Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/153

 purpose to put into every people a mob-instinct of hatred for the enemy, man, woman and child, Since everyone who has a pair of working hands is useful to the purposes of a modern war, the hate-propaganda was aimed at the civilians as well as the soldiers. But “keeping up morale” in the army was the main object. Generating hate in the civilian population made toward that end. If the soldier on leave heard from his women, his father and his uncles that the enemy were all a set of ruffians, a race which had nothing in common with the human race, it made him a better hater when he returned to the line. Half-truth was the best tool of this propaganda; but, war being the negation of all ordinary morality, the propagandists did not gag at lies. For a familiar example, there is the story about the Germans cutting off children’s hands in Belgium. It was not true. I repeat that I was in Belgium during the first month of the war; that there were German atrocities, some of which I witnessed—atrocities committed by order, for the strategic purposes of the General Staff—but that no case of the kind I mention was ever fully proved. Nevertheless it was a popular war-rumor in the beginning; it had all the qualities which make a story “go.” It was taken up by the propagandists, spread as a means of lashing up hate by men who knew better; so firmly fixed in the public mind that I myself have but lately been called “pro-German” for denying it. In fairness, I may add that they lied more grossly in Germany,