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.
II
It is the common habit of nations at war to ascribe to the other side all the cunning, as if the possession of a Ulysses were some sort of discredit. Happily for us our chosen Ulysses in France, at the most critical time, was of the first order. But no soldier can go far ahead of his time; he has to work in it and with it. And so the rich new mine of Intelligence work through the Press was not worked by either side, in the Great War, for all it was worth. Only a few trial borings were made; experimental shafts were sunk into the seam, and good, promising stuff was brought to the top.
Here are a couple of samples. Some readers of popular science, as it is called, may have been shocked to see in a technical journal, rather late in the war, a recklessly full description of our “listening sets”—the apparatus by which an enemy telephone message is overheard in the field. “Why,” they must have thought, “this is giving away one of our subtlest devices for finding out what the enemy is about. The journal ought to be prosecuted.” The article had really come from G.H.Q. It was the last thrust in a long duel.
When the war opened the Germans had good apparatus for telephonic eavesdropping. We had, as usual, nothing to speak of. The most distinctly traceable result was the annihilation of our first attack at Ovillers, near Albert, early in July 1916. At the instant fixed for the attack our front at the spot was smothered under a bombardment which left us with no men to make it. A few days after when we took Ovillers, we found the piece of paper on which the man with the German “listening set” had put down, word for word, our orders for the first assault. Then we got to work. We drew our own telephones back, and we perfected our own “listening sets” till the enemy drew back his, further and further, giving up more and more of ease and rapidity of communication in order to be safe. At last a point was reached at which he had backed right out of hearing. All hope of pushing him back further still, by proving in practice that we could still overhear, was
