Rommel called the North Africa campaign Krieg Ohne Hass, "War Without Hate."  From everything I've read in diaries and memoirs of the era, he was right. 

In the desert war, machine gunners of both sides routinely held their fire when enemy crewmen bailed out of disabled tanks.  Stretcher bearers were permitted to dash into the open to retrieve the wounded.  In Advanced Dressing Stations it was not exceptional to witness soldiers of both armies being treated side by side, often by Allied and Axis medical personnel working shoulder to shoulder. 

No individual exemplified this ethic more than Rommel himself.  There's a famous story of a British field hospital that was overrun by panzers of the Afrika Korps.  The medical staff had refused to evacuate, but remained in place tending the wounded, a number of whom were Germans and Italians.  When Rommel learned of this, he made straight for the hospital, shook the hand of every member of the staff and thanked them for their care of his men.  He refused to make the doctors and nurses prisoners of war but instead saw to it that they were repatriated through neutral Switzerland.

Studying the North Africa campaign got me to thinking: why are contemporary conflicts so devoid of chivalry?  Was the clash of the Desert Fox and the Desert Rats an anomaly?  Will future wars continue to be characterized by such horrors as genocide and ethnic cleansing, by suicide bombings and beheadings-on-video, by places and acts like Abu Ghraib and waterboarding?

What is it about today's wars that makes them so brutal and without mercy?  For one, contemporary conflicts are often asymmetrical.  The weaker force possesses no Abrams tanks or Apache attack helicopters; it makes up for this by the use of terror and brutality.  Acts of atrocity become political, committed for the benefit of the evening news.  At the same time, slaughters of the weaker side's innocents (accidental or otherwise) are stage-managed by media-savvy advocates to produce maximum revulsion and guilt in the psyches of the more powerful force, aiming to undermine its home front support. 

In North Africa, the fight was Christian European versus Christian European.  Today's wars are often fought between forces of different races and religions -- races and religions with centuries of bad blood between them.  Contemporary wars often involve the invasion of the weaker by the stronger.  This looses a Pandora's box of passions.  For the invaded, fury at the violation of sacred soil, the emasculation of warrior honor, the shaming of women and of children.  For the occupier, the rage is inverted but equally poisonous -- anger and disgust with a foe who hides behind innocents, who routinely breaks oaths, who takes sanctuary in places of worship and in myriad ways refuses to "fight fair." 

Compounding this often is tribal mind-set of the invaded.  In Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, occupiers of the West are confounded by a state of mind that is utterly alien to their notions of liberality, inclusiveness, progress.  The tribesman's mind is ancient.  He is a warrior whose code is not law (which may yield change by reason or persuasion) but honor, which is eternal and absolute.  The tribesman's code mandates revenge for any affront to pride; his memory is not years but centuries.  Dissent is heresy to the tribal way of thinking; compromise is weakness.  The tribe is perpetually at war with all other tribes.  It reveres the past and is insular, impenetrable, implacably hostile to outsiders.  The tribal mind is immune to the charms of "freedom," which it perceives as a threat to piety and to family cohesion, to tradition, lore and all that the tribesman holds dear.  The tribesman's resolve is ineradicable.  He will hate you till hell freezes.

All of these factors serve to dehumanize and demonize the Other.  They eradicate empathy, which is the basis of chivalry and voluntary self-restraint.  Chivalry is not the monopoly of one race or religion.  Tribesmen and prophets have historically conducted themselves as knights.  But in today's asymmetrical world, as the weaker side calls upon the only weapons available to it -- terror, insurgency, deception, betrayal and brutality -- soldiers and leaders of the stronger side are faced with the moral dilemma of whether or not to respond in kind.   The dirty, not-so-secret secret of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is how frequently the answer has been to give as good as you get.  The consequences of this to the greater polity (and to the individual psyches of the men and women involved) are only beginning to reveal themselves.

What would Rommel do?  Unfortunately, history tells us.  Faced with the demons set loose by his own supreme commander, Rommel aligned himself, however reluctantly, with the conspiracy against his Fuhrer.  The plot failed.  In the end, Rommel took his own life rather than violate the code of soldierly honor he had always lived by. 

Is our choice that stark?  Is the notion of a War Without Hate so "quaint" as to seem absurd?  In a way the Tommies and Jerries of the North African campaign had it much easier than today's warriors.  The desert war was brutal and ghastly in many respects, but it was also simpler and of far greater moral clarity than the clashes our soldiers and Marines are engaged in today and are likely to be faced with in the future.