Humanity in War
Even at its best, war must always be an ugly and brutal business. But, owing to the ideal of chivalry, humanity in war was possible in the Middle Ages in Europe. In those old days, a battle was a matter of personal hand-to-hand combat, and was fought mainly by the knights. A Christian knight was bound by the laws of chivalry. He had an ideal of conduct, set before him, and took solemn religious vows of devotion to God, loyalty to his king, personal chastity, courtesy to women, honour, truthfulness and justice; and he swore to protect the weak and oppressed, and never to use his sword in an unrighteous cause. Such conduct was called “chivalrous”. A true knight would, of course, fight bravely and fiercely in battle against his foes, and would do his best to conquer or kill them; but he observed certain rules of honour in fighting, as a good sportsman observes the rules of the games he plays. These rules included the sparing of non-combatants, mercy to a fallen foe, and courtesy towards and protection of the women of the enemy. No true knight would maltreat or insult women, or slay innocent citizens, or hit a man when he was down. Of course all knights were not true knights, for there were many who broke the laws of chivalry; but such were considered to have disgraced themselves by their unknightly conduct. All this does not of course mean that old-time war-fare was without the cruelties and horrors incident to all war; it was often savage and barbarous enough; but chivalry did do something to modify its worst excesses.
But modern warfare is a very different thing. For one thing, battles are no longer hand-to-hand conflicts; for modern guns have made war the wholesale scientific slaughter of a distant and often unseen enemy. And high explosive shells, bombing aeroplanes and poison gas have turned war into the “mass massacre of civilians”, of non-combatants far behind the fighting line. In the Great War, thousands of innocent men, women and little children were destroyed in their own homes by these diabolical weapons. What would happen if war broke out again. It would be far worse than the horrors of the last Great War, owing to the perfecting of the modern weapons of destruction.
The only trace of humanity in modern warfare is the work of the Red-Cross ambulances and hospitals, which collect and care for the wound of friend and foe. In the Great War British doctors and nurses made no distinction between British and German wounded men; and it was the same in German hospitals and ambulance work. In this the spirit of humanity did what it could to mitigate the horrors of war.
