Breaker Morant Punishment

Walzer states that if a soldier believes a command to be unjust, he is morally bound to disobey it, even if he has to adopt different ways to respond, such as, “postponement, evasion, deliberate misunderstanding, loose construction, overly literal construction, and so on” (Walzer, p.315). This claim is supported by the example of the German soldier at the Netherlands, who refused to obey an unjust order from his commander and ended up being imprisoned and eventually killed (Walzer, p.314). However, soldiers are not required to “plead self-preservation when they violate the rules of war” (Walzer, p. 313). This leads to the second exception to the responsibility of soldiers I mentioned earlier.
There are some circumstances when the soldiers

I maintain that the severity of punishment sentenced to the convicted soldiers was extreme. This is to say on the basis of Harry Morant’s claim that he was only obeying superior orders. But his commander who had given unjust orders had died before the trial. Unfortunate on the behalf of the convicted soldiers, they couldn’t get a solid testification in their defense and were charged with the sole responsibility of war crimes. Indeed, the soldiers did violate the rules of war convention and their claim of merely obeying the orders cannot protect them from criminal culpability. They could have disobeyed the unjust commands if the coercion of superior orders was not life-threatening. However, in cases like these when the soldiers receive direct orders to violate the rules of war, the superiors are to be held responsible equally for the war crimes. In Breaker Morant’s case, the superior who directed the soldiers to kill the Boer prisoners had already died, however, Lord Kitchener, the head of the English troops had also allowed indiscriminate killings. I argue that Lord Kitchener is also to be held equally responsible for the crimes committed during the war. Moreover, I also argue that the convicted soldiers were used as scapegoats for political expediency to end the war, not caring that convictions could and probably will lead to execution sentences. Hence, the punishment sentenced to the soldiers was