Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/154

 especially when the case grew desperate. There, cutting off women’s breasts was the favorite nightmare tale.

This hate-propaganda failed a little of its main purposes. The soldier swallowed it less avidly than the civilian population. If you wanted a tolerant view of the enemy, you were most likely to get it from a soldier sitting in a dugout under fire, his gas-mask at the alert. If you wanted to hear that the enemy was a creature not quite human, but a species of gorilla which should be exterminated to the last baby, you must go to some comfortable home in Paris or London—or equally I suppose in Berlin. Indeed, whole elements in the European armies quietly closed their minds to this form of propaganda. British officers of the old school, for example, tried to maintain the tradition of the warrior chivalrous even in his thoughts. It was a conventionality of most British headquarters messes not to speak ill of the enemy. If the civilian visitor introduced the “hate-stuff” into the conversation, he was answered by polite denials or by frigid silence.

All this must be changed in the next war. You must focus your hatred where it is most useful and needed—in the soldiers at the front. And we are studying to change it. The propagandists and boards of morale are working and experimenting like the chemists—coolly reviewing the methods and mistakes of the last war, finding new methods without mistakes.