I won’t go down with this ship; I won’t put my hands up and surrender; there will be no white flag above my door; I’m in love and always will be.
A popular musician once sang the lyrics quoted above to a sad song about her crush for a guy. The focus here isn’t the crush, but her use of white flag as a symbol of surrender. How did it start? Let’s find out.
Soldiers have been using white flags to signify capitulation or surrender for thousands of years. The ancient Roman historian, Livy described a Carthaginian ship being decorated with “white wool and branches of olive” as a symbol of negotiation during the Second Punic War.
Most historians believe white banners first caught on because they were easy to distinguish in the heat of battle. Since white cloth was common in the ancient world, it may have also been a case of troops improvising with the materials they had on hand. The white flag later became well established in Western warfare, but evidence shows it also arose independently in China during the Eastern Han dynasty in the first three centuries A.D. The colour white has long been associated with death and mourning in China, so its soldiers may have adopted white surrender flags to show their sorrow in defeat.
In more recent history, the white flag has become an internationally recognized symbol not only for surrender, but also for the wish to initiate ceasefires and conduct battlefield negotiations.
The various meanings of the flag were later codified in the Hague and Geneva Conventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those same treaties also forbid armies from using the white flag to fake a surrender and ambush enemy troops.
So, there goes the story of the white flag. But like Dido (the musician mentioned earlier) sang, will you be too proud to surrender to that one who has conquered your heart, content to suffer silently “as you refuse to surrender and hang up a white flag”?