CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

the rules of war, beginning with the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) and continuing
through the Peace of Westphalia (1638) to the development of early international law by
the likes of Grotius, Pufendorf and Vattel (see Section 1.2.3 ), can be seen as a reaction
to the increasing cost of war (in human and financial terms) made particularly apparent
by the 30 Years War. Warfare in the 17 th and 18 th Century became, then, something of
a well-regulated stately dance between organised forces, by-and-large disciplined and
well ordered and, again by-and-large, avoiding to a great extent any impact on the
civilian population. Standing armies were simply too costly to be lost in wholesale
slaughter. The advent of the levee-en-mass and the beginnings of total war following
the French Revolution changed this again. To a greater extent than ever before nations
and not just their armies were at war.
The 19 th and 20 th Centuries saw both an increasing involvement of the civilian
population in the conduct and effect of war and, through war’s industrialization, an ever
expanding capacity for destruction. Even so, it is possible to find examples of those
who sought, ultimately without success, to hold back this tide of change. JFC Fuller 95
draws attention to French Marshal Gerard’s 1832 assault on Antwerp. Dutch General
Chasse, commanding the defenders in the citadel, agreed to train his guns only on the
open plains if Gerard would agree (as he did) only to approach from that direction, thus
sparing the citizens and property of Antwerp. At the same time Western armies
transformed themselves with military service becoming increasingly professional.
These changes at once demanded the development of internationally recognized
restraints on the conduct of war – to mitigate the scale of slaughter made possible by
industrialization and to limit the effects on the civil populace – and saw the replacement
of chivalric-based honour codes amongst the predominantly aristocratic officer classes,
with the ethos and codes of conduct of a ‘profession’ of arms. 96
The 20th Century, as was shown in Chapter 1, saw increasingly strident attempts to
curtail warfare altogether as an instrument of international policy, and the culmination
of such attempts in the UN Charter, together with the re-formulation of the Geneva
Conventions in 1949, largely rendered obsolete discussion of jus in bello insofar as the
conduct of individual soldiers was concerned. There had been established, after all, a
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