For God, King and Country.

• Author: Howard, Michael

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight But Battling Bill (who slew him) thought it right.

--Hilaire Belloc

HILAIRE BELLOC penned this sardonic couplet in those halcyon days before 1914 when, in Europe and North America, "the Peace Movement" was reaching its height. The rest of the twentieth century, with its unprecedented bloodshed and catastrophic results, might seem to justify the views of Ebenezer. Is the world any better, we may ask, as a result of all those wars? Should people not have listened to him rather than to Battling Bill and, like him, refused to fight? Today Ebenezer's successors continue gallantly to urge their cause; and even if they have failed to persuade us that to fight is "wrong," at least we now expect our governments to think a great deal harder before they put their soldiers (as the rather-charming American euphemism has it) "in harm's way": that is, order them to kill people and run a distinct risk of getting killed themselves.

In considering the reasons that people give, and have given in the past, for killing one another, I have in mind something rather different from the justification, the jus ad bellum, that governments give when they go to war. Rather, it is the justification invoked by the people who do the actual killing; that exemption from the normal laws of humanity which licenses, indeed orders, them to do things that would otherwise be considered abominable. If we look for the answer in the history of the Western world, we find it conveniently summarized in the motto under which the British army went to war in 1914: For God, King and Country. But nowadays the first of those authorities, if He is invoked at all, is likely to provoke contention rather than unity. The second has little significance even where such a person still exists. Finally, in a global and interdependent world order, even the demand "to die for one's country" has lost much of its appeal; more so perhaps in a Europe battered after two bruising world wars than in a victorious and still-intact United States.

Further, although it is conceivable that wars may still have to be fought for territorial defense, in practice those in which the United States and her allies have engaged for the past half century have consisted of the projection of armed force to distant parts of the world to engage in conflicts that, although fought in "the national interest," often bear a very remote connection to the actual defense of one's native land. Sometimes the connecting thread seems very tenuous indeed. Under such circumstances a new and stronger argument may be needed to provide a convincing license to kill.

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THE TRIAD of "God, King and Country offers a useful summary of the reasons that people in the Western world have given for killing one another over the past thousand years. Like most historians, I assume a central "Westphalian" period in European history, dating from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and lasting into the twentieth, if not the twenty-first, century, that began when Europe sorted itself out into the system of sovereign states which has been the template for international relations until our own time. Before that we find a "feudal" era, when relations between political powers were vertical rather than horizontal. Then, all political authority was seen as being ultimately derived from God, from whom it devolved through a pyramid of authorities, all of whom claimed by derivation to act as His agents; a claim ratified by the sanction of a universal Church. When these authorities fought between themselves--as they did almost continuously--they did so to uphold, or restore, a divinely ordained order, and could thus invoke divine sanction to justify their claims. In practice, their conflicts were usually struggles over possession or inheritance of landed property. For them war was a form of litigation, an appeal to God's judgment, and fighting was the means of ensuring that His will should be done. The people who did the fighting usually did so to fulfill their obligations to an overlord who rewarded them with land and the political power that went...