31 OCTOBER 1925, Page 3

front the more credulous they are. However the tale grew,

we hope it will be proved that our Intelligence Branch did not invent it, though we can understand that an extreme practitioner in propaganda might easily contend that war means a contest of minds as well as a contest of physical endurance and that stories likely to discredit the enemy are legitimately employed. They are, however, a kind of poisoned gas of the brain. We suggest that a controversy will not lead us very far. We believed some things about the Germans which have since turned out to be untrue and the Germans believed things about us which were equally untrue, and perhaps even more untrue. Such things are the emanations of war ; they rise like vapours from a swamp.

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