This secretiveness is, I fear, a mark of the second-rate
military mind. The big people are naturally too busy to concern themselves with censorship questions, and even those efficient officers who in the past managed with intelli- gence the publicity departments of the Services and the Foreign Office have either been sent elsewhere or find their efforts clogged by the machine. It is the little people to whom secretiveness means " safety first." It is interesting to recall that Herr Hitler, whom even his warmest admirers would not describe as possessing a first-class military mind. was all for secretiveness. I have been looking up recently those passages in Mein Kampf in which he criticises the German character. After describing his fellow-countrymen as " that great stupid flock of sheep, the patient and mutton- headed German people," he curses them for their pacifism. their democratic tendencies, their readiness to believe in international solidarity and their refusal to behave as a herd. " If only," he writes, " the German people had possessed the spiritual unity of a herd, then would the Reich today be master of the globe." These criticisms strike us as strange. Yet even more strange is his fury with them for their " lack of secretiveness," for their " schwatzhaftigkeit," or love of gossip. Are the Germans really " schwatzhaf lig" ? Are we particularly "schavatzhaftig "? I do not believe it. It is merely that the ordinary human conversation is repellent to the second-rate military mind.
Previous page
