Well, in my judgment, these official German communiqués are in the main remarkably exact, and I believe it is possible to say why they are so exact. The German General Staff makes war in a purely mechanical fashion. It gravely exaggerates, as do all modern North Germans, the calculable element in human affairs. It is what used to be called “scientific.” It is obvious that if you get a reputation for exactitude your falsehood, where it pays you to tell the falsehood, will be the more likely to work. The remarkable general accuracy of the official German communiqués cannot be due to any other object. It cannot be due to a mere love of truth, for the same Government deliberately circulates to its own provincial Press and to certain neutrals stories which cannot in the nature of things be true. Nor is this inaccuracy the result either of haste or of stupidity, it is very intelligent and obviously deliberate.
When, therefore, a German communiqué tells an untruth, that untruth is deliberate and upon an effective scale, and we have to consider what object it has, if we are to understand the news. We may take it that the object is nearly always domestic and political. Remember that these official German falsehoods, countersigned by the General Staff and the Government, are as rare as they are solid. They do not slip in. They are not vague or led up to by doubtful phrases.
Let me take two of them. Scarborough was officially described as a fortified port, like Sheerness or Cherbourg. That takes one’s breath away. But monstrous as it is, it is not childish, because it was intended to give to the public that read it at home a certain effect which was, in fact, produced.
So successfully was that effect produced that a competent military critic in the German Press, writing the day after, had already got the idea that Scarborough was the most important naval base upon the East Coast. We must remember when we read such things that very few educated men out of a thousand in our own country could give the names of the fortified naval bases upon, say, the Adriatic, or even the Atlantic coast of France.
Another example of the same thing in a rather different line is the illumination of Berlin, the giving of a holiday to the school children and the official proclamation of a great and decisive victory in Poland during the course of the second battle for Warsaw, an action which had already lasted a fortnight, which was destined to last for many more days, and which remained at that time utterly undecided.