And you could deliver your messages, too. The enemy’s command might try to keep the contents of your Press from reaching his troops. But, thanks to the aeroplane, you can circularize the enemy’s troops almost as easily as traders can canvass custom at home. You can flood his front line with leaflets, speeches, promises, rumours, and caricatures. You can megaphone to it. Only in recent years has human ingenuity thought of converting the older and tamer form of political strife into the pandemonic “stunt” of a “whirlwind election.” Shall war not have her whirlwind canvasses no less renowned than those of peace? Some rather shamefaced passages of love there have been between us and the Rumour of Shakespeare, the person “painted full of tongues,” who “stuffs the ears of men with false reports,” to the advantage of her wooers. Why not espouse the good lady right out? Make an honest woman of her?
V
Perhaps you would shrink back. Perhaps at any rate you do so now, when for the moment this great implement is not being offered to you, to take or leave, at an instant crisis of your country’s fate. You feel that even in such a case you would stand loftily aloof in your cold purity? You would disclaim as a low, unknightly business the uttering of such base coinage as cooked news, whatever your proud chastity may cost anyone else? Or arrive, perhaps, at the same result by a different route, and make out to yourself that really it pays, in the end, to be decent; that clean chivalry is a good investment at bottom, and that a nation of Galahads and Bayards is sure to come out on top, on the canny reckoning that the body housing a pure heart has got the strength of ten? That is one possible course. And the other is to accept, with all that it implies, the doctrine that there is one morality for peace and another morality for war; that just as in war you may with the clearest conscience stab a man in the back, or kick him in the bowels, in spite of all the sportsmanship you learnt at school, so you may stainlessly carry deception to lengths which in peace would get you blackballed at a club and cut by your friends.
It may be too much to hope that, whichever of these two paths we may choose, we shall tread it with a will. We have failed so much in the way of what Germany used to call “halfness,” the fault of Macbeth, the wish to hunt with the hounds while we run with the hare, that it would be strange if we did not still try to play Bayard and Ulysses as one man and succeed in combining the shortcomings of an inefficient serpent with those of a sophisticated dove. If we really went the whole serpent the first day of any new war would see a wide, opaque veil of false news drawn over the whole face of our country. Authority playing on all the keys, white and black, of the Press as upon one piano, would give the listening enemy the queerest of Ariel’s tunes to follow. All that we did, all that we thought, would be bafflingly falsified. The whole landscape of life in this island, as it reflects itself in the waters of the Press, would come out suddenly altered as far past recognition as that physical landscape amid which it is passed has been changed by a million years of sunshine, rain, and frost. The whole sky would be darkened with flights of strategic and tactical lies so dense that the enemy would fight in a veritable “fog of war” darker than London’s own November brews, and the world would feel that not only the Angel of Death was abroad, but the Angel of Delusion too, and would almost hear the beating of two pairs of wings.
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
