The only new thing about deception in war is modern man's more perfect means for its practice. The thing has become, in his hand, a trumpet more efficacious than Gideon's own. When Sinon set out to palm off on the Trojans the false news of a Greek total withdrawal, that first of Intelligence officers made a venture like that of early man, with his flint-headed arrow, accosting a lion. Sinon's pathetic little armament of yarns, to be slung at his proper peril, was frailer than David's five stones from the brook. Modern man is far better off. To match the Lewis gun with which he now fires his solids, he has to his hand the newspaper Press, a weapon which fires as fast as the Lewis itself, and is almost as easy to load whenever he needs, in his wars, to let fly at the enemy's head the thing which is not. He has this happiness, too: however often he fires, he can, in a sense, never miss. He knows that while he is trying to feed the enemy with whatever it may be bad for him to read the enemy will be trying just as hard to leave no word of it unread. As busily as your enemy's telescopes will be conning your lines in the field, his Intelligence will be scrutinising whatever is said in your Press, worrying out what it means and which of the things that it seems to let out are the traps and which are the real, the luminous, priceless slips made in unwariness. What the Sphinx was to her _clientèle_, what the sky is to mountain-climbers and sailors, your Press is to him: an endless riddle, to be interrogated and interpreted for dear life. His wits have to be at work on it always. Like a starved rat in a house where rat-poison is laid, he can afford neither to nibble a crumb that has got the virus on it, nor yet to leave uneaten any clean crumb that has fallen accidentally from a table. Do not thrilling possibilities open before you? What cannot you and I perform upon The unguarded Duncan? What not put upon His spongy officers? --that is, if Duncan be really unguarded enough to "ravin down his proper bane," like a dutiful rat, and his officers spongy enough to sop up, according to plan, the medicated stuff that you give them. III It is the common habit of nations at war to ascribe to the other side all the cunning, as if the possession of a Ulysses were some sort of discredit. Happily for us our chosen Ulysses in France, at the most critical time, was of the first order. But no soldier can go far ahead of his time; he has to work in it and with it. And so the rich new mine of Intelligence work through the Press was not worked by either side, in the Great War, for all it was worth. Only a few trial borings were made; experimental shafts were sunk into the seam, and good, promising stuff was brought to the top.