Let us turn from the abstract to the concrete, and take two instances as a test of the principle. In 1689, Marshal Duras, commander of the French army of the Rhine, received orders to destroy the Palatinate, and make a desert between France and Germany, though neither the Elector nor his people had done the least injury to France. Did a single soldier, did a single officer quail or hesitate? Voltaire tells us that many officers felt shame in acting as the instrument of this iniquity of Louis XIV., but they acted nevertheless in accordance with their supposed honour, and with the still orthodox theory of military duty. They stopped short at no atrocity. They cut down the fruit-trees, they tore down the vines, they burnt the granaries; they set fire to villages, to country-houses, to castles; they desecrated the tombs of the ancient German emperors at Spiers; they plundered the churches; they reduced well-nigh to ashes Oppenheim, Spiers, Worms, Mannheim, Heidelberg, and other flourishing cities; they reduced 400,000 human beings to homelessness and destruction--and all in the name of military duty and military honour! Yet, of a truth, those were dastardly deeds if ever dastardly deeds have been done beneath the sun; and it is the sheerest sophistry to maintain that the men who so implicitly carried out their orders would not have done more for their miserable honour, would not have had a higher conception of duty, had they followed the dictates of their reason and conscience rather than those of their military superiors, and refused to sacrifice their humanity to an overstrained theory of their military obligation, and their memory to everlasting execration. In the case of these destroyers military duty meant simply military servility, and it was this reckless servility that led Voltaire in his ‘Candide’ to put into the mouth of his inimitable philosopher, Martin, that definition of an army which tales like the foregoing suggested and justified: ‘A million of assassins, in regiments, traversing Europe from end to end, and committing murder and brigandage by rules of discipline for the sake of bread, because incompetent to exercise any more honest calling.’[326]