war is in general one of indiscriminating bitterness; but scarcely a reproach of violence to non-combatants rests upon the great armies that decided the War of Liberation in the United States. So, again, the Germans who entered France under Von Moltke were appreciably more humane and better disciplined than the soldiers whom Blücher commanded, and this to an extent that is not altogether explained by the absence of recent provocation. It seems, therefore, possible to hope that war, terrible and to some extent pitiless as it must always be, may come to be conducted without intentional injury to non-combatants, and with the smallest possible damage to private property. When horrors, like those which attended the storm of Tarragona by Suchet, and that of San Sebastian by Wellington,[1] are reprobated as atrocities by public opinion—even in military circles—and punished with unsparing severity by courts-martial, the worst influence of war will have been abolished. Lastly, when all is said, we cannot escape from a certain truth in Shakespeare's view of war, that it is "the great corrector of enormous times." Many
- ↑ Of Tarragona, Napier says: "That every barbarity commonly attendant upon the storming of towns was practised may be supposed … and it would be unjust to hold Suchet responsible. " Peninsular War, book xiii. chap. v. Of San Sebastian, where some circumstances were of unusual atrocity, Wellington writes only: "I am convinced it is impossible to prevent a town in such a situation from being plundered."—Letter to Right Hon. Sir H. Wellesley, K.B., October 9, 1813.
vol. ii. p. 140. During the inactive interval of a fortnight that elapsed before the battle of Salamanca, "the soldiers of both sides bathed together, and frequently swam over, and interchanged civilities with each other." Secret Despatch quoted in Buckingham's Memoirs of the Court of England, vol. i. p. 385. "Towards the close of the war … so good an understanding prevailed between the outposts of the two armies, that Lord Wellington found it necessary to forbid all communication whatever. … It was a sort of custom the French and British guards visiting each other by turns."—Gleig's Subaltern, p. 158.
