INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ITHE 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.1The 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 inmind, 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?2Yes, 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?3Yes; 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?4No; “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?5No; 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?6No; 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 betweenKriegsmanierandKriegsraison,10between 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’sHandbuch 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 alevée en masse, terminates the argument for a generous recognition of the combatant status of the enemy with the melancholy qualification, “unlessthe Terrorism so often necessary in wardoes 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 agood 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. Wedo 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 howto 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 language12about 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 mentionedin 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 ownManual 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.”13Nothing 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 Conventioncould never be too explicit,14the 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.”15Conscience, “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 neutralterritory. 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.

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 neutralterritory 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 isex 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.

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