THE DUTY OF LYING
I
To fool the other side has always been
fair in a game. Every fencer or boxer may feint. A Rugby football player
"gives the dummy" without any shame. In cricket a bowler is justly
valued the more for masking his action.
In war your licence to lead the other fellow astray is yet more ample.
For war, though it may be good sport to some men, is not a mere sport.
In sport you are not "out to win" except on certain terms of courtesy
and handsomeness. Who would take pride in a race won by a fluke? At
Henley, a long time ago, there were five or six scullers in for the
Diamonds. One of them, L----, was known to be far the best man in the
race. In the first heat he was drawn against A----, of Oxford, about the
best of the others. L---- had one fault--a blind eye; and it often made
him steer a bad course. Before the two had raced for fifty yards L----
blundered out of his course, crashed into A----, and capsized him. The
rules of boat-racing are clear: L---- had done for himself. A----, who
was now swimming, had only to look up to the umpire's launch and hold up
a hand. A nod would have been the reply, and the heat would have been
A----'s, and the final heat, in all likelihood, too. A---- looked well
away from the umpire and kept his hands down, got back into his boat and
said to his contrite opponent, "Start again here, sir?" A---- was
decisively beaten, and never came so near to winning the Diamonds again.
Of course he was right, the race being sport. He had "loved the game
beyond the prize"; he had, like Cyrano, _emporté son panache_; he had
seen that in sport the thing to strive for is prowess itself, and not
its metallic symbol. But the prize of victory in war is no symbol; it is
the thing itself, the real end and aim of all that you do and endure. If
A---- had been sculling not for a piece of silversmith's work but for
the righting of a wronged nation or for the reassertion of public right
throughout Europe, not only would he have been morally free to take a
lucky fluke when he got it: he would not have been morally free to
reject it. In war you have to "play to win"--words of sinister import in
sport. Pot-hunting, unhonoured in sport, is a duty in war, where the pot
is, perhaps, the chance of a free life for your children.
Hence your immemorial right to fall on your enemy where he is weak, to
start before he is ready, to push him out of the course, to jockey him
on to the rails, to use against him all three of Bacon's recipes for
deceiving. A good spy will lie to the last, and in war a prisoner may
lie like a saint and hero. With unmistakable glee the Old Testament
tells us of Gideon's excellent practical fib with the crockery and
trumpets. Even the Wooden Horse of the Greeks has long ceased to raise
moral questions. The pious Aeneas, certainly, called it a foul. But what
did he do himself, when he got a good opening? Went, as the Irish say,
beyond the beyonds and fought in an enemy uniform. Ruses of war and war
lies are as ancient as war itself, and as respectable. The most innocent
animals use them; they shammed dead in battle long before Falstaff.
The only new thing about deception in war is modern man's more perfect
means for its practice. The thing has become, in his hand, a trumpet
more efficacious than Gideon's own. When Sinon set out to palm off on
the Trojans the false news of a Greek total withdrawal, that first of
Intelligence officers made a venture like that of early man, with his
flint-headed arrow, accosting a lion. Sinon's pathetic little armament
of yarns, to be slung at his proper peril, was frailer than David's five
stones from the brook. Modern man is far better off. To match the Lewis
gun with which he now fires his solids, he has to his hand the newspaper
Press, a weapon which fires as fast as the Lewis itself, and is almost
as easy to load whenever he needs, in his wars, to let fly at the
enemy's head the thing which is not.
He has this happiness, too: however often he fires, he can, in a sense,
never miss. He knows that while he is trying to feed the enemy with
whatever it may be bad for him to read the enemy will be trying just as
hard to leave no word of it unread. As busily as your enemy's telescopes
will be conning your lines in the field, his Intelligence will be
scrutinising whatever is said in your Press, worrying out what it means
and which of the things that it seems to let out are the traps and which
are the real, the luminous, priceless slips made in unwariness. What the
Sphinx was to her _clientèle_, what the sky is to mountain-climbers and
sailors, your Press is to him: an endless riddle, to be interrogated and
interpreted for dear life. His wits have to be at work on it always.
Like a starved rat in a house where rat-poison is laid, he can afford
neither to nibble a crumb that has got the virus on it, nor yet to leave
uneaten any clean crumb that has fallen accidentally from a table. Do
not thrilling possibilities open before you?
What cannot you and I perform upon
The unguarded Duncan? What not put upon
His spongy officers?
--that is, if Duncan be really unguarded enough to "ravin down his
proper bane," like a dutiful rat, and his officers spongy enough to sop
up, according to plan, the medicated stuff that you give them.
III
It is the common habit of nations at war to ascribe to the other side
all the cunning, as if the possession of a Ulysses were some sort of
discredit. Happily for us our chosen Ulysses in France, at the most
critical time, was of the first order. But no soldier can go far ahead
of his time; he has to work in it and with it. And so the rich new mine
of Intelligence work through the Press was not worked by either side, in
the Great War, for all it was worth. Only a few trial borings were made;
experimental shafts were sunk into the seam, and good, promising stuff
was brought to the top.
Here are a couple of samples. Some readers of popular science, as it is
called, may have been shocked to see in a technical journal, rather late
in the war, a recklessly full description of our "listening sets"--the
apparatus by which an enemy telephone message is overheard in the field.
"Why," they must have thought, "this is giving away one of our subtlest
devices for finding out what the enemy is about. The journal ought to be
prosecuted." The article had really come from G.H.Q. It was the last
thrust in a long duel.
When the war opened the Germans had good apparatus for telephonic
eavesdropping. We had, as usual, nothing to speak of. The most
distinctly traceable result was the annihilation of our first attack at
Ovillers, near Albert, early in July 1916. At the instant fixed for the
attack our front at the spot was smothered under a bombardment which
left us with no men to make it. A few days after when we took Ovillers,
we found the piece of paper on which the man with the German "listening
set" had put down, word for word, our orders for the first assault. Then
we got to work. We drew our own telephones back, and we perfected our
own "listening sets" till the enemy drew back his, further and further,
giving up more and more of ease and rapidity of communication in order
to be safe. At last a point was reached at which he had backed right out
of hearing. All hope of pushing him back further still, by proving in
practice that we could still overhear, was now gone. All that was left
to do was to add the effects of a final bluff to the previous effects of
the real strength of our hand. And so there slipped into a rather
out-of-the-way English journal the indiscretion by which the reach of
our electric ears was, to say the least of it, not under-stated. Few
people in England might notice the article. The enemy could be trusted
to do so.
When the Flanders battle of July 31, 1917, was about to be fought, we
employed the old ruse of the Chinese attack. We modernised the trick of
medieval garrisons which would make a show of getting ready to break out
at one gate when a real sally was to be made from another. The enemy was
invited to think that a big attack was at hand. But against Lens, and
not east of Ypres. Due circumstantial evidence was provided. There were
audible signs that a great concentration of British guns were cautiously
registering, west of Lens. A little scuffle on that part of the front
elicited from our side an amazing bombardment--apparently loosed in a
moment of panic. I fancy a British Staff Officer's body--to judge by his
brassard and tabs--may have floated down the Scarpe into the German
lines. Interpreted with German thoroughness, the maps and papers upon it
might easily betray the fact that Lens was the objective. And then a
really inexcusable indiscretion appeared--just for a moment, and then
was hushed up--in the London Press. To an acute German eye it must have
been obvious that this composition was just the inconsequent gassing of
some typically stupid English General at home on leave; he was clearly
throwing his weight about, as they say, without any real understanding
of anything. The stuff was of no serious value, except for one
parenthetic, accidental allusion to Lens as the mark. As far as I know,
this ebullition of babble was printed in only one small edition of one
London paper. Authority was then seen to be nervously trying, as Uncle
Toby advised, "to wipe it up and say no more about it." Lest it should
not be observed to have taken this wise precaution some fussy member of
Parliament may have asked in the House of Commons how so outrageous a
breach of soldierly reticence had occurred. And was there no control
over the Press? It all answered. The Germans kept their guns in force at
Lens, and their counter barrage east of Ypres was so much the lighter,
and our losses so much the less.
IV
If we did these things in the green leaf, what might we not do in the
dry? Mobilize our whole Press, conscribe it for active service under a
single control, a--let us be frank--a Father-General of Lies, the
unshaming strategic and tactical lies of "the great wars" which "make
ambition virtue," and sometimes make mendacity a virtue too? Coach the
whole multitudinous orchestra of the Press to carry out the vast
conceptions of some consummate conductor, _splendide mendax_? From each
instrument under his baton this artist would draw its utmost
contributive aid to immense schemes of concerted delusiveness, the
harping of the sirens elaborated into Wagnerian prodigies of volume and
complexity.
As you gaze from the top of a tree or a tower behind your own front, in
a modern war, all the landscape beyond it looks as if man had perished
from the earth, leaving his works behind him. It all looks strangely
vacant and dead, the roofs of farms and the spires of churches serving
only to deepen your sense of this blank deletion of man, as the Roman
arches enhance the vacuous stillness of the Campagna. Your Intelligence
Corps has to convert this first impression, this empty page, into a
picture, built up line by line, dot by dot, of the universe of
activities that are going on out there. Its first and easiest task is to
mark out correctly the place where every enemy unit is, each division,
each battery, each railhead, aerodrome, field hospital and dump. Next it
has to mark each movement of each of these, the shiftings of the various
centres of gravity, the changes in the relative density and relative
quality of troops and guns at various sectors, the increase, at any
sector, of field hospitals, the surest harbingers of heavy attacks. The
trains on all lines must be counted, their loads calculated. Next must
be known in what sort of spirits the enemy is, in the field and also at
home. Do the men believe in their officers? Do the men get confident
letters from their civilian friends? Do they send cheerful ones back? Is
desertion rare and much abhorred? Or so common that men are no longer
shot for it now? So you may go on enumerating until it strikes you that
you are simply drifting into an inventory of all the details of the
enemy's wartime life, in the field and at home. And then you understand.
For what you want to know, in order to beat him, is no less than
this--to see him steadily and see him whole. In the past we have talked
of information "of military value" as distinct from other information.
But all information about either side is of military value to the other.
News of the outbreak or settlement of a strike in a Welsh coalfield was
of military value to Ludendorff. News of the day's weather in Central
Europe was of military value to Sir Douglas Haig. News of anything that
expressed in any degree the temper of London or Berlin, of Munich or
Manchester, helped to eke out that accurate vision of an enemy's body
and mind which is the basis of success in combat. A black dot, of the
size of a pin-head, may seem, when looked at alone, to give no secret
away. But when the same dot is seen, no longer in isolation, but as part
of a pen-and-ink drawing, perhaps it may leap into vital prominence,
showing now as the pupil of the eye that completes a whole portrait,
gives its expression to a face and identifies a sitter.
Throughout the Great War our own Press and that of the Germans were each
pouring out, for the undesigned benefit of their enemy, substantially
correct descriptions of everything in the war life of their respective
nations, except a few formal military and naval secrets specially
reserved by the censors. Each nation fought, on the whole, with the
other standing well out in the light, with no inscrutability about its
countenance. If we were ever again in such risk of our national life,
would we not seriously try to make ourselves an enigma? Or would we
leave this, as we have left some other refinements of war, to the other
side to introduce first?
V
Suppose us again at war with a Power less strong at sea than ourselves.
If we should want its fleet to come out and fight in the open, why not
evoke, some fine morning, from every voice in our daily press, a sudden
and seemingly irrepressible cry of grief and rage over the unconcealable
news--the Censor might be defied by the way--that our Grand Fleet, while
ranging the seas, had struck a whole school of drift mines and lost half
its numbers? Strategic camouflage, however, would go far beyond such
special means to special ends as that. It would, as a regular thing,
derange the whole landscape presented to enemy eyes by our Press. There
was in the war a French aerodrome across which the French camouflage
painters had simply painted a great white high-road: it ran across
hangars, huts, turf, everything; and everything was amazingly
obliterated by it. Across our real life, as seen under the noonday rays
of publicity in ordinary times, the supreme controller might draw some
such enormous lines of falsification.
Most of the fibs that we used in the war were mere nothings, and clumsy
at that. When the enemy raided our trenches in the dead winter season,
took fifty prisoners, and did as he liked for a while--so much as he
liked that a court of inquiry was afterwards held and a colonel deprived
of his command--we said in our official _communiqué_ that a hostile
raiding party had "entered our trenches" but was "speedily driven out,
leaving a number of dead." When civilian _moral_ at home was going
through one of its occasional depressions, we gave out that it was
higher than ever. We did not officially summon from the vasty deep the
myth about Russian soldiers in England. But when it arose out of nothing
we did make some use of it. These were, however, little more than bare
admissions of the principle that truthfulness in war is not imperative.
Falsification was tried, but it was not "tried out." Like really
long-range guns, the kindred of "Bertha," it came into use only enough
to suggest what another world-war might be. _Vidimus tantum._ And then
the war ended.
Under a perfected propaganda system the whole surface presented by a
country's Press to the enemy's Intelligence would be a kind of painted
canvas. The artist would not merely be reticent about the positions,
say, of our great training camps. He would create, by indirect evidence,
great dummy training camps. In the field we had plenty of dummy
aerodromes, with hangars complete and a few dummy machines sprawling
outside, to draw enemy bomb-fire. At home we would have dummy Salisbury
Plains to which a guarded allusion would peep out here and there while
the new unity of command over the Press would delete the minutest clue
to the realities. Episodes like that of the famous Lansdowne letter
would not be left for nature to bungle. If at any time such an episode
seemed likely to touch any diplomatic spring with good strategic effect,
it would happen at that moment and no other. Otherwise it would not
happen, so far as any trace of it in the Press could betray.
By-elections, again, their course and result, may tell an enemy much of
what your people are thinking. But, for military purposes, there is
always some particular thing which you want him to believe them to be
thinking. So you would not leave it to the capricious chances of an
actual election to settle whether he should be led to believe this or
not. You would see to it. Just as you camouflage your real guns and
expose dummy guns, so you would obliterate from the Press all trace of
your real elections and offer to view, at the times that best suited,
dummy elections, _ad hoc_ elections, complete in all their parts.
We have imagined a case in which it would be our interest to raise false
confidence in the enemy, perhaps to draw a hurried attack on our shores
at a time of our own choosing. Then, if the whole of our Press is held
in our hand like a fiddle, ready to take and give out any tune, what
should prevent us from letting fall, in sudden distress, a hundred
doleful, forced admissions that the strain has proved too great, the
smash has come, the head of the State is in hiding from his troops, the
Premier in flight, naval officers hanging from modern equivalents to the
yard-arm, Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief shaking their fists in one
another's faces? Or take the opposite case, that you mean to attack in
force, in the field. Here you would add to the preliminary bombardment
of your guns such a bombardment of assertion and insinuation, not
disprovable before "zero" hour, as has never yet been essayed; plausible
proofs from neutral quarters that the enemy's troops are being betrayed
by their politicians behind, that typhus has broken out among the men's
homes, that their children are dying like flies, and some of the
mothers, insane with famine and grief, are eating the dead in hope of
nursing the living. Oh, you could say a great deal.
And you could deliver your messages, too. The enemy's command might try
to keep the contents of your Press from reaching his troops. But, thanks
to the aeroplane, you can circularize the enemy's troops almost as
easily as traders can canvass custom at home. You can flood his front
line with leaflets, speeches, promises, rumours, and caricatures. You
can megaphone to it. Only in recent years has human ingenuity thought of
converting the older and tamer form of political strife into the
pandemonic "stunt" of a "whirlwind election." Shall war not have her
whirlwind canvasses no less renowned than those of peace? Some rather
shame-faced passages of love there have been between us and the Rumour
of Shakespeare, the person "painted full of tongues," who "stuffs the
ears of men with false reports," to the advantage of her wooers. Why not
espouse the good lady right out? Make an honest woman of her?
VI
Perhaps you would shrink back. Perhaps at any rate you do so now, when
for the moment this great implement is not being offered to you, to take
or leave, at an instant crisis of your country's fate. You feel that
even in such a case you would stand loftily aloof in your cold purity?
You would disclaim as a low, unknightly business the uttering of such
base coinage as cooked news, whatever your proud chastity may cost
anyone else? Or arrive, perhaps, at the same result by a different
route, and make out to yourself that really it pays, in the end, to be
decent; that clean chivalry is a good investment at bottom, and that a
nation of Galahads and Bayards is sure to come out on top, on the canny
reckoning that the body housing a pure heart has got the strength of
ten? That is one possible course. And the other is to accept, with all
that it implies, the doctrine that there is one morality for peace and
another morality for war; that just as in war you may with the clearest
conscience stab a man in the back, or kick him in the bowels, in spite
of all the sportsmanship you learnt at school, so you may stainlessly
carry deception to lengths which in peace would get you blackballed at a
club and cut by your friends.
It may be too much to hope that, whichever of these two paths we may
choose, we shall tread it with a will. We have failed so much in the way
of what Germany used to call "halfness," the fault of Macbeth, the wish
to hunt with the hounds while we run with the hare, that it would be
strange if we did not still try to play Bayard and Ulysses as one man
and succeed in combining the shortcomings of an inefficient serpent with
those of a sophisticated dove. If we really went the whole serpent the
first day of any new war would see a wide, opaque veil of false news
drawn over the whole face of our country. Authority playing on all the
keys, white and black, of the Press as upon one piano, would give the
listening enemy the queerest of Ariel's tunes to follow. All that we
did, all that we thought, would be bafflingly falsified. The whole
landscape of life in this island, as it reflects itself in the waters of
the Press, would come out suddenly altered as far past recognition as
that physical landscape amid which it is passed has been changed by a
million years of sunshine, rain, and frost. The whole sky would be
darkened with flights of strategic and tactical lies so dense that the
enemy would fight in a veritable "fog of war" darker than London's own
November brews, and the world would feel that not only the Angel of
Death was abroad, but the Angel of Delusion too, and would almost hear
the beating of two pairs of wings.
VII
Well--and then? Any weapon you use in a war leaves some bill to be
settled in peace, and the Propaganda arm has its cost like another. To
say so is not to say, without more ado, that it should not be used. Its
cost should be duly cast up, like our other accounts; that is all. We
all agree--with a certain demur from the Quakers--that one morality has
to be practised in peace and another in war; that the same bodily act
may be wrong in the one and right in the other. So, to be perfect, you
need to have two gears to your morals, and drive on the one gear in war
and on the other in peace. While you are on the peace gear you must not
even shoot a bird sitting. At the last stroke of some August midnight
you clap on the war gear and thenceforth you may shoot a man sitting or
sleeping or any way you can get him, provided you and he be soldiers on
opposite sides.
Now, in a well-made car, in the prime of its life, there is nothing to
keep you from passing straight and conclusively from one gear to
another. The change once made, the new gear continues in force and does
not wobble back fitfully and incalculably into the old. But in matters
of conduct you cannot, somehow, drive long on one gear without letting
the other become noticeably rusty, stiff, and disinclined to act. It was
found in the Great War that after a long period of peace and general
saturation with peace morals it took some time to release the average
English youth from his indurated distaste for stabbing men in the
bowels. Conversely it has been found of late, in Ireland and elsewhere,
that, after some years of effort to get our youths off the no-homicide
gear, they cannot all be got quickly back to it either, some of them
still being prone to kill, as the French say, _paisiblement_, with a
lightness of heart that embarrasses statesmen.
We must, to be on the conservative side, assume that the same phenomenon
would attend a post-war effort to bring back to the truth gear of peace
a Press that we had driven for some years on the war gear of
untruthfulness. Indeed, we are not wholly left to assumption and
speculation. During the war the art of Propaganda was little more than
born. The various inspired articles-with-a-purpose, military or
political, hardly went beyond the _vagitus_, the earliest cry of the
new-born method, as yet
An infant crying in the night,
And with no language but a cry.
Yet for more than three years since the Armistice our rulers have
continued to issue to the Press, at our cost as Blue Books and White
Papers, long passages of argument and suggestion almost fantastically
different from the dry and dignified official publications of the
pre-war days. English people used to feel a sovereign contempt for the
"semi-official" journalism of Germany and Russia. But the war has left
us with a Press at any rate intermittently inspired. What would be left
by a war in which Propaganda had come of age and the State had used the
Press, as camouflaging material, for all it was worth?
It used at one time to be a great joke--and a source of gain
sometimes--among little boys to take it as a benign moral law that so
long as you said a thing "over the left," it did not matter whether it
was true or not. If, to gain your private ends, or to make a fool of
somebody else, you wanted to utter a fib, all that you had to do was to
append to it these three incantatory words, under your breath, or indeed
without any sound or move of your lips at all, but just to yourself in
the session of sweet silent thought. Then you were blameless. You had
cut yourself free, under the rules, from the vulgar morality. War
confers on those who wage it much the same self-dispensing power. They
can absolve themselves of a good many sins. Persuade yourself that you
are at war with somebody else and you find your moral liberty expanding
almost faster than you can use it. An Irishman in a fury with England
says to himself "State of war--that's what it is," and then finds he can
go out and shoot a passing policeman from behind a hedge without the
discomfort of feeling base. The policeman's comrades say to themselves
"State of war--that's what it has come to," and go out and burn some
other Irishman's shop without a sense of doing anything wrong, either.
They all do it "over the left." They have stolen the key of the magical
garden wherein you may do things that are elsewhere most wicked and yet
enjoy the mental peace of the soldier which passeth all understanding.
To kill and to burn may be sore temptations at times, but not so
besetting to most men as the temptation to lie is to public speakers and
writers. Another frequent temptation of theirs is to live in a world of
stale figures of speech, of flags nailed to the mast, of standing to
one's guns, of deaths in last ditches, of quarter neither asked nor
given. It is their hobby to figure their own secure, squabblesome lives
in images taken from war. And their little excesses, their breaches of
manners, and even, sometimes, of actual law, are excused, as a rule, in
terms of virile disdain for anything less drastic and stern than the
morals of the real warfare which they know so little. We have to think
in what state we might leave these weak brethren after a long war in
which we had practised them hard in lying for the public good and also
in telling themselves it was all right because of the existence of a
state of war. State of war! Why, that is what every excitable politician
or journalist declares to exist all the time. To the wild party man the
party which he hates is always "more deadly than any foreign enemy." All
of us could mention a few politicians, at least, to whom the Great War
was merely a passing incident or momentary interruption of the more
burningly authentic wars of Irish Orange and Green, or of English Labour
and Capital.
VIII
Under the new dispensation we should have to appoint on the declaration
of war, if we had not done it already, a large Staff Department of Press
Camouflage. Everything is done best by those who have practised it
longest. The best inventors and disseminators of what was untrue in our
hour of need would be those who had made its manufacture and sale their
trade in our hours of ease. The most disreputable of successful
journalists and "publicity experts" would naturally man the upper grades
of the war staff. The reputable journalists would labour under them,
trying their best to conform, as you say in drill, to the movements of
the front rank. For in this new warfare the journalist untruthful from
previous habit and training would have just that advantage over the
journalist of character which the Regular soldier had over the New Army
officer or man in the old. He would be, as Mr. Kipling sings,
A man that's too good to be lost you,
A man that is 'andled and made,
A man that will pay what 'e cost you
In learnin' the others their trade.
After the war was over he would return to his trade with an immense
accession of credit. He would have been decorated and publicly praised
and thanked. Having a readier pen than the mere combatant soldiers, he
would probably write a book to explain that the country had really been
saved by himself, though the fighting men were, no doubt, gallant
fellows. He would, in all likelihood, have completed the disengagement
of his mind from the idea that public opinion is a thing to be dealt
with by argument and persuasion, appeals to reason and conscience. He
would feel surer than ever that men's and women's minds are most
strongly moved not by the leading articles of a paper but by its news,
by what they may be led to accept as "the facts." So the practice of
colouring news, of ordering reporters to take care that they see only
such facts as tell in one way, would leap forward. For it would have the
potent support of a new moral complacency. When a man feels that his
tampering with truth has saved civilization, why should he deny himself,
in his private business, the benefit of such moral reflections as this
feeling may suggest?
Scott gives, in _Woodstock_, an engaging picture of the man who has
"attained the pitch of believing himself above ordinances." The
independent trooper, Tomkins, finds his own favourite vices fitting
delightfully into an exalted theory of moral freedom. In former days, he
avows, he had been only "the most wild, malignant rakehell in
Oxfordshire." Now he is a saint, and can say to the girl whom he wants
to debauch:
Stand up, foolish maiden, and listen; and know, in one word, that
sin, for which the spirit of man is punished with the vengeance of
heaven, lieth not in the corporal act, but in the thought of the
sinner. Believe, lovely Phoebe, that to the pure all acts are pure,
and that sin is in our thought, not in our actions, even as the
radiance of the day is dark to a blind man but seen and enjoyed by
him whose eyes receive it. To him who is but a novice in the things
of the spirit much is enjoined, much is prohibited; and he is fed
with milk fit for babes--for him are ordinances, prohibitions, and
commands. But the saint is above all these ordinances and
restraints. To him, as to the chosen child of the house, is given
the pass-key to open all locks which withhold him from the enjoyment
of his heart's desire. Into such pleasant paths will I guide thee,
lovely Phoebe, as shall unite in joy, in innocent freedom, pleasures
which, to the unprivileged, are sinful and prohibited.
So when a journalist with no strong original predisposition to swear to
his own hurt shall have gained high public distinction by his fertility
in falsehoods for consumption by an enemy in the field, the fishes that
tipple in the deep may well "know no such liberty" as this expert in
fiction will allow himself when restored to his own more intoxicating
element.
The general addition of prestige to the controversial device of giving
false impressions and raising false issues would naturally be immense.
To argue any case merely on its merits and on the facts would seem to
the admirers of the new way a kind of virtuous imbecility. In what great
industrial dispute or political campaign, in what struggle between great
financial interests, would both sides, or either, forego the use of
munitions so formidable? Such conflicts might almost wholly cease to be
competitions in serious argument at all; they might become merely trials
of skill in fantastic false pretences, and of expertness in the morbid
psychology of credulity.
So men argued, surmised and predicted, talking and talking away in the
endless hours that war gives for talking things out. When first they
began to ask each other why so many lies were about, the common
hypothesis, based on prior experience, was that they must be meant to
save some "dud," up above, from losing his job. Then they came to admit
there was something more in it than that. Lies had a good enough use for
fooling the Germans. A beastly expedient, no doubt; acquiescence in
lying does not come quite so easily to a workman of good character as it
does to men of a class in which more numerous formal fibs are kept in
use as social conveniences. Still, the men were not cranks enough to
object. "They love not poison that do poison need." The men had hated,
and still continued to hate, the use of poison gas, too. It was a
scrub's trick, like vitriol-throwing. But who could have done without
it, when once the Germans began? And now who could object to the use of
this printed gas either? Could they, in this new warfare of propaganda,
expect their country to go into action armed in a white robe of candour,
and nothing besides, like a maskless man going forth to war against a
host assisted by phosgene and all her foul sisters?
It was a clear enough case: decency had to go under. But it was hard
luck not to be able to know where you were. Where were they? If all the
news they could check was mixed with lies, what about all the rest,
which they were unable to check? Was it likely to be any truer? Why, we
might be losing the war all the time, everywhere! Who could believe now
what was said about our catching the submarines? Or about India's being
all right? And how far would you have to go to get outside the lie belt?
Could our case for going to war with the Germans be partly lies too?
Beastly idea!
How would it be, again, when we came to play these major tricks which
the men were already discussing as likely to come into use? Suppose it
became part of our game to publish, for some good strategical reason,
news of a naval or military disaster to ourselves, the same not having
happened? To take in the enemy this lie would have to take in our own
people too; the ruse would be given away if the Government tried to tip
so much as a wink to the British reader of the British Press. So men's
friends at home would have the agonies of false alarms added to their
normal war-time miseries, and wives might be widowed twice and mothers
of one son made childless more than once before the truth finally
overshadowed their lives.
And then, your war won, there would be that new lie-infested and
infected world of peace. In one of his great passages Thucydides tells
us what happened to Greece after some years of war and of the necessary
war morality. He says that, as far as veracity, public and private,
goes, the peace gear was found to have got wholly out of working order
and could not be brought back into use. "The meaning of words had no
longer the same relation to things, but was changed by men as they
thought proper." The pre-war hobby of being straight and not telling
people lies went clean out of fashion. Anyone who could bring off a good
stroke of deceit, to the injury of some one whom he disliked,
"congratulated himself on having taken the safer course, over-reached
his enemy, and gained the prize of superior talent." A man who did not
care to use so sound a means to his ends was thought to be a goody-goody
ass. War worked in that way on the soul of Greece, in days when war was
still confined, in the main, to the relatively cleanly practice of
hitting your enemy over the head, wherever you could find him. The
philosophers in our dugouts preserved moderation when they expected as
ugly a sequel for war in our age, when the chivalrous school seems to
have pretty well worked itself out and the most promising lines of
advance are poison gas and canards. But the survivors among them are not
detached philosophers only. They act in the new world that they foresaw,
and the man whose word you could trust like your own eyes and ears,
eight years ago, has come back with the thought in his mind that so many
comrades of his have expressed: "They tell me we've pulled through at
last all right because our propergander dished out better lies than what
the Germans did. So I say to myself 'If tellin' lies is all that bloody
good in war, what bloody good is tellin' truth in peace?'"