' Civilised' Warfare.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 2, 9 January 1902, Page 1

' Civilised ' Warfare.

In the Kentuckian idea, some kinds of whisky are better than others, but none are bad. A reverse comparison might be applied to methods of warfare. Some are worse than others, but none are good. Even at its best war is an evil game. Thackeray has said that it taxes both sexes alike — taking the blood of men and the tears of women. When the note of Weylerism is added to its normal horrors, it is a Herod slaying the innocents. In the concentration camps of South Africa it has produced among the hapless little ones a heartrending mortality that, despite all the efforts of apologists of various degrees, is at last creating a strong agitation among people of all creeds and parties in Great Britain. The longdrawn war in the Philippines is hell let loose. Here is, for instance, a sample of how a reputable and staunch American jonrnalist at the front describes, in the Philadelphia Public

Ledger, the ' benevolent assimilation ' of the Filipinos by the Bashi-bazouks of Uncle Sam :— 'The present war is no bloodless, fake, opera-bouffe engagement. Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate, men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten vp — an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile, in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap. Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men "to make them talk," have taken prisoners of people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop in the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses. It is not civilised warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilised people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, brutality, and we give it to them. The new military plan of settling the trouble by setting them at each other is one that looks promising. We have now sent a thousand Maccabeebes to Samar. They are hereditary enemies of the " Ladrones," and go forth to the slaughter gaily.'

In the ruder and coarser days of the eighteenth century — long before international law was placed upon its present basis — strenuous objection was raised to the employment of armed Indians by both sides during the wars between Great Britain and France on the American Continent. Nowadays people ma,ke little more than a passing comment at the employment of armed half-savage Maccabeebes in Samar and the occasional appearance of scarcely half-civilised Kaffirs as combatants upon the battlefields of the South African campaign. In some respects neither military nor popular sentiment seems to have quite kept pace with the more humanising tendency of international law. True civilisation is still sorely in need of (1) a code of honestly Christian warfare with ' inferior' races; (2) an international force courageous enough to speedily note and strong enough to promptly punish infractions thereof ; and (3) an upright judge and a squad of able-bodied hangmen to treat to a course of Manila hemp white demons such as those who are roaming about seeking whom they may devour in the Philippines.