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.