That the Hour of Parley is Dangerous

Among the maxims of war that experience has taught and history has confirmed, none seems to me more constantly verified than this: the hour of parley is the most dangerous of all. When men lay down their weapons to speak, they lay down, together with the weapons, a great part of the vigilance that the weapons enforced. They imagine, because swords are sheathed, that threats are also suspended. They are wrong. The enemy who agrees to treat has not agreed to become trustworthy — he has merely agreed to be still for a moment, and stillness in a man who means you harm is its own kind of threat.

I have read enough of the military historians to fill a library with examples. Cities taken at the very hour of negotiation, when the gates were opened for ambassadors and the guards had been stood down from the walls. Commanders seized during conferences called under flags of truce. Truces used not for rest but for resupply, so that when the fighting resumed the army that had felt itself gaining found it had merely allowed the other time to recover. The truce, in these cases, was a weapon — lighter and cheaper than iron, and far more effective.

“Men on the verge of agreement are men who have already begun to disarm themselves in their minds. They have invested in the peace before it exists, and this investment makes them credulous.”

What I find most instructive in these histories is not the perfidy of the aggressors but the credulity of the victims. A man who has been fighting for his life does not easily believe that the enemy across the field desires peace in good faith — and yet, when a parley is proposed, something shifts in him. Hope, perhaps. Or the exhaustion of sustained vigilance. He wants to believe the danger is over, and wanting it, he begins to act as though it were. This is the moment his opponent has been waiting for.

I draw no lesson from this that recommends permanent suspicion — a man who trusts no one and treats all overtures as traps will be no better a commander and a good deal worse a human being. But there is a quality of watchfulness that ought not to be surrendered even in the most hopeful of negotiations. Trust, in war as in all things, must be earned in increments. The man who gives it in full at the first handshake has given away something he may not be able to recover.