War and Peace -the anniversary of General Order #100

 

In literature and history nothing sets the stage or frames the drama of life like a war. Real wars bare very little resemblance to how they get depicted . There is the boredom, the fear and real ugliness of violent death that never gets translated into books like War And Peace or Gone With The Wind.

I was at the local book store and found a book about the American Civil War. It's a book of lists and statistics. That might sound dry but in the numbers are the facts and figures that tell the real story of war. That the average soldier was much more likely to die of disease than the battlefield and even with all the improvements in rifles and artillery it was the sword and bayonet that were still the most effective weapons.

Gettysburg is only a short drive away and this part of Pennsylvania is a mecca for Civil War re-enactors. The time period costumes, large formations of uniformed men preparing for battle and the dedication to get every detail right are all part of the spectacle  -though they really can't show the true filth and squalor of a military encampment, tents full of men dying of dysentery or the hand to hand combat that most battles and skirmishes degraded into.

Europe took a great deal of interest in the American Civil War. England and France both depended on Southern cotton for their mills. Many European intellectuals felt a democracy was too unstable to endure without a king or royal family in executive control. The industrialists of  Europe favored the aristocratic South but the working masses they employed were for the Union and supported the abolition of slavery.

Like all wars, governments will spare no expense to kill its enemies. Historians will dispute the final figures for the Civil War because of the sketchy records from the South but a common total is a little over 7 billion dollars, that's billions in 1860 dollars. The United Sates government had only spent 15 million for the Louisiana Purchase, 7.2 million for Alaska and 50 million to build the first transcontinental railroad.

Even today war remains an expensive endeavor.  Every soldier serving in Afghanistan is a million dollar proposition.  Most of that expense is in the cost of sending food, water and material to soldiers out in extremely remote regions.

Europeans also looked at the American Civil War as the beginning of modern warfare.  Railroads and the telegraph sped-up troop movements and battlefield communications by a factor of ten over what was available only a generation earlier. Industrial production and technology became the determining factors in achieving victory. 

It's been said the only thing that separated the trench warfare of World War 1 and the Civil War was the machine gun. The Gatling Gun almost made it to the battlefield and lost in the footnotes of history is the Gatling Gun's predecessor known as the Coffee Mill Gun.

It got its name because it did look like a coffee mill and was worked by a big hand crank on the side. Some soldiers first mistook it for a sausage grinder though in a metaphorical way it was.  The gun was sold with the sales pitch of an "army in a box" with a firing rate of 120 rounds a minute, not that incredibly impressive  by today's standards but in the 1860's the muskets that both armies use at the start of the war could fire only 4 to 5 rounds a minute at best.

In the spring of 1862 Lincoln urged his Generals to use the new weapon but they couldn't see the immediate benefit of it. A few amateur historians have wondered how the whole war would have changed if a dozen of these guns where in the right place at several key battles.

The American Civil not only brought industrial technology to the forefront it also was the first modern war with a written legal code of conduct. On April 24tth 1863 the Union Army issued General Orders #100. In total it was 157 articles on how exactly Federal Troops were to handle Confederate prisoners, civilians and guerilla fighters.

General Orders #100 was predominately the work of Francis Lieber.  Lieber a Prussian immigrant and scholar of international law had three sons at the time, one who fought for the Confederacy and the other two for the Union.

There was no other document like this in any other country anywhere in the world.  It was the foundation for international military law today. It was also a counter current to the ideas of industrial warfare and total war , where war can have rules and the carnage be limited  -at least when it has no military value.

So on this day a 150 years ago as war was being made so much more efficient and deadly, Francis Lieber was also trying to make it more civilized. Still war keeps expanding it's horizons, sometimes in ways that look utterly ridiculous until you remind yourself that all that effort went into something that was meant to kill another human being.