SECRESY AND LYING IN WAR.
4LL soldiers of rank, we believe, assert in principle the necessity of secrecy in war, and it is seldom wise to reject the opinion of an entire profession. As a matter of fact, neither English nor American Generals have ever had the power of enforcing perfect secrecy, and some of the ablest among them have boldly accepted the evil as one of the unavoidable drawbacks to free institutions ; but it has always been with reluctance, and, as it were, under pro- test, a protest which will become more urgent after this war. Politicians may doubt whether in a peaceful but brave country the militarization of popular sentiment which arises or may arise from admitting the nation into the Council of War, is not a sufficient compensation for the evils produced by want of secresy, but soldiers will point to this campaign as unanswerable evidence to the contrary. The German Army has gained great victories through secresy alone, a secresy maintained with a strictness and a success which are almost unintelligible, unless the German states- men arrested the post as well as the telegraph. There were, it is said, 250,000 men in the Crown Prince's Army ; that army was collected in the Palatinate, one of the best-known corners of Europe ; it touched Homburg, a regular gossip-shop, and around its outskirts hung reporters by the score ; yet, till the debouche in force was sanctioned by the King, no one in London or Paris had an idea that the Crown Prince had massed his forces behind the woods of the frontier ; that one march would bring him on the enemy, who believed him miles away. For nearly a fortnight a cloud settled down on Germany, which seemed and was impenetrable, and the success due to that secresy will be quoted by the Army against the Press for years to come. The true answer,—that if the French Staff had done its duty no letters could have told it anything, that it would have known all facts as well as its enemies, will not be believed, and the precedent will be quoted as a final reason for the expulsion of Correspond- ents. We are not disposed to dispute the conclusion, for it is only in England that the advantage of publicity over secresy is certain, and in England during a popular war secresy would be either im- possible, or maintained by an understanding with the Press ; but granting secresy, we wish to point out the inutility of lying in war. It is of little use to attack the practice from the moral side, nor would it be altogether philosophical. The mass have an instinct that war is in itself so immoral, or so completely at variance with the ordinary moral code, that an offence against morals more or less scarcely makes a difference ; while the few perceive that, ex- cept out of wantonness, true lying is difficult in war. That is a true or a false utterance which is true or false to the hearer, which makes him see a truth or falsehood, and deception being ac- cepted on both sides as an instrument of war, the use of deception, whether objectionable or not on other grounds, can scarcely be called lying.
It is rather its inutility that we wish to press, and we believe this, even in the field, to be very nearly complete. It is the rarest thing in the world for a General in the field to be deceived by a false statement, though he may be taken in by a false movement, and many false statements work distinct injury to those who utter them. The commonest of all, for instance, an exaggeration of available forces, is certain to induce the enemy to make extra exertions, to mass his resources more closely, and to make up by energy for defective numbers. If the secret history of 1866 were ever known, it would, we believe, be found that one secret of the marvellous preparation of the Prussians was a latent belief at head-quarters that the Austrian strength bore at least some near proportion to the numbers about which her politicians were so loud, that Austria could not be so intent upon a mere deception as after- wards was proved to have been the case. On the other hand, the converse trick, a public representation of numbers at less than their real strength, can hardly be managed without depressing the spirit of the trickster's soldiers ; soldiers, however brave, dreading before all things to find themselves heavily outnumbered. The conceal- ment of loss may be wise sometimes, though rarely, as the enemy always have a suspicion of the truth ; but a distinct falsehood about it, besides puzzling all departments, and leading to relaxations of effort in the despatch of reinforcements, leaves an impression of disregard for them on the minds of the soldiery them- selves, which is terribly injurious to their tone. The soldier's first recompense for his sufferings is their appreciation by his leaders and his country. The strange and still unexplained failure of the French Army to reinforce MacMahon was due in part, we suspect, to the rose-coloured reports of his defeat which he issued to the world, and may have forwarded to chiefs between whom and himself there is believed to have existed some rivalry. Latterly, it is said, this cause of error hampered the First Napoleon. His great chiefs dreaded him so much that the temptation to con- ceal or attenuate a reverse became almost irresistible ; and this temptation, it is obvious, is indefinitely increased when the public utterances of the Generals are false. We can hardly conceive a case even in the field when falsehood is advantageous, and when the time comes for appealing to the nation it is almost cer- tain to be disastrous. Its effect at first is to paralyze effort, afterwards to spread an unfounded despondency, and always to destroy that confidence between governors and governed without which the nation loses half the advantage of its organization. The tone of the mass of citizens in any country about war is almost invariably the same. They will do and suffer what- ever is necessary to be done and suffered, but they do not wish either to do or to suffer unless it is required. Either they have done their part, as Prussians might say ; or they are not organized, as Frenchmen would say ; or they know nothing of the duty, as most Englishmen might safely say. To tell them their army is victorious, therefore, is to excite in them an unwillingness to do that army's work, against which orders and appeals fall almost powerless. Paris, for example, is full of brave men ; but the organization of those brave men would have been all the swifter and the more effective if Paris had known what England knows about the condition of her Army. This is an evil, even while falsehoods are believed ; but the moment they are detected two further evils set in, a deadly despondency and a still more deadly distrust. No news is, then, always bad news. Every morsel of pleasing tidings is scanned with hos- tile eyes, every " repulse " is held to be a euphuism for a defeat ; a sort of craze sets in, and the population acts, and thinks, and resolves as if the time had arrived to display either the heroism or the cowardice of despair. The Government loses all moral authority, for "if it trusted us, it would tell us the truth ;" and the people, unaware of facts, moved by successive and over-violent emotions, and disorganized by its recognized inability to see through the haze of illusions, is left to guide itself, and, unless in its extremity it evolves a great man from within itself, wastes in purposeless rioting the energies which might have saved the State. Even with a population so liable to emotion as that of
Paris, it is, we believe, safer to be rigidly truthful, while with any other there is absolutely no excuse for maintaining illusions.
It would be lunacy, for example, for the German Generals to deny a true defeat in Germany, which would but be moved thereby to send them fresh and fresh resources, and worse than lunacy for an English General or Minister who is speaking to a country which is never energetic until it is fairly thrashed.
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