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.
VII
Under the new dispensation we should have to appoint on the declaration of war, if we had not done it already, a large Staff Department of Press Camouflage. Everything is done best by those who have practised it longest. The best inventors and disseminators of what was untrue in our hour of need would be those who had made its manufacture and sale their trade in our hours of ease. The most disreputable of successful journalists and “publicity experts” would naturally man the upper grades of the war staff. The reputable journalists would labour under them, trying their best to conform, as you say in drill, to the movements of the front rank. For in this new warfare the journalist untruthful from previous habit and training would have just that advantage over the journalist of character which the Regular soldier had over the New Army officer or man in the old. He would be, as Mr. Kipling sings,
A man that’s too good to be lost you,
A man that is ’andled and made,
A man that will pay what ’e cost you
In learnin’ the others their trade.
After the war was over he would return to his trade with an immense accession of credit. He would have been decorated and publicly praised and thanked. Having a readier pen than the mere combatant soldiers, he would probably write a book to explain that the country had really been saved by himself, though the fighting men were, no doubt, gallant
