A Higher Form of Killing Read Online Free Page B

neutral colliers; if I lose it, I shall go down with my ship . . . and then protests will effect me still less.
     
    Fisher was seconded in such opinions by another fifty-eight-year-old, the American naval delegate Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, already a renowned naval strategist. An admirer of Admiral Horatio Nelson, he had propounded in his 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History and subsequent works that “control of the sea, by maritime commerce and naval supremacy means predominant influence in the world . . . [and] is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations.”
    Andrew White in his summary of the conference observed that Mahan “prevented any lapses into sentimentality . . . When he speaks the millennium fades and this stern severe actual world appears.” Mahan reiterated that “the object of war was to smite the enemy incessantly and remorselessly and crush him by depriving him of the use of the sea,” strangling the enemy into submission by cutting off his trade, including the neutral’s right to trade with him. With such powerful opposing voices as Mahan and Fisher arguing against the conference’s generally pacific purpose of introducing restrictions on warfare, the delegates thought it better to leave unaltered the by now time-honored body of custom and practice relating to war at sea known as the “Cruiser Rules,” the origins of some parts of which dated back even beyond Grotius to the time of Henry VIII. Other parts, such as a ban on privateering, were more recent. * The consensus embodied in these “rules” prohibited enemy warships sinking on sight merchant vessels of whatever nationality. They had to be stopped and searched for “contraband” and only if contraband were found could they either be sunk—after their crews had been given time to take to the boats—or seized as prizes. To effect such searches warships were allowed to blockade their enemies’ ports.
    The delegates made no headway either on disarmament against broad and implacable opposition vociferously led by Germany, satisfying themselves with the platitudinous resolution “that the restriction of military budgets, which are at present a heavy burden on the world, is extremely desirable for the increase of the material and moral welfare of mankind.” When the Russian delegation proposed that all states should agree “not to transform radically their guns nor to increase their calibres for a certain fixed period” the British objected that effective verification would be impossible since new armaments could easily be concealed. Captain Mahan opposed international control and verification in principle because they would breach national sovereignty.
    During the long debates about arbitration Mahan stated his belief that “the great danger of undiscriminating advocacy of arbitration, which threatens even the cause it seeks to maintain, is that it may lead men to tamper with equity, soothing their conscience with the belief that war is so entirely wrong that beside it no other tolerated evil is wrong.” Despite such objections, although no state would commit itself to put every dispute in which it became involved to arbitration, none wanted to be seen as warmongering. Consequently, the conference in its resolutions encouraged the use of arbitration and established at The Hague a permanent Court of Arbitration ready and willing to consider all cases submitted to it by those involved. Even the kaiser, who considered arbitration “a hoax” that a state could use to gain time to build up its forces to improve its position before war eventually began, felt forced to agree to the arbitration provision. However, in doing so he wrote in the margin of one of the relevant documents, “I consented to all this nonsense only in order that the Tsar should not lose face before Europe, in practice however I shall rely on God and my sharp sword! And I shit on all their