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T h e Et h i c s o f W a r
The Ethics of War
Essays

Edited by

Saba Bazargan-Forward and Samuel C. Rickless

1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Oxford University Press 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with
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reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the
Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bazargan-Forward, Saba, author.
Title: The ethics of war : essays / Saba Bazargan and Sameul Rickless.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016023720| ISBN 9780199376148 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780190614553 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: War—Moral and ethical aspects. | Just war doctrine.
Classification: LCC U22 .B39 2016 | DDC 172/.42—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023720

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Peter Lewis
who made this all possible
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction by Saba Bazargan-Forward and Samuel C. Rickless xi

Part I: Proportionality in War

1. Liability, Proportionality, and the Number of Aggressors

Jeff McMahan 3
2. The Lesser Evil Obligation
David Rodin 28
3. Human Rights, Proportionality, and the Lives of Soldiers
Larry May 46

Part II: Responsibility in War

4. Resolving the Responsibility Dilemma

Richard Arneson 67
5. Duress and Duty
Victor Tadros 94
6. Can States Be Corporately Liable to Attack in War?
François Tanguay-Renaud 116

Part III: The Law of War

7. Targeting al Qaeda: Law and Morality in the US “War on Terror”

Andrew Altman 141
viii • Contents

8. Killing with Discrimination

Adil Ahmad Haque 164
9. Double Effect and the Laws of War
Kai Draper 182

Part IV: War’s Beginning and Ending

10. Beyond the Paradigm of Self-Defense? On Revolutionary Violence

Mattias Iser 207
11. War’s Endings and the Structure of Just War Theory
Seth Lazar 227
12. Moral Recovery After War: The Role of Hope
Nancy Sherman 243

Index 265
A c k n o wl e d g m e n t s

This collection originates in a conference on the ethics of war held at UC San

Diego on March 1–2, 2013. The vast majority of the contributors to this volume
either presented or commented on papers at that conference. We are deeply grate-
ful to all of the conference participants, including UC San Diego philosophy
faculty, staff, and graduate students, for their efforts at making the conference the
success that it was. We single out, for special thanks, the then chair of the depart-
ment of philosophy, Don Rutherford, and the then dean of Arts and Humanities,
Seth Lerer, for their unwavering support. And our deepest thanks go to our friend
and benefactor, Peter Lewis, who made the conference, and hence this volume,
possible.
We would also like to thank Peter Ohlin, Emily Sacharin, and Andrew Ward
at Oxford University Press for shepherding the volume from conception to pro-
duction, and the OUP reviewers for their constructive comments and helpful
suggestions.
introduction

Since the writings of the scholastics and jurists of the late Renaissance and Early
Modern periods (from roughly the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries),
two precepts have underwritten accounts of the morality of war. First: war is per-
spicuously described as a relation not between individuals but between states
(or, at least, as a relation between a state and a collective with aspirations of at-
taining—or undermining—statehood). Second: the rules governing conduct in
war should proceed independently of whether the war fought is just or unjust.
These precepts form the basis of what is known as “Just War theory,” which today
informs the judgments of ethicists, government officials, international lawyers,
religious scholars, news coverage, and perhaps most important, the public as a
whole. The influence of Just War theory is as vast as it is subtle; many are inclined
to identify the criteria of Just War theory, once made explicit, as common sense.
Indeed, according to David Rodin, Just War theory is “one of the few basic fix-
tures of medieval philosophy to remain substantially unchallenged in the modern
world.”1 The most modern and compellingly articulated formulation of this theory
is Michael Walzer’s influential book Just and Unjust Wars written in 1977,2 which
has become a sine qua non for those interested in the morality of war.
Since the turn of the century, however, a small but growing chorus of philoso-
phers and legal theorists has critically analyzed Just War theory. Some of them,
led chiefly by David Rodin and Jeff McMahan, challenge the Walzerian frame-
work by criticizing the paradigm dominating how we have morally evaluated
wars since the late Renaissance. In doing so, they have subjected the pair of fun-
damental precepts underwriting the legalistic paradigm to withering criticism.
From these ashes a ‘revisionist’ account of the morality of war has sprung, empha-
sizing an individualistic, self-defensive paradigm for evaluating the morality of
war. On this view, wars are best characterized as relations between individuals

1. David Rodin, War and Self-Defense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 189.
2. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
xii • The Ethics of War

rather than states. Certainly the number of individuals is great, the organizational
relations among them are intricate and often obfuscatory, and the kinds of threats
these individuals together impose and face are complex and uncertain; though
these conditions make it more difficult to ascertain the relevant empirical facts,
they do not undercut the fundamental principles grounding individual morality.
Accordingly, the morality of war is, for these revisionists, of a piece with the mo-
rality of everyday life. In keeping with this view, these revisionists maintain that
the rules governing conduct in war depend on the moral status of the war being
fought. Consequently, individual soldiers who participate in an unjust war
cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for what they do by adverting to their
role as ‘instruments’ of the state. This revisionist account has, accordingly, come
to be known as “reductive individualism.”
The essays herein include contributions from ‘first-wave’ revisionists (viz.,
David Rodin and Jeff McMahan) as well as from ‘second wave’ members. Some of
the second wave (viz., Richard Arneson, Victor Tadros, and Kai Draper) see re-
ductive individualism as fundamentally correct but much in need of refinement;
others (viz., Larry May, François Tanguay-Renaud, Mattias Iser, and Seth Lazar)
argue that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of reductive individ-
ualism; they raise challenges for the self-defensive paradigm dominating revision-
ist thought. Still others (viz., Andrew Altman, Adil Haque, and Nancy Sherman)
raise issues in the morality of war that pertain to both traditional and revisionist
accounts. In what follows, we further detail and connect these novel contribu-
tions to the recent resurgence of thought on the morality of war.

Part I—Proportionality in War

Much of the revisionist literature on the morality of war since the turn of the cen-
tury focuses on how to weigh the lives of enemy combatants fighting an unjust
war, which is a necessary task for determining whether a war satisfies the con-
straint of proportionality. This constraint prohibits wars (and acts in wars) that
inflict harms so great that they cannot be justified by the evils that inflicting those
harms averts. But how should reductive individualists weigh the life of soldiers in
the proportionality calculus? Whether a soldier (or a civilian, for that matter) is
morally liable to be killed depends on what she does and whether she is responsi-
ble for it, rather than simply on what group she is a member of. But this commit-
ment to individualism raises problems. A single individual wrongly threatening
the life of an innocent is morally liable to be killed if necessary to save that inno-
cent. If this is correct, it seems we are forced to say that when many individuals
together lethally threaten one innocent, each and every such wrongful threatener
is morally liable to be killed (if necessary to save the innocent’s life). Some find
 Introduction • xiii

this conclusion unproblematic; but it becomes harder to accept when we stipu-

late that each of the wrongful threateners is only ‘minimally responsible’ for her
own wrongful contribution. At some point, the number of minimally responsible
wrongful threateners reaches a point at which it is morally preferable to allow
their innocent target to be killed than it is to kill all the wrongful threateners. Yet
reductive individualism, as articulated by Jeff McMahan, seems incapable of
grounding this desideratum. Rodin, however, in his contribution to this volume,
adds an important resource to the reductive individualist’s conceptual arsenal
that, he argues, enables its proponents to aggregate the lives of minimally respon-
sible threateners in ways that avoids the conclusion that we can kill countless
many to prevent them from killing a single innocent. This resource, specifically, is
a novel moral concept, which he calls the ‘lesser evil obligation.’ It functions as
the mirror image of the well-known ‘lesser evil justification.’ Whereas the lesser
evil justification allows us to permissibly transgress an individual’s rights in order
to avoid a substantially greater evil (impersonally construed), the lesser evil obli-
gation enjoins us to refrain from exercising a right that we have, on the grounds
that doing otherwise will yield a substantially greater evil (impersonally con-
strued). So though an innocent individual has the right to defend herself (or an-
other innocent) from countless threateners who are together wrongly attempting
to kill her, the lesser evil obligation requires that she refrain from exercising that
right, since doing otherwise would have morally catastrophic consequences. So
like the lesser evil justification, the lesser evil obligation adverts to consequences
as a basis for the claim that the rights an individual has are not absolutely dispos-
itive of what we may or should do. This novel moral category explicates, Rodin
argues, our intuition that we cannot kill countlessly many minimally responsible
threateners in a way preferable to the method that McMahan provides in this
volume—and it does so in a way that he believes will substantially enhance our
increasingly sophisticated understanding of the relationship between deontic ob-
ligations to respect rights and the consequentialist obligations to avoid bad con-
sequences.
But some, such as Larry May, argue that such a view does not go far enough in
protecting the rights of enemy combatants. He notes that international humani-
tarian law, which establishes the rights of combatants in wartime, is far more
­permissive than international human rights law, which establishes the rights of
persons qua persons. The former permits any combatants to target and kill almost
any enemy combatant (medics and religious personnel excluded, as well as those
who are disabled or in enemy hands) even if such combatants are not presently
posing a threat. This stands in contrast with international human rights law,
which holds the right to life inviolable. To reconcile the two norms, some have
argued that humanitarian law should give way to the more progressive strictures
xiv • The Ethics of War

of human rights law. May is one such proponent. In his essay ‘Human Rights,
Proportionality and the Lives of Soldiers,’ he points out that, historically, the lives
of enemy combatants received no weight in the constraints of necessity and pro-
portionality. This is morally tantamount, he argues, to treating them as cannon
fodder. May argues in favor of adopting a human rights model of the morality of
war, which requires those initiating and implementing a war to take account not
only of civilian causalities, but of the casualties of enemy combatants as well, since
they qua persons (in accordance with human rights law) have the right to life.
May presents a picture of what the proportionality and necessity constraints
would look like if, in his words, “the human rights perspective were taken more
seriously than it has in the past.” Some, however, have argued that combatants
fighting in furtherance of an unjust cause forfeit their right against being killed.
Accordingly, the weight their deaths receive in the ‘costs’ column of the propor-
tionality constraint should be substantially diminished (if not eliminated). This
would vindicate a version of international humanitarian law. May responds to
this sort of challenge by arguing that though fundamental rights can be lost in
certain limited contexts between very restricted sets of people—as when one in-
dividual culpably and wrongly attacks another—combatants, as a general class of
people, cannot be plausibly regarded as having forfeited their right to life by
virtue of their state’s decision to wage an unjust war. He thus finds the self-defensive
paradigm of reductive individualism largely inapplicable to war. May also re-
sponds to legal theorists who have argued that the domain of humanitarian law is
lex specialis—that it effectively trumps human rights law. He explores various
ways that human rights law and humanitarian law might occupy overlapping legal
terrain. May ends by considering the relationship between the necessity constraint
and the proportionality constraint from the perspective of human rights law. He
argues that taking the necessity constraint seriously—which is what a human rights
perspective requires us to do—proscribes conduct traditionally thought to be le-
gally (if not morally) unproblematic. For example, he argues that that we must ex-
haust (or show to be ineffective) all non-lethal alternatives to achieving a military
goal, including alternatives that make use of non-lethal or less-lethal means. He ac-
knowledges that giving prominence to human rights in the way he suggests moves us
toward contingent pacifism—a conclusion May urges us to take seriously.

Part II—Responsibility in War

According to reductive individualism about the morality of war, how we weigh
the lives of those killed in war depends largely on what those individuals do and the
degree to which they are responsible for what they do. It is no surprise, then, that
much of the literature on reductive individualism—both for and against—has
 Introduction • xv

focused on the role that personal responsibility plays in one’s liability to be killed.
But reductive individualism has been criticized on the grounds that its precepts
about the relevance of responsibility to liability do violence to our firmest convic-
tions about who is targetable in war. In particular, some have argued that reduc-
tive individualists are forced to abandon the view, established in law and common-
sense morality, that it is morally permissible for combatants to aim fire at enemy
combatants, and morally impermissible for combatants to aim fire at noncomba-
tants. This is because reductive individualists maintain that almost all enemy
combatants fighting in furtherance of an unjust cause have forfeited their right
not to be killed. The problem, though, is that (as Larry May argues in this volume)
it is not clear that combatants fighting for an unjust cause have indeed forfeited
their right not to be killed. After all, among combatants ignorance and coercion
are commonplace; these mitigate their responsibility for killing in an unjust war
(though perhaps duress justifies rather than excuses—see Victor Tadros’s contri-
bution to this volume). To make matters worse, typical combatants contribute
only minimally to the war effort; this is problematic since (it might be thought)
a causal contribution to a wrongdoing must be substantial in order for it to
ground lethal liability. So it seems virtually all wars—including those fought for
a just cause—will violate the constraint of proportionality, since many or most of
the combatants intentionally targeted will be non-liable. This risks a version of
contingent pacifism. In response to this, we might reduce the threshold of liabil-
ity so that merely foreseeably contributing minimally to an unjust cause suffices
to forfeit the right against being killed; that way the vast majority of combatants
who fight in an unjust war will indeed be liable. But this criterion seems to cast
the net too widely: it equally allows many noncombatants to be targeted since
each of us contributes if only minimally and nonculpably to the wars fought by
our government. So it seems reductive individualists are caught in dilemma: they
must either accept a version of contingent pacifism, or admit that many civilians
are morally liable to be killed. Seth Lazar developed this line of argument and
called it the “Responsibility Dilemma.”3 Richard Arneson, in his contribution to
this volume, defends the reductive individualist by arguing in favor of the more
permissive horn of the dilemma. He maintains that morality does not categori-
cally and unconditionally forbid the killing of noncombatants in war. The dis-
tinction between combatants and noncombatants is merely pragmatic, in that
enshrining it in policy and international law tends to diminish unjustified blood-
shed. We should not infer from this fact that there is any deep moral importance
to the distinction. At the level of fundamental moral principle, “no version of the

3. Seth Lazar, “The Responsibility Dilemma for Killing in War: A Review Essay,” Philosophy
and Public Affairs 38 (2010): 180–213.
xvi • The Ethics of War

distinction between combatant and noncombatant plays a substantial role in

­determining who is a permissible object of violent attack.” The Responsibility
Dilemma, he argues, assumes otherwise; once we recognize that the distinction
between combatants and noncombatants is morally operative only at the level of
policy and law and not at the level of fundamental morality, the Responsibility
Dilemma disappears.
Whereas Arneson seeks to defend reductive individualism, François Tanguay-
Renaud challenges it. He contends that if, as some have forcefully argued in the last
decade, a state can qualify as a group agent, we have to consider whether such a state
can be liable to defensive violence qua group agent. In the same way that an individ-
ual can be liable to defensive violence should that individual engage in certain kinds
of wrongful conduct, a state qua group agent might be so liable as well. Tanguay-
Renaud provides reasons for thinking that states can indeed bear corporate liabil-
ity: in the same way that a state egregiously violating the fundamental rights of its
own citizens might have no justified “sovereignty-based” complaint against various
types of external interferences aimed at thwarting those violations, it might also
have no justified sovereignty-based complaint against certain kinds of external in-
terferences aimed at countering the state’s unjust threats to foreign populations.
Tanguay-Renaud argues that the corporate liability of a state can affect the calculus
determining the permissibility of the resort to war. He concedes, however, that
cases in which corporate liability is morally determinative are likely to be rare, partly
because we cannot robustly infer individual liability from corporate liability—and
any violent actions aimed at a state are likely to adversely affect many individuals.
Nonetheless, Tanguay-Renaud’s investigation reveals a constellation of related
issues pertaining to the connection between individual and corporate liability in
the context of warfare (such as whether individual participation in corporate
wrongdoing aggravates their individual liability) that any account of the morality
of war—including those wedded to reductive individualism—must address.
Victor Tadros, like Arneson, is largely supportive of reductive individualism.
His contribution to this volume focuses on exploring how we should morally
evaluate the conduct of soldiers who act under duress, given that reductive indi-
vidualism is true. He notes that for many conscripts, the very act of participating
in a war is done against threats of fines, incarceration, or worse. Legal and moral
scholars have typically assumed that duress does not justify an otherwise wrong-
ful act—rather, it merely excuses it. That is to say, the act committed is still wrong-
ful, but we should not blame its perpetrator for the wrong of committing it; she
is thereby partially or fully excused. Whereas McMahan and Arneson in this
volume discuss the liability of partially excused combatants, Tadros argues that at
least sometimes duress justifies the apparently wrongful act; in such cases the per-
petrator is blameless, not because there are mitigating circumstances diminishing
 Introduction • xvii

her responsibility for what she does, but because what she does is not wrongful in
the first place. This occurs, Tadros argues, in circumstances where the coercer
threatens to inflict a catastrophic wrongful harm (such as death) on the coercee
should the latter refuse to accede to the former’s demand to inflict a much smaller
wrongful harm (such as a severed finger) on an otherwise uninvolved innocent.
Provided that there is nothing the coercee can do to prevent the coercer from ful-
filling her threat, the right thing to do, all things considered, is to accede to the
demand—not because the coercee has a permission to give special weight her own
well-being, but because from an impersonal standpoint a broken finger is prefera-
ble to a lost life. Thus acceding to the coercer’s demand is not simply excused, but
justified. But to show that participating in an unjust war under duress can be justi-
fied, it is necessary to show that killing under duress can be justified. Tadros argues
even if duress does not justify participating in a war that lacks a just cause, it may
sometimes provide a justification for participating in wars that violate the propor-
tionality constraint. Tadros also considers a variety of other cases in which killing
under duress arguably justifies rather than excuses. They have in common that in
each case acceding to the demands is the lesser evil relative to a refusal. But in some
of these cases, it is not simply the lesser evil that justifies acceding. Suppose you are
told to kill on pain not only of your death but also of those whom you are told to
kill. In such a case, they have a reason to authorize you to kill them, since sparing
them is not only worse impersonally considered but is also no better for them. It
might be said, though, that in all these cases, that you are not merely engaged in
killing when you accede to a threat; you are, moreover, acting as the coercer’s agent,
thereby fulfilling his malign intentions, which makes it more difficult to justify
that killing. This worry is especially salient given the hierarchical command struc-
ture of war. Tadros argues, though, that at least sometimes it is permissible for you,
acting as someone’s agent, to carry out an instruction that it was wrong for your
director to issue. He ends by considering one more challenge: that acceding to
threats involves manipulative killing, which is, again, harder to justify that non-
manipulative killing. Tadros concedes that killing in duress is manipulative, but
argues that it does not have other problematic features present in standard cases of
manipulative harming. The upshot is that we should not assume that participating
and thereby killing in an unjust war under duress is always wrongful.

Part III—The Law of War

Revisionists have largely abandoned the legalistic paradigm for the moral evaluation
of war (in which morality plays second fiddle to the law). But this has only deepened
the exchange between the literature on the morality of war and on the law of war, as
evidenced by Altman’s, Haque’s, and Draper’s contribution to this volume.
xviii • The Ethics of War

In “Targeting al Qaeda: Law and Morality in the US ‘War on Terror’, ” Andrew

Altman challenges both the legality and the morality of the US policy of targeted
killings, whether through drone strikes or manned military operations, as part of
the implementation of the Authorization to Use Military Force against al Qaeda
and its affiliates in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Altman ex-
plains that although the law of war has evolved over time, first to take account of
armed conflict not preceded by declarations of war and second to implement
rules governing anti-colonial guerrilla warfare, it has not yet developed a clear,
concrete doctrine governing armed conflict between a state and a non-state party
(such as al Qaeda, or, in more recent days, the Islamic State). Generally speaking,
it would be presumptively unjust to prosecute and punish those who acquire a
license to kill under the law of war. But, Altman argues, the necessary conditions
for the acquisition of such a license have not been met in the war on terror. The
main (legal and moral) argument used by the United States to justify targeted
killings relies on the principle of collective self-defense, which, as usually under-
stood, licenses the use of violence as a necessary means to avert an imminent
threat to the life of innocents. President George W. Bush attempted to modify
the principle of self-defense to permit the use of lethal preemptive measures to
prevent a threat from becoming imminent. But, Altman claims, there is no inter-
national consensus on making the Bush Doctrine a part of international law. In
his first term, President Barack Obama argued that imminence should be just one
of several factors to be weighed in the balance in determining the legality and
morality of self-defensive aggression. Altman argues that this does not represent
the articulation of an adequately determinate (legal or moral) norm. In his second
term, President Obama argued that three conditions must be met in order to jus-
tify lethal self-defensive action to avert a continuing threat: imminence, near cer-
tainty of no noncombatant casualties, and the absence of other governments to
address the threat. Altman argues that such a principle, even if defensible, does
not justify the significant number of drone strikes and other attacks on foreign
soil designed to kill enemy militants and degrade their ability to pose a threat to
United States citizens. This is because the claim that each and every strike, among
the hundreds that have been launched, was designed to avert an imminent threat
of harm to innocents is dubious. Moreover, in the aggregate, these strikes have
imposed a significant risk of serious harm to innocents abroad, notwithstanding
the Obama administration’s claim to the contrary. Altman recognizes that the
principle of self-defense might be replaced by a principle of necessity (such as one
articulated by Seth Lazar4), according to which lethal attacks to avert a threat are

4. Seth Lazar, “Necessity and Non-Combatant Immunity,” Review of International Studies 40

(2014): 53–76.
 Introduction • xix

justified only if, given available evidence, any less harmful response to the threat
would pose an excessively high risk of unjust harm. But even such a principle, argues
Altman, would not justify the targeted killings launched by the United States,
given that the risk of harm to non-US citizens posed by drone strikes and the like
has not been adequately weighed. Altman concludes by calling for the develop-
ment of a principle that fairly and adequately distributes risks to innocents when
the use of force is considered as a means to avert serious danger posed by an aggre-
gation of threats from non-state actors.
From the moral and legal status of drone strikes and military intervention
against non-state actors on foreign territory, we move to another aspect of jus in
bello, namely the moral and legal status of using imprecise weapons (such as bio-
logical agents and cluster munitions) in warfare. In “Killing with Discrimination,”
Adil Ahmad Haque argues that the use of weapons that are more likely to kill
civilians than they are to achieve military objectives is inherently, and not merely
instrumentally, morally impermissible, and that consequently there should be an
absolute legal prohibition on their employment. Haque notes that there is a
moral norm grounding a legal prohibition on inflicting intentional, unnecessary,
or disproportionate harm on civilians. Granted, he argues, most uses of imprecise
weapons violate (one or more aspects of ) this norm. More generally, it might be
possible to justify banning particular sorts of weapons indirectly, on the grounds
that such a ban would be the most effective means of implementing the first
norm. But Haque goes further, claiming that the use of imprecise weapons would
be impermissible even when it does not involve the infliction of intentional, un-
necessary, or disproportionate harm. Using a series of cases, Haque argues that
our intuitive judgments support the thesis that “the probability of killing civilians
makes an independent contribution to the moral status” of attacks. Haque then
grounds this thesis on the more general principle that actions are justified only when
they are supported by undefeated reasons and (epistemically) excused only when they
are supported by undefeated reasons to believe that they are justified. Using this
principle, he argues that the use of imprecise weapons can’t be justified and is in-
excusable when it will more likely than not strike civilians. Haque concludes by
pointing out that the norm against using imprecise weapons clashes with rule-
consequentialism, and particularly with expectabilism—the theory, roughly
stated, that we ought to act in such a way as to produce the outcome with the
highest expected value.
Another important aspect of jus in bello is the distinction between harming
innocents intentionally and harming them only as a foreseen consequence of
achieving a military objective. In the law of war, direct attacks on civilians are
prohibited, while the destruction of military targets that foreseeably harms civil-
ians can be justified if it satisfies requirements of necessity and proportionality. In
xx • The Ethics of War

“Double Effect and the Laws of War,” Kai Draper considers whether this legal
distinction is morally grounded, and concludes that it is not. Instead, Draper
argues, the justification for the legal distinction between direct and indirect at-
tacks on civilians is purely pragmatic: the guiding thought is that the implemen-
tation of a rule prohibiting direct attacks while permitting some indirect attacks
is more likely to reduce the costs of war (including human suffering) than would
the implementation of some alternative rule.5 Using a variety of counterexamples
tied to hypothetical cases, Draper criticizes three deontological principles that
have been thought to ground the direct/indirect distinction: the Principle of
Double Effect (PDE), and two close cousins of that principle, namely, the Means
Principle (MP) and the Restricted Claims Principle (RCP). According to PDE,
it is more difficult to justify harm that is intended than it is to justify harm that is
merely foreseen; according to MP, it is more difficult to justify harm that is the
consequence of using a person to achieve one’s ends than it is to justify harm that
is not the consequence of such use; and according to RCP, it is more difficult to
justify infringing a person’s non-restricting claim than it is to justify infringing a
person’s restricting claim, where a claim against S is restricting if and only if, were
S to respect that claim, S would be unable to achieve some good that S could
achieve if the claimant were not present. Draper’s argumentative strategy can be
put in the form of a dilemma. Either these principles are strongly discriminating
(in the sense that actions favored by the principle are much easier to justify than
actions disfavored by the principle) or they are only weakly discriminating: if
the former, then although they might serve as adequate grounds for the direct/
indirect distinction, the principles are indefensible; if the latter, then although
the principles might be defensible, they cannot serve as adequate grounds for the
direct/indirect distinction.

Part IV—War’s Beginning and Ending

Reductive individualism about war has implications for the conditions under
which we can permissibly resort to war, as well as the conditions under which we
are obligated to end wars. In addition, the focus on individuals—in combination
with the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—has also cast into glaring
relief the trauma that soldiers suffer on their return from war. These are the issues
on which the last three contributors focus.

5. Instead of conceptualizing the disagreement here as one between those who advocate a
moral justification and those who advocate a pragmatic justification for a rule of war, one might
conceptualize it as a disagreement, within the moral realm, between a deontological and a rule-
consequentialist approach to justifying the rule.
 Introduction • xxi

Relatively few, perhaps no, societies in the world today came into existence as
the product of a social compact. Rather, they exist as the outcome of conquest or
usurpation, and are maintained in existence by institutional mechanisms that are
not directly responsive to the will of the governed. When people chafe under
unjust rule, it becomes important to determine whether, and if so, when, it is ever
permissible for them to use (possibly lethal) violence in defense of their rights. In
“Beyond the Paradigm of Self-Defense? On Revolutionary Violence,” Mattias
Iser explores whether the self-defense paradigm for justifying harm in war can
provide insight into the necessary and sufficient conditions for the moral permis-
sibility of revolutionary violence, and finds the model wanting. So, like May and
Tanguay-Renaud (in this volume), Iser poses a challenge to the reductive individ-
ualist. Some have argued that the principles of self-defense against a culpable at-
tacker do not sanction the use of lethal force as a means of protecting peripheral
rights, including property rights and political rights. Extrapolation then yields
the result that revolutionary violence designed to protect or establish political
rights is justified only as a necessary and proportionate means of preventing such
egregious wrongs as mass murder or enslavement. Iser argues that the self-defense
paradigm ignores both the instrumental and expressive aspects of the public ac-
knowledgment of rights: instrumentally, such acknowledgment secures impor-
tant human goods for the right-holders; expressively, the same acknowledgment
codifies the general understanding of what those with moral status can reasona-
bly demand of others. In a severely unjust political system, Iser claims, both the
instrumental and the expressive dimensions of public rights-acknowledgment are
lacking. By contrast, an attack that violates a person’s rights within a largely just
political order does not have such instrumental or expressive features: the victim
(should she survive an attack) retains her rights and has not been deprived of
moral status. Ultimately, Iser argues, revolutionary violence is “permissible as a
last resort in one’s struggle against institutions which are guilty of an unnecessary
and grave denial of persons’ equal status.” At the same time, Iser is mindful of the
inherent dangers of violence, no matter the end that it is used to promote. For
violence fed by indignation can lead to the demonization of opponents; indigna-
tion itself conduces to a sense of moral and epistemological superiority, which
can lead to arbitrary and hence unjust decisions; and the use of violence itself has
a hedonistic dimension that can perpetuate a “culture of violence.” And all of
these natural outgrowths of indignation-fed violence have a tendency to thwart
post-revolutionary efforts at peace and reconciliation.
The end of all war is some sort of stable peace. In “War’s Endings and the
Structure of Just War Theory,” Seth Lazar claims that too much of Just War theory
has been focused on articulating principles governing resort to war (jus ad bellum)
and the prosecution of war (jus in bello). Attuned to this concern, some theorists
xxii • The Ethics of War

have sought to develop principles governing the transition from war to peace (jus
ex bello) and war’s aftermath (  jus post bellum). However, Lazar argues, these
Latinate categories should serve as no more than heuristic devices for policy-mak-
ing: from the theoretical point of view, their use in carving up the moral territory
relevant to the assessment of war and its constituent activities conduces to con-
ceptual confusion rather than to analytical clarity. As a replacement for categoriz-
ing moral principles governing war in terms of the stages from peace to war and
from war to peace, Lazar offers us two principles of categorization: (1) a distinc-
tion between ethical principles that apply to different levels of analysis, those for
decisions governing the war as a whole (Command Ethics) and those for decisions
governing the actions and operations that constitute war (Combatant Ethics);
and (2) a distinction between positive reasons for action and negative constraints
on action. Importantly, Lazar argues that neither Command Ethics nor the ethics
of positive reasons for action reduces to the principles of jus ad bellum, and that
neither Combatant Ethics nor the ethics of negative constraints on action re-
duces to the principles of jus in bello. And when we realize that the use of Latinate
categories has been hampering the conceptual elucidation of the moral laws of
war, we also come to realize that traditional Just War theory has given short shrift
to the principles governing negotiation at every stage of war. These principles
(namely, that all negotiation should be entered into in good faith, that negotia-
tors should not be harmed, that negotiation should not issue in the establishment
of new rights, and that negotiated settlements should be complied with), argues
Lazar, are founded on trust, vulnerability, and the natural law principle that right
cannot arise out of injustice. Lazar’s hope, in the end, is that Just War theory will
turn away from its roots in heuristic categories and toward new, heuristically un-
constrained moral principles at various levels of analysis governing all war-related
decisions.
When wars end and peace breaks out, normal life becomes possible, at least
for those who have not been traumatized or who have not experienced the kind
of suffering that unspeakable violence causes. But when soldiers come home,
often, at least in volunteer armies, after multiple tours of duty, they face the
mental and physical aftereffects of extreme stress. Although they may have been
the agents of harm, they too have suffered, and need to heal. In “Moral Recovery
After War: The Role of Hope,” Nancy Sherman explores the role of hope in moral
and psychological repair after war has ended. Following Adrienne Martin,
Sherman distinguishes between two kinds of hope: normative and non-normative.
Non-normative hope is hope for a good outcome, while normative hope is a kind
of “aspiring attitude with regard to worthwhile ends we set for ourselves or
others.” As Sherman explains, non-normative hope, as in the case of a wounded
veteran who has been told by medical personnel that it is unlikely that he will ever
 Introduction • xxiii

walk again, can be a galvanizing form of cognitive resolve or agential investment.

Normative hope in others, the hope of a veteran in those who support her, and
the hope of her support group in her, can play an important role in successful re-
integration. And finally, normative hope in oneself, grounded in facts about one’s
own abilities and character traits, can help heal the wounds of survivor guilt and
feelings of failure and inadequacy that stem from costly battlefield errors. In hope
lies the possibility of happiness.
T h e Et h i c s o f W a r
I Proportionality in War
Another random document with
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“I think so,” Sylvia answered, smiling quietly and mysteriously.
Gay took her chair. “I always thought so!” she said, bravely. “Has it
been settled—long?”
“It isn’t settled now!” Sylvia responded, in a little tone of merry
warning and alarm. “But I have promised”—and her smile was that of
the consciously beloved and courted woman—“I have promised to
think about it!”
When David came down with the suitcases a few minutes later
Sylvia was alone. Gay did not come in until just before dinner, and
then she seemed quiet and grave. David suspected that Sylvia’s
departure and the ending of the happy holidays were depressing her,
but two or three times, catching her serious glance fixed upon
himself during the evening, he was puzzled by something more
serious than this, something almost reproachful, almost accusing.
However, he forgot it in the confusion of the early start the next
morning, and when he returned to Wastewater late that evening,
Gay seemed quite herself. David stayed on comfortably from day to
day, and the three settled to a pleasant, if monotonous and quiet,
life.
Gay worked busily at her music and with her books all morning and
now and then had the additional interest of a postcard from one of
the Montallens, or one of Frank du Spain’s singularly undeveloped
and youthful letters to answer. David was painting a study of the old
sheds and fences on the western side of the house, buried in a
heavy snow, with snow-laden trees bowed about them, and as a
fresh blizzard came along early in the year, and the first study was
extremely successful, he delayed to make a second.
In the cold afternoons he and Gay usually went for long walks,
talking hard all the way, and David found it as often astonishingly
stimulating to get her views of men and affairs and books as it was
pleasant to guide her or influence her. Sometimes, bundled to the
ears, she would rush out to the old cow yard to stand behind him as
he painted, and what she said of his work, he thought, was always
worth hearing. He was to have an exhibition in New York for a week
in the early spring, and it was at Gay’s suggestion that he did some
small water colours for it.
“There!” she said. “Now those things that you call ‘notes’—those are
perfectly delightful! And many a person who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—
spend several hundred dollars for a picture would love one of those.”
“Lots of fellows either throw them out as rubbish or give them away,”
David protested.
“Yes, but yours are so lovely, David! I can’t think that most men
would make such nice ones. This little one—I’ll tell you what it’s like,”
said Gay, with a brightening face, “It’s like a little Diziani in the
Louvre!”
These little touches of familiarity with the field so infinitely interesting
to him were delightful to David. He would spend whole winter
afternoons going over his European catalogues with her and
identifying picture after picture. Gay made him mark the “notes” at a
hundred dollars each.
“Catalogue them separately under ‘notes,’” she suggested one
morning, “and then let’s give each one of them a name.” And
following some line of thought she presently added dreamily, “David,
does the money part matter so tremendously to you?”
“Does—God bless the child!” answered David, with a glance toward
the sketches he was assorting in the big upstairs room in which he
worked at Wastewater. “Of course it does!”
Gay, who had been making some little sketches herself on a large
bare block with a very sharp pencil, laughed at his tone. Outside a
January rain was sleeting roughly against the windows, the
casements rattled. A small oil stove was burning in the cool gray
daylight of the room, the air was faintly scented with the odour of
kerosene and hot metal.
“Why, what would you do if you had more money?” Gay asked.
“Oh, Lord——!” David began. “Well, I’d take a studio near Rucker’s,”
he began. “At least, I might. And probably about once in every three
years I’d go across and study in Europe. I’d buy one of Neil Boone’s
pictures to-morrow,” went on David, warming suddenly, “and I’d buy
one every three months, to keep the poor fellow from committing
suicide before people begin to find out what a marvel he is.”
“Is he so clever, David?”
“Oh——” David said, briefly, almost impatiently. “The uses of
adversity are sweet, Gay,” he added, working busily with an eraser
on a smudged pencil sketch, “but Boone has had a little too much of
a good thing! He idolized his wife, and she died, and I think he feels
that it might have been different if she’d had less want and care.
He’s mad about his kid, and a well-to-do sister has him in
Washington. Boone can’t afford to keep him.”
“I must say that you don’t seem to want money so much for
yourself,” said Gay, laughing. “You might get a studio, and you might
go abroad. I’ll tell you what I think,” finished Gay, “you’d like money
principally because, when a man’s pictures sell, it’s proof that he is
succeeding in his profession!”
“Well, I shouldn’t wonder if you’re right, Gay,” David said, surprised
at the shrewdness of the analysis.
“Because, if you and Sylvia——” the girl was beginning, animatedly.
She stopped. Her face was crimson. “Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to
know that,” she stammered, smiling.
“Not much to know,” David said, also a little red. “It—it’s indefinite
until Sylvia chooses to have it definite,” he added. And then, with
what was suddenly a rough, almost an angry manner, for David, he
went on: “But what were you going to say, Gay? Did you mean that if
Sylvia and I were married I would be rich?”
“Nothing quite so crude, David!” she answered, readily, with an
apologetic smile. “I was contrasting the pleasure you would get from
a—well, from a really sensational success with your exhibition,” Gay
went on, feeling for words, “to the pleasure any amount of money
just put into your hand would give you! You and Sylvia can do
anything you like, I suppose, but I know it won’t make you feel like
working any less!”
It was said with her innocent, sisterly smile, and with her usual
unspoiled earnest interest, but David felt oddly uncomfortable
whenever he thought of it throughout the day. A dozen times he
wondered exactly what the situation would be if Sylvia were in—well,
in Gay’s position, looking to her husband for everything.
He could not be more fond of her, he was glad to think. Indeed,
David thought, Sylvia’s character would probably come out in far
finer colours under these circumstances than it was apt to do as it
was. To receive all that Sylvia was to receive upon coming of age, to
be so clever, so beautiful, and so admired, was sure to prove more
or less upsetting. As for the rest, he wished heartily that it had been
his good fortune to fall in love with a woman who had not a penny!
Not that Sylvia would be anything but charming in her attitude to his
income and her own. She would glide over any conceivable
awkwardness with her own native fineness. She would ask—he
knew exactly how prettily—“David, should I buy a new fur coat, do
you think? David, would another maid be an awful extravagance?”
There would never be a word or a hint to remind him that after all the
safety-deposit box, and the check books, and indeed the very roof
over their heads, were hers.
It was not that that he feared. But he did fear her quite natural
opinion that money was extremely important. It was important to her.
It was important to almost everyone. But it was not important to
David.
If their friends would think him fortunate in winning so clever and
beautiful and charming a wife, well and good. But he knew that they
would go on to the consideration of her wealth, if indeed many of
them did not actually commence there. “Pretty comfortable for him,
she has scads of money!” the world would say, and Sylvia—
unfortunately!—could hardly help having her own convictions upon
that score, too.
Of course dear old David would love to be rich! Sylvia would think.
Here he had been struggling along on a few thousands a year,
making no complaints, happy in his work, travelling, with a keenly
anxious eye on his checkbook, spending nothing on clothes, giving
one odd and curious little presents that yet were so pitifully
inexpensive, anxious about those exhibitions of canvases that as yet
did not sell very fast—what could be more delightful than sudden
riches to David? To buy him a big car, a big fur coat, to entertain their
friends at the finest hotels, to travel, to pick up odd books and
canvases, to have smart luggage, a beautiful home—who wouldn’t
like such a change?
Well, David knew himself that he would not. He realized perfectly
that one of the difficulties of his early married life would be to
persuade his rich young wife that he really preferred his old
corduroys to paint in, that he really liked little restaurants, that he
hated big hotels.
Far happier for him if Gay, for example, had been the heiress. Then
he and Sylvia would have been the poor relations, would have had
the tramping, the little studio in Keyport, the frugal trips abroad so full
of adventures and excitements, and always the beloved old family
homestead to turn to for holidays and special occasions. That would
be a realler sort of living than he was apt to experience with all
Sylvia’s charming responsibilities and exaction upon his shoulders.
There would be a distinct loss of something free and personal,
something far higher and purer and more wonderful than even old
Uncle Roger’s money, in David’s marriage. And he knew now that he
could never expect Sylvia to see that loss. To Sylvia any one who
could be rich, and who saw even the tiniest scrap of advantage
anywhere in remaining poor, was stupid to the point of annoyance.
Well, it would all work out somehow, David thought philosophically,
thinking these things seriously upon a certain bitter night late in
January. A heavy storm was brewing again, for the winter was
unusually severe, but he had resolved to turn his back upon it; he
must get down into the city and arrange matters for the April
exhibition. He would leave Wastewater the next day, after almost six
weeks in which the days had seemed to fly by.
It was almost midnight now; Gay, who had seemed out of spirits to-
night, had gone upstairs early, and Aunt Flora had followed her an
hour ago. But David sat on by the fire, not so much reading the book
he held in his hand, as musing, and occasionally leaning forward to
stir the last of the coals. The passage to bed was a long and chilly
one, the halls were cold, his room would be cold; he felt a deep, lazy
disinclination to stir.

Suddenly and hideously in the darkness and night he heard a wild

scream, followed by other screams, all piercing, high—the shrieks of
a woman in mortal terror. David, with a quick exclamation, started to
his feet, ran to the door, opened it and shouted into the blackness of
the hall, snatched the lamp from the centre table, and, always
shouting, ran up toward the evident source of the confusion; which
was in the direction of his room and Gay’s, on the floor above.
It had all taken place so quickly and was so unspeakably horrifying
and alarming that David had no time to think of his own emotions
until he reached the upper hall and rushed into Gay’s room. He set
the light on a table, and caught the girl, who was blundering blindly
about the doorway, in his arms.
“Gay—for God’s sake—what is it!” he said, drawing her into the hall,
holding her tight, and looking beyond her into the dimness of the
room.
“Oh, David—David!” she sobbed, clinging to him. “Oh, David, it’s that
old woman again! She’s in my room—I saw her! She had a candle in
her hand—I tell you I saw her!”
“You had a dream, dear!” David said, tenderly. “She must have had a
bad dream!” David explained to Flora, who came upstairs carrying a
candle, and with a ghastly face, and to Hedda and Trude, who
appeared from another direction, frightened and pale.
“Oh, no—no—no! I didn’t dream it!” Gabrielle said, still gasping and
clinging tight to David, but in a somewhat quieter tone. “No, I didn’t
dream it! She—I had just put out the light and she—she came into
my room——”
“Now, don’t get excited, dear,” David interrupted the rising tone
reassuringly. “We’re all here, and she can’t hurt you! What did you
think you saw?”
“She came to my door,” Gabrielle whispered, with a heaving breast
and a dry throat. “She was—she was——” Her voice rose on a shrill
note of terror in spite of herself, and she looked into David’s eyes
with a pathetic childish effort to control herself. “She was—smiling at
me!” Gabrielle whispered.
David felt his own flesh creep; it was Flora’s voice that said
somewhat harshly:
“Come down to Sylvia’s room for the rest of the night, Gabrielle.”
They were all in the doorway of Gabrielle’s room; the lamp that
David had carried upstairs he had placed just within it, in a sort of
alcove. Now he picked up the light and said reassuringly:
“Look here, dear, nobody’s gone out of the hall! We’ll go all over your
room, and open the wardrobes, and look under the bed——”
He had gotten so far, turning courageously into the apartment, when
he stopped, and Gabrielle screamed again. For the light now shone
upon the girl’s tumbled bed, her desk, her bureau, her bookshelves.
And standing close to the latter, with bright mad eyes fixed upon
them all, and something of the hunted look of a cornered yet
unfrightened animal, was a small, bent old woman, with gray hair
straggling out upon the gray shawl she wore over her shoulders, and
an extinguished candle in the stick she carried in her hands.
David’s heart came into his mouth with shock; there was an uncanny
and fearful quality about such an apparition in the quiet winter night
and in the shadowy old house. Flora, behind him, made a sound of
despair, and Hedda and Trude moaned together. Afterward, it
seemed to him odd that it was Gabrielle who spoke.
The girl was still shaken badly, but the lights and the voices had
instantly dissipated the horrifying mystery and fear, and although
Gay was pale and spoke with a somewhat dry throat, it was steadily
enough, it was even with a pathetic sort of reassurance in her voice,
and a trembling eagerness to quiet the strange visitor, to restore the
fantastic unnaturalness of the scene to something like the normal.
“You—you frightened me so!” she said to the little old woman, gently,
touching her on the arm, even trying to draw about the shaking little
old figure the big slipping gray shawl. “You—she didn’t mean any
harm, David,” Gay said, with her breath coming easier every second.
“She—I think she’s a little——” A significant lifting of Gay’s eyebrows
finished the sentence. “Margret knows her—Aunt Flora knows who
she is!” she added, appealingly.
“I wanted to see you, dear, and Flora wouldn’t let me!” the old
woman said, tearfully and childishly, catching Gay’s hands and
beginning to mumble kisses over them.
David made a sudden exclamation.
“Is it—I’ve not seen her for twenty years!” he said, with a puzzled
look at his aunt, about whose shaking form he immediately put a
bracing arm. “Isn’t it your mother, Aunt Flora? Is it Aunt John? I
thought she was dead.”
“Yes—just help me take her to her room, David,” Flora said,
feverishly and blindly. “Just—take her arm, Hedda. We’ll get her all
comfortable, and then I’ll explain. I’ll explain to you and Gabrielle—
you needn’t be afraid of this happening again—I’ll—I’ll—— Let Trude
take her, Gabrielle.”
“But she doesn’t want to go, do you, dear?” Gay asked, pitifully. And
David thought her youth and beauty, the hanging rope of glorious
tawny hair, the slim figure outlined in her plain little embroidered
nightgown, and the kimono she had caught up, contrasted to that
shaking old creature’s feebleness and wildness, were the most
extraordinary things he had ever seen in his life. But then the whole
thing was like a crazy dream.
“But she must go,” Flora reiterated, firmly, her voice shaking and raw,
her face streaked with green lines across its pallor.
“Aunt John,” David pleaded, gently, taking an elbow that controlled a
thin old yellow hand like a hanging bird’s claw. For he remembered
the days when “Aunt John” had kept house for them all, when Flora
was a brisk young woman, and Lily only a timid, romantic girl, when
his own mother was mistress of Wastewater, and poor Tom and
himself the idolized small boys of the family.
“What are you calling me ‘Aunt John’ for, David Fleming?” said the
old woman, shrilly and suddenly. “Mamma died years and years ago,
didn’t she, Flora? I’m your Aunt Lily, and I came down to see my
girl!”
Hedda and Trude exclaimed together; but David sensed instantly
that they were not surprised. Flora choked, caught blindly at the back
of a chair, and stood staring; David, in his quick glance, saw that her
lips were moving. But she made no sound.
Then it was at Gabrielle that they all looked; Gabrielle, who stood tall
and young and ashen in the uncertain lamplight, with her
magnificent, pathetically widened eyes, like shadowy gray star
sapphires, moving first to Flora’s face, and then to David’s, and then
back to the little woman beside her, whose hand, or claw, she still
held in her own.
David saw her breast rise and fall suddenly, but there was in her
bearing no sign that she was conscious of his presence, or that of
the maids or Flora. She bent down toward the forlorn little mowing
and mumbling creature, looking into the wandering eyes.
“I’m sorry they wouldn’t let you see me!” Gay said, gently, in just the
essence of her own beautiful voice. To David every syllable seemed
to throb and flower like a falling star in the unearthly silence of the
room. Outside a winter wind whined, branches creaked, the ivy at
Gay’s window crackled as a load of snow slipped from its dry twigs;
they could hear the distant muffled sound of the cold sea, tumbling
and booming among the rocks.
The lamp flared up in a sudden draught, burned steadily again.
Great shadows marched and wheeled on the ceiling. The two maids
stared with dilated eyes. Flora caught at David with fierce fingers.
“Don’t—don’t let her talk! She’s not responsible, David! I tell you it’s
all a mistake—no harm done—I won’t have Gabrielle worried——”
“Don’t worry about me, Aunt Flora!” Gay’s voice said. And again it
sounded strange to David; it had a sad and poignant sweetness that
seemed to have more in common with the icy night, and the
streaming winter moonlight, and the cold sea, than with this troubled
little human group. “I’m glad to know. I never would have been afraid
of you if I had known,” Gay said, to the little bent old woman. “I won’t
be frightened again. You can—you can see me as much as you like.
If you’re Lily, I’m—I’m your little girl, you know—Mother.”
 CHAPTER X
The night that followed was one of the strange, abnormal times that
seemed—David thought more than once—so peculiarly appropriate,
so peculiarly in tone with the atmosphere of Wastewater; with the
empty, dusky, decaying rooms, with the shadowy mirrors clouded
with mould, with the memories, the tragedies, the ghosts and echoes
that on a bitter winter night seemed to throng the old place.
Outside there was a sharp frost, and when the massed silent snow
slipped from the branches of the old elms, an occasional crack like a
pistol shot sounded through the night. A cold bright moon moved
over the packed snow, and the sea swelled with booming, sullen
rushes over the rocks. Clocks seemed, to David, to stand still; to
mark strange hours.
When Gabrielle had put her young arm about the shrinking, withered
form of the harmless old feeble-minded woman that David did now
indeed recognize as Aunt Lily, for some reason he had felt his throat
thick, and his eyes blind with tears. The girl was so young, she had
been so full of hope and gaiety and high spirits during the happy
holidays and the weeks that followed; she had tramped beside him
chattering like a sturdy little sister, belted into a big coat, her eager
feet stamping and dancing on the snow, her cheeks glowing with the
tingle of the pure cold air. They had had some contented rainy
mornings together, in the bare upstairs room he called his studio,
and they had sometimes played a sort of double solitaire in the
evenings, Gay as anxiously excited as a child, and saying “Oh,
fudge!” when the cards fell wrong, in a little baffled, furious tone that
always made him laugh. He and she had thought the weak little
mother and the worthless, wandering father long ago vanished from
her problem; the child had quite a sufficient problem left, as it was!
And she had faced it so bravely, faced it cheerfully even with the
constant reminder of Sylvia’s contrasted good fortune, Sylvia’s
wealth, Sylvia’s impeccable parentage, right before her vision.
Now, suddenly, while her heart was thumping with the shock and
terror of awakening from sleep to find this dreadful apparition in her
room, she had had to accept this same mowing, gibbering, weeping
old woman as her mother. And David loved her that she had not
hesitated, where for sheer bewilderment he knew he might have
hesitated.
She had not glanced at Aunt Flora, who was leaning sick and silent
against a chair, nor at the cowed and white-faced old Belgian
servants, nor at him. Quite simply she had put her arm about poor
Aunt Lily, touched her young lips to the yellowed old forehead where
the forlorn wisps of grayish hair hung down, and then turned, steady-
eyed and ashen-cheeked but quite composed, to say quietly:
“Where does she sleep, Aunt Flora? In that room where I saw the
light? I’ll go up with her—she’s shuddering with cold, she’ll be ill. I’ll
—you’ll go with me, won’t you, Margret? We’ll get her to bed.”
For Margret, also pale, in a gray wrapper, and looking anxiously from
one to the other as if to read in their faces what had occurred, had
joined the group from some rear doorway.
“No, that was partly it, Gabrielle,” Flora forced herself to say, with
chattering teeth. “She hasn’t been so bad until lately. And after you
met her, that day, we moved her into the back of the house—
someone was always supposed to be near her. You shouldn’t have
gotten out of bed and come through the halls in your bare feet, Lily!”
Flora mildly reproached her sister. Lily clung stubbornly to Gabrielle’s
arm, but they were all moving slowly in the direction of the rooms
Flora had mentioned now, through the bitter darkness of the halls.
The lamp, carried by David, sent their shadows wheeling about the
angles and corners ahead of them, doors banged, shutters creaked,
and when Lily’s chattering whisper of complacency and exulting
triumph was silent, they could hear Hedda and Trude telling Margret
that the sick lady had wandered into Miss Gabrielle’s rooms in the
night and frightened her.
Lily was really almost sick by the time they reached the homely,
comfortable rooms, which, Gabrielle noted, were well furnished, and
warmed by a still-glowing stove. David built up the fire while they put
the poor little chattering creature to bed, and Gabrielle, without
seeming to be even now conscious of anybody’s presence but that
of her mother, caught up an old ivory-backed brush and massed the
straying gray hair into order, pinning it, David noted pitifully, with the
pins that had held back from her face her own thick, rich braids.
There was a tenderness, an absorbed, gentle, and childish pity
about her whole attitude the while she did so that made his throat
thicken again.
Meanwhile Margret and Hedda, evidently well used to this ministry
and moving about the room with an air of being entirely at home
there, had supplied Lily with hot-water bottles and some sort of milky
hot drink which Lily fretfully complained was bitter.
“It has her sleeping stuff in it,” Margret explained, in an aside. Lily
smiled knowingly at Gabrielle.
“They wouldn’t mind poisoning me a bit, dearie,” she said, in a loud
whisper. “At Crosswicks they used always be trying to poison us.”
However, she took the drink, when Gabrielle held the glass, in short
sips, meanwhile patting the girl’s hand, beaming, and occasionally,
with increasing drowsiness, recalling old memories.
“Gabrielle had a little gray coat and a hat with gray fur on it—beaver,
it was real beaver—it looked so good with her golden curls!” she said
once, complacently. “Roger said she looked like a squirrel. Where is
Roger, Flora? Why don’t he come up some night, so’s we could all
play euchre, like we use’ to?”
And at another time, some moments later, she added, in a sweet and
natural voice: “I was looking all over the place for Tom. He gets my
nasturtium seeds and eats them! But I don’t know where all this
snow’s come from. It was real sunny yesterday when I put them out,
and Roger and Will were in swimming!”
All this time Flora had sat in an armchair by the stove, with one hard,
veiny hand tight over her eyes. Margret lessened the lights, Lily
began to sink into sleep, and Gabrielle sat timidly down near her, still
holding her hand. The servants slipped away, but still Flora did not
stir.
When Lily was so soundly off that their voices did not disturb her,
David touched Gabrielle’s arm, and stiff, and looking a little
bewildered, she rose noiselessly to her feet. Flora started up, pale,
and with a bitten under lip and a look of some deep fright in her
eyes, and they quietly left the room, David carrying the lamp as
before.
“And now,” he said, cheerfully, when they were back in the hall
outside of Gabrielle’s room, “there’s no good worrying ourselves
about all this to-night! You look exhausted, Aunt Flora, and Gay here
has had enough. Jump into bed, Gay, it’s after two, and get off to
sleep. I’ll leave my door open and you leave yours—or if you like I’ll
wheel this couch up against your door and sleep on it myself.”
“No, David, thank you; I’m not afraid now,” the girl said, quietly and
seriously, and David knew that there were more than vague
unnamed terrors to occupy her thoughts now. “I’ll do splendidly, and
to-morrow we’ll talk. I only hope,” she added slowly, “my mother will
not be ill, although”—and there was infinite sadness in her voice
—“perhaps I shouldn’t even hope that, for her! Good-night, Aunt
Flora.”
And with a sudden impulse that seemed to David infinitely fine and
sweet, she stooped and kissed her aunt’s cheek before she turned to
her own door.
“Good-night, Gay dear, don’t worry!” David said, tenderly. And with a
quick emotion as natural as hers had been, he kissed her forehead
as a brother might have done. Flora had already gone, and Gay
smiled at him pathetically as she shut her door.
She would not think to-night, the girl told herself restlessly. But there
was nothing for it but thought. She was bitterly cold, and shuddered
as she snuggled into the covers, and stared out with persistently
wakeful eyes at the blackness of the big room. Gay heard creaks,
crackling, the lisp of falling blots of snow, the detonations of
contracting furniture in distant closed rooms, the reports of breaking
branches outside. And always there was the cold, regular pulse of
the sea.
The girl looked at her watch; twenty minutes of three, and she
seemed to have been tossing here for hours. Her brain seethed;
faces, voices, came and went, problems for the future, speculations
as to the past. She was deathly cold; she wondered if there were any
fuel at her cold fireplace, lighted the candle, and investigated. None.
“Well, these windows at least can be closed!” Gay decided, with
chattering teeth. The night struck through her thin nightgown like a
wall of ice as she struggled with the heavy blinds. Gabrielle
experienced a weary and desperate sensation of discouragement;
the horrible night would never end, her thoughts would never
straighten themselves out into peace and quiet again, there would
never be sunlight, warmth, safety in the world!
Looking down, however, toward the kitchen wing, she saw that a
heartening red light was striking through the shutters, and
immediately she caught up her wrapper and went slippered and
shuddering down the long stairs and passages that led to the
kitchen.
She opened the door upon heartening lamplight and firelight;
Margret, Trude, and Hedda were in comfortable talk beside the
stove, and a boiling coffee-pot sent a delicious fragrance into the
dark old room.
“Margret,” Gay began, piteously, with a suddenly childish feeling of
tears in her voice. “I can’t sleep—I’ve been lying awake——”
And immediately she was on her knees beside Margret, and had her
bright head buried in the old servant’s lap, and Margret’s hand was
stroking her hair.
Gay, after the first tears, did not cry. But as the blessed heat and light
seemed to penetrate to the centre of her chilled being, and as the old
servant’s hands gently stroked her hair, she felt as if she could kneel
here for ever, not facing anything, not thinking, just warm again and
among human voices once more.
Margret’s words, if they were words, were indistinguishable; neither
Hedda nor Trude spoke at all. The Belgian women looked on with
their faded old eyes red with sympathy. Trude put a smoking cup of
coffee, mixed in the French fashion, as Gay liked it, on the table, and
Hedda turned a fresh piece of graham toast on the range, and
Margret coaxed the girl to dispose of the hot drink before there was
any talk.
Afterward, when Gay had dried her eyes upon a towel brought by the
sympathetic Hedda, and rolled herself tight in her wrapper, and had
her feet comfortably extended toward the range, Margret said:
“You mustn’t feel angry at us, Miss Gabrielle. It was to spare you, I’m
sure, that Miss Flora has kept this secret all these years.”
“I’m not angry——” Gabrielle began, and stopped abruptly, biting her
lip, and turned her eyes, brimming again, toward the glow of the
range.
“I know, it seems awful hard, but this has always been a bitter thing
to Miss Flora, and she has taken her own way about it,” Margret
said, kindly, and there was silence again. “You know your mamma,”
the old woman began again, presently, and Gay’s eyes, startled,
fixed themselves for a moment upon Margret’s face, as if the girl
found the term strange. “Your mamma made a silly marriage, dear,”
Margret went on, “and Miss Flora felt very badly about it. Your
mother was such a pretty, gentle girl, too,” she added. “I’d see her
gathering flowers, or maybe hear her singing at the piano, when I’d
come up here to Wastewater to help them out with sickness, or
company, or whatever it was. Very pretty, Miss Lily was. There was
quite a family then. Miss Flora had married Mr. Will Fleming, and
Sylvia was just a little thing, as dark as a gipsy. And of course that
was just the time that poor Mr. Roger’s wife was dying of some
miserable growth she’d had for years, and it was when Tom run
away. Mrs. Roger Fleming had a big couch on the porch in summer,
and she’d be laying there, and perhaps Mr. Roger reading to her, or
talking about some cure; they were for ever trying new cures and
new doctors! And Miss Flora would have Sylvia out there, with her
big rag doll—Sylvia’s father was never much of a success, they used
to say, he was usually away somewhere getting a new job of some
sort,” Margret added, reminiscently.
“Somehow I never think of Aunt Flora as having a husband,” Gay
said, in a sombre, tear-thickened voice. “Her being Sylvia’s mother,
and all that, seems natural enough. But to think of her as Mrs. Will
Fleming always is so queer.”
“I don’t know that she ever loved Mr. Will,” Margret said, with a
glance behind her at Hedda, who was straightening the kitchen as
composedly and indifferently as if the hour had been four o’clock in
the afternoon instead of the morning. Hedda was paying no attention
and Margret went on, with all an old servant’s significance: “It was
well known that Miss Flora loved Roger Fleming all her life, and she
was engaged to him after his first wife, that was David’s and Tom’s
mother, died.”
“Yes, I know,” Gabrielle said, with a long sigh. She had heard all this
before.
“When Roger Fleming married the second time, she took his brother
Will,” Margret resumed, “and for a while they had a little apartment in
Boston, and he was in a bank there, but he died when Miss Sylvia
was only three and Miss Flora was here more than she ever was
there, anyway; Miss Lily stayed here all the time. And then, that
terrible summer when little Tom ran away, if Miss Lily didn’t fall in
love with a man nobody knew anything about——”
There was an old-fashioned little peasant bench beside the stove,
brought from across the seas when Hedda and Trude had come to
America twenty-five years before, and Gabrielle was on this low seat
now, with her arms across Margret’s knees. She looked up into
Margret’s face wistfully as she said:
“But there was nothing against my father? Wasn’t he just a young
man who was staying in Crowchester for a while?”
“He had some sort of agency,” Margret said. “No, dear, for all we
ever knew he was a good enough man. But he was no husband for
Miss Lily, who was Mr. Roger Fleming’s cousin, and had lived here at
Wastewater all her life. And more than that, she married him secretly,
and that’s always a bad thing!” the old woman added, impressively.
“Yes, I know!” Gabrielle murmured, with impatience and pain in her
voice. “But I don’t see anything so terrible in it!” she finished, looking
back at the fire again and half to herself.
“Well, it was such a bad time, when they were all so upset,” Margret
argued. “Miss Flora felt something terrible,” she added, simply,
“when she knew that Miss Lily—her sister that she’d always guarded
and loved so dearly—was secretly married and going to have a
baby. I don’t know that she told Mrs. Roger Fleming, who was so
little and so delicate, anything about it, but I know she talked it over
with Mr. Roger, for he came to me—so kindly! he was a wonderful
man for being kind-hearted—and told me that Miss Lily was going
into Boston to live in Miss Flora’s little apartment for a little while,
while they tried to find this man, Charpentier——”
“That was my father,” Gay interpolated.
“That was your father, dear. I went to Boston with your mother and
got her nicely settled,” Margret resumed. “She was very quiet then,
and pleased with the little things she was making for the baby, but it
was only a few months later—when Mr. Roger was off hunting little
Tom, and Mrs. Roger dying, with this doctor or that quack or dear
knows what always in the house here—that poor Miss Lily got
typhoid fever.”
“Before I was born!” Gay had heard of the typhoid fever, but had
never quite placed it in the succession of events before.
“Just after you were born. Poor Miss Flora was pulled every which
way,” said Margret. “She’d rush into Boston to see Miss Lily, and
she’d rush back here, afraid Mrs. Roger had died while she was
gone. She didn’t dare risk the infection for Miss Sylvia, and so she
sent for me, and I took Miss Sylvia into the rooms where poor Miss
Lily is now, and Miss Sylvia hardly saw her mother for weeks. Miss
Flora went up to see her sister—that was your mother—every week,
and while she did that she’d never risk infection for little Sylvia.
“Well, then poor little Mrs. Roger died—very sudden, at the end.
Miss Lily was convalescent then, but weak as a rag, and she and
you came down here to Wastewater—and you were the most
beautiful child I ever laid my eyes on!” Margret broke off to say,
seriously.
Gabrielle, red-eyed and serious, laughed briefly.
“Well, you were a beautiful child,” Margret persisted. “Miss Flora let
Miss Sylvia and me go on and take a peep at you, in a blanket, the
day you came. Miss Lily was very sick after the trip, and she didn’t
get out of bed for a week, and Hedda and I had you, and didn’t we
make Miss Sylvia jealous with the fuss we made over the new baby!
“I remember one day—they were all in black then for poor Mrs.
Roger, and Mr. Roger came home suddenly from one of his trips,
poor man! We’d not seen him since the day of the funeral——”
“He got here too late to see her again?” Gabrielle asked, knowing
the answer.
“He’d gotten here the very day of the funeral,” Margret nodded. “And
he’d just stood looking at her as she lay there dead—she’d been
more than five years his wife, and she was only twenty-two as she
lay there with the flowers all around her! And he said to poor Miss
Flora, ‘I killed her, Flora!’ And out of the house he walked, and we
never saw him again until this day I’m talking about, six months after
the funeral.
“By this time Miss Lily, your mother, was all over her illness, but the
typhoid had left her very weak and light-headed, and sometimes
she’d talk very queer, or cry, or whatever it was,” Margret went on.
“In fact, that was the beginning of her trouble—she never again was
—quite right—here,” interpolated Margret, significantly, touching her
forehead. “Well, this day she was all in white, and she had an
innocent sort of childish look, and Mr. David was home from school,
and Miss Sylvia was running about, and you were just getting to the
cunning age—my goodness, but you were a beautiful baby!” the old
woman said again, affectionately. “Well, Mr. Will Fleming was home,
he was out of a job again, and they were all out on the lawn—Mr.
David was a fine little fellow of about thirteen then, and he saw Mr.
Roger first, and he went running over. And Roger Fleming came up
to them and asked, as he always did: ‘Any news of Tom? Any letter
from my boy?’ and they told him, No. And then Miss Lily held you out
to him so gently, and her face flushed up and she said: ‘Roger,
you’ve hardly seen my pretty baby!’ and I remember his taking you in
his arms and saying, ‘Well, hello, here’s a yellow-headed Fleming at
last!’”
“Nobody seemed to make much of my Charpentier blood, or my
name,” Gabrielle observed, drily.
“I remember,” Margret resumed, without answering, perhaps
unhearing, “that after a while Mr. Roger said to Miss Flora, so sadly,
‘Look at them, David and Sylvia and this baby! But my own boy will
never be master of Wastewater!’ and she said to him, ‘Roger, he’ll
come home, dear!’
“But indeed he didn’t ever come home,” Margret finished, sighing,
“and Miss Sylvia’s father died a year or two later and never left a son
behind him. And after a while poor Mr. Roger died—he died a broken
man. And then we had to send Miss Lily to Crosswicks, for she got
worse and worse. She was there for fifteen years. But Crosswicks
broke up last year, and Miss Flora didn’t quite know what to do with
her,” Margret added, “and it was only while she was finding some
other good place where she’d be happy that we thought of keeping
her here. Poor, gentle little soul, she’d never hurt you or any one.”
Her voice died away into silence, and Gabrielle sat staring darkly into
the fire, with a clouded face.
For a long time the two sat together, the girl with her young strong
hands locked in Margret’s, and her eyes absently fixed on the dying
fire, and gradually the old woman’s soothing voice had its effect.
Margret gently begged her not to worry, there was no harm done,
and perhaps it would be better, after all, to have her see her mother
daily and naturally, as the poor little mental and physical wreck she
was, and get over the fright and mystery once and for all. And now
Gabrielle must take a bottle of hot water upstairs and get to sleep,
for it was long after four, and they mustn’t keep poor Hedda up all
night.