In war your licence to lead the other fellow astray is yet more ample. For war, though it may be good sport to some men, is not a mere sport. In sport you are not "out to win" except on certain terms of courtesy and handsomeness. Who would take pride in a race won by a fluke? At Henley, a long time ago, there were five or six scullers in for the Diamonds. One of them, L----, was known to be far the best man in the race. In the first heat he was drawn against A----, of Oxford, about the best of the others. L---- had one fault--a blind eye; and it often made him steer a bad course. Before the two had raced for fifty yards L---- blundered out of his course, crashed into A----, and capsized him. The rules of boat-racing are clear: L---- had done for himself. A----, who was now swimming, had only to look up to the umpire's launch and hold up a hand. A nod would have been the reply, and the heat would have been A----'s, and the final heat, in all likelihood, too. A---- looked well away from the umpire and kept his hands down, got back into his boat and said to his contrite opponent, "Start again here, sir?" A---- was decisively beaten, and never came so near to winning the Diamonds again. Of course he was right, the race being sport. He had "loved the game beyond the prize"; he had, like Cyrano, _emporté son panache_; he had seen that in sport the thing to strive for is prowess itself, and not its metallic symbol. But the prize of victory in war is no symbol; it is the thing itself, the real end and aim of all that you do and endure. If A---- had been sculling not for a piece of silversmith's work but for the righting of a wronged nation or for the reassertion of public right throughout Europe, not only would he have been morally free to take a lucky fluke when he got it: he would not have been morally free to reject it. In war you have to "play to win"--words of sinister import in sport. Pot-hunting, unhonoured in sport, is a duty in war, where the pot is, perhaps, the chance of a free life for your children. Hence your immemorial right to fall on your enemy where he is weak, to start before he is ready, to push him out of the course, to jockey him on to the rails, to use against him all three of Bacon's recipes for deceiving. A good spy will lie to the last, and in war a prisoner may lie like a saint and hero. With unmistakable glee the Old Testament tells us of Gideon's excellent practical fib with the crockery and trumpets. Even the Wooden Horse of the Greeks has long ceased to raise moral questions. The pious Aeneas, certainly, called it a foul. But what did he do himself, when he got a good opening? Went, as the Irish say, beyond the beyonds and fought in an enemy uniform. Ruses of war and war lies are as ancient as war itself, and as respectable. The most innocent animals use them; they shammed dead in battle long before Falstaff.