I think this is a good reason the search engine on here should be more understandable or easy to use----eg the principles of camouflage MacKenzie observed from Boer military trenches in the Boer War and how he applied those principles to military tactics and strategies as well as to golf course architecture has been explained a number of times and pretty comprehensively.
The thing to stress is the differences and distinctions in the use of camouflage, particularly trench camouflage in a military context or application, from the context and application of its use in golf course architecture.
If those differences and distinctions aren't made and explained it seems too many tend to assume Mackenzie was trying to hide his bunker and hazard features and such from the golfer.
He really wasn't trying to do anything of the kind. What he was trying to hide was the juxtaposition of the "man-made" formations of earth from the natural formations of earth. We, in golf architecture tend to call that "tying in". By doing this well (as well as the Boers did in the construction of their military trenches) the idea was that golfers would not be able to tell the difference of what was man-made and what was natural.
Obviously, the Boers did this with their military trenches so the British would not know where they were and therefore would not shoot at them and kill them. In this way clearly the Boers were trying to hide what they made from the British by making it appear that the trenches they made were part of the natural landscape. But that is not all the Boers made in military trenches in the Boer War. They ALSO made military trenches that were remarkably man-made and artificial looking just as the British did. Except unlike the British the Boers were not in them. They were merely dumby trenches to draw British fire away from where the Boers really were. And obviously this modus operandi by the Boers was pretty much the ultimate in an attempt at visual deception!
But Mackenzie was certainly not trying to hide his hazard features and such from the oncoming golfer, in fact his sand bunkering was starkly obvious just like a lot of the natural sand areas of say CPC. The fact that the sand bunkers were not visible if the golfer turned around and looked back at a hole he just played was merely a curious by-product. I very much doubt this was ever Mackenzie's primary intention to do, and in a sense something like that isn't much more than the result of a very well done stage set if someone looks at it from BEHIND the stage rather than from the perspective of the audience's seats.
There may’ve been some visual deception involved in Mackenzie’s attempts to make his man-made features look like they were naturally occurring but no more than naturally occurs in Nature anyway.
Matter of fact, if Mackenzie subscribed to some of Max Behr’s theories on naturalism in golf architecture which I believe he very much did, the idea was that naturally occurring landforms and really good man-made imitations of them were a whole lot less deceptive to a golfer’s perception and visual perspective of distance and such than starkly man-made looking golf architectural features were and could be. Behr’s point was that natural green sites and such which flowed naturally with and into the overall natural landscape were easier to determine distance and such in than some man-made artificial abrupt change in the landscape would be.
On the other hand, and in a strictly military context and application, Mackenzie constantly lobbied the British military to listen to him and his observations of Boer military trenching for the simple reason he felt if they did that a whole lot less British soldiers would die, and that was obviously true!
And Mackenzie never really stopped in his fixation on the effects of camouflage, not just in a golf architectural sense and application but in a military context and application.
In Doak’s book there is a copy of a letter Mackenzie wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt imploring him to employ his trench camouflage techniques. Mackenzie went so far as to proclaim to Roosevelt that if he did that it would essentially serve the purpose of ending all war as militaries would basically never know where the hell their enemies were they would be so well hidden!
It appears Roosevelt didn’t take his advice and perhaps never even answered him. The reason for that may be pretty obvious in a historical context as Roosevelt was getting to that point where he realized the nature of warfare was changing to such an extent that camouflage techniques had been rendered useless or were about to be.
I mean Roosevelt was not that far from understanding that nuclear weapons were close to a reality and no matter what the Japanese, for instance, did to try to hide them they were probably never going to be able to hide such as Nagasaki and Hiroshima and certainly Tokyo from Roosevelt’s B-29s bombers with nuclear payloads aboard them!
I hope this tells you everything you'd ever want to know about Mackenzie's application of camouflage to golf architecture, Nick, and the differences and distintions he understood in it between camouflage's application to warfare in a military context and camouflage's application to golf course architecture to produce the look of far more naturalism.
Some of the same principles and purposes apply to both, but as I hope you can see from the above, by no means all of them.