Discipline and Control: The Army as Civilisation

Abstract

It was the British statesman Lord Macaulay who in 1831 declared that, ‘The essence of war is violence and moderation in war is imbecility.’ However, in the nineteenth century, the civilising process described by Norbert Elias resulted in. a greater codification and control of war, typified by the Geneva convention of 1864, while the expansion of literacy and mass society led to the rise of war correspondents and reportage from the battlefield. With this, the question of brutality in war and of military discipline became vastly more complex. This complexity was heightened as armies grew in size or were dispersed ever more widely by steamships and railways. It became increasingly incumbent upon belligerent forces either to focus and contain their violence, or to provide greater justification for excessive bloodshed: the most obvious means to achieve this was to dehumanise the enemy to the point where it seemed merely that a barbarous scourge, or what Theodore Roosevelt termed the ‘encumberers of the earth’, was being eradicated.