GREAT BRITAIN: Never Did, Never Shall

This week the war was a year old. Twelve months of anguish had trespassed on human hope. Young men with smiles had been struck down, boundaries had been swept aside as lightly as snow, loyalties had cringed and sickened, the whole world had learned to fear, suspect, hate. Among other things it had become plain that while Germans were without question the most meticulous, thorough, shrewd, methodical fighters in the world, Britons had dug down to the marrow of each British bone and to the ganglion of each British nerve, and demonstrated that despite gross muddleheadedness and inefficiency, Britain could fight.

The year’s greatest irony was that Britons expected bombs in the year’s first days but got them only in the last. Although war caught Britain unprepared, there was no panic. Munich, the most exhausting psychological experience a nation ever endured, had dulled the British capacity to react. The mood of Britain in the first week of September 1939 was utter depression. Win or lose, for better or for worse, the Britain they had known was ended. Instinctively all knew it.

A year ago in Britain the first thought was for protection. Shelter-building became a major industry. Civilians papered their windows, painted their curbs and even their horses and cows for blackout.

As international order gave way to universal insanity, even the laws of nature got mixed up. In Newcastle, 700 blind people offered to act as guides during total blackouts.

Britons were reluctant to give up their little luxuries—weekends at Brighton, afternoons messing about in the rose garden, outings with the children to Kew Gardens or the Zoo, drinks and darts in the pub around the corner. Being endowed with exaggerated poetic imagination, the nation got a mild case of “crisis stomach” worrying about bombing and gassing, about Mr. Chamberlain and what would happen after the war. But through it all ran a thin wire of pluck, which showed itself best in humor. Those were the days when a West End druggist put a placard in his window: “Bismuth as usual during altercations.”

But Hitler let the British down; nothing happened. There grew up the curious notion that they could win the war “comfortably.” Sacrifice on a national scale was not asked, hence not made. For eight precious months Britain slept on, until there was a rude noise in Norway.

Now the story was different. Bombs had begun to fall, by day and by night. The paraphernalia of A. R. P. were part of the landscape. Everyone was doing his bit—even the gentlewomen who practiced rifle shooting against the day when parachutists might land in their rose gardens. The amateur spirit was unconquerable.

“They’ll be easier than grouse,” remarked one post-debutante. “Too bad we can’t eat them.”

The grim business of real instead of imaginary air raids showed London something new: the best fun lives at the pit of danger. Concerts became enthusiastic patriotic festivals when bombers came overhead (see p. 56). In theatres there was an air of camaraderie. The manager of the Palace was roundly cheered when he interrupted Chu Chin Chow to announce that German planes were over the city. After Me and My Girl’s 1,625th performance, the audience joined the cast on the stage and did the Lambeth Walk for hours. At / Lived With You, Ivor Novello spontaneously gave the crowd a piece he wrote a quarter of a century ago: Keep the Home Fires Burning. At the Hippodrome Winston Churchill’s actor son-in-law, Vic Oliver, as master of ceremonies, invited each person in the audience to do an act. A youngster from the Canadian R. A. F., who until eight months ago sold women’s shoes in Cleveland to earn himself a musical education, sang for the first time in his life in public, and brought the house down.

Out in the country neighbors more or less appropriated German raids as their intellectual property. Villages boasted having more bomb craters than nearby towns. Citizens sagely analyzed raids.

They discriminated knowingly between the noise of bombs and antiaircraft, between parachute and ordinary flares, between Whitleys and Messerschmitts—which they now call “Jitterschmitts.” (London joked last week about a flustered gentleman who asked a telephone operator: “Quick, give me Messerschmitt 109.”) Most London bars stayed open (against regulations), and restaurants also kept going after hours to accommodate customers who were stranded—for taxis, busses and trams halted the moment the warnings sounded. Diners at the Savoy moved down into comfortable shelters under the building where a dance band and cold buffet awaited them.

Many had not yet learned bitter lessons, and stayed out to watch the show from roofs and in parks. Roof-squatters presented a problem to the authorities, who feared that their cigarets might be seen. In open Hampstead Heath, overlooking the great expanse of the city, crowds discussed the fingers of searchlights groping above them, analyzed the beams’ varying attitudes with an almost professional air, identified the locality of each light as it swung on the raiders.

A major loss was sleep. One morning-after a newspaper seller’s placard read: “Good yawning.” The nights were fun, but there was much to be done by day, and gradually the people rearranged their sleeping habits. They learned to nap between alarms. In large buildings, couches were wheeled into passages below stairs for those from dangerous top floors. In homes, mattresses were laid in unlikely places if they seemed safer than bed rooms. A deaf woman in London’s brainy Bloomsbury each night tied one end of a long string around her toe and hung the other end out of a window. By arrange ment, the local air-raid warden jerked when the sirens sounded.

These superficial contrasts between the year’s early depression and its late gay calm were rooted in a really important turnover in psychology. In the early days Britain was fighting for Poland, freedom, prestige, and other academic matters. Last week, Britons were fighting for hedgerows, chimney pots, foggy fens, swift foxes and horses with heart, the Derby, cabbage & boiled potatoes, squabbles in the House of Commons and in every man’s kitchen —things that grow and flourish and are loved in Britain. They were fighting for His Majesty George VI, King and Em peror By the Grace of God. They were fighting for their past, and for the right to make a new Britain. Upon that there was national resolve. Chamberlainism was dead. The Old School Tie was going fast. Bitterly it was observed that if Britain loses she will have lost upon the Playing Fields of Eton.

They were glad to be fighting alone at last; no one now could say, “Britain fights to the last Frenchman,” or “What can Britain do for Poland, Finland, Norway, Belgium?” Their feeling was not bravado. Nor was it always realistic — but great courage is seldom born of the prac tice of meticulously weighing facts. The thing they feared worse than bloodshed —boredom — was no longer fearful. British reserve had melted. Cabby was speaking to toff — and being answered. In the House of Commons Sir Kingsley Wood said last week that it would soon be both patriotic and distinguished to wear shabby clothes. Britons made up their minds now on the moral issue. Britain was wholly right, Germany wholly wrong.

Britain’s determination — which even the German press noted last week with “the admiration that the strong may grant his foe” — was not necessarily an accurate reflection of the military situation. Cen sorship and traditional military reticence combine to blur the picture, good or bad. In France, only a week before Paris fell, a wave of desperate optimism swept the country, electrifying even the indifferent French workers. But Britain is not France. The rest of the world might wonder whether Adolf Hitler would parade one day soon from Trafalgar Square to Pic cadilly, up Regent Street and across to Hyde Park — and down to the gates of Buckingham Palace. But there was no question in the minds of British men and women. They boast the world’s greatest poet and the world’s greatest confidence. With both they said last week.

This England never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.