A Higher Form of Killing Read Online Free PDF Page A

decisions.”
    The conference did however make major progress in codifying the conduct of war once it broke out, agreeing to a convention on the laws of war on land. Among the key prohibitions were those against “poison or poisoned weapons”; killing or wounding “treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army”; declaring that “no quarter will be given”; employing “arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering”; destroying or seizing “the enemy’s property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war”; . . . “the attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended; the pillage of a town or place even when taken by assault.”
    Neither these rules nor any other part of the Hague agreements spelled out specifically the position of civilians but rather relied on the consensus and the custom and usage evolved over the centuries as to their inviolability. Civilians were, however, implicitly covered by the catchall phrase that placed all caught up in warfare “under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilised peoples, from the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.” Some of the other prohibitions, in particular that against bombardment of undefended places, provided them extra protection.
     
    The Hague Conference also considered banning certain weapons. At least since the Roman siege of the port of Syracuse in Sicily in the third century B.C.E. when Archimedes, one of the defenders, developed a crane-like claw designed to grapple Roman ships and a focused mirror system to blind their sailors and even burn their vessels, war has accelerated the pace of scientific and engineering development. The speed of innovation grew with the Industrial Revolution. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Napoleonic Wars saw the introduction of the shrapnel shell and the Congreve black-powder-fueled artillery rocket. By the middle of the century warships were becoming steam powered and iron clad; breech-loading rifles were replacing muzzle-loading muskets; while the rifling of gun barrels was improving artillery. The U.S. Civil War brought innovations such as mechanical-fused land mines, machine guns and improved hand grenades, and the sinking of a Union warship by a man-propelled Confederate submarine. Alfred Nobel’s inventions of dynamite and of smokeless powder—the latter patented by him during the decade before the Hague Conference—were among the latest developments to have a major effect on warfare. Smokeless powder, for example, allowed much greater visibility across the battlefield as well as permitting the concealment of artillery and increasing the range and accuracy of weapons.
    Throughout history some weapons such as poison, which could be thought underhand or against the spirit of a fair or manly fight, have attracted popular revulsion. The Laws of Manu, the greatest of the ancient Hindu codes, prohibited Hindus from using poisoned arrows. Greeks and Romans customarily refrained from using poison or poisoned weapons, considering them abominable violations of nature and contrary to the laws of the gods. Often when new weapons were introduced, they too generated an outcry against their inhumanity. In 1132, the Lateran Council declared the crossbow and arbalest “un-Christian weapons.” In 1139 Pope Innocent II again tried to ban the crossbow as too “murderous for Christian warfare.” Nearly three hundred years later the French Chevalier Bayard, usually considered the epitome of the fearless and faultless chivalrous knight, valiant, honorable, and merciful to all, was so incensed by the introduction of the unchivalrous musket that he ordered no quarter to be given to captured musketeers.
    The Hague Conference considered in detail three potentially inhumane