That the propaganda was in large part conscious and directed was proved by the ease with which the flood of atrocity stories could suddenly be switched over from Germans to Russians. During the time that the Russian armies were fighting on our side, there was not a single story in our Press of Russian barbarity. But when the same armies, under the same officers, are fighting against the Poles, atrocities even more ingenious and villainous than those of the Germans in Belgium suddenly characterise the conduct of the Russian troops. The atrocities are transposed with an ease equal to that with which we transfer our loyalties.[91] When Pilsudski's troops fought against Russia, all the atrocities were committed by them, and of the Russian troops we heard nothing but heroism. When Brusiloff fights under Bolshevik command our papers print long Polish accounts of the Russian barbarities. We have seen that behind the conception of the enemy as a single person is a falsehood: it is obvious that seventy millions of men, women, and children, of infinitely varying degrees of responsibility, are not a single person. The falsehood may be, in some degree, an unwitting one, a primitive myth that we have inherited from tribal forbears. But if that is so, we should control our news with a view to minimizing the dangers of mythical fallacies, bequeathed to us by a barbaric past. If it is necessary to use them for the purposes of war morale, we should drop them when the war is over, and pass round the word, to the Churches for instance, that on the signing of an armistice the moratorium of the Sermon on the Mount comes to an end. As it is, two years after the Armistice, an English Vicar tells his congregation that to bring Austrian children to English, to save them from death by famine, is an unpatriotic and seditious act.