A Higher Form of Killing (5 page)

Undaunted, the following year Cochrane urged the use of his “secret weapons” to dislodge the Russians from the Crimean port of Sevastopol and asked for: “Four or five hundred tons of sulphur and two thousand tons of coke” to vaporize it as well as “a couple of thousand barrels” of tar and a large amount of straw, hay, and firewood to create smoke. He also suggested floating naphtha near Sevastopol and then “igniting it by means of a ball of potassium.” By these means, he assured Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, Sevastopol’s outer defenses would be “smoked, sulphured and blown up” and “thousands of lives” saved. Sevastopol fell soon afterward without chemical intervention.

While the Crimean War was still under way, British chemist Lyon Playfair [
sic
] recommended firing shells filled with toxic cacodyl cyanide at Russian ships since “such a shell going between the decks of a ship would render the atmosphere irrespirable and poison the men if they remained at their guns.” When the government suggested this was a low trick akin to poisoning the enemy’s water supply Playfair responded with another argument often to be used to defend poison gas: “It is considered a legitimate mode of warfare to fire shells with molten metal which scatters among the enemy, and produces the most frightful modes of death. Why a poisonous vapour which would kill men without suffering is to be considered illegitimate is incomprehensible.”

The American Civil War saw several proposals for the use of poison gas but again none were taken up. Chemist William C. Tilden contacted Union general Ulysses S. Grant with “a scheme for producing chemically a means of settling wars quickly by making them terribly destructive.” Grant responded, as the British Admiralty had to Cochrane, that “such a terrific agency for destroying human life should not be permitted . . . by the civilized nations of the world.” In 1862, New Yorker John Doughty sent the U.S. War Department his proposal for a projectile to clear Confederate troops from fortified positions. For the first time it suggested the use of the chlorine gas that was to be used so destructively on April 22, 1915: “Chlorine is a gas so irritating in its effects upon the respiratory system, that a small quantity diffused in the atmosphere produces incessant and uncontrollably violent coughing—It is 2 ½ times heavier than the atmosphere and when subjected to a pressure of 60 pounds to the inch it is condensed into a liquid, its volume being reduced many hundred times. A shell holding two or three quarts would therefore contain many cubic feet of the gas.”

The Hague Conference agreed to a ban on asphyxiating gases that in its detailed clauses was framed against projectiles containing them. The only dissent came from the United States at the urging of Captain Mahan who argued that not enough was known about the potential use of gas as a weapon to ban it and thus to place restrictions on the “genius” of U.S. citizens “in inventing and producing new weapons of war” was not justified. Besides, he said, being asphyxiated by gas could be no worse than four or five hundred sailors choking on seawater with only the remotest chance of rescue after their ships had been torpedoed by a submarine.

The proposal to ban projectiles or explosives launched from the air also proved contentious. As early as the seventeenth century an Italian Jesuit, Francesco Lana de Terzi, had imagined a diabolical air machine that would fly over helpless civilian populations, lobbing flaming and explosive weapons upon their heads. A century later, in his book
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
, the lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson asked: “What would be the security of the good, if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, nor mountains, nor sea, could afford security. A flight of northern savages might hover in the wind, and light with irrepressible violence upon the capital of a fruitful region.”

The first major breakthrough in making such flying machines reality came in 1783 when a fashionable crowd in France watched a manned hot air balloon, built by the Montgolfier brothers and powered by a wood fire, take off and fly some five miles. Among the spectators was Benjamin Franklin who, when a French officer derided the balloon as a mere toy, amusing but useless, replied, “Of what use is a new-born baby?” The same year, another Frenchman, Jacques Charles, piloted the world’s first manned hydrogen-filled balloon which traveled over twenty miles in two hours. A few years later, during the Napoleonic Wars, people in southern England scanned the skies, alarmed by rumors of giant balloons crossing the Channel to deposit French soldiers, guns, and even horses on British soil.

That never happened, but balloons found uses in warfare. During the American Civil War, a Union army Balloon Corps used tethered balloons for observation. A young German officer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, took his first flight in a balloon in 1863, courtesy of the Union army. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) the French used balloons to convey people and mail out of a besieged Paris. By the time of the Hague Conference a more sophisticated “lighter than air” flying machine—the powered airship—was under development, pioneered by von Zeppelin who would give his name to it. By 1874 he had already decided that his craft “must have the dimensions of a big ship. The gas-chambers so calculated as to carry the machine . . . Elevation will then be obtained by starting the engine.”

Von Zeppelin regarded war “as the main study of [his] life” and had pleaded with the German army to help fund his research into “dirigible balloons” as “a very important instrument in modern warfare” but had no success until 1896 when the endorsement of the Union of German Engineers persuaded the authorities to finance his building of a prototype on the shores of Lake Constance. On July 2, 1900—barely nine months after the end of the Hague Conference—the “mad count,” as the locals called him, would reveal his gargantuan creation to the world.

Though delegates at the first Hague Conference were mostly skeptical about airships—and the even more embryonic airplanes—many were reluctant to restrict their countries’ options by agreeing to a ban on launching projectiles from the skies. Captain William Crozier, the U.S. Army’s representative, on Mahan’s advice objected to a prohibition unlimited by time, arguing that such weapons were untried and that the further development of dirigible airships or aircraft might make them valuable in warfare and in the long run shorten conflicts and spare lives. As a result, the conference agreed unanimously to ban the launching of weapons from the air but for five years only.

As they concluded their ten weeks of discussions, The Hague delegates expressed a wish that a further conference should be held in due course.

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The delegates acknowledged the importance of Grotius’s contribution to their task when they visited his grave in nearby Delft one day to lay wreaths on his tomb.

CHAPTER THREE

“The Law of Facts”

The agreements at The Hague had little immediate practical effect. Shortly after the conference, in October 1899 the Boer War broke out between the British and the Boer republics of South Africa. The cause was partly rights for non-Boers in the Boer republics but perhaps more about the control over the diamond fields of the Rand. When the British in due course won,
Life
summed up, “A small boy with diamonds is no match for a large burglar with experience.” The British initially suffered a series of heavy defeats but eventually began to win set-piece battles, causing the Boers to adopt guerrilla tactics. To combat these and prevent supplies and assistance reaching the Boer fighters, the British burned down Boer farms, confiscated their flocks and crops, and interned Boer women, children, and old men in what were to become known as “concentration camps.” Although the intention of the camps was only to isolate the Boer guerrilla fighters from the support of their families, conditions were poor and disease was rampant so that twenty-five thousand internees died.

Reports on the conditions by an Englishwoman, Emily Hobhouse, prompted an outcry in Britain. Although one British civil servant described Hobhouse’s campaign as “agitation . . . raised by a few unsexed and hysterical women . . . prepared to sacrifice everything for notoriety,” the British parliamentary opposition led by the Liberal Henry Campbell-Bannerman took up the cause. “When,” he asked, “is a war not a war?” “When it is carried out by methods of barbarism,” he answered himself. Conditions in the camps were quickly improved. Nevertheless at home and abroad the British continued to be accused of imprisoning and ill-treating civilians contrary to the customs and usages of war. What the camps showed for certain was the difficulty of deciding who was a civilian and true noncombatant, rather than an active guerrilla (the Boers did not wear uniforms) or supplier of assistance to the fighting Boers, as well as the limits on the means of stopping such supplies.

The United States was then fighting its own war in the Philippines against a guerrilla rebellion demanding independence after the recent American seizure of the country from the Spanish. The Americans faced the same difficulties in distinguishing insurgents from civilians. Both sides committed atrocities. The Americans used expanding bullets. On occasion, in direct contravention of the Hague principles, they gave orders that no quarter should be given. When an American soldier was found with his throat cut villages were burned down and every inhabitant killed. American troops used the “water cure” and other torture to secure information. Although the United States, like Britain in South Africa, emerged victorious, neither country could look with any satisfaction on the conduct of their campaigns, their fiercest critics coming from within. Among the leaders of the opposition in the United States to the Philippine war, and an unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1900, was William Jennings Bryan, who would be American secretary of state when the First World War broke out in 1914.

In 1900, the world had also seen the assembly of its first international force. In some ways a forerunner of UN and NATO police actions, its purpose was to relieve the foreign legations besieged in Beijing by Boxer rebels enjoying the support, at least for a time, of the Chinese court and the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi. The force consisted of contingents from the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, Japan, and Germany under a German commander. When the kaiser addressed his own troops leaving for China he departed from his prepared text: “My men, you are about to meet a crafty, well-armed foe! Meet him and beat him! Give him no quarter! Take no prisoners! Kill him when he falls into your hands! Even as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made such a name for themselves as still resounds in terror through legend and fable, so may the name of Germany resound through Chinese history . . . that never again will a Chinese dare to so much as look askance at a German.” As a consequence, his future opponents would frequently dub German troops “Huns.”

When the international army eventually relieved the Beijing legations and captured the city, the majority of the foreigners indulged in an orgy of looting. But that was not the worst. A British officer described how “Every Chinaman . . . was treated as a Boxer by the Russian and French troops and the slaughter of men women and children . . . was revolting.” The French commander, General Henri Frey, when challenged about “the frequent occurrence of disgraceful outrages upon women” by his men, responded dismissively: “It is impossible to restrain the gallantry of the French soldier.”

In February 1904, without any declaration of war Japan attacked Russia in a dispute over their competing ambitions in Korea and Chinese Manchuria. In the fighting that followed, the Japanese navy, with its modern guns, torpedoes, and mines, first destroyed the Russian Far East Fleet and then at Tsushima—the greatest sea battle since Trafalgar in 1805—the Russian Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway around the world to its doom. Early in its voyage to the Far East, the Baltic Fleet had at the Dogger Bank in the North Sea fired on British trawlers, sinking one of them and killing two fishermen under the fanciful impression that the Japanese were confronting them. The incident produced a major crisis with Britain, only resolved when the two countries put the dispute to arbitration in The Hague. On land, in fighting that saw the first extensive use of barbed wire to defend positions, the Japanese defeated the Russians and captured Port Arthur in Manchuria—Russia’s prized and recently occupied only eastern warm-water port. Captured Russian soldiers suffered greatly at Japanese hands.

In July 1905 U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt offered to mediate between the Russians and the Japanese, both of whom were nearly exhausted militarily and economically. At a meeting under his chairmanship at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, they agreed to a peace treaty. Soon afterward the United States also played a leading role in persuading the kaiser to agree to a peace conference to resolve a crisis between Germany and France over Morocco. In 1906 Roosevelt, the advocate of speaking softly but carrying a big stick, was awarded the fifth Nobel Peace Prize.

Although his inventions had produced major advances in weapons technology, Alfred Nobel had been an advocate of arbitration and deeply interested in the peace movement. (The peace activist Bertha von Suttner had briefly been his secretary.) On his death in 1896 he left most of his fortune to establish five prizes to be awarded irrespective of nationality or sex for eminence in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace promotion. The first peace prize in 1901 had gone to Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, rehabilitating his reputation.
*