Prisoners of War and Military Honour, 1789–1918

Customs adapted from experience have always informed the conduct of armies towards each other and towards enemy populations. By the seventeenth century parole had become one such mainstay of the laws of war. The pawning of their personal honour enabled officers to purchase freedom of movement and other privileges when they were taken captive. Increasingly, other ranks and civilians claimed a right to parole, too. Based on material from close to thirty British, Dutch, French, German, and Swiss archives the book investigates how captives, statesmen, and humanitarians understood honour in the ‘long nineteenth century’, how they negotiated national differences, and why parole d’honneur continued to matter as a humanitarian resource into the First World War despite recurring infringements. It is argued that the dichotomy created by a substantial amount of scholarship between the ‘good’ codes of conduct prevalent in the eighteenth century and modern warfare calls for a re-assessment. In explaining the longevity of parole, this study sheds new light on a question which loomed large during the centenary of the First World War: why did international agreements like the Geneva and Hague Conventions that provided for the humane treatment of captives fail to stem the tide of total war?

Honour formed a key component of the European laws of war. The chapter contextualizes the reasons against the backdrop of wider political, social, and intellectual transformations since the Middle Ages. Chivalry bequeathed an appealing model, but the rediscovery of stoic thought in the sixteenth century exerted the arguably greater influence on the professional formation of modern standing armies. Honour offered guidance where conscience was left to close gaps of the law. Yet as an excursion into the popularization of duelling shows, the moral autonomy that men of honour claimed for themselves in defence of their interpretation of Right also insulated them to a certain extent from the control of the state. The adoption of duelling by common soldiers overlapped with an incipient democratization of military honour in the eighteenth century, which both unified and challenged the stratified organization of armed forces. The Age of Revolutions (1770s–1830s) and the subsequent codification of humanitarian international law to contain total war added urgency to the quest to define which prisoners of war could give parole.

The colonial ‘small wars’ of the late nineteenth century saw experimentation with new forms of incarceration which confined hostile populations to discrete locales to cut insurgents off from their bases of support. Counter-intuitively, ‘concentration camps’ did not put an end to conditional releases on parole. During the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) captured Boer commandos held in the far reaches of the British empire continued to enjoy the privilege while their families died by the thousands in South African camps. The scrupulous adherence of the two belligerents to international law in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) restored European observers’ faith that parole could alleviate the need for mass incarceration. Despite the systemic violence prisoners of war and civilian internees experienced in the First World War (1914–1918), honour-based pledges that granted captives varying degrees of relief therefore continued to take place in different theatres of the conflagration. In fact, agreements from 1915 onwards for the transfer of long-suffering prisoners to the custody of neutral Switzerland and later the Netherlands generated a late flowering of the humanitarian ideals of parole. With the introduction of official guarantees to return escapees to neutral internment, the nationalization of military honour reached a natural point of culmination.