VII
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 passkey 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 wartime 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 prewar 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 someone whom he disliked, “congratulated himself on having taken the safer course, overreached 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?’ ”