155 CHAPTER VI. BARBARIAN WARFARE. Non avaritia, non crudelitas modum novit. . . Quæ clam commissa capite luerentur, quia paludati fecere laudamus.-Seneca. Variable notions of honour-Primitive ideas of a military life-What is civilised warfare-Advanced laws of war among several savage tribes-Symbols of peace among savages-The Samoan form of surrender-Treaties of peace among savages-Abeyance of laws of war in hostilities with savages-Zulus blown up in caves with guncotton-Women and men kidnapped for transport service on the Gold Coast-Humane intentions of the Spaniards in the New World contrasted with the inhumanity of their actions-Wars with natives of English and French in America—High rewards offered for scalps -The use of bloodhounds in war-The use of poison and infected clothes-Penn's treaty with the Indians-How Missionaries come to be a cause of war-Explanation of the failure of modern Missions -The Mission Stations as centres of hostile intrigue--Plea for the State-regulation of Missions-Depopulation under Protestant influences The prevention of false rumours, Tendenzlügen— Civilised and barbarian warfare-No real distinction between them. A MISSIONARY, seeing once a negro furrowing his face with scars, asked him why he put himself to such needless pain, and the reply was: For honour, and that people on seeing me may say, There goes a man of heart.' Ridiculous as this negro's idea of honour must appear to us, it bears a sufficient resemblance to other notions of the same kind that have passed current in the world at different times to satisfy us of the extreme variability of the sentiment in question. Cæsar built with difficulty a bridge across the Rhine, chiefly because he held it beneath his own dignity, or the Roman people's, for his army to cross it in boats. The Celts of old thought it as ignominious to fly from an inundation, or from a burning or falling house, as to retreat from an enemy. The Spartans considered it inglorious to pursue a flying foe, or to be killed in storming a besieged city. The same Gauls who gloried in broadsword-wounds would almost go mad with shame if wounded by an arrow or other missile that only left an imperceptible mark. The use of letters was once thought dishonourable by all the European nations. Marshal Montluc, in the sixteenth century, considered it a sign of abnormal overbookishness for a man to prefer to spend a night in his study than to spend it in the trenches, though, now, a contrary taste would be thought by most men the mark of a fool. Such are some of the curious ideas of honour that have prevailed at different times. Wherein we seem to recognise not merely change but advance; one chief difference between the savage and civilised state lying in the different estimates entertained in either of martial prowess and of military honour. We laugh nowadays at the ancient Britons who believed that the souls of all who had followed any other pursuit than that of arms, after a despised life and an unlamented death, hovered perforce over fens and marshes, unfit to mingle with those of warriors in the higher and brighter regions; or at the horsemen who used before death to wound themselves with their spears, in order to obtain that admission to Walhalla which was denied to all who failed to die upon a battle-field; or at the Spaniards, who, when Cato disarmed them, preferred a voluntary death to a life destined to be spent without arms. No civilised warrior would pride himself, as Fijian warriors did, on being generally known as the 'Waster' or 'Devastator' of such-and-such a district; the most he would look for would be a title and perhaps a perpetual pension for his descendants. We have nothing like the custom of the North American tribes, among whom different marks on a warrior's robe told at a glance whether his fame rested on the slaughter of a man or a woman, or only on that of a boy or a girl. We are inferior in this respect to the Dacota tribes, among whom an eagle's feather with a red spot on it denoted simply the slaughter of an enemy, the same feather with a notch and the sides painted red, that the said enemy had had his throat cut, whilst according as the notches were on one side or on both, or the feather partly denuded, anyone could tell after how many others the hero had succeeded in touching the dead body of a fallen foe. The stride is clearly a great one from Pyrrhus, the Epirot king, who, when asked which of two musicians he thought the better, only deigned to reply that Polysperchon was the general, to Napoleon, the French emperor, who conferred the cross of the Legion of Honour on Crescentini the singer. And as the pursuit of arms comes with advancing civilisation to occupy a lower level as compared with the arts of peace, so the belief is the mark of a more 1 Livy, xxxiv. 17. polished people that the rapacity and cruelty which belong to the war customs of a more backward nation, or of an earlier time, are absent from their own. They invent the expression civilised warfare to emphasise a distinction they would fain think inherent in the nature of things; and look, by its help, even on the mode of killing an enemy, with a moral vision that is absurdly distorted. How few of us, for example, but see the utmost barbarity in sticking a man with an assegai, yet none whatever in doing so with a bayonet ? And why should we pride ourselves on not mutilating the dead, while we have no scruples as to the extent to which we mutilate the living? We are shocked at the mention of barbarian tribes who poison their arrows, or barb their darts, yet ourselves think nothing of the frightful gangrenes caused by the copper cap in the Minié rifle-ball, and reject, on the score of the expense of the change, the proposal that bullets of soft lead, which cause needless pain, should no longer be used among the civilised Powers for small-arm ammunition.1 But whilst the difference in these respects between barbarism and civilisation is thus one that rather touches the surface than the substance of war, the result is inevitably in either state a different code of military etiquette and sentiment, though the difference is far less than in any other points of comparison between them. When the nations of Christendom therefore came in contact with unknown and savage races, whose customs seemed different from their own and 1 As at the Brussels Conference, 1874, when such a proposal was made by the member for Sweden and Norway. little worthy of attention, they assumed that the latter recognised no laws of war, much as some of the earlier travellers denied the possession or faculty of speech to people whose language they could not interpret. From which assumption the practical inference followed, that the restraints which were held sacred between enemies who inherited the same traditions of military honour had no need to be observed in hostilities with the heathen world. It is worth while, therefore, to show how baseless was the primary assumption, and how laws of war, in no way dissimilar to those of Europe, may be detected in the military usages of barbarism. To spare the weak and helpless was and is a common rule in the warfare of the less civilised races. The Guanches of the Canary Islands, says an old Spanish writer,' held it as base and mean to molest or injure the women and children of the enemy, considering them as weak and helpless, therefore improper objects of their resentment; neither did they throw down or damage houses of worship.' The Samoans considered it cowardly to kill a woman: 2 and in America the Sioux Indians and Winnebagoes, though barbarous enough in other respects, are said to have shown the conventional respect to the weaker sex.3 The Basutos of South Africa, whatever may be their customs now, are declared by Casalis, one of the first French Protestant missionaries to their country, to have respected in their wars the persons of women, In Pinkerton, xvi. 817. 2 Turner's Nineteen Years in Samoa, 304. |