Aftermath of War - 1 February 2002

A close friend of mine at Cambridge was a downright, forthright, no-nonsense Tory, even at the age of 18.

He came up to Cambridge to become a lawyer but I regret to say scholarship was not his thing.

However, he finished his first big exam and when the results were known he burst into my rooms and announced with pride that his tutor said he'd done the worst qualifying paper for a law degree ever heard of.

Accordingly he dropped out of the pursuit of the law and the next term he appeared with an alarming moustache, already bushy, and started throwing the windows open in any room he entered.

He'd done what many failing scholars do - he'd decided to take Military Subjects A. He was going to be a soldier.

So throughout his last year I would find him in mid-morning actually buried in a book, just one book, but a strange one.

The first time I glanced at it I saw very odd names which turned out to be the names of battles long ago - Bull Run and Vikesburg and Chancellorsville and Shiloh. Yes, he was reading about the American civil war.

How come, I wondered.

"Compulsory," he said, "the damned Americans changed war."

So they did, fighting what was called the first industrial war.

Transport and tactics transformed by the revolutionary invention of the railroad, naval strategy by the steamship and the ironclad and the torpedo, infantry warfare by the repeating rifle and - a point I'm sure was stressed in this compulsory textbook - the device or invention of entrenching.

The Southern armies, on the defensive from the start, made possible the lengthening of war by resting between battles in the trenches.

It was an invention greatly expanded in the First World War, after the first great battle, when both sides dug themselves a more or less permanent underground halting place - from Switzerland to the Belgian coast on the North Sea.

Thus, as one blunt historian put it, guaranteeing another two or three years of war and the deaths of several million more men.

So the young officers of the 1939 British and French forces had learned their lessons well - from Shiloh and Bull Run to the conduct of trench warfare 20 years before.

Unfortunately these lessons did not work as a buffer against Hitler's invention of the Blitzkrieg - the new mechanised war of bombing planes and tanks did to the French, in three weeks, what could not quite be done in four years by cavalry, infantry and entrenched reserves.

Now if there's truth to the cliché that generals always prepare to fight the last war and cannot foresee the future, what special prophetic powers were given to the international lawyers, who with noble intentions, sat down in Geneva in 1864 and set out the first rules for the conduct of a war?

They had no special magic, they too were human, as I hope the following sketch history of the Geneva Conventions (plural) will show.

After Napoleon's defeat and exile Europe enjoyed almost 40 years of peace, or at least the absence of any big disastrous war.

And then came the Crimean War which we don't need to go into except to say its notable mark or stain on history was the revelation of its appalling indifference to the suffering of the wounded which led, even while the war was on, to the arrival of a 34-year-old English woman with a terrifying gift for running hospitals, imposing hugely improved standards of care for the wounded and, in fact, pioneering a new profession for women called nursing.

The scandal of the Crimean suffering spread far and wide and within three years brought a much smaller war under scrutiny. It was known as the little Italian war with France and Sardinia fighting Austria.

There was one memorable battle, not for any tactical novelty but for its outrageous casualties and, again, for the careless treatment of the wounded.

We might never have heard anymore about it if a Swiss journalist, one Henri Dunant, had not been present at the battle of Solferino and put out a shocking book about it.

His complaint, echoing the correspondents in the Crimea, was about the unheeded suffering and indifferent medical care of the wounded.

Dunant was more than a reporter, he was a missionary. He urged somebody -prominent philanthropists, welfare agencies - to do something to establish an international central body which might become accepted as a roving free agent in setting universal standards for the care of the wounded.

Within two years a committee calling itself The International Red Cross met in Geneva, Switzerland and two years later organised the Geneva Convention of 1864 for "the amelioration of the condition of the wounded and the sick of armies in the field".

Now right away, you see, without meaning to give an exclusive definition of war they confined their concern to the most ill-treated victims of war as they knew it, which every succeeding convention has done, naturally.

It took 40 years, after the Russians had taken the most surprising beating from the Japanese navy, for a second Geneva Convention to adapt its concern for the wounded to the men who go down to the sea in ships.

And then came the First World War, when the main participants found themselves landed with hundreds of thousands of a new victim of war, so-called "prisoners of war" who might be perfectly well but mistreated in various ways, including torture.

So between the Great Wars international lawyers became preoccupied with prisoners of war and with the problem of what to do with them when a war was over.

It was not until 1949 with both Great Wars over that the third Convention dictated the repatriation of millions of prisoners of war on all sides.

There was a dreadful day towards the end of the Second War when Stalin required the allies to repatriate Soviet prisoners, as the latest Geneva agreement demanded.

Roosevelt and Churchill had to agree, knowing that about two million of these prisoners - who'd either fled from Soviet Russia or done forced labour for the Nazis or had willingly surrendered - two million would go home, most of them to be shot, starved or sentenced to slave labour for life, which indeed they were.

A private secretary of Churchill chalked up the day of the allies' obedience to the Geneva Convention as only the third sleepless night Churchill had ever confessed to.

Indeed the fourth Geneva Convention, also in 1949, met in an atmosphere of fear and misgiving about the possible shape of war to come. After all it had been only four years since the Hiroshima bomb.

It hastily added one or two rough rules for victims of technological warfare otherwise undefined.

In fact Geneva now had to act on the unpleasant new discovery that whereas formerly civilians went off to war now the war came to them.

The last piece I read on this fourth Convention made a general criticism that it was - is - outdated in that "the ideological aspect of modern warfare is hardly accounted for.

The international protection of human rights is rather wished for than provided for. And the drawback of agreements of the Geneva type is that they responded only to past stimuli instead of looking forward to the future."

Well of course, we've never yet in the 137 years since the first Convention, never yet found in Geneva or anywhere else a committee of seers and wizards with the God-given gift of prophesy and foresight.

I hope I've made clear why there have been four Geneva Conventions instead of one, "the Convention" to which politicians and some soldiers and most newspaper pundits alike have been casually, vaguely referring to in the past few weeks.

Over that nearly century and a half, the four conventions reflect rather the appalling and unanticipated growth of the weapons and the conditions of warfare.

Yet in the past week or two British - especially - editorial writers have referred to The Convention, unnamed, as a sort fixed wholly writ, a sacred book, which the Americans have barbarously flouted.

There's really no question of flouting any of the Geneva Conventions because none of them anticipates even a new kind of warrior.

For example, the prisoner of war status applies to captured soldiers and all that's required of them - no vital interrogation but name, rank, serial number.

How do you so classify a gang of trained civilian murderers - that is to say murderers of civilians - who have no rank, no serial number and as many names as they have or had passports?

It's surely time for a fifth Convention that will recognise the existence of terrorists, suicide bombers, chemical warfare, weapons of mass destruction and guess at other new breeds of warriors and weapons that compose the engine of modern war.

And as for the gusher of pious rage that sprang up from the dumb release of that wretched photograph of detainees shackled for a hazardous moment or two, I can only offer the first-hand testimony of a serious and respected British correspondent who's just been done there.

He says, frankly, that what he saw for years in the prisons of Northern Ireland made Guantanamo look like a Holiday Inn.

He found the men well-fed, with hot Muslim meals apart from various snacks and candy bars. They enjoy hot showers, they write home, they have room to jump around in.

Perhaps the Pentagon would make up for its dumb blunder by releasing a new, true photograph of the whole 158 detainees standing alongside the 161 surgeons, doctors, paramedics and nurses assigned to them - 161 for 158 patients, a ration of personal medical care unknown I should think to prisoners anywhere or even I daresay to the English newspaper editors who are so outraged by the barbarity of American treatment.

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