A Higher Form of Killing (4 page)

At every opportunity Fisher derided the objective of humanizing war as naive:

The humanising of war? You might as well talk about humanising Hell! The essence of war is violence! Moderation in war is imbecility! . . . I am not for war, I am for peace. That is why I am for a supreme Navy. The supremacy of the British Navy is the best security for the peace of the world . . . If you rub it in both at home and abroad that you are ready for instant war . . . and intend to be first in and hit your enemy in the belly and kick him when he is down and boil your prisoners in oil (if you take any) . . . and torture his women and children, then people will keep clear of you.

He believed all nations wanted peace “but a peace that suits them.” An enemy’s realization of the horrors of war coupled with conviction about Britain’s readiness to fight were the best deterrents of all. It was his duty, Fisher said, to see that his country, and in particular its navy, were prepared.

He was similarly dismissive of the delegates’ debate about the freedom of the seas and the rights of “neutral shipping”:

Suppose that war breaks out, and I am expecting to fight a new Trafalgar on the morrow. Some neutral colliers try to steam past us into the enemy’s waters. If the enemy gets their coal into his bunkers, it may make all the difference in the coming fight. You tell me I must not seize these colliers. I tell you that nothing that you, or any power on earth, can say will stop me from sending them to the bottom, if I can in no other way keep their coal out of the enemy’s hands; for to-morrow I am to fight the battle which will save or wreck the Empire. If I win it, I shall be far too big a man to be effected by protests about the neutral colliers; if I lose it, I shall go down with my ship . . . and then protests will effect me still less.

Fisher was seconded in such opinions by another fifty-eight-year-old, the American naval delegate Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, already a renowned naval strategist. An admirer of Admiral Horatio Nelson, he had propounded in his 1890 book
The Influence of Sea Power Upon History
and subsequent works that “control of the sea, by maritime commerce and naval supremacy means predominant influence in the world . . . [and] is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations.”

Andrew White in his summary of the conference observed that Mahan “prevented any lapses into sentimentality . . . When he speaks the millennium fades and this stern severe actual world appears.” Mahan reiterated that “the object of war was to smite the enemy incessantly and remorselessly and crush him by depriving him of the use of the sea,” strangling the enemy into submission by cutting off his trade, including the neutral’s right to trade with him. With such powerful opposing voices as Mahan and Fisher arguing against the conference’s generally pacific purpose of introducing restrictions on warfare, the delegates thought it better to leave unaltered the by now time-honored body of custom and practice relating to war at sea known as the “Cruiser Rules,” the origins of some parts of which dated back even beyond Grotius to the time of Henry VIII. Other parts, such as a ban on privateering, were more recent.
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The consensus embodied in these “rules” prohibited enemy warships sinking on sight merchant vessels of whatever nationality. They had to be stopped and searched for “contraband” and only if contraband were found could they either be sunk—after their crews had been given time to take to the boats—or seized as prizes. To effect such searches warships were allowed to blockade their enemies’ ports.

The delegates made no headway either on disarmament against broad and implacable opposition vociferously led by Germany, satisfying themselves with the platitudinous resolution “that the restriction of military budgets, which are at present a heavy burden on the world, is extremely desirable for the increase of the material and moral welfare of mankind.” When the Russian delegation proposed that all states should agree “not to transform radically their guns nor to increase their calibres for a certain fixed period” the British objected that effective verification would be impossible since new armaments could easily be concealed. Captain Mahan opposed international control and verification in principle because they would breach national sovereignty.

During the long debates about arbitration Mahan stated his belief that “the great danger of undiscriminating advocacy of arbitration, which threatens even the cause it seeks to maintain, is that it may lead men to tamper with equity, soothing their conscience with the belief that war is so entirely wrong that beside it no other tolerated evil is wrong.” Despite such objections, although no state would commit itself to put every dispute in which it became involved to arbitration, none wanted to be seen as warmongering. Consequently, the conference in its resolutions encouraged the use of arbitration and established at The Hague a permanent Court of Arbitration ready and willing to consider all cases submitted to it by those involved. Even the kaiser, who considered arbitration “a hoax” that a state could use to gain time to build up its forces to improve its position before war eventually began, felt forced to agree to the arbitration provision. However, in doing so he wrote in the margin of one of the relevant documents, “I consented to all this nonsense only in order that the Tsar should not lose face before Europe, in practice however I shall rely on God and my sharp sword! And I shit on all their decisions.”

The conference did however make major progress in codifying the conduct of war once it broke out, agreeing to a convention on the laws of war on land. Among the key prohibitions were those against “poison or poisoned weapons”; killing or wounding “treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army”; declaring that “no quarter will be given”; employing “arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering”; destroying or seizing “the enemy’s property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war”; . . . “the attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended; the pillage of a town or place even when taken by assault.”

Neither these rules nor any other part of the Hague agreements spelled out specifically the position of civilians but rather relied on the consensus and the custom and usage evolved over the centuries as to their inviolability. Civilians were, however, implicitly covered by the catchall phrase that placed all caught up in warfare “under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilised peoples, from the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.” Some of the other prohibitions, in particular that against bombardment of undefended places, provided them extra protection.

The Hague Conference also considered banning certain weapons. At least since the Roman siege of the port of Syracuse in Sicily in the third century
B.C.E.
when Archimedes, one of the defenders, developed a crane-like claw designed to grapple Roman ships and a focused mirror system to blind their sailors and even burn their vessels, war has accelerated the pace of scientific and engineering development. The speed of innovation grew with the Industrial Revolution. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Napoleonic Wars saw the introduction of the shrapnel shell and the Congreve black-powder-fueled artillery rocket. By the middle of the century warships were becoming steam powered and iron clad; breech-loading rifles were replacing muzzle-loading muskets; while the rifling of gun barrels was improving artillery. The U.S. Civil War brought innovations such as mechanical-fused land mines, machine guns and improved hand grenades, and the sinking of a Union warship by a man-propelled Confederate submarine. Alfred Nobel’s inventions of dynamite and of smokeless powder—the latter patented by him during the decade before the Hague Conference—were among the latest developments to have a major effect on warfare. Smokeless powder, for example, allowed much greater visibility across the battlefield as well as permitting the concealment of artillery and increasing the range and accuracy of weapons.

Throughout history some weapons such as poison, which could be thought underhand or against the spirit of a fair or manly fight, have attracted popular revulsion. The Laws of Manu, the greatest of the ancient Hindu codes, prohibited Hindus from using poisoned arrows. Greeks and Romans customarily refrained from using poison or poisoned weapons, considering them abominable violations of nature and contrary to the laws of the gods. Often when new weapons were introduced, they too generated an outcry against their inhumanity. In 1132, the Lateran Council declared the crossbow and arbalest “un-Christian weapons.” In 1139 Pope Innocent II again tried to ban the crossbow as too “murderous for Christian warfare.” Nearly three hundred years later the French Chevalier Bayard, usually considered the epitome of the fearless and faultless chivalrous knight, valiant, honorable, and merciful to all, was so incensed by the introduction of the unchivalrous musket that he ordered no quarter to be given to captured musketeers.

The Hague Conference considered in detail three potentially inhumane weapons—the Dum-Dum bullet, asphyxiating or poison gas, and air-launched projectiles, that is, bombs. The prohibition of the use of the submarine in warfare had been proposed by Count Muraviev on behalf of Russia during the advance discussion of the agenda and was also debated on the sidelines of the conference but was not taken further.

The Dum-Dum or expanding bullet was the only one of the three that had actually been used effectively in warfare. Developed at and named after the British Dum-Dum arsenal near Calcutta, the bullets exploded and expanded within the body of the victim, considerably increasing the damage to surrounding tissue and bone. All nations at the conference were content to ban such bullets except Britain and the United States. The British army delegate, General Sir John Ardagh, told in his instructions from London “you have a difficult hand to play,” underlined the distinction still then drawn between “civilised nations” and “barbarians.”

The civilised soldier when shot recognises that he is wounded and knows that the sooner he is attended to the sooner he will recover. He lies down on his stretcher and is taken off the field to his ambulance where he is dressed . . . by his doctor or his Red Cross Society according to the . . . rules of the game as laid down in the Geneva Convention. Your fanatical barbarian, similarly wounded, continues to rush on, spear or sword in hand; and before you have had time to represent to him that his conduct is a flagrant violation of the understanding relative to the proper course for the wounded man to follow—he may have cut off your head.

Hence the requirement for the Dum-Dum bullet to knock down the “barbarian” immediately and once and for all. Despite British and American reservations, the other conference members agreed to ban expanding bullets.

Poison gas had never been used effectively in battle although the ancient world had experimented with what might be called “chemical warfare.” The Spartans used sulfur fumes while besieging Plataea during the Peloponnesian Wars while in the third century
C.E.
Sassanian soldiers burned bitumen and sulfur in an attempt to asphyxiate their Roman adversaries. In 1456 the Christian defenders of Belgrade used a toxic cloud said to contain arsenic to repulse the Muslim Ottoman Turks. A commentator writing about it a century later described the event as “a sad business. Christians must never use so murderous a weapon against other Christians. Still it is quite in place against Turks and other miscreants.” Leonardo da Vinci suggested throwing “chalk, fine sulphide of arsenic, and powdered verdigris . . . among enemy ships by means of small mangonels” so that “all those who . . . inhale the powder . . . will become asphyxiated.” The Taino Indians of Hispaniola hurled gourds filled with ashes and ground chili peppers at the invading Spanish conquistadores to create a stinging smoke screen.

In Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, Thomas Cochrane, naval captain later to be admiral, first proposed the use of poison gas. While visiting Sicily—then the world’s major sulfur producer—he noticed how, as sulfur was heated to separate it from the earth from which it had been dug, hot, toxic gases—in fact sulfur dioxide—were created which destroyed surrounding vegetation. People were forbidden to sleep within three miles of the sulfur works. Cochrane speculated about loading “stink ships” with sulfur and coal, anchoring them close to enemy positions and setting them alight to create fumes that would annihilate “every animal function.”

The Admiralty eventually dismissed his proposals as impracticable. Many years later, after falling out with the Admiralty, a conviction for fraud, and a remarkable career commanding successively the fleets of Greece, Brazil, and Chile, culminating in a pardon and reinstatement in the British navy, Cochrane returned to the idea of poison gas. In 1846 the Admiralty this time responded that using sulfur gas would not “accord with the feelings and principles of civilised warfare,” Furthermore, if Britain deployed it others would surely follow.

In 1854 during the Crimean War, the now near-octogenarian Cochrane tried again, proposing the use of stink ships to expel the Russians from the Baltic port of Kronstadt. Anticipating counterarguments about “civilized war,” he put forward an argument often to be used to defend highly destructive new weapons: “No conduct that brought to a speedy termination a war which might otherwise last for years, and be attended by terrible bloodshed . . . could be called inhuman.” As others would do, he also suggested that advanced weapons such as poison gas would have a deterrent effect: “The most powerful means of averting all future war would be the introduction of a method of fighting which, rendering all vigorous defence impossible, would frighten every nation from running the risk of warfare at all.” A secret committee rejected his ideas, some members calling them “so horrible” that “no honourable combatant” could resort to them.