Honour or high respect, glory, credit and good name, and an adherence to what is right, has always been inextricably bound up in the conduct of warfare. To the medieval knight, his sense of honour was a controlling factor in battle which forbade flight before the enemy. The medieval ideal was personified in the Song of Roland. Roland accepted battle against overwhelming odds when he had the opportunity to flee. But being an honourable knight, he chose to fight, overcame his urge to escape, and died heroically. He gave his life for his cause and did nothing that would taint his honour. A knight's honour is a preoccupation of the Song of Roland because, to its writers, what a knight feared most was being denounced as a coward. However, practical experience and human nature showed that not everyone should allow themselves to die in battle once it became obvious the army was defeated. Lost battles do not necessarily mean lost wars, though this would be the case if the defeated side had allowed themselves to be killed on the battlefield. In such cases, honour had to be reconciled with the need to fight again and human safety and prudence.
In theory, knightly honour allowed only two alternatives, death or capture. During the Third Crusade, the Master of the Templars refused to flee from battle when he still could, and as a result was slain. He believed that had he fled it would have been a stain not only on his honour personally, but also on the honour of the entire order. However, distinction was made between an individual escaping during a battle while the outcome was still undecided and the retreat or collective flight of an army facing defeat. The Templars provided the generally accepted rule in such cases of defeat: once Christians were so near defeat that there were no banners left flying on the battlefield, the knight might escape to wherever he pleased.
By the early 19th century, the concept was not a great deal different. Certainly officers of Wellington's army did not look to sacrifice themselves needlessly. It was the way they faced death that most concerned them. It was an abstract idea, a matter of comportment, exposure to risk, acceptance of death if it should come, and of private satisfaction. Officers were most concerned about the figure they cut in their brother officers' eyes. This might be demonstrated by an officer's refusal to leave his post after receiving life-threatening wounds or the calm acceptance of an extremely hazardous order. For example, Major Howard of the 10th Hussars was ordered at the end of the battle of Waterloo to charge a well-formed French square without infantry support. Howard's calmness in undertaking this order and his death at the edge of the French square seems to epitomize what honourable conduct was to British officers of the time. Officers demonstrated their fitness to hold rank by their conduct in battle. They were very much individual gentlemen, their behaviour reflected on them, not necessarily that of their regiment. One hundred or so years later the officer's principal motivation and sense of honour was more likely to be defined in terms of ‘duty to the regiment’.
Although Frederick ‘the Great’ believed that only gentlemen should be officers because they alone were capable of being influenced by honour, it is clear that the definition of honour is rightly wider than this. The German army of the 19th and 20th centuries was able to foster a sense of soldierly honour which was not directly rank-related. Battlefield cohesion at the lowest level is promoted by men's desire to stick by their mates, and an abstract sense of honour is replaced by a very concrete desire not to let down those whose respect they value. A sense of honour binds men to military totems. The ex-soldier and radical politician William Cobbett observed that men would allow themselves to be ‘sabred into crow's meat’ in defence of a set of ragged colours which, were they for sale in a market, would fetch only a few pence. A Russian officer at Austerlitz urged his men not to leave their fine pieces to ‘these enemies of Christ’, and a British officer watched devoted Italian gunners hauling their elderly pieces over rough country after the defeat at Caporetto, bound to them by a sense of honour which exceeded the weapons' real military value.
In WW II, Japanese soldiers had a very firmly rooted culture of honour to sustain them. For centuries, the samurai warrior caste of Japan had emphasized the primary nature of honour and loyalty, and this code, called bushido, ‘the way of the warrior’, had been kept alive by officers of the imperial Japanese army. Bushido was a concept of a heroic life that excluded frailty and was directed to perfect service and success. It produced a heroism that impressed those fighting them. Very few Allied units defended a position literally to the last man. But for the Japanese surrender, even in hopeless positions, was considered a disgrace. Therefore for the Japanese, fighting to the very end was routine and unwounded prisoners were a rarity. For example, only 216 of the 20, 000-strong garrison of Iwo Jima were taken prisoner. Conversely this produced the most revolting cruelty. Prisoners who by the harsh standards of bushido should never have been captured were routinely mistreated and civilian populations subjected to rape, massacre, and torture. Honour, which can produce the most noble behaviour on the battlefield and inspire acts of astounding courage, has also been guilty of provoking some of the worst atrocities committed by the military.
Bibliography
- Keegan, John, The Face of Battle (London, 1976).
- Pritchard, John, et al., Total War, vol.
2 (London, 1989)
— Chris Mann
