PLAYING AT WAR.
WILL nations consent to play at war, to treat hostile operations as a game, and to stick to the rules laid down by Conferences and Professors of International Law —that is a question which has been greatly exercising the public mind since the close of the Naval Manoeuvres. Professor Holland has stated very ably the case for those who think that England may, in case she becomes embroiled in a great war, count upon her coasts being free from the kind of attack to which she is most vulnerable, owing to the observance of certain fixed 'rules as to what are legitimate and what illegitimate hostilities on the part of her enemies. Professor Holland seems to think that what is called International Law—it would be much better named International Usage, since law postulates the notion of an enforcing power, and the so-called public law of nations has confessedly no background of authority —would forbid the levying of contributions upon open towns, or the bombardment of them in case of refusal. To prove his point, he gives some most positive quotations from the opinions of distinguished persons who have con- demned such practices, and shows that historians and military critics generally, when considering the matter soberly in times of profound peace, have confidently charac- terised such behaviour as barbarous.
Still, though we are willing to admit that Professor Holland has a great deal of reason on his side when he claims that international usage is with him in the contro- versy, we find it impossible to adopt his contentions as a base for national action. It seems to us that if our inter- national lawyers, instead of judging the future by the past, would stop and think out the problems of naval war- fare as they affect the England of to-day, they would get us far nearer to a true realisation of the conditions under which our next naval war will be waged, than by telling us what the public opinion of Europe felt about the bombardment of Valparaiso or the burning of Paita. We cannot help feeling that after Brighton had been bom- barded, or held to ransom for £1,000,000, it would be a poor consolation to be able to prove that the act was barbarous, or to show great authorities against such prac- tices, in the way adopted by Bon St. Andre when, in the poem in the Anti-Jacobin,- " The Consul quoted Wicquefort
And Puffendorf and Grotius, And proved from Vattel Exceedingly well, Such a deed would be quite atrocious."
it may be a comfort to Professor Holland to picture the Mayor and Town Clerk sitting among the smoking ruins of the Pavilion, turning up the heading " Open towns, bombardment of," in the index of the last edition of Wheaton—saved from the Free Library, as the palladium of undefended coast towns when all else was burnt—and finding a proud and ennobling consolation in the assurance that their bombardment had been irregular and illegal. For ourselves, however, and, we expect, for the mass of our countrymen, the sense that the enemy had acted like barbarians would be nothing but an aggravation of the evil. We cannot agree to the plan of daring the enemy to do such wicked things. War, if we are wicked enough or mad enough to engage in it recklessly, or unfortunate enough to have it thrust upon us, will be something too real to be affected by such considerations. If we fight, we shall have to fight with a nation forced to arms by the conscrip- tion, and so a nation more anxious to win quickly in the war it has undertaken, than to fight in accordance with the rules. Let us try and picture to ourselves what sort of war this will be. If it is to be one in which we shall only have a partial and disputed command of the sea—and that is the only war we need consider, for it is the only one in which the question of the safety of our coasts will arise—it will be with some Power like France, or coalition of Powers like France and Russia combined. Say, now, that we have injured France materially by seizing her possessions in Indo-China, in the West Indies, and in the Pacific. It is obvious, then, that she will be extremely anxious to injure us in return and to punish us for our attacks on her. This she, perhaps, will have only one method of doing,—namely, by destroying our commerce, seizing our ships, and damaging our ports and sea-shore towns. But if she is to conform to international usage, only a few well-understood places, not coming under the category of open towns, will be liable to her attacks. These few places, however, our fleet, though not strong enough to blockade the French ships in their ports, will be perfectly well able to defend, with the aid of shore batteries. The French Admirals and Captains then will either be con- demned to wander round our coasts doing nothing, or to attack our undefended towns. Can we doubt which course they will choose ? If, however, this is not a sufficient reductio ad absurdum of the contention of those who declare that international usage is to be our protection, we may ask : If England discarded all land fortifica- tions, and laid •all her sea towns open, would she thereby be allowed during war to remain inviolate and undisturbed by hostile squadrons, unless and until her enemies were prepared to land troops and actually begin a regular invasion.' Surely no nation would willingly allow England so extraordinary an advantage. Let us put yet another case. Suppose England lost command altogether of the open sea, and had only just enough of a fleet to prevent the landing of an army. Next suppose— and the supposition is not extravagant—that the• enemy had found it impossible to maintain a blockade of the whole of the English and Scotch coasts, and that neutral American ships carrying corn were constantly bringing to our open towns the food upon which England was living. Would not the enemy say At this rate the war may go on for ever. We can't starve England out, and treat her as she ought to be treated—i.e., as a besieged town —because the fear of foreign complications forbids us to make corn contraband of war, as the French made rice in China. Our only way, then, of bringing England to her senses and putting an end to a war which will wear ourselves out if we do not put a stop to it, is to make her population. feel what the pinch of war really is. We cannot do this by actual invasion, because we dare not risk sending one hundred thousand men into a possible death-trap, and it would be madness to try such an operation with a smaller number. What we must do, then, is to organise constant raids on the coasts, levying enormous fines on the open towns, and bombarding them if they refuse. In this way, we shall either get a war indemnity big enough to keep us going, or else make the English come to terms.' Can we doubt for a moment that any nation determined upon prosecuting a life-and-death struggle, would refuse, if necessity arose, to act thus ; or that it would not care a straw as to whether the public opinion of Europe supported it or not ? Can we also doubt—unless Englishmen have lost all their old spirit— that in the case of such raids, bombardments would be the almost universal result ? Let us remember that a town would only be treated as an open town if it made no resistance of, any kind whatever, and then think whether this would be likely. Suppose a hurried raid up the Bristol Channel to levy contributions from the docks at Avonmouth, or from the Welsh seaports. Even if the contributions were not refused, and the enemy told to do his worst, is it not almost certain that some pilot-boat or fishing-vessel, or maybe a hardy swimmer, would try in the dark to get at the hostile visitors with a torpedo ? If any such plan were tried, may we not be sure that whether the contribution had been paid or not, the enemy's Admiral would. immediately make the attempt an excuse—and, we are bound to admit, a valid excuse— for punishing the offending town by burning it ? Perhaps our international lawyers will say that in such a case the open town would deserve its fate. We can only then remark that since it is certain that such illegitimate re- sistance would take place along the English coasts, all hope of protection even from the shield of international law would vanish into thin air. Clearly, the less we trust to international law as a protection, and the more we realise that war is not a. game, but a stern reality in which the combatants try to inflict upon each other the maximum of injury, the better it will be for the national safety. In writing this, we fear that we may seem to lay our- selves open to the charge that we are in sympathy with what may be called the doctrine of a maximum instead of a minimum of inhumanity in war. Our contention, it will perhaps be said, must end in poisoned wells and explosive bullets. Let us at once disclaim any notion that men will suffer no restraints in war. We are quite willing to admit that such questions cannot be decided upon grounds of pure logic. Neither have we any desire to say that combatants in the future will take to inhuman methods of fighting, or will not tend to restrict more and more the ordinary operations of war to regular com batants. The case we have argued. rests, in truth, on perfectly different grounds. The aim of war is to fight. Combatants, however, when the conditions are equal, agree for mutual convenience to abandon certain forms of fighting. Still, they will never, at the dictates of inter- national usage, abandon means of fighting whenever such abandonment would, in fact, prevent all hostile opera- tions. To fight and inflict injury is the dominant motive, and if no other ways can be found except ways generally given up by mutual consent, then those ways will be used. Our enemy will not make raids on our coasts if he possesses other modes of attack. When, however, circumstances, as they very likely will, have made such raids the only possible or effective form of hostilities, he will most certainly use them. Indeed, he will have no option but to do so or to make peace. But war is what an enemy wants, not peace. Is he, then, likely to give up his only mode of battle simply because other nations more richly endowed. with the opportunities for injuring each other have happened to make certain artificial and conventional restrictions upon the conduct of war ?
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