Disenchantment

combatant world. The Staff was both their friend and their censor. How could they show it up when it failed? One of the first rules of field censorship was that from war correspondents “there must be no criticism of authority or command”; how could they disobey that? They would visit the front now and then, as many Staff Officers did, but it could be only as afternoon callers from one of the many mansions of G.H.Q., that heaven of security and comfort. When autumn twilight came down on the haggard trench world of which they had caught a quiet noonday glimpse they would be speeding west in Vauxhall cars to lighted châteaux gleaming white among scatheless woods. Their staple emotions before a battle were of necessity akin to those of the Staff, the racehorse-owner or trainer exalted with brilliant hopes, thrilled by the glorious uncertainty of the game, the fascinating nicety of every preparation, and feeling the presence of horrible fatigues and the nearness of multitudinous deaths chiefly as a dim, sombre background that added importance to the rousing scene, and not as things that need seriously cloud the spirit or qualify delight in a plan.

“Our casualties will be enormous,” a General at G.H.Q. said with the utmost serenity on the eve of one of our great attacks in 1917. The average war correspondent⁠—there were golden exceptions⁠—insensibly acquired the same cheerfulness in face of vicarious torment and danger. In his work it came out at times in a certain jauntiness of tone that roused the fighting troops to fury against the writer. Through his despatches there ran a brisk implication that regimental officers and men enjoyed nothing better than “going over the top”; that a battle was just a rough, jovial picnic; that a fight never went on long enough for the men; that their only fear was lest the war should end on this side of the Rhine. This, the men reflected in helpless anger, was what people at home were offered as faithful accounts of what their friends in the field were thinking and suffering.

Most of the men had, all their lives, been accepting “what it says ’ere in the paper” as being presumptively true. They had taken the Press at its word without checking. Bets had been settled by reference to a paper. Now, in the biggest event of their lives, hundreds of thousands of men were able to check for themselves the truth of that workaday Bible. They fought in a battle or raid, and two days after they read, with jeers on their lips, the account of “the show” in the papers. They felt they had found the Press out. The most bloody defeat in the history of Britain, a very world’s wonder of valour frustrated by feckless misuse, of regimental glory and Staff shame, might occur on the Ancre on July 1, 1916, and our Press come out bland and copious and graphic, with nothing to show that we had not had quite a good day⁠—a victory really. Men who had lived through the massacre read the stuff open-mouthed. Anything, then, could figure as anything else in the Press⁠—as its own opposite even. Black was only an aspect of white. With a grin at the way he must have been taken in up to now, the fighting soldier gave the Press up. So it comes that each of several million ex-soldiers now reads every solemn appeal of a Government, each beautiful speech of a Premier or earnest assurance of a body of employers with that maxim on guard in his mind⁠—“You can’t believe a word you read.”

VIII

The Duty of Lying

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