attend when a student at Berlin University, worked out the maritime possibilities of German ambitions in “Volks-und Seewirthschaft,” and his method is highly significant in view of the recent ultimatum delivered by Germany to Belgium. It was nothing less than the seduction of Holland by economic bribes into promising to Germany the abandonment of the neutrality of her ports in the event of war. Thereby, and thereby alone, he argued, Germany would be reconciled to the “monstrosity” (Unding) of the mouth of the Rhine being in non-German hands. In return Germany would take Holland and her colonies under her “protection.” To the same effect writes Professor Karl Lamprecht in his “Zur jüngsten deutschen Vergangenheit,” seizing upon the Boer war to demonstrate to Holland that England is the enemy. The same argument was put forward by Professor Lexis. This was in the true line of academic tradition. Even the discreet and temperate Ranke once counseled Bismarck to annex Switzerland.

Such, in briefest outline, is the story of the academic “garrison.” Of the lesser lansquenets, the horde of privat-dozents and obscurer professors, whose intellectual folly is only equaled by their audacity, and who are the mainstay of the Pan-German movement, I have said nothing. It may be doubted whether the second generation can show anything like the intellectual prestige which, with all their intemperance, distinguished their predecessors. But they have all laid to heart Treitschke’s maxim, “Be governmental,” honor the King, worship the State, and “believe that no salvation is possible except by the annihilation of the smaller States.” It is a strange ending to the Germany of Kant and Goethe.

Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben
Der täglich sie erobern muss—

The noble lines of Goethe have now a variant reading—“He alone achieves freedom and existence who seeks to repeat his conquests at the expense of others” might be the motto of the Germans of to-day. But as they have appealed to History, so will History answer them.

CHAPTER IV
GERMAN THOUGHT
TREITSCHKE

In a pamphlet of mordant irony addressed to “Messieurs les Ministres du culte évangélique de l’armée du roi de Prusse” in the dark days of 1870, Fustel de Coulanges warned these evangelical camp-followers of the consequences to German civilization of their doctrines of a Holy War. “Your error is not a crime but it makes you commit one, for it leads you to preach war which is the greatest of all crimes.” It was not impossible, he added, that that very war might be the beginning of the decadence of Germany, even as it would inaugurate the revival of France. History has proved him a true prophet, but it has required more than a generation to show with what subtlety the moral poison of such teaching has penetrated into German life and character. The great apostle of that teaching was Treitschke who, though not indeed a theologian, was characteristically fond of praying in aid the vocabulary of theology. “Every intelligent theologian understands perfectly well,” he wrote, “that the Biblical saying ‘Thou shalt not kill’ ought no more to be interpreted literally than the apostolic injunction to give one’s goods to the poor.” He called in the Old Testament to redress the balance of the New. “The doctrines of the apple of discord and of original sin are the great facts which the pages of History everywhere reveal.”

To-day, everybody talks of Treitschke, though I doubt if half a dozen people in England have read him. His brilliant essays, Historische und Politische Aufsätze, illuminating almost every aspect of German controversy, have never been translated; neither has his Politik, a searching and cynical examination of the foundations of Political Science which exalts the State at the expense of Society; and his Deutsche Geschichte, which was designed to be the supreme apologetic of Prussian policy, is also unknown in our tongue. But in Germany their vogue has been and still is enormous; they are to Germans what Carlyle and Macaulay were to us. Treitschke, indeed, has much in common with Carlyle; the same contempt for Parliaments and constitutional freedom; the same worship of the strong man armed; the same somber, almost savage, irony, and, let it not be forgotten, the same deep moral fervor. His character was irreproachable. At the age of fifteen he wrote down this motto for his own: “To be always upright, honest, moral, to become a man, a man useful to humanity, a brave man—these are my ambitions.” This high ideal he strove manfully to realize. But he was a doctrinaire, and of all doctrinaires the conscientious doctrinaire is the most dangerous. Undoubtedly, in his case, as in that of so many other enlightened Germans—Sybel, for example—his apostasy from Liberalism dated from the moment of his conviction that the only hope for German unity lay not in Parliaments but in the military hegemony of Prussia. The bloody triumphs of the Austro-Prussian War convinced him that the salvation of Germany was “only possible by the annihilation of small States,” that States rest on force, not consent, that success is the supreme test of merit, and that the issues of war are the judgment of God. He was singularly free from sophistry and never attempted, like Sybel, to defend the Ems telegram by the disingenuous plea that “an abbreviation is not a falsification”; it was enough for him that the trick achieved its purpose. And he had a frank contempt for those Prussian jurists who attempted to find a legal title to Schleswig-Holstein; the real truth of the matter he roundly declared, was that the annexation of the duchies was necessary for the realization of German aims. When he writes about war he writes without any sanctimonious cant:

It is not for Germans to repeat the commonplaces of the apostles of peace or of the priests of Mammon, nor should they close their eyes before the cruel necessities of the age. Yes, ours is an epoch of war, our age is an age of iron. If the strong get the better of the weak, it is an inexorable law of life. Those wars of hunger which we still see to-day amongst negro tribes are as necessary for the economic conditions of the heart of Africa as the sacred war which a people undertakes to preserve the most precious belongings of its moral culture. There as here it is a struggle for life, here for a moral good, there for a material good.

Readers of Bernhardi will recognize here the source of Bernhardi’s inspiration. If Treitschke was a casuist at all—and as a rule he is refreshingly, if brutally, frank—his was the supreme casuistry of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. That the means may corrupt the end or become an end in themselves he never saw, or only saw it at the end of his life. He honestly believed that war was the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, he feared the commercialism of modern times, and despised England because he judged her wars to have always been undertaken with a view to the conquest of markets. He sneers at the Englishman who “scatters the blessings of civilization with a Bible in one hand and an opium pipe in the other.” He honestly believed that Germany exhibited a purity of domestic life, a pastoral simplicity, and a deep religious faith to which no European country could approach, and at the time he wrote the picture was not overdrawn. He has written passages of noble and tender sentiment, in which he celebrates the piety of the peasant, whose religious exercises were hallowed, wherever the German tongue was spoken, by the massive faith of Luther’s great Hymn. Writing of German Protestantism as the corner-stone of German unity, he says:

Everywhere it has been the solid rampart of our language and customs. In Alsace, as in the mountains of Transylvania and on the distant shores of the Baltic, as long as the peasant shall sing his old canticle

Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott

German life shall not pass away.

Those who would understand the strength of Treitschke’s influence on his generation must not lose sight of these purer elements in his teaching.

But Treitschke was dazzled by the military successes of Prussia in 1866. With that violent reaction against culture which is so common among its professional devotees, and which often makes the men of the pen far more sanguinary than the men of the sword, he derided the old Germany of Goethe and Kant as “a nation of poets and thinkers without a polity” (“Ein staatloses Volk von Dichtern und Denkern”), and almost despised his own intellectual vocation. “Each dragoon,” he cried enviously, “who knocks a Croat on the head does far more for the German cause than the finest political brain that ever wielded a trenchant pen.” But for his grievous deafness he would, like his father, have chosen the profession of arms. Failing that, he chose to teach. “It is a fine thing,” he wrote, “to be master of the younger generation,” and he set himself to indoctrinate it with the aim of German unity. He taught from 1859 to 1875 successively at Leipzig, Freiburg, Kiel, and Heidelberg. From 1875 till his death in 1896 he occupied with immense éclat the chair of modern history at Berlin. And so, although a Saxon, he enlisted his pen in the service of Prussia—Prussia which always knows how to attract men of ideas but rarely produces them. In the great roll of German statesmen and thinkers and poets—Stein, Hardenberg, Goethe, Hegel—you will look almost in vain for one who is of Prussian birth. She may pervert them; she cannot create them.

Treitschke’s views were, of course, shared by many of his contemporaries. The Seminars of the German Universities were the arsenals that forged the intellectual weapons of the Prussian hegemony. Niebuhr, Ranke, Mommsen, Sybel, Häusser, Droysen, Gneist—all ministered to that ascendency, and they all have this in common—that they are merciless to the claims of the small States whose existence seemed to present an obstacle to Prussian aims. They are also united in common hatred of France, for they feared not only the adventures of Napoleon the Third but the leveling doctrines of the French Revolution. Burke’s Letters on a Regicide Peace are not more violent against France than the writings of Sybel, Mommsen, and Treitschke. What, however, distinguishes Treitschke from his intellectual confrères is his thoroughness. They made reservations which he scorned to make. Sybel, for example, is often apologetic when he comes to the more questionable episodes in Prussian policy—the partition of Poland, the affairs of the duchies, the Treaty of Bâle, the diplomacy of 1870; Treitschke is disturbed by no such qualms. Bismarck who practised a certain economy in giving Sybel access to official documents for his semi-official history of Prussian policy, Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs, had much greater confidence in Treitschke and told him he felt sure he would not be disturbed to find that “our political linen is not as white as it might be.” So, too, while others like Mommsen refused to go the whole way with Bismarck in domestic policy, and clung to their early Radicalism, Treitschke had no compunction about absolutism. He ended, indeed, by becoming the champion of the Junkers, and his history is a kind of hagiography of the Hohenzollerns. “Be governmental” was his succinct maxim, and he rested his hopes for Germany on the bureaucracy and the army. Indeed, if he had had his way, he would have substituted a unity state for the federal system of the German Empire, and would have liked to see all Germany an enlarged Prussia—“ein erweitertes Preussen”—a view which is somewhat difficult to reconcile with his attacks on France as being “politically in a state of perpetual nonage,” and on the French Government as hostile to all forms of provincial autonomy.

By a quite natural transition he was led on from his championship of the unity of Germany to a conception of her rôle as a world-power. He is the true father of Weltpolitik. Much of what he writes on this head is legitimate enough. Like Hohenlohe and Bismarck he felt the humiliation of Germany’s weakness in the councils of Europe. Writing in 1863 he complains:

One thing we still lack—the State. Our people is the only one which has no common legislation, which can send no representatives to the Concert of Europe. No salute greets the German flag in a foreign port. Our Fatherland sails the high seas without colors like a pirate.

Germany, he declared, must become “a power across the sea.” This conclusion, coupled with bitter recollections of the part played by England in the affair of the Duchies, no doubt accounted for his growing dislike of England.

Among the English the love of money has killed every sentiment of honor and every distinction between what is just and unjust. They hide their poltroonery and their materialism behind grand phrases of unctuous theology. When one sees the English press raising its eyes to heaven, frightened by the audacity of these faithless peoples in arms upon the Continent, one might imagine one heard a venerable parson droning away. As if the Almighty God, in Whose name Cromwell’s Ironsides fought their battles, commanded us Germans to allow our enemy to march undisturbed upon Berlin. Oh, what hypocrisy! Oh, cant, cant, cant!

Europe, he says elsewhere, should have put bounds to the overweening ambition of Britain by bringing to an end the crushing domination of the English Fleet at Gibraltar, at Malta, and at Corfu, and by “restoring the Mediterranean to the Mediterranean peoples.” Thus did he sow the seeds of German maritime ambition.

If I were asked to select the most characteristic of Treitschke’s works I should be inclined to choose the vehement little pamphlet Was fordern wir von Frankreich? in which he insisted on the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. It is at once the vindication of Prussian policy, and, in the light of the last forty-four years, its condemnation. Like Mommsen, who wrote in much the same strain at the same time, he insisted that the people of the conquered provinces must be “forced to be free,” that Morality and History (which for him are much the same thing) proclaim they are German without knowing it.

We Germans, who know Germany and France, know better what is good for Alsace than the unhappy people themselves, who through their French associations have lived in ignorance of the new Germany. We will give them back their own identity against their will. We have in the enormous changes of these times too often seen in glad astonishment the immortal working of the moral forces of History (“das unsterbliche Fortwirken der sittlichen Mächte der Geschichte”) to be able to believe in the unconditional value of a plebiscite on this matter. We invoke the men of the past against the present.

The ruthless pedantry of this is characteristically Prussian. It is easy to appeal to the past against the present, to the dead against the living. Dead men tell no tales. It was, he admitted, true that the Alsatians did not love the Germans. These “misguided people” betrayed “that fatal impulse of Germans” to cleave to other nations than their own. “Well may we Germans be horrified,” he adds, “when to-day we see these German people rail in German speech like wild beasts against their own flesh and blood as ‘German curs’ (‘deutschen Hunde’) and ‘stink-Prussians’ (‘Stinkpreussen’).” Treitschke was too honest to deny it. There was, he ruefully admitted, something rather unlovely about the “civilizing” methods of Prussia. “Prussia has perhaps not always been guided by genial men.” But, he argued, Prussia united under the new Empire to the rest of Germany would become humanized and would in turn humanize the new subject-peoples. Well, the forty-four years that have elapsed since Treitschke wrote have refuted him. Instead of a Germanized Prussia, we see a Prussianized Germany. Her “geniality” is the geniality of Zabern. The Poles, the Danes, and the Alsatians are still contumacious. Treitschke appealed to History and History has answered him.

Had he never any misgivings? Yes. After twenty-five years, and within a month of his death, this Hebrew prophet looking round in the year of grace 1895 on the “culture” of modern Germany was filled with apprehension. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sedan he delivered an address in the University of Berlin which struck his fond disciples dumb. The Empire, he declared, had disarmed her enemies neither without nor within.

In every direction our manners have deteriorated. The respect which Goethe declared to be the true end of all moral education disappears in the new generation with a giddy rapidity: respect of God, respect for the limits which nature and society have placed between the two sexes; respect for the Fatherland, which is every day disappearing before the will-of-the-wisp of an indulgent humanity. The more culture extends, the more insipid it becomes; men despise the profundity of the ancient world and consider only that which subserves their immediate end.

The things of the mind, he cried, had lost their hold on the German people. Every one was eager to get rich and to relieve the monotony of a vain existence by the cult of idle and meretricious pleasures. The signs of the times were everywhere dark and gloomy. The new Emperor (William the Second), he had already hinted, was a dangerous charlatan.

The wheel had come full circle. Fustel de Coulanges was justified of his prophecy. And the handwriting on the walls of Destiny was never more legible than now.

CONCLUSION

The contemplation of History, so a great master of the art has told us, may not make men wise but it is sure to make them sad. The austere Muse has never had a sadder page to show than that which is even now being added to her record. We see now the full fruition of the German doctrine of the beatitude of War. In sorrow and in anguish, in anguish and in darkness, Belgium is weeping for her children and will not be comforted because they are not. The invader has spared neither age nor sex, neither rank nor function, and every insult that malice could invent, or insolence inspire, has been heaped upon her bowed head. The hearths are cold, the altars desecrated, the fields untilled, the granaries empty. The peasant watches the heavens but he may not sow, he has regarded his fields but he might not reap. The very stones in her cities cry out; hardly one of them is left upon another. No nation had ever given Europe more blithe and winning pledges of her devotion to the arts of peace. The Flemish school of painters had endowed the world with portraits of a grave tenderness which posterity might always admire but could never imitate. The chisels of her medieval craftsmen had left us a legacy of buoyant fancy in stone whose characters were alive for us with the animation of the Canterbury Tales. All this the invader has stamped out like the plague. A once busy and thriving community begs its bread in alien lands. Never since the captivity of Babylon has there been so tragic an expatriation. Yet noble in her sorrow and exalted in her anguish, Belgium, like some patient caryatid, still supports the broken architrave of the violated Treaty. Her little army is still unconquered, her spirit is never crushed. She will arise purified by her sorrow and ennobled by her suffering, and generations yet unborn shall rise up to call her blessed.

THE WAR BOOK OF THE
GERMAN GENERAL STAFF

INTRODUCTION

What is a State of War.

The armies of belligerent States on the outbreak of hostilities, or indeed the moment war is declared, enter into a certain relation with one another which is known by the name of “A State of War.” This relationship, which at the beginning only concerns the members of the two armies, is extended, the moment the frontier is crossed, to all inhabitants of the enemy’s State, so far as its territory is occupied; indeed it extends itself ultimately to both the movable and immovable property of the State and its citizens.

Active Persons and Passive.

A distinction is drawn between an “active” and a “passive” state of war. By the first is to be understood the relation to one another of the actual fighting organs of the two belligerents, that is to say, of the persons forming the army, besides that of the representative heads of the State and of the leaders. By the second term, i.e., the “passive” state of war, on the other hand, is to be understood the relationship of the hostile army to those inhabitants of the State, who share in the actual conduct of war only in consequence of their natural association with the army of their own State, and who on that account are only to be regarded as enemies in a passive sense. As occupying an intermediate position, one has often to take into account a number of persons who while belonging to the army do not actually participate in the conduct of hostilities but continue in the field to pursue what is to some extent a peaceful occupation, such as Army Chaplains, Doctors, Medical Officers of Health, Hospital Nurses, Voluntary Nurses, and other Officials, Sutlers, Contractors, Newspaper Correspondents and the like.

That War is no Respecter of Persons.

Now although according to the modern conception of war, it is primarily concerned with the persons belonging to the opposing armies, yet no citizen or inhabitant of a State occupied by a hostile army can altogether escape the burdens, restrictions, sacrifices, and inconveniences which are the natural consequence of a State of War. A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the combatants of the Enemy State and the positions they occupy, but it will and must in like manner seek to destroy the total intellectual[38] and material resources of the latter.[39] Humanitarian claims such as the protection of men and their goods can only be taken into consideration in so far as the nature and object of the war permit.

The Usages of War.

Consequently the “argument of war” permits every belligerent State to have recourse to all means which enable it to attain the object of the war; still, practise has taught the advisability of allowing in one’s own interest the introduction of a limitation in the use of certain methods of war and a total renunciation of the use of others. Chivalrous feelings, Christian thought, higher civilization and, by no means least of all, the recognition of one’s own advantage, have led to a voluntary and self-imposed limitation, the necessity of which is to-day tacitly recognized by all States and their armies. They have led in the course of time, in the simple transmission of knightly usage in the passages of arms, to a series of agreements, hallowed by tradition, and we are accustomed to sum these up in the words “usage of war” (Kriegsbrauch), “custom of war” (Kriegssitte), “or fashion of war” (Kriegsmanier). Customs of this kind have always existed, even in the times of antiquity; they differed according to the civilization of the different nations and their public economy, they were not always identical, even in one and the same conflict, and they have in the course of time often changed; they are older than any scientific law of war, they have come down to us unwritten, and moreover they maintain themselves in full vitality; they have therefore won an assured position in standing armies according as these latter have been introduced into the systems of almost every European State.

Of the futility of Written Agreements as Scraps of Paper.

The fact that such limitations of the unrestricted and reckless application of all the available means for the conduct of war, and thereby the humanization of the customary methods of pursuing war really exist, and are actually observed by the armies of all civilized States, has in the course of the nineteenth century often led to attempts to develop, to extend, and thus to make universally binding these preexisting usages of war; to elevate them to the level of laws binding nations and armies, in other words to create a codex belli; a law of war. All these attempts have hitherto, with some few exceptions to be mentioned later, completely failed. If, therefore, in the following work the expression “the law of war” is used, it must be understood that by it is meant not a lex scripta introduced by international agreements; but only a reciprocity of mutual agreement; a limitation of arbitrary behavior, which custom and conventionality, human friendliness and a calculating egotism have erected, but for the observance of which there exists no express sanction, but only “the fear of reprisals” decides.

The “flabby emotion” of Human­itar­ian­ism.

Consequently the usage of war is even now the only means of regulating the relations of belligerent States to one another. But with the idea of the usages of war will always be bound up the character of something transitory, inconstant, something dependent on factors outside the army. Nowadays it is not only the army which influences the spirit of the customs of war and assures recognition of its unwritten laws. Since the almost universal introduction of conscription, the peoples themselves exercise a profound influence upon this spirit. In the modern usages of war one can no longer regard merely the traditional inheritance of the ancient etiquette of the profession of arms, and the professional outlook accompanying it, but there is also the deposit of the currents of thought which agitate our time. But since the tendency of thought of the last century was dominated essentially by humanitarian considerations which not infrequently degenerated into sentimentality and flabby emotion (Sentimentalität und weichlicher Gefühlsschwärmerei) there have not been wanting attempts to influence the development of the usages of war in a way which was in fundamental contradiction with the nature of war and its object. Attempts of this kind will also not be wanting in the future, the more so as these agitations have found a kind of moral recognition in some provisions of the Geneva Convention and the Brussels and Hague Conferences.

Cruelty is often “the truest humanity.”

The perfect Officer.

Moreover the officer is a child of his time. He is subject to the intellectual[40] tendencies which influence his own nation; the more educated he is the more will this be the case. The danger that, in this way, he will arrive at false views about the essential character of war must not be lost sight of. The danger can only be met by a thorough study of war itself. By steeping himself in military history an officer will be able to guard himself against excessive humanitarian notions, it will teach him that certain severities are indispensable to war, nay more, that the only true humanity very often lies in a ruthless application of them. It will also teach him how the rules of belligerent intercourse in war have developed, how in the course of time they have solidified into general usages of war, and finally it will teach him whether the governing usages of war are justified or not, whether they are to be modified or whether they are to be observed. But for a study of military history in this light, knowledge of the fundamental conceptions of modern international and military movements is certainly necessary. To present this is the main purpose of the following work.

PART I
THE USAGES OF WAR IN REGARD TO THE HOSTILE ARMY

CHAPTER I
WHO BELONGS TO THE HOSTILE ARMY?

Who are Combatants and who are not.

Since the subjects of enemy States have quite different rights and duties according as they occupy an active or a passive position, the question arises: Who is to be recognized as occupying the active position, or what amounts to the same thing—Who belongs to the hostile army? This is a question of particular importance.

According to the universal usages of war, the following are to be regarded as occupying an active position:

1. The heads of the enemy’s state and its ministers, even though they possess no military rank.

2. The regular army, and it is a matter of indifference whether the army is recruited voluntarily or by conscription; whether the army consists of subjects or aliens (mercenaries); whether it is brought together out of elements which were already in the service in time of peace, or out of such as are enrolled at the moment of mobilization (militia, reserve, national guard and Landsturm).

3. Subject to certain assumptions, irregular combatants, also, i.e., such as are not constituent parts of the regular army, but have only taken up arms for the length of the war, or, indeed, for a particular task of the war.

The Irregular.

Only the third class of persons need be more closely considered. In their case the question how far the rights of an active position are to be conceded to them has at all times been matter of controversy, and the treatment of irregular troops has in consequence varied considerably. Generally speaking the study of military history leads to the conclusion that the Commanding Officers of regular armies were always inclined to regard irregular troops of the enemy with distrust, and to apply to them the contemporary laws of war with peculiar severity. This unfavorable prejudice is based on the ground that the want of a military education and of stern discipline among irregular troops, easily leads to transgressions and to non-observance of the usages of war, and that the minor skirmishes which they prefer to indulge in, and which by their very nature lead to individual enterprise, open the door to irregularity and savagery, and easily deteriorate into robbery and unauthorized violence, so that in every case the general insecurity which it develops engenders bitterness, fury, and revengeful feelings in the harassed troops, and leads to cruel reprisals. Let any one read the combats of the French troops in the Spanish Peninsula in the years 1808 to 1814, in Tyrol in 1809, in Germany in 1813, and also those of the English in their different Colonial wars, or again the Carlist Wars, the Russo-Turkish War, and the Franco-Prussian War,[41] and one will everywhere find this experience confirmed.

Each State must decide for itself.

If these points of view are on the whole decisive against the employment of irregular troops, yet on the other hand, it must be left to each particular State to determine how far it will disregard such considerations; from the point of view of international law no State is compelled to limit the instruments of its military operations to the standing army. It is, on the contrary, completely justified in drawing upon all the inhabitants capable of bearing arms, entirely according to its discretion, and in imparting to them an authorization to participate in the war.

The necessity of Authorization.

This public authorization has therefore been until quite recently regarded as the presumed necessary condition of any recognition of combatant rights.

Exceptions which prove the rule.

The Free Lance.

Of course there are numerous examples in military history in which irregular combatants have been recognized as combatants by the enemy, without any public authorization of the kind; thus in the latest wars of North America, Switzerland, and Italy, and also in the case of the campaign (without any kind of commission from a State) of Garibaldi against Naples and Sicily in the year 1860. But in all these cases the tacitly conceded recognition originated not out of any obligatory principles of international law or of military usage, but simply and solely out of the fear of reprisals. The power to prevent the entrance on the scene of these irregular partizans did not exist, and it was feared that by not recognizing their quality as combatants the war a cruel character might be given, and consequently that more harm than good might result to the parties themselves. On the other hand there has always been a universal consensus of opinion against recognizing irregulars who make their appearance individually or in small bands, and who conduct war in some measure on their own account (auf eigene Faust) detached from the army, and such opinion approves of the punishment of these offenders with death.

This legal attitude which denies every unauthorized rising and identifies it with brigandage was taken up by the revolutionary armies of France towards the insurrection in La Vendée, and again by Napoleon in his proceedings against Schill and Dörnberg in the year 1809, and again by Wellington, Schwarzenberg, and Blücher, in the Proclamations issued by them in France in the year 1814, and the German Army adopted the same standpoint in the year 1870–71, when it demanded that: “Every prisoner who wishes to be treated as a prisoner of war must produce a certificate as to his character as a French soldier, issued by the legal authorities, and addressed to him personally, to the effect that he has been called to the Colors and is borne on the Roll of a corps organized on a military footing by the French Government.”

Modern views.

In the controversies which have arisen since the war of 1870–71 over the different questions of international law and the laws of war, decisive emphasis has no longer been placed upon the question of public authorization, and it has been proposed, on grounds of expediency, to recognize as combatants such irregulars as are indeed without an express and immediate public authorization, but who are organized in military fashion and are under a responsible leader. The view here taken was that by a recognition of these kind of irregular troops the dangers and horrors of war would be diminished, and that a substitute for the legal authorization lacking in the case of individuals offers itself in the military organization and in the existence of a leader responsible to his own State.

Moreover the Brussels Declaration of August 27, 1874, and in consonance with it the Manual of the Institute of International Law, desire as the first condition of recognition as combatants “that they have at their head a personality who is responsible for the behavior of those under him to his own Government.”[42]

The German Military View.

Considered from the military point of view there is not much objection to the omission of the demand for public authorization, so soon as it becomes a question of organized detachments of troops, but in the case of hostile individuals who appear on the scene we shall none the less be unable to dispense with the certificate of membership of an organized band, if such individuals are to be regarded and treated as lawful belligerents.

But the organization of irregulars in military bands and their subjection to a responsible leader are not by themselves sufficient to enable one to grant them the status of belligerents; even more important than these is the necessity of being able to recognize them as such and of their carrying their arms openly. The soldier must know who he has against him as an active opponent, he must be protected against treacherous killing and against any military operation which is prohibited by the usages of war among regular armies. The chivalrous idea which rules in the regular armies of all civilized States always seeks an open profession of one’s belligerent character. The demand must, therefore, be insisted on that irregular troops, although not in uniform, shall at least be distinguishable by visible signs which are recognizable at a distance.[43] Only by such means can the occurrence of misuse in the practise of war on the one side, and the tragic consequences of the non-recognition of combatant status on the other, be made impossible. The Brussels Declarations also therefore recommend, in Art. 9 (2 and 3), that they, i.e., the irregular troops, should wear a fixed sign which is visible from a distance, and that they should carry their weapons openly. The Hague Convention adds to these three conditions yet a fourth, “That they observe the laws and usages of war in their military operations.”

The Levée en masse.

The Hague Regulations will not do.

A short way with the Defender of his Country.

This condition must also be maintained if it becomes a question of the levée en masse, the arming of the whole population of the country, province, or district; in other words the so-called people’s war or national war.[44] Starting from the view that one can never deny to the population of a country the natural right of defense of one’s fatherland, and that the smaller and consequently less powerful States can only find protection in such levées en masse, the majority of authorities on International law have, in their proposals for codification, sought to attain the recognition on principle of the combatant status of all these kinds of people’s champions, and in the Brussels declaration and the Hague Regulations the aforesaid condition[45] is omitted. As against this one may nevertheless remark that the condition requiring a military organization and a clearly recognizable mark of being attached to the enemy’s troops, is not synonymous with a denial of the natural right of defense of one’s country. It is therefore not a question of restraining the population from seizing arms but only of compelling it to do this in an organized manner. Subjection to a responsible leader, a military organization, and clear recognizability cannot be left out of account unless the whole recognized foundation for the admission of irregulars is going to be given up altogether, and a conflict of one private individual against another is to be introduced again, with all its attendant horrors, of which, for example, the proceedings in Bazeilles in the last Franco-Prussian War afford an instance. If the necessary organization does not really become established—a case which is by no means likely to occur often—then nothing remains but a conflict of individuals, and those who conduct it cannot claim the rights of an active military status. The disadvantages and severities inherent in such a state of affairs are more insignificant and less inhuman than those which would result from recognition.[46]

CHAPTER II
THE MEANS OF CONDUCTING WAR

Violence and Cunning.

By the means of conducting war is to be understood all those measures which can be taken by one State against the other in order to attain the object of the war, to compel one’s opponent to submit to one’s will; they may be summarized in the two ideas of Violence and Cunning, and judgment as to their applicability may be embodied in the following proposition:

What is permissible includes every means of war without which the object of the war cannot be obtained; what is reprehensible on the other hand includes every act of violence and destruction which is not demanded by the object of war.

It follows from these universally valid principles that wide limits are set to the subjective freedom and arbitrary judgment of the Commanding Officer; the precepts of civilization, freedom and honor, the traditions prevalent in the army, and the general usages of war, will have to guide his decisions.

A.—MEANS OF WAR DEPENDING ON FORCE

The most important instruments of war in the possession of the enemy are his army, and his military positions; to make an end of them is the first object of war. This can happen:

1. By the annihilation, slaughter, or wounding of the individual combatants.

2. By making prisoners of the same.

3. By siege and bombardment.

1. Annihilation, slaughter, and wounding of the hostile combatants

How to make an end of the Enemy.

In the matter of making an end of the enemy’s forces by violence it is an incontestable and self-evident rule that the right of killing and annihilation in regard to the hostile combatants is inherent in the war power and its organs, that all means which modern inventions afford, including the fullest, most dangerous, and most massive means of destruction, may be utilized; these last, just because they attain the object of war as quickly as possible, are on that account to be regarded as indispensable and, when closely considered, the most human.

The Rules of the Game.

As a supplement to this rule, the usages of war recognize the desirability of not employing severer forms of violence if and when the object of the war may be attained by milder means, and furthermore that certain means of war which lead to unnecessary suffering are to be excluded. To such belong:

The use of poison both individually and collectively (such as poisoning of streams and food supplies[47]) the propagation of infectious diseases.

Assassination, proscription, and outlawry of an opponent.[48]

The use of arms which cause useless suffering, such as soft-nosed bullets, glass, etc.

The killing of wounded or prisoners who are no longer capable of offering resistance.[49]

The refusal of quarter to soldiers who have laid down their arms and allowed themselves to be captured.

The progress of modern invention has made superfluous the express prohibition of certain old-fashioned but formerly legitimate instruments of war (chain shot, red-hot shot, pitch balls, etc.), since others, more effective, have been substituted for these; on the other hand the use of projectiles of less than 400 grammes in weight is prohibited by the St. Petersburg Convention of December 11th, 1868. (This only in the case of musketry.[50])

He who offends against any of these prohibitions is to be held responsible therefore by the State. If he is captured he is subject to the penalties of military law.

Colored Troops are “Blacklegs.”

Closely connected with the unlawful instruments of war is the employment of uncivilized and barbarous peoples in European wars. Looked at from the point of view of law it can, of course, not be forbidden to any State to call up armed forces from its extra-European colonies, but the practise stands in express contradiction to the modern movement for humanizing the conduct of war and for alleviating its attendant sufferings, if men and troops are employed in war, who are without the knowledge of civilized warfare and by whom, therefore, the very cruelties and inhumanities forbidden by the usages of war are committed. The employment of these kinds of troops is therefore to be compared with the use of the instruments of war already described as forbidden. The transplantation of African and Mohammedan Turcos to a European seat of war in the year 1870 was, therefore, undoubtedly to be regarded as a retrogression from civilized to barbarous warfare, since these troops had and could have no conception of European-Christian culture, or respect for property and for the honor of women, etc.[51]

2. Capture of Enemy Combatants

Prisoners of War.

If individual members or parties of the army fall into the power of the enemy’s forces, either through their being disarmed and defenseless, or through their being obliged to cease from hostilities in consequence of a formal capitulation, they are then in the position of “prisoners of war,” and thereby in some measure exchange an active for a passive position.

Vae Victis!

According to the older doctrine of international law all persons belonging to the hostile State, whether combatants or non-combatants, who happen to fall into the hands of their opponent, are in the position of prisoners of war. He could deal with them according to his pleasure, ill-treat them, kill them, lead them away into bondage, or sell them into slavery. History knows but few exceptions to this rule, these being the result of particular treaties. In the Middle Ages the Church tried to intervene as mediator in order to ameliorate the lot of the prisoners, but without success. Only the prospect of ransom, and chivalrous ideas in the case of individuals, availed to give any greater protection. It is to be borne in mind that the prisoners belonged to him who had captured them, a conception which began to disappear after the Thirty Years’ War. The treatment of prisoners of war was mostly harsh and inhuman; still, in the seventeenth century, it was usual to secure their lot by a treaty on the outbreak of a war.

The credit of having opened the way to another conception of war captivity belongs to Frederick the Great and Franklin, inasmuch as they inserted in the famous Treaty of friendship, concluded in 1785 between Prussia and North America, entirely new regulations as to the treatment of prisoners of war.

The Modern View.

The complete change in the conception of war introduced in recent times has in consequence changed all earlier ideas as to the position and treatment of prisoners of war. Starting from the principle that only States and not private persons are in the position of enemies in time of war, and that an enemy who is disarmed and taken prisoner is no longer an object of attack, the doctrine of war captivity is entirely altered and the position of prisoners has become assimilated to that of the wounded and the sick.

Prisoners of War are to be honorably treated.

The present position of international law and the law of war on the subject of prisoners of war is based on the fundamental conception that they are the captives not of private individuals, that is to say of Commanders, Soldiers, or Detachments of Troops, but that they are the captives of the State. But the State regards them as persons who have simply done their duty and obeyed the commands of their superiors, and in consequence views their captivity not as penal but merely as precautionary.

It therefore follows that the object of war captivity is simply to prevent the captives from taking any further part in the war, and that the State can, in fact, do everything which appears necessary for securing the captives, but nothing beyond that. The captives have therefore to submit to all those restrictions and inconveniences which the purpose of securing them necessitates; they can collectively be involved in a common suffering if some individuals among them have provoked sterner treatment; but, on the other hand, they are protected against unjustifiable severities, ill-treatment, and unworthy handling; they do, indeed, lose their freedom, but not their rights; war captivity is, in other words, no longer an act of grace on the part of the victor but a right of the defenseless.

Who may be made Prisoners.

According to the notions of the laws of war to-day the following persons are to be treated as prisoners of war:

1. The Sovereign, together with those members of his family who were capable of bearing arms, the chief of the enemy’s State, generally speaking, and the Ministers who conduct its policy even though they are not among the individuals belonging to the active army.[52]

2. All persons belonging to the armed forces.

3. All Diplomatists and Civil Servants attached to the army.

4. All civilians staying with the army, with the approval of its Commanders, such as transport, sutlers, contractors, newspaper correspondents, and the like.

5. All persons actively concerned with the war such as Higher Officials, Diplomatists, Couriers, and the like, as also all those persons whose freedom can be a danger to the army of the other State, for example, Journalists of hostile opinions, prominent and influential leaders of Parties, Clergy who excite the people, and such like.[53]

6. The mass of the population of a province or a district if they rise in defense of their country.

The points of view regarding the treatment of prisoners of war may be summarized in the following rules:

Prisoners of war are subject to the laws of the State which has captured them.

The treatment of Prisoners of War.

The relation of the prisoners of war to their own former superiors ceases during their captivity; a captured officer’s servant steps into the position of a private servant. Captured officers are never the superiors of soldiers of the State which has captured them; on the contrary, they are under the orders of such of the latter as are entrusted with their custody.

The prisoners of war have, in the places in which they are quartered, to submit to such restrictions of their liberty as are necessary for their safe keeping. They have strictly to comply with the obligation imposed upon them, not to move beyond a certain indicated boundary.

Their confinement.

These measures for their safe keeping are not to be exceeded; in particular, penal confinement, fetters, and unnecessary restrictions of freedom are only to be resorted to if particular reasons exist to justify or necessitate them.

The concentration camps in which prisoners of war are quartered must be as healthy, clean, and decent as possible; they should not be prisons or convict establishments.

It is true that the French captives were transported by the Russians to Siberia as malefactors in the years 1812 and 1813. This was a measure which was not illegitimate according to the older practise of war, but it is no longer in accordance with the legal conscience of to-day. Similarly the methods which were adopted during the Civil War in North America in a prison in the Southern States, against prisoners of war of the Union Forces, whereby the men were kept without air and nourishment and thus badly treated, were also against the practise of the law of war.

Freedom of movement within these concentration camps or within the whole locality may be permitted if there are no special reasons against it. But obviously prisoners of war are subject to the existing, or to the appointed rules of the establishment or garrison.

The Prisoner and his Taskmaster.

Prisoners of war can be put to moderate work proportionate to their position in life; work is a safeguard against excesses. Also on grounds of health this is desirable. But these tasks should not be prejudicial to health nor in any way dishonorable or such as contribute directly or indirectly to the military operations against the Fatherland of the captives. Work for the State is, according to the Hague regulations, to be paid at the rates payable to members of the army of the State itself.

Should the work be done on account of other public authorities or of private persons, then the conditions will be fixed by agreement with the military authorities. The wages of the prisoners of war must be expended in the improvement of their condition, and anything that remains should be paid over to them after deducting the cost of their maintenance when they are set free. Voluntary work in order to earn extra wages is to be allowed, if there are no particular reasons against it.[54] Insurrection, insubordination, misuse of the freedom granted, will of course justify severer confinement in each case, also punishment, and so will crimes and misdemeanors.

Flight.

Attempts at escape on the part of individuals who have not pledged their word of honor might be regarded as the expression of a natural impulse for liberty, and not as a crime. They are therefore to be punished by restriction of the privileges granted and a sharper supervision but not with death. But the latter punishment will follow of course in the case of plots to escape, if only because of the danger of them. In case of a breach of a man’s parole the punishment of death may reasonably be incurred. In some circumstances, if necessity and the behavior of the prisoners compel it, one is justified in taking measures the effect of which is to involve the innocent with the guilty.[55]

Diet.

The food of the prisoners must be sufficient and suitable to their rank, yet they will have to be content with the customary food of the country; luxuries which the prisoners wish to get at their own expense are to be permitted if reasons of discipline do not forbid.

Letters.

Correspondence with one’s home is to be permitted, likewise visits and intercourse, but these of course must be watched.

Personal belongings.

The prisoners of war remain in possession of their private property with the exception of arms, horses, and documents of a military purport. If for definite reasons any objects are taken away from them, then these must be kept in suitable places and restored to them at the end of their captivity.

The Information Bureau.

Article 14 of the Hague Regulations prescribes that on the outbreak of hostilities there shall be established in each of the belligerent States and in a given case in neutral States, which have received into their territory any of the combatants, an information bureau for prisoners of war. Its duty will be to answer all inquiries concerning such prisoners and to receive the necessary particulars from the services concerned in order to be able to keep a personal entry for every prisoner. The information bureau must always be kept well posted about everything which concerns a prisoner of war. Also this information bureau must collect and assign to the legitimate persons all personal objects, valuables, letters, and the like, which are found on the field of battle or have been left behind by dead prisoners of war in hospitals or field-hospitals. The information bureau enjoys freedom from postage, as do generally all postal despatches sent to or by prisoners of war. Charitable gifts for prisoners of war must be free of customs duty and also of freight charges on the public railways.

The prisoners of war have, in the event of their being wounded or sick, a claim to medical assistance and care as understood by the Geneva Convention and, so far as is possible, to spiritual ministrations also.

These rules may be shortly summarized as follows:

Prisoners of war are subject to the laws of the country in which they find themselves, particularly the rules in force in the army of the local State; they are to be treated like one’s own soldiers, neither worse nor better.

When Prisoners may be put to Death.

The following considerations hold good as regard the imposition of a death penalty in the case of prisoners; they can be put to death:

1. In case they commit offenses or are guilty of practises which are punishable by death by civil or military laws.

2. In case of insubordination, attempts at escape, etc., deadly weapons can be employed.

3. In case of overwhelming necessity, as reprisals, either against similar measures, or against other irregularities on the part of the management of the enemy’s army.

4. In case of overwhelming necessity, when other means of precaution do not exist and the existence of the prisoners becomes a danger to one’s own existence.

“Reprisals.”

As regards the admissibility of reprisals, it is to be remarked that these are objected to by numerous teachers of international law on grounds of humanity. To make this a matter of principle, and apply it to every case exhibits, however, “a misconception due to intelligible but exaggerated and unjustifiable feelings of humanity, of the significance, the seriousness and the right of war. It must not be overlooked that here also the necessity of war, and the safety of the State are the first consideration, and not regard for the unconditional freedom of prisoners from molestation.”[56]

One must not be too scrupulous.

That prisoners should only be killed in the event of extreme necessity, and that only the duty of self-preservation and the security of one’s own State can justify a proceeding of this kind is to-day universally admitted. But that these considerations have not always been decisive is proved by the shooting of 2,000 Arabs at Jaffa in 1799 by Napoleon; of the prisoners in the rising of La Vendée; in the Carlist War; in Mexico, and in the American War of Secession, where it was generally a case of deliverance from burdensome supervision and the difficulties of maintenance; whereas peoples of a higher morality such as the Boers in our own days, finding themselves in a similar position, have preferred to let their prisoners go. For the rest, calamities such as might lead to the shooting of prisoners are scarcely likely to happen under the excellent conditions of transport in our own time and the correspondingly small difficulty of feeding them—in a European campaign.[57]

The end of Captivity.

The captivity of war comes to an end:

1. By force of circumstances which de facto determine it, for example, successful escape, cessation of the war, or death.

2. By becoming the subject of the enemy’s state.

3. By release, whether conditional or unconditional, unilateral or reciprocal.

4. By exchange.

As to 1. With the cessation of the war every reason for the captivity ceases, provided there exist no special grounds for another view. It is on that account that care should be taken to discharge prisoners immediately. There remain only prisoners sentenced to punishment or awaiting trial, i.e., until the expiation of their sentence or the end of their trial as the case may be.

As to 2. This pre-supposes the readiness of the State to accept the prisoner as a subject.

Parole.

As to 3. A man released under certain conditions has to fulfil them without question. If he does not do this, and again falls into the hands of his enemy, then he must expect to be dealt with by military law, and indeed according to circumstances with the punishment of death. A conditional release cannot be imposed on the captive; still less is there any obligation upon the state to discharge a prisoner on conditions—for example, on his parole. The release depends entirely on the discretion of the State, as does also the determination of its limits and the persons to whom it shall apply.

The release of whole detachments on their parole is not usual. It is rather to be regarded as an arrangement with each particular individual.

Arrangements of this kind, every one of which is as a rule made a conditional discharge, must be very precisely formulated and the wording of them most carefully scrutinized. In particular it must be precisely expressed whether the person released is only bound no longer to fight directly with arms against the State which releases him, in the present war, whether he is justified in rendering services to his own country in other positions or in the colonies, etc., or whether all and every kind of service is forbidden him.

The question whether the parole given by an officer or a soldier is recognized as binding or not by his own State depends on whether the legislation or even the military instructions permit or forbid the giving of one’s parole.[58] In the first case his own State must not command him to do services the performance of which he has pledged himself not to undertake.[59] But personally the man released on parole is under all circumstances bound to observe it. He destroys his honor if he breaks his word, and is liable to punishment if recaptured, even though he has been hindered by his own State from keeping it.[60] According to the Hague Regulations a Government can demand no services which are in conflict with a man’s parole.

Exchange of Prisoners.

As to 4. The exchange of prisoners in a single case can take place between two belligerents without its being necessary in every case to make circumstantial agreements. As regards the scope of the exchange and the forms in which it is to be completed the Commanding Officers on both sides alone decide. Usually the exchange is man for man, in which case the different categories of military persons are taken into account and certain ratios established as to what constitutes equivalents.

Removal of Prisoners.

Transport of Prisoners.—Since no Army makes prisoners in order to let them escape again afterwards, measures must be taken for their transport in order to prevent attempts at escape. If one recalls that in the year 1870–71, no fewer than 11,160 officers and 333,885 men were brought from France to Germany, and as a result many thousands often had to be guarded by a proportionately small company, one must admit that in such a position only the most zealous energy and ruthless employment of all the means at one’s disposal can avail, and although it is opposed to military sentiment to use weapons against the defenseless, none the less in such a case one has no other choice. The captive who seeks to free himself by flight does so at his peril and can complain of no violence which the custody of prisoners directs in order to prevent behavior of that kind. Apart from these apparently harsh measures against attempt at escape, the transport authorities must do everything they can to alleviate the lot of the sick and wounded prisoners, in particular they are to protect them against insults and ill-treatment from an excited mob.

3. Sieges and Bombardments

Fair Game.

War is waged not merely with the hostile combatants but also with the inanimate military resources of the enemy. This includes not only the fortresses but also every town and every village which is an obstacle to military progress. All can be besieged and bombarded, stormed and destroyed, if they are defended by the enemy, and in some cases even if they are only occupied. There has always been a divergence of views, among Professors of International Law, as to the means which are permissible for waging war against these inanimate objects, and these views have frequently been in strong conflict with those of soldiers; it is therefore necessary to go into this question more closely.

We have to distinguish:

(a) Fortresses, strong places, and fortified places.

(b) Open towns, villages, buildings, and the like, which, however, are occupied or used for military purposes.

Fortresses and strong places are important centers of defense, not merely in a military sense, but also in a political and economic sense. They furnish a principal resource to the enemy and can therefore be bombarded just like the hostile army itself.

Of making the most of one’s opportunity.

A preliminary notification of bombardment is just as little to be required as in the case of a sudden assault. The claims to the contrary put forward by some jurists are completely inconsistent with war and must be repudiated by soldiers; the cases in which a notification has been voluntarily given do not prove its necessity. The besieger will have to consider for himself the question whether the very absence of notification may not be itself a factor of success, by means of surprise, and indeed whether notification will not mean a loss of precious time. If there is no danger of this then humanity no doubt demands such a notification.

Since town and fortifications belong together and form an inseparable unity, and can seldom in a military sense, and never in an economic and political sense, be separated, the bombardment will not limit itself to the actual fortification, but it will and must extend over the whole town; the reason for this lies in the fact that a restriction of the bombardment to the fortifications is impracticable; it would jeopardize the success of the operation, and would quite unjustifiably protect the defenders who are not necessarily quartered in the works.

Spare the Churches.

But this does not preclude the exemption by the besieger of certain sections and buildings of the fortress or town from bombardment, such as churches, schools, libraries, museums, and the like, so far as this is possible.

But of course it is assumed that buildings seeking this protection will be distinguishable and that they are not put to defensive uses. Should this happen, then every humanitarian consideration must give way. The utterances of French writers about the bombardments of Strasburg Cathedral in the year 1870, are therefore quite without justification, since it only happened after an observatory for officers of artillery had been erected on the tower.

The only exemption from bombardment recognized by international law, through the medium of the Geneva Convention, concerns hospitals and convalescent establishments. Their extension is left to the discretion of the besieger.

A Bombardment is no Respecter of Persons.

As regards the civil population of a fortified place the rule is: All the inhabitants, whether natives or foreigners, whether permanent or temporary residents, are to be treated alike.

No exception need be made in regard to the diplomatists of neutral States who happen to be in the town; if before or during the investment by the besieger their attention is drawn to the fate to which they expose themselves by remaining, and if days of grace in which to leave are afforded them, that simply rests on the courtesy of the besieger. No such duty is incumbent upon him in international law. Also permission to send out couriers with diplomatic despatches depends entirely upon the discretion of the besieger. In any case it will always depend on whether the necessary security against misuse is provided.[61]

A timely severity.

If the commandant of a fortress wishes to strengthen its defensive capacity by expelling a portion of the population such as women, children, old people, wounded, etc., then he must take these steps in good time, i.e., before the investment begins. If the investment is completed, no claim to the free passage of these classes can be made good. All juristic demands to the contrary are as a matter of principle to be repudiated, as being in fundamental conflict with the principles of war. The very presence of such persons may accelerate the surrender of the place in certain circumstances, and it would therefore be foolish of a besieger to renounce voluntarily this advantage.[62]

Once the surrender of a fortress is accomplished, then, by the usages of war to-day, any further destruction, annihilation, incendiarism, and the like, are completely excluded. The only further injuries that are permitted are those demanded or necessitated by the object of the war, e.g., destruction of fortifications, removal of particular buildings, or in some circumstances of complete quarters, rectification of the foreground and so on.

“Undefended Places.”

A prohibition by international law of the bombardment of open towns and villages which are not occupied by the enemy, or defended, was, indeed, put into words by the Hague Regulations, but appears superfluous, since modern military history knows of hardly any such case.

But the matter is different where open towns are occupied by the enemy or are defended. In this case, naturally all the rules stated above as to fortified places hold good, and the simple rules of tactics dictate that fire should be directed not merely against the bounds of the place, so that the space behind the enemy’s firing line and any reserves that may be there shall not escape. A bombardment is indeed justified, and unconditionally dictated by military consideration, if the occupation of the village is not with a view to its defense but only for the passage of troops, or to screen an approach or retreat, or to prepare or cover a tactical movement, or to take up supplies, etc. The only criterion is the value which the place possesses for the enemy in the existing situation.

Regarding it from this point of view, the bombardment of Kehl by the French in 1870 was justified by military necessity, although the place bombarded was an open town and not directly defended. “Kehl offered the attacking force the opportunity of establishing itself in its buildings, and of bringing up and placing there its personnel and material, unseen by the defenders. It became a question of making Kehl inaccessible to the enemy and of depriving it of the characteristics which made its possession advantageous to the enemy. The aforesaid justification was not very evident.”[63]

Also the bombardment of the open town of Saarbrücken cannot from the military point of view be the subject of reproach against the French. On August 2nd a Company of the Fusilier Regiment No. 40 had actually occupied the railway station and several others had taken up a position in the town. It was against these troops that the fire of the French was primarily directed. If havoc was spread in the town, that could scarcely be avoided. In the night of August 3rd to 4th, the fire of the French batteries was again directed on the railway station in order to prevent the despatch of troops and material. Against this proceeding also no objection can be made, since the movement of trains had actually taken place.

If, therefore, on the German side[64] energetic protest were made in both cases, and the bombardment of Kehl and Saarbrücken were declared a violation of international law, this only proves that in 1870 a proper comprehension of questions of the laws of war of this kind was not always to be found even in the highest military and official circles. But still less was this the case on the French side as is clear from the protests against the German bombardment of Dijon, Chateaudun, Bazeilles, and other places, the military justification for which is still clearer and incontestable.[65]

B.—METHODS NOT INVOLVING THE USE OF FORCE. CUNNING, AND DECEIT

Stratagems.

Cunning in war has been permissible from the earliest times, and was esteemed all the more as it furthered the object of war without entailing the loss of men. Surprises, laying of ambushes, feigned attacks and retreats, feigned flight, pretense of inactivity, spreading of false news as to one’s strength and dispositions, use of the enemy’s parole—all this was permitted and prevalent ever since war begun, and so it is to-day.[66]

What are “dirty tricks”?

As to the limits between recognized stratagems and those forms of cunning which are reprehensible, contemporary opinion, national culture, the practical needs of the moment, and the changing military situation, are so influential that it is prima facie proportionately difficult to draw any recognized limit, as difficult as between criminal selfishness and taking a justifiable advantage. Some forms of artifice are, however, under all circumstances irreconcilable with honorable fighting, especially all those which take the form of faithlessness, fraud, and breach of one’s word. Among these are breach of a safe-conduct; of a free retirement; or of an armistice, in order to gain by a surprise attack an advantage over the enemy; feigned surrender in order to kill the enemy who then approach unsuspiciously; misuse of a flag of truce, or of the Red Cross, in order to secure one’s approach, or in case of attack, deliberate violation of a solemnly concluded obligation, e.g., of a war treaty; incitement to crime, such as murder of the enemy’s leaders, incendiarism, robbery, and the like. This kind of outrage was an offense against the law of nations even in the earliest times. The natural conscience of mankind whose spirit is chivalrously alive in the armies of all civilized States, has branded it as an outrage upon human right, and enemies who in such a public manner violate the laws of honor and justice have been regarded as no longer on an equality.[67]

Of False Uniforms.

The views of military authorities about methods of this kind, as also of those which are on the borderline, frequently differ from the views held by notable jurists. So also the putting on of enemy’s uniforms, the employment of enemy or neutral flags and marks, with the object of deception are as a rule declared permissible by the theory of the laws of war,[68] while military writers[69] have expressed themselves unanimously against them. The Hague Conference has adopted the latter view in forbidding the employment of enemy’s uniforms and military marks equally with the misuse of flags of truce and of the Red Cross.[70]

The Corruption of others may be useful.

And murder is one of the Fine Arts.

Bribery of the enemy’s subjects with the object of obtaining military advantages, acceptance of offers of treachery, reception of deserters, utilization of the discontented elements in the population, support of pretenders and the like, are permissible, indeed international law is in no way opposed[71] to the exploitation of the crimes of third parties (assassination, incendiarism, robbery, and the like) to the prejudice of the enemy.

The ugly is often expedient, and that it is a mistake to be too “nice-minded.”

Considerations of chivalry, generosity, and honor may denounce in such cases a hasty and unsparing exploitation of such advantages as indecent and dishonorable, but law which is less touchy allows it.[72] “The ugly and inherently immoral aspect of such methods cannot affect the recognition of their lawfulness. The necessary aim of war gives the belligerent the right and imposes upon him, according to circumstances, the duty not to let slip the important, it may be the decisive, advantages to be gained by such means.[73]

CHAPTER III
TREATMENT OF WOUNDED AND SICK SOLDIERS

The generally accepted principle that in war one should do no more harm to one’s enemy than the object of the war unconditionally requires, has led to treating the wounded and sick combatants as being no longer enemies, but merely sick men who are to be taken care of and as much as possible protected from the tragic results of wounds and illness. Although endeavors to protect the wounded soldiers from arbitrary slaughter, mutilation, ill-treatment, or other brutalities go back to the oldest times, yet the credit of systematizing these endeavors belongs to the nineteenth century, and this system was raised to the level of a principle of international law by the Geneva Convention of 1864.