Page:Political and legal remedies for war.djvu/34

28 MODERN AVARS AND PERMANENT 1'EACE. ing. There was a picture of men chosen, often out of pure and honorable homes, and consecrated to brutal practices, and such forms of (perhaps) mitigated savagery as man is compelled to put on when he is taught it is his duty first to destroy, and only secondarily to save alive. No doubt the order, the preci- sion, the very comprehensiveness of military action did much, as it always does, to give dignity, and even lustre, to barbarities exercised on defenceless towns-people, erring on the side of pa- triotism, or making honest mistakes as to their technical duties in respect of either their own Government or an invading Army. But the individual life, given to rapine, and more and more ha- bituated to dispense with the most ordinary moral obligations ; reckless of all claims but those of so-called military necessity ; blunted and hardened against the commonest sensibilities, and merging all the finer responsibilites of humanity in the one overbearing duty of military obedience all this was brought into clear relief by the searching eye of the Special Corre- spondent ; and it was generally felt and believed that, if it be true that self-sacrifice, patriotism, and military skill form one side of War, it is also true that individual demoralization, and the suspense of all customary moral obligation, form the other side. Of course this picture is not here recurred to for the purpose of branding one side in certain special Wars with infamy rather than the other, or even of doing any dishonor to the undoubted courage, the endurance, and even the forbearance of the mass of the men and officers engaged on both sides. These qualities were conspicuous enough, and have everywhere had justice done them. But what the daily memoirs from the seat of War brought out was, that the ordinary result of War, as it proceed- ed, was for passions to become roused on both sides with ever growing intensity ; for the legal restrictions on the exercise of the extreme (so-called) Rights of War to become increasingly disregarded ; for the gentle to become harsh, the harsh brutal ;