William Gerhardie (original spelling Gerhardi; 1895-1977) was British but lived as a child in Russia where his father was in the cotton trade. He volunteered in WW1 and was sent to Russia with military intelligence. An Oxford University graduate, William Gerhardie, became an acclaimed novelist in the 1920s with his novels “ Futility” (1922), “The Polyglots” (1925), “Doom” (1928) and “Resurrection” (1934), and other works. He published an autobiography, “Memoirs of a polyglot: The autobiography of William Gerhardie” (1931) and co-authored “The Casanova Fable: A Satirical Revaluation” with Hugh Kingsmill (1934). He subsequently became reclusive, living impoverished in London where he worked on his non-fiction masterwork “God's Fifth Column. A biography of the Age 1890-1940” that was discovered among his papers and thence published posthumously in 1981 by Hodder & Stoughton (page references below are to the 1990 Hogarth Press edition) .
William Gerhardie's “God's Fifth Column” provides a rich account of the ideas, manners, mentality and motivation of 2 sets of people in the run up to WW1 and thence to WW2 – on the one hand, the wonderful humanitarian writers such as Anton Chekhov, Lev Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw. D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Emile Zola, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, Herman Hesse, and Walt Whitman, and on the other, the English, French, German, Austrian, Italian and Russian kings, emperors, generals, statesmen, diplomats and other Establishment figures, male and female, who inexorably led the world to disaster and of whom the best that could be said in hindsight was that they had good table manners. The term “fifth column” derived from Fascist Nationalist Franco colleague General Mola boasting that in addition to his 4 columns advancing on Republican-held Madrid he had supporters inside the city, described by the Republican defenders as a “fifth column” (page 61). To Gerhardie, “God's Fifth Column” are those elements that wittingly or unwittingly sabotage defective human social constructs.
William Gerhardie in “God's Fifth Column” was particularly scathing of journalists and their role in national propaganda that leads to war: "The Aristotelian exploitation of reason for purposes of power can be traced in advertising, in politics, and particularly in journalism, which is a debased Aristotelian form of using human failings and weaknesses to extract power by deliberately exploiting these failings and weaknesses. Literature is an intuitive communication of the Platonic Idea of truth and beauty hiding behind the shadow of its material form. If journalism and modern advertising are debased forms of literature, propaganda is debased journalism. But journalism as exploitation of suspense, trading as it does on human restlessness, is equally despicable whether it takes the form of detective fiction, films, plays or magazine stores. Art, communicating the eternal reality of the Platonic Idea which invests objects and persons alike with the breath of life, is constitutive, not conceptual, and as such it is independent of artificial stimulants. The criterion of a genuine work of literature is that you can open it at any page to savour each passage for itself, without the narcotic of induced excitement in the shape of knowing what has come before and speculating on what is to happen next, commonly called "a plot". If a book is worth reading at all it is worth reading more than once... This, then, is the exploitation of the Word for profit - the generic term of this remunerative if thoroughly un-Platonic pursuit being "journalism"... After this to the final deception - national propaganda - is not not far to sink. Propaganda is indeed is the last refuge of journalism" (page 274).
For a detailed review see Gideon Polya, “ Book Review: “God's Fifth Column” by William Gerhardie”, Countercurrents, 6 May 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya060514.htm .