A Higher Form of Killing (3 page)

On his return to Geneva Dunant wrote
A Memory of Solferino
and paid for the book’s publication. In it he proposed societies of volunteers to help the wounded of all sides in war and “some international principles, conventional and sacred, which once agreed and ratified would form the basis for these national societies to help the wounded.” His book was widely praised throughout Europe and beyond. Subsequently Dunant and four other prominent citizens of Geneva established an international committee for the relief of the wounded. The committee oversaw the establishment of kindred national organizations and then persuaded the Swiss government to sponsor an international governmental conference to draw up a convention on the treatment of the wounded.

The conference met in Geneva’s town hall in August 1864. Within a fortnight the members had agreed to a convention requiring the care of all wounded irrespective of nationality, and neutrality for medical staff, hospitals, and ambulances. To ensure that humanitarian helpers and facilities were recognized, the delegates agreed on the use of a red cross on a white background (the Swiss flag’s symbol with its colors reversed) to distinguish them. Quickly thereafter the national and international organizations became known as the Red Cross.

Although Britain and the United States were among the sixteen states represented at the conference, they were not among the first to sign up to the new convention. Florence Nightingale, who had done so much to improve the treatment of the wounded during Britain’s war in the Crimea a few years previously, wrote that it would be “quite harmless for our government to sign . . . It amounts to nothing more than a declaration that humanity to the wounded is a good thing. It is like an opera chorus. And if the principal European characters sing,

We never will be cruel more,

I am sure, if England likes to sing too,

I never will be cruel more,

I see no objection.

But it is like vows. People who keep a vow would do the thing without the vow. And if people will not do it without the vow they will not do it with.”

Britain signed the convention in 1865. Clara Barton, who had performed a similar role to Florence Nightingale and emerged with equal heroine status from the Union side in the American Civil War, was an avid supporter and her advocacy was a major factor leading to the United States’ ratification of the convention though not until March 1882. It is symptomatic either of the slow speed and extent of communication or the chauvinism of the inhabitants of Geneva and quite probably both that in their deliberations the five founding members of the International Committee claimed not to have known the details of either Nightingale’s or Barton’s work. They professed themselves similarly unaware of the “Sanitary Commission” that on the Union side in the U.S. Civil War had much improved the care of the wounded, establishing convalescent homes and a corps of stretcher bearers as well as regular inspection of hospitals.

The Union side also issued guidance to troops on the conduct of warfare, developed by Francis Lieber, a German-born university professor who had emigrated to the United States after being wounded at the Battle of Waterloo. He concluded that the destruction of people and property was acceptable if essential to victory; however, cruelty to prisoners of war, torture, use of poison, and wanton destruction as well as “any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult” were not. “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings responsible to one another, and to God.”

The Civil War established another milestone in the law of war by the conviction and execution of Captain Henry Wirz, the Confederate commandant of the Andersonville, Georgia, prisoner of war camp who was judged responsible for the death of Union soldiers in the camp “in violation of the laws and customs of war.” The court set a precedent for future such trials by refusing to accept the validity of the defendant’s plea that he was only following orders.

When in June 1866 Austro-Hungary and Prussia went to war, Louis Appia, one of the original five founding members of the International Committee wore the first Red Cross armband in Schleswig. By that time Henry Dunant had left the organization he had done so much to establish. He was never astute in commercial matters and probably distracted by the demands of his humanitarian work on his time and attention. In autumn 1865 one of his businesses—a bank called Credit Genevois—went into liquidation with large debts, and the bankruptcy court declared that Dunant had “knowingly swindled” shareholders. Dunant resigned from the Red Cross and departed Geneva forever, pursued by the malice of his creditors and more surprisingly by that of another of the five founding members, Gustave Moynier. Now the president of the organization, he had long felt animosity to Dunant, partly at least due to jealousy of his charisma and celebrity. Moynier did his best to rewrite the history of the Red Cross, expunging Dunant’s name and contribution wherever he could and warning any who would listen against further involvement with him.

After the agreement of a humanitarian approach to those involved in war when it broke out, as the nineteenth century drew toward its close, public attention began to turn toward preventing wars or at the very least regulating the methods used in their conduct to comply with the concept of what civilized values permitted. Peace unions sprang up in industrialized countries and international peace congresses were held where individuals and groups such as the Quakers urged alternatives to war such as the use of arbitration to resolve disputes between nations. As early as 1874 a nongovernmental conference of experts held in Brussels produced a draft code of laws on war and in 1894 the campaigning British journalist William Thomas (“W. T.”) Stead proposed that the great powers should jointly pledge not to increase their military budgets until the end of the century.

Nevertheless, what the French newspaper
Le Temps
called “a flash of lightning from the north” shocked governments on August 24, 1898, when entirely unexpectedly at his weekly meeting with foreign ambassadors in Saint Petersburg, the Russian foreign secretary Count Mikhail Muraviev handed to them a call on behalf of Czar Nicholas II for the convening of an international conference to consider “the grave problem” of the development of “military forces to proportions hitherto unknown.” His note stated:

The intellectual and physical strength of the nations, labour and capital are for the major part diverted from their natural application and unproductively consumed. Hundreds of millions are devoted to acquiring terrible engines of destruction, which though today regarded as the last word of science, are destined tomorrow to lose all value in consequence of some fresh discovery in this field. National culture, economic progress and the production of wealth are either paralysed or checked in their development. Moreover, in proportion as the armaments of each power increase, so do they less and less fulfil the object which the government has set before themselves.

Many were surprised that such an initiative should come from autocratic, backward Russia. Some welcomed it as “an omen for the coming new century” or, as an American journalist wrote, possibly “the most momentous and beneficent movement in modern history—in all history.” W. T. Stead brought out a new weekly,
War Against War
, launched an international peace crusade, and toured European capitals urging support for the proposal. Most, however, looked cynically for the motive, agreeing with Britain’s Prince of Wales that it was “some new dodge of that sly dog M[uraviev] who put it into the Tsar’s head.” The ailing Russian economy could not in their view finance the latest weapons and therefore Russia had decided on the initiative.

Germany, only united since 1871 following its victory over France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War in which it had seized from its defeated enemy the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, had none of Russia’s economic worries but great political and imperial ambitions. The thirty-nine-year-old mercurial, sometimes vacillating, sometimes impulsively unreasoning Kaiser Wilhelm II, among whose titles was that of “Supreme War Lord,” was stunned that Nicholas had “put a brilliant weapon into the hands of our democrats and opposition. Imagine a monarch dissolving his regiments and handing over his towns to anarchists and democracy.” He compared the invitation to the conference to a Spartan proposal during the Peloponnesian War that Athens agree not to rebuild its city walls and asked, “what will Krupp pay his workers with?” (Friedrich Alfred Krupp’s company was then Europe’s biggest business and at the forefront of artillery development.) Inclined as often to see issues between nations as personal ones between their rulers, Wilhelm alleged Nicholas was trying to steal the limelight from his own planned visit to Jerusalem. As a confidant of the kaiser put it, “he [Wilhelm] simply cannot stand someone else coming to the front of the stage.”

However, with vibrant peace unions in many countries and with no desire to appear enemies of peace, all invited nations felt compelled to accept the czar’s invitation even if many privately sympathized with the kaiser when he said, “I’ll go along with the conference comedy but I’ll keep my dagger at my side during the waltz.”

CHAPTER TWO

“Humanising War”

One hundred and eight delegates from twenty-six countries assembled in May 1899 in a red brick Dutch royal chateau—“the House in the Woods”—just outside The Hague, which as the capital of the Netherlands, a neutral country, the nations had chosen as the venue. Thus began the city’s association with the laws of war, just as the conference in Geneva began that city’s association with the Red Cross. The head of the American delegation, Andrew White, was not alone in thinking that no similar group had ever met “in a spirit of more hopeless scepticism as to any good result.”

The agenda had two main components—how to avoid war by the use of arbitration and the limitation of armaments, and how war should be conducted if it did break out. Each delegation had strict guidance from its government on how best to protect its interests. The British, for example, were told prohibiting or restricting innovations in weaponry would “favour the interests of savage nations and be against those of the more highly civilised.”

Members of the press, soon to be considerably annoyed by being excluded from the formal sessions of the conference, and what would now be called “lobbyists” of all sorts thronged The Hague. The head of the German delegation, Count Munster, complained to his foreign minister, “The conference has brought here the political riffraff of the entire world, journalists of the worst type, baptised Jews like Bloch and female peace fanatics.” In Munster’s mind journalists “of the worst type” would have included W. T. Stead who was in The Hague to chronicle the conference and to campaign for his views. Ivan Bloch was a Russian railway magnate who believed that any future wars would be “suicide” and who was author of a newly published peace-promoting treatise in six volumes. Said to have influenced the czar, it prophesied the stalemate of trench warfare leading to a prolonged conflict whose intolerable human and economic costs would exhaust the belligerents or plunge them into social revolution. On the eve of the conference an international women’s movement had organized demonstrations for peace in many of the countries involved and some of its members were in The Hague. Among the foremost female peace campaigners was the Czech Bertha von Suttner who considered peace “a condition that the progress of civilisation will bring about by necessity.” The hotel in which she stayed for the conference flew a white flag in honor of her and her views.

Even mild-mannered Andrew White complained that “the queer letters and crankish proposals which come in every day are amazing . . . The Quakers are out in full force . . . The number of people with plans, schemes, notions, nostrums, whimsies of all sorts who press upon us and try to take our time, is enormous and when this is added to the pest of interviewers and photographers, life becomes serious indeed.” To his regret the pressure of work imposed by the conference required that “for the first time in my life I have made Sunday a day of work.”

White and the head of the British delegation, Sir Julian Pauncefote, both had members of their teams who were difficult to control and whose views were often at variance with their governmental instructions. Both the chief mavericks represented their country’s navy. The Briton was fifty-eight-year-old Admiral Jacky Fisher, destined to play an important part in the events of spring 1915. From relatively humble beginnings—his father was a failed coffee planter—he had made a spectacular rise through the navy for which he advocated less bureaucracy, less ship painting, and far fewer time-wasting drills and in their place far more training, far better gunnery, heavier armaments, a broader officer-recruitment base, and a new emphasis on torpedoes and defenses against them.

Both charismatic and tactless, Fisher made friends and enemies equally quickly. He stood out at The Hague not only for his opinions but also for his white top hat and tireless skills on the dance floor. His language was colorful and exaggerated. The existence of politicians had “deepened his faith in Providence. How else could one explain Britain’s continued existence as a nation?” His bold scrawl, usually in green ink, was full of exclamation marks, and double and triple underlinings, and he frequently admonished his addressee to burn his letters after reading to protect his confidences. He signed letters “Yours till hell freezes” and “Yours till charcoal sprouts.”