ABSTRACT

Victory presented primitive societies with unlimited opportunities and simple solutions. Enemy soldiers could be killed, their women and children seized and their houses burnt, so making it difficult or even impossible for them to recover and seek revenge.1 But as the international system developed within a Christian society, or within the legacy left by that society, so Western leaders were increasingly constrained in the terms they could impose. Anything less than their complete destruction meant that the enemy might recover and seek revenge at a later stage. Yet statesmen were and are expected to bring about settlements which perpetuate the achievements of victory and, to the extent possible, justify the sacrifices of lives and treasure which the war demanded. This was all the more important in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the wider public came to have a say in policy formulation and to make demands which would justify the war from their point of view and not just that of their rulers.