§ 257. All war crimes may be punished with death, but belligerents may, of course, inflict a more lenient punishment, or commute a sentence of death into a more lenient penalty. If this be done and imprisonment take the place of capital punishment, the question arises whether such convicts must be released at the end of the war, although their term of imprisonment has not yet expired. Some publicists[485] answer this question in the affirmative, maintaining that it could never be lawful to inflict a penalty extending beyond the duration of the war. But I believe that the question has to be answered in the negative. If a belligerent has a right to pronounce a sentence of capital punishment, it is obvious that he may select a more lenient penalty and carry the latter out even beyond the duration of the war. And it would in no wise be in the interest of humanity to deny this right, for otherwise belligerents would have always to pronounce and carry out sentence of capital punishment in the interest of self-preservation. [Footnote 485: See, for instance, Hall, § 135, p. 432.] V TAKING OF HOSTAGES Hall, §§ 135 and 156--Taylor, § 525--Bluntschli, § 600--Lueder in Holtzendorff, IV. pp. 475-477--Klüber, §§ 156 and 247--G. F. Martens, II. 277--Ullmann, § 183--Bonfils, Nos. 1145 and 1151--Pradier-Fodéré, VII. Nos. 2843-2848--Rivier, II. p. 302--Calvo, IV. §§ 2158-2160--Fiore, III. Nos. 1363-1364--Martens, II. § 119--Longuet, § 84--Bordwell, p. 305--Spaight, pp. 465-470--_Kriegsbrauch_, pp. 49, 50--_Land Warfare_, §§ 461-464. [Sidenote: Former Practice of taking Hostages.] § 258. The practice of taking hostages as a means of securing legitimate warfare prevailed in former times much more than nowadays. It was frequently resorted to in cases in which belligerent forces depended more or less upon each other's good faith, such as capitulations and armistices for instance. To make sure that no perfidy was intended, officers or prominent private individuals were taken as hostages and could be held responsible with their lives for any perfidy committed by the enemy. This practice has totally disappeared, and is hardly likely to be revived. But this former practice must not be confounded with the still existing practice of seizing enemy individuals for the purpose of making them the object of reprisals. Thus, when in 1870, during the Franco-German War, Count Bismarck ordered forty French notables to be seized and to be taken away into captivity as a retaliation upon the French for refusing to liberate the crews of forty captured merchantmen, these forty French notables were not taken as hostages, but were made the object of reprisals.[486] [Footnote 486: The case has been discussed above in § 249. All the French writers who comment upon this case make the mistake of referring to it as an instance of the taking of hostages.] [Sidenote: Modern Practice of taking Hostages.]