Throughout the Great War our own Press and that of the Germans were each pouring out, for the undesigned benefit of their enemy, substantially correct descriptions of everything in the war life of their respective nations, except a few formal military and naval secrets specially reserved by the censors. Each nation fought, on the whole, with the other standing well out in the light, with no inscrutability about its countenance. If we were ever again in such risk of our national life, would we not seriously try to make ourselves an enigma? Or would we leave this, as we have left some other refinements of war, to the other side to introduce first? V Suppose us again at war with a Power less strong at sea than ourselves. If we should want its fleet to come out and fight in the open, why not evoke, some fine morning, from every voice in our daily press, a sudden and seemingly irrepressible cry of grief and rage over the unconcealable news--the Censor might be defied by the way--that our Grand Fleet, while ranging the seas, had struck a whole school of drift mines and lost half its numbers? Strategic camouflage, however, would go far beyond such special means to special ends as that. It would, as a regular thing, derange the whole landscape presented to enemy eyes by our Press. There was in the war a French aerodrome across which the French camouflage painters had simply painted a great white high-road: it ran across hangars, huts, turf, everything; and everything was amazingly obliterated by it. Across our real life, as seen under the noonday rays of publicity in ordinary times, the supreme controller might draw some such enormous lines of falsification. Most of the fibs that we used in the war were mere nothings, and clumsy at that. When the enemy raided our trenches in the dead winter season, took fifty prisoners, and did as he liked for a while--so much as he liked that a court of inquiry was afterwards held and a colonel deprived of his command--we said in our official _communiqué_ that a hostile raiding party had "entered our trenches" but was "speedily driven out, leaving a number of dead." When civilian _moral_ at home was going through one of its occasional depressions, we gave out that it was higher than ever. We did not officially summon from the vasty deep the myth about Russian soldiers in England. But when it arose out of nothing we did make some use of it. These were, however, little more than bare admissions of the principle that truthfulness in war is not imperative. Falsification was tried, but it was not "tried out." Like really long-range guns, the kindred of "Bertha," it came into use only enough to suggest what another world-war might be. _Vidimus tantum._ And then the war ended.