THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1903. LOOT

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 40, Issue 40, 1 October 1903, Page 17

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1903. LOOT

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CURIOUS ' exhibit ' is at present on view in the library of our House of Representatives-. It is a venerable Boer Bible, looted from the ouse of Joseph Johannes Fritz by one of our gallant raiders during tihe oourse of the South African war. It was rescued by the Premier from the sordid surroundings of a Wellington pawnshop, and is soon to be restored to its rightful owner, in response to the appeal made by Lord Roberts for the return of those venerated family treasures to the Boer homes from which they were stolen by thieves in khaki. Many of those stolen Bibles were ponderous volumes dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All of them contained family records of births, marriages, and deaths that are accepted in South African Courts as legal evidence on these matters. To their Boer owners they possess a religious, sentimental, and genealogical value that made their theft a grievous loss and doubtless dictated the appeal of Lord Roberts for their speedy restoration. * This strange and widespread freak of military thieving is a fresh reminder to us that war, even at its best, was properly described by the first Napoleon as ' a trade of barbarians.' In, pagan days there was a real and terrible meaning in the phrase, ' spoils of the \ ictors.' Yet there were even then men that were better than the spirit of their times. Fabricius, for instance, returned without personal spoils from his sweeping victories that enriched his soldiers and filled to overflowing the coffers of his country's treasury. Soon afterwards- he was found by his ingle-nook eating the roots and herbs that he had cultivated with his own browned and horny hands. He was the one of the noblest Romans of ttfiem all, and lived and died in rigorous poverty. Yet he could, in his campaigns, have piled the talents high and retired like the conquering heroes of our days to enjoy his laurels in wealth and ease. The old pagan principle was that war, when

declared, was declared \agains* an jantire nation,, and that every man, woman, and child belonging to it was an enemy. To the Catholic Church we owe the. abandonment of this principle in actual practice : that we do not raze cities and. sprinkle salt upon their smoking rjiins, that we do not slay or ienslave captives, or (usually) strip the dead upon the field of battle, or treat women, children, the sick, physicians and sturgeons, and non-com-batants generally, as enemies. It was ever the Church's ideal that, when an armed struggle became necessary, it should be ' a duel between, the military and naval farces of the States at war.' And so it purports to be t(Hday. * The Church and the theologian have raised their voices against promiscuous private looting in war, but thus far without very conspicuous effect. A great step in advance was made when merchants belonging to the country of an enemy, found in England at the breaking out of the war, were protected by the Magna Charta in their body and goods. The Spanish Jesuit theologians Suarez and Ayala were the first to codify in a way the laws of Christian warfare. We have moved pretty fast and far since their day. We have had Geneva Conventions and Inter-national Laws of War since then— hastened on, no doubt, by the wholesale plundering of the Peninsula* War, and the historic sackings and massacres of Badajos, San Sebastian, Tripolitza, and Belgrade. The unauthorised and forcible seizure of the private property of an enemy by a soldier for his personal benefit is nominally punishable by a firing party and sundry lethal doses of lead. So it is-on paper, where good discipline and glowing philanthropy may be bought by the ream at counter-bargain rates. A somewhat looser printed code prevails at sea. Privateering, for instance, is not yet legally abolished. And is not every Prize Court to this hour a Court of the Law of Nations % In actual practice the provisions against private looting are a homage to the Christian ideal in war— only that and little more. The Lord of Misrule is too often the lord of war. Scratch a Russian and you'll find a Tartar. And there is a distinctly appreciable percentage of the Russian in the men that shoulder the rifle and go down to the wars, tn the evil days of the Peninsula and the Crimea, when muddling commissariats often left Thomas Atkins hungry o'nights, a keen forager like Mickey Free or an accomplished chicken-thief was a treasure to his company. ( All sorrows are bearable if there is- bread. So runs the Spanish proverb. But it was not the achings of hunger that led to the extensive looting which took place in the German army, even under the sternest military discipline, during the war between the Fatiherland and France. Officers and men alike fell to wholesale thieving ; and during the whole course of that memorable campaign bands of Jewish and Christian dealers formed a conspicuous hody among the variegated tatterdemalion of parasites and camp-fol-lowers of the German army. They bought up the military loot of every kingdom, from ladies' ear-rings to hall clocks and grand pianos, and sent them in vast consignments to the eager and profitable markets beyond the Rhine. During the Chinese crisis of three years ago whole qjuatters of Tientsin were plundered by uniformed white thieves from ridge-pole to cellar-floor. So was Pekin. It was only during the present year that some priceless relics of the bygone days of the Hwa Kwo or Kingdom of Flowers were recovered from an American • officer and genWeman ' and restored to their rightful owners. The strange spectacle was even witnessed of missionaries openly joining in the plunder, not of necessary articles of food, but of objects of value, which they converted into cash They afterwards had the courage to attempt to justify their action in the columns of the American secular press. Tt was a curious case of history repeating itself. In the old Puritan days in England preachers maintained that dominion or ownership is founded on grace, and that if any man lacked this he had no right

to lands, goods, or chattels. Mark Twain's stinging castigation of one of those Chinese missionary looters will be fresh in the memory of many readers of the American reviews. American officers that presumably wear clean linen witnessed, directed, and took part in the scandalous desecration and sacrilegious plunder of vestments, sacred vessels, reliquaries, pictures, candelabra, statuary, ancient tomes, etc., from Catholic churches in the Philippines. Vast quantities of this kind of church loot were sent across the Pacific an 4 exposed for sale in second-hand stores and pawn-shops in San Francisco and other American cities. The noted Australian war-correspoodent, « Banjo ' Patterson, said in the course of one of the lectures delivered by him in New Zealand that during the South African war matter had appeared in the British and colonial newspaper press that it was a disgrace for soldiers to write and for editors to publish. An ugly anthology of military ruffianism might easily be compiled from the letters of British and colonial soldiers that were published in the daily papers of Great Britain and Australasia. The amazing part of this bad business was the cool lack of any, sense of shame with which officers and men recorded and editors published cases of picking the pockets of prisoners and stealing watches, money, jewellery, music, love-letters, etc., from private houses— and some of this even in British territory. A London weekly of the time before us reported two ' Tommies ' as having ' swelled their purses by more than £100 apiece ' at Elandslaagte and ' one of the Lancers ' as having ' " come across " £400 the other day in one of the houses on the Modder River.' And did not the aforesaid ' Banjo ' Patterson make the faces of his New Zealand audiences exparid in twelve-inch laughter at the keenness and cunning displayed by some Australian officers atid men in stealing property under cover of sham receipts and under the pretence of a legal requisition ?

A certain rugged old British officer liked to see a bit of the devil in a soldier. If it is there— and it often is— it will find its way out in war-time through the thin veneer of manners ajid observances that frequently pass muster for ' civilisation.' There is a good deal of truth in old Eben Holden's sayfng : ' A man he can be any kind uv a beast, but a panther he can't be nuthin' but jest a panther.' War is- an evil game. It may bring out the courage and endurance that there Is in a man. It is pretty certain to evoke whatever dash of the demon there is in him. And the story of the pawned Boer Bible is "one of the things that ought to give one pause and wonder if, after all, war is a thing to huzza and sound the loud timbrel about.