"By 1918, the French were trying large-scale visual deception, camouflage par faux-objectifs. Giant models of the Gare de l’Est railway station, together with fake boulevards and avenues made of wood and canvas, were set up in fields north-west of the city, with strings of lights that stayed on when Paris blacked out its street lights. But the British Royal Engineers remained sceptical of these kinds of objectifs simulés as antidotes to air raids. When enthusiastic amateurs wrote suggesting ‘the erection of a replica of London at some little distance in the country, meanwhile covering the real London with imitation fields’, the ideas were (as a witty letter to The Times by Colonel J. P. Rhodes pointed out) ‘received with reverence’, but ‘reluctantly discarded as unsuited to this imperfect world’."

from Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin