If one general kills in cold blood some hundreds of prisoners who embarrass his motions, his antagonist may not be justified in staining himself by similar crime, nor may he break his word or oath because the other had done so before. The limits of such retaliation it may be hard to lay down. Yet any act of cruelty to the innocent, any act, especially, by which non-combatants are made to feel the stress of war, is what brave men shrink from, although they may feel obliged to threaten it. (Compare § 114, and the instructions for the government of our armies, §§ 27, 28.) unlawful wea § 127. The use of poisoned weapons, the poisoning of springs, the Particular rules employment of hired assassins, have long been conof war. 1. As to demned, as opposed to the idea of war, which is an pons, and ways of open, honourable way of seeking redress.1 Such injuring the ene- practices characterise savage warfare. Grotius (iii. my's person. 4, § 17) is decided in condemning the practice of poisoning springs, but thinks that it is right to corrupt water so that it cannot be used, which is no worse than to turn the channel of a stream in a direction where the enemy cannot get at it. He says also (§ 18), that whilst hired assassins must never be used, above all when they violate express or implied confidence, an enemy may undertake to kill another in a private and concealed way. This he supports as usual by testimonies from Greek and Roman writers. Modern times would use another language. Bynkershoek, in 1737, falls below the standard of Grotius, and allows of fraud to any extent in war. 'Ego omnem dolum permitto, sola perfidia excepta, non quod contra hostem non quodlibet liceat, sed quod, fide data, quatenus data est, hostis esse desinat'-('Quæst. J. P.' i. 1)-opinions which it gives us pain to cite from such a writer. The Greeks, Romans, and some other states of antiquity, professed to abhor these methods of fraud in carrying on war. 2 The Emperor Tiberius, when an offer was made him to put Arminius out of the way by poison, rejected it, although he committed many worse crimes. Non fraude,' Tacitus makes him say (Annal. ii. 88), neque occultis, sed palam et armatum populum Romanum hostes suos ulcisci.' The spirit of chivalry was still more opposed to fraud and secret 1 For the history of the rules of war, compare Mr. Ward's Hist., chapters ix., xv., and elsewhere; also an excellent article in the Oxford Essays for 1856, by Mountague Bernard, Esq., which has been of great use to the present writer, and from which the passages appearing as quotations in the next pages are taken. See also General Halleck's International Law and Laws of War, chap. xvi. This work of the learned military officer would have been of important service to the author of this book if he could have seen it sooner. 2 Compare Dionys. Hal. antiq. iii. 8, οὐδ ̓ ἐκ τοῦ φανεροῦ ἐπέθεντο ἡμῖν, ὡς ὁ κοινὸς ἀξιοῖ τοῦ πολέμου νόμος, ἀλλ ̓ ὑπὸ σκότους. stratagem. Enemies often gave notice of an intention to make an attack at a certain time, and the true knight rejected every advantage, save that which his skill and prowess in knightly warfare afforded him. The laws of war are loose in regard to the instruments of death used against an enemy. Formerly chain shot 2. Allowable and red-hot shot were objected to, but they do not weapons in moseem to be now. 'Now invention racks itself to dern war. produce the biggest gun, the deadliest projectile, the most frightful engine of wholesale slaughter, and the shallows of Kertch and Cronstadt are planted thick with infernal machines. It is possible to go too fast and too far in this direction.' What is here quoted from an English essay written a few years since is more true of sea warfare than of land. As Heffter remaks (§ 119), war on that element is the more harsh and destructive. Its maxims, owing to a want of the proper equipoise between naval powers, have been far from reaching the same level of humanity on which land warfare stands. It is still half a war of plunder.' As for war in general, Klüber (§ 244) lays it down that the customs of war (Kriegsmanier) condemn not only poisoned weapons, poisoning of wells and of utensils, attempts to spread the plague among the enemy, but also the use of chain shot and bar shot (boulets à bras), shooting bits of iron, brass, nails, &c. (tirer à la mitraille). The loading of muskets with two balls, with jagged balls, or with balls mixed with glass or lime, he also holds, somewhat too broadly, to be forbidden. Special treaties have prohibited as between the parties the use of chain, bar, and hot shot, as well as of pitch rings (cercles poissés). An infernal machine invented about the year 1585, which was a kind of fire-ship, was disapproved of by some, but went out of use because it did not do its work well. On the whole, it may be said that weapons whose efficiency consists simply in inflicting a bad wound, and instruments of wholesale slaughter which cannot be foreseen or avoided by flight, are against the customs of most kinds of warfare; but that naval warfare too much, and sieges of necessity, make use of summary and wholesale means of death. Naval warfare is the storming of one floating fortress by another, but its laws need not be altogether assimilated to the storming of fortified places on the land. Hitherto the practice of using barbarians in the wars of Christian nations with one another has not been absolutely Kind of troops condemned by the law of nations. The French used employed. the American Indians against the English in America, and the 1 Mountague Bernard, u. s., p. 127. Turcos, a force made up of Algerines, Kabyles, and negroes, in Italy; the English employed savages against their revolted colonies, in spite of the rebukes of Lord Chatham; and the Russians brought Circassians with them into Hungary in the war following 1848. But nothing is clearer than that troops who are accustomed to an inhuman mode of warfare, and belong to a savage race, cannot be trusted to wage war according to the spirit of humanity, and ought not to be employed. 3. Breach of faith: solicitations to crime. Breach of faith between enemies has always been strongly condemned, and that vindication of it is worthless which maintains that, without an express or tacit promise to our enemy, we are not bound to keep faith with him. But no rule of war forbids a commander to circulate false information, and to use means for deceiving his enemy with regard to his movements. If he abstains from them, he must do so by the force of his own Christian conscience. To lead the officers, counsellors, or troops of an enemy to treachery by bribes, or to seduce his subjects to betray their country, are temptations to commit a plain crime, which no hostile relation will justify. Yet to accept of the services of a traitor is allowable.2 § 128. The A combatant is any person directly engaged in carrying on war, or concerned in the belligerent government, or present with its armies and assisting them; although those who are present for purposes of humanity and religion-as surgeons, nurses, and chaplains are usually classed among non-combatants, unless special reasons require an opposite treatment of them. ancient rule was that a combatant taken in battle became the 4. Treatment of property of his captor, who could kill, enslave, or captured per- sell him. Ransom was a kind of sale to those who sons, especially of soldiers. were most interested in paying a high price. Among the Greeks the general practice was not to refuse quarter to a Greek who gave himself up on the field of battle, and to allow his friends to redeem him, if they would; the price for which was more or less fixed between contending parties. This usage prevailed also among the Romans, as well as that of exchanging prisoners, but any degree of injury to the enemy was allowed in their jus belli. Neither law, nor the feelings of humanity, nor aught save considerations of prudence, restrained them. After the disaster in the Caudine Forks, when they gained their next victory over the Samnites, they slew alike the resisting and the 1 A qualification is here necessary, that when a nation has been conquered and is under a usurper's sway, and in similar cases, it cannot be wrong for those who are engaged in a war of liberation to lead the people to revolt. 2 Vattel, iii. 10, §§ 180, 181. unresisting, armed and unarmed, slaves and free, boys and adults, men and cattle, nor would any living thing have been left alive, unless the consul had given the signal for withdrawing. (Livy, ix. 14.) By the rules of both nations leading officers of the hostile army, after being taken, might be put to the sword. Such was the case with the Athenian generals taken at Syracuse (Thucydides, vii. 86), against the will, however, it should be added, of the Spartan general Gylippus; and many an illustrious warrior, taken captive by the Romans, had his death delayed, only to endure the humiliation of being led in triumph. Similar cruelty was universal in ancient times, as among the Jews, where David's campaigns dealt death in frightful forms upon surrounding nations; and yet, a century and a half after David, a prophet, to the King of Israel's inquiry' Shall I smite them ?' could answer, 'Wouldst thou smite those whom thou hast taken captive with thy sword and thy bow?' showing that a more humane mode of warfare was then in vogue. War put on all its horrors in the invasions of the empire by the Germans. Then came the times of feudalism and knighthood, when many mitigations of the barbarian practice grew up. Captives, in wars between Christians, were ransomed and sometimes released on parole to raise the money necessary for this purpose. But the common soldier did not receive much benefit from the relaxation of the old severities. During the wars just before the Reformation, especially those of the French invasions of Italy, the cruelties of war seemed to revive, and the religious animosities of a century and a half afterwards did not extinguish them. In the thirty years' war Gustavus Adolphus made a convention with the Imperialists to give and receive quarter: only the Croats on one side, and the Pomeranians on the other, were excepted from this act of humanity. In the wars of England between the king and the parliament no quarter was allowed to the Irish, who served in the royal army, and when Prince Rupert retaliated, he was told there was a great difference between an Irishman and an Englishman. In these wars the exchange of prisoners, practised just before in the wars of Germany, became systematic. Cartels fixing the rate of ransom for prisoners exchanged are Isaid to have been of somewhat later date. For the two centuries past, cruelty to prisoners and non-resisting soldiers has been exceptional. The present practice is to spare the lives of those who yield themselves up, to exchange them with captives taken by the other party, or to give them up on payment of a ransom, and meanwhile to supply them with the necessary comforts at the expense of the state to which they belong.' It were well if such comforts were to be found in a state of captivity, but the prisonhulks of some civilised nations, and the general neglect of the prisoners, seem almost calculated to make them unserviceable when exchanged. Officers and others, whose word can be relied on, are often set free, on their parole not to serve during the war, or until ransomed. Persons escaping from captivity and retaken, or even recaptured in war, are not held to merit punishment, for they only obeyed their love of liberty; but the breach of parole justly subjects such persons to heavy punishment. (Heffter, $129.) Deserters, if captured, acquire no rights from joining the other belligerent, and may be put to death. The property belonging to combatants, or taken on the field of battle, has been considered to be lawful plunder, and usually goes to the victorious officers and troops (such of it as is not stolen), as a reward of successful bravery. The treatment which the milder modern usage prescribes for 5. Treatment of regular soldiers is extended also to militia called irregular soldiers. out by public authority. Guerilla parties, however, do not enjoy the full benefit of the laws of war. They are apt to fare worse than either regular troops or an unarmed peasantry. The reasons for this are, that they are annoying and insidious, that they put on and off with ease the character of a soldier, and that they are prone, themselves, to treat their enemies who fall into their hands with great severity. 6. Non-combatants and their $129. It is in regard to non-combatants and their property that the mildness of modern warfare appears in most striking contrast with the severity of ancient. The old rule property. was to regard every human being pertaining to the enemy's country as a foe, to lay waste territory, kill or take captive those who could serve in the enemy's armies, enslave women and children, and carry off all the property of value which could be transported. Wars to a considerable extent were ravaging forays into a hostile country, and the more harm was done, the sooner, it was thought, redress could be procured. War Usages of the ancients. thus, especially at Rome, fed the public treasury, supplied the market with slaves, and laid the foundation of the wealth of noble families. The mango or slave-dealer accompanied the armies, and forwarded the captives, purchased by him at wholesale, to the city market. If a territory was conquered, the former inhabitants were stripped often of a part of their lands, and we find one-third confiscated by the Romans on a number of occasions; or they were removed in mass, as was common in the East, into another country. When the Germans conquered the empire, the horrors of war for the inhabitants were not as great as those which the Romans in their best days inflicted on the conquered, for the provinces yielded with slight struggles, |