VI
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 postwar 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 newborn 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 prewar days. English people used to feel a sovereign contempt for the “semiofficial” 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.