A PROPHET AT HOME

by

Douglas Reed

published: 1941

Home Page of Douglas Reed Books

AUTHOR'S NOTE

My publisher, however, tells me that the title, 'Decline To Fall', would certainly be misunderstood and would lead to confusion, and as I always bow to his excellent judgment in such things the cover and the title-page of the book bear the title, A Prophet At Home. For me, nevertheless, the book remains 'The Decline To Fall', as I feel that this best expresses my mind, and the reader will find several passages which allude to this title. I owe him this explanation.

Curtain Raiser

Window Over London

Part One

The Piping Times

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11

Part Two

New Wars For Old

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

Part Three

The Defence Of Dullmouth

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07

Part Four

Decline To Fall

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08

Postscript

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CURTAIN RAISER

This book is the third - and the last, as I vow with as much sincerity as any man making his good resolutions on New Year's Eve - to grow out of an idea which was to have been contained in one, Insanity Fair.

The trilogy, the triptych, the three-master and the three-decker have all passed out of fashion; here, belatedly, is a three-volume-book sprung from a single seed, a fleur-de-lis that grew its second and third petals as an afterthought. When the first and second books were published, events promptly supplied enthralling sequels to them, so that the perspiring writer was left muttering, like Oscar Wilde, 'I wish I had said that', while his second self, who knows him very well, answered, like Whistler, 'You will, Reed, you will'. The saddest of all things of tongue or pen are those you might have said, the retort you might have made if the waiter had not spilt the soup down your neck just as it sprang to your lips, and these last words of mine, famous or infamous, always seethe in me and make me feel like a champagne bottle bursting to expel its cork, or a retired actress pining for her last farewell appearance, which, like to-morrow, never comes.

The story of these three books is, to me, very interesting, like many other things about me. They belong to the more notable of the minor literary failures of our time. The first, Insanity Fair, was conceived in 1935, written in 1936 and 1937 and published in 1938. It was the product of an irresistible impulse to warn the British public that it was about to be struck down by the thing which somebody at some time has probably called the juggernaut of war.

About 5000 other writers and politicians at that time were writing and saying the same thing; 5000 more were writing and saying precisely the opposite. I felt that, amid this tumult of voices crying their wares, I would need to wrap mine in some new kind of tinfoil if I were to catch the British eye; indeed, at that time literary critics, in some exasperation, were tending to begin their reviews of any book on this boring subject with the words 'Yet another of these books about Europe', as who should say, 'Tragic is the state of literature when men write only of such things as life and death, of liberty and hope, of freemen and bondmen, of war and peace, of poverty and moneybags, when they could write about sweeties and cuties and debutantes and debentures and cricket and croquet and cocktails and cockshies and the clubs and the pubs and who-did-the-murder and all the other fascinating things that make life worth writing about'.

So I had to strike a note that might catch the British ear amid the din, and sought to do this by setting my warning against a background of personal adventure, by weaving into the story a great deal about that absorbing subject, the study of myself.

The method succeeded, in one way. The book did attract the attention I wanted. But the effect was different from that which I meant to achieve. The British public, in large numbers, read the book, decided that it was 'readable', cast a sidelong and suspicious but curious glance at its author, and imperturbably, continued on its way, caring no more then than before for the juggernaut bearing down on it from behind. The book, as something to read, had succeeded; the warning it contained might as well not have been uttered, and was by many thought to be the expression of an exaggerated pessimism that spoiled an otherwise 'readable' piece of writing, a bad patch in a good story.

The juggernaut was by now very near and I decided to yell 'Look out!' even louder than before. Or rather, I did not decide this, but just followed my inner instinct, and yelled. Time still remained, I felt, for that incorrigible jay-walker to jump out of the way, if only he would. I was no selfless altruist; he had in his pocket my own life, my career, my earnings, my hopes, my future, my children's future, and my ideals. So I wrote another book, Disgrace Abounding, and the jay-walker had hardly had time to turn the last page and declare that it, too, was 'readable', but its author an intolerably gloomy fellow, when the juggernaut hit him in the back.

So these two books failed. But then the strange thing happened. The jay-walker, mangled but still breathing, looked up with reluctant respect and said, 'Sir, you are a successful man. You said this thing would run me down and by Buddha it has. Your books are most readable'. To which I answered, 'Sir, the thing I regret is that all this has hurt me more than it has hurt you'.

But as I contemplated them, the jay-walker and the juggernaut, a project was born in me - to write another book. My typewriter looked at me reproachfully, but I ignored its glance and forced a sheet of paper into its reluctant maw. I had written two books about the juggernaut; now I would write one about the jay-walker, another cautionary tale about his horrid lot, his hopes of recovery, and his chances, if ever he stood on his feet again, of heading straight for the next precipice and casting himself over it, as by all past experience he was bound to do.

I did not want him to do that, but if he did, and if by any chance a spark of life remained in him after that, I wanted him feebly to call to me, as he lay groaning 'twixt life and death, 'Sir, you continue to be successful. You told me I should hurt myself if I threw myself over this precipice and by Mahomet I have hurt myself. I regret that I had with me your last remaining cash, and that this has been lost in the fall, but your books, if I never breathe another word, are beyond dispute readable. You are indeed the model of a successful man'.

Thus, out of a single book came forth twins, and out of those twins, triplets. 'Decline to Fall' is the brother of those others. It is still the product of that flaming, overpowering feeling, born in Berlin and Vienna about the time of Hitler's coming, that there is something rotten in the state of England, which had the strength and power to prevent this, if such plagues of war and death, famine and destruction, can be twice let loose on Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Other motives have since then come to join that one. For one thing, people in many countries like to read these books, and write to ask me to continue writing them. For another thing, I like to write them.

Before I begin to tell the tale of a homeless patriot, I owe a bow and a special word, first, to Scottish, and second to English readers.

Being of a mild and placatory disposition I never, well hardly ever, offer affront without cause, and I do not like to think that Scottish readers may, in this book as in the others, be pained by finding references to 'the English Channel' or suchlike. To some extent I share their feeling, that this is an archaic form, like Ye Olde this-and-that, which has no claim to survival, and when I hear politicians to-day foretelling that our salvation after this war can only come through the union of 'English-speaking peoples', I wonder where they, who like myself are probably students of our stage, press, radio and literature, propose to find these English-speaking peoples.

Nevertheless, I fear I may offend Scottish readers in this book again. The trouble began with Insanity Fair, in which I severely criticized 'England' and 'English policy' because I thought these were leading straight to a war that could be prevented. The book brought me plaintive plaudits from Scotland, letters in which I was praised with faint damns for always criticizing 'England' and 'English policy'. Be British, urged the writers, and include us in this.

In the next book, Disgrace Abounding, I became violently critical of 'England' and 'English policy' because time to avert the war was shortening. This time Mrs. MacGalashiels, of Cromarty Terrace, Inverlochness, and many others, were really cross. They sharply reminded me that Scotland was just as much responsible as, if not more responsible than England for everything that was going wrong, and said plainly that I laboured under an age-old Sassenach delusion if I thought England could make mistakes in a big way without Scottish help. Had I no notion of the part great Scotsmen had played in helping England to bring about all these disasters, they implicitly asked? 'Britain' and 'British' were the words I should use. (I sometimes tried to placate these good Scots friends by addressing my replies to their letters, 'Mrs. MacGalashiels, Cromarty Terrace, Inverlochness, Britain'; but strangely, this seemed to soothe them not at all.)

Of course I know of those Scotsmen, and could name many names, if I would, and these letters almost made me resolve to include the Scots next time I had anything really nasty to say, so that they should not again feel slighted. But I feel limits should be set. Would the Scots wish the Germans to re-name rickets, which, as I believe, they call die englische Krankheit (the English ailment), or the French to broaden into britannique their description of an article said to be in daily use to which we, for some reason, ascribe French origin?

Apart from that, 'English' was what I meant and mean. First, I am English and feel justified, first, in criticizing my own people. And last, the faults and mistakes I scarified seemed to me specifically 'English', and the product of a system specifically 'English'. London, the English capital, is the centre of Britain and the Empire, the seat of the Government which in the end has the decisive word to say in British affairs, and of its parliament. The rulers of Britain, in the Government and in the equally important civil services, are in the vast majority men bred and trained at a few 'public' schools, reserved to a small moneyed coterie, most of which are situated within a long stonethrow of London. 'Foreign policy' is made in London and England. In England, more than in any other part of the Empire, dislike of exertion, fear of change, and rigid class distinctions reach their greatest ponderousness and this dead weight of a system now as far behind the times as Puffing Billy acts as a drag and brake on the younger, healthier and more vigorous forces which would have reinvigorated England, strengthened Britain, and prevented this war.

So 'England' and 'English policy' it will have to be, though I do confess to one inexcusably insular slip in a former book - when I said that 'G.B.' on the number-plate of a motor car stood for 'England'.

And now for the special word to English readers, to the compatriots of the homeless patriot. In one of those books of mine - I often wish that people would not buy my books, but just send me the money for them, this would do quite as well - I spoke casually with some regret of one of those English faults, the lack of a sense of humour.

Little did I anticipate how many dovecots I should flutter by this simple statement of what seemed to me the most self-evident truth. For the first time I succeeded, beyond all belief, in rousing people. Warnings of war - no, these had not moved the jay-walker, with the juggernaut behind him; who had gone calmly on his way, with the same half-curious, half-pitying, I-know-better-than-you-me-lad look on his face. Not even war itself went deeper than skin-deep.

But with these few words I seem to have set idols atotter all over England. Letters implored me to retract. Acquaintances took me into corners and, after a propitiatory glass of sherry, said, as if by chance but with a deep underlying fear that could not be hidden, 'Of course, you were only joking when you said that we haven't a sense of humour?' Luncheon-table ladies, looking nervously round the table in a perceptible appeal for the support and succour of the assembled company, tittered, with a ghastly attempt to invest the terror they obviously felt in the clothes of a dazzling witticism, 'Mr. Reed is the man who thinks we have no sense of humour, tee-hee!'

I am not easily surprised, but I was startled by the effect these few words had had. To many countrymen and countrywomen of the homeless patriot they seemed to have given a glimpse into some unknown and terrifying world; it was as if, sleep-walking, they had wakened to find themselves on the brink of an abyss, or as if they had found themselves suddenly stripped naked. Take from us what you will, they seemed to say, with pleading eyes, take fortune, hope, even life itself; but do not deprive us of our belief that we have A Sense Of Humour.

Yet these words were seriously written and seriously meant. I believed that, by and large, England and the English lack a sense of humour. Otherwise, how could they live without a single humorous journal, or suffer the heavy bludgeonings of facetiousness they receive from 'light leaders'? How could they continue to laugh, for decades and centuries, at the lampooning of charladies and plumbers' mates, of people who drop their aitches or keep aspidistras?

Does a sense of humour mean that the blue-behinded baboon should only be moved to mirth by contemplation of its own nether end, reflected in a pool? How, I thought, could a people have a sense of humour that had allowed its highest Public Attorney to pillory Whistler in the witness-box because he had 'only taken two days' to paint a picture. and for this 'labour of two days, asked a fee of two hundred guineas'? And again, what people with a sense of humour could cling to the depressing rite of the white-shirt-and-white-tie so that sometimes in the Bay of Biscay, as somebody once remarked, 'Every first class passenger put on evening clothes to be sick in'?

But the English Sense Of Humour, as I had noticed, only found class distinctions funny when contemplated, in those below, by those on top; when considered, in those on top by those below, they were sacrosanct. No plumber's mate, charlady, aitch-dropper or aspidistra-keeper was expected to find anything funny in the white-tie gag, which I find excruciating; this would have been class-hatred.

That form of minor mental derangement which is known as dressing-for-dinner took one of its funnier turns, as I think, with the coming of radio, when the joint owner of the voice that reads the news, the cough, and the phrase 'Excuse me, I'll read that again', was required to appear in evening clothes before the tiny mechanical box through which his words, cough and apology travelled to the public, and was authorized to claim a small sum each week for the laundering of the starched shirts he thus needed.

Invisible to all but himself, he stood there, clothed in the same uniform as every waiter in the land and as every bandsman, crooner, and fashionable comedian, for, as one of these, himself most immaculately attired, once most truly sang, the world that tries so hard to amuse itself demands that even its bawdy ballads should be sung to it by a man wearing such clothes:

Give them smut, and give them dirt
In a clean white tie and a clean white shirt!

That invisible man at the microphone, in his dinner-jacket, seems to me symbolic of many things in England, but among these things is not a sense of humour.

Every rule has its exceptions, and England has, of course, here and there, men and women with a sense of humour. One of these got loose during the present war and was promptly suppressed; he escaped with a fine, and was lucky not to have gone to prison. This was the man, and in my opinion he deserves to count among the gayest jesters in history, who was bombed in his house in Jermyn Street and, on climbing into the next door house to see the damage, found, in his own words, 'an unexploded bomb standing up on the floor like a beer bottle'.

His subsequent actions, in my view, are those of a man with A Sense Of Humour, but then, as I say, he was fined. The bomb had not exploded, but might explode at any time. In the general interest, therefore, its removal to a place where it could explode harmlessly was advisable, and this man picked it up and started downstairs with it. It weighed 100 lb., and on the way he dropped it on his foot. At the foot of the stairs he met a friend and said, 'Look, I've got a bomb. How can we get it to the Green Park?' The friend said, 'Wait here and I'll fetch a taxi, and we'll take it and give it breakfast at the Corner House'.

This seems to me a very humorous proceeding, and I only regret that before the friend came back the man with the bomb had been arrested, because I should love to know if London contains a taxi-driver with that particular sense of humour. Unfortunately the official sense of humour dictated that, in the circumstances of this incident, the bomb should have been left where it was until it could be officially removed, and if during the wait it exploded and wrecked a house or two, well, that would just be part of the price that has to be paid for a sense of humour.

The man with the hundred-pound bomb was fined a hundred pounds and granted bail in a hundred pounds; his final remark, when the fine was reduced to one of only five pounds, was that he was 'glad to be out of the hundred pound class'.

This, as I say, was an exceptional man, and he learned that a sense of humour is an expensive thing to have in England.

But England at large - and how often have I wondered whether England deserves to be at large - most certainly lacks a sense of humour. The proof of this, to my satisfaction at all events, is first that a nation with a sense of humour would not talk so incessantly about its sense of humour; second, that it would not object so vehemently when it is told that it has no sense of humour; and third, and most important, and above all, that no nation with a sense of humour could on three successive days vociferously applaud the same statesman in such contradictory declarations as these:

On Monday:

Freaks, rum'uns, fellow-curiosities, lend me your ears. The great power Athens has treacherously and without warning attacked the weak state of Corinth, which we are pledged to succour. We are resolved to prevent a new era of militarist aggression on this planet and shall aid noble Corinth with all our might, until the barbarous aggressor is defeated.

Athens has almost completed the subjugation of Corinth: we feel there is after all much to be said for Athens and it would be midsummer madness to try and preserve so ramshackle a state as Corinth, which is a long way away anyway, and which we know nothing about. We should not hastily forget the long traditional friendship and the close bonds of sympathy which unite us with noble Athens.

On Wednesday:

Barbarous Athens has attacked us. In taking up the sword, which we shall not sheathe until we sheathe it, we are defending the cause of weak states and freemen throughout the world against the forces of evil. History will show etcetera etcetera etcetera. We are fighting for Christianity civilization democracy etcetera etcetera etcetera....

One aspect of a sense of humour is that a man should be able to laugh at a joke against himself. A Jew, for instance, always enjoys a joke at his own expense, because it costs him nothing.

But the homeless patriot is still looking for the English sense of humour. It was there once. Perhaps we have put it down somewhere and cannot remember where, somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century. We certainly know we had it, once. Perhaps Sheridan and Hook and Lamb gave it to Wilde and Whistler, and these two, deciding that it belonged to Ireland and America anyway, took it with them. If it is to be found anywhere in England now, then it is in the keeping of the Cockneys, or perhaps of the great working class as a whole; they, it is true, still have a very keen sense of fun.

WINDOW OVER LONDON

My drabbest memories are of basements and ground floors, but the coldest attic, like one I once had in Paris, glows pleasantly in my thoughts, because the sun and the moon and the stars were its neighbours. If I had been a dale-dweller, in some primitive time, I should never have rested until I had come to live on a hill, and those medicine-men of our contemporary times, the surgeons of the mind, who think to discern the instincts and impulses that were being given a man when he lay in his mother's womb, would produce some strangely-named explanation for this, something about fear and phobia; but I think a healthy man, like a plant turning towards the light, is naturally moved to get his head into the clean air and look about him and make for a higher hill, if he sees one.

Here, in this room, I feel that I am on the roof of London. Nothing that I can see is higher than I am, save the barrage balloons, that on a fine day browse above me like silver cows in an azure meadow, and on a dull one loom intermittently through the lower fringe of trailing grey clouds, staring stupidly down at me from between their horns. In this long and lofty room, with its tall windows all around, I feel that I am in a ship, sometimes sailing towards a cloudless blue horizon, sometimes ploughing across the ragged and broken grey sea of London's roof-tops.

Outside, as far as I can see, and that is a long way, is London. Ten or twenty spires, according to the weather. Leagues of roofs and chimneypots.

Outside are shrieking sirens, the fierce bark of anti-aircraft guns, like tethered bloodhounds savagely but vainly straining at something just beyond their reach, the drone of engines from unseen aeroplanes, the leaden, quivering crash of bombs.

Two of them fell a little way off last night, as I sat at my window over London, watching spellbound. They fell near the Edgware Road; one, exploding in a great flower of flame and sparks, blossomed into the night like a gold and scarlet chrysanthemum, and the other grew into a tall black tulip of dark and menacing smoke.

To-day I shall see two more heaps of squalid ruins in those mean streets; strange how houses that die a violent death, like human beings, look ridiculous and repugnant, an obscene caricature of their well-tended, best-face-foremost living selves, so that you long to take a cloth and cover them. This, you think, half-pitying and half-contemptuous, was a man, who lived and laughed and loved; is it possible? (How often have I thought that and wished that we could evaporate in the moment of death.) And this, you think, was a house, where men and women mated and children played, this heap of muck with the inexplicably intact bathtub lying askew on top of it; is it possible?

And why is the bathtub seemingly always spared? Would it then be good to undress and take a bath when the bombs begin to fall? Strangely, I always do just the opposite. If I am in my bath, singing, as is the Englishman's bathright, when they come I get out of it and dress; although I have, or think I have, less superstitions, prejudices and inhibitions than most, I share with others this unreasonable resolve to be clothed and in my right mind for any rendezvous with a bomb, although I know better than they that, clothed or unclothed, I should look just as ridiculous afterwards.

London. London, for the first time for centuries, visited by flame and destruction. How those barrage balloons remind me, sometimes, of the Gadarene swine, the heraldic beasts of our time! London in the throes of her greatest ordeal since the Great Fire and the Plague. Courage standing guard in the streets; fear huddling in the basements. My own, my native city; for the first time for many years I feel like that about London, for pity is at any rate akin to love. The silhouette I see from my window is still almost unimpaired. The gaps, relative to the gigantic mass of the city, are few and far between; London has only had a few teeth knocked out. But the cup of human misery fills and fills; it must have a hole in the bottom, or it would have overflowed long since.

I cannot myself understand the insuppressible second side of my nature which makes me exult to sit at my window over London and watch and experience the very thing I foresaw and dreaded for so long. For I sat at another high window in Berlin for many years and watched the four horsemen - war, famine, pestilence and death - grooming their steeds for a new adventure; and afterwards I sat at other windows in Vienna and Prague and saw them gallop through the streets; and in Bucharest and Warsaw and Brussels and Paris I heard the drumming of their approaching hooves; and during all those nightmare years I thought and knew and said and wrote, 'The end of all this will be London and England and Britain and the British Empire, and why the heck doesn't my own, my native land throw off its lunatic obsession with golf and the pictures and chocolate creams and cocktail parties and ranting, sanctimonious politicians and stop this while there is time, for peace is more desirable than another war?'

To be run over by a train you never see is not so bad; but I was like a man tied to the track who had to watch the train bearing down on him for miles. I was like a man who called to another, about to be knocked down, 'Look out', only to be rebuked by the cold stare of one who has not been introduced. I was like a man who knew for years the nightmare he would have on a certain night. Yet now when the nightmare is here, I am glad to be in it.

I suppose there are several reasons. The schoolboy longing for adventure still stirs in me, and the journalist's itch to write about great events, however revolting, too; if I were sent to Hades I should take an asbestos typewriter with me. Then, I have forgotten fear, and this helps; the summer of 1940 suddenly made me realize, for some queer reason, that nothing is wasted in such prodigious quantities as fear, and that to fear for others is as wasteful as to fear for oneself. Then again, the smug years from 1918 to 1939, when God's name was tagged on by smug old men to every crime against reason and humanity and the cause of mankind, were so bad that the present is not worse; on the contrary, it is better, for now we no longer pretend that we are at peace when we are at war. And lastly, the nightmare has not reached the one final and fatal and irretrievable end - the invasion of England and England's subjugation to a foreign conqueror, which would mean to a man of my mind a death worse than the other death, because it would mean for centuries the end of hope.

England, has lain in immunity from this thing for too long; her people have almost forgotten what it means. But I know, for I have lived among peoples who for centuries lay under alien rule, and I have seen other peoples, who had known a brief liberation from that worst of all fates, again surrendered pitilessly to it - in one appalling case at the command of England herself. As long as this irrevocable disaster does not happen, hope remains; and while there's hope, there's life.

But back to London and St. John's Wood, and my window over London. The Gadarene swine are just being hauled down; one gigantic beast sinks slowly past my window, goggling in at me in porcine incomprehension of my contemptuous look, and disappears behind an apartment house to his lair. Now nothing is higher than I, in my crow's nest over London town. Low cloud and mist and driving rain have hidden the spires and all else but the nearer roof-tops, and an unexpected sea-gull, swinging round and round outside, makes me feel more than ever that I am in a ship on a wintry sea. Somewhere above, even in this weather, flies a bomber, for the sirens are shrieking again. Where London was, half an hour before, is only a grey curtain, a backcloth the thoughts that chase each other through my mind. That sea-gull is back again, majestically steadying himself on some air current known only to the chart of his instinct. I must be in a ship. The bomber sounds to be overhead; what weather to fly in! In the last war, when I was in the air force, we would never have thought of leaving the ground on such a day as this, but now, with all these new instruments, they fly in anything.

The last war! Against that grey backcloth, from my window over London, I see the figures of my youth's friends, of the men who were young when I was young. Rain, and mist, and driving wind, and mud, and the little khaki figures rising from some unsuspected trough in the mire and going forward, at Ypres, on the Somme, at Passchendaele. There they go, like the ten little nigger boys, and rat-a-tat-tat, and down they go, and soon there are none.

A million of them. I might have been dining with one of them to-night. There they go, against the grey curtain, with little blobs on their heads that are tin hats, and little sticks in their hands that are rifles, one after another they go, and fall, and disappear into the grey mist. They were heroes; they made the world safe for democracy; where are they now? All sorts of phrases we made up about them:

They died that we might live
Their name liveth for evermore

They shall grow not old as we that
are left grow old

At the going down of the sun, and in the
morning, we will remember them

If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies blow....

But I remember them, as they pass before me against that grey background, and am sorry for them. I never said, as many people said, that their lives had been ruined by the last war. Mine was not - but then, I survived, and had a good time, and having had it I should not mind sharing their lot to-day, as long as nobody irritated me by telling me I was making the world safe for something, but their lives were quite ruined, because they died, and if they could, if they can, look back now they must wonder why.

I wish they could all have survived, as I did, and have known good times before they went to make the world safe for something - have known the sunshine on Swiss lakes, snow on Austrian mountains, wine-gardens on the Vienna hills, Prague at Christmas time, Budapest in the spring, poverty, fatherhood, success, despair, love, especially love amid the bombs. But they were so young, and what has it all availed? Will this avail anything? Why must the young men, the best, go first, this time again? The military age should begin at fifty and work downwards. Why take the cream of another generation before it has had time to form? Why deliver England to another generation of old men?

The grey curtain that envelops my window over London offers no answers to these questions; only the echo comes back - Why? But looking out from it I am surprised to discern that my life, which like the lives of millions of others in these times seemed continually to be taken up and thrown senselessly here and there by the unmeaning storm of events, has after all a certain rhythm. For I notice, suddenly, that I am still in the middle of the events I have watched for so long. They have swept me back to my home town, even to my birthplace.

On revient toujours ... I have not loved London for long enough, but I have come back to London. Just round the corner, only just out of sight, is the house where I was born; it was nearly bombed the other night. just round another corner are the barracks from which, when I was a baby in arms, I saw British soldiers march off to make South Africa safe for something or other. Just round a third corner is a place I was married - not the marriage that is in the records, but a romantic affair that was solemnized between the lamp post and the letter-box in Avenue Road, and how well I remember that day. Nearby, too, is Lord's Cricket Ground, Mecca of all my youthful pilgrimages, place where I lay as a British soldier waiting to go to the last Great War.

The grey curtain, and the superior sea-gull, and the thing that just exploded somewhere, suddenly combine to tell me that I am just where I ought to be. They can answer no other questions, but they can at least tell me that. Here I was born; here I am; and here I might die if one of those bombers pulls his lever just at the right moment. But by some manner of means I know that this will not happen. If it should, the most precious part of my English birthright - need I say, my sense of humour - will enable me, looking back from any future existence there may be, to have a good laugh at my own expense; the joke will be on me. But it will not.

And meanwhile, this window over London is the best possible place for me. I am most lucky to have it, and I owe my possession of it to a man called Hitler. For before he began bombing London a dwelling on the roof of London was the most desirable of things, hardly to be had for love or money by any Englishman in London, now the most un-English of towns, and quite unobtainable in those parts which the few remaining natives have come to call St. Johann's Wood, Finchley Strasse and Britisch West Hampstead.

But with the coming of the bombs many of the new British - after the last war we had the miscalled new poor, and after this one we shall have the similarly miscalled new British - have departed, to Cheltenham, Bedford and Harrogate, to basement dwellings and cellars cool. The native Londoner may find air to breathe.

He may even find, as I have, a window over London.

PART ONE

THE PIPING TIMES

Chapter One

HOMECOMING

It was a strange experience for me to compare the man who came down the gangplank from the little Polish steamer, that day in the spring of 1939, and looked about him at his native London, with the man who had gone up the gangplank of another steamer twelve years before and turned his face towards Europe. I remembered the regret, that lingered on for years, like a chronic toothache, with which that other man turned his back on his native land, where he had known nothing but hard times and struggle, and the wary distrust with which he journeyed towards countries he did not know, for, strange to say, this London-bred young man had until that time scarcely ventured outside his London, save for four years spent in Flanders fields, where poppies are said profusely and significantly to grow, and a few months in Paris.

I remembered particularly the clean white faith of that young man, who went up the gangway, in his country, in its leaders, and in the pledges they had made over the graves of a million other young men cradled, like himself, about the turn of the century.

He, and they, were all the children of a dead century in which tyrants, great and small, had progressively had their claws clipped, in which the oppressed, whether communities or individuals, had come nearer and nearer to liberty; the Turk had at last been driven from Europe, his subject peoples had begun to free themselves from the yoke of the Germanic Kaiser in Vienna, the last serfs had been freed, the new slaves, those of the machine, were gradually achieving recognition of the dignity of their labour. Then a new tyrant, a new black Teutonic knight, a new despoiler of small and defenceless peoples, had appeared in freedom's ring, been promptly met and challenged and overthrown.

The young man going up the gangplank in 1927, and his millions of comrades in arms, dead and still alive, had had a hand in that. Now the ring was free again. His country, and France, would see that no new tyrants arose in Europe, that the continent should steadily resume and continue its slow but perceptibly upward progress towards a better and juster and more equal order. The price that had been paid was appalling, but every penny piece and every drop of blood that had been paid were worth it. For a man could still believe that his world was slowly improving through the unnumbered centuries, and as long as he could believe that life had joy and meaning; without that, it was a senseless thing that could not be invested with meaning by all the chanting and dirging about some shining paradise to come. Peace on earth and goodwill towards men were the things to labour for, and not all the ranting about some Omar-Khayyam-like hereafter could compensate for war on earth and inhumanity towards men.

But the young man climbing up the gangplank, in 1927, had no doubts on this score. All was moving, slowly but still surely, for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and, as long as he could believe this he was quite prepared to believe that God was in His heaven - for the only God he could believe in was that higher purpose and meaning in life on this planet. But in 1927 life on this planet still seemed to show a pattern and a meaning; suffering and inhumanity were understandable because they had patently begotten good. There was undoubtedly gold in them thar hills. The young man going up the gangplank was quite sure of that.

How different he was, and what different luggage he brought with him, when he passed through those open arms in March of 1939! How much he had discarded, how much he had acquired! With what different eyes he looked at his native city and native land! Even his outer man had changed beyond recognition. When he went up the gangplank, as he now recollected with astonishment and dismay, he wore a black soft hat and even carried an umbrella - because other men had worn black soft hats and carried umbrellas. At that time he had not begun to think, to see himself as others saw him; he had been a sheep among other sheep, and a sheep moving north sees nothing but the southern aspect of the sheep, before it.

Now he came down the gangplank with a battered, sand-coloured hat on his head, a trophy dear to him, because it had been bought in Prague the day before the petrol-driven hosts of the new tyrant had crashed and rumbled into the city. On his back, weirdest of garments, was an almost azure-blue greatcoat with an enormous fur collar; the fur had been necessary in a bitter Rumanian winter and the azure-blue colour, which ought to have been a discreet greenish grey, was the result of a trick of light in a murky Bucharest furrier's.

I stood on the wet planks of Somebody-or-other's Wharf, that rainy day, and looked back at Tower Bridge, and compared those two men, the man with the black hat and firm faith who had passed under it outward bound so many years before, and the disillusioned man in the astonishing fur coat who had just come home and been folded in those embracing arms. The outer change was great; but the change in his inner man was far greater.

When I came down the gangplank I came home, not for good, but at any rate until after the war. The war had not yet come, but I knew it must come, and soon; and England, the homeless patriot's home, was the only place to be. What else was there to do? My beloved Europe hardly held a corner where a journalist still might write, and, what was worse, I had found that the things he knew would not be published or would not be heeded.

For I had been present at the preparation of a war. In my youth, when the first was being prepared, I had been a London clerk, living in a London suburb, Brondesbury, and had neither known nor understood anything of these things. I had simply known, with an instinct born of things I read in the newspapers, that a war with Germany loomed ahead, and the German commercial travellers in the lodging-house next door, with whom I chatted on summer evenings, were as sure of that as was my instinct. It worried me not at all; indeed, I looked forward to it. I did not know why or how that war was being prepared. All the fault, I was sure, lay on the other side. I did not wonder whether it might be prevented - I was too young.

But this time I had seen the inner mechanism of a war under construction, the intrigues of the rich and palsied old men in this country and that which had brought it about, the tricks that had been used to thwart all efforts to prevent it. I had been in all the countries where the separate parts of the machine were made, and watched the men who controlled it. I knew this time, as I had not known before 1914, that the war could have been prevented; I knew, indeed, that more skill and effort had been needed to allow it to happen, through the delusion of the peoples, than would have been needed to hinder it.

I knew, now, that seven years before the 1914 war the permanent head of the British Foreign Office, Sir Eyre Crowe, whose voice should have been heeded, had in black and white precisely foretold the coming of that war - unless the things were done that would avert it. I knew that the British Ambassador in Berlin of that time and the correspondents of The Times in Berlin of that time had uttered precisely the same warning and had always given chapter and verse to support it. Nothing had availed and that war had come. That did not worry me: I had rather enjoyed it - but then, I had survived.

But now, coming down the gangplank in 1939, I knew that all this history had exactly repeated itself, just as vainly, and I found this sinister indeed.

I knew that the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, seven years before, just after the coming of Hitler in 1933, had in well-measured words given precise warning of the character of that new regime in Germany and of the dangers it must lead to. He knew Germany.

I knew that the permanent head of the British Foreign Office of that time, Sir Robert Vansittart, was of exactly the same mind and that his opinions, who also knew Germany, had been set aside in favour of those of men who did not; I knew that he had been promoted downstairs by his appointment as 'Chief Diplomatic Adviser', and that in major crises in our affairs with Germany the counsel of men who did not know Germany had prevailed, for instance, the 'Chief Economic Adviser', Sir Horace Wilson.

I knew that the correspondents of The Times in Berlin, of whom I had been one, had given precisely the same warning, also with chapter and verse, for seven years before the coming of this war, with as little avail. I knew that Norman Ebbutt, the Chief correspondent of The Times in Berlin when Hitler came to power, wrote in April of that year (1933):

Herr Hitler, in his speeches as Chancellor, has professed a peaceful foreign policy. But this does not prove that the underlying spirit of the new Germany is a peaceful one. Germany is inspired by the determination to recover all it has lost and has little hope of doing so by peaceful means. Influential Germans do not see ten years elapsing before the war they regard as natural or inevitable breaks out in Europe. One may hear five or six years mentioned.

The forecast I have quoted is especially remarkable for the careful weighing of words - not one too many nor one too few, although this was high-speed daily journalism, not leisurely conjecture written at a spa. It is not even difficult for skilled men, thoroughly steeped in their subject, to achieve such close political forecasts (which are not prophecies; there is nothing prophetic about them).

My own view, written and spoken, was exactly the same, and I said the same things at the same time to Members of Parliament and others who came to Berlin. Other British newspapermen in that city foretold the course of events with equal exactitude. Indeed, almost unanimity prevailed. Seldom has the course of events been so simple to foretell and so difficult to misjudge, save by men either deluded or dishonourable. I myself was reminded, after the war began, by a Government official whom I met in a London hotel that at a meeting in Geneva in the spring of 1935, he had asked me whether I thought war was approaching, and that I answered: 'There will certainly be a European war in 1939 or 1940 - if we do not do this-and-that.'

We did not do this-and-that, and why not?

The question rankled sorely in my mind as I came down the gangplank. I knew that, in such a case, the joint opinion of three authorities - the permanent Head of the Foreign Office, the Ambassador in Berlin, and The Times correspondent in Berlin - could be counted on, especially if they coincided so closely. In small things they certainly would be followed. Why were they discounted, or even suppressed, in so great a matter as a new European war? Why was the public, which received a true report of every stroke in a game of tennis at Wimbledon or of every kick in a cup final at Wembley, why was the public misled and misinformed about such things as the making of a war, so that it doddered uncomplainingly and unsuspectingly along, confident in the assurances of its leaders that peace would prevail in our time, until, suddenly, war came upon it?

For, in those twelve years between going up and coming down the gangway, although I had never found an answer that fully satisfied me to the question I have just asked, I had discovered one thing for certain: that it is not true that wars must be and will always be. This one need not have been. It would have been far easier and far cheaper to prevent it than to allow it to come about.

Then, why? Can stupidity, ignorance, age, fear of exertion, the dithering of old men, can these things alone explain it? I hardly think so. There must be some deeper motive, for which I am still seeking, though I often think that I have touched its skirt. One thing is certain. If the war of 1939 was possible, after the experiences of 1914, another war after this one is not possible but probable.

Hatred of the war-makers - in all countries, not in any particular country - seethed in my mind as I came down the gangplank that day and turned to contemplate my blissfully ignorant self of twelve years before.

The war was at hand, I knew that. I had just come from Poland, where its shadow was already touching the frontier, and before that I had seen the machine at work in Czechoslovakia and Austria. War lay close ahead, black, pestilent, dreary, foul, and inevitable because no man in England had had the courage or energy or inner truthfulness to avert it.

Should I escape to some balmy beach, lie basking at Tahiti or in the Bermudas? I felt half-inclined to fly while there was still time - not from the war, but from this awful apathy and dilatoriness and do-nothingness and we'll-muddle-throughness in my own country to which I had in my own mind given the name of Chamberlainism and the heraldic symbol of an umbrella rampant.

This was the thing which I could not stand, the thing which to me was more horrible than all the horrors of war, and yet was always dressed up in godly words and smug phrases. It was the spirit which led people through the length and breadth of the land, later, when the war came, to placard on their walls a lunatic saying, probably uttered by Queen Victoria at the time of the Crimean War, or some such distant affray: 'There is no depression in this house, and the possibilities of defeat do not interest us. They do not exist.'

This was the spirit which appalled me, and I would almost sooner have slept with a corpse than have lived with it, the spirit that sees something good and brave and clever in ignoring unpleasant things and pretending that dangers do not exist, as long as one is not personally in peril.

To be bombed or shot was a small thing, but to live in an atmosphere of blundering rich men entirely surrounded by sycophantic applauders was a fate far worse than death, I thought. Yet there was nothing for it. The war was coming to England, soon, and I had to be there, to see what happened. Not the war, but the feeling of hopelessness, born of those seven years of vain and thwarted effort, was the awful thing.

This was the feeling which made me say, when one Noel Coward, whom I had never met, called to see me soon after my homecoming and asked me what I thought of our old friend The Situation, that I thought it a loathsome Situation and would like to go the the South Seas, so that I could be as far as possible from it.

'Oh,' said Noel Coward, a thought shocked, 'but that would be running away!'

I knew, with some regret, on the day I came down the gangplank, that I should not be able to bring myself to run away, even from that infuriating, self-satisfied apathy which had come to inspire me with horror. My journalist's curiosity and my English birth would force me to stay.

Resplendent in my sky-blue coat with the terrific collar, I passed down the gangplank, with some hundreds of Polish Jews who had come to England in the same ship. I looked around me curiously at the land of the jay-walker to whom I had been shouting for so long. Grey skies, grey water, grey roofs, grey streets.

I was home! 'So this is England!' I thought, and I turned to begin my voyage of exploration and discovery.

Chapter Two

OU L'ON S'ENNUIE

Half the newspapers were still scoffing at the very suggestion that war was possible. Conscription had been jubilantly introduced, true, a few days after the Tory majority, thinking to anticipate the wishes of Mr. Chamberlain, had drafted its solemn vow to die in the last ditch rather than vote for conscription, but the actual preparations for universal military service were proceeding with the speed and in the manner of a county cricket match, with intervals for lunch, tea, and all the rest. (I am not of those who profess to know what history will say about everything, not because I do not know but because I am not interested, history being seemingly an imbecile who never learns anything from past follies, but I should imagine that history will have a good laugh about the antics of the British Parliament just before the war of 1939 began.)

England in the spring and summer of 1939, in fact, looked more like a mangy mongrel bestirring itself sleepily to go and die by the roadside than a British lion preparing to turn at bay and rend its tormentors.

Columbus never looked at his new continent with more curiosity than I at my native land when I re-discovered it. It was strange, and a thing I regretted, to feel myself so alien in my own country, and to find that this feeling did not pass with time. But I had brought back with me from those years abroad something which put everything I saw in a new light. This was a standard of comparison, which I had lacked in the unquestioning days of my English youth; now I set all that I saw, men, manners and modes, against the things I had seen elsewhere, in other countries.

In this frame of mind I started out on my journey of discovery. I began with London, my home-town, and because night begins the day, I began at night. I sought the amusements of the town and, trying gamely to bummeln in London, I explored the theatres and music-halls, the cinemas and all the other places where Londoners go to laugh and refresh their minds.

The thing that struck deepest into my mind was the enormous difference, so little realized, that the coming of the film has made in the industry of entertainment, and even in the outlook of the nation. The picture-theatre and the things it offered, I discovered, affected the speech, the looks, the habits and the very minds of the people. The women, in increasing numbers, made-up, dressed, behaved and talked like the marionettes that were manipulated in some distant Californian studio, puppets whose every expression and word were formed, not by the impulse of their own feeling, but by the command of some off-screen producer with uplifted finger and instructions chalked on a slate. The majority of the young men and women of the country, I found, spent several hours each week in the picture-theatres, and their minds, unquestioning and plastic as mine had been, were moulded by anonymous men far away who were of alien blood and alien thought.

For the first time in history, as far as I know, one of the main methods of influencing the minds of people in one country was controlled by people thousands of miles distant who could neither feel for nor understand England, English history and English tradition. The richest and greatest country in the world, which had produced such poets as Shakespeare and such players as Garrick, for some reason produced no films and hardly any film-players of its own.

For some reason? I knew what the reason was. This was one of the things I had discovered in those years spent behind-the-scenes. It was the old reason of the exclusive monopoly, the racket, the squeeze-out. The film-magnates far away meant to keep both the profit and the power of this mighty industry in their hands. There were a few 'British' films, yes. They were mostly produced by daughter-companies of those great concerns in California, and if I am any judge their business was to produce films which would never challenge the supremacy of those issued by one of the great Dictatorships of the world - the film dictatorship of Hollywood. Enormous picture 'palaces', bearing ridiculous names, such as Plaza and Regal and Pantechnicon and Pandemonium and Odious and the like, were springing up everywhere, but these too were controlled, in one way or another, by that fantastically powerful, cosmopolitan, not American, settlement which, from California, moulds the minds of immature and ignorant men and maids in countries far away.

This new form of entertainment was far more powerful than the theatre ever was or could have been. But it was not necessarily only a form of entertainment; it could also be a most subtle means of influencing the minds of the masses, if it were used to that end by the few men who controlled it.

And England, the sceptr'd isle, the land of the great poets and players, had no film-theatre of her own! It was fantastic, and this was, as I knew, an instance of the way in which the system of 'democracy' can be turned against itself, to defeat its own ends. For a free England, left to herself, would most certainly have produced great films and great picture players. But here, in naked audacity, was the system of the squeeze-out, of the alien financial dictatorship at work.

In music, of a sort, the same hidden tyranny was called 'song-plugging'; band-leaders played tunes, good or bad, that had been written in Broadway penthouses because they were secretly paid to do so, and by this means any song, of no matter what quality, could be made to be 'one of the song-hits of the season', and ballads that might have told of England were either never heard or never came to be written, while mill-girls and miners baa'd sheep-like about Mexico and Cuba and Idaho and eternally regurgitated all the other snivel-drivel, weep-wail-and-whine mixture-as-before:

The skies are blue
And I am too
All 'cos of you
Boo-hoo, boo-hoo

With the moon above -
I'm telling you
That I'm in love -
I'm telling you
When all our dreams come true
In paradise we'll be
And we'll no more be blue -
You're telling me -
I'm telling you -
Boo-hoo, boo-hoo

The moment when the song, old or new, comes to be plugged into the minds of that vast audience of English people, gathered respectfully about a million wooden boxes throughout the length and breadth of the land, is a dramatic one. The song-pluggers, kindly men who love all dumb creatures, dress the moment with the utmost ceremony. It is as if a princess were born or a new planet launched. First, the refaned voice, which so subtly conveys the suggestion that it comes from above the obligatory white shirt:

'And now, we present to you that great British star of the stage, screen and air, Judy Platinum, who is going to sing for you to-naight a song that all England will be singing to-morrow. Here (clash) she (bang) comes (crash). Good evening, Judy!' (cymbals, roll of drums, and sustained blare from the band). And then: 'Thanks a lot, Cyril. Hello, boys. G'd evening, everybuddy. I wanna sing, for the foist time in England, Loco Mose's new song, the sensashunal Broadway success, "I'll be blue again to-morrow". Thank you, Heinie.' And so on, until the inevitable, 'Thanks, Judy, that was grehnd.'

This England. If and when the next war comes, I used to muse at about that time, the song-pluggers will certainly want us to fight for democracy and freedom to song-plug.

True, a voice was raised here and there against this practice. The Evening News proclaimed that 'The song-plugging racket must be stopped' and said: 'High officials of the B.B.C. are planning a fresh inquiry into the activities of song-pluggers ... Music publishers and artists will be asked to co-operate with the B.B.C. in stopping this form of radio-racketeering.... Many artists have complained that in the past few weeks almost every one known to have a singing or playing booking on the air has been tempted by song-pluggers. Representatives of many music publishers have been busy. It is an open secret that large sums of money, from £10 to £100, are being offered for the broadcasting of two or three choruses that the publishers wish to "get over". Certain artists who have refused the offers of music publishers have complained that they are broadcasting at a financial disadvantage.'

But that was about the last that was ever heard of the matter. Yet it is a matter serious enough to deserve serious attention. The increasing subordination of the British mind to alien influences through practices of this sort, is a grave thing. The British people have been through enough stirring experiences of all kinds in the last twenty years, to say nothing of the last ten centuries, for them to be able, given fair play and a free market, to produce their own music, literature, films and drama. They did in the past. Now their minds are atrophying from suppression, disuse and misuse.

Some of the songs that come to us across the Atlantic nowadays, from the other great land of the 'English-speaking peoples', seem to me almost unintelligible. Indeed, I see the day coming when really enterprising shopkeepers and others in this country may need to put up a sign, 'English spoken here', alongside 'Ici on parle français'. I have long and vainly tried to distil the English-speaking essence from some of the strange chants I have recently heard:

Fred Chopin
Had his Georges San'
And Alexander
Had his ragtime ban'
Metro-Goldwyn
Had his Mayer
But I've got nobody
And nobody's got me

Although I'm rich or poor
I still will love you more

The intellectual and spiritual diet of English people is by such means being progressively divested of the calories and vitamins and what-you-wills that it needs. As I wandered about London, those summer evenings of 1939, I observed that the Philharmonic Orchestra still survived; the second World War for Civilization was yet, needed to bring it to the verge of death.

The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, however, save for that brief period of the year when opera is 'in season' in England, those few weeks when the Mutual Admiration Society foregathers there mutually to admire its tiaras rather than to hear music, was given over to the half-crown-hop.

Ballet, surprisingly, was experiencing a revival, probably to be short-lived, somewhere in the remote fastnesses south of the Thames, and its devotees were widely held in kindly derision; people of balanced mind were only uncertain whether to think of them as cranks or maniacs.

The theatre! Now that was a very different matter. In the theatre, as I saw it in London in those days, a sharp distinction had to be made between the plays and the players. The stage was being swamped by meretricious imported products similar, in their nature, to the films and songs that were being plugged elsewhere, and some of them reached a low level appalling in such a city as London. But many native players still remained, and in them the highest traditions of the English stage lived on. I never saw a good play better acted than Ladies in Retirement, with Mary Clare in the chief part; every character in it was played to perfection. A memorable evening, before the black-out fell on London. And Emlyn Williams, in one of his own plays, and Godfrey Tearle, in another, provided the other oases where I found refreshment in the desert of the London stage.

Some months later, after the Great War had been resumed, the plight of the London stage was accurately described, as I think, by a junior Minister, Mr. Kenneth Lindsay, in a speech to the Three Arts Club. When he spoke between thirty or forty theatres were playing in London's West End, many of the them to crowded houses every night, and he remarked that there was scarcely a play in London worth seeing, save the classics. (The Anspruchslosigkeit, the lack of a discriminating standard, which English audiences show is to me one of the most astonishing signs of the state of mental atrophy into which the mind of the country has fallen: they applaud everything.)

Mr. Lindsay said, and I think truly, that 'the trouble is that new drama can only be born out of live people and we have been moderately dead for the last twenty years. Since the last war we have been living on our past and I hope that out of the present war there will be born some fresh artist. Great art is often born out of great wars'.

It is true. England in the interval between the two halves of the Great War was like a train halted in open country because of some red signal that the passengers cannot see; a great puffing of steam can be heard but the train does not budge, and the people inside contemplate the same piece of country until their eyes grow tired of it, they fume and fret with impatience, but they have to stay put. They are the prisoners of the machine; not all their impatience nor all their ardour can avail them. Never was a time in our history so killing to the energy and vigour of youth. It was the heyday of old men, the golden age of the fearful and fretful, of the tired and anxious, of the lean and slippered pantaloons who always were in front and cried 'Back' while the young and eager behind vainly cried 'Forward'! And everything that period produced, on the stage and screen and paper, is typical of it. Now, at last, at long last, perhaps, perchance, the submerged and repressed vigour of the nation may break through that crust.

But the London theatre, as I saw it in 1939, and as it still is while I write, though it may have put forth new leaf by the time this book appears, was the child of that age. It could not deny its parent; the resemblance was too great. The people whom the players portrayed were people of no importance, not worth portraying; having no feelings, they could not make an audience feel anything; the things they said and the things they sang were alike trivial. Those times must have been as bad for an actor who loved his profession as for a journalist who loved his.

However, all these things look different from different points of view, and my point of view is but one. Those who were closer to the theatre did not all take so dark a view. For instance, the Daily Sketch reported that:

'Joe ("Never Give Up") Sacks, Russian-born producer of West End musical plays, gave final details of his affairs yesterday in his fourth public examination, and left the Bankruptcy Court, Carey Street, to plan his next production. "A little trouble like this can't put me down," Joe told a Daily Sketch reporter, his quaint foreign accent as attractive as ever. "I have the play all ready. All I want now is the stars." Although he can sign his name, Joe still admits that even at 59 he cannot read or write. Probably that is why he said: "No straight plays for me. I can't understand them. I want music, girls, glamour, spectacular shows."'

Points of view! Sometimes in those London nights of 1939, when I was rediscovering my native town and was tired of contemplating the Café Royalists, when I was surfeited with plays and films, I stayed at home and read. I found, and I know that in this at least many other people shared my experience, that I could not read novels, or at any rate only the novels of an older time, those of Thackeray or Borrow or Dickens, which seemed to give a picture of something, but not the novels of my own time, which seemed like mirrors held over the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens; they reflected nothing but themselves, no life, no animation, no meaning.

They, too, were the true images of an empty and shallow age. They showed nothing of the great storm that was approaching the Round Pond, of the great human tragedies that were being enacted on its brink; at the utmost they caught a minnow passing. Like the politicians and the press, they pretended that there was no life beyond the Round Pond; or, as the Hungarians say, 'There is no life outside Hungary, and if there is life, it is not the same life'. Their common motto, 'We are not interested in the possibilities of war; they do not exist' was the forerunner of that lunatic phrase about the possibilities of defeat that was placarded all over England when the war came. They were about petty people who lived petty lives, who seemed incapable of a generous impulse or a great emotion.

But the times we were living in were great and stirring times, revolting but absorbing times, the best and the worst of times, and if I was to read anything I wanted to read something that mirrored these exciting times. I could not understand the mania of my fellow-countrypeople for those stupendously dull books which they miscall 'thrillers', which tell of a murder on the first page and of monstrously boring dialogues between the astute amateur detective and the stupid professional detective on the remaining 299.

So I turned to books about our times, which were really thrilling, and about the world outside the Round Pond, to such absorbing stories as those of Alain Gerbault and Cecil Lewis, who went to the South Sea Islands to see what civilization had done there, and found that civilization in Tahiti meant syphilization, the destruction of civilization, so that I wish people would be careful when they say we are fighting to-day for civilization; I turned to the writings of contemporary politicians and historians, and to those of the high-speed journalists abroad, a remarkably fine body of men. With such tempests brewing in the world as were then brewing, I found that only such works as these could hold my attention.

Here you have the different points of view again, for about this time medals of the Royal Society of Literature were presented to two young poets, Mr. John Gawsworth and Mr. Christopher Hassall, in recognition of their work, and at the presentation the High Commissioner for Canada, Mr. Vincent Massey, who I believe is a graduate of Oxford University and brother of a leading actor said:

The professor of the future will point out to his students that it was significant of this period that the young writer, instead of expressing himself like his predecessors in a first novel, probably produced a work on European politics. He will probably observe that imaginative literature of all kinds seemed unduly preoccupied with political themes. Poets, dramatists, and novelists indeed appear to-day to be increasingly anxious to play the role of tractarians and pamphleteers. The student of the future may be told that one literary medium which remained true to its job was the humble detective story, of which I am a happy addict. No ideologies here, nothing tendentious, no preoccupation with politics or diplomacy -just a happy release for people who saw too much of either or both.

'Release'. 'Escape'. 'Dope'. 'Opium'. These, to me, were idols, and I preferred ideals. Such words best described the mentality of England between the first and second half of the World War; they were responsible for the second half. I detested them. They were the doctrine of a degenerate stage and degenerate press, of the Pashas in Hollywood: 'Don't worry, get yourself a girl friend, go to the pictures, take home a box of chocolates, settle down cosily with a thriller and turn on "Doomsday Night at Eight" on the radio, and all your dreams will come true you'll no longer be blue boo-hoo boo-hoo.'

I prefer other words: Effort, exertion, enthusiasm, and above all, no escape, but to look at unpleasant things, not pretend that they aren't there as a genteel Victorian dame who would rather go to the stake than show that she noticed a nasty smell, but to look at them and think how to change them and then get rid of them.

So there you have two points of view, set against each other with much distinctness.

Having pondered this forecast of 'Posterity's view of literature', delivered before the Royal Society of Literature, I came to the conclusion that, on balance, I for one did not regret that I had not written 'Murder by the Round Pond' or 'The Corpse in the Serpentine' as my first essay, and was glad I had written about things I had seen and felt and feared and hoped and experienced, for they were real, and the times were stirring, and I knew that if ever I tried to write novels or plays I would cut them too from life, like a slice of cake, and not try to produce lullabies and 'whodunits' for those who sought a happy release. I knew that, if ever I should try to create people out of my imagination, the first one would be a living man or woman, and not a corpse.

It is a very strange thing, this habit or practice of trying to escape from everyday realities and problems, because they are unpleasant or difficult to solve, that has grown up in England of late years. It is not only strange, but an almost impossible thing to achieve in England, because the normal and healthy ways of escape are closed in this land. Escape to nature, for instance, is practically impossible, because the unplanned growth of the cities and the ribbon-building on their outskirts makes the way out too long and tedious, and even when you get out the land is in such an overwhelming proportion in private ownership and behind barricades that you cannot penetrate to it. Escape to congenial company, for instance, a pleasant hour at an inn, is almost impossible, too, because the inns are seldom pleasant and are usually shut at the hour when you need them. Of one long-dead Duke of Buckingham it was said, I believe, that he found his best companions in an inn, a thing more natural than reprehensible in a civilized society, but he would be a clever man who found good companions in an inn in England to-day, where laws beyond the understanding of mortal man have reduced drinking to a process similar to that of pigs swilling at a trough. They have not, to my knowledge reduced the amount of drunkenness or of liquor consumed; if those have diminished, the taxes on alcohol have caused it.

So the chief means of 'escape' in England is, or was in the summer of 1939, the alien-controlled 'film palace', and in my wanderings about London I studied these places a great deal, and the shadow-plays they showed and the people who watched them.

As songs were 'plugged', so were films 'plugged' into the mind of the masses, who lined up in their legions before the weirdly-named 'palaces' for their daily trip to dreamland. If ever they lived at all, these nameless millions, they lived in that make-believe world that flickered before them on the screen. Later, in the war, on a day when Hitler stood at the gates of Paris and the real world seemed about to collapse about our ears, when mortal calamity seemed to loom imminently over England, I came through Leicester Square and saw such a queue, of thousands of people, waiting patiently for hours on end to see 'Gone with the Wind'. With baffled incomprehension I contemplated the faces of the people who formed it, faces that told of lives of bleak drabness. Why, I thought, did they not seek to live themselves, instead of plunging into these darkened caverns in search of adventure and emotion at second-hand? Opium-smokers.

Once, on the radio, I heard a Londoner tell the moving story of his encounter, at a distance but still in the flesh, with his heroine from that shadow world. She was Grace Moore, whom he had long admired, and on a day she came to London, to sing at the Albert Hall, and he booked his seat to see her for weeks in advance, and at last the great night came and he saw her, whom he had so long revered, and heard her sing!

That was four years before the night when he spoke in the radio, and yet the feeling in his voice moved even me as he told of looking down and seeing, on the distant platform, a tiny figure in a white dress and with golden hair - HER! Beauty! Romance! Music! Still distant, but a little nearer than on the screen! A thing to dream about for years and years! The white lady with the golden tresses, singing, and the workaday Londoner, absorbed, in the darkness of the upper balcony!

What a glimpse of a Londoner's life. What a proof of the power of the films.

Even the speech of the people has been affected by this mighty and anonymously-wielded power. As I write, my reluctant ear has been listening to a competition, before the microphone, of young aspirants to parts in a radio play. Three young British girls, Britishwomen, oh, hang it, three young English girls with pleasant, well-modulated English voices, were required to deliver a test-piece, of which this is the last lunatic fragment: 'C'mon, big boy, giv'm the woiks; I c'n takeut.'

Shades of Shakespeare!

I was not surprised, when the war came, and a London picture newspaper held a referendum among its women readers to choose 'Britain's Perfect Soldier' (who at that time was saving Hollywood from Hitler in the air over the English coasts), that this ideal composite warrior, voted for by the womanhood of England and duly put together by the paper's picture-mounting experts, had the hair, eyes, nose, moustache and mouth of five Hollywood film-stars of mixed cosmopolitan origins. 'True, his physique was allowed to be that of 'a typical British Soldier', grave injury thus being done to Johnny Weissmuller. The result really meant, I suppose, that the ideal British fighting-man may look British from the ankles down.

Inevitably, when the war came, 'the things we are fighting for' were 'plugged' into the mind of the British masses by Charlie Chaplin, on behalf of Hollywood, that paradise of equal-opportunity-for-all and home of tolerance and democracy. And just as inevitably, when the war is over, will the story of Britain's ordeal and triumph be made into pictures there by men neither British nor American in their origins and feelings, and from Wigan to Walthamstow the lads and lasses will go, open-mouthed and starry eyed, to see themselves as others wish them to see themselves. A genuine emotion, a real feeling, a lifelike but unhappy ending? Fie, pfui, and fi donc!

The real reason that I felt myself so alien in England, I thought, was that England had become so alien, so little English or British. The alienization of English life reached its highest point in the picture-theatre, the theatre and the radio. A Member of Parliament, Mr. MacLaren, in an excellent speech which hardly anybody outside Parliament ever heard of, once spoke with a deep loathing, shared by myself, of the cosmopolitan 'Whitechapel Yankees' whose voices reach us through the radio, singing such popular dirges (well and truly 'plugged') as 'If the earth should swallow me, I know that you would follow me, boo-hoo, boo-hoo'.

However, I feel that in this, as in many things, my view is a rare one. I like other people to enjoy themselves, and from the applause that is heard, from the sound of 'the boys' telling each other in quaint English that they are 'grand' and 'marvellous', I gather that a good time is had by all at the transmitting end. I even have some affection myself for those filleted voices, as of castrated curates, which announce the tidings of the day, good or bad, disastrous or cheering, in the level tone of a mildly facetious recording angel.

But there are other entertainments in London, my native town, and I sampled them all. The alien influence in the music halls was particularly strong, and though I should understand and welcome the appearance there of good singers, dancers, jugglers or acrobats from abroad (I saw few of these) I could not think why the friendship of the English-speaking peoples, which is to play so great a part in international affairs after the present war, as we are told, should lead to the importation from America of comedians who had not been there long enough to learn English and whose salacious humour and accent alike had been acquired somewhere between Cracow and New York's East Side.

Sometimes I saw turns which, as I should have expected, would have been hissed or bad-egged off the stage by any audience not composed of half-wits, or in any country where a sense of humour is indigenous. Once, several men of no identifiable nationality or mother-tongue exchanged gags, prompted to them by another. I believe 'stooge' is the current professional name for this calling. They had no talent save this, yet topped the bill and brought down the house.

For instance, one of them, a corpulent fellow, laughed on a high-pitched scale and his colleague, the prompter, said to him 'If you wanna lay an egg, go over there!' whereon the fat one, pulling up his coat-tails and drawing shapeless pants tight round his formidable posterior, waddled off to the corner, saying 'All right, and you like a teeny-weeny piece of bacon too, hein?' and then had to be hauled back with an appearance of outraged propriety. Another time, all the men gathered round the microphone, announcing that they were about to sing a song, and in the preparatory expectant hush one of them belched loudly. These jests raised hurricanes of laughter. In front of me, a pretty girl in her early teens bounced on her seat, clapped her hands delightedly and laughed herself nearly into a fit. I felt that if only one of these talented artists could have vomited or performed a natural function on the stage the entire audience might have had to be removed helpless with laughter.

The next turn was one demanding talent, strength and endurance. It was a roller-skating dance performed by two handsome and athletic men and two good-looking girls dressed in white tights and singlets. Languid interest accompanied it and an apathetic house sent perfunctory applause after it when it was finished.

And those Glamour Girls! Why Glamour? Clamour Girls, perhaps; the noise of their choruses ('Here we are so bright and gay and you can't hear what we say') might awaken the reluctant dead. Or Amour Girls, possibly: die Mädis vom Chantant, die nehmen es mit der Liebe nicht so tragisch, and why should they?

But glamour? It is not glamorous to stand about undressed in a draught, no pay for rehearsals or extra performances, for a pound or two a week and for the profit of some alien producer. The name, Glamour Girl, is a snare and a delusion - for the girl and for the public. The chance of promotion, of a real stage career, of making good, of bringing into play talent which is actually existent, is insignificant, in the condition of the English stage to-day. And yet at the back of those English stages, while the star mouths his pidgin English in front, you may see girls lovely in face and figure, afidget with youth and life and energy. They are the people who deserve to be helped. But not one of them in a hundred ever gets a chance. It is, behind the footlights, the story of England in the last twenty years all over again: youth held back, held down.

Another of London's entertainments that I learned to know, during those 1939 nights, was all-in wrestling. That all-in wrestling! I grieve to say that, to my belief, it would be disallowed - by the public, not by the authorities - in many of the foreign cities I know. I watched it in the company of a man who knew this sport thoroughly, because he was in it, and I came away dumbfounded by the exhibition - not by the exhibition in the ring, because for a little money you could apparently find a human being willing to have himself publicly inoculated with lepra germs, but by the exhibition which the public gave.

These wrestlers, as I came to know them, were in their private lives and among each other more or less harmless, average people, who wished none ill. A few were smart tricksters, but most were exploitees, whose misfortunes or deformities were capitalized by the promoters. They were chosen, mostly, for great strength and ugliness. The more brutal and animal-like they looked, the better.

There was one they called Methusalah. He had an enormous head about twice the normal size, and I supposed him to suffer from the disease from which, as I seem to remember, the painter Gauguin died - lion-head. This doubled his already remarkable ugliness. He was a gentle creature. Another, not much less hideous, they called the Liberrian Champion; he was a mechanic from Blackpool. The Champion of the Crimea was a thug from the slums of Port Said. And so on.

Mixed with them, so that the public should get value for money, were some good-looking ones, whose victory, after seemingly imminent defeat, was always prearranged. Every possible device was used to make the ugly men uglier - cropped heads, long beards, and the like. They were taught to roar like stricken bulls and squeal like stuck elephants, to shimmy-shake their skin, to grimace as if in mortal agony, to bare their teeth, bite, butt, and generally to behave as much like rabid gorillas as they could - but not to hurt each other.

I watched one of these prearranged contests between one of the best-looking young wrestlers, who was due to win, and one of the most villainous, the loser-elect, and asked myself, by what means had public taste and credulity been brought to this low level in England, the country of Bob Fitzsimmons and John Jeffries.

The match went according to plan. It was a hard struggle, but gradually the good-looking man, as the spectators wished, proved himself to be the better. The brute-man roared, snorted, bellowed, bit, grimaced, kicked, bear-hugged, gouged, but all to no avail - each time Adonis just outwitted him. The spectators purred; this was the stuff to give them.

But the organizers, being of the same fry which had brought this public up on amazing, sensational, mystery disclosure-revelations, heart-throbs and thrills, knew that it ought to see something more than a straight victory; it must have its awful moment just before the happy end, before the fade-out, before the kiss-and-be-happy-ever-after.

Suddenly, the gorilla butted Adonis in the stomach. Adonis, his face writhing horribly with simulated pain, fell on his back, gasped, contorted himself, groaned in anguish. Around the ring, pretty girls, their lips parted in suspense, clutched their bosoms in the neighbourhood of their hearts, assuming their anatomy is still what it was, I don't guarantee anything to-day. Beside them, young Englishmen blenched, and waited, hoping against hope, for evil to triumph over good.

They need not have worried; the organizers had thought of everything. Gorilla, supposedly intent on finishing his man, launched himself in a flying leap that was to land him with both feet on Adonis's stomach. But just before he got there Adonis, the white hope, rallied his last ounce of strength, shot up his legs like pistons, took gorilla in the stomach with his two feet, and sent him flying over the ropes into the second row of seats.

A pandemonium of cheering broke out around me. The white man had won, all was well. St. George had vanquished the dragon, democracy had conquered dictatorship, the gospel according to Hollywood had been vindicated. Adonis was carried shoulder high from the ring. Gorilla was carried away by attendants. Adonis, in the midst of his triumphs, looked anxious and distrait. He needed to, because he had mistimed and overloaded his kick, which by the prearrangement was only to have thrown gorilla across the ring. Gorilla now had concussion, and recriminations were brewing behind-the-scenes.

I was carried out into the dark street amid a throng of happy, laughing, chattering girls, clinging to the arms of contented, smiling men. 'Wozzid id awfud? I thoughd he woz dud for, diddldew?' My Buddha, thought I, these people certainly do all they can to justify the racketeers, political and private, in treating them as morons.

Scourging my soul further, I went to see roller-speedway-racing, which was just the same sport on roller-skates. The public went to see it on the understanding - the same understanding that prevailed on the appropriately-named dirt-track - that they would see somebody hurt. Its interest was titillated by tales of the injuries the girls had received during their careers - how they had been bruised all over, had their muscles torn, their skin gashed and burned, and so on. These good-looking young girls and men also had brought to a high pitch of efficiency the pantomime of pretending-to-be-angry-with-each-other, of tripping each other up, of falling over each other, of lashing out furiously at each other, of gasping and kicking and writhing. Did the spectators really believe it? Is such credulity really possible? Or did they not care about that, as long as somebody seemed to get hurt, seemed to behave like a cornered hyena. I give it up.

In the England where I grew up this kicking and fighting and swearing and face-making - which was only pantomime, but which the spectators seemed to accept as genuine - would have been thought worse than bad sportsmanship. I believe it might have been hissed off. Not that that England was a particularly good place, but in some things it was seemingly a better one than now.

Most of the things I had seen and did not like, in these London nights of 1939, were alien and imported, they were not native. I had seen in other cities, Berlin and Vienna, Budapest and Prague, how native things, good things - good music, good songs, good talent, good entertainment - were smothered and elbowed aside in the same way.

Unrestricted free trade in goods is a doctrine long discredited, because it leads, for the natives of a country, to the very opposite of freedom - to dependence, to a form of enslavement, to alien control, to the lowering of home standards. The same thing is true of the goods and products of the mind, and particularly of entertainment, which nowadays is a form of education, or at any rate of influencing the mind of the people, more powerful even than the schooling received in youth.

I have shown how, by such methods as song-plugging and film-plugging and other kindred arts, free-trade-in-entertainment can be turned to the disadvantage of the native talent of a country, of its standards and traditions. A large measure of protection for indigenous talent and particularly for native standards is even more essential in the things of the mind than in things material, in the country that bred Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, Dickens and Thackeray, Garrick, Kean and Mrs. Siddons.

One other thing I saw in London at night, in 1939 - the dance. Dancing seemed to me, in those bad twenty years between the first and second bouts of the World War, to have reached as low a level of taste and skill as most other things. The waltz and the polka seemed gay and graceful compared with the dances of that era, when a roomful of couples pushing each other here and there resembled a plateful of pea-soup being slowly stirred with a spoon. The Lambeth Walk brought a faint hope of better times, but that period in the history of the dance closed with the Boomps-a-Daisy, in which the bow-and-curtsey of less enlightened times was reproduced in a form better suited to 1939: the partners imparted a chaste salute upon each other by banging their behinds together, an innovation which seemed to me to verge on the inelegant without being funny.

So, after a study of the illustrated press printed in America (I abstain from saying the American illustrated press) I was prepared to be depressed again when I went to see the Jitterbug Marathon in Tottenham Court Road. We only lacked this, I thought. A first sight of the company assembled fortified my misgivings: negroes and negresses, Jews and Jewesses, quadroons, octoroons and picaroons at first prevailed. The men were in trousers, shirts and braces (poidon me, suspenders), or in short-sleeved open-necked shirts and pullovers. The girls wore simple frocks or knickers and bare legs, which didn't matter much, because they were often inverted anyway. Antics. Grimaces. Yells.

But later I saw the Jitterbug danced in different company and liked it. Danced by good-looking and healthy young people, with some sense of human dignity, it was lively and gay and amusing, infinitely preferable to the dreary shuffle-along dances of the between-war era. It was a dance into which young people might put youth and laughter and enthusiasm. They looked, dancing it, as if they might have a better time than the generation before them, and I wished them luck.

These were the things I saw in London, at night time, in the summer of 1939. The shadows were gathering over this city, or, as I had written at the opening of the year, the twilight was thickening above it. Death and destruction and defeat were at its door, and I had watched them approach for seven years. I had seen them arrive in two other cities, and had passed through a third just ahead of them.

But in those places I had always thought of London, which was my own home town, the capital of my own country. Now as I walked about its streets I felt just as I had felt in Vienna and Prague and Warsaw, the only man who knew, quite certainly, what was coming, and coming soon. Nobody else knew or even thought much about it or even cared, that I could see. I asked myself often enough, why worry? and told myself irritably that I ought to get this itch out of my blood, the itch that came of belonging to a generation that had really believed, once, that it had fought a war to end war, that war could be prevented. But it was all of no avail, because I knew, now, quite certainly, that war could be prevented.

The knowledge of that prevented me, and always will prevent me, from acquiescing, from accepting the 'happy release' of the detective novel, the box of chocolates; the film palace, the radio and the girl friend.

Determined to distil the last drop of honey from London's night life in 1939 I went to London's nude theatre. Though none surpasses me in my admiration for the female form unclothed in the right place, by which I mean of course the Louvre or the National Art Gallery, I have in the process of much bummelling in many parts of Europe come keenly to dislike these dreary exhibitions of shivering and underpaid girls standing about in laboured attitudes to be looked at by hordes of males. When I lived in Paris my obstinate sales-resistance nearly broke the heart of the persevering, hard-working and frugal-living little man who lived in the next attic and tried every time he met me to sell me some of his [ed:?] feelthy postcards, and my feeling about these shows was the same; I find the private contemplation of one beautiful woman, on canvas or in marble, as I said before, an absorbing occupation, but to pay money in order to see complete strangers with less clothes on than they wear in other theatres is a thing outside my understanding.

So I went ready to be bored, but actually I was much amused. For the audience was composed entirely, without a single exception, if I remember rightly, of men, young and old, who had seemingly come to see life in the raw, as Port Said and Marseilles know it, and who waited hungrily, with riveted gaze, for the nude, the rude, and the lewd.

It came after an hour or more of quite normal, and if anything overclad turns. The curtains parted to show a darkened stage, the band played appropriately soft music, a man in full evening dress and a woman in an evening frock appeared from opposite sides and began to dance a waltz, and then the spotlight lifted from them and began to travel slowly up a flight of stairs at the back of the stage, finally revealing to the breathlessly expectant male audience IT - the thing all had been waiting for.

And it was a girl in classical draperies, showing a good deal of one leg and the left half of a pair of breasts! I was moved by this supreme anti-climax to let out a hoot of laughter which startled three rows of people in front of me and came away in high good humour.

But I felt, wandering about London those summer nights before the black-out fell upon the city, that I was alone enough in these feelings to count as a stranger within my own gates, as a homeless patriot, as no land's man. It was a funny feeling.

Chapter Three

LONGITUDE AND PLATITUDE

I was anxious to see Parliament at work again, for in my opinion of that institution, too, a change had occurred similar to that I told of in the man who went up the gangway in 1927 in a black hat and the man who came down it in 1939. A similar change, and part of the greater change, an essential part of it indeed, because the bearing of the British Parliament had done more than any other thing to make me lose hope that the new war would be prevented.

But this change had occurred in a shorter time, because I had last visited Parliament only four years before, in 1935, and looked down from its gallery upon Mr. Baldwin, who in the meantime had had opportunity, as Lord Baldwin, to gratify his oft-expressed wish for the company of his pipe, his pigs and his constituents. In 1935, when I had surveyed the House of Commons from above, all good men within it were supposed to have been agreed that Germany's incorrigibly aggressive ambitions had been demonstrated beyond doubt and that high time was come to thwart her in her new warlike designs by making a pact with France and Russia to oppose her with force immediately she tried any new act of aggression. To that very end Anthony Eden was then, in 1935, about to go to Moscow, as the first British Minister to venture near that Chamber of Horrors, and I was going, too, as one of the journalists sent to report his mission.

That was why I was at the House that day, when I watched the Commons approve his undertaking. That day, in 1935, I took it all seriously. I really believed that the British Government and Parliament meant to do the one and only and obvious thing which could preserve the peace in Europe and prevent the further spread of Communism in Europe - make that watertight pact with France and Russia which Germany would never dare to attack.

But now, four years later, in 1939, when I looked down again on the House, many strange things had happened. First, Italy, not Germany, had committed the next act of aggression, in Abyssinia, and the very Parliament on which I looked down had been elected in the autumn of 1935 to lead the world in punishing and crushing that aggression, the Tory Party having been returned with an enormous majority to that very end.

Next, the leader of the Tory Party, the new Prime Minister upon whom I now looked down, had not long after declared that it would be 'midsummer madness' to attempt any such thing, a view which the enormous majority, and seemingly the voters in the country, as stoutly endorsed as they had acclaimed the opposite view a few months before.

Then both Germany and Italy had committed the next attack, in Spain, in support of a Generalissimo who had risen against a Government elected by popular vote, as had been the Chamberlain Government in Britain. Yet The Times, which when the next Great War came was loudly to proclaim that Britain was fighting the cause of democracy, attacked the Government of Spain, beleaguered by its own rebels and two Great Powers, as 'an offspring of the Soviet Government'. The Tory Government, which was with equal fervour later to proclaim that same thing, implicitly took the same line about the Spanish Government and, by denying supplies to both sides impartially in the name of 'non-intervention', effectively caused its defeat. So by that time, say 1937-38, the Russian Government, which was to have been enlisted to combat aggression, was being treated in a hostile manner, and the aggressors were being helped to their successes.

All this made the resumption of the Great War inevitable, since it strengthened the aggressor powers and weakened those which were ready to resist them. The Parliament of March 1935 had indeed clearly seen that this would be the effect if aggression were tolerated or encouraged; that was why it sent Anthony Eden to Moscow; that was why it had had itself re-elected, with a much larger Tory majority, to put a stop to aggression. And after the Abyssinian and Spanish affairs Germany, in her turn, had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia, and Italy, again in hers, Albania, so that the war, foreseen in 1935 to be inevitable if such things were allowed, was now clearly on the doorstep.

And yet - all this time, with the war coming nearer, and even being beckoned nearer, and helped nearer we were not even rearming! True, years before this, the Government had admitted the necessity for rearmament - long before Munich, long before 1938. True, the money had been voted, and spent! Two thousand million pounds in eight years!

Yet now, in 1939, when I looked down on Parliament, we had no arms! We were not ready! Sir Nevile Henderson, one of Mr. Chamberlain's chief apologists, was later to say that at the time of Munich - in September 1938! - we had hardly a single aeroplane or anti-aircraft gun! This, indeed, was to be put forward as Mr. Chamberlain's chief claim to the gratitude of the country - that he had saved us from war when we were not ready! At that time he had been Prime Minister for nearly two years, and before that for seven years second Minister in the Cabinet! He had long been Chancellor of the Exchequer! The money, millions and millions of it, had been spent! Why had we no arms, why were we not ready, when all the dangers had long been foreseen and admitted, the money voted and spent!

Looking down on the House of Commons from the Gallery I asked, 'Why?' It is the one major question in all this story to which I have never found the answer. The facts are staggering, the motives hidden, only the, result is plain - war. War - and why?

Almost everybody professes to know quite certainly what history will say about this or that. I do not, and in any case I am indifferent, because history is a proved mental deficient. But the historian will be a lucky or a clever man who probes to the real motives that governed British policy in those years. For my part I can say, as one of many British newspaper correspondents abroad, that when we saw the British Government and Parliament marching downhill to the cry 'We are marching uphill', we, in our innocence, loudly cried 'Hey, you're wrong, you are marching downhill'. But men who uttered that warning cry found, to their initial surprise, that they were very coldly treated, that they were rebuffed and sidetracked and called 'Reds!' and 'extreme anti-Nazis' and the like more, and were even prejudiced in their employment!

The facts are very grave. Only the decay of the British Parliament and the seeming apathy or feeling of impotence of the British people can explain that there has been no reckoning, no calling-to-account.

On this day in the summer of 1939 I looked down with feelings of angry bewilderment on the House. Mr. Chamberlain sat in the place where, four years before, I had seen Mr. Baldwin, already then avowedly and admittedly aware to the full of the dangers that threatened. Sir Samuel Hoare, the Abyssinian episode long since forgotten, was back there, and so was Sir John Simon, and all the others. Behind them the enormous majority, impregnably entrenched in power by the three-card-trick played on the electorate, which thought it had in 1935 picked the card 'Resistance to aggression and peace', only to find, in turning it over, that it had chosen the card 'Condonation of aggression and war'.

It was a cabinet of elderly men, the average somewhere around 60 years, backed by a great majority whose leading members were not much younger. Youth sat on the back benches under the watchful eye of the Chief Whip, a disciplinarian whom Hitler might have envied, and with stern means of enforcing his will and obedience to The Party, right or wrong.

On the other side of the House, the Opposition side, on the Labour benches, the picture was no better. The Labour Party on which I looked down, still suffering from the desertion of its foremost leaders in 1931, had degenerated from the vigorous and idealistic and upward-striving group that took form at the beginning of the century into a throng of elderly trades union officials, professors and time-servers (the average age of 80 trades union members of parliament was about 61) whose ideas and ideals no man could understand. On that side of the House, too, age immovably packed the front ranks and youth sat impatient at the back. Just as junior Tory members went in fear of the Tory Chief Whip, so were younger Labour members sternly repressed by the elderly gentlemen in front, especially after Labour leaders entered the Government during the war, so that one such young Labour member who ventured to criticize some action of the Government was vilified as being 'lukewarm about the prosecution of the war' from the Labour Front Bench, a charge which he acquitted by calling his mentor 'a pimp of the Government'.

A few months after the day I went to the House, the good Lord Halifax in a speech at Oxford University told its members that 'the real conflict to-day is not between youth and age but between youth and youth'.

Even I, hardened to almost anything by the events of the last ten years, start at the audacity of such a claim. The men who had charge of Britain's policy between the two instalments of the present World War were always old, and clung to offices to which they were not equal with all the savagery of limpets defending their young. Many of them do so still. They had a faith in their pristine vigour, never vindicated by events, that is usually seen only in elderly gentlemen who fall in love. If the conflict is between youth and youth, they might at least allow youth to take charge of it. But do they? No.

If youth, the generation of 1914, had ever had its chance in England this war would not have happened.

'A conflict between youth and youth'? The war that was resumed a few months after I went to look at the Parliament which I had watched in helpless bewilderment from abroad for so many years is a conflict between youth and youth only in the sense that young men are fighting it, as they fought the last.

Old men made it, by allowing it to happen. They stand ten times convicted out of their own mouths, by their own actions, by the ludicrous way that events always gave them the lie before the words had quite left their lips.

But even when all that is said, a question still unanswered remains - where were the arms, for which so much money was asked, voted and spent? Is it not fantastic that even this gigantically culpable piece of remissness should be twisted into an argument in defence of the men who were guilty of it - that Mr. Chamberlain, who had for so many years been second minister in the Government, should have been acclaimed, and still to-day be acclaimed by so many of his contemporaries, for saving us from war 'when we were not ready'?

If the principle of the non-accountability of Tory Ministers, whatever they do, has become an established one in Britain, even worse things may happen after victory in the war which was the inevitable result of these omissions. It makes Parliament meaningless:

'Mr. Chamberlain's policy is leading this country straight to war' - 'Sir, you are a Red, Communist, Bolshevist, irresponsible alarmist, and warmonger; you are trying to wreck this noble man's policy of appeasement, which is leading us straight to peace.'

'Mr. Chamberlain's policy has now led us straight to war; because he is of proved incapability, he should immediately give way, preferably to a much younger man.' 'Sir, you are a Nazi, Fascist, defeatist, and pacifist; you are trying to wreck this noble man's conduct of the war, which is leading us straight to victory.'

'Mr. Chamberlain has now resigned, as is fit and proper, but I see that he and many who were co-responsible with him still remain in the Government; because their incapability has now been demonstrated beyond doubt I think without rancour that they should make way, preferably for younger men; they should go their way, and go in peace.' 'Sir, you are trying to wreck the unity of the nation at this fateful moment in its affairs by recriminations about the past; you are hindering our war effort.'

'Mr, Chamberlain is now dead, and this event confirms me in the belief I long held, that he was past his full physical and mental vigour when he held, and stubbornly retained, an office that carried with it the destiny of this country; the fruits of this are plain to see in the wreckage all around us, and they fortify me in my view that there is something very wrong in a system which, from the interests of one party, make impossible a change in the occupancy of a high office and in the pursuit of a false policy when the interests of the entire country so clearly demand this.' 'Sir, you are decrying the noble dead; you are a traitor and a cad.'

A conflict between youth and youth!

When I watched the Commons at work, that day in 1939, I had been long enough in my own country to study its people a little and to remark the apathy about Parliament which had spread. It was understandable, because it was the result of many disillusionments and of a lack of choice.

The electorate had seen that the Parliaments it returned always, invariably, did exactly the opposite of that which had been promised and that which it had returned them to do, and felt, furthermore, that there was no means of remedying this, because no clearcut difference was apparent between the two parties which faced each other in the House; appalling though the Tory Party's record was, the Labour Party offered no clear alternative.

Those people who saw what was wrong, to what disasters all this would lead, still could not see how they could help to better things. To vote, at the next election, for Professor Theory (Lab.) instead of Colonel Pondicherry (Con.) would not make much difference; they knew that from past experience. And in any case there would not be a next election, in time to prevent the next war; the Tory Party, by getting itself elected in 1935 to nip aggression in the bud, had made sure that it would remain in office for five years and thus be still in office when aggression, un-nipped, blossomed into the full red flower of a new world war in 1939.

Nevertheless, a country gets the Parliament and Government it deserves, and the England of 1939 deserved the House of Commons I saw in that summer. I never saw, anywhere, so general a preoccupation with trivial things, so little interest in great national ones. I never found anywhere so much apathy, and ignorance.

The ruling class, the plus-four and petit-four coterie, thought a great deal about politics, without perceiving anything; for it the fate of the world hung upon Mr. Chamberlain, and the general idea seemed to be that if he were removed from office a Bolshevist would forthwith appear beneath every bed.

The middle class was the prey of the 'escape' mentality; it seemed to think that if it only went to the pictures often enough, listened to the radio often enough, read enough thrillers, all would in the end be well.

The most enlightened people I met were among the working-class masses, but their enlightenment came, not from instruction, but from instinct. Most of them saw clearly enough that a war was coming to them, and soon, and they were the most critical people I met - and the most sensitive for Britain's honour! But they felt themselves disfranchised and impotent and, though they muttered occasional imprecations about the age of senility in which they lived, they quickly dismissed such thoughts, as being vain, and got on with their jobs.

Such an electorate, lacking all coordinated energy, is an easy prey for political organizers, and, since it imparts no impulse to Parliament from beneath, Parliament was bound to descend to its level.

Sitting in the gallery of the House that day I thought of the way the electorate had been duped and misused for party purposes since the war to end war was interrupted in 1918. At the first election after that war the enthusiasm of the electorate, mourning its million dead, lying in graves that 'girdled the world', had been kindled for a proposal to 'Hang the Kaiser' and an adequate majority had been returned to Parliament for that purpose. Once safely ensconced in office, the rulers of that day had shelved the proposal to hang the Kaiser, who spent twenty years in a villa in Holland, soon to be overrun by German soldiers, and its people massacred in scores of thousands, and in course of time received birthday congratulations from the British King; he will probably end his days in Potsdam.

The proposal to 'Hang the Kaiser', incidentally, was buried by the executioners-elect under the holy-sounding argument that 'it would be most imprudent to make a martyr of the former Kaiser', and as I see that this lunatic phrase has been resurrected quite recently I should like to ask in what way we should be worse off to-day if we had made a martyr of the former Kaiser, and if Hitler is likely to receive birthday wishes in twenty years' time. The main reason for the recurrence of these world wars, if they are not actually desired and brought about by the anti-martyr school, is that warlords and dictators are never martyred, but, after shouting for years about the glory of death on a battlefield, retire in the moment of defeat to inglorious but peaceful villadom in some neighbouring neutral land.

The only time, for centuries, that this country enjoyed a long period of rest from the necessity to intervene on the Continent of Europe was after Napoleon had been relatively martyred by exile on a bleak and distant island, and I can-say with the utmost certainty now that the length of peace we shall enjoy after this war will be measured by the degree of harshness with which we treat Hitler and his prompters after the present war, if we can get them into our hands. If we begin again to show our Christian spirit of forgiveness by giving them slices of other people's territory we might as well not bother about peace, but make this war permanent.

The next time that an enormous Tory majority in Parliament, for a space of years, was secured by tricking the electorate was in 1924, when, on the eve of the voting, a letter from a high Bolshevist politician, Zinovieff, was suddenly thrown into the ring to suggest to the electors that unless they voted Tory they would immediately be murdered in their beds. Many students of political tactics have since declared their opinion that the Zinovieff letter was a forgery; but whether it was authentic or false, the danger of Bolshevism in England at that time was rather less than the danger of an attack by Martians.

This trick, indeed, was exactly the same, though in another form, as that used by Hitler and his men in Germany in 1933, when they fired the Reichstag. 'This,' they said, pointing to the flames, 'is what will happen to your hearths and homes if you do not vote National Socialist. Behold, we have saved you from Bolshevism!' 'This,' said the Tory press lord, Rothermere, as he flung the Red Letter at the electorate through the columns of the Daily Mail, 'is what will happen to you if you do not vote Tory! Vote Tory, if you would be saved from Bolshevism!'

The credulity of the masses is so great that such devices can seemingly be used over and over again. You can fool the great majority of the people all the time. Masses of human beings whose lives, between the cradle and the grave, will inevitably remain on the most placid plane of humdrum uneventfulness, love to think that they actually walk amid great dangers and that they are saved from these by their chosen delegates, sitting watchful and wary at Westminster. Men whose greatest adventure is the daily train journey to town, women whose highest excitement is to 'go shopping' seemingly love to feel that, but for these wise guardians, they would be sprung upon and bludgeoned by bewhiskered anarchists at the next station, the next turning.

Nothing, if I may repeat, is wasted in this life in such prodigious quantities as fear. Yet, in all these between-war years, one great danger threatened and came always nearer, something really worth fearing - the danger of a new war. It was clear and gigantic. No need to trick the electorate on that issue: an enormous majority could have been had at any time by an honest man who said: 'A new war threatens and we are in imminent danger of losing the fruits of our victory in the last war, as well as much more life and treasure; give me arms and men now, and I can hinder it.' But no. Here, where there was really something to fear, the electorate was humbugged again - by being told that there was nothing to fear.

'If I had told the country, Germany is re-arming and we must re-arm, that would have made the loss of the election certain from my point of view.' (This is what Baldwin said in 1935.)

It is not even true. On that issue, plainly stated, the Tory Party could have had, and for once deserved, its enormous majority.

The next election came in 1931. By that time fear of the Bolshevists had subsided and the electorate had to be saved from something else. A major trade crisis racked Britain and the world, millions of unemployed stood idly about the country, and South Wales, Durham and Jarrow, gaunt, cadaverous, bitter and forgotten, mocked the noble phrases of the statesmen who had conducted the World War and the inscriptions on the memorials to the dead alike.

At such a crisis all good men clearly needed to come to the aid of the Tory Party and the foremost Labour Leaders stepped out of their own ranks and joined it, so that Britain might be saved 'from going off the gold standard'. The electorate knew not in the least what the gold standard was, but the prospect of being saved from something was again an irresistible lure, and this time the Tory Party gained so enormous a majority that the House of Commons, being almost bereft of an Opposition, came to look like the legislature of a Dictatorship State.

As soon as the new members were comfortably settled in their seats Britain went off the gold standard.

In 1935 another election came. By this time the first moves towards the resumption of the World War - the reintroduction of conscription in Germany and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia - had already been made, and the time was ripe for Britain to be saved from aggression. On that issue the Tory Party made its appeal to the country, which immediately and ardently responded. The enormous Tory majority returned to the House.

Immediately afterwards the process of propitiating Italy began and before a few months had passed the idea of opposing her annexation of Abyssinia was being openly derided as 'midsummer madness'. The process led, inevitably, foreseeably and within four years, by way of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Albania to the open resumption of the World War. As I write this second half of the World War is seemingly being won, for us, on the playing fields of Athens. Strange to think, in the light of the Italian performance against the Greeks, one of the weakest and most poorly equipped military nations in Europe, how easily the whole drift towards war could have been prevented by stamping out that first essay in aggression.

This Parliament of 1935 was the one upon which I looked down, with such feelings of anger and incomprehension in the summer of 1939. As I write it still sits, having prolonged its life for another year, and who knows if it may not still be in existence, still dominated by men of the same type, when this war ends?

I have devoted my main criticism to the Tory Party, because this was the party which, by the devices I have described, recurrently secured for itself an overwhelming majority in the House and then pursued policies which made the prevention of war impossible.

But just as much criticism falls upon the Labour Party, which in those years failed to offer the electorate any clear alternative. The British Labour Party as it was in those years, and as it still is to-day, reminds me most strongly of that degenerate German Socialist Party, the sickly offspring of the great striving movements of the nineteenth century, which at the first outbreak of the World War was only divided upon the question, whether to rise in Parliament and cry 'Hoch' for the Kaiser or only to rise; which after that war called in the generals and the free corps to suppress its own people; and which at the coming of Hitler failed to strike a single blow in defence of itself, parliamentary government, or Germany.

The British Labour Party to-day in spite of all past lessons, seems to me to have no plan for the future, no ideal, no vision of an England made better, not by taking away from those who have much, but by raising the level and improving the lot of those who have little. This party shows no sign of having realized, for instance, the enormous opportunity of raising the mental and physical standards of the coming generation which lie in the dispatch of hundreds of thousands of children from the city slums to the countryside. They are there, in groups of two and three and four, at the mercy, for better or worse, of the private householders with whom they have been quartered. There is no general supervision of their welfare, no exploitation of this unique opportunity to train their minds and bodies in a greater patriotism. Are they, when the war is over, simply to return to the slums, there to resume life as they lived it before, after this glimpse of a better and healthier and freer life? Would a real working-class party fail to seize such a chance of eradicating from their minds the feeling that they are just individual, lower-class children hiding from bombs, and training them to feel that they are members of a community?

I cannot see that the British Labour Party of to-day is a 'working-class party'. Too many of its representatives are trades union officials, as were the German Socialist leaders and deputies, and when a man has been a trades union official for many years he ceases to be a working man and becomes a bureaucrat, just like the civil servant. Too many others are professors and members of that class which is called intellectual, a word not to be confused with intelligent. Anybody who cares to study the debates in Parliament day by day and word by word, as I did after I returned to my native land, may be astonished to find how little some of these representatives of 'Labour' seemingly think about unemployment, the slums, under-nourishment, mis-education and the derelict areas, and how preoccupied, or even obsessed, they seem to be with the task of finding jobs for 'friendly aliens' or of furthering the cause of discrimination against the Arabs in Palestine.

But the thing that stupefied me, as I looked down on Parliament that day, was the thought of the long acquiescence of that vast phalanx of back-bench Tory members in the front-bench Tory policy which had made the avoidance of war impossible. This was a thing I then found inexplicable. I knew that there must be among them many who were not merely self-seekers and Yes-men, yet in all those years a protesting voice had been a rare thing.

I knew there must be many men of high ideals and high patriotism there. Why, then, had they not made their voices heard regardless of cost and consequence, and forced the old men in front to listen? Even such men as Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper, who had made their protest and gone, and been proved ten times right, seemed, as I judged from the subsequent silence of the one and the writings of the other, to labour under a feeling of the enormity of their offence in challenging the dictates of The Party, and none had followed them.

I did not know then, having been too long abroad to study the inner mechanism of Parliament, what later became widely known: that the Tory Party had perfected not only an electoral routine by which it could, for many years, be sure of repeatedly retaining its great majority, but that it had also perfected a system for ensuring the obedience of its members, once returned. The Whip's Hand ensured that these members should vote for The Party, Right or Wrong.

The devices which were used are now known to anybody who has studied the decay of Parliament in those between-war years. They were so effective that Britain had to be brought to the verge of catastrophic defeat before enough members rebelled for the changes in leadership and policy that