Page 83 - ACTL_Win23

THE BOOKSHELVES OF HISTORY ARE RIDDLED WITH ACCOUNTS OF EVENTS LONG FORGOTTEN AND RELEGATED TO GATHER DUST. YET MANY OF THOSE EVENTS HAVE HAD LASTING CONSEQUENCES, TAKEN FOR GRANTED EVEN AS THE DETAILS LAPSE UNREMEMBERED.
One such event was the simultaneous creation of the Red Cross and the formation of the first Geneva Convention. Established in 1864, both were the fruit of the inspiration of an obscure Swiss businessman, Jean Henri Dunant. Dunant was so distressed at the vicious carnage and brutality he witnessed at the battle of Solferino in 1859, upon which he stumbled by accident, that he felt compelled to embark on a campaign to establish a society for the care of the victims of warfare. This eventually evolved into the International Committee of the Red Cross and the first of the four Geneva Conventions. Dunant became the recipient of the very first Nobel Prize for Peace in 1901.
The middle years of the nineteenth century were host to serious changes in the way war was waged. The battlefield tactics had remained much as those Napoleon and Wellington had prac- tised half a century earlier but improvements in offensive armaments created the ability to wreak immensely greater casualties. The invention of the telegraph took the dissemination of information out of the days of the carrier pigeon and allowed journalists to bring vivid accounts of campaigns to the home front within twenty-four hours of the events.
The constitution of the armies had changed. The Duke of Wellington described his o
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in the Peninsular war, he remarked “I don’t know what effect they have on the enemy y
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certainly terrify me” – a comment that revealed the high command’s attitude to the fo
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they were merely cannon fodder. Gustave Moynier, a Swiss lawyer who worked wit
described the shift from armies of outcasts to armies of citizens:
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The home front reading the news were now more likely to be the parents or siblings of the sons and brothers at the front (there were no daughters yet in the armed forces). Public opinion was beginning to stir and the times were ripe for reform of the kind that spawned the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention.
“The Geneva Convention” is the common term used to describe the agreement between nations that attempts, not always successfully, to bring some humanity to bear on the victims of war: not just military personnel, but also civilians subjected to what the Convention refers to as “collat- eral damage” and to the depredations, rape and pillage of the uninvited and unwelcome armies.
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“Modern armies differ very much in composition from those of former days. These, for the greater part, were recruited from the vagabonds, whose bad habits made them unfitted for a quiet la- bourious life, and who excited but little interest in their fellow-countrymen; whilst the custom of conscription, generally employed in these days, or that of the Landwehr in use amongst the Prussians and the Swiss, have given rise to armies which strike home to the bosom of every family in the country. The army has struck its roots so deeply into the midst of the population, that it is impossible that people can remain passive spectators of its sufferings.”