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 clientele, 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.