V
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.