CHAPTER ONE
The Warning
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy went to war in 1851, at age twenty-two. The young aristocrat dropped out of university, entered the army, then spent three years in the Caucasus Mountains. As a junior officer, he was mobilized west with the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854, nearly dying in a blizzard on the transfer by horse-drawn sleigh. After a stint on the Romanian front, where the strife had broken out after Western powers opposed Tsar Nicholas I’s designs over Ottoman lands, Tolstoy was sent to the war-torn peninsula that gave the conflict its name. There Tolstoy, who had been born in 1828, acquired a skepticism of making war humane that matters even today. Especially today.
It would last his whole life long—but it would take a radically different shape in his youth and his old age. Revisiting the origins of the laws of war with Tolstoy, whatever his idiosyncratic and objectionable conclusions, is of enormous value today. He offered the most eloquent and thought-provoking reservations ever leveled against the attempt to “humanize” war, highlighting the moral risk of failing to combine the desire for less brutal war with skepticism toward war itself—since war routinely makes the world worse, no matter how humanely fought, and almost never better.
While a soldier, Tolstoy passed almost a year in and around Sevastopol, where the Crimean War would end in an eleven-month siege of the picturesque Russian town on the Black Sea by a multinational alliance of armies. Arriving in its midst, Tolstoy manned one of Sevastopol’s fortified high bastions during the climactic ten-day bombardment of the town. Tolstoy wrote three short stories about the siege, culminating in an account of that final battle for the city. These stories first crystallized his belief that war itself is the moral evil to be concerned about, not the niceties of how it is fought.
The sketches, which established Tolstoy’s national fame, begin with his introduction to Sevastopol under siege in December 1854, in a moment of quiet when he is rudely led into the amputation room for wounded soldiers. “You will see ghastly sights that will rend your soul,” he writes, “you will see war not with its orderly beautiful and brilliant ranks, its music and beating drums, its waving banners, its generals on prancing horses, but war in its real aspect of blood, suffering, and death.” The sketch concludes with nationalist hopes for Russian victory, but its concern for wounded soldiers already led in a different direction: not to aspirations for better treatment but to grim reflections on the propriety of the enterprise of killing.
Then everything changed. In the second sketch, set six months later, in May 1855, brief concern evolved into barbed criticism. After six months of siege, the reports of bullets and the shriek of cannon fire rang in his ears as they were traded from ramparts to trenches daily. And the “angel of death hovered unceasingly,” for in a stalemated confrontation “the question the diplomats did not settle still remains unsettled by powder and blood.”
But Tolstoy did not conclude his sketch with powder and blood. Rather, he chose a truce that had been established for humane purposes. And he found the morality of caring for soldiers’ bodies during a pause in the fracas wanting. Beneath the incongruously resplendent sun, the officers of both sides manage to agree to a truce during which each would take responsibility for its dead and wounded. “Yes, there are white flags on the bastions and the trenches but the flowery valley is covered with dead bodies.” The scene was certainly sickening: “Hundreds of men, with curses and prayers on parched lips, tossed and groaned,” among “the corpses in the flowering valley,” “the bodies of men who two hours earlier had been filled with all manner of hopes and desires.” While the officers chat across lines about tobacco, the caregiving takes place before the engagement resumes.
About the ability of warring armies to agree to a moment of humanity during hostilities, the sketch is caustic. The humane treatment of the wounded does not interfere with the greater evil of war, Tolstoy reflects, let alone lead to peace. “Thousands of people crowd together, look at, speak to, and smile at one another. And these people—Christians professing the one great law of love and self-sacrifice—on seeing what they have done do not at once fall repentant on their knees.” Instead, they pick up where they left off: “The white flags are lowered, the engines of death and suffering are sounding again, innocent blood is flowing and the air is filled with moans and curses.”
The exhibition of humanity was little more than a pause amid death-dealing. Humanity might even make it worse. What Tolstoy could not yet know was that a decade hence another battle would prompt the invention of international law for humane war. Rafts of new treaties covering more topics have since followed, protecting soldiers in more situations along with more kinds of people—civilians, especially—and regulating means and methods of warfare, too. As for Tolstoy, he went a different way, refining and elaborating his suspicion that making war humane only allowed it to break out more often or drag on endlessly.
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Americans only recently have come to face a binary choice between two forms of interminable war: intense or humane, dirty or clean. Some time ago, Americans were at the forefront of another possibility: pacification. The ambitions of those Americans exerted an enormous influence on Tolstoy and on twentieth-century politics before almost disappearing in the twenty-first.
The transatlantic peace movement was one of the most extraordinary novelties of the nineteenth century, the more so since it was genuinely unprecedented. The idea of making war more humane had roots in practices of restraint in warfare deep in the mists of history. The idea that peace was available in human affairs, by contrast, was a genuine novelty. One Quaker complained that because people could not envision a world without war, they acquiesced in it as “in the rising of the sun, without any other idea than that it is part of the ordinary processes of the world.” Yet Enlightenment theorists and nineteenth-century movements arose convinced that there was no need to wait for the end of days when, as the biblical prophets had promised, nation would not lift up their swords against nation, nor learn war anymore.
Now modernity afforded a new sense of possibility. Other plagues, such as hierarchy, poverty, and slavery, also came to seem, especially after the French Revolution, eliminable rather than eternal. It was suddenly credible that, even if animal aggression was eternal, human beings could transcend it through self-reform and finally put the scourge of war in the past. The evil that pacifists condemned had to be reimagined as a practice that could be brought to an end. “All history is the decline of war,” Ralph Waldo Emerson explained in 1838. The trouble was that “the right of war remains.”
To spread the word that war ought not to be tolerated as ordinary, Americans founded the first nongovernmental associations aiming at pacifying international relations in 1815. Soon, their fledgling activism was dwarfed by British movements, thanks especially to the Peace Society, formed in 1816. By the later nineteenth century, Continental Europe was awash in peace mobilization, too.
For a long time, it was Christians, citing the example of Jesus himself, who most frequently dreamed the dream of an end to war. For many proponents of a peace mobilization—Tolstoy not least—pacifism followed simply from taking Christianity seriously. A few transatlantic sects, such as Anabaptists, Mennonites, and Quakers, had for centuries understood refusal to take up arms as part of their faith. They were right to think that Jesus’s message had less to do with making war humane than with turning the other cheek.
In the nineteenth century, Christian pacifism boomed. The American seer William Lloyd Garrison, the devout abolitionist who campaigned against slavery, had war in his sights, too. The Massachusetts senator and radical Republican Charles Sumner condemned the “war system of the commonwealth of nations” in 1845, as the country’s invasion of Mexico was brewing. It was probably the most influential antiwar speech in U.S. history. Then there was Adin Ballou, whom Tolstoy would come to admire even more. Born in 1803 in Rhode Island, Ballou converted to pacifism in 1838. An austere Christian minister, he founded the utopian community of Hopedale, Massachusetts, and crisscrossed New England to preach peace (as well as abolition, socialism, and temperance). Unlike Garrison—who publicly announced that his antislavery campaign trumped his nonviolent creed when John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry in 1857—Ballou refused in the Civil War to give “allegiance to the war god when with his battle-axe he cleft asunder the fetters of the slave.” Most onetime American pacifists—like Sumner—followed Garrison’s lead in the crisis. But after the destruction of slavery, American peace movements would surge again.
As the nineteenth century passed, secular radicals and later liberals joined the mix, alongside Christian pacifists. One of the leading ideologues of eternal peace in the second half of the nineteenth century was the Englishman William Cobden, who insisted that free trade could someday unify humanity where Christianity had graphically failed to do so. The American Non-Resistance Society never numbered more than two hundred members and was shuttered after a decade. To achieve greater impact, the movement would have to shift away from Christian ethics. It would have to make compromises, especially with those who proposed arbitration schemes and supranational organizations that did not establish a complete ban on armed force in all circumstances.
Fragmented by tenacious debates over the use of force to destroy slavery, the U.S. wing of the peace movement declined through the coming of the Civil War. In Europe, by contrast, it took off after 1850. Lulled by more than three decades of post-Napoleonic peace, the continent’s burghers and Christians were shocked by the Crimea events and then the Austro-Sardinian War of 1859.
Across the Atlantic and in the United States, peace circles debated a recurring issue: Was it permissible for a state to undertake “defensive” responses when unbidden attacks occurred? Should pacifists scorn those who left room for some wars? Many were skeptical from the start about any exception for self-defense, which later became almost the sole legal basis for war in the United Nations Charter of 1945, as it remains today. Any exception, purists said, could easily become the pretext for aggression. As one agitator angrily put it, “A peace society which allowed a right of defensive war was one to which a Tamerlane or a Napoleon might consistently belong.”
Meanwhile, a new breed of internationalists offered scores of proposals for peace through the second half of the nineteenth century. Often they relied on international law, envisioning new bilateral and multilateral treaties. Sumner, to take only one example, proposed the use of international law to banish war. Tolstoy was to be more skeptical that states could voluntarily agree to get along—and his skepticism only increased when they promised to fight their wars with one another humanely.
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If the attempt to end war was inspired at first by eschatological visions, the effort to humanize it had another point of departure—a Christianity of good works, which evolved into a secular enlightenment ethic of identifying with the pain of others. By the Enlightenment, the use of investigative torture to ferret out the truth from suspects and harsh punishment once they were deemed guilty may already have been on the wane. The rise of sentimental ethics singling out bodily violation as among the most offensive evils drove campaigns against both, and made an important contribution to the rise of antislavery ideology, too.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche could complain that what “civilization” now meant was the treatment of physical cruelty as the worst evil, with pain regarded as ever more hurtful, and torture an especially taboo infraction. (“We tremble even at the very thought of torture being inflicted on a man or an animal and we undergo unspeakable misery when we hear of such acts,” Nietzsche commented dismissively.) The effort to abolish or diminish physical pain swept the agenda of social reform, touching practically all areas of life and law, from the criminal process to industrial policy, to medical care. The surprise, perhaps, is how long it took reformers to add making war specifically humane to their agenda. Still, as the post-Napoleonic European peace began to disintegrate in stages after 1850, proposals accumulated with a vengeance.
Overwhelmingly, the leading early cause was the mistreatment of soldiers, especially when they were wounded on the battlefield. The wars of the period had already galvanized women’s activism to help wounded soldiers. In fact, it was a set piece of the public morality of the age. Florence Nightingale, eminent Victorian, became one of the most idealized do-gooders of all time for her work ministering to her empire’s wounded soldiers in the Crimea. The American Dorothea Dix made a pilgrimage to Constantinople in hopes of meeting Nightingale—who was then enjoying international veneration that outstripped even the patriotic celebration of victorious armies. Dix decried the deplorable preparations of the Union Army’s Medical Bureau after the carnage of Bull Run in 1861; the nurse Clara Barton, who would go on to found the American branch of the Red Cross, got her start healing the Northern wounded.
But there was no formal system that would permit philanthropic engagement in wars and make it a regular feature of the conflicts of states in the self-styled “civilized world.” To go beyond the ad hoc organization of local remedies, a collection of elites would need to come together and cajole states into conducting their clashes within “civilized” limits, at least on paper. When generals like those at Sevastopol did not do the work on their own, humanitarians were needed. The time was ripe. As high politics increasingly depended on public legitimacy, and the public included not just bloodthirsty zealots but organized peacemongers, states could split the difference between freedom of action and the appearance of virtue through showy agreements on paper to humanize war.
It may have been accidental that Swiss gentlemen captured the cause when they founded the Red Cross in the 1860s, and that as a result Geneva remains to this day the city most associated with making warfare more humane. Still, after their own minor civil war in 1847, the Swiss had fewer other problems to solve and low levels of political conflict by comparison with other countries. A cipher named Henry Dunant was in the right place at the right time to give Swiss gentlemen a high international task. A pious Calvinist, he had restricted his moral engagements as a youth to familiar causes such as relief for the poor and support for orphans, and all on a local scale. He was on a business trip when he wandered onto the stage of history. Though there only briefly, he got a star turn in the drama of humane war.
In the 1850s, Dunant represented Genevan investors in the business of settling the new French colony of Algeria, and he acquired his own land in the territory. Hoping to convince France’s Emperor Napoleon III to grant a water concession so that Dunant could irrigate his property, he set off to find him during a French war with Austria in its northern Italian holdings in June 1859. Dunant ran across the site of the Battle of Solferino in Lombardy, where the biggest clashes of forces since the time of the first Napoleon had just occurred—and was horrified by what he saw. Leaving the battlefield, he continued his search for Napoleon III, whose attaché curtly turned down Dunant’s business proposition. He then returned to Solferino and tended to the wounded.
Dunant wrote a pamphlet about the carnage. Describing himself as a “tourist,” he narrated the battle (which he had not witnessed) before turning to the aftermath, with bodies alive and dead strewn over more than twelve miles of countryside. It took three days to bury the corpses (not including the horses), amid “a fetid stench.” In emotional prose, Dunant described how soldiers lacking water lapped it from bloody puddles, near handsome boys converted to hideous carrion. But Dunant’s most influential pages were reserved for how badly organized was the care for the wounded. Stricken fighters were abandoned as gangrene and infection set in, or if they healed in unsanitary conditions guaranteed to lead to the same results. “Their faces black with flies that buzzed around their wounds, they looked every which way for help that no one gave.”
The depiction of such harrowing scenes had invited a variety of responses before, from grim acceptance of God’s inscrutable justice, to Francisco Goya’s mockery of the human folly of Napoleon’s counterinsurgency in his country. Dunant’s sentimental prose, by contrast, voiced the conscience of a new era in which the body in pain mandated socially organized relief and an episode of legal reform. Indeed, the success of Dunant’s call for identification with suffering in war played on the tide of pacifist sentiment. The celebrated French literary critics Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, after overpraising Dunant’s writing as “better, a thousand times better, than Homer,” concluded that it was an antiwar tract in effect if not in intent. “One finishes this book cursing war.”
But in the 1860s, Dunant was not a peacemonger. Dunant’s own proposal was to accept war and to form international brigades to help soldiers in circumstances like those he had witnessed. Dunant and some Genevan notables founded what became the International Red Cross (so named in 1876). Their first idea was to call on states to write an international treaty guaranteeing that a humanitarian brigade could assist the medical services of European armies if and when they failed on their own.
Of these notables, the most consequential was Gustave Moynier, who would prove in the long run far more important than Dunant for his long service, his pragmatic sensibility, and his distinctive moral vision. A Swiss lawyer, Moynier gruffly rejected the visionary idealism that annoyed him in Dunant and insisted on bringing militaries themselves on board the humanitarian project. In doing so, he hoped for Christian virtue and humanitarian compassion to be advanced through state connivance in general and military consent in particular. He did not hesitate to affirm that making war humane would “advance God’s reign on earth.” Apparently, God would have to work in mysterious ways. From the start, General Guillaume Dufour, a Swiss war hero, was recruited to help brand and lead the humane war project.
From the start, too, however, Moynier advertised his realistic movement as one that could fulfill the peace movement. Treating enemies better, he hoped, might prove a stepping-stone to turning the other cheek. “We must leave to war all its horrors, as the only way to open the eyes of those who order it and those who pay the price,” a Lyons doctor had complained of the Red Cross project of humanizing unnecessary evil. Moynier responded that such an objection, taken to an extreme, would imply the abolition of all army medical services, not merely the backup the Red Cross hoped to provide. And in any case, humanizing war might work better than the “sterile sentimentalism” of the peace movement in revealing war’s cruelties.
True, Moynier later acknowledged grudgingly, the notion of “civilized war” was “nonsense” and there was a hard core of immorality that would always remain even once humanization was done. “War without the spilling of blood would no longer be war,” Moynier admitted. Even if states played along, an essentially inhumane activity could be taken only so far in a humane direction. But, he insisted, this hardly implied that the goal was not worth pursuing.
Called to Geneva by Dunant, Moynier, and their colleagues, representatives of twelve European states met twice, in 1863 and 1864, and agreed to a first set of treaty rules for war. The treaty protected brigades of caregivers as neutrals in future conflicts. It would take a long time to be carried out, but the treaty eked out a bit of room for international legal obligation and humane treatment in the brutal activity of war. (It portended things to come long after—not for nothing would the U.S. president Barack Obama offer a shout-out to Dunant in his Nobel Peace Prize address in 2009.)
In the short term, no one would have predicted the canonization of Dunant or the prestige of his project. Within three years of the Geneva treaty, in the midst of a bank failure due in part to Genevan investments in Algeria that a not very competent Dunant had arranged, he was forced out of his outfit. After disappearing, he was presumed dead. Decades later, expelled by Moynier from the organization he helped inspire and living modestly in a senior center in the picturesque resort town of Heiden near Lake Constance, Dunant was rediscovered by a passing journalist. An elderly man recalled to life for a few years of celebrity, he became the poster senior of a project that had accelerated in the prior decades. With earlier life recrafted hagiographically and his 1901 Nobel Prize reported across the world, Dunant now assumed the appearance of a white-bearded guru, much like the greatest critic of the humanizing enterprise he had helped launch.
Copyright © 2021 by Samuel Moyn
