consists of great strategic movements, flank attacks, encirclements,
and dramatic surrenders, had gradually to forget that picture in favor
of the terrible idea that by matching lives the war would be won.
Through its control over all news from the front, the General Staff
substituted a view of the facts that comported with this strategy.

The General Staff of an army in the field is so placed that within
wide limits it can control what the public will perceive. It controls
the selection of correspondents who go to the front, controls their
movements at the front, reads and censors their messages from the
front, and operates the wires. The Government behind the army by its
command of cables and passports, mails and custom houses and blockades
increases the control. It emphasizes it by legal power over
publishers, over public meetings, and by its secret service. But in
the case of an army the control is far from perfect. There is always
the enemy's communiqué, which in these days of wireless cannot be kept
away from neutrals. Above all there is the talk of the soldiers, which
blows back from the front, and is spread about when they are on
leave. [Footnote: For weeks prior to the American attack at St. Mihiel
and in the Argonne-Meuse, everybody in France told everybody else the
deep secret.] An army is an unwieldy thing. And that is why the naval
and diplomatic censorship is almost always much more complete. Fewer
people know what is going on, and their acts are more easily
supervised.

3

Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the
word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be
some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real