If an enemy attempts any communication with his opponent, he has no right to lie to, or to deceive him.  He must not draw him into an ambuscade, or over concealed torpedoes, on the plea of desiring an amicable interview with him; and his every word given to an enemy must be observed sacredly as an obligation of truth.

Even before the Christian era, and centuries prior to the time when Chrysostom was confused in his mind on this point, Cicero wrote as to the obligations of veracity upon enemies in time of war, and in repudiation of the idea that warfare included a suspension of all moral relations between belligerents during active hostilities.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Cicero’s De Officiis, I., 12, 13.]

He said:  “The equities of war are prescribed most carefully by the heralds’ law (lex fetialis) of the Roman people,” and he went on to give illustrations of the recognized duty of combatants to keep within the bounds of mutual social obligations.  “Even where private persons, under stress of circumstances, have made any promise to the enemy,” he said, “they should observe the exactest good faith, as did Regulus, in the first Punic war, when taken prisoner and sent to Rome to treat of the exchange of prisoners, having sworn that he would return.  First, when he had arrived, he did not vote in the Senate for the return of the prisoners.  Then, when his friends and kinsmen would have detained him, he preferred to go back to punishment rather than evade his faith plighted to the enemy.

“In the second Punic war also, after the battle of Cannae, of the ten Romans whom Hannibal sent to Rome bound by an oath that they would return unless they obtained an agreement for the redemption of prisoners, the censors kept disfranchised those who perjured themselves, making no exception in favor of him who had devised a fraudulent evasion of his oath.  For when by leave of Hannibal he had departed from the camp, he went back a little later, on pretense of having forgotten something.  Then departing again from the camp [without renewing his oath], he counted himself set free from the obligation of his oath.  And so he was free so far as the words went, but not so in reality; for always in a promise we must have regard to the meaning of our words, rather than to the words themselves.”

In modern times, when Lord Clive, in India, acted on the theory that an utter lack of veracity and good faith on the part of an enemy justified a suspension of all moral obligations toward him, and practiced deceit on a Bengalee by the name of Omichund, in order to gain an advantage over the Nabob of Bengal, he was condemned by the moral sense of the nation for which he thus acted deceitfully; and, in spite of the specious arguments put forth by his partisan defenders, his name is infamous because of this transaction.