THE FOG FACTORY

In 1917 British and American publishers released what they said was a nonfiction book titled Christine, by Alice Cholmondeley. The book’s protagonist is a young English woman living in Berlin just before the outbreak of the World War I. She’s a violin student, and she frequently writes her widowed mother about her life in the German capital. At first she is happy and captivated by her experiences in Berlin, which a romance with a handsome German military officer. But as war approaches, Christine’s portrayal of the German people turns dark. They gradually reveal themselves to be not gracious but sour, conformist, and callous. The government announces harsh new regulations for civilians, the police become cruel, and Christine gets elbowed as she walks in the street. The Germans develop a bloodlust for the spoils of military victory. “The Germans have gone mad,” Christine writes. “The streets seem full of drunken people, shouting up and down with red faces all swollen with excitement.” Her impending marriage to the German officer is blocked, and when she tries to leave Germany she is stopped and held for hours. She develops pneumonia and dies in Stuttgart on August 8, 1914—just four days after Britain enters the war.

Readers in Britain, the United States, and elsewhere were moved by the woman’s tragic story—and appalled by the brutish behavior of the Germans. As was later learned, however, the book was a hoax. There was no young girl named Christine, and no author named Alice Cholmondeley. The real author was Countess Mary Annette (Elizabeth) Russell, a novelist who was married to the elder brother of English philospher Bertrand Russell. Her knowledge of Germany gave credibility to a clever work of propaganda, created by the British government to arouse international antipathy toward Germany. It succeeded brilliantly.

The British propaganda effort was unprecedented, improvised, and effective.

The use of propaganda—the shaping of opinion by symbols, stories, rumors, reports, films, and other forms of communication—goes back at least to the 16th century, when Thomas More’s Utopians employed it to avoid war. Propaganda figured in the early 17th-century struggle between Catholicism and emerging Protestantism. But it wasn’t until the Great War that the concept of psychological warfare became a bona fide tactic to be used alongside the more conventional