Should questions be asked, Saxon had a long story prepared, to the
effect that we were travelling to join Henry Somerset, Duke of Beaufort,
to whose household we belonged. This invention he explained to me, with
many points of corroboration which I was to furnish, but when I said
positively that I should rather be hanged as a rebel than speak a
falsehood, he looked at me open-eyed, and shook his head as one much
shocked. A few weeks of campaigning, he said, would soon cure me of my
squeamishness. For himself, no more truthful child had ever carried a
horn-book, but he had learned to lie upon the Danube, and looked upon it
as a necessary part of the soldier's upbringing. 'For what are all
stratagems, ambuscades, and outfalls but lying upon a large scale?' he
argued. 'What is an adroit commander but one who hath a facility for
disguising the truth? When, at the battle of Senlac, William the Norman
ordered his men to feign flight in order that they might break his
enemy's array, a wile much practised both by the Scythians of old and by
the Croats of our own day, pray what is it but the acting of a lie?
Or when Hannibal, having tied torches to the horns of great droves of
oxen, caused the Roman Consuls to imagine that his army was in retreat,
was it not a deception or infraction of the truth?--a point well brought
out by a soldier of repute in the treatise "An in bello dolo uti liceat;
an apud hostes falsiloquio uti liceat." And so if, after these great
models, I in order to gain mine ends do announce that we are bound to
Beaufort when we are in truth making for Monmouth, is it not in accord
with the usages of war and the customs of great commanders?' All which
specious argument I made no attempt to answer, beyond repeating that he
might avail himself of the usage, but that he must not look to me for
corroboration. On the other hand, I promised to hold my speech and to
say nothing which might hamper him, with which pledge he was forced to
be contented.