Fal. All war involves falsehood. It in-In Keebood volves falsehood more surely and more copiously than, other human activity; for it is essential to success in war that the enemy should be deceived, observes Hilaire Belloc in "Truth." The more cultivated a society may be, and the more advanced' in its instruments, the more does it need falsehood for the successful pursuit of war. What is more, a society indifferent to falsehood or clumsy in the manipulation of falsehood will suffer defeat, which no society can afford to do, It will seem, therefore, that no destructive criticism could be raised against the practice of falsehood in war, save this: that a prolonged habit of falsehood warps the judgment, But let us begin by being quite clear on the main principle, which is that nations, to survive under the strain of war, must lie. Now lies that are necessary to a nation at war are of three kinds: first and most important, of course, the lies which have the object of deceiving the enemy, but only second in importance the lies which have the object of preventing panic or confusions on one's own side, To these two one must add the third kind of war lying, lying to impress the neutrals or even one's allies. We have, when we are lying about a military situation, to consider to whom we are lying, and I am very sorry to say that in the last few months this careful consideration of one's audience has broken down. The wrong lies are told to the wrong people, Wherever I go I notice that the general reader of the newspapers has ceased to believe, and to a degree far greater than his scepticism of older days. It has reached such a pitch that today an educated man takes the falsehood of almost all he reads about the war for granted, In other words, the mistrust of educated people of our war news has been carried to an excess, because the lie that is told is told without the liar clearly remembering which of the three audiences he is addressing—the enemy, his own compatriots or the neutral foreigner.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.