A Higher Form of Killing (2 page)

Thus each attack was condemned roundly not only by the Allies but by most neutral opinion. In the press, banner headlines and editorials accused Germany of barbarism and “frightfulness.” The latter—a translation of the German word
Schrecklichkeit
and often placed in quotation marks—was rapidly becoming shorthand for what were perceived as Germany’s brutal methods of waging war. Reporting the gas attack at Ypres, the
Observer
deplored the use of “a poison-mixture patented by German frightfulness.” On the sinking of the
Lusitania
it commented that “while the Germans think there is the least possibility that superiority in ‘frightfulness’ may save them, ‘frightfulness’ will continue to rage with increasing and extending virulence.” The
Washington Herald
ruled that the Germans who were guilty of the “frightfulness against Belgium were the same who sank the
Lusitania
” while the
New York Nation
denounced the sinking as Germany’s “latest display of frightfulness.” In a similar vein, the
Guardian
called the first air raid on London “a piece of ‘frightfulness.’ ”

The motivation for the attacks was the desire by the German government under Kaiser Wilhelm II to break the stalemate in the war and to achieve a quick victory before their enemies could fully mobilize their greater economic and military resources. Part of the attraction of the new weapons to the German authorities was indeed the potential of their “frightfulness” to cause mass panic not only among troops but also civilians, thus forcing their opponents to make peace. Although they failed in this aim, the attacks did indeed have an immense psychological effect disproportionate to the initial casualties incurred. Henceforth no one—whether a member of the armed forces or a civilian or even a neutral—could feel or be safe from attack without warning from air, land, or sea, however far they were from the battlefield, whatever they were doing, day or night.

As a consequence of these six weeks in 1915 no technology thereafter would be considered too indiscriminate to deploy in warfare. When Fritz Haber oversaw the release of gas over enemy trenches, science lost any innocence it had retained. Using the childhood argument “They started it!” the Allies swiftly followed their enemies in the use of poison gas, pursuing military victory at the price of legitimacy. The age of weapons of mass destruction had dawned when a single attacker or a small group in comparative safety, at a distance and often unseen, could launch at the press of a firing button or the touch of a bomb release a weapon that could kill thousands.

Hitherto-held concepts of morality had clashed with technology and political and military expediency and lost. We still feel the consequences today as the international community struggles to protect civilians in warfare and to regulate the use of weapons such as poison gas still deemed too “frightful” or “barbaric” to be deployed. A 2013 article in the
Wall Street Journal
about the civil war in Syria headlined
SYRIA’S GAS ATTACK ON CIVILIZATION AFFIRMED
that “it takes a barbarian to employ poison gas.” It could have been written in 1915 with the simple substitution of “Germany” for “Syria.”

CHAPTER ONE

“A Flash of Lightning from the North”

In early times warfare was total, constrained only by limits of weapons technology, transport, and communication. No distinction was made between combatants and civilians. Defeated enemies might be sacrificed to gods or enslaved, women raped and/or forced into marriage. Captured cities were looted and destroyed. Territory was taken by right of conquest. Scorched-earth policies where countryside and dwellings were razed were common, for example, in the long Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta in the late fifth century
B.C.E
.

However, as societies developed, they began to think about regulating the conduct of war. Several verses from chapter 20 of the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy show the beginning of such thinking:

When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it . . . If it makes thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it. And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword. But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies . . .

When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the siege.

The next chapter of Deuteronomy stipulates that a victor may take a “beautiful” captive woman if he has “a desire unto her” but thereafter “if you have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.”

In the sixth century
B.C.E.
, in chapter 2 of his classic book on the art of war, Sun Tzu advises that captive warriors must be kindly treated and kept but suggests that the taking of booty should be permitted to maintain the morale of troops. In the first century
B.C.E.
the Roman orator, lawyer, and politician Cicero praised the conduct of wars that was “mild and marked with no unnecessary cruelty” while again allowing the destruction or seizure of enemy property.

In time, Christian thinkers began to discuss the justification for and conduct of wars at least when they were between Christians. Both Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430
C.E.
) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274
C.E.
) considered what constituted a “just” war. Saint Augustine thought that war was a crime if fought “with a malicious intent to destroy, a desire to dominate, with fierce hatred and furious vengeance.” Conversely, it became a moral duty if fought “in a just cause” to turn wrong into right. Saint Thomas Aquinas believed war could be justified provided three conditions were satisfied: that there was a just cause, that it was begun on proper authority, and that it was waged with the right intention for “the advancement of good or the avoidance of evil”—conditions sufficiently general to leave considerable room for debate.

In the Islamic tradition the first caliph, Abu Bakr, suggested “rules for guidance on the battlefield” including: “Do not commit treachery . . . Do not mutilate dead bodies . . . Do not kill women or children or an aged infirm person . . . Do not cut down fruit-bearing trees . . . Do not slaughter [your enemy’s] sheep or camels except for food . . . Do not destroy an inhabited place.” This guidance amplified the Koran itself which requires that in combat Muslims only strike back in self-defense against those who strike against them and, once the enemy ceases to attack, Muslims also should stop fighting.

Over centuries in Europe a system of uncoded customs and traditions concerning war evolved covering matters such as the status of treaties and ambassadors, and arrangements for the safe conduct of the latter together with heralds and other envoys. However, they did little to mitigate the horrors of warfare for the individual soldier or civilian. These reached a peak in the Thirty Years War starting in 1618 between the Catholics of the Holy Roman Empire and their neighboring Protestant states, with other countries such as Sweden and France also intervening. Armies routinely lived off the land, killing, raping, and looting, even digging up graveyards for the jewels buried with the dead. After the capture of Magdeburg, a center of Lutheranism, by the Catholic general Count Tilly, the city was destroyed and some twenty-five thousand of its thirty thousand inhabitants killed, the majority of the survivors being women who had been taken to the enemy camp to be raped. Even when order was restored the few surviving males were forced to buy back their womenfolk and ransom themselves. Those unable to do so had to march with their captors as forced laborers.

Writing during this period the Dutch jurist and diplomat Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) published a series of works that make him usually considered “the father of international law.” One of his early works,
De Mare Liberum
, dealt with the freedom of the seas, suggesting they were open to all to conduct their trade—a proposition adopted by the Dutch but opposed by other thinkers and indeed nations, such as the British, who argued that the sea could be annexed by a state just as land could be. Disputes about free trade and freedom of the seas led to two Anglo-Dutch wars in the mid-seventeenth century after the English forbade any goods from entering their country except on an English ship. States reached a compromise in the early eighteenth century that the extent of the sea to which a nation could lay claim was the distance that a cannon shot could travel to protect it, which in turn evolved into the three-mile territorial limit. Nevertheless, the freedom of the seas and the ability of belligerents and others to impose restrictions on it remained a subject of controversy through the Napoleonic Wars and into the First World War, being among other things a prime cause of the Anglo-American War of 1812 and a source of tension between the Union side and Britain in the American Civil War.

Grotius’s major work was, however,
De jure belli ac pacis
(About the law of war and peace) published in 1625, and prompted Grotius said by his belief “that there is a common law among nations which is valid alike for war and in war . . . Throughout the Christian world I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war . . . I observed that men rush to war for slight causes, or no cause at all, and that when arms have once been taken up there is no longer any respect for law divine or human; it is as if in accordance with a general decree, frenzy had openly been let loose by the committing of all crimes.” His work was in three volumes; the first two looked at the justification for war, the third at its conduct. Grotius quoted a comment from Cicero that “people are apt to call lawful what they can do with impunity” and then argued that what they should think about is not the rigor of the law but what is “becoming to one’s character.” He maintained that humanity and morality are as crucial to the declaration and conduct of war as to any other sphere of life and he recognized three “just causes” for war—self-defense, reparation of injury, and punishment—and argued that once war has begun all parties should act humanely and are bound to do so whether or not their cause is just.

Over the next two centuries debates continued about the legitimacy of the causes and conduct of war, interacting toward the end of that period with the concept of the “civilized” nation as opposed to the barbarian one, which had developed in discussions about the United States Constitution as well as in Europe. (The earliest use of the word “civilization” in its modern sense dates from the late 1750s.) By the mid-nineteenth century a fairly general consensus had emerged about the justification for wars between civilized nations. Much more latitude was at least tacitly given to the treatment of “barbarian” states and individuals.

Few would have dissented from the definition of a just war quoted by an Englishman, Henry Lushington, in opposing his country’s first (and disastrous) intervention in Afghanistan in 1838–42:

The received code of international morality is not even in the nineteenth century very strict. One principle, however, seems to be admitted in the theory, if not the practice of civilized men, that an aggressive war—a war undertaken against unoffending parties with a view to our own benefit only—is unjust, and conversely that a war to be just must partake the character of a defensive war. It may be defensive in various ways . . . either preventing an injury which it is attempted to inflict, or of exacting reparation for one inflicted, and taking the necessary security against its future infliction but in one way or other defensive it must be.

Another major step in the codification of laws about war followed what was intended to be a business trip by thirty-one-year-old Henry Dunant, a chubby banker from Geneva, to visit Emperor Napoléon III of France. At the time Napoléon was leading his army with that of his Piedmontese allies against the forces of Austro-Hungary commanded by their emperor Franz Ferdinand. On June 24, 1859, the two armies clashed at Solferino on the north Italian plains in the last major battle in Europe fought under the direct and personal command of reigning monarchs. The French and their allies were the victors but more than thirty-five thousand men from both sides lay dead or wounded when Dunant arrived that evening. At sunrise the next day, Dunant went to the battlefield and was appalled: “Corpses were strewn over roads, ditches, ravines, thickets and fields; the approaches to Solferino were literally thick with dead . . . The wounded . . . were ghostly pale . . . The most badly hurt had a stupefied look . . . Others were shaken by spasmodic trembling . . . Some had gaping wounds already beginning to show infection [and] begged to be put out of their misery . . . Many were disfigured, limbs stiffened, their bodies blotched with ghastly spots, their hands clawing at the ground.” (The French had four veterinary surgeons for  every one thousand horses but only one doctor for every one thousand men.) Dunant put aside all thoughts of business and began organizing help for the wounded, irrespective of nationality, with the assistance of some local people and four English tourists, a Parisian journalist, a French count, an ex-naval officer, and a chocolate manufacturer called Philippe Suchard.