They may, and do, plead
the excuse that they are "earnest" in war, but all nations are earnest
in war, which is the most desperately earnest thing of which we have any
knowledge. How earnest we are will be shown when the question of
endurance begins to tell. But no earnestness can condone the crime of
the nation which deliberately breaks those laws which have been indorsed
by the common consent of humanity.
War may have a beautiful as well as a terrible side, and be full of
touches of human sympathy and restraint which mitigate its unavoidable
horror. Such have been the characteristics always of the secular wars
between the British and the French. From the old glittering days of
knighthood, with their high and gallant courtesy, through the eighteenth
century campaigns where the debonair guards of France and England
exchanged salutations before their volleys, down to the last great
Napoleonic struggle, the tradition of chivalry has always survived. We
read how in the Peninsula the pickets of the two armies, each of them as
earnest as any Germans, would exchange courtesies, how they would shout
warnings to each other to fall back when an advance in force was taking
place, and how to prevent the destruction of an ancient bridge, the
British promised not to use it on condition that the French would forgo
its destruction--an agreement faithfully kept upon either side.
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