War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and

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War
 War
A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices

BEATRICE HEUSER
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 In Memory of
Tomasz Creffield
16 August 1995 – 6 February 2020
 Acknowledgements

It is with great gratitude that I acknowledge the help I have had

with this endeavour from many sides. This includes the support of
the American Smith Richardson Foundation and the Foreign Policy
Research Institute in Pennsylvania, USA. It includes my colleagues at
the ‘Laboratory of Excellence’ (Labex) ‘Writing a new History of
Europe’, run from the Sorbonne in Paris, my colleagues at Sciences
Po’ Paris and Reims and to my colleagues at the University Paris II
Assas with whom I had many very helpful exchanges on this and
related subjects. My teaching at the Sciences Po’ Paris as incumbent
of the Vincent Wright Chair at in the first semester of 2018 and a
few classes I gave at Assas helped me crystallize some of my
confused thoughts, as did my teaching in the following years at the
University of Glasgow. For their support in securing my links to
Sciences Po’ and Paris II Panthéon-Assas, I am particularly grateful
to Professors Guillaume Piketty, Jean-Vincent Holeindre and Julian
Fernandez. I also owe thanks to the German Historical Institute in
Paris under Thomas Maissen and Stefan Martens with its splendid
library, its support for the Labex and its generous hospitality towards
visiting researchers like myself.
Particular thanks are due to Professors Michael Whitby, Stephen
Neff, David Parrott, Stig Förster and Alan Forrest, and Dr Georgios
Chatzelis who kindly reviewed the entire script for me and spotted
many an error. My admiration for their enormous erudition knows no
bounds.
I also owe thanks to Professors Cian O’Driscoll and John France,
and Dr Roel Konijnendijk for valuable thoughts and corrections, and
to Dr Eado Hecht, Professor Yakov Ben-Haim, Dr Anne-Marie
Thévenot-Werner, Howard Body, Colonel Andrew Dennis, Messrs
Mark Waring and Paul Strong, Dr Olaf Theile, Wing Commander
Harold Simpson, Ronald Poetiray, Professor Robin Geiss, Mr Paul
Strong, Dr Asli Özcelik Olcay, Dr Saskia Millmann, Dr Joanna Wilson,
Messrs Theodoros Kaloudiotis and Pelayo Fernández García, and
Professor Christian Tams for individual corrections, clarifications,
suggestions and explanations.
I am profoundly grateful to Dominic Byatt of Oxford University
Press for the patience with which he accepted requests for
extensions and exceeding of word limits.
 Contents

Author’s Note

1 Introduction
Ideas
Practice and the Larger Cultural Context
The Genealogy of ‘Western’ Ideas
Six Sources of Thinking about War
Judaeo-Christian Contradictions and Scholarship
How Ideas Interact with Reality
Theory and Practice
Sources
Terminology and Definition of War
Economic Warfare—Sanctions, Blockades
The Structure of This Book

2 War in Europe: A Short Typological Survey

Enduring and Recurrent Patterns in Warfare
Raids and Massacres
Siege Warfare
Battle
Conducting Business: Epicheirein
Wars, Campaigns, Operations
Scale and Intensity
Major Wars versus Small Wars
Small War within Major War
From Small War to Irregular War
Criminal Activities and ‘Hybrid’ Warfare
 Major Changes in Warfare
A Cavalry Revolution?
Asymmetric Wars: Europeans versus Turks
An Infantry Revolution?
A Gunpowder “Revolution”?
The Myth of ‘Limited’ Cabinet Wars
Non-Technology-Driven Revolution: the French Wars, 1792–
1815
Total War, Genocide and Democide
The Nuclear Revolution
Total War vs Conventional War
Change and Continuity
‘New’ Wars …
… and Recurrent Patterns
Quantitative Differences
Conclusions

3 Ethical, Political, and Legal Concepts of War

Ethical Conceptualization of War
War as Evil
War as Condonable as a Lesser Evil
Jihad and Crusade: War Commanded by God
War as Good: A Tonic Against Decadence and Promoter of
Progress
Political Conceptualizations of War
Polemos or Stasis, Public versus Private or Civil War
From Sovereign Prince to State-Centric Definitions of War
Legal Conceptualizations of War
From Inter-State ‘War’ to ‘Armed Conflict’
War as a Legal Condition or state
The Declaration of War
Judicium Belli: War as an Ordeal, in Lieu of a Trial
War Outlawed
 The state of Armed Conflict
Conclusions

4 Root Causes and Drivers of War

Flawed Nature
Flawed Human Nature
Specific Vices: Cupidity, Anger, Pride, and Vanity
Ambitions of Princes
Flawed Polity
Flawed Inter-Polity System
Flawed Values and Ideologies
Conclusions

5 Just War Traditions

The Just War Criteria
Legitimate Authority
Self-Defence
Military Interventions in Third-Party Conflicts
Peace as the Only Legitimate Aim of a Just War
Ulcisci Iniurias: Restoration or Retribution?
Pre-emption and Prevention
Punishment and Correction as Purposes of War?
Last Resort, Proportionality, Moderation, and Fair Prospect of
Success
Expansionism Justified; The Quest for Booty
Freedom of Trade Defended
Insurgencies: Just War Against one’s Government?
Just Causes on Both Sides?
Just War Yields to Raison d’Etat and National Interest, 1796–
1919
National-Socialism as the Total Negation of Just War Principles
The Revival of the Just War Tradition, 1919–
The Cost of Upholding the Rules-Based International Order
6 Professed Reasons for Going to War and War Aims
War Manifestos and Other Professions of War Aims
Universal Monarchy versus Liberty
Sovereignty
Balance of Power
The Quest for ‘Natural Frontiers’
Colourful Pretexts
Conclusions

7 Who Fights?
Total Defence and Raiding Parties
Farming or Military Service?
Professional Soldiers in Antiquity
The West After Rome: Back to the Future
Limitanei, Akritai, Gazi, and Grenzer
A Return to Total Defence and Raids
Professional Soldiers were Mercenaries
Special and Irregular Forces
The Reality: Mixed Forces
The Return of Mercenaries: Private Military Companies
The Ideal and Myth of the Citizen-Soldier
European Armies since 1815: between Conscription and All-
Volunteer Forces
The Fear of the Undisciplined Masses
Guerrilleros—Rebels, Brigands, Insurgents
Excluded from Fighting
Women in the Armed Forces
Conclusions

8 Who is the Enemy?

The Enemy Defined by Religion/Nation/Race/Class
God’s Foes
Barbarians, Idolators, and Heretics
 Ethnic or ‘Racist’ Intolerance and Nationalism
The Class Enemy
The Enemy Defined by Legal Status
The Legal Status of Insurgents and Clandestine (Special) Forces
Universal Humanity?
From Sparing the Essential Labour Force to Sparing Civilians
How Innocent are Civilians?
Technology and the Designation of the Enemy
Conclusions

9 Traditional and Legal Constraints on Warfare

Assyrians, Hebrews, and Ancient Greeks: A Lack of Compassion
Romans: The Juridicization of War
Treaties Must Be Honoured
Necessity and Military Necessity
The Medieval Church Steps in: The Truce and Peace of God
From Customary Law to International Treaty Law
From Ordinances to International Laws of Armed Conflict
Prohibition of Certain Weapons
Ruses and Stratagems

10 The Rules and Practice of Warfare

Battles and the Treatment of ‘Regular’ Combatants
Booty
Prisoners of War
Hostages and Reprisal Killings
Protecting Civilians
From Sparing Civilians on Our Side Only …
… to Sparing Also Enemy Civilians
Targeting Civilians
Sieges
Slavery
Scorched Earth Tactics and Blockades
 Rape
Collateral Damage? The Bombing of Civilians
Genocide, Democide, and the State
Occupation, Resistance, Insurgents
Occupation and Resistance in International Humanitarian Law
Heretics, Rebels, and Insurgents
Conclusions

11 Past and Future: Some Concluding Reflections

Conceptualizations of War
The Changing Manifestations of War
Causes and Aims of War
Strategic Protagonists
Soldiers, Rebels, Routiers, and Robots
War Outlawed and Laws of Armed Conflict
Who is the Enemy? The Civilian Conundrum
Can War be Abolished?

Select Bibliography of Primary Sources

Index
 Author’s Note

To keep footnote references length, I have frequently given the

place in the original work but not the source of the translation. The
latter is provided in the bibliography at the end of this volume.
Where no translation into English is indicated, the translation is my
own. I have at times used excerpts in translations as found in the
following collections of relevant texts. For these, the following
abbreviations have been used:
EW = Gregory Reichberg, Henrik Syse, and Endre Begby (eds),
The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Oxford:
Blackwells, 2006)
FHIG = Wilhelm G. Grewe (ed.), Fontes Historiae Iuris
Gentium/Quellen zur Geschichte des Völkerrechts/Sources Relating
to the History of the Law of Nations, i. 1380 BCE–1493; ii. 1493–
1815; iii. 1815–1945 (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988–95)
R&G = Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff (eds), Documents on the
Laws of War (3rd edn, Oxford: OUP, 2000)
SM = Beatrice Heuser (ed. and tr.), The Strategy Makers:
Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Santa
Barbara, CA: Praeger-ABC Clio, 2010)
WM = War Manifesto Database (1492–1945), Yale Lawschool,
https://documents.law.yale.edu/manifestos
 1
Introduction

Imagination in what pertains to war is still dominated by Homer and the

Old Testament.
Bertrand Russell, 19151

Ideas

This book is mainly about ‘Western’ ideas about war, but also about
Western practices. Ideas give a sense to action, but action can also
be driven by more basic forces. War and warfare stand at the
interface between instinctive behaviour and the driving force of
ideas, invoked when collective violence is organized. Collective
emotional responses can be catalysed by leaders proposing and
extolling the benefits of the recourse to armed force, and then
organizing it. They do so against a background of social conventions
backed by the articulation of values ingrained in a particular culture.
Such conventions and values are part practice, part ideas, meaning
collective beliefs, accepted (or at times challenged) norms.
Instincts are plural, often at odds with one another: the instinct to
fight versus the instinct to flee, aggressiveness versus fear, a killer-
instinct versus a protective instinct, hatred versus compassion,
obedience versus violent confrontation. Ideas are brought in to
suppress instinctive behaviour or to amplify it. Natural or learnt
psychological barriers against certain behaviour must be overcome.
This can happen intuitively (a soldier feeling a sudden surge in the
desire to kill enemies because they have just killed his or her fellow-
soldier), through group dynamics that can arouse passions and turn
a reluctant onlooker into a volunteer spoiling for a fight, through
rousing speeches by leaders who employ arguments or evoke past
events, use conditioning similes and metaphors—ideas—to appeal to
values and culturally founded beliefs.
Motivating people to go to war happens against very different
settings. In some contexts it can be easy, in others more difficult to
persuade humans to risk their lives, and to prepare to kill others.
The larger the group to be motivated, the more important the
introduction of ideas. But consider also these different generic
situations. If an organized band attacks you and your group, such
self-defence will be a natural response for most people. But where
does self-defence end? Where does the perception of ‘self’, or ‘us’,
end? How far from you can others live for you to feel they are part
of ‘you’? Anthropologist Benedict Anderson has convincingly
explained how groups comprising millions of people, most of whom
will never meet one another, have been constructed into ‘imagined
communities’ by State governments and institutions, as well as the
media.2 In this process of construction, ideas are crucial: in
Anderson’s examples, it is the idea of the nation as the key
collectivity to defend. But as we shall see, in other contexts it can be
co-religionists, or people of the same ‘class’ (e.g. free citizens as
opposed to slaves, ‘workers of the world’), or of the same political
orientation, or human victims of persecution and injustice more
generally. Unless a person right next to you is being attacked and
your instincts take over, mobilizing anybody to defend somebody
else requires the introduction of ideas—appeals to compassion or
solidarity, or the argument that their enemy might become yours
tomorrow.
 Curiously, for centuries in Europe, people could be also mobilized
to defend a chief or prince and their family, sometimes with only the
faintest promise that this would be of any advantage to them
personally—note that, primarily, they would be risking their lives,
and accrue benefit only with good fortune. Much explanation in
terms of culture, beliefs, values is required there. Equally, the fight
for religious freedom, in defence of differences of practice or
doctrine that seem of little consequence to an outsider, requires
much explanation.
A call to arms may come not to save lives, but with the purpose of
retribution: to avenge lives already lost or goods already consumed
or destroyed; or of restitution: to recuperate property such as
occupied lands, abducted persons or cattle, or looted objects. If this
concerns yourself and your family, village, or tribe, the anger and
immediate interest are obvious. What if this concerns the lives of
people who live hundreds or thousands of miles away, or the
restitution of their property? As the French Count Guibert put it at
the outset of the French Revolution, with his personal experience of
reforming of the French Army:
When it is a question of only defending his fields, his house, his family, every man
becomes a soldier or, at least, fights. Any man can, animated by these great
concerns, kill or be killed. But in a vast empire, will you persuade all of the people
that all of the empire’s provinces must be loved equally by them? Will you deploy
the people of the South of France to defend Flanders or Alsace, or the people of
these provinces to protect the coasts of the Mediterranean or Gascony? Assuming
that you arranged for everyone only to defend the border closest to them, will it
then be necessary, when war takes place at sea, that the entire burden be borne
by the coastal … provinces, or when it is on the Rhine, for it to be defended by the
sole provinces that border [it]?3

Indeed, a question that arose in Guibert’s lifetime was: how could

one motivate people to defend the property of some princely family,
in a different part of Europe or even overseas? Cultural conditioning
from birth and much persuasion were necessary, and yet within his
lifetime, first in America, then in France, rebellion broke with such
traditions.
Or, to turn to aggression (where it is not a response to earlier
aggression with the aims of restitution or retribution): motivating
people in a famine-stricken region to invade the lands of others
suspected of having food stores may not take much effort. In other
cases greed alone will suffice to incite aggression, as shown by
warfare taking the form of cattle rustling and raiding. By contrast,
where there is no loot to be taken, aggression in defence of a more
abstract cause where you personally risk your life and may have little
to gain requires some convincing.
One might expect less of this to be needed for professional
soldiers, particularly in periods of history when they were absolved
of the responsibility to judge the rights and wrongs of a cause for
themselves. It appears, however, that in most contexts persuading
people to go and risk their lives in war required the construction of
reasons and motivations. Even the most venal hirelings may
appreciate rousing speeches giving their enterprise a moral sense.
People prefer to think of themselves as noble rather than just
greedy. That is where ideas come in.

Practice and the Larger Cultural Context

In practice, norms have often been broken. This in itself is not

evidence of the complete insignificance of laws any more than the
frequent occurrence of multiple shootings in the USA is evidence of
the insignificance of the prohibition on killing: murder remains a
crime in the USA, and Americans continue to be scandalized by such
shootings. Nevertheless, different cultures have different levels of
tolerance for norm-breaking, and for the loss of life, another factor
important for the conduct of war.
 Culture and habitual practice have varied over time and space.
Attitudes to death and slaughter were different from ours in societies
where everyday violence was widespread, and where death through
sickness or plague, accident or hunger, crime or war, could come at
any time. In antiquity, infanticide of new-borns was common and not
a punishable crime. Legally, Greeks and Romans could do to
whatever they liked to their slaves. In Plato’s Gorgias, Callicles
argues that, for a slave, death is preferable to life, as he or she has
no defence against injustice and poor treatment.4 In practice, at
least in the later Republic and the Principate, unmerited and
excessively cruel punishments might have been seen as in bad taste
by some members of the refined senatorial classes like Cicero. But
using slaves—including of course children—for sexual pleasure was a
widespread practice even then. So why should a Roman soldier
hesitate to kill or rape members of defeated tribes out in the wilds of
Gaul or Britain?
Despite repeated attempts to ban the enslavement of defeated
enemies, this was common practice even among Christians until the
thirteenth century, and the slave trade was practised by Turks and
Arabs at least until the Brussels Conference Act of 1880. Until the
eighteenth century, Scottish cottars were virtually serfs, as were
Russian and Prussian peasants quite formally until the nineteenth
century, living in abject poverty, always close to starvation, and kept
in conditions close to slavery. Huge differences were made between
the treatment of nobles and commoners in Western Europe as well.
Medieval codes of chivalry would apply to noble adversaries and
ladies, for example, and not to people of lower rank, even if the
Church sought to protect non-combatants from violence and theft.5
Until the mid-twentieth century, most European countries applied
capital punishment, although in most it had ceased to be a public
show and the horror-entertainment it had been in previous
centuries. Many governments still torture their own citizens,
although this is outlawed by human rights conventions. State-
sponsored assassinations of political enemies are still occurring as
this is being written. In short, in each place and at each time,
attitudes towards war and killing must be seen against the larger
context of tolerance of violence.

The Genealogy of ‘Western’ Ideas

This book is about ‘Western’ ideas about war, by which I mean ideas
we know about that came out of the Ancient Middle East and
Mediterranean, then to form the basis of European ideas, spreading
especially to North America and Australasia, but also to other areas
influenced more superficially by European philosophy, traditions, and
practice. It includes a particular dialectic between some Jewish and
Christian ideas that were picked up by Islam and that in turn had
some influence on (particularly South-East) European ideas and
practice from the seventh to the nineteenth centuries. In turn,
European ideas and practice would continue to influence the
Ottoman Empire and the larger Middle East, throughout the Middle
Ages and until the present. Thus European (and especially
Byzantine/Greek) theory and practice repeatedly interacted with
Islamic arguments and practices, as in ideas like that of Holy War or
the enslavement of prisoners of war.

Six Sources of Thinking about War

How do ideas spread? One theory can be traced back to the Scottish
social anthropologist James Frazer, who in his late nineteenth-
century classic The Golden Bough collected evidence of similar ideas
and concepts that had emerged largely independently, he thought,
in different parts of the world—about anything from human sacrifice,
or mother-goddesses, to ideas about purity.6 Another is the
‘diffusionist’ theory, which presupposes that an idea (or a technique,
such as making pottery in a certain way), along with language,
springs from only one source, but can then spread.7 While the
answer is probably: a bit of both, ideas about war and warfare in
‘Western’ culture did spread in large part by diffusion. Yet they did
not have only one source, but several.
First, there is the Hebrew Bible that has some commonalities with
other Ancient Middle Eastern cultures but is quite distinct both in its
monotheism and in being the only Middle Eastern text to have
passed its legacy to Europe. Secondly, there is Ancient Greece, from
the initial oral traditions and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to the
historiographers and philosophers writing before the Greek world
was absorbed into the Roman Empire. The Romans, distant relations
of the Greeks by whom they were strongly influenced from the
second century bce, provided a further, semi-independent source of
Western thinking. Fourthly, there was the mongrel child of all three
of these: Christianity.
With its Hebrew and classical traditions, Christianity in turn, in the
Middle Ages, had to contend with pagan influences that came with
the Germanic invasions and settlements in the disintegrating Roman
Empire in the West, but later also with the mass movement
especially of Slavs into the previously Roman world. Ideas and
traditions stemming from each of these sources would mix in
European cultures, some receding at times only to come to the fore
again later. And finally, there would be influences from Muslim theory
and practice, once Islamic expansion began to roll back the Roman
rule of the Euro-Mediterranean world, in the Middle East, then along
the northern shore of Africa and across Europe’s Mediterranean
shores, and later, under the Turks, spreading far into South-Eastern
Europe. Islam, first with the Arab conquests, then with the Turks,
became Europe’s (and the ‘West’s’) enduring antithesis: as we shall
see, especially the idea of Jihad and Turkish practices of warfare had
their influence on the West.
 These traditions of thought and the histories of these cultures
would make up the ever-changing kaleidoscopic patterns of Western
thinking about war, to the exclusion of others: Chinese thinking had
little influence before the twentieth century, Indian Kautilya was
largely unknown, and no Native American, African, or South-East
Asian influences can be detected. Nor did any noteworthy traces of
Russian thinking on war and peace leave their imprint on the West
before the nineteenth century. By contrast, the heritage of European
ideas would in the twentieth century come to influence many other
parts of the world and form the basis of public international law
pertaining to war.
This study, while fully cognizant of Europe’s mongrel heritage, is
thus mainly Eurocentric. Given the roots of European thinking
already described, this has to include some sorties into the ancient
history of theory and practice in the Middle East—the cultures that
are ancestors of European civilization, especially, through the Bible,
Ancient Israel. It also has to pay special attention to the dialectical
relationship with the Islamic world.

Judaeo-Christian Contradictions and Scholarship

The Hebrew Bible contained many explicit passages and laws

concerning the conduct of wa. Given its multiple authors and the
centuries over which these wrote and their books were edited by
later theologians, one would rightly expect it to contain
contradictions. The Christian New Testament, building on the
Hebrew Bible, is devoid of any explicit reference to war, but not of
contradictions, even though the four Gospels claim to represent the
teaching of Jesus alone. We thus find on the one hand, ‘Peace I
leave with you, my peace I give unto you’ (John 14: 27) and on the
other, ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not
to send peace, but a sword.’ (Matthew 10: 34). Rejecting the narrow
prescriptiveness of the Mosaic law, Jesus preferred to speak in
parables. This left the door wide open to Christian theologians’
extrapolations when applying them to warfare, in part with addition
of passages from the Hebrew Bible, in ways that produced starkly
contrasting positions, ranging from pacifist to the advocacy of
expansionist war for the sake of the propagation of Christianity.
Nevertheless, both Jewish and Christian theologians were very
scholarly in referencing the relevant passages from their holy
scriptures. Ancient Israelites, Greeks, and Romans, just as their heirs
in Europe shared their extreme consciousness of historical precedent
and respect for literary authority. Already Ancient Greek and Roman
authors cited earlier authors and works and historical examples as
authoritative points of reference. Both Judaism and Christianity
added a very careful verbatim transmission of their sacred texts to
ensure no word was changed. Moreover, since antiquity, Christian
theologians were as respectful of the verbatim transmission of the
Hebrew Bible as they were of the New Testament, with St Jerome
moving to Palestine (he died in Bethlehem in 420) to study the
original Hebrew texts to produce his translation of the Hebrew Bible
(the Vulgate version of the ‘Old Testament’). Even now, students
training to become Lutheran ministers usually must study Hebrew
along with Greek and Latin to be able to engage with the original
words. Thus, despite the obvious division between Christians and
Jews arising from the Christian addition of the New Testament, both
religions share a scholarly text-critical approach, and most Protestant
confessions share with Judaism the postulate that all the faithful
should be enabled to engage with the text themselves. Added to the
contradictions contained in the Bible itself, this promoted the
development of multiple positions within Christianity on a host of
issues, including war.
Mohammed’s teaching as recorded in the Koran, by contrast, while
including many ideas and stories from the Hebrew and Christian
Bible, paraphrased them, altering them liberally in the process.
There is thus no shared body of text. Once recorded, however,
Mohammed’s followers treated the Koranic text itself with extreme
veneration, so that until the twentieth century, it was widely held by
orthodox Muslims that the Koran must not be translated into
vernacular languages from its original archaic Arabic. Indeed text-
critical study suggesting multiple authorship or focusing on pre-
Islamic traditions is still frowned upon.
Meanwhile, Latin as the language of scholarship united Europe
from Roman times and until well into the twentieth century, enabling
the survival, circulation of, and debate about the heritage of ideas,
and especially of legal traditions. Spanish Francisco de Vitoria and
Francisco Suárez, Dutch Hugo Grotius, English Thomas Hobbes, and
Saxon Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz all wrote in Latin. From the grand
siècle of Louis XIV Latin was gradually replaced by French so that in
the eighteenth century, the great jurists like Swiss Emeric Vattel and
Hamburger Georg von Friedrich Martens wrote in French, as did
Estonian-Russian Fyodor Fyodorovich (Friedrich Fromhold) Martens
in the nineteenth. Only after the First World War did English
gradually become the lingua franca of diplomacy and of law. Thus,
the continuing influence of the works of antiquity, and of widely-
circulated modern texts was immensely strong, providing both terms
and concepts with which jurists, theologians, philosophers, and
initially also political scientists operated.
The resultant culture in Europe, until the French Revolution, and
beyond in several disciplines, was both a very scholarly and a
conservative one. This had advantages: when customs were
disdainful of human lives, as in the Middle Ages, the more humane
views of a Cicero could be evoked by scholars to try to limit the
human suffering caused by war. But it could also have the
disadvantage of ensuring the survival of less humane concepts when
the practice had become more clement.
Gradually, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these
ancient, medieval, and early modern authorities would be replaced
by others as universal points of reference. As disciplines were ever
more neatly divided, each developed its own Olympus of authorities
from whom any argument had to start or with which it had to
engage. But the methodology of the classical writers and of medieval
scholarship lived on, with a careful tracing of texts and arguments.
This explains why this book puts such great weight on the historical
development of ideas about war, to trace their genealogy in its
several dimensions, against the background of the evolution of
practices in war.
What will become apparent is that there is a large spectrum of
European (and later, more generally ‘Western’, and through Western-
dominated international law and international organizations,
worldwide) notions of what constitutes war, who fights, who should
be spared, how war is begun, what aims there might be, and so on.
These are all human constructs, not predetermined by nature. They
depend heavily on a generation’s own experiences of violent conflict,
contemporary usage of language, and confluences of political
thinking. It would be most unsatisfactory, however, to end by saying
that there is much diversity in all these definitions and resultant
attitudes (or attitudes and resultant definitions), and to leave it at
that. Areas of strong tradition and overwhelming convergence will be
highlighted, always bearing in mind that profound changes—of
society, of technology, of values—can obviate a consensus on certain
aspects of war that had existed over centuries. Where a strong
consensus of ideas exists, it will require exceptionally strong
arguments to change them. These may be growing: the dominance
of the Western heritage in public international law is increasingly
being challenged by other cultures, and their influence relative to
that of the West is in the ascendant.

How Ideas Interact with Reality

Not that there was ever any full consensus on thinking about war in
the West. As a result of their mongrel progeny, and of their
interaction with different experiences, beliefs and values do not form
a coherent whole—it is misleading to talk about ‘belief systems’. The
world religions are riddled with contradictions. The Hebrew Bible’s
‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among thy
people but love thy neighbour as thyself’,8 introduced by Jesus into
his own teaching, is at odds with prescriptions for the use of force to
avenge injuries.9 The threat of divine punishment for the
transgression of commandments is at odds with divine charity and
the promise of forgiveness. While Quakers and other Christian
denominations have interpreted Jesus’ teachings in a pacifist sense,
the New Testament has been interpreted by the Catholic and
Lutheran traditions as not only allowing warfare but making it
necessary and legitimate, and willed by God, in certain
circumstances. The multi-authored biblical texts in their vagueness
and their extensive use of metaphor have lent themselves easily to
many contradictory interpretations. This applies equally to the Koran.
How the words passed on in written or oral tradition are filled with
meaning depends on the experiences of each group and each
generation, including those passed down in ‘living memory’—
accounts which people have heard from their elders within their own
lifetime. Experiences and particular circumstances endow words with
specific meanings. One word may be used across time and space,
but it will be filled with different meanings depending on experiences
within living memory.
This applies specifically to different historical experiences of war
among parts of ‘the West’. The Thirty Years War plays no role in the
collective memory of Americans or Australians, nor of Britons who
had their own wars at the time, nor of Spain, Italy, or Ottoman-
occupied South-Eastern Europe. The American Civil War and a whole
series of wars in Latin America with US involvement did not concern
the Europeans. The First World War, so traumatic for Belgium,
France, and Britain, and so formative for the collective national
consciousness of Canada and Australia, means little to Sweden,
Norway, Denmark, or Spain let alone Latin America. While West
European countries that shared the experience of Nazi occupation
and collaboration have a largely post-nationalistic approach to
interstate relations in Europe, those that have more recently
emerged from Communism and Soviet domination seem to be
imbued with an almost nineteenth-century ethnic (xenophobic)
nationalism. Britain and Sweden never experienced occupation in
modern times, conditioning their particular reservations, in one case
about European integration, in the other about NATO. Consequently,
even within ‘the West’, different historical experiences condition the
patterns yielded by the kaleidoscope of inherited pan-European
religious or other cultural traditions, even if the colours within it are
mostly the same.

Theory and Practice

Given the importance of the role of historical context in which

certain ideas and concepts were first constructed, and of historical
memory and interpretations then projected into them, these dictate
an historical approach for this book on to the evolution of thinking
about war, and an historical contextualization. Many theoreticians are
not interested in this, arguing with Clausewitz that the further away
a period, the less relevant it is to the present.10 Yet in trying to write
as though the present were eternal one makes two mistakes. One is
to be blind to the particular conditions and circumstances in which
ideas and concepts—the tools we have for communicating and
explaining the world—came into being, and the connotations they
had at the time as opposed to those they have now. The other is the
consequent blindness to the disappearance of conditions and
circumstances as our own world changes, gradually rendering
inherited ideas and concepts obsolete, sometimes at revolutionary
speed, sometimes imperceptibly. In short, it is only by reflecting on
the particular context in which ideas originate that we become aware
of their artificiality, their constructedness—they are not God-given or
determined by nature—which in turn may help us better to evaluate
whether they are still appropriate to our own times, or in the
foreseeable future. A concept, a lesson, a description that seemed to
fit one context may not be eternally true or valid in all.
While this book is mainly a history of ideas, it therefore presents
them alongside examples of the practice. These are taken mainly
from historical sources, with the occasional admixture of
archaeological evidence. These examples come almost exclusively
from the history of the European-Mediterranean area, and are by
necessity selective.

Sources

This brings us to the sources used here. The Hebrew Bible, along
with Ancient Greek and Roman texts, constituted the main body of
authoritative literature on which Christian scholars from theologians
to lawyers would draw until the eighteenth century and beyond.
Writing in the twenty-first century, when most students of politics
and international relations at best have a passing acquaintance with
these texts, one cannot but be impressed how homogeneous and
strong the tradition of European legal and ethical thinking was
previously, and how many key ideas went back to classical antiquity.
It is also remarkable how strong the Judaeo-classical scholarly
tradition was previously, with only few writers seeing no need to
bolster their own authority with references to the great works of the
past. Today, this canon is largely lost as the disciplines diverge and
fracture within themselves into a myriad of sub-fields.
 Given that so many of the ideas about war, about who should fight
whom and how, with what ends and with what endings, can be
traced back so far in history, this book is unashamedly front-loaded.
Admittedly, the same phrase or word has often changed its
connotation and shifted in meaning over the centuries, and if this is
the case, it will be noted. But when the same idea was echoed
without much change over the centuries, this is noted by giving only
select later examples rather than by any aspiration to
comprehensiveness.
Other than sacred texts or laws, the works cited here were all
written by exceptional people, members of an unusually well-
educated elite. Some were political philosophers like Plato and
Aristotle, Kant and Rawls. Some were practising politicians like
Cicero or Sully. Some were historians like Livy and Plutarch. Many
were theologians, like St Augustine of Hippo, Gratian, Moses
Maimonides, Ibn Khaldûn, or Matthew Sutcliffe. Many were jurists
like Bartolo da Sassoferrato, Giovanni da Legnano, Vitoria, Grotius,
Vattel, Bluntschli, or Oppenheim. Some were military men with a
reflexive bent and a love for writing like Xenophon, Thucydides,
Fourquevaux, or Clausewitz. Some in their own lives acted both as
military officers and diplomats, like Lazarus von Schwendi, Don
Bernardino de Mendoza, or the third Marquis of Santa Cruz de
Marcenado, or Rühle von Lilienstern. The degree to which many of
the later thinkers were familiar with centuries- or indeed millennia-
old ideas is astonishing, especially given the late invention of
printing and the generally even later first translations of classical
works into vernacular languages. Despite being quite
heterogeneous, these authors’ works, at least within Christendom or
‘Western’ civilization, constitute an authoritative canon, even if
considerable divergences of interpretation could lead to diametrically
opposite positions on many war-related questions of great
consequence. Collectively, the works reflect or even generated
Europe’s customary laws before the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries when the Law of Armed Conflict was turned from
customary law into international treaty law, a body of conventions
approved by multiple States. But this canon underpinned elite
opinion; it does not necessarily reflect what people generally thought
about war (if that was even recorded), or how sculptors, painters,
poets, fiction writers, or composers represented war; the latter,
given the wealth of evidence, deserves a research project of its own.
I have endeavoured here to include as many key texts of the
larger European-Western civilization, and of its respective parent
civilizations, as possible. Readers will find many familiar quotations,
but hopefully also many unfamiliar ones that are worthy of
rediscovery. The result of this cannot claim to be a comprehensive
treatment of all existing texts, but given the back-referencing to
earlier texts in most of the works consulted, it is unlikely that many
important works of the European tradition have escaped my notice.
Quite apart from the early standardization in the orthography of
Greek and Latin terms that was carefully maintained throughout
medieval and modern times, even late medieval and early modern
French, English, German, Italian, or Spanish texts with their
charming idiosyncrasies in spelling are relatively easy to understand
for the modern reader as generally their authors abstained from
creating and using neologisms. Indeed, until well into the nineteenth
century, rather than proudly coining new expressions, writers aimed
to be understood by using terms that were widely known. Often they
themselves were unaware that their use of a term—e.g. equester by
Christine de Pizan to mean the medieval ‘knight’ rather than Roman
cavalry—skewed its meaning to fit historically different contexts. This
admittedly left subsequent generations to puzzle about what
precisely Machiavelli meant by virtù or Clausewitz by die Politik.
Nevertheless, their use of classical terms helps the reader get a
general sense of what they were writing about. I may by contrast
have missed out on some very recent texts of a legal, philosophical,
and political-theoretical nature, especially if they deliberately use
jargon and cryptic references impenetrable to the non-initiate. To
put it bluntly, in this book I have drawn mainly on texts I can largely
understand.

Terminology and Definition of War

Human language never captures reality in its entirety. It reduces

reality to fit the particular organizing principles of a particular
language and its vocabulary, and of prevailing interpretational
patterns. Keeping these limitations in mind, and anticipating the
findings of Chapter 3 that discusses definitions of war, we shall take
warfare to mean the practice of organized violence between two
groups, but to include configurations where one side uses violence
against another large but unarmed group, making ideologically
founded claims that the latter poses a vital threat to their own
group. Ideological drivers or political aims should be present, even if
economic ones are as well.
We shall not be dealing with animals, while recognizing that some
species, too, engage in such violent group action. We shall include
any conflicts that were seen as war (i.e. if a contemporary
equivalent term for war was used) by contemporaries. We shall
exclude spontaneous, non-organized uprisings—an important feature
of war is that it is planned (at least on one side) in cold blood. Also,
the current Law of Armed Conflict, International Humanitarian Law
(IHL) rightly specifies: ‘IHL generally does not apply to internal
disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts
of violence or other acts of a similar nature.’11 We will exclude non-
violent forms of strife, such as fisheries disputes or trade unions
contending with employers.12
But some clashes would in the past be seen as a form of war:
what are seen as actions of criminal gangs (or for example drug
cartels) today would in part have been seen as ‘private war’ or
campaigns aiming at bringing home booty in other periods of history,
so we shall include these in our reflections. Non-State warfare was
common and in large part the norm throughout the Middle Ages.
With some earlier attempts to curb it, in modern history princes and
State governments sought to monopolize the use of force and to
outlaw war on a sub-State level. Governments have always sought
to criminalize armed uprisings challenging their authority, which have
occurred in and outside the context of major war. But such uprisings
and small-scale war designed to obstruct invading and occupying
armies in the Second World War led to a revision of international law
to include such warfare, now referred to as armed conflict. This was
done both to encourage the insurgents (combatants not fighting for
a recognized State) to respect limitations on their side, and to give
them protection similar to that enjoyed by captured or wounded
regular soldiers. A first big step in this direction was made with the
American Lieber Code (General Order No. 100) adopted by the
Northern States in the American Civil War, so as not to treat the
Southern rebels merely as criminals but instead to keep the door
open to a more humane conduct and ending of the war.
With this book we are staying firmly in a Euro-Mediterranean
cultural tradition of the word ‘war’, which we can trace back, on the
one hand, to the Homeric Greek’s polemos13 and the Hebrew Bible’s
(Milchamah, meaning a big fight, war), on the other. For well over
two millennia, our culture has had the same framework of reference
in the form of the Iliad and the Hebrew Bible, large parts of the
latter, the Septuagint (including passages dealing with war), having
first been translated into Greek in the third century bce.
Subsequently, they were translated from Greek into Latin and then
into vernacular languages. As we shall see in the following chapter,
these words sometimes did not quite match the use made of
polemos in the Iliad or the Septuagint, or the Roman bellum. But as
in reality, violent conflict always manifested itself in a variety of
ways, with delimitations between them always fluid. Ancient texts
influenced how actual warfare was perceived in the following ages,
on what was defined as acceptable (hence the concept of ‘agonal’ or
rule-bound warfare), what was against the rules, and what was
regarded as ‘improper war’ and increasingly outlawed.
We shall include such armed conflicts if their effects in scale and
substance are comparable to what was called war at any other time.
We shall also include genocide, when it was explained by the
perpetrators in terms of war, even if this is based on entirely
constructed views of (often unarmed) ‘enemies’ against whom the
use of force is clearly one-sided.14

Economic Warfare—Sanctions, Blockades

When asking what is war and what is not, one must ponder the use
of ostensibly non-bloody means of waging war. Ravaging the
countryside, economic blockade, especially the prevention of the
supply of food and fuel to the enemy, is an instrument of war and a
tool of strategy. While it does not lead to bloodshed—unless the
enemy attempts to break the blockade by the use of force—it is still
lethal. Moreover, artificially imposed famines will most affect the
weakest members of an enemy society—this must have been the
case for blockades throughout history. It is obviously difficult to work
out to what extent insufficient nourishment tipped the balance
towards death in weak individuals—infants, the old, and the sick. At
best, increases in the mortality rate of the population overall can be
calculated, and sometimes retrospective inferences from a decline in
the birth rates after the event can be used. While the British naval
blockade of Germany during the First World War with its fatalities
among the civilian population (estimates vary widely between
c.100,000 and several times this number) is often cited, the most
horrendous example of a deliberately imposed famine as a tool of
war is that which the Germans used in the Second World War
against the Soviet Union, leading to millions of deaths.15 Clearly,
such measures (and an overall strategy even if it only uses such
‘bloodless’ measures) must be included in what we categorize as
war.
Technological developments of the last three decades have
created a new tool of war that could have lethal effects: cyberwar.
Should this be included in our consideration of war, if not part of
other forms of action? As the jurist Jutta Brunée notes, according to
conventional legal approaches, ‘armed conflicts must have a
territorial dimension, so that non-State actors cannot engage in an
armed conflict unless they control territory’.16 Moreover, international
law still supposes that there is a physical ‘area of operations’ or
‘theatre of war’. As the jurist Christopher Greenwood put it, ‘it
cannot be assumed—as in the past—that a State engaged in armed
conflict is free to attack its adversary anywhere in the area of war’.17
Cyberwar, however, is not confined to a particular territory or area.
So far, recorded instances of the use of internet-based technology
have created damage to affected industries, massive disruptions in
normal life, or in one case have set back a country’s nuclear
programme by a decade or so. When in 2017, the British National
Health Service’s computers were affected by such an intervention
(purportedly by criminals who asked for ransom money for stolen
data), this must have led indirectly to some patient somewhere
losing out on urgent treatment, possibly with a fatal outcome. A
serious cyberattack by a State on another, putting electrical grids
and fuel supplies out and stopping transport, is bound to have some
fatal consequences; these would rise over time if the interference
could be sustained. Thus it is reasonable to include some
cyberattacks under the rubric of acts of war, depending on their
effects, even if there is no declared state of war or if they are not
accompanied by any military measures. The Tallinn Manual 2.0
specifies: ‘A cyber operation constitutes a use of force when its scale
and effects are comparable to non-cyber operations rising to the
level of a use of force.’ (Rule 69).18
Metaphorical use of the term war, such as a ‘war on poverty’ or
‘war on diabetes’, will be excluded from our considerations. Deadly
violence remains central to our working definition. Otto August Rühle
von Lilienstern (1780–1847), a gifted Prussian officer who influenced
the more famous Carl von Clausewitz, put it thus: ‘war is fighting’.19
But then, most of politics can be described as a struggle. This work
draws the line where fighting does not include violence and does not
lead to death. We shall include past violent conflicts which were
seen as forms of war at the time (private war), even if from today’s
perspective they resemble criminal activities more than wars. But we
shall exclude purely criminal activities in our own times, although the
line is difficult to draw: even criminals like to think of themselves as
in some way righteous, and their adversaries as in some way less so,
as studies of mafias have shown.20 In future, it may again become
very difficult to make such a distinction.
In short, as a working definition for the survey of war in European
history in the following chapter, we will use this: war is
premeditated, organized violence practised by one group against
another. This is not a plea for anthropologists, historians,
sociologists, strategists, and political scientists to adopt or abandon
the word ‘war’ (the reasons for abandoning it in the legal context are
good and fully endorsed by the argument of this book). To the
contrary, it is a plea to broaden the meaning of ‘war’ to include
phenomena classically excluded, especially genocide and intra-State
conflicts, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

The Structure of This Book

To repeat, this book focuses on ideas, including values articulated as

ideas, but it tries to contextualize them with practice. After a very
brief historical overview of the evolution of war in European history,
it will ask with what causes and aims wars have been fought, and
which of these, by a generally agreed ethical code, were seen as
condonable, which not. It then goes on to ask who was supposed to
fight and who did the fighting. Who was seen or treated as the/an
enemy? What restraints were there on war in theory? And how did
that translate into practice?
In the conclusion, we shall ponder the implications of our findings
—the open questions, obsolete and enduring views, and how they
might stand up to future technological, political, economic, and
social developments.
Finally here some advice to readers: this is not a book designed to
be read cover to cover by those interested in specific ideas only. The
table of contents will guide them to the relevant section.

Notes
1
Bertrand Russell: ‘The Ethics of War’, International Journal of Ethics, 25/2
(Jan. 1915), 135.
2 Benedict Anderson,: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

3 Guibert, De la Force publique (1790), translation in SM 169.
4 Gorgias 483a–848a.
5
John Gillingham,: ‘Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles
from the Late Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Century: A Comparative Study’, in
Brendan Smith (ed.), Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval
European Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114–34.
6
James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London:
Macmillan, 1890).
7
As found in the work of G. E. Smith, Ancient Egyptians and their Influence
upon the Civilization of Europe (New York: Harper’s, 1911); and G. E. Smith, The
Diffusion of Culture (London: Watts & Co., 1933).
8 Leviticus 19: 18.
9 Despina Iosif,: ‘New Testament Teachings and Readings on the Legitimacy of

Warfare’, Historein, 6 (2006), 7–19.

 10 Beatrice Heuser,: Reading Clausewitz (London: Pimlico, 2002), 187–8.
11 Dieter Fleck,: ‘The Law of Non-International Armed Conflicts’, in Dieter Fleck
(ed.), The Handbook of International Humanitarian Law (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 616.
12
Masahiko Asada,: ‘The Concept of “Armed Conflict” in International Armed
Conflict’, in Mary Ellen O’Connell (ed.), What is War? An Investigation in the Wake
of 9/11 (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2012), 57.
13 Homer, Iliad 1.69: pólemós … kai loimòs—war … and pestilence.
14 Beatrice Heuser,: ‘Misleading Paradigms of War: States and Non-State Actors,

Combatants and Non-Combatants’, War and Society, 27/2 (Oct. 2008), 1–24.
15 G. F. Krivosheyev, V. M. Andronikov, P. D. Burikov, and V. V. Gurkin (eds),

Velikaya Otechestvennaya bez grifa secretnosti Kniga poter (Moscow:, Veche,

2010), 43–51.
16
Case No IT-94-1-A Prosecutor v. Tadić, reprinted in (1999) 38 ILM 1518, cited
in Jutta Brunnée, ‘The Meaning of Armed Conflict and the Jus ad Bellum’, in
O’Connell, What is War?, 32–50.
17 Christopher Greenwood,: ‘Scope of Application of Humanitarian Law’, in Fleck,

Handbook, 61–2.
18 Michael Schmitt,: ‘The Use of Force’, in Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International

Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2017), 330.
19
Translation in SM 175.
20
See e.g. Alastair Smith and Federico Varese. ‘Payment, Protection and
Punishment: The Role of Information and Reputation in the Mafia‘, Rationality and
Society, 13/3 (2001), 349–93; Norma Rossi: ‘Breaking the Nexus: Conceptualising
“Illicit Sovereigns”. A Study of the Relation between the Sicilian Mafia and the
Italian State’, Global Crime, 15/ 3–4 (2014), 299–319.
 2
War in Europe
A Short Typological Survey

Enduring and Recurrent Patterns in Warfare

One cannot but agree with Clausewitz that, in its outward

manifestation, war has been ever-changing, adapting to its context
like a chameleon, while in its essence—the duel in which each side
seeks to hurt the other until the latter is willing to yield on important
points of difference—it remains the same.1 What has been defined
as war, and what has been excluded, how war has been conceived
(which we shall consider in detail in the following chapter) is
constructed by human minds and interpretations, not nature-given.
For analytical purposes, it helps to draw up some categories of
war, even if real wars often fit into them as into a Procrustean bed,
and must be seen as distributed along a multidimensional spectrum
(or a multitude of spectra) on which it is difficult to differentiate
between categories of war. But categories of war have been defined
and used, generally as a function of what authors saw around them
in their own lives, and had read about. To engage with their thinking
about war, we must work with some of the categories they
constructed.
 We shall start here with a short survey of the types of planned
(premeditated) and organized collective violence—our working
definition of ‘war’—that we can trace in the archaeology of the Euro-
Mediterranean region, or that were listed as ‘war’ in the cultural
sources of Western thinking already sketched.

Raids and Massacres

Palaeoanthropologists have not been able to give us definitive

answers as to when warfare first occurred, as there is an absence of
clear evidence of warfare during the largest part of the existence of
our own species, 300,000 years or somewhat less. To document
organized group violence, one would need to find multiple skeletons,
with evidence of their having suffered violence rather than being
victims of infectious diseases.2 So far worldwide the earliest
evidence of this sort comes from an archaeological find dating from
c.11,600 bce: at Jebel Sahaba in Nubia, either actual stone
projectiles, or at least evidence of trauma caused by externally
applied force, were found in 45 per cent of the skeletons found.
Sixty-one belong to adults of both sexes and thirteen to ‘sub-adults’
(adolescents and children); some twenty-one of the skeletons still
had stone projectiles lodged among their bones.3 Such a mass grave
is evidence of a massacre, that is, unilateral killing, and not of
combat between two groups. Even if we include unilateral mass
killing in our definition of war (as I think we should4), we do not
have positive evidence that modern humans waged war in the
previous 290,000 years—or 96 per cent of the time they existed.
There is thus no evidence that war is as old as humanity, as is
frequently claimed (see p.129f.).
A similar find at Nataruk in Kenya yielded thirty victims of a
massacre, including a pregnant woman, dating from somewhere
around 8000 bce.5 Other examples of such skeletal finds—all
indicating massacres rather than symmetric encounters by two
armed groups—are more recent by several millennia than that of the
Jebel Sahaba.6 A number of different finds in Central Europe, all
dating from around 5100 bce, after the agriculturalists had
established themselves in Europe alongside and in between the
earlier hunter-gatherer populations, give a varied picture of raids on
villages resulting in massacres. At Asparn-Schletz (Austria) a burial
ground of 200 skeletons belonging to people of all ages and sexes
(except for the absence of young women) indicates a massacre
similar to that of Jebel Sahaba, with the added aspect of the
abduction of women. At Talheim (Germany), skeletal remains of
thirty-four people were found, including children, adults, and old
people of both sexes, with most skulls showing evidence of trauma
inflicted with pointed objects. Similar mixed-sex and mixed-age mass
graves indicating massacres dating from roughly the same period
were found in Wiederstedt and Schöneck-Kilianstädten (all in
Germany). At an excavation site in Halberstadt (Germany), by
contrast, the nine skeletons found all belonged only to young men
who (as Strontium-tests on their teeth indicated) were not locals.
They, too, had been systematically killed. This site has been
interpreted as locals killing a defeated raiding party who had
attacked their village. We can only conjecture that this was the end
of an armed raid, not some other form of ritual killing as findings
from a further dig at Herxheim (Germany) strongly suggest. Dating
from the same period, the Herxheim excavations produced remains
of 500 victims whose skeletons were broken up into small pieces,
the tops of their skulls sliced off systematically, and there is evidence
that the flesh was systematically cut off the bones, possibly
indicating cannibalism.7
The dating of this cluster, and of later evidence of warfare in
Europe, is perhaps significant, as it post-dates the spread of
agriculture from the Middle East to Africa and Europe. This may
furnish confirmation that such killings emerged once there was
something to kill for: when populations began to domesticate and
herd animals, or later still, when they settled down due to the
agricultural revolution and began to stock food, other groups,
nomads, or unsuccessful farmers in times of famine found these
food stocks something worth fighting for. In other words, warfare
may have come into existence only after the Agricultural Revolution.8
While the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, it is
conspicuous that no earlier evidence even of one-sided warfare
(massacres) has so far been found.9
In any case, raids for booty and food, for brides or slaves, and
cattle rustling and sheep stealing, are fundamental patterns of
warfare on a small scale that have been found in primitive societies
until our own times, with many examples of surviving hunter-
gatherers, and of nomadic tribes recorded by anthropologists in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is not proof that the earliest
forms of war followed such patterns, but it is plausible to suggest
that they did at least in part, and it would fit the Halberstadt
findings.10 In societies where the survival of the group was easily
threatened by a drought or a bad harvest, or by small numbers after
a disease had killed off part of the population, aims and purposes of
war would have converged to a large extent: to procure food, or
even to bring in more human labourers to enlarge the workforce
(ones who could not put up strong resistance to abduction, i.e.
women and children) by raiding neighbouring lands. Even more
complex societies engaged in such raiding, to procure slaves to prop
up their economy. We find this reflected in the fates of Middle
Eastern tribes such as the Israelites, who variously became labourers
for the Egyptian and slaves to the Babylonian empires.
As we enter recorded history, we learn that Huns, Goths, and
other Germanic tribes, Mongols, Vikings, and Turks undertook such
raids or razzias,11 only later moving to wars of conquest and lasting
occupation. This can again be complemented by archaeological
examples: at the end of the tenth century ce, a group of thirty-seven
Vikings were executed on grounds today belonging to St John’s
College Oxford in a similar way to those at Halberstadt four millennia
earlier, suggesting that they were a captured raiding party from the
Danelaw into Saxon-ruled areas; many others were recorded for this
period of the history of the British Isles.12
Such raids were the most common acts of war, even if in more
developed societies raids on this scale are today seen as criminal
enterprises, or as police actions against criminal bands in times of
peace. In times of war, they constitute lesser elements of a larger
military operation. The raiding parties—assuming that this is what
they were at Halberstadt and in the St John’s College burial site—
may have been on campaign for weeks or even months.
In peacetime, gang raids may be seen as quite distinct from
warfare. In many periods of European history, however, the
distinction between warfare when armies lived off the land (the line
between extracting victuals and fodder to sustain themselves and
plunder was always hard to draw), and armed expeditions mainly
aiming to loot and pillage and carry home any booty worth
transporting, is impossible to make. Well into the eighteenth century,
soldiers despoiled fallen enemies on the battlefield, and how to
divide the spoils of war was a key subject for military ordinances and
treatises on the conduct of war.13 Even in the middle of politically
motivated wars, for example, the Anglo-Norman-French Wars of the
twelfth century, units could turn to raiding: Ordericus Vitalis noted in
that context that the soldiers of the Norman baron Robert Blouet
attacked Evroul and ‘instead of overrunning the lands of warlike
knights, tried to carry off without warning the herds that were
peacefully grazing on the fields belonging to’ the abbey of Evroul.
Feeble attempts were made in penitentiaries (medieval lists of
penances and penalties to impose for misdeeds) to distinguish
between motivations that were seen as legitimate in the context of
war—to find fodder and food for the royal host—and mere plunder.14
Yet the quest for booty—and civilian prisoners, to be turned into
slaves—continued to be a main driver for war until the nineteenth
century, if not longer; slavery was only abolished by European
nations in the nineteenth century.
Massacres also continued to characterize European warfare until
the all-too-recent past. Bulgarian independence from the Ottoman
Empire was finally achieved in the late nineteenth century not only
with big Russian-supported battles but also through fighting that
took the form of Turkish and Bulgarian villagers raiding each other’s
settlements with deliberate massacres, already at the time making
the Balkans part of the ‘bloodlands’ (Timothy Snyder) that would
characterize them and much of Eastern Europe in the first half of the
twentieth century.15 Most recently, the massacre of the men and
boys of Srebrenica in Yugoslavia in 1995 shook Europeans out of
their smug belief that their continent was now free from such
atavistic collective acts of hatred.
Nor has looting disappeared from warfare. While reparations are a
formalized form of extracting wealth from defeated peoples, the
dismantling of industry in eastern parts of Germany occupied by the
Soviets after the Second World War and the transport of machinery
and other equipment to the USSR could be seen as a modern form
of loot. Raiding (just as food requisitioning by passing armies in
recorded history) can easily lead to death as the populations against
whom the raids are carried out may face starvation when they lose
their food stocks and animals in this way. They are thus likely to put
up a defence, even if they are unarmed or poorly armed. It will be
difficult to tell whether the ensuing massacres are by-products of
raids or had as their prime purpose the killing of people seen as
mortal enemies.16 Either way, raids of this sort would remain part of
European history well into the twentieth century as a part of the two
world wars and even the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and of the
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 It was luncheon-time, and the men had halted in their work to
discuss the contents of the baskets that had been sent up from the
farms. Owd Zub helped himself to another piece of cold apple pie
before answering.
‘It’s a gooid dog nah,’ he said presently, speaking with
deliberation, ‘if t’ lad doesn’t get it ower fond.’
‘Ower fond?’ It was Nance the woman who spoke. She had
brought up her father’s luncheon and was sitting near at hand. There
was a sparkle in her eye, and her resolute little chin was thrust forth
aggressively. ‘Ower fond,’ she repeated, scornfully. ‘Some o’ yo think
us younger end can’t do owt reight. Why, Zubdil’s trained that dog
reight, an’ all. It’s good enough for t’ trials.’
The men laughed good-humouredly. The girl’s relations with Zubdil
were now well established and recognised, and her quick
intervention was to be expected. But good enough for the trials—
well, working it on the moors was one thing, but to direct an
inexperienced dog on an enclosed field under the eyes of a crowd,
and in competition with some of the best and most experienced trial
working animals, was another matter altogether. They laughed at the
girl’s warmth, and let it go at that. But young Zub, happening to walk
past at the time while counting up the sheep, heard the words. They
quickened him and gave birth to the idea, while Long Abram’s
praise, which, if brief, went a long way, emboldened him. He thought
deeply, but kept his counsel; not even to Nance did he open his mind
for some time. But he worked the young dog even more regularly
and watched her keenly. Then one day he wrote a letter, and the girl,
face flushed, looked on.
A few weeks later the two, with Owd Zub, were units in the crowd
that had gathered in a large field in a village some miles higher up
the dale. It was the dale’s annual agricultural show and gala day, and
all the farming community that could toddle, walk, or ride, to say
nothing of visitors, had converged upon the spacious pasture. On the
back of the right hand of each and all of them was an impression in
purple ink; it was the pass-out check, imprinted upon each one with
a rubber date stamp by a stalwart, red-faced policeman, who stood
guard at the gate. They have little use for gloves, these folk of the
Craven dales.
The three, with l’ile Nance stretched at ease at their feet, stood
somewhat apart from the crowd. Owd Zub was uneasy and a trifle
wrathful, and also, having already paid several visits to the
refreshment booth, inclined to be querulous. Not until that morning,
as they were packing into the farm gig, had he learned that l’ile
Nance had been entered for the sheep-dog trials. For years these
trials had been the feature of the show, and they attracted good
dogs, and knowing this, and being convinced that the little dog would
not shine against such opponents, he was sore. Deep down in his
heart he was proud of his son, and he did not relish seeing him
beaten before his fellows of the dale.
‘What chance hes shoo?’ he growled. ‘Theer’s lots o’ first-class
dogs here. There’s Tim Feather wi’ his, ’at’s run i’ theease trials for t’
past six year. An’ theer’s Ike Thorpe, thro’t’ Lancashire side. He’s
ta’en t’ first prize here this last two year. He’s owd hand at t’ game,
an’ soa is his dog.’
‘Well,’ said his son, ‘if he wins it ageean he can hev it.’
He spoke somewhat abstractedly. The trials had already begun,
and he was more intent on watching his rivals and in familiarising
himself with the course than in listening to the elder man. It was a
long field and of good breadth, so that there was plenty of room for
the sheep to run. Along the farther side, close to the bank of the
river, were three sets of upright posts, like goal-posts, but lacking the
net and cross-bar. Through these the sheep had to be driven, and
whilst this was being done the owner of the dog had to stay near the
judges; he was, in fact, looped to a rope attached to a stake to
prevent him, in his eagerness, going to the assistance of his animal.
As a consequence, all his commands had to be given in whistles or
by word of mouth. Near the head of the enclosure was the second
set of obstacles—a cross-road made of hurdles. The sheep had to
be piloted through each road and then driven to a little hurdle
enclosure and penned there. The competing owners were allowed to
drop their rope and go to the help of their dogs at the cross-roads
and the pen, and the winning dog was the one that penned the
sheep in the shortest time with the fewest mistakes.
Young Zub was the last to compete, and so far the best
performance had been done by Ike’s dog, which had penned its
three allotted sheep in fine style in nine-and-a-half minutes. As the
young farmer looped the rope about his arm he took stock of his
three sheep, held by as many perspiring attendants at the far end of
the enclosure. They were fresh from the moors that morning, and
their fear and wildness were manifest. Zubdil saw that there would
be trouble if once they broke away, but he was cool and unflurried as
he nodded to the time-keeper to indicate that he was ready.
‘Time,’ said that official, and dropped a white handkerchief. It was
the signal for the men to let go the sheep, which, once released, ran
a little way, and then began to nibble the rich luscious grass. It was
grand fare for them after what the moors had provided. At the same
instant Zubdil waved his stick. As if galvanised into life, Nance, who
had been stretched lazily at his feet snapping at the flies, shot up the
field like an arrow from a bow. Young Zub, straining hard at the rope,
his fingers in his mouth, watched her every stride, judging both pace
and distance. A moment later a shrill whistle, a long-drawn-out rising
cadence, went up, and with one ear cocked by way of reply the
young dog closed in on the rear of the nibbling sheep. They threw up
their heads and broke towards the river in a swift rush. A series of
sharp notes stabbed the air, and l’ile Nance, belly flat almost, such
was her speed, swung round them and headed them off. Back they
came in a huddled group to the very mouth of the first lot of posts.
For a second they hesitated, uncertain where to run, but Nance was
coming up on their rear and they broke through. Hard on their heels
she followed, swinging now right, now left, as one or other made as if
to burst away, and so skilful her piloting that she took them straight
away through the second line of posts at the run. A loud cheer went
up from the onlookers; it was a neat bit of work. But not a man but
knew that things were going too well; it is not in the nature of driven
sheep to keep the proper course for long together.
True to their traditions of stupidity and contrariness, they broke
away fan-wise when nearing the last posts. Zubdil, straining on loop
until he was drawn sideways, sent out clear, quick calls, a Morse
code of commands. Nance was as if making circles on her two near
legs. With ears laid flush, body stretching and closing like a rubber
cord, she flashed round the heads of the straying ones, collected
them and hustled them through the posts at panic speed. Once
again that rising note rang out, and in response she swept them
round in a wide circle towards the cross-roads. This was the danger
point, for the hurdles stood close to the ring of spectators, and here,
if anywhere, the sheep were most likely to bolt out of hand.
What happened was the unexpected. A fussy fox-terrier, excited
by the tumult and its nerves snapping at the sight of the racing
sheep, broke loose from its owner and, open-mouthed and noisy,
sprang in to take a hand. It caught the nearest sheep and nipped its
leg. A roar of anger went up; an interruption like this was against all
tradition. Young Zub, who was racing across the field to join l’ile
Nance, rapped out an excusable ‘damn,’ and half a dozen farmers
on the edge of the ring loudly expressed a wish to break the neck of
the terrier, and to ‘belt’ the careless owner of that animal. On the
slope above the crowd Owd Zub was dancing with rage.
‘They done it a’ purpose,’ he roared, his voice booming above the
din. ‘Sumbody’s done it a’ purpose. They knawed t’ l’ile dog ’ud win.
We’ll hev another trial. We’ll tak all t’ dogs i’ England an’ back wer
own for a ten-pun noat. We’ll hev another trial.’
In deep wrath he was making his way to the enclosure, one hand
fumbling meanwhile to get into the pocket where lay his old-
fashioned purse, securely tied and buttoned up, when a hand
gripped him firmly. Another, equally decided in its action, closed over
his mouth.
‘Ho’d thi din,’ cried Nance, for it was she. ‘It’s all reight. Sitha, look
at t’ l’ile dog nah. Well done, Zubdil.’
It was all over in a moment, but it was a stirring moment. L’ile
Nance had dealt with the intruder. Taking it in her stride, she had
seized the terrier by the back of the neck, flung it from her with a toss
of her head, and was about her business. She and her master had to
deal with a serious situation, for one sheep, in mad panic at the
terrier’s attack and at the feel of its teeth in her leg, had bolted
blindly through the crowd, clearing the fence in one fine leap. A
silver-and-grey streak flew through the opening thus made, and in a
second both dog and sheep were swallowed up among the
onlookers. Zub, down on his knees the better to see through the legs
of the huddled spectators, was whistling until he was well-nigh black
in the face, but he never lost his head. His calls were wonderful,
articulate almost. They were thrilling, short, but infinitely encouraging
and coaxing. Many a man would have deeply cursed his dog; every
ounce of Zubdil went into encouraging the little animal. ‘Over, over,
over,’ said the whistles, as plainly as could be, and at the moment
that the other Nance on the slope had stayed the wrathful old farmer,
her four-footed namesake came back over the fence in the rear of
the missing sheep.
The prodigal, bearing down upon its fellows, who had stopped to
graze the moment they found they were not being harried, alarmed
them, and they fled. By good luck they bore down straight upon the
cross-road hurdles. With Zubdil on one flank, l’ile Nance on the
other, there was no escape, and they bolted straight through. All the
precious seconds lost by the incident of the fox-terrier were thus won
back, with more to them. Nance awaited the panting fleeces at the
exit, and with her tongue lolling, and her bright eyes just visible
through the tangled fringe of hair, she appeared to be grinning them
a welcome. The sheep spun round to avoid her, and were brought up
opposite the second entrance by the long form of the young farmer.
His arms were swaying, gently, unhurriedly, waving them into the
entrance. There was need now of patience and tact, for seconds
were becoming precious, and an over-alarmed sheep is a—mule. He
whistled softly with pursed lips while yet they hesitated what to do.
Nance sank prone.
Save that there was a dark patch against the green of the grass,
she had disappeared. Without any visible movement the patch drew
nearer the hesitating sheep. It was pretty work, and the crowd
marked their admiration by their dead silence. The sheep sighted the
dog, backed round to face her, and crowded with their hind-quarters
against the hurdle. Zubdil was silent, motionless, save for the slow
movement of his arms. Nance slid a little nearer, nearer yet. The
sheep crowded further back against the opening. She was not now a
yard away. Suddenly she sat up and panted hard. One of the
animals, turning sharply to escape, found an opening, pushed along
it in dread haste. The other two struggled for next place, and the
cross-roads were won.
Again was l’ile Nance there to meet them as they gained the open,
and collecting them smartly she raced them off towards the pen.
They broke away, but their wild rush ended in their being brought up
exactly against the opening of the pen. Zubdil was there, too, his
arms going like the sails of a windmill on an almost breezeless day.
They pushed past the opening, and Nance rose up out of the grass
to greet them. They spun about and raced off, but in a trice she was
doing trick running about their heads and flanks, and when they
stopped for breath the mouth of the pen was again before them.
Zubdil drew a cautious step nearer, arms outspread, his lips
puckered. Just wide of him a pair of ears pricked up above the grass.
There was a moment’s hesitation; one of the sheep poked its head
through the mouth of the pen. Nance glided a little nearer, and the
other two animals crowded against the first. Another step into the
pen; the dog was only a yard away. There was a flurried movement
about the opening. L’ile Nance sat up and lolled out a red tongue.
She appeared to be laughing. There was a crush, a scramble, the
sheep burst in, and Nance slid across the opening, lay down, and
fixed her pearly eyes on her master. What wonder if she appeared to
be grinning cheerfully?
Before the cheering had subsided, a stolid-faced judge stepped
towards Zubdil. The pink rosette which denoted the first prize was in
his hand, and at the sight of it there was more cheering. The other
Nance on the slope clutched the arm of Owd Zub. For his part he
was smiling broadly, and ecstatically slapping his leggings hard with
his ash stick.
‘Nine-an’-a-quarter minutes,’ said the judge, handing the rosette to
the young farmer. ‘By gum, but it wor a near do. Shoo’s a rare ’un,
that dog o’ thine, an’ nobbut a young ’un, too.’
 But Zubdil’s greatest reward came later. It was not the hearty
congratulations of so doughty an opponent as Ike, nor the incoherent
remarks of Owd Zub. It was when an arm slid through his, when
eyes dimmed with the moisture of genuine pride looked into his, and
a low voice said:
‘I’se reight glad, lad. I is.’
He laughed, gladly. Then openly, unashamed, he stooped and
took toll of her lips. Nor was he denied. And the other Nance, looking
up from where she lay at their feet, tossed back a lock of hair and
wagged her tail in approval.
 FRAGMENTS FROM GERMAN EAST.
by a soldier’s wife.
A still lagoon of veld, mile upon mile. Nowhere in the world, I
should suppose, does the tide of battle ebb and flow so almost
imperceptibly. Sometimes, only in echo, we hear the thunder of the
overwhelming seas—sometimes, just now and then, the ripple at our
feet breaks in a little cloud of spray and for a moment dims the eyes
that are used to vast spaces, with sudden yearning for an island
home beneath the far horizon, and perhaps hands tremble a little in
tearing the wrapper from the daily newspaper.
But enough for us, so far, has been our all unequal struggle with
Nature, who turns our skies to steel and with fierce winds scatters
the hovering clouds, while the young crops shrivel and the
watersprings are dry and the eyes of the beasts wait upon us who
can give them no meat in due season.
A Kaffir boy comes round one evening and sings a doggerel he
has fashioned from an old nigger melody, and others join in the
foolish refrain:

‘I come to Basutoland,
I come through lands and sea,
I kill five thousand Germans,
With my banjo on my knee.’

We laugh and throw him a tickey, and turn again to watch the skies—
to-morrow, perhaps, the rains will come and we can plough and sow.
For the dread hand that writes upon the wall has formed no fearful
word for us—as yet—and sympathy, deep and very real as it is,
stands in our lexicon as ‘a feeling for’ rather than ‘a feeling with.’
And then a cable calls me in haste to Durban to meet a returning
transport and suddenly there is nothing in the world but war and its
magnificence and its horror. The clusters of people at various
stations who come to meet the mail train—the event of the day—the
youths who slouch up and down the platform with loud voices and
noisy jests, the girls who laugh with them, the groups of farmers
talking of the crops—all these rouse me to a feeling of irritation, then
to an impotent anger.
‘Come with me,’ I want to urge, ‘and I will take you where men are
heroes in life and death.’ And again, ‘Is it nothing to you that your
brothers agonise? Will you jest while the earth opens under your
feet?’—and something ominous creeps into the meaningless
laughter.
And then at last comes Durban, and I am surrounded with war
activities and what was sinister has vanished in the wholesomeness
of sacrifice and strenuous work.
To hundreds here war work has become their daily life. The town
is always full of soldiers—Australians, New Zealanders, South
Africans—coming and going. Here is a company of New Zealanders
winding up the street. From a balcony I watch them marching with a
fine swing—well set-up, stalwart fellows. Someone comes with a tray
of cigarettes and we throw packets down amongst them, and their
upturned, laughing boyish faces ask for more. Youngsters all of
these, eager for happiness, eager for a slap at the Germans, and to
‘see life’—and their destination is the battlefield of Flanders! At the
corner they dismiss and there is a race for the rickshaws; three
crowd into one, and the Zulu boy gladly sweats up the incline and
capers and leaps when the downward slope relieves him, knowing
that for his brief exertion he will ask and get six times his lawful fee.
His ostrich feathers wave, his black limbs flash, and the passengers
lean back and laugh.
And the other side of the picture—a shipload of returning
Australians, on crutches, arms in slings, helpless on wheeled chairs,
with the look of the trenches on the brave faces that smile their
grateful thanks. For to each and all Durban has a warm welcome.
While they still lie off the Point, a girl signaller bids them come to the
Y.M.C.A. Hut for all that they want, ladies from the Patriotic League
wait on the wharf with supplies of cigarettes and fruit, motor-cars and
carriages stop to pick up stragglers and carry them home to dinner,
to a concert or theatre, and the Hut itself tempts with open doors to
the comforts within, to the tables strewn with magazines and papers,
to the letter-writing facilities and varied games, to the most excellent
meals, where one penny will give a hungry man a liberal helping of
cold meat or an appetising plate of fish mayonnaise, while a second
penny provides the steaming cup.
Down on the Point a little crowd has gathered. The steamer is a
day late, and wives and mothers sit and wait, or restlessly ply any
and all with endless reiterate questions, or hold impatiently to a
telephone receiver. And the night falls, and along the beach gardens
the coloured lights hang in jewelled strings against the dark. A
drizzle of rain makes a halo of their blurred radiance, the band plays,
the few wanderers—the last of the holiday-makers—talk of their
homeward journey, for the summer and the beginning of the season
of rains are with us. Far out in the bay a mast-head light springs up,
then more lights, a stir of excitement in the gathering crowd at the
Point, and slowly the tug leads the transport to her moorings.
‘Stand back—stand back! Make way there!’ and with a whir of
starting engines, the motor ambulances steer their way through the
pressing crowd, and slowly the stretcher-bearers carry their freight
along the lower deck and round the difficult angle of the lowered
gangway. In silence this, and the greetings are very quiet as the
waiting women meet their loved ones again—for this great steamer
with her rows of decks and wide accommodation holds but the
remnant of a regiment. Fifteen hundred strong they marched through
Durban nine months ago, and how many have not returned! Fever,
dysentery, debility, starvation, wounds and death—these have all
taken their toll.
I suppose there are few parts of the world which nature has made
more difficult to the intruder than German East Africa. In the forest
the thorny creepers join tree to tree in close high walls until the very
stars—man’s only guide—are hidden, nearly all the trees also are a-
bristle with protecting spears, sharp as needles to pierce and tear
the flesh, and to leave behind, it may be, a poisoned festering sore.
Mountain ranges throw their boulders and tear their gaping chasms
in the way, the streams, too few and far between for thirsty man, are
torrents to be crossed on fallen logs, on slimy boulders where one
sees the sudden agony flash in the eyes of a laden mule that slips,
and with a struggle of frantic hoofs is tossed to death. A herd of
elephants crashes like thunder through the scrub, trumpeting their
suspicion of man’s presence, the lions prowling unheard startle with
a sudden hungry roar and seek their meat from God.
Then come the swamps where the crocodile lies in the slime, and
snakes coil, and the mosquito goes about its deadly work. Men sink
to their waists in mud, the transports break down—all are tried in
vain, ox waggons, mule carts, motor-cars, ‘and then we go hungry,’
said one man to me. Gaunt and weak, with eyes too bright for health,
he smiled and spoke lightly—a least trembling of the hands, a twitch
of a muscle, a look behind the smiling eyes which no laugh could
quite conceal, these the only signs of the over-strained, still quivering
nerves. He told me the story of how the flour supply ran out, of how
the pangs of hunger were eased with the flesh of donkey or
rhinoceros. For eight days the hungry men waited and watched and
then a transport laden with sacks appeared—and the sacks held
newspapers!
Another spoke. ‘The worst thing that ever I went through was in
the ⸺ valley. Will you ever forget it, Mike? We were going into
action along one of those awful winding elephant tracks through
grass above our heads—sort of maze, and you don’t know where
you’ll find yourself next minute, perhaps back where you came from,
or perhaps in a clearing, looking into the muzzle of a machine gun—
can’t see a foot ahead. Suddenly the Boches opened fire, and at the
very same moment we were attacked by a swarm of bees. Sounds
funny, but I can tell you it wasn’t. There were millions of ’em, going
for us all they were worth. The horses and pack-mules went near
mad and there were we, blind and dazed, stumbling along trying to
keep the brutes from our faces and the enemy’s fire dropping
around. Pretty sights we were when they’d finished with us—my two
eyes were bunged up so I’d just a slit to see through, and hands so
stiff and swollen I could scarce bend my fingers.’
 ‘My worst day,’ and another took up the tale, ‘was just when we
were at our worst off for food—fair starved we were, and just at
daybreak a family of rhinos came charging through our camp—Pa
and Ma and a lot of rum little coves scooting after them. Well, thinks
I, a slice of Pa would come in very handy grilled, so off I treks with
two or three chaps after me, and there, far below the rise, was a vlei
and a whole lot of rhinos standing round. Worse luck, as we got
down, we found it just chock-a-block with crocodiles. You hardly see
them at first, but just look close and you see a mud-bank sort of
heave and here and there you’ll get the glimpse of a great wide jaw,
the colour of the mud and as still, never moving an inch, but with
eyes watching the rhinos all the time. I tell you we didn’t go any too
close, but we were mortal hungry, so we tried to edge round to the
rhinos, keeping well clear of the mud and slime. One huge awkward-
looking brute was a bit away from the others and the swamp, so we
let fly and brought him down, staggering and falling not very far from
us—but by God, if these crocs hadn’t ripped out and got him before
we had a show, and so we didn’t get dinner that day. As nasty brutes
as you’d care to see, those crocs. A chap of ours shot one of ’em
one day and cut it open, and inside he found an anklet ornament and
a ring. How’s that for an ugly story? At another camp a horse went
down to the river to drink all serene, no sign of another living thing—
when sudden up comes a grinning jaw, and like a flash of light, it
snaps on the poor beast’s nose and pulls him in, and there was an
end of him.’
In the more open country grows the giant grass, waving over a
man’s head, dense and resistant as sugar-cane, and once a source
of deathly peril. The regiment had dug itself in some 300 yards from
the enemy trenches, when the wind, blowing in their faces, brought
to the men a smell of burning, and with a sudden roar a sea of
flames came sweeping down upon them—the enemy had set fire to
the tall grass. There was not a second to spare. The men leaped up
and, weak and exhausted as they were, forced their failing strength
into clearing the ground and cutting a fire belt. It was done with the
speed of demons, for a fiercer demon was upon them; the men with
their tattered garments that would have flared up so easily, put half a
life into those few seconds.
 The heat of the fire was on their faces, blinding their eyes, the
flames reached out tongues towards their store of ammunition.
Under cover of the fire and smoke the enemy came out and attacked
heavily. Our men leaped back, turned the full strength of their fire on
the enemy through the blinding smoke, and suddenly, miraculously—
the wind changed! It is gratifying to know that in a few moments the
enemy survivors were hurried back to their trenches before the
flames, to find their grass shelters on fire, and under a withering
storm from every rifle, maxim, and gun a grim silence fell upon their
trenches.
And so Nature, whose gigantic forces have joined our enemy’s in
this war against us, for once played him false; but the Hun is always
quick to turn her help to his best advantage. He sees to it that every
post, detached house, village, kraal, &c., has the protection of a
‘boma’—a thick impenetrable fence made of thorn trees, with the
huge strong spikes thrust outwards and the smooth butts inside the
shelter, made of such height and depth as is necessary to resist the
onslaught of elephant and rhinoceros and the cunning of the lion. All
around a wide thorn carpet is spread to pierce the feet of the
intruder. Imagine such a ‘boma’ flanked by rifle and machine-gun fire
from deep trenches concealed by cover and by a ‘false boma’ in rear
which makes the boma line apparently continuous—and a frontal
attack by infantry becomes a hazardous undertaking.
‘Could not the artillery destroy them?’ I asked, and was told of the
difficulties of locating the trenches for this purpose and of the
unlimited supply of high-explosive shells that would be required. All
approaches to defended posts have lanes cut through the bush, and
these are so arranged in irregular shape that every open piece of
ground can be covered by machine-gun and cross rifle fire.
Of the hardships of the march, of the hunger and thirst—once a
battle was fought for two days before a drop of water could be
obtained—of the fever and exhaustion, I could guess from watching
the speakers, and from the men’s talk to each other I heard of the
skilfully posted machine guns alert for a fleeting glimpse of troops
grouped, perhaps, round a wounded man, of the snipers in the trees,
of the maxims fired from the backs of animals clothed in grass, of the
danger of horrors and mutilation should a wounded man fall into the
hands of the Askari. All of this I was told freely; but of the endurance,
the magnificent self-oblation, the comradeship and devotion, these
came to my ears only from those who had commanded troops and
who could barely speak of these things for a catch in the throat.
The actual warfare, the battles, the bayonet charges, the fervour
and courage of attack—these are described by newspaper
correspondents in cables and despatches; but of the more human
side—‘the soul of the war’—few tales reach the outside world. The
courage of endurance, the absence of one word of complaint from
men so weak, latterly, that five miles a day sometimes had to be the
limit of their march—who shall tell of these?
Hear one last story from an outsider.
‘That regiment of yours is very thick with its companion regiment,
the Nth,’ he said. ‘A chap who is in the Nth told me the one regiment
never loses a chance of doing the other a good turn. Once, he said,
the Nth were in the first firing line, only 150 yards from the enemy.
There had been no chance of getting water-bottles filled, and the
men’s tongues were swollen with thirst. The other chaps were
suffering a lot too, but what do you think they did? All the regiment,
officers and men, sent up every bottle that had a drain left in it to the
fellows of the Nth, and mind you this was done under continuous fire.
Pretty fine, wasn’t it?’
A bugle call, a whistle, and the short breathing space is past.
Faces lean over the bulwarks, pink and boyish beside the thin and
often haggard brown, hands are waved and with songs and cheers
the old regiment, reinforced with its recruits, sways slowly and
steams into the blue.
Were the whole history of the war ever to be written, were the
myriad glorious deeds ever to be chronicled, would the world itself
contain the books that should be written?
 COQ-D’OR: A LETTER TO A SOUL.
by r. c. t.
My dear Dick,—When you went out from the breastwork that
night, along the little muddy path, and whispered me a laughing au
revoir, I thought no more of it than of a hundred similar episodes that
made up day and night in these mad, half-romantic, unbelievable
times. There was nothing especial to make the incident memorable.
It was ten o’clock at night and the second relief for the sniper pits
had gone out half an hour or so. A frost had started after the
previous day’s cold rain, the water-filled crump holes had iced over
and the so-called paths through the wood were deceptively firm
looking, though in reality one’s feet and legs sank through the ice a
foot deep into that ghastly, sticky foot-trodden mud.
I knew your job—to visit the listening patrols and the snipers on
the edge of the wood—and I remember thinking that your habit of
going out alone without an orderly was foolish, near though the posts
might be to the breastworks. However, you were young—four and
twenty isn’t a great age, Dick—and I recalled your saying that you
would no more think of taking an orderly than of asking a policeman
to pilot you across Piccadilly Circus.
The wood was fairly quiet that night, though there were the usual
bursts of machine-gun fire, the stray ping of high rifle shots against
the branches of the trees, and the noisy barking of that fussy field
battery of ours which always seemed to want to turn night into day.
The light of the moon let me see you disappear into the shadows,
and I heard the scrunch of your feet as you picked between the tree
trunks a gingerly way. Then I went along the breastwork line, saw
that all was right, found Peter munching chocolate and reading a
month-old copy of The Horse-Breeders’ Gazette!—fellows read such
funny literature in war time—in his dug-out—and myself turned down
the corduroy path to the splinter-proof hut that you so excellently
named ‘The Château.’
Dennis and Pip had already turned in and had left me an
uncomfortably narrow space to lie down beside them, and they were
daintily snoring. Through the partition beyond I heard our company
servants doing the same, only with greater vigour in their snore. But
my bed was already prepared, the straw was only moderately dirty
and odorous, and after ridding my boots with a scraper of some
portion of the mud, I thrust my feet into the sand-bags, lay down,
coiled myself up comfy in my bag and blankets and went to sleep.
For ten minutes only. Then I suddenly awakened into full
consciousness and found myself sitting up staring into the darkness,
and the chinks of moonlight coming in below and at the sides of the
ill-fitting door. I was listening intently too, and I did not know why. The
wood was absolutely quiet at the moment, and Dennis, Pip, and the
servants had all settled off into their second sleep where snoring is
an intrusion.
I had not dreamt, or I had no recollection of any dream if I had. But
upon me was a curious ill-defined sensation of uneasiness. No, I am
wrong—uneasiness is not the word. The feeling was merely that
something had happened. I did not know where or how or to whom.
Now the one thing one ought not to be in war time is fidgety. It is a
bad habit and yet a habit into which it is very easy to drift. So with
this thought upon me I deliberately lay quietly down again and
attempted to renew the sleep from which I had so suddenly been
wakened. Of course I failed. Sleep had gone from me completely,
absolutely, and moreover there was a force—that indefinite word
best describes it—impelling me to be up and doing. Doing what
Heaven only knew! I struggled against the feeling for a minute or
two, then I definitely gave in to it. Fidgety or not, I was going out of
the hut.
Dennis wakened momentarily as I rose and untied the sand-bags
off my legs and made for the door. He muttered ‘What’s the matter?’
heard my ‘Nothing, go to sleep again,’ and did as he was told.
 The night was beautiful outside and I stood at the door of the hut
shivering a little with the cold, but thinking what a madness it was
that had turned this wonderful wood into a battlefield! The sound of a
rifle shot knocking off a twig of a tree three or four feet above me
recalled my thoughts. Mechanically I felt to see that I had my
revolver, and then with my trusty walking-stick in my hand I went up
to the front breastworks.
I went along them and found all correct—the sentries alert and at
their posts. They were in the third night of their spell in the trenches
and in the moonlight they gave one the impression of sandstone
statues, their khaki a mass of dried yellow clay. Then I peeped in at
Peter and found the youth still munching chocolate, and afterwards I
went along to your abode expecting to find you asleep, and found
instead that your tiny dug-out was untenanted.
The curious feeling that had wakened me from my sleep had
disappeared while I had been making my tour of the breastworks
and only now did it reappear. There was no especial reason why I
should have been anxious, for a score of things might have taken
you elsewhere, but I nevertheless found myself striding quickly back
to the little gap between No. 2 and 3 breastworks, the spot where I
had last seen you and where you had bidden me good-night. I
questioned the sentry. It happened to be Rippon, that quaint little
five-foot-three cockney, who, I honestly believe, really likes war and
chuckles because he is genuinely amused when a shell hits the
ground ten yards in rear and misses the trench itself. He had seen
nothing of you since we parted.
‘Mr. Belvoir,’ he said—and you know how he mutilates the
pronunciation of your name—‘never comes back the same way as
he goes out.’ He gave me the information with a trace of reproof in
his voice, as though I ought to have remembered better the principal
points of my own lectures on Outposts, which I had so often given
the company in peace time. I nodded, walked along to the other
sentries and questioned them. They had none of them seen you
return. They were all quite confident that you had not passed by
them.
 I returned to Rippon and stood behind him a moment or two. The
cold was increasing and he was stamping his feet on the plank of
wood beneath him, and humming to himself quietly. I did not want to
seem anxious, but I was. I could not understand what had become of
you, where you had gone. I took a pace or two towards Rippon and
spoke to him.
‘Things been quiet to-night?’ I said casually.
He started at the sound of my voice, for he had not heard my
approach.
‘Quieter than usual, sir,’ he answered. ‘There was a bit of a
haroosh on the left half an hour ago and the Gerboys opposite us
took it up for a minute or so, but they’ve quieted down since. Funny
creatures, them Gerboys,’ he ruminated—‘good fighters and yet
always getting the wind up. I remember at Ligny when we was doin’
what wasn’t too elegant a retirement, me and Vinsen was in a
farm’ouse....’
I stopped him hurriedly. When Rippon gets on to the subject of
Ligny his garrulity knows no bounds.
‘I’m going out ahead, Rippon,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back again this
way. Warn the next sentry that I shall be doing so. Give me an
orderly, too.’ Rippon looked at me curiously. Perhaps my tone was
not normal. Then he bent down and stirred a man snoring in the
breastwork beside him. The man stirred uneasily and then suddenly
jumped up and clutched at the rifle through the sling of which his
right arm was thrust.
‘What’s up?’ he murmured. Rippon smiled.
‘It ain’t no attack,’ he answered. ‘The Captain wants you as his
orderly.’
A minute later we had left the breastwork line and were out in front
in the wood, our feet breaking through the thin film of ice and sinking
over our ankles in the mud beneath. Belgian mud may not be any
different from other mud, but to my dying day I shall always imagine
it so. It clasps you as though it wants to pull and keep you down, as
though, with so many of your friends lying beneath it, you too should
be there. We tugged our feet out each step, treading on fallen
branches where we could. I tried to trace by footsteps the path you
had taken, but failed. I could not think of anything better to do than
go out to the sniping pits and question the men there to know if you
had visited them.
I turned to the left then and made for number one group, Bell, my
orderly, following a pace or two behind. A cloud came over the face
of the moon, the night became suddenly dark, and the next moment I
had stumbled and almost fallen over what I imagined for a second to
be a stray sand-bag.
It was not a sand-bag, God knows it was not! The moon
reappeared and I saw it was you, Dick, lying on your side, with your
legs outstretched. I bent down when I realised that it was a body,
turned you over on your back and with Bell’s assistance ripped open
your Burberry, your tunic and your vest. A bullet had gone straight
through your heart, there was a little spot of congealed blood on your
breast, and—you had died—well, as suddenly and as easily as you
deserved to do, Dick. On your face was a smile.
I am not good at analysing feelings and there is no purpose in
trying to analyse mine. Indeed, I cannot remember exactly what my
sensations were. I had no sorrow for you, as I have never had
sorrow for those killed in this war. I do not suppose two men have
ever been closer friends than you and I, yet I was not even sorry for
myself. I remember that I turned to Bell and said half angrily: ‘I told
him to take an orderly, I was always telling him to take an orderly!’
I heard Bell’s irrelevant reply, ‘Damn them Bosches, sir.’ (The men
in your platoon had an affection for you, Dick.) Then together we
raised you, your wet clothes frozen, your hair matted with mud, and
picking up your cap and rifle from the ground, carried you slowly
back to the breastwork line, and there wakened a couple of stretcher
bearers.
Oh! I’m sick of this war, Dick, dully, angrily sick of it. This world
can’t be anything, I know, otherwise fellows like you would be kept in
it. For a week or two the fighting is all right; it is amazing, and
wonderful and elemental. Then as month after month goes by, when
there is nothing in your brain but making your line stronger, when
you think in sand-bags and machine guns and barbed wire and
bombs, when the stray shot or the casual shell kills or lacerates
some sergeant or corporal whom you have had since his recruit days
in your company, given C.B. to, spoken to like a father,
recommended step by step for promotion and at length grown to
trust and rely on—then it begins to show its beastliness and you
loathe it with a prolonged and fervent intensity.
Down at the field dressing station half a mile away, the young
doctor did what he could to preserve the decencies of death. I stood
at the door of the little cottage and looked out into the night. I
remember that my thoughts flew back to the immediate days before
the war and to a night a little party of us spent at the Russian Opera
at Drury Lane, when we saw that wonderful conceit ‘Coq-d’Or.’ You,
your sister, I and that young Saxon friend of yours—and of your
sister’s too! We had dined at The Carlton and were ever so pleased
with life. We had chuckled delightedly at the mimic warfare on the
stage, the pompous King, the fallen heroes. Now the mimic warfare
had turned to reality and here you were—dead in a ruined Belgian
cottage.
I left after a quarter of an hour and returned to the wood, my
feelings numb, my brain a blank. The corduroy path seemed
interminably long. Sleep was not for me that night and the morning
would do to tell Peter, Dennis and Pip that you were killed.
Unaccompanied by any orderly this time, I went through the
breastwork line to the spot where we had found you. The impress of
your body was on the ground; your loaded revolver, which for some
reason or other you must have had in your hand, was lying a yard or
two away. I picked it up, examined it and noticed that a round had
been fired.
I wondered why. You must have aimed at somebody and that
somebody must have shot back at you, and the somebody must
have been close. You were not the sort of man to blaze off into the
blue. I leant against a tree and tried to think the matter out. Our
snipers were out on your left, so the shot could not have come from
that direction, and a hundred yards on the right was the machine-gun