Throughout the Great War our own Press and that of the Germans were each pouring out, for the undesigned benefit of their enemy, substantially correct descriptions of everything in the war life of their respective nations, except a few formal military and naval secrets specially reserved by the censors. Each nation fought, on the whole, with the other standing well out in the light, with no inscrutability about its countenance. If we were ever again in such risk of our national life, would we not seriously try to make ourselves an enigma? Or would we leave this, as we have left some other refinements of war, to the other side to introduce first?
IV
Suppose us again at war with a Power less strong at sea than ourselves. If we should want its fleet to come out and fight in the open, why not evoke, some fine morning, from every voice in our daily press, a sudden and seemingly irrepressible cry of grief and rage over the unconcealable news—the Censor might be defied by the way—that our Grand Fleet, while ranging the seas, had struck a whole school of drift mines and lost half its numbers? Strategic camouflage, however, would go far beyond such special means to special ends as that. It would, as a regular thing, derange the whole landscape presented to enemy eyes by our Press. There was in the war a French aerodrome across which the French camouflage painters had simply painted a great white high-road: it ran across hangars, huts, turf, everything; and everything was amazingly obliterated by it. Across our real life, as seen under the noonday rays of publicity in ordinary times, the supreme controller might draw some such enormous lines of falsification.
Most of the fibs that we used in the war were mere nothings, and clumsy at that. When the enemy raided our trenches in the dead winter season, took fifty prisoners, and did as he liked for a while—so much as he liked that a court of inquiry was afterwards held and a colonel deprived of his command—we said in our official communiqué that a hostile raiding party had “entered our trenches” but was “speedily driven out, leaving a number of dead.” When civilian morale at home was going through one of its occasional depressions, we gave out that it was higher than ever. We did not officially summon from the vasty deep the myth about Russian soldiers in England. But when it arose out of nothing we did make some use of it. These were, however, little more than bare admissions of the principle that truthfulness in war is not imperative. Falsification was tried, but it was not “tried out.” Like really long-range guns, the kindred of “Bertha,” it came into use only enough to suggest what another world-war might be. Vidimus tantum. And then the war ended.
Under a perfected propaganda system the whole surface presented by a country’s Press to the enemy’s Intelligence would be a kind of painted canvas. The artist would not merely be reticent about the positions, say, of our great training camps. He would create, by indirect evidence, great dummy training camps. In the field we had plenty of dummy aerodromes, with hangars complete and a few dummy machines sprawling outside, to draw enemy bomb-fire. At home we would have dummy Salisbury Plains to which a guarded allusion would peep out here and there while the new unity of command over the Press would delete the minutest clue to the realities. Episodes like that of the famous Lansdowne letter would not be left for nature to bungle. If at any time such an episode seemed likely to touch any diplomatic spring with good strategic effect, it would happen at that moment and no other. Otherwise it would not happen, so far as any trace of it in the Press could betray. By-elections, again, their course and result, may tell an enemy much of what your people are thinking. But, for military purposes, there is always some particular thing which you want him to believe them to be thinking. So you would not leave it to the capricious chances of an actual election to settle whether he should be led to believe this or not. You would see to it. Just as you camouflage your real guns and expose dummy guns, so you would obliterate from the Press all trace of your real elections and offer to view, at the times that best suited, dummy elections, ad hoc elections, complete in all their parts.
We have imagined a case in which it would be our interest to raise false confidence in the enemy, perhaps to draw a hurried attack on our shores at a time of our own choosing. Then, if the whole of our Press is held in our hand like a fiddle, ready to take and give out any tune, what should prevent us from letting fall, in sudden distress, a hundred doleful, forced admissions that the strain has proved too great, the smash has come, the head of the State is in hiding from his troops, the Premier in flight, naval officers hanging from modern equivalents to the yardarm, Ministers and Commanders-in-Chief shaking their fists in one another’s faces? Or take the opposite case, that you mean to attack in force, in the field. Here you would add to the preliminary bombardment of your guns such a bombardment of assertion and insinuation, not disprovable before “zero” hour, as has never yet been essayed; plausible proofs from neutral quarters that the enemy’s troops are being betrayed by their politicians behind, that typhus has broken out among the men’s homes, that their children are dying like flies, and some of the mothers, insane with famine and grief, are eating the dead
