THURSDAY, DECEMBER G, 1900. IS THIS CIVILISED WARFARE?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 49, 6 December 1900, Page 17

THURSDAY, DECEMBER G, 1900. IS THIS CIVILISED WARFARE?

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HE knight of the days of chivalry was the beauideal of the Christian soldier. But he is as dead as the Barmecides, and has left no heir. He had remote ancestors in some of those horny-fisted citizen-soldiers who were taken from plough and hoe to be consuls and dictators in the palmy days of the Pioman Republic : Cuitirs, who gloried in having no money himself, but in his capacity to command those who had ; Fabricius, who, after his triumphs, was found by his inglenook eating the roots and herbs which he had cultivated with his own browned and horny hands ; Bcirio, who overcame his enemies almost as much by his generosity and moderation as by the weight of the onset of his conquering legions. "We do not now enslave, as in those far-off pagan times. Nor do we (usually) strip the dead upon the field, nor waste time sprinkling salt on the sites of razed cities, nor pound each others' brains out to the flowing courtesies of Bayard or Kiciiard of the Lion-heart. War is a business affair nowadays — undertaken chiefly for the purpose of securing gold-deposits or diamond-fields in the territory of some weak neighbor, or of opening up new markets for Smith's rum, Brown's cotton goods, Jones's crockery- wire, and Robinson'h pots and pans and iron buckets. The commercial aspect of war has so far overlain the purely professional, at least in Great Britain, since the days of Maryborough, that it is the recognised practice to pile the shekels high for conquering heroes, and, in ' Mr. Dooley's ' words, to ' ilivate them to the peerage.'

We have in the present century bolted the door upon some of the more savage incidents which marked the warfare of a previous day. But the campaigns that are at present dragging slowly along in South Africa, China, and the Philippines, give us grave cause to doubt whether war, as conducted by Christian countries, can even yet be

properly described as 'civilised.' We have had Geneva Conventions and codified International Laws of War since the sackings and massacres of Badajos, San Sebastian, Tripolitza, and Belgrade. But the Lord of Misrule is often the lord of war. Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tartar ; and the demon in a man or a battalion or a regiment often works out, even still, in war-time, through the thin veneer of manners and observances that frequently pass muster for uivilisctbiuii.' Military discipline was severe to the ver^e of savagery among the troops of the Fatherland in tne Franco-German war. Yet it did not prevent the wanton burning of villages, the occasional execution of unoffending non-combatants, and wholesale looting by officers and men alike during that memorable campaign. British and American naval officers that wore clean linen and had the entree to what ia termed 'the best society,' ordered the inhuman shelling and destruction of defenceless Samoan villages in 1898. American army officers witnessed, directed, or took part in the murder of prisoners and noncombatants and the wholesale plundering and desecration of churches in the Philippine Islands. Tientsin was conscientiously looted. So was Peking. And reports of griavous massacres of non-combatants by ' civilised ' troops from Russia and Germany come like a wail of the dying from Paotingfu and the banks of the Amur. We are still evidently far off from the verification of Leoste Levi's statement : that an armed conflict between nation and nation is now * merely a duel between the military and naval forces of the States at war,' and that the unauthorised seizure of the private property of an enemy for the personal benefit of the soldier is punishable by a firing party, a rapid volley, and the sudden death of the offender. So it is — on paper, where moderation and discipline may be bought by the ream or volume at 'cut rates.' 'To be good is noble,' says Mark Twain, 'but to show others how to be good is nobler, and is no trouble.' Hand-books on International Law do the ' nobler ' work. But military practice lags leagues behind with heels of lead, while military precept flits far ahead on wings of airy gauze. • # »

The war between Briton and Boer was begun and carried out under circumstances of mutual aggravation which might naturally be expected to produce its quota of sufficiently lurid situations. The Cape and British and American and Colonial papers have from time to time published accounts of some of them. The noted Australian war correspondent, ' Banjo ' Patterson said in the course of one of his lectures that matter had appeared in the British and Colonial Press which it was a disgrace for soldiers to write and for editors to publish. Incidentally, however, k the Man from Snowy River ' conhrmed the truth of some of the most disgraceful of the statements to which he appears to have made such angry reference. In Bronson Howard's comedy, Henrietta, one of the characters says of the French Anglomaniacs : ' Each fellow wants every other fellow to believe that he is the devil of a fellow — but he isn't.' It is, of course, possible that a similar spirit of frothy bravado may have prompted an individual trooper or * Tommy ' here and there or now and then to make himself appear ' the devil of a fellow.' But the theory of a general and widespread conspiracy of exaggeration and lying cannot for a moment be entertained, and in the main the letters of volunteer and regular must be taken as fairly representing actual occurrences of the campaign. At any rate, a particularly ugly anthology of military excess and ruffianism might be easily compiled from the letters of British and colonial soldiers in South Africa published in the leading daily papers of Australasia and Great Britain. The most amazing part of this bad business is the cool lack of any sense of shame with which men at the front have recorded — in words that are before vs — and newspaper editors have published, accounts of the * pig-sticking ' or bayoneting of disarmed and helpless Boers ; picking the pockets of prisoners ; stealing money, watches, music, love-letters, etc., for personal use, from private houses which had not sheltered the enemy ; the customary smashing and wanton destruction of pianos, harmoniums, and other furniture and effects — and this even on British territory. A London weekly before us reports two ' Tommies ' as having ' swelled their purses by more than £100 apiece 'at Elandslaagte. A trooper of the First Australian Horse wrote from Arundel of a rumor that ' one of the Lancers " came across " £400 the other day in one of

the houses on the Modder River.' And did not ' Banjo ' Patterson record in terms of misplaced admiration the marvellous skill acquired by some regiments in the work of plunder, and the sham ' receipts ' given by colonial officers or men for goods which were seized under the pretence of a legal requisition ?

War, even at its best, was properly described by the First Napoleon as 'a trade of barbarian*,' Orrasions arisp \vh\ch necessitate and justify the infliction of serious loss — even of the loss of life — to nou-combaiants. The destruction of farm-houses is occasionally a measure of military necessity or military justice. But no circumstances that have thus far arisen in South Africa, or that are likely to arise, could justify the wanton and wholesale destruction of farmsteads and their effects and the plunder of stock that are now being carried out on a vast scale over great areas of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. We can find no such record of wholesale burning and cattle-lifting in the Btory of any war between civilised States in the present century. _ We are glad to notice that some, at least, of our Colonial troops deprecate this ' warfare against women and children ' — as one of them terms it in a recent letter. It is no wonder that to the American mind the fire-stick campaign is regarded as in great part an act of vengeance by officers who had not the skill to deal with the enemy with rifle or Maxim. Curiously enough, this wholesale burning and looting of farm-houses were among the chief means by which the population of Wexford, Wicklow, Carlow, and Kildare were goaded into insurrection by the infamous Orange yeomanry in 1798. After the ill-fated rising had been suppressed in blood and flame, the same means were adopted by the rabid ascendency party in their endeavor to re-kindle the fires of rebellion. It is quite in the nature of things that such measures create or aggravate racial hate. A cable-message published a few days ago gives the following as one of the results of this unfortunate capitalistic war : * The Cape papers declare that the political and the racial condition of the Colony was never worse since the war began. The loyalists are clamoring for the application of martial law throughout the whole Colony.' History is merely repeating itself. The hot contagion of racial hate has gone from the fighting man to the * loyalist ' civilian in South Africa, as it did in Ireland over a century ago. This is about the worst and most enduring form of racial bitterness. It acts and re-acts even when the soldier has gone away. And it is the saddest and most dangerous legacy left by a miserable war which ought never to have begun.