All Our To-morrows

So I call it All our To-morrows. After the last war, a famous book was written, by H. M. Tomlinson, called All our Yesterdays. He took the words from Macbeth, who, communing upon life and death, says:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

An apt reflection, in 1919! The accumulated experience of centuries, all our yesteryears, only served to light millions of men the way to dusty death. And to-day, after another quarter-century of nightmare-ridden peace, it happens again.

This book still pursues the hope that the people of this country, at least, may yet use the light that comes to them from all our yesterdays to show them the way to something better than dusty death. That is why I call it All our To-morrows. It is an attempt, my fourth, to force upon the minds of such as may read it the implacable relationship between yesterday and to-morrow, between cause and effect, between squandering and bankruptcy, between blunder and penalty, between apathy and awful awakening, between Munich and Dunkirk, between parent acorn and offspring acorn.

This doctrine is detested in England to-day, where many people seemingly would, if they could, have those who preach it burned at the stake; thus did the Pope of Rome order that Galileo be put to the torture for teaching that the earth moved round the sun, because this was 'contrary to Holy Scripture'.

The world might have been made yesterday, and they themselves might yesterday have been born, for all the use that all our yesterdays are to such people. They hate to be asked to contemplate the errors of the past, which are so much worse than crimes, in order that they may have a future. They love the idiot's doctrine, that if they do not think at all or exert themselves to preserve to-morrow from the fate of yesterday, some benevolent chance will nevertheless save them and 'there'll be blue birds over, the white cliffs of Dover, to-morrow - just you wait and see!'

The truth is that the people have been too much lied to and lullabied to, and to-day alternate between a leprous listlessness and a bitter cynicism. This extract, from a published letter written by a woman whose feelings burst their bounds, gives a glimpse of the tormented mind of England in 1942:

For some years before the war I became increasingly ashamed to belong to the nation. I have read much history and was ashamed of much of that too, but I became more and more discouraged at the complete lack of interest people displayed about things such as government, dishonesty, the awful products of education and many other things. Gradually I saw that man (I only know that of this country) just was not noble or great or hard-working or clever. Mostly he seemed to be a brainless idiot who had no desire to learn and who expected government to do everything for him; who complained bitterly about taxes and conditions but stirred no finger to try and make things better ... Of course this is the attitude of a woman who sees what she was created for reduced to dust and ashes. After four years of marriage, not only do I see our future ruined, but I know now that I will never be responsible for bringing another life into this world to be killed or widowed in another twenty years' time....

And the writer adds:

Though we may in the end win the war satisfactorily, someone must soon start the first volume of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

This statement prompts me, by showing how wrong I was, to divest myself of the unwelcome title of prophet which was being thrust upon me. For in two books before this war I wrote that the British Empire was, most unnecessarily, moving to its decline and fall; but the third, written in exultation after Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, I gleefully called The Decline To Fall of the British Empire; and now, large portions of that Empire have been lost.

It was simple to foretell what Germany would do: namely, strike with all its strength for the things it wanted. But to assume that this country, after awful awakening and miraculous reprieve, would shake off the shackles of inefficiency was going much too far. 1941 and 1942 have brought new prodigies of unalertness and shortsight.

Long before the Japanese attacked, our leaders stated that, if they struck at America, our declaration of war would follow 'within the hour'; yet when they struck their great successes were attributed to the surprise-value of 'treachery'! The new enemy was perfectly prepared. We were not. When we sent battleships against him, he promptly produced the suitable torpedo-firing aircraft to sink them; when we sent cruisers and an aircraft-carrier, his dive-bombers forthwith found and destroyed them. (Yet when the two German battleships, which we had been 'straddling' or 'scoring near misses on' - to quote the jargon of hoodwinking used by our broadcasting monopolises - for a year, calmly steamed home past our front door, we had no aircraft able to get near them.)

The cause of our troubles was the old one, of immune inefficiency in high places. Dunkirk was the offspring of Munich, and when this hideous infant was delivered even a cautious man felt justified in assuming that methods of birth-control would be used to suppress other such progeny, that Mr. Churchill was but biding his time before ridding himself of the men and the system he inherited from Mr. Chamberlain, who had them from Messrs. MacDonald and Baldwin. But that hope died in 1941.

Thus the ugly duckling, Dunkirk, was joined by ill-favoured others bearing the same unmistakable family features - Hongkong, Penang, Malaya, Singapore ... India and Australia are imminently threatened. The Empire has had large lumps backed from it. They can be regained; but not by the methods which have brought us so many disasters.

The British Empire is either in unnecessary and avoidable decline, before our eyes, or it suffers temporary dents which can be made good. The British people, from weariness with mistakes they feel to be needless, seem almost indifferent. Mr. Harold Nicolson declares that 'the attitude of Australia, the position in India, are not taken tragically by the general public, who have for long been convinced that change is necessary'!

But the struggle with Germany remains paramount, for us. It should have been possible now to say confidently that before 1942 ends Hitler would be on his way out, that political moves behind-the-scenes in Germany would denote the intention to call off the war before that country is too much damaged. This still is possible, if our leaders are ready to make war on Germany, to abandon the strange, punch-pulling policy which has often shown through our belligerent declarations.

The first two-and-half years of this war contain inexplicable things: the passivity of this country, sworn to aid Poland, when Poland was attacked; the ban on the bombing of Germany when the Royal Air Force lay in France, close to German targets; the 'astonishing seven months' (Mr. Churchill's own words!) of 'the phoney war'; the silence about Hess; the sudden publication of Lord Gores Dunkirk dispatches when the country demanded help for Russia and the argument that these showed how criminally foolhardy such a venture would be in view of our lack of shipping (though shipping was ready to take an army half-round the world to Singapore, where it would surrender after an ingloriously brief resistance); the sudden batch of Ministerial statements, just when Russia was hardest-pressed, that no British offensive would be possible 'before 1943'; the failure, at that supremely critical moment, to fulfil the many Ministerial promises about the heavy bombing of Germany; the wasteful divergence of what bombing there was to French targets; the ostentatious refusal to bomb Rome after Malta had had two thousand alerts; and so on.

If such things continue, it is vain to hope for Hitler to be on his way out in 1942, or 1943, or at any particular time. The Russian leaders have now repeatedly called on us to attack; American influence favours aggressive action; and the British people yearn for it. The instinct of the people has always been right. They want attack now, as they wanted aggression nipped in the Abyssinian bud. If their leaders again thwart this sound impulse, for ulterior political reasons, the victory which should soon he ours, will be put in jeopardy. Invasion should by now be utterly out of the question, but when this book appears Hitler's armies may well have struck at the Russians, aiming to smash through to the Caspian, to split the Russians from the Allied forces, and to drive through to the Persian Gulf, there to make contact with the Japanese. If we allow them to succeed, as we may if we do not at last launch some weighty diversion, the prospect before us will be either that of defeat or of many years of war.

And at Westminster still smoulder, in somnolent lifelessness, the 615 Embers of Parliament elected in 1935, by a passionately enthusiastic people, to check aggression at its first appearance, in Abyssinia!

If we hit hard, then, in 1942, as the people wish, save those who wish the war would never end, the next winter should bring us the better half of victory, and Japan could be made to disgorge at relative leisure. Otherwise the outlook is one of interminable war abroad and of soul-destroying afflictions at home. The worst of these is the growth of officialdom, which twines itself, like poison ivy, around every branch and tendril of the nation's life, sucking out all health and nourishment. All Our Yesterdays gives an oddly prophetic glimpse of this bureaucratic perdition to which we are being delivered in the name of 'a crusade for freedom'. A character in it, the Dockland Vicar, speaking during the last war, says:

'My church is down, my God has been deposed again. They've got another god now, the State, the State almighty. I tell you that god will be worse than Moloch ... It will allow no freedom, only uniformity ... You will have to face the brute. It is nothing but our worst, nothing, but the worst of us, lifted up. The children are being fed to it.'

They are, indeed - youngsters, girls, young married women, all. Our leaders may frequently fail to thwart the enemy's plans, but nothing is ever forgotten that can tighten the bonds of the British people. Every day sees fresh hordes of officials enlisted, who devise new paper forms, which call for more officials, who draw up new forms ... The Paper Chase is on. We may not light a fire or turn on the light (if the current proposals are maintained) without filling in forms, surrendering 'coupons', paying the salaries of jacks-in-office. Every Artful Dodger in the country strives for a job in, or on the fringe of officialdom; it means exemption, immunity, privilege, authority. All the good things of life are reserved for the new privileged class, because its members wear a label, 'I am doing vital national work'. To work hard, serve, live modestly, and rear a family, does not count as 'vital national work'. Everything else does, if you have the right friend in the right place.

Politicians and officials are avid and insatiable as vampires, once they are allowed to begin imposing 'temporary' prohibitions upon their fellow-countrymen, and awarding themselves exemptions from these bans. The regime that results is the worst that can befall a country, with the sole exception of a permanent foreign occupation.

Thus, between foreign undertakings still burdened down by the political system of preference-for-the-few of which Mr. Churchill, lamentably, has accepted the legacy from Mr. Chamberlain, and a man-eating officialdom in this island, our tomorrows look grim.

The future, instead of beginning anew, takes up the gloomy story of the past where Mr. Chamberlain left it. That is why I call this book, All Our To-morrows.

PROLOGUE

Every writer is entitled to his prologue, and this curtain-raiser, a blinding glimpse of the obvious in six acts, is intended to serve the reader as an elucidatory introduction to the theme of this book.

Its title is:

NEVER AGAIN!

(or, plus ça change....)

ACT I

The date is 1814. The BRITISH PRIME MINISTER, on a dais, left, addresses the British public, a group of citizens, right. All wear the dress of the period. The face of the British Prime Minister is a mask; the faces of the British citizens, with open mouths and awed eyes, express little comprehension but much credulity as he says:

We shall fight on, if necessary alone, if necessary for years. If the invader come, we shall fight him on the hills and in the vales until we have utterly destroyed him or driven him into the sea. The bloodthirsty Corsican tyrant and the whole grisly gang that works his wicked will must be crushed until their reptilian trail is erased and their memory either expunged from history or their names left a subject only for contempt and imprecation. We shall never parley or negotiate with Bonaparte or any of his party. Never again must such a monster be allowed to grow fat and batten on the misery of mankind. We are fighting for freedom and democracy and the right of men and nations to live their own lives in their own way. The earth must and shall be rid of this wicked man and all his works. Let him do his worst and we shall do our best. Never again, never again, never again....

As the lights dwindle and go out this refrain, 'Never again', is heard through the increasingly vociferous applause of the British citizens.

ACT II

The date is 1821. Two surgeons stand by a slab, in a house on the Island of St. Helena. One of them replaces the shroud over something that lies on the slab. They wipe their hands, look at each other, and shake their heads.

FIRST SURGEON I never saw such a stomach - perforated like a sieve. The man must have lived in agony for years.

SECOND SURGEON Ay, and made mankind suffer for the pain he endured! How many campaigns may he have made because of his bellyache? He was a case for the doctors, not for the statesmen and politicians.

FIRST SURGEON Now we know why he habitually went about with one hand thrust between the buttons of his coat - to ease the pain. Acute and chronic indigestion, leading to incurable disease, were the real meaning of that clamp of the lips which so many mistook for a sign of strength. Pray Heaven no fool of the future may think to imitate his gestures or his hanging forelock. Ten million men died for a stomachache. They called it 'Glory'!

SECOND SURGEON Never fear, my friend, mankind will never again be cursed by such a rot-gutted upstart. We have discovered his secret. How little a man he was, this mighty tyrant with the ruined bowels, this usurper of thrones and kingmaker with the pain in his vitals. But he had to be, that mankind might learn its lesson - never again, never again....

The lights dwindle and go out as they sagely confabulate, offer each other snuff and wisely shake their heads.

ACT III

The date is 1930. One of the Napoleons of Hollywood sits at his desk, surrounded by his secretary, an author, and other hirelings

MR. PORKENHEIM Now, waddabout this Napoleon film, Mr. Penhack? I told you, I'm gonna spend a million dollars on it, and it's gotta he the most sensational film that ever left Hollywood. You got the greatest chance you ever had with this film, and it's up to you to make good.

MR. PENHACK (reflectively) Did you say, to make good?

MR. PORKENHEIM Soitinly I did, you heard me.

MR. PENHACK It's not easy, to make good out of evil.

MR. PORKENHEIM Lookithere, Mr. Penhack, you know what I mean. I wanna story about this guy Napoleon that'll just burn 'em up. (Irritably) I don't know why nobody ever told me about him before. What do I pay you fellers for? I been reading about this Napoleon 'n he's got everything to make a great film play. Now what's your broad line on him gonna be, Mr. Penhack?

MR. PENHACK Well, Mr. Porkenheim, briefly I should say he was a man who suffered from a malignant disease of the stomach which caused him acute pain for many years and eventually killed him. Unfortunately for the world, he was in a position to make it suffer for the pain he endured, for he had a great army and enormous resources. The more irritable he became from pain, the more wars he made.

MR. PORKENHEIM (shocked) See here, Mr. Penhack, I want history, not theories. You know as well as I do it ain't the business of the film industry to be morbid. You try dragging in stomach complaints and suffering into this film and I'll fire you. You been with me long enough to know we gotta duty to the public. Wholesome films has always been our motto.

MR. PENHACK Wholesome is as wholesome does.

MR. PORKENHEIM So don't you go putting any morbid things like disease and death into this film. We gotta educate the public.

MR. PENHACK Napoleon had a good deal to do with the industry of death, you know, Mr. Porkenheim. About ten million dead, I think, was the sum total of his wars.

MR. PORKENHEIM Aw, that's different. Soldiers lying about on the battlefield - now, there'll be some good shots in that. And besides, those uniforms, in technicolor - oh boy!

MR. PENHACK Ah yes, the uniforms of Napoleon's Marshals were brilliant.

MR. PORKENHEIM Yea, that's the stuff, gimme plenty of that. I been looking at a picture of one of them guys, all cocked hat and plumes and tight trousers and high boots and sidewhiskers and stars - Marat, I think he was called.

MR. PENHACK (gently) Murat.

MR. PORKENHEIM Oh yeah, Murat. Now, what about Napoleon's love life? That's the stuff we want - glamour, movement, action, colour. What do you say, Miss Pencil, as a woman?

MISS PENCIL Yes, indeed, Mr. Porkenheim, plenty of wholesome glamour. Josephine, you know.

MR. PENHACK Glamour, clamour, and amour. I know.

MR. PORKENHEIM Sure. Now, what do you know about Napoleon's love life, Mr. Penhack?

MR. PENHACK (wearily) Well, there is always Josephine, of course. We could work in the gag about 'Not to-night, Josephine', there ...

MR. PORKENHEIM (eagerly) Yeah, Yeah, that's the stuff, that's box office.

MR. PENHACK And then there was the Countess Walewska, the beautiful Polish girl. She's supposed really to have been fond of Napoleon, but then, history is such a liar about these things. I should think it improbable. He wasn't a man whom women would have loved.

MR. PORKENHEIM (severely) Lookithere, Mr. Penhack, don't you go introducing this nasty suggestiveness into the story. Let true love be true love. We gotta consider the public, we gotta be wholesome. Napoleon's romance! Napoleon's only real love! The woman who stood by him to the end! One of the greatest love stories of all time! Boy, this is gonna be terrific. I can see it taking shape. And them uniforms! In technicolor! Oh boy, oh boy!

MR. PENHACK And then there was Marie Louise, the Empress of Austria's daughter. The Emperor sold her to Napoleon as the price of being left in peace. Napoleon couldn't wait to have her until he got her to Paris and married her. He met her half-way and had her in an inn. That's a nice wholesome piece.

MR. PORKENHEIM (enthusiastically) Fine, fine, that's just what we want. Plenty of human interest, plenty of heartthrobs. Glamour, love, colour, good wholesome stuff....

While Mr. Porkenheim enthuses rapturously, the lights dwindle and go out.

ACT IV

The date is 1935. The marble portals of the Frabjous Picture Palace at Clapham are almost hidden by coloured placards showing Napoleon surrounded by bemedalled Marshals, plumed and cloaked. He holds in his arms a Glamour Girl dressed in the fashion of the Empire. The title of the film is 'Loves of an Emperor'. It is described as 'The greatest all-talking all-technicolor love-story of all time'.

Two English working-girls come out of the theatre.

FIRST GIRL Wasn't it lovely! I 'ad to cry when 'e took 'er in 'is arms at the end and she promised to follow 'im into exile on an island....

SECOND GIRL ... and 'e said, 'Then, sweetart, though I 'ave lost an empire, I 'ave won a kingdom - the kingdom of love....'

FIRST GIRL ... and she laid 'er 'ead on 'is breast and all them Marshals took orf their 'ats and that lovely music played in the background and they all faded out. Ooh, it was nice.

SECOND GIRL (puzzled) You know, Elsie, it's funny, but I read a book about Napoleon once, and it didn't say she went with 'im to 'is island. I thought he gone there alone and died there.

FIRST GIRL (reprovingly) See, now you know 'ow it really 'appened. I always say, the films does educate yer.

As the lights dwindle and go out they exit, drying damp eyes.

ACT V

The date is l941. A coffin, draped with the lmperial German flag, passes through a street in the Dutch village of Doorn. It is followed by a cortège of bestarred and bemedalled Hohenzollern Princes in the German uniforms of the period. As they disappear, German soldiers, who have been standing rigidly at attention, fall in and follow. The emptying stage reveals two Dutch peasants, standing cap in hand over their spades. They look after the procession and, when the last mourner is out of earshot, they replace their caps and turn to each other.

FIRST PEASANT Well, that's the last of the great Kaiser. Only twenty years ago he was the big man who was going to conquer the world, and now, there he goes.

SECOND PEASANT Ay, there he goes, to join the five or six million dead his war cost Europe. 'The war to end war', they called that one, and now they're all at it again and this time the Germans have taken our country, too. (Nods his head in the direction of the cortège.) Ah, and they said they was going to 'ang 'im after that war, too, an' all.

FIRST PEASANT (derisively) 'Ang 'im! They allus says that, during a war, and after a war. More'n twenty years he lived here, the Kaiser, in fat and plenty, and over eighty he was, they say, when he died. 'Ang 'im! No, no, when the war's over the big ones, they settles down on their estates until the next war begins. Mark my words, Jan, one o' these fine days you'll see one o' them there high-collared German princes, that walked behind his coffin, back on the throne of Germany, and then he'll make a war, and they'll talk about 'anging 'im, too.

SECOND PEASANT Ah, that's right. Never again, they said after that war, too. Never again!

FIRST PEASANT Never again? Why, they said that after Napoleon. They'll say it after this war. (Contemptuously) Never again! 'tis a farce, that's what 'tis.

He spits on his hand, emphatically, casts a glance full of meaning after the coffin, takes up his spade, and turns to his work again, against a grey and desolate sky. As the lights dwindle and go out, he is heard exclaiming derisively, 'Never again! Never again!'

ACT VI

The date is 1942. The BRITISH PRIME MINISTER, on a dais, left, addresses the British public, a group of citizens, right. All wear the dress of the period. The face of the British Prime Minister is a mask; the faces of the British citizens, with open mouths and awed eyes, express little comprehension but much credulity as he says:

We shall fight on, if necessary alone, if necessary for years. If the invader come, we shall fight him on the hills and in the vales until we have utterly destroyed him or driven him into the sea. This bloodthirsty tyrant and the whole grisly gang that works his wicked will must be crushed until their reptilian trail is erased and their memory either expunged from history or their names left a subject only for contempt and imprecation. We shall never parley or negotiate with Hitler or any of his party. Never again must such a monster he allowed to grow fat, and batten on the misery of mankind. We are fighting for freedom and democracy and the right of men and nations to live their own lives in their own way. The earth must and shall be rid of this wicked man and all his works. Let him do his worst and we shall do our best. Never again, never again, never again....

As the lights dwindle and go out this refrain, 'Never again, never again', is heard through the increasingly vociferous applause of the British citizens.

PART ONE

TIMES PAST

Chapter One

OVERTURE, 1941

SCENE: Kent, the seashore near Dover. Firing heard at sea. Then enter, from a boat, a CAPTAIN, a MASTER, a MASTER'S MATE ...

Why should I dress my story in new phrases, when old ones fit it so becomingly? These clothe it admirably well. When I thought that I would write this reminiscence, I sat in an inn, on the sea-shore at Dover, in Kent. I heard firing at sea. Entered, from a boat, a Captain, a Mate ...

So, as I cannot improve on Shakespeare's words. I have borrowed them. How often have they been apt, since he wrote them, 350 years ago!

Early in 1941 I revisited Dover. The place always fascinated me. As a boy, my head filled with mazy ideas of running away to sea, I trudged along the Dover Road, and failed to reach its end. Afterwards, as a soldier and civilian, I knew it well, for it was the gateway to all those countries which, when I came to know them, caught my interest.

Now, in 1941, when the gateway was closed, the thought of Dover held an almost hypnotic fascination for me. I felt like a man turning to the last chapter of a book, the end of which became plainer to see with each previous chapter. Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France; so the chapters went, and now came the last chapter, England.

That made me think of Dover, for from Dover you could see, on a fine day, the enemy, crouching for his spring. Sometimes, before the new war, I flew to the Continent, and I remembered, with a chilly spine, how very narrow those Straits looked from above, so thin, that you almost feared lest the ships, passing them, should scrape their sides against the land. How small a ditch, I thought, as I apprehensively fingered the pages of that last chapter; and I went down to look at Dover.

It was a grim and battered little town, then. The sea, that once lay so broad and inviting at its gates, calling to all to go out and examine their world, looked menacing and full of foreboding. The busy sirens had barely time to wail, Dover scarcely time to duck, before the swooping aeroplanes or the screaming shells were upon it. An hour, the steamers used to need to make the crossing. Much less, the Germans would want, with their troop-carrying and troop-towing aeroplanes and speedboats. To me, who possibly alone among men in Dover had seen the Germans race into Vienna and Prague, it was eerie to think of those legions, just across the ditch, and of the things they would do, if they could span it; and then to see how casually Dover, rather battered and tattered on its seaward side, went about its daily tasks.

Dover was the chin of England, stuck out almost within reach of the enemy's fist. Dover was, at this moment, the centre of the universe, the anvil of history; and the great smith, Destiny, standing doubtfully astride the narrow Channel, hesitated whether to forge upon it the chains of defeat or the sword of liberation. In the drab seaward streets, where were scarred walls and shattered windows, the future of the world was being decided. But the English people have small sense of drama, as little feeling for tragedy impending as for triumphs past, and Dover, though it lustily cursed the explosive evils of the present, doubted the future not at all, so that tragedy, perhaps misliking so dull an audience, paused in indecision at its gates.

'Firing heard at sea. Enter, from a boat, a Captain ...' I could not count the inns and hotels I have stayed at, all over Europe. Nearly all are now but shadowy memories of a bed or an ornament, that for some inexplicable reason refuse to be forgotten, or of a view from a window. But I could never forget the inn at Dover.

'The seashore, at Dover, in Kent ...' It was in the front line. Only the sea lay between it and the Germans; on a fine day, the German-held cliffs opposite, German ships stealthily hugging the land, German aeroplanes circling over their landing-grounds, could be seen. From its windows, then, you might look at the wheeling vultures, waiting for their corpse, contemplate the gleam of the headman's axe, about to fall.

But turn your back on those windows, and the little, indifferent world of England, was all about you, busy chiefly with domestic cares. Mine host was a worried man, but not on account of the menace outside; his wife lay sick in the hospital on the hill, and that fretted him. Kindly soul, I hope she is well again. Within those four shell-scarred walls, bells rang and maids dusted, breakfast came up the stairs to brass-knobbed bedsteads, solid sideboards of Victorian mahogany stood with the dignity of butlers about the dining-room, in fading prints beribboned and bemuslined maids, wearing great floppy hats, played with dogs and dolls; and, from a boat, Captains entered.

They came, ate toast and marmalade, chatted about this and that, but seldom about the war, they went, and usually they returned, from a boat, to toast and marmalade. Once one of them, who still had a suppurating leg from Dunkirk, brought with him the little pilot parachute of a German airman, whom he had shot down, with a Lewis gun, during an attack on his ship. It lay drying on the brass fender, before the fire, while he ate his supper and talked to me about Scotland, his home. He brought back a large part of the German's aeroplane, too, in wreckage festooned about his decks.

A strange experience, that sojourn the inn at Dover. A shell splinter had delved, jagged and deep, into the ceiling above my bed. Sometimes, the enemy would, quite suddenly, strike at the chin of England. One moment the world was quiet; the next, pandemonium broke. The shrieking sirens, vainly trying to get their word in first, would be drowned by the swelling roar of hurtling aeroplanes, the chattering argument of machine-gun fire, the bang-bang-bang of the pom-poms and the crash of anti-aircraft guns, and by the time you reached the window, the attackers were already far way, the guns had given up the chase, and the barrage balloons brooded over the sea as if nothing had happened.

The front-line inn, when it was young, had many friends, with whom it had grown up. Now, in its mature age, it was rather lonely. Some of its friends were dead, some wounded. Only a few remained, in their full health, to keep it company.

One of its defunct companions was the Hilarious Hotel, not far away, fallen victim to a bomb. A friend of mine, Hubert Harrison, whom I met again in Dover after encounters abroad, was in at the death of it, which was nearly also his own. Harrison, who knows more about Yugoslavia than almost any living Englishman, suffered the common lot of the British newspaper correspondents in Europe, between the two wars. Trying for years to tell people at home that Yugoslavia was being dragged by suborned men into the German camp, and that the Prince Regent Paul connived in this policy, he was ostracized by British representatives who should have supported him, and eventually expelled by those same suborned men whom the Serbs, when they found the enemy at the doors, turned upon and spewed out. How England cheered when the Serbs did this! How long was England prevented from knowing that the Serbs wanted to do this!

Now Harrison was posted on the cliffs of Dover, to await the invader. From a little cliff top inn, one fine summer's day in 1940, he saw between thirty and forty German ships steal along the opposite shore. It must have seemed clear to him that day, who had watched the war being written chapter by chapter, that the moving finger was writing the first lines of the last chapter, with these ships. Invasion! There it was, dim shapes gathering, like wolves in the shadows of the forest.

It was not. As the months passed, Harrison was still in unsubjugated Dover, and on a day he found himself in the Hotel Hilarious, playing snooker. He made a shot, and the pink, he swears, was travelling straight for the pocket, when the bomb struck. He will always wonder if the pink would have dropped in. Slowly, as it seemed, the great lamps above the green table began to come down, and went out. He heard his companion shout, 'Dive under the table', and he dived under the table. Slowly, the vibration ceased and the crashing of masonry and debris dwindled into a taut silence. Feeling grateful to the billiard table, and very safe beneath it, he put up his hand. It was not there!

The most comic moments in a man's life are his narrowest escapes from death - in retrospect. At the front line inn, a sudden shell bursting not far away, caught me in my bath. Afterwards I realized that I instinctively ducked beneath the water, as it burst.

What great days those were in the drab little town, seemingly so unaware of the nearness of calamity. Nowhere else had the flood been stayed, until it turned towards, and sought to submerge Dover. The tiny ditch was not much deeper than a well or much wider than a church door, but it served. At last, the Gadarene gallop was checked. Dover little realized that. Here you saw no grim-faced garrison in a beleaguered citadel, vowing that the besiegers should pass only over their dead bodies. Here you saw only an odd sailorman rolling along the street, cocking an indifferent eye upward at duelling aeroplanes, and turning into the Sea-farer's Arms for a pint; or a bored soldier, on 'leaf', drifting drearily to The Pictures; or the postman placidly going his rounds.

The two maids in the front line inn were most typical citizenesses of Dover. One was tall and thin; the other, her niece, short and plump. They were the female counterparts of two comedians, Swedish, I think, and most popular in foreign parts in peacetime, called Pat and Patachon. They were not highly trained or of lightning-quick understanding. They were apt to appear in one's room without knocking, or not to appear when rung, for. A call requested for eight o'clock might be given at any time up to eight-forty-five.

But they were full of fun, and willing, and maids, like men, become scarce in wartime. The front line inn, anyway, was more like a ship than anything on firm ground, and they brought with them a jolly, rolling, slapstick, all-shipmates-together atmosphere well suited to it. They were discussed sometimes in the wardroom, I mean the dining-room, by captains and masters and master's mates, entered from boats, and received, in my hearing, one of the strangest tributes that can ever have been paid to mortal maid, busy with boots and breakfasts. 'Well, they're steady under fire!' I like to picture the reference they might receive, some day: 'Not highly experienced, but hard-working, willing, anxious to please and steady under fire.'

I met again a good friend, in Dover, and spent a vivid hour or two, in her company, at the front-line theatre. Many theatres in England, at that time were struck by bombs. This one alone endured, not only bombs, but also shellfire. Few of the much-advertised topliners then found their way to Dover; pressing engagements took them elsewhere. The hard-working everyday players, men and women, though their contribution to 'our war effort' was never sung by the newspaper hacks, counted shells and bombs in the day's work and busked cheerfully on. while the lightning played around them, and I was glad that, through Jill, I came to know them.

Her dressing-room, with the pink-distempered walls, was warm and garishly fit. As I watched, in the blazing mirror, her fresh young beauty disappear behind the bedizened stage mask I thought I saw a picture by Matisse come into being, and chatter, and smile, and laugh, and live.

First the vigorous rubbing-in of the fleshing, then the carmine on cheeks and lips. How alive she was, I thought, watching, and how close, how inseparable were life and death, like a man and his shadow. Did she realize that only the wall of her dressing-room, one thickness of brick, stood between her and the shells?

Now the green shadow on her eyelids and the hotblack on her long lashes and the pencil stroke along her eyebrows. A dot of red in the inner corners of her eyes. Perhaps those men on the other side of the Channel, in their heavy steel helmets, were laying the gun now!

Wet-white on her throat and shoulders, brilliantine from a spray on her abundant fair hair. The picture in the mirror gave its hair a dab here and a pat there, paused, regarded its living counterpart seriously, then transferred its vivid gaze to me, with an unspoken question in the bright eyes and on the parted lips. Now, I thought, suppose they fire now! Then would the 'mirror crack out far and wide! Here is life; there, death; between, just that narrow water.

'How do I look?' said the picture.

'Fine,' said I, 'fine, and may your shadow never grow less.' The picture smiled and, in response to my gesture, raised a glass to its lips. At that time, you might stilt buy something in a bottle suitable for toasting a picture like this.

'Does my hair look all right?'

'It should do,' I said, 'you spend an unconscionable time dyeing.'

'Dyeing? My hair? It isn't even tinted.'

'I know,' I said, 'you just use Whosit's Golden Shampoo, bless you. Anyway, it's lovely, and I wouldn't change a hair of it for all the gold in New York.'

Only one thickness of brick, I was thinking. A very frail door, and death might tap on it at any moment. But the tap came at the other door, and it was the call-boy. 'Overture, Miss Jill,' he said, and in a quick cloud of powder and whirl of skirts she was gone; I heard her feet scampering down the stone stairs and badinage bandied to and fro and the faint sound of the orchestra. I felt the quick excitement that always throbs behind the scenes of a theatre before the curtain rises, no matter how good or bad the show, how full or empty the house. The mirror, that had been a living thing, was like a glass from which the champagne had been drunk.

I went down and watched, from the wings. I saw the rows and tiers of indistinct blobs that were people's faces, and the prevalent notes of khaki and blue. I saw the orchestra, and my friend the trombone player, lustily blowing, whom I always thought to be a fat man until I met him in the bar, where he was very thin. I leaned against the tawdry back of a piece of scenery, among ropes and props, while the comedian contemplated his red nose in a hand-mirror, and the chorus girls chattered and fidgeted in nervous anticipation, and Jill waved to me from the opposite side, and the curtain rose.

She was on the stage when the sirens sounded and the first shell fell. It was not very near. I don't think she heard it, but if she had, it wouldn't have made her falter; once on the stage, Jill was too rapt, too completely lost in her singing and her audience, to have a thought for anything else. I watched her, with the spot on her, young, lively, lovely, exerting every note and smile and gesture to make the people like her.' Perhaps that shell killed someone, just up the street; she didn't even know it had fallen, her universe was the house in front of her, she the mighty atom in it. But the girls in the wings, waiting to come dancing on, heard it. I saw them go pale beneath their make-up; their hands fluttered to their hearts, they looked at each other in affright. Then, as their cue sounded, the fixed stage-smile sprang back to their faces. Arms linked, legs kicking, they came on.

I felt I had seen all this before, and as another shell burst, and then a third, I remembered where. Of course, this was Poperinghe, in the first great war. The Ypres Salient was a stoutly-held British bulge in the long German trench line, that ran from the sea to the Alps, and in the middle of the bulge's base lay Poperinghe. Paris itself never seemed so gay or grateful to the leisured pleasure-seeker as drab and battle-scarred little Poperinghe to weary British soldiers, come back from the trenches to bath and delouse themselves, and in the evenings they rolled gladly round to the little theatre, where the Sixth Division's concert party played, The Follies.

How good they were, ah, how good! For another four days, until you went back to the trenches, you were alive! And there was the tall tenor, singing 'My Little Grey Home in the West', and the little comedian, impersonating George Formby, who made a joke of the cough that killed him, and the two Belgian girls, who did little but show two pairs of appetizing, tantalizing legs, and we called them Claudine and Grenadine, and afterwards they were joined by a third, less well-favoured, whom we named Chlorine.

I think no audiences ever relished so much every jest and gesture on the stage, as those muddy British soldiers, who had a four-day lease of life, and after that the certainty of wounds or death. But even at these feasts was a skeleton; the four days' respite was not unconditional. For the Germans did not like British soldiers to rest, when they were out of the trenches, and brought up a long-range gun - just as those German soldiers on the cliffs opposite Dover brought up long-range guns - which could reach Poperinghe.

So, every evening, all ears were pricked for the noise of that approaching shell, and sometimes the evening passed without it, and sometimes it came, and there was an almost imperceptible pause in the rollicking while those ears waited for the explosion, and when it burst, the same unspoken thought was in every mind, 'Safe again, this time', and you could see Claudine's eyes flicker and Grenadine's lips tremble.

Jill came off, laughing and excited. 'Did you hear the shells?' I asked.

'No,' she said, wide-eyed, 'are they shelling?'

Then she was back again, for an encore, and the house sang with her, to raise the roof, a very old song, a great favourite of the soldiers and sailors, 'Nellie Dean'. 'You're my heart's desire, I love you, Nellie Dean'; the song swelled. Faintly, at the back of it, I heard the dull thump of another shell.

Afterwards we walked together, through pitch-dark streets, to the front-line inn, for a meal. A shuffling of feet around us, and a dwindling murmur of voices, as the theatre emptied and the people dispersed. Then Dover was black and lonely as the grave. You could hear, but not see, the sea. An angry wind blew fiercely against the land. The front-line inn, when we found it, seemed the last outpost of England, a bleak stronghold in the menacing night. But within was light, and the two maids busily shuffled to and fro, and in the dining-room were captains and mates from a boat.

Jill was as happy as only a young actress can be, when she comes to a good meal after a hard evening's work. We had a fine time, and all the sailormen, who recognized her, begged her to sing 'My Ain Folk', and songs of that kind, when next they went to the show. Outside the wind howled.

Dover, captains and mates, and firing heard at sea,' said I. 'But Shakespeare didn't know you, Jill, or he would surely have included you. Here's to Dover and you. Or rather, here's to you, and Dover.'

Gosh, I feel good,' said Jill. 'I could eat that all over again. The air here makes me feel hungry and good.'

'You make me feel good,' said I, 'let's meet here and have a terrific celebration after the war.'

'I'll be here,' said Jill.

'After the war'! That seemed a reasonable rendezvous to make, when I talked with Jill in Dover, at the beginning of 1941. We had four priceless things to thank destiny for: that Germany had not struck at us with all her might at the outbreak, that our army had been rescued from Dunkirk, that Hitler had not attempted invasion immediately after that, and that we had beaten back the air assault on Britain. The near future, too, held something better than all of these - the German attack on Russia.

But in spite of all those reprieves and all that good fortune, we still did not make use of our chances, and as 1941 waxed and waned to-morrow grew darker, not brighter.

That rendezvous in Dover receded....

Chapter Two

THE LONDON I LEAVE

I am a Cockney; I have been bored within sound of Bow Bells ever since I can remember. I left my native London to go to one war and came back when I thought that war finished. Then I went to foreign parts and found the war was not finished, that it would soon be resumed; by 1944 we shall be able to enter another Thirty Years War in our history books - for our life in the years between 1918 and 1939 was not peace, it was suspended animation, waking nightmare.

London! The undisputed centre of our universe, the focal point of all human hopes and fears upon this planet. While it stands, men in countries near and far may hope for the future. If it fell, our world would be quite different.

Yet I have not had this feeling of historical climax during the latest of my London years. At the beginning, yes, when the sirens came chasing the dusk, and the vibrant hum in the air and the noise of rushing bombs tautened every nerve in the expectant, fearful human body, and the clangour of fire-bells filled the night and the glow of fires painted the sky, so that the chimneys and rooftops were etched black and sharp against it; then, a man could feel that his native London was the citadel of civilization, the last stronghold of the future, that a great battle for mankind was being fought and won within its walls.

That was the brave time of which a blithe spirit, Noel Coward, returning from afar on the morrow of the waning air assault, sang:

London Pride has been handed down to us,

the first line of which, by some whimsy of his muse, has to my ear almost exactly the same melody as that of Deutschland ueber Alles.

London Pride - has been handed down to us
Deutschland, Deutschland, ueber Alles
Tumty-tum-tum, tumty-tum-ti-tum.

Ah well, what's in a tune? I lay awake once, in a Berlin bedroom, in the turbulent early days of Hitler's advent to power, when you sometimes heard shots and shouts in the night, and heard a belated pedestrian, whose footfalls rang sharp and clear in the silent street, whistling himself homeward to the tune of 'God Save the King'. How incongruous, I thought. Then I remembered that this was, long before 'God Save The King', the tune of the King of Prussia's national anthem, 'Hail to thee Victory, in thy laurels'. And the early Bolshevists, for their hymn of worldwide revolution, with guileful hatred of the Gentiles took the tune of a German Christmas carol, '0 Tannenbaum'.

Thus the Gods who rule our destinies, or the demons, whichever they may be, with mocking laughter mix up the melodies in a hat, and with one and the same tune you may inflame the passions of a man in Kiel to-day and a man in Kieff to-morrow.

London, after the air attack ceased, became depressing. The songs which were written about London's staunchness and ordeal came too late, after the fury of the siege abated; perhaps they still warmed the hearts of American audiences, which seemingly loved to think of London 'taking it', but they had no relation to the careworn city which London became during 1941. The excitement was over, the siege raised, the war moved south and east and was being fought out in Africa and Russia, and few people in Britain, for all the warnings, believed that an invasion still might come.

All that was left were the toothless gaps, the waiting anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, barrage balloons and fire-fighters, food rationing, the black-out, and the war stretching far into an impenetrable future. Every day brought new restrictions to circumscribe every normal act of a normal man's life, every day new paper forms and new regulations were invented by the ever-growing army of officials to which this country was delivered for the second time in a generation. On one side of the road officialdom posted its injunctions to the patriotic to 'save paper', 'save fuel', 'save food', 'save money', and 'waste nothing'; on the other side of the road were celebrated the riotous orgies of waste which officialdom, in all countries, always brings; and along the hard road between marched the British nation, docile, unthinking, unquestioning, staunch, passive, bearing its burden with a coolie-like patience, forgiving everything because it understood nothing.

The closed and shuttered little shops, tombs of so many small men's hopes, were to me more poignant than the songs of troubadours about London's courage. Everywhere the placards, 'No cigarettes', 'No chocolates', 'No eggs'; the nation of shopkeepers was going through a hard time, though one newspaper, seemingly resolved to serve a great tradition to the last, announced that 'Shops are to remain open during an invasion'. The only placard I missed was one, 'No information', at the Ministry of Information, that gigantic teapot in Bloomsbury, which to be suitably housed should add a handle to one side and a spout to the other of its great central tower.

And the black-out! The philosophy of the ostrich was honoured on a stupendous scale. The winter of 1940-1941 proved that the black-out is the night raider's friend, because it gives him the darkness he loves, and vain, because it does not keep him from his prey. In several cities he destroyed main streets as cleanly as if be had gone afoot, casting bombs from side to side. A light-up, not a black-out, was needed to clear the air. But, once ordained by officialdom, the black-out stayed, would stay.

What a satanic invention! When I consider the black-out, and the besnouted masks which were given - the only free thing they were ever given, save that they paid for them - to the people, I wonder whether we are in the grip of demoniac forces which work to degrade and humiliate mankind to the semblance of the lower animals. Not even officialdom, yet, has been able to make people carry, far less wear, these piglike helmets. Perhaps in the next war we shall find means to darken the daylight sky, perhaps we shall live underground and only emerge, stealthily and warily, at night, perhaps we shall grow pallid and pale-eyelashed and red-eyed, behind our pig-snouts, in the cause of saving civilization.

There was a Minister, believe me or believe me not, there is a Minister, a Labour politician, but by the implacable processes of pass-the-sweets, which are as immutable and unchallengeable as the laws of nature and time themselves he has for the nonce eased a Tory politican out of the Home Secretary's chair, who would like to see the people even take these swinish masks to bed with them! None has explained how the gas is to be launched which might exterminate those who go about without one of these begoggled porcine gargoyles on their heads. Like many politicians who wage this war, he has no experience of warfare. He derided, as the dupes of warmongering politicans, the British soldiers who fought the Germans in the last war; come to office himself, he imprisons those he thinks injurious to 'the war effort' in this.

In London, as 1941 aged, I was haunted by the ghost of the last war. I am not of those who say that things are not what they were because I am not what I was. The lives of a million men were seldom more drearily spent than those of a million Britishers in the 1914-1918 war. Hardly a gleam of strategic genius brightened their Calvary. They just lay in muddy holes in the ground, waiting to be killed or wounded; there was no other alternative for those in the forefront. They could only assume that when enough of them had been killed or wounded the war, somehow, would end.

Yet their spirits never flagged; they believed, nearly all of them, that they served a purpose by their suffering and sacrifice. So, when they came home, a rollicking, roystering band rolled out of the leave train at Victoria, took its waiting womenfolk eagerly in its arms, or surged eagerly westward in search of a drink, a dinner and a girl. Caps set at a swagger slant; legs well shod in high boots that still bore French mud; high spirits and laughter. At another platform the hospital trains pulled in; women threw flowers as the wounded men were driven away.

At yet another platform stood the reluctant trains, with averted eyes, that waited to take the leave-men back to France, but even there all was bustle and laughter; only when the train drew out did you see a tear or two. It was a bad war, but yet a good war. It should never have been allowed, but it had to be fought, and when it was won, a new century, a new life would lie ahead. That was the belief of those young men. How little they knew - of the bitter years that lay before them, when ex-service men would push barrel organs around the streets and ex-officers, figures of unfriendly fun, would peddle vacuum-cleaners.

Victoria, for me, was filled with the ghosts of 1918, looking wonderingly about them at the Victoria Station of 1941. A dark cavern, its gloom intensified by rare lights of a spectral blue. Blacked-out trains, lying like dead monsters alongside slimy platforms. The dank mist, peculiar to London stations, hanging on to the air. Vague, muffled shapes plodding silently about. Inside the carriages, silent, harassed-looking men trying to read newspapers in the dim light, or talkative young workmen telling each other about their last wages increase, what they said to the foreman, football coupons, dancing. Everywhere notices, 'Blinds must be kept down after dark' (altered by the usual humorist to 'Blondes must be kept down after dark').

Between 1914 and 1918, for all the bloodshed, London was gay, forward-looking, full of hope and belief in the future. The promenades behind the circle at the Empire and the Pavilion were open, and were thronged with young officers and the lighter ladies of the town, laughing and talking. The prurient prudery which, with lascivious obsession, gives the word 'morality' an exclusively sexual meaning, and ignores the slums, the derelict areas, political corruption, the exploitation of young people and the like, had those places closed. Now the prostitutes stand outside them, in rows, upon the kerbstone.

Indeed, I found it hard to imagine, in blacked-out 1941, that there were ever in London town such places as the Cremorne Gardens and Vauxhall, where people could openly disport and refresh themselves without a sense of wrongdoing, of oppression and repression, without having to wait for that hour to strike which is deemed rightful for the sale of alcohol or having to slink into outer darkness when that other hour strikes when it is held to be wrongful. Ever since I have known London it has grown duller and duller.

The exhilaration of the years 1914-1918 may have been artificial and wrong, but it kept the people buoyed up. This time, the Londoner's mood contained none. It was one, at the best, of grim resignation. The Londoner becomes cynical, sceptical, disillusioned, almost soured, and how should he not? He reminds me of the Viennese I knew in the years of Vienna's tattered grandeur after the 1914-1918 war. Vienna was like someone who was once lovely and still tried to carry off the gowns with which she captivated all in her far-distant youth.

For the Londoner carries with him memories which cannot breed faith or hope. He need not be old to have caroused on Mafeking Night, to have cheered before Buckingham Palace on August 4th, 1914, to have rolled along Piccadilly shouting and yelling on Armistice Night, to have roared 'Good old Neville' as Mr. Chamberlain, returned in triumph from Munich, cried 'Peace with honour' from the window of 10 Downing Street. Scarcely ten years ago, he may have gone to Victoria Station to acclaim Mr. Philip Snowden, come back with a victor's laurels from the Reparations Conference at The Hague; to-day, he cannot even remember what good old Philip, soon to receive the proud Freedom of London, then brought back with honour. If this particular Londoner is a particularly enthusiastic Londoner - like the lady I know who wrote a letter of sixty-nine lyrical pages about the Coronation to her brother abroad - he went to Waterloo, on a day, to acclaim one Stanley Baldwin, returned 'with a feather in his cap' (Punch, inevitably,) from discussing, with dollar barons in the United States, the number of noughts behind the figure of the British war debt. He was supposed to have won a nought or two, and gained great renown.

The Londoner, if he apply his ear to the past, will hear the faint echo of his own cheers coming down the years - and where is he now? At war again, a worse war than ever. His future wrapped in fog. That might not matter; he is of the generation which has never known a future. But what of his children? Are they to be denied one, too?

He himself went into the last war as a volunteer, and resented the tardy ones, the conscripts, who came after. Now, as he approaches his fifties, he is liable to be conscribed himself. He thought himself a good patriot, in 1914, when he rushed forward among the foremost volunteers; now he sees that his next-door neighbour, who was called up in 1918 but never went to France, struts about as a major in the Home Guard - he has good friends in the right places and has been given a commission under the Palsy Walsy Act, he will be able to parade the crown upon the shoulder of his ribbonless coat for the duration of the war and look after his business at the same time.

John Londoner, indeed, sees all around him the smart Alecs, the wise guys, the Artful Dodgers, whom he knew in the last war, the men who know how to get out of everything that others have to do and how to get everything that others have not. He is himself nearly fifty; his sons have already gone, and one is dead; his daughters are now to be taken away; but everywhere he sees the young men who are somebody's pals, the infant proteges, in 'reserved occupations'; these are the spoilt children of 'individual selection', the favourites of the system of 'judging each case on its merits'.

Lean, bespectacled, going bald, harassed, careworn, perplexed and uncomprehending, John cannot go to a restaurant, a theatre or a club without seeing on all sides of him the people he detested between 1914 and 1918 - the profiteers, the racketeers and the war efforteers, the wily ones, the ghouls who batten and fatten on wars. They throve in Moscow in 1917, until they drove a starving and desperate population to revolution and to the grip of an even more pestilential clique. They throve in Berlin in 1918 and in 1923, the inflation year, when they paved the way for Hitler. Now John Londoner meets them, in his home town.

I am a Londoner. On the darkest black-out nights, when I could not see my hand before my face, my foot unerringly led me along streets I had not trod for many years. Tugging at my trouser-leg, it would say, 'Here, Master, here is Farringdon Street', and, within a yard, it was right. Memory, that always faithful and sometimes too zealous servant, would jog my elbow, and murmur, 'This pile of debris in the darkness, Master, is all that remains of the house where your daughter was born, do you remember?' - and that was right too.

And in these gloomy days and blacked-out nights I felt sad for London, which seems to me to have known little joy in my time and to have little hope of anything much better for long to come. The contrast seems to me so incongruous between the part that London is playing in the history of our time and, the lot of most of its people, which during this century has been a joyless, care-laden and drab one.

London, if you take London as the symbol of England, Britain, the Empire, is also the symbol of victory or defeat. I do not say, of 'civilization', because I take this word to mean a gradual increase, on this planet, of kindred feeling among the peoples, of respect for human life, human dignity and liberty, beauty and the arts. I have seen no sign of these things, in my time; the movement I have observed, in these matters, has been a downward and not an upward one. The only 'progress' I have seen, has been in mechanical ingenuity, in making machines move faster, loud speakers speak louder, lavatories flush more efficiently, and cannon shells travel farther.

But London, as a symbol, most certainly stands at least for this: that if it should fall, life on our planet would be substantially different in future, and if it does not fall, life on this planet will continue more or less as we have known it; the possibility of attaining a state of civilization will remain in our hands. This planet is so small, in space, that nothing on it is very important, but that is about as important as anything on it could be. And that is why I felt sad and disgruntled that London was become, and as this war proceeded became more and more, a city of petty and pettier restrictions, of little, niggardly, harassing regulations, of paltry plays and a drivelling radio, which afflicted me with chronic B.B.C.-sickness; a city without music or gaiety, without any common meeting-ground for citizens on pleasure or recreation bent; a city, the greatest in numbers in the world, inhabited by careworn people. And every night the cursed black-out came down upon it like the black-cap upon a judge's head.

There was no exhilaration in this, no idealism, no high hope, no reeling of a historical mission, no exalted belief that a battle was being fought 'for civilization' or to make the future secure. Such phrases were golden in the years between 1914 and 1918, but in 1941 they rang false in the people's ears. There was only a grim acceptance of the argument that the war, having come, must be won. But, after 1918, even victory held no dazzling allure; behind it lay lean and threadbare years - and this time there would be not only millions of men hungry for work and a future, but millions of women, too. With the memory of conditions in London and Berlin and Vienna and Moscow even after the last war in my mind, I think with foreboding of the conditions that may prevail after this one, unless men and women of great understanding and civic conscience take charge of the problem of these masses of women - when the war is over.

The Londoners, as they stumbled about in the black-out in later 1941, were indeed little children groping in the dark. Mr. Churchill, for once misread their mind when he said they would one day think of this as their finest and fullest hour. At the expensive hotels and restaurants, were people for whom this was possibly their fullest hour, but for John Londoner it was a series of very bad quarter-hours, uneased by the unquestioning faith in the future, after victory, that carried him through the war of his younger manhood. He made the best of a very bad job, but on his shoulders lay the-burden of two world wars in a generation, of ever-thwarted hopes for the future, and of anxiety for his children.

Statesmen who deal in large maps and great battles are more tempted than ordinary men to think such times stirring. John Londoner - and with him John Edinburgh, John Belfast, John Cardiff and his cousins from overseas - could only plod his stony path without much hope of ever emerging into open country and seeing his way clear before him.

So my native London lay heavy with care beneath grey skies and black nights, as 1942 approached. I wondered whether even victory would move it to Maffick or Munich again. This underlying weariness of the spirit was revealed when the Lord Mayor's Show was held. In peacetime this archaic mixture of flummery and flunkeys, unchanging in its stereo-typed composition, always attracted a fair throng of sightseers, children brought by their parents, city workers and the like. In 1941, for once, it had real meaning and justification. Old London town had beaten off a siege. The background for the procession, the ruins of the bombed City, was more dramatic than anything a theatrical producer could have devised. Soldiers from the conquered countries, the men who fought to liberate their homelands, the men who shared the Battle of Britain with us, marched in the procession.

Here, if the fight had real meaning, was the ideal opportunity to celebrate it. But the Lord Mayor's Show of 1941 was a failure. The Press irritably criticized it as ill-timed. A few chance spectators indifferently watched it pass through empty streets, the tramp-tramp of marching feet hollowly echoing among the ruins. In 1914 or 1918 the battered city would have rung with cheers and shouting, with bands and drums.

No, old London was tired. How should it have been other? The third winter of the war impended. The first was the winter of the 'phoney war' period, to quote the jargon in which Britain's story of this war is seemingly to be handed down to posterity, when people wallowed in plenty, music hall comedians sang 'Let's all forget about the war', and good Santa Chamberlain was left to look after it. The second war winter was that of shock and impact, of sudden awakening and impending calamity, of ordeal and death and destruction and fire and flame.

Now came the third winter, with the young men embarking for the four corners of the world, the middle-aged ones getting ready to go, the old ones wondering when their turn would come, the papers shouting 'Slackers' at the women, homes and businesses being broken up on all Sides, and the smart ones, shouting 'help the war effort', sidling into becushioned jobs at Teapot House and Loudspeaker House and all the other Houses for the duration.

And how long, O lord, how long? This question preyed on John Londoner's mind - how long, and what lies beyond? John Londoner was often told by his own politicians that he must not know anything about anything, for this was not in the public interest. Yet, when he opened his paper, he found that the Australian Minister of Munitions thought the war would last 'another three years maybe even five', the Canadian Prime Minister that the war 'might drag on for years, carrying in its train pestilence, famine and horrors yet undreamed of', that the American President talked of 'another three years', and so on.

So, as the hard, bleak winter of 1941 approached him, John Londoner, for the first time, began to see clearly the footprints that Mr. Baldwin, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald and Mr. Chamberlain left in the sands of time. The bombing of the previous winter was far less than had been expected, and physical danger, anyway, is not the worst thing that can happen to men. But now John Londoner, and all the other Johns in the British town and countryside, reaped the full fruits of those years, and bitter-tasting fruits they were. Now they perceived the price they would have to pay for the folly of their leaders and their own apathy in those between-war years. The breaking-up of families, the ruination of businesses, the interruption of careers, on every hand - and, at the end of it, what? No certainty of betterment, after victory.

For the evils that caused this war remained! All clamour to mend them was rebuked by the words 'No recriminations', 'This is not the time to discuss the past; that can wait'; and 'Let us get on with the job'.

This caused John Londoner's depression of spirit, despite his grim determination. He could not believe, this time, that anything would be better, when the war was won; he had no security that the history of the years between 1918 and 1939 would not be repeated.

But that would mean that life on this planet has no meaning or pattern. An American author wrote: 'No civilization can survive repeated wars between millions armed with weapons capable of creating wholesale devastation and destruction in the heart and centre of that civilization.'

That is the very picture of our future, unless we bestir ourselves. We seemed for centuries to move slowly but surely towards 'civilization', through the liberation of slaves and serfs and bondmen and small nations and the gradual raising of the conception of human dignity and the rights of man, but since the coming of the machine and the rise of the machine-barons, we have been moving just as perceptibly away from it.

The most ominous sign of this backward process is the decline in human respect for humanity and human life. In the last war, a million men were killed, but, in a way, the nation felt every single one of them. The pangs that people felt did not lessen because the casualty lists went on for years. After the war, the most truly religious feeling I have ever seen revealed itself every year in the silence on November 11th. Outstanding acts of criminal brutality, like the shooting of Nurse Cavell, of the Belgian civilians at Louvain, or the sinking of the Lusitania, aroused real fury.

That was gone. The human mind has been so dulled by a surfeit of horrors that it no longer feels anything about mass massacre. The killing of four million Chinese in the Japanese 'experiment' (to quote a Times leader during this war) is a phrase which conveys nothing to the average British imagination. The massacre of 30,000 people in half an hour during the bombing of Rotterdam is a newspaper item which leaves no impression on the mind. 50,000 people were killed in air raids upon this country. Not even their names are known: they are just 'persons killed' in 'incidents'. The dulled public senses, strangely, can still react to the death of 27 people in a fire! Crowds throng to the funeral of the victims in such a case. But mass murder has become so normal that people no longer resent it.

I can never accustom myself to this; I have been amazed at the lack of hostile feeling to the Germans, of anger at their acts, that I observe in the people I meet, particularly among troops. This atrophy of the mind, or of the senses, whichever it is, makes me wonder if Mr. H. G. Wells may not be right in his theory that man is like to become as extinct as the dodo. For, if we stumble through this war, we can hardly survive another without a reversion to jungle conditions in large parts of the globe. Already, in this war, in Greece and Yugoslavia and Russia, masses of men have been driven by the invaders to live in the mountains, from which they can never return if he is not driven out.

Once, in my journeyings from London, I spent a night at Torquay. From my bedroom window I looked down on a quiet tree-lined street, heard the laughter and footfalls of young,men in khaki and blue, hurrying to their billets. Through a gap in the trees I saw the placid blue sea and thought that, if I had sat there something more than a century before, I might have seen the sails of a British ship glide into that tree-framed gap - the British warship Bellerophon, bringing captive to these shores a man named Napoleon.

What wretched use we made of the century of peace his capture gave us! The slums and the derelict areas are the monuments to that century of 'prosperity' - those, and the war of 1914-1918 and the present war. Now, we have to do it all over again, for the third time. I do not believe in the lazy, way-of-least-resistance theory that 'there always were wars and always will be wars; after this war there'll be peace and then, some time, another war, and then some more peace, and so on and so on'. That was all very well in the days of breech-loaders. But to-day the machines kill too many at one blow, mankind could not stand the pace.

That is the reason for John Londoner's underlying despondency. The system, in this country, that brought about this second war, is intact; it has been firmly shored up upon the prop, 'No recriminations!'

We come of an ill-starred generation, we who were cradled at the turn of the century. The world seemed to move upward when we came into it, and has gone downhill ever since. Now we are in the Nineteen Forties. The century is in its middle age. Middle aged men are often at their best. They retain the vigour of youth and have some of the experience of age. But our century, in its middle age, behaves like the lean and slipper'd pantaloon. Having cast away the victory it won in its youth, it has dithered into new calamity, and shows no sign of knowing what to do if and when its young men overcome this.

Sitting at my window over London sometimes, when the fires burned on the Surrey side, or the night was quiet, I thought that soon the clock of the years would have struck 2000 times since we began to count the years. The year 2000 would have been a golden goal for humanity to fix its eyes on, if this century had continued the trend of its fathers. But, as this century behaves itself, the year 2000 holds more foreboding than hope.

As 1942 approached I felt the time was come for me, once more, to move on. London twelve months before was ordeal - but also hope. London now was apathy and lull and careworn faces and repressed anxiety for the future and jibbering alien stars drooling their drivel into the radio and sleek war efforteers concerting profitable black market operations behind their hands in corners of restaurants and young men marching past my windows every day in hundreds to join up.

I have seen too much of this, I was not amused. I was sick for fresh air and open skies and a few trees and the smell of earth and burning wood and the noise of birds. During the autumn, I spent a mad week dashing about Sussex, talking, for their sins, to the troops. It was an exhausting week, and at the end the army, which asked me to come, and undertook, if I would, to defray my out-of-pocket expenses, told me that my 'claim' would be considered and I might receive payment after several months, which, with memories of the £60,000,000 wasted on militia camps, I thought was pretty good, but this by the way.

I had much difficulty, in the uncharted and signpostless English countryside, in finding my way from unit to unit. (I sometimes think that if Hitler sends 50,000 parachutists to this country, with orders to report their landing-places to Berlin by radio, he will get 50,000 radiograms reporting a landing at a place called 'Gentlemen'; this was the only indication of my whereabouts I ever found.)

Anyway, I dashed frantically about as if our sole chance of winning this war depended upon my reaching the 48th Royal Brownedoffs at 3.15 p.m. and giving them a good talking-to about The Situation. And on one of these Turpinesque rides, I saw a little cottage that was to let. I liked the look and lay of it, but could not pause - we might have lost the war if I had not found the 48th Brownedoffs in time.

Later, when the grey winter approached, dragging the burdensome and impenetrable future behind it, I thought of the cottage.

London lay as heavy on my soul as a bad meal on a tender stomach. I had to take my mind away and bathe it. I set out in search of that cottage.

Chapter Three

SOJOURN IN SUSSEX

My cottage, when I found it, was a new one, but yet had the feeling of age. An old barn, formerly on that site, had bequeathed to it the stout timbers that crisscrossed the ceiling and the mellow bricks which some belated Sussex craftsman, with the inherited lore of centuries in his eye and hands, had built into the big open hearth. It was a splendid fire, that sprang to life at the touch of a match like a horse at the touch of a spur, and I kept it piled high with wood, as the winter of 1941 drew on, so that its friendly gleam went dancing round the room, from copper pots to copper pans, and back again.

It was a quiet corner, and quiet was a dish of which I had forgotten the taste, if I ever knew it. I led a turbulent, unresting, pillar-to-post life after 1914, and before 1914 I was barely alive at all, and I thought now, as the healthful sojourn on Lake Geneva, of which I had so long dreamed, was indefinitely postponed, that I might for a brief while, between journeys, try the tranquil air of Sussex.

The lane that ran past the cottage seemed likely to lead nowhere, although, if you turned to the left, it presently took you to Brighton and the sea, and, if you turned right, it without much ado brought you to London. You seldom heard a sound by day, and by night only those of the train, a mile away, or of a bomber overhead.

The little village, near at hand, was like many others that you may find in what once was rural England. If Sleepy Vale does not yet know Priest & Levite's chain stores, that is because these amiable cosmopolitans think it has too few people to be worth their while. Otherwise Sleepy Vale grows more like a London suburb every day, and as both London and Brighton move rapidly towards it, and the intervening space fast fills with isolated, outer suburbs, settlements of fairly prosperous people who can afford to live in the English countryside, and do not notice that such no longer exists, Sleepy Vale will soon form part of an unbroken line of dwelling houses, shops and picture theatres stretching from London to Brighton-by-the-sea.

Already the last traces of old Sussex, old England, are disappearing from Sleepy Vale. The inevitable 'Parade', where cake-selling ladies and milliners and beautifiers advertise themselves by their Christian names, has sprung up alongside the station; behind it, all forlorn, stands a lovely old cottage that you can only see from the bridge over the railway line. At that station, sixty years ago, you would have seen seven two-horse broughams waiting for the incoming trains, and there was always too much work for them; to-day, two descendants of that enterprising coach-man who founded the business, an ageing man and woman, struggle for enough petrol to keep a couple of taxicabs running, and after them the firm will cease. Midway along a road of Council houses, the hideous memorials to the war to end war, stand some century-old brickworks, with some fine kilns.

That is about all that remains of Sleepy Vale, for the thing that has grown up where Sleepy Vale stood, having no character, might as well have a number as a name. Nowadays, it boasts a factory operated by a community of Jews down from London. They are all interrelated; the men seem exempt from war service; the women wear expensive mink coats. They live in the same roads, from which the Gentiles, as ever, are withdrawing. They look prosperous and well fed. The searing misery of this new war, which eats deep into the native life of Sleepy Vale, seemingly spares them. Foreign in appearance, name and customs, for the most part, and anti-Gentile by faith, they are of a monopolistic concentration which makes the natives compare them with a cloud of locusts. I have seen similar Jewish infiltrations into the countryside in other countries, and the results these lead to, and know that the same thing is happening all over the Home Counties and in other parts of England. Are the men and women returning from the war to find the nest full of cuckoos? Sleepy Vale is only typical. Several of its small traders have gone to the war and had to close their shops. Sometimes they are taken and reopened by these diligent newcomers. Thus the worldly affairs of Sleepy Vale are dominated by the factory that has come to it from London. Its spiritual life derives from the church, standing within a churchyard with many tombstones, at the gates of which a large notice says:

This is God's acre

DOGS STRICTLY PROHIBITED

There are several fish-and-chip 'saloons', suffering nowadays from no-fish, and I often wonder what the Sussex men of yore, men of beef and beer and ham, would say if they could see their descendants filling themselves with this food. Of the inns, the best known is the Sleepy Vale Inn. Its sign catches every traveller's eye, as he mounts the steep hill, but to-day it reads:

THE |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| INN

This crafty subterfuge is designed to thwart the Germans; when they come to Sleepy Vale they will not know where they are.

Unfortunately, other important things have been forgotten. The clocks still function; they should be stopped, so that the invader would not know the time. The weather vanes, too, still tell the wind; they ought to be removed, so that he would not know whence it blew. Our war effort, indeed, is far from one hundred per cent in Sleepy Vale as everywhere in England. If all these things were done, and if in addition we all wore our gas masks day and night, in bed as well, kept our eyes closed, put in our ears those plugs which our government, forgetting nothing, is ready to provide, and blacked-out our dwellings during the hours of daylight as well as those of darkness - if we did all these things, and preferably never went out of doors, the war would soon be won.

However, nothing is lost by blacking-out the name of the Sleepy Vale inn, because none has ever called it that. Standing on the hilltop, it always was and ever will be The Tophouse, and pleasant it is, during the rare occasion when it is allowed to open, with its cheery landlady, good beer, and dartboard. The inns of England, once places of good cheer and good conversation, good drink and good victuals, were wounded by the passing of the post-coach, and almost killed by the lunatic licensing laws, which so eloquently reveal the crazy-pavement of English thought. Little folk, hag-ridden by an inner resentment at the emptiness of their own lives, gain a perverted pleasure from interfering with the recreations and the refreshment of others, and would clothe their spoil-sport activities in godly garb by claiming that they serve the cause of Christianity, propriety, or whatnot, in other countries, where the inns remain open from dawn until midnight, they are more comfortable, and brighter than the English 'local' of to-day. Because people in those countries do not feel that they may only drink at certain times, they drink less, I imagine. It looks less, and is certainly not more. You seldom see, abroad, the roaring half-tipsy crowd you often find in an English public-house just before 'chucking-out time' - people who have hurried to get two or three extra ones down and who will be sleepy or bad-tempered for the rest of the day.

The return of the dartboard and shove-halfpenny board, however, have given back to the English public-house a little of the pleasant and friendly atmosphere which should be theirs by rights, and would be if they could conduct their trade in peace. In Sussex I was surprised to find an occasional public-house with a skittle alley, and to learn that this was once general. In parts of Germany this still is the rule, and a very pleasant resort the skittle alleys often are.

The Picture Palace; the church; the Tophouse; these complete the attractions of Sleepy Vale, save for - the shops.

The Shops! THE SHOPS! How great a part these play in the life of Englishwomen. 'I'm just going to the Shops'; 'I've just been to the Shops'. The Shops, Tea and The Pictures; The Pictures, Tea, and The Shops; Tea, The Shops and The Pictures; The Shops, The Pictures, and Tea. These, and now the radio, limit their lives between the cradle and the grave. The food they like best, they buy in tins; it is most quickly prepared. The furniture they like best is the trash from O-So-Kumfi-Kumpany; its hideous upholstery covers all its multitudinous sins; it may be paid for by instalments called easy and its swelling curves, which would shame the Rokeby Venus, make their tiny rooms look as if a balloon barrage had been herded together in a sheep-pen. When they are at home they open tins, make tea, and listen to the radio - and what poison drips into their ears. Moan, groan and drone; drool and croon; snivel-drivel; weep, wail and whine; Wishing Will Make It So; Wait For The Silver Lining; Blue Skies Are Coming By-and-By; It's a Lovely Day To-morrow; make yourself a nice, strong cup of, meander up to The Shops and The Pictures, and when you come back all will be well.

What a life! But in Sleepy Vale are still women of stout Sussex stock who know something about the care of a house and the merits of food. The mothers from London made me digress. You see them pushing their prams drearily to and fro between The Shops and The Pictures. They have been in Sleepy Vale since the air raids. Some are neat and clean, have some trace of alertness and vigour. Too many carry the brand of London on their brows. They had better have stayed at home, so that their children at least might benefit from the change; because they are here, the children are as miserably unkempt and thin as ever. As I came up the hill I saw one, her hands resting listlessly on the pram handles, a fag end drooping from her lips, waiting for some drab alehouse to open.

Sleepy Vale! How typical of the England of 1941 it is, the central core of cottages and small houses and shops clustering round the station, then the fringe of well-to-do people's villas, and beyond that, hidden from sight, the big houses in their palisaded parks. Along the roads go soldiers, aimlessly looking for some way to pass the time, or you see them at the windows and gates of the villas they have taken over. Hard though it often is to realize this, in Sleepy Vale, we are all on tiptoe still, should the invader come.

Sometimes Imperial troops come through the village - Canadians, or others - and a tremor shakes Sleepy Vale. In the little grocer's, where a notice asks mysteriously 'Do you suffer from damp walls?' they breeze in, without a by your leave, and call briskly 'Say, have we gotta have any coupons for chickens or rabbits?' The village store wakes to life, and people turn their heads and smile, and the imp of sex, lying asleep, or as we had thought dead, in a corner, jumps up, and a perceptible thrill excites the girls behind the counter and they giggle at each other and at these selfsure, free-and-easy men who take them as women like to be taken and, all at once, the little store is full of new thoughts and feelings and emotions, pulsing through the air, and then the Canadians, throwing jests back over their shoulders, go out, and, like a waning fountain, the excitement dwindles and subsides, and the store becomes quiet and sleepy again, and the imp, sex, curls disgustedly up in his corner, and a British soldier comes in, rather bashfully, shyly waits his turn, and then mutters 'Piece o' soap, miss, please - 'k' you.'

How have Englishmen come by this sheepish and half-ashamed manner? Where have their alertness, their self-pride gone, They play as great a part as any people ever played in history. What cause have they to look so furtive? Because they are like this, they have been nose-led into this war. If they remain like it, they will be carrot-led into a new one.

The fields, that climb up and cling like sucklings to the swelling bosom of the Downs, reach with their feet to my house. There is a tree-fringed pool that looks as if it brooded there, inscrutable and placid, since time began. Nothing can more than faintly stir its surface; it mirrors the low-flying bomber, overhead, without a ripple; it has seen too much to be surprised at this.

Sometimes I see an old, old man bent over his work in the fields, or a boy, promoted to tasks he never dared to hope for, standing in his farm-cart and whipping his horse across the meadow like a charioteer. Another boy brings me my milk, a girl, barely in her teens, my paper. The country has become a land of the old or ageing and the very young. Down the lane comes a tub-cart with two very old ladies in it. One holds the reins, but that is a formality. The old pony, who has taken them down the lane and back nearly every morning for twenty-five years, knows every step of the way perfectly, and puts one hoof before the other with sedate precision, ruminating as he goes.

High overhead an invisible hand draws lines with white chalk on the blue sky. Vapour trails, the wash that high-flying aircraft leave. This sleepiness below is an illusion; the combat still goes on. Are they ours, are they German? From the nearest German landing-ground to here is the distance from one blade of grass to another for a grasshopper - and how little we know, compared with the grasshoppers, for we could not leap twenty times our own height and come deftly down on a twig.

No anti-aircraft fire - they must be ours. They might have been Germans; over these fields, in these skies, the Battle of Britain was fought, last year. Few saw much of it. 'Aery navies grappling in the central blue', wrote the poet Tennyson, with prophetic vision, but when his dream came true, the aery navies were far out of sight, the people below, straining their necks, saw only those white trails in the sky, the faint rat-a-tat-tat that reached their ears was the noise of machine-gun bullets which were fired a minute before, perhaps had already killed their man.

This is a good place to pause, on the helter-skelter ride through Insanity Fair, with its derailments and collisions and shuntings and interruptions and disappointments, the mad rush to get somewhere which never leads anywhere; a good place to sit back for a moment and think of the past and the future, of the things and countries I have seen.

I come to be a collector of windows. From a window in Berlin I watched Hitler march to power, and from a window in Vienna, his armies march in there. From a window in Prague I saw them come again, and from a window in London I watched them hurl themselves at us, and now I have a window in Sussex, and the show goes on.

It is fascinating to look through this window at the kaleidoscope of the past nine years.

There are the flames bursting out of the Reichstag and there is the unhappy, slavering puppet van der Lubbe, being led out to the scaffold.

There, over the line of the Downs, goes old Hindenburg's funeral cortège, with Hitler, bowing his head in mock humility, behind it.

There is Benesh, talking earnestly to me beside a warm fire in a room of the Hradschin in Prague, with the scarlet-and-white Habsburgs on the walls behind him; and there goes Benesh, behind Masaryk's coffin, with the Men of Munich already mocking him in the shadows. Well, he has survived, and is here, and if he goes back, one day, to a liberated Czechoslovakia, he will not confide, I hope, in 'assurances' from abroad, but will build a strong army and stout alliance with the Poles.

There is Schuschnigg, sitting at the table next to mine in the garden restaurant in Vienna; he talks with his friend, Guido Schmidt. His friend? Guido Schmidt has a stiletto in his hand; to-day he stands high in the good graces of the Nazis. Schuschnigg, politically blind, but the bravest of them all, one of the few heroic figures from the political stage, for nearly four years has lain in a German prison. No man, more than he, deserves new hope and freedom.

There, beneath the Downs, is a little bridge. On a bridge over the Danube, four years ago, I saw young King Peter, his cousin and Regent, Prince Paul, sitting with veiled eyes beside him. I wondered then, 'what King Peter's kingdom will look like, and where King Peter will be, when he comes of age to mount his throne'. Now I know, it is as I thought; I saw King Peter in Regent Street the other day, and few kings will have known such acclamation as he, when he goes back to the Serbs. But Prince Paul? Ah, there was another wily one, who knew how to play heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose. He lives in comfort, somewhere; the Serbs must pay.

There goes King Carol, in his theatrical white cloak, striding through Bucharest with his son Michael, looking down the side-streets at the silent populace, gathered behind police cordons half a mile away. A king reviewing his troops in a deserted city? I knew that day that he would not keep his throne. Now he suns himself in Cuba, with his Lupescu. And the Rumanians? Who cares about them?

There goes King George of Greece, stepping briskly ashore from the pinnace that brought him back, for the second time, to the wildly cheering Athenians. He's in London, too, and his brother, tall Prince Paul, I saw yesterday strolling up Bond Street.

There are the Duke of Windsor and his Duchess, strolling through Viennese streets. Where are they? Ah yes, I read of them this morning. They make an American tour, the Americans wax ironic about the number of their attendants, trunks, and Cairn terriers.

A mad hurly-burly, the pageant I see from my window.

But my friend the blackbird flies into it, to distract my thoughts. I already know most of the birds at my cottage, but this one I know particularly well, because he has a clubfoot, turned inward, and alights on one claw, which I think pretty good. He reminds me of another clubfoot I knew, a sparrow in Vienna. There was a café there, by the Danube Canal, where the waiters, in the spring, used to put the chairs outside, and the sparrows, who waited and watched under the caves, shouted 'Whoopee, and fluttered down and clustered on the chairs to share breakfast rolls with the customers.

One of them had a clubfoot, and most warm days daring 1936 I fed him, calling him Goebbels. I wondered if he would be there in 1937, and on one of the first warm days went to see, and sure enough, he was back. This gave me a great affection for Goebbels, and during the winter of 1937-1938 I often reflected with pleasure that in 1938 I would again feed him crumbs from my roll. But on March 11th. 1938, Hitler came, and I went, and I doubt whether sparrows live so long that Goebbels will be there if and when I see Vienna again.

I have another appointment with a bird in Vienna, for in the Café Goethe there was a budgerigar which had to be heard to be believed. Charlie of the Café Goethe had a vocabulary, of several hundred words, and could speak various Austrian dialects. He would fly round the café, alight on a guest's shoulder, look appraisingly at him, and then begin to talk. 'Hullo,' he would say, 'I'm Charlie, Charlie of the Café Goethe. They make good coffee at the Café Goethe. Give me a kiss. Do you like the pictures? I like the pictures. I'm a lad from Styria and I've got a goitre, too' - for goitre is prevalent in Styria and Charlie had a big bulge beneath his beak which he used to puff out -'What about a cup of coffee?', and so on, and so on, and so on.

To listen to that little blue thing talking into my ear, in a human voice, was a queer experience, and I have an especial grudge against Hitler for breaking my friendship with Charlie. True, Charlie had one demerit. He insisted upon his inalienable bird rights, and guests at the Café Goethe would gently remove him from their heads when he alighted upon them.

In Vienna the birds had a Christmas Tree, behung with good things, in the park before the old Imperial Palace. And I loved the sellers of grain in Vienna's market for their way with the sparrows. Before their booths, they had bulging sacks of corn and maize and oats and barley, which poured out of the open mouths. The sparrows used to meet in scores there and eat their fill, while the marketwomen, muffled and remuffled in petticoats and shawls and coats and big boots and earwarmers and fur caps, stood indifferently by. The sparrows must have eaten much of their profits, and I asked one if she did not mind this. 'Ach,' she said, casually, 'die haben Hunger.' 'Oh well, they're hungry.'

My clubfoot blackbird reminds me of these things. Him I call Hitler, because he has a white streak dingy enough to pass for yellow.

Interesting things, I see, from this new window, which is mine for a little while. From it I could lean out and, by stretching my arm, so to speak, touch the top of the Downs. From the top of the Downs, again, I might lean down and touch the British coast. And from there, by stretching my arm to its utmost, I might reach across and touch the place where the Germans are. Three full arms' lengths away, you might say, or one grasshopper's hop, in these times of 400-miles-an-hour aeroplanes.

This is a good place to think, and see pictures in the sky, and write. I always lived in the midst of turmoil before, and turmoil is always within us, the men of this generation. A little surface serenity, like the face of the pool I see from my window, won't harm. It won't be for long, anyway.

Chapter Four

SOOTHSAYERS AND TRUTHSAYERS

I took a bicycle, because my thwarted spirit craved for any kind of movement, and pedalled sweating through the gusty November day, that made the leaning trees shrink and hug themselves to escape its chilly blast, which drove the smoke from the chimneys horizontally across the fields, by way of Hassocks and Ditchling and Lewes and Falmer to Brighton.

The friendly Downs, where once an Englishman could tread real turf and feel a little free, were cordoned off, with wire and placards and threatened penalties, 'By Order'. Even the Downs were prisoners now, like everything else in this new war of liberation, this new battle for freedom, and remotely shrugged a helpless shoulder at me as I went by below, looking up at them.

On that road, between the shivering winter hedges, I met the shade of myself, an office-boy upon another bicycle, faring forth to Brighton on a Bank Holiday in 1910, the farthest excursion I ever made from London, before the other war. The old two-horse bus passed that earlier me, with the front passengers on top talking to the driver, whip in hand.

I rode past the Dome, strange monument to the whims of Teutonic princes. That set me thinking idly of the Bavarian kings and their passion for building fantastic palaces on mountaintops, and made me wonder, with some yearning, whether the Stuarts, if they had kept the throne, would have made England what it is to-day, whatever that may be.

Then I met the wraith of another me, a young flying officer on crutches, chatting on the sunlit pier with others of my age and kind, while the band played and the girls admired the back of the well-shaped and curly head of the conductor, who, in his tall collar and befrogged frock-coat, looked like enough to a Guards officer in undress uniform to titillate any feminine fancy. My earlier self was learning an early lesson: that women find a whole man more romantic than any number with empty trouser-legs.

Ah', 1917! How the sun shone, how good was life in that hospital, how gay the morning stroll along the pier, how free from doubt the future! It lay before you, as serene and peaceful as the sea. 1920, 1930, 1940 and 1950, you knew, would be good - if you survived.

I watched myself, testing that leg, limp gingerly along the highboard at the end of the pier and dive into the sea. Then, as I watched, the sun went out and in the distance, across the slate-grey water, a little convoy went, towing its docile balloon behind it, and the chattering crowd, the officers on sticks and crutches and the men in blue hospital clothes and the Indian soldiers in turbans and the women in long skirts and the band, all these vanished, and the pier lay there, empty, with a gap cut in the middle to thwart the invader, and a Spitfire flashed roaring above the waves breaking on the deserted beaches and was gone.

I saw the Aquarium was closed, and thought of Brown. How different men's lives can be! The Aquarium was Brown's life. Come war, come peace, he tended his fish, cut up their food, observed the antics of the electric eel and the mating of the lobsters. He loved them all; rumour even said that he once saw the octopus. For decades he watched the trippers come and go, gaping at the inhabitants of his tanks, while their children sucked bright pink sticks of Brighton Rock and the babies cried, and he probably held a poorer opinion of the crowd on the dry side of the glass than of his own charges.

Down there, events in the world outside made faint echo. I knew Brown, with his white moustache, in earlier days. He first came to the Aquarium, a man of twenty, not long after the King of Prussia proclaimed himself Emperor of Germany at Versailles, in the presence of young Lieutenant von Hindenburg; on the Austro-German frontier a young customs official, named Hitler, looked forward to an easy life of upholstered officialdom and never in his wildest nightmares suspected that a son of his one day would rule Europe.

Ten, twenty years passed, while Brown lovingly tended his fish, and the strains of 'Good-bye, Dolly Gray' and 'A Little Boy Called Taps' faintly reached him from the bandstand, and then another ten years went, and more, and wounded men began to mix with the trippers who visited his tanks and there was talk of the Kaiser and Lloyd George and presently all these faded away, and nearly twenty years more passed until, in 1934, Brown, aged 77, had to admit that he had reached the age of retirement, 65.

A sad day, an enforced break in a long life's devoted work, not much sweetened by the compliments, the municipal dinner and the gifts! An interruption, but not an end, for next morning Brown, who could not be refused, was back at work, unpaid, tending his fishes. Then another five years passed, and down among the tanks faint echoes said 'Hitler' and another war.

What matter? There were other wars, other echoes. But this one brought tragedy. Hitler sought out even Brown, aged 82, would not let him end his days among the fish. The Aquarium was closed! What a climax, at 82! The tanks were emptied, the fish taken away, who knows where? But Brown obtained permission to continue attendance. Every day he visited the Aquarium, inspected the empty tanks, looked at the place where he chopped up the food, communed with the ghostly throng of trippers, the accumulated legion of sixty-four years. Perhaps, he thought, as his faltering footsteps echo hollowly through the vaults, perhaps one day the fish will come back, the visitors will return.

No. He died, aged 84, in 1941. I saluted his shade, wandering among the fishless tanks, as I turned away from the Aquarium and met, once more, my earlier self.

Yes, there I was, in 1935, on leave between promotion from Berlin to Vienna, come to see England in April. I came along the windy, rain-swept front, between the trudging crowds of careworn holidaymakers, fulminating until I nearly emitted steam from my nostrils, an angry, embittered man, cursing the apathy I saw, the unintelligent uninterestedness, the stupid refusal to awaken and arm in time, the universal preoccupation with fish-and-chips and football-coupons and flicks and thrillers and chocolate creams and the result of the three o'clock. Better lazy than clever, these leery, vacant faces seemed to say, and my 1935 self came pushing through the crowd, muttering, 'This is drivelling lunacy, you've only a little while to get ready, and if you start now, you can prevent this war yet'. Whereon the crowd went and bought itself a stick of Brighton Rock, and I hope - well, never mind about that.

That picture faded, too, and my flesh and blood self looked at the Brighton Front of 1941. We sowed dragons' teeth, and they were come up - rusty stakes and miles and miles of rusty barbed wire, and rank grass and thistles where the lawns used to be and gaps left by stray bombs and half the shops empty.

The grey sky cleared and the winter sun shone. On the landward side of the Front were still a few seats, and the invalids and elderly people, toilsomely prolonging the illusion of life, who in peacetime filled them, and the little shelters across the road, came to huddle in them.

The sun struck sharply on a great new building, which in its rectangular lines and glaring white face flaunted the repressed gentility of its Victorian and Georgian neighbours. At its open windows, sleek young men with black hair spread themselves with arrogant indolence over large arm-chairs and sunned themselves, their feet on the sill; lords of all they surveyed, they derided the misery of the world outside by the cushioned ease they so ostentatiously displayed.

Loathing them, these people who grow fat in every war, I turned away, and, leaning against the half-gale that blew from the sea, walked to Shoreham and back. The grey clouds came again and snuffed the pale sun. Spray and drizzle swept across. The last invalids, and aged ones, hats turned down and collars turned up, muffled and gloved and furred, toiled up the side-streets towards tea-and-toast havens. The dreary winter afternoon, shivering, pulled on its drab twilight jacket and reached out for the black greatcoat of the night.

I looked eastward and westward, along the Front. Twin vistas of melancholy, heavy with foreboding. A man-made town and man-made havoc. Rust, weeds, some ruins, inactivity where once was life and bustle.

Here was a faint prophetic glimpse of what the world might come to look like, if these wars went on. Change, for the worse, and decay.

Perhaps it was but a passing phase. Perhaps those were right who said comfortably, there would always be wars, after this war there would be a little peace and then some more war, then again some peace, then war, and so on for ever. After this phase, perhaps everything would be refurnished and refurbished and the war would be forgotten, until the next war.

But perhaps, I thought, that picture, seen on an evening in November, was the true one, the real shadow and shape of things to come. For I could not bring myself to believe, if the killing-power of the machines continued to increase, in the survival of - no, I will not say, civilization. No man who has seen the Acropolis at Athens, and the things they recover from the ground there, or has studied the contents of Tutankhamen's Tomb, could bring his lips to utter this word in 1941. In all save the ability to move faster, to travel beneath the sea and through the air, we have moved backward; and for that matter the Chinese seem to have known the secret of flight thousands of years ago.

But I could not believe in the survival of mankind, in the state we know, if these wars went on. And why should they not? This one was moving, on laggard feet, to its end, some day, and the machines, slowly, were being built which would overcome the other machines until the war-machine itself ran down. Victory, for some, and defeat, for others, would presently come of this war. But the things were not being done which would prevent new wars, and, for the death of me, I could not see how the forked radish could make such wars as these without a return to the caves and forests.

Perhaps, I thought, the suffering the war would bring would yet cause an awakening from the torpor which was come upon men, so that they allowed themselves, from lack of interest in their own fate, to be led sheeplike from war to war, as a gaping crowd at a fair, having been duped by the thimblerigger at one booth, lets itself be drawn, before it has recovered from its bewilderment, to the gold-brick auction at the next by the shouting of the brass-throated showman there.

'Wars are inevitable'; 'Enduring peace.' 'There'll always he wars'; 'Never again.'

My mind tossed from horn to horn of this dilemma. I came through the darkling streets of Brighton, and found my dilemma posturing on the stage of a music hall, with the all-unseeing crowd witlessly applauding. I came to an open door where a cold blue light dimly showed people going in, and Memory, ever zealous, nudged me and said, 'This, Master, is the Scrumptious Variety Theatre, and here you went one night in 1917, with Reg Whitworth, his arm in a sling, and he was the best turn, for the twelve stone of him sat down in a seat in the stalls and went clean through it, do you recall'. So, chuckling to myself at the echo of that long-forgotten noise of splintering wood, and of a red-faced Reg Whitworth struggling to escape from his wrecked stall, while the band blew false and windy notes from laughter, I went in, and there, on the stage, was Dilemma, one horn called Duncan's Collie Dogs, and the other, Salvador, the Seer.

Strange symbols, and strange place to find them! For Duncan's Collie Dogs were the symbols, to me, of the passive, apathetic, lazy, witless philosophy I feared - 'Things always work out right in the end'. And Salvador, The Seer, was to me the symbol of the soothsayers, the mortal foes and frequent vanquishers of the truthsayers, of the men who profit from this cowardly inertness of the human mind and, calling 'Who's for a jolly sail? All aboard for Gadarea', lead the credulous and truth-fearing nations again and again to disaster.

Why? Come to the Scrumptious Variety Theatre, and see.

Duncan's Collie Dogs meant more to me than patient, alert and uncomprehending animals turning somersaults, than dignity playing the jester for the diversion of witless humans. For in London, in the Edgware Road, is another music hall, the Metropolitan, which I sometimes frequent, partly because of its memories of Marie Lloyd and Chirgwin and Cinquevalli and G. H. Elliott - I once saw Charles Chaplin there - and partly because it retains something of the feeling of an older London.

Nearby is a public house, the Trotting Cob or what you will, which displays the playbill of a Gala Night at the Theatre Royal, which stood on or near the site of the Metropolitan. Gala Nights were Gala Nights, in 1890, and the white-gloved chairman, with his fierce moustache and cigar and glass of beer and hammer, announced over seventy turns that night, among them the young George Robey and the young Tom Leamore and the young Charles Coborn; and, as we are by this way, in 1941 I heard Charles Coborn on the radio, in his ninetieth year, and saw Charles Coborn on the stage, contemptuously waving aside the daft-looking microphone with the remark that he hadn't needed that thing at the Albert Hall, and how small he made some of the young droolers of to-day sound and look, on both occasions.

The gigantic list of performers on that night (to-day we have eleven or twelve turns, three of them being 'Overture', 'Interval', and 'National Anthem') includes Duncan's Collie Dogs!

Over fifty years ago, as I write! While continental and world wars came and went, Duncan's Collie Dogs have gone the rounds. Duncan has succeeded Duncan, and the show has gone on. The sires mated with the bitches, and presently the puppies grew into fully-fledged performers, and the show went on. It has kept pace with the times, for the dogs now mime a motor-car accident, and motor-cars were hardly imagined - in 1890!

'The circus-tent has not fallen in. How comforting a symbol for the easygoing, the lackadaisical, for those who cannot rouse themselves to be actively interested in the state of their village, their city, their country, their planet, for those who bury, the anxious promptings of thought beneath the clods of torpor, who deny the necessity to help themselves by the paralytic's argument that everything will come right in the end, so why should they bother? And how difficult an argument to confute. It always was so, they say, and it always will be. They forget that, measured by the age of this planet, mankind was born only yesterday and could die to-morrow. Or they tell themselves that that would be posterity's business, not theirs. How ignoble a thought! Why be born into this world alive at all?

So Duncan's Collie Dogs went, while the band blared and the people clapped, and then was faint music, dwindling into silence, and the curtains parted to show Salvador, the Seer, in wizard's garb, with humble mien and downcast eyes.

A remarkable man. What did he do, to justify his top line on the bill, when you analysed it? Two or three modest juggling tricks, but he was not a very good juggler; a better one hid in an obscure corner of the programme. Jugglers, anyway, are as a rule not very popular with British audiences, I think, although Maskelyne and Devant did for many years succeed in running an entire theatre for juggling and conjuring and I spent a thrilling afternoon of wonder there as a boy, and by chance was in the hotel across the way when that theatre was bombed.

But Salvador, the Seer, if he neither toiled up a tottering ladder nor span plates on a stick, if he did not know much wizardry, knew a deal about mankind. He knew that millions of people buy newspapers every morning and turn eagerly to the astrologer's column, to learn that something good awaits them to-morrow. The something good, like to-morrow, never comes, and one weekly journal, yielding to the hallucination that the people wish to be informed, and that they do not like being gulled, whereas they actually take an almost sexual delight in being duped, once published an analysis of these daily messages from the stars which showed that they had no relationship to truth, the future, or reality, and this brought indignant protests from readers. Why this periodical, after Munich, should have thought that anybody wished to know the truth, is a mystery.

Salvador, the Seer, knew better. He knew that the people adore soothsayers, and loathe truthsayers; that sooth is a marketable commodity, while truth is not. He knew that the people will pay and cheer to be told that it's a lovely day to-morrow, but that they will imprecate anyone who tells them what they should do to-day to ensure that to-morrow shall be lovely.

So Salvador dressed up his few tricks in a fantastic display of mumbo-jumbo. He made an egg vanish from his hand and appear in his mouth, volubly went on from this to say that things were not what they seemed and powerful invisible forces were at work of which the ordinary mortal had little inkling, though he, Salvador, could tell a thing or two about them if he wished, and that what with witchcraft and wizardry, you never knew, did you, and in short he, Salvador, believe it or not, could tell you that the war was going much better than you might think, and not only that, but on December the Umpteenth Hitler would suffer catastrophic defeat and on April the Umpty-ninth the Russians would invade Germany! And all this he did, in his fantastic dress, with the gestures, sometimes suppliant, sometimes declamatory, sometimes humble, sometimes imperious, of a priest, a prophet, a seer, a wise man, a medicine man, with eyes sometimes hidden behind lids lowered in deference to the rapier-like intelligence of the people before him, sometimes wide open in candid challenge of their gaze.

They loved it. They clapped and cheered and whistled and stamped their feet. How they loved to be told that, without their doing anything about it, everything would come right, that their Christmas good cheer would include the news that Hitler's armies were in rout, that when the spring burst singing through the earth and the branches again, the Russians would surge into Germany - and all for the price of a seat at the Scrumptious. Ah, that was good. I turned and looked at the faces behind me.

How often have I done this, since I came back to England, and tried to understand full grown people who cheered over Munich. That look along the rows of faces explains everything. Try it for yourself, reader, next time you go to the Empire and the comedians exchange jests of this kind (which I have borrowed from James Agate, I think, but it is funnier than most things you actually hear on our stage):

Well, well, and how are you?
Thanks, I'm in the pink.
In the sink?
No, in the pink.
Ah, in a pink sink.

If you wonder, at the roar of applause, turn and glance down the row of faces!

Ah well. I paid homage to Salvador. His performance was a fine piece of showmanship. Never, I opined, was so little applauded so loudly by so many. It was marvellously well done, and if the secret of its success lay on the other side of the footlights, in that row of faces, well, that was the price of admiralty, and Lord Blueblood, we had paid in full. Salvador, in his way, had discovered Hitler's secret. The Tory Chief Whip held the same secret, and used it with success from the Zinovieff Letter to Munich; Munich was but the last but one of a series of chapters, the final one of which was this war.

A head full of thoughts, you can bring away from a bicycle journey to Brighton on a winter's afternoon in 1941. I came away from the Scrumptious Variety Theatre with plenty to think about during the long ride back. The night was bitter dark.

Chapter Five

MIDWINTER NIGHTMARE

I rode through the unpeopled, unlit land, shaking the last clutching suburbs of Brighton from me, over the Downs, into the sheltered Sussex vale. The tumult in the sky, that noisy night-life of death that filled the winter of 1940, was halted, and only the unbroken gloom now told that the war still kept its malevolent watch.

It was a like a ride through a blacked-out desert. Once I saw the rigid shade of a soldier, standing guard at a gap in the hedgerow, behind which a searchlight slumbered or an anti-aircraft gun dozed. There was no moon, and when a rare star, peeping through hurrying clouds, looked at the planet, it quickly averted its gaze again, as if it did not like what it saw. I felt, because I could not see, the dark villages through which I rode. The world was a black dungeon, life a fruitless effort to get out.

How full of meaning, sad or hopeful, for every traveller, were once the lights that pinpointed the darkest night. There, he thought, is a homestead, life, warmth, food, talk, laughter, children. The lights were the symbols of everything good. Light was the first friend the first men on earth discovered, their first move towards security, towards a state higher than that of the animals.

But now? 'The lights are going out!' Who said that, I thought, as I pedalled towards a North Star I could not see. Why, Grey, Grey the British Foreign Minister, in 1914. Not all the lights went out, then. Most of the man-made ones remained. The homestead lights still flickered in this English countryside, then, and the great beacons of the spirit, hope and faith, flamed. But now? 'The lights are going out!' Who said that, in 1938 or 1939. Why, Churchill, now the British Prime Minister.

This time they were all out, and where were those two beacons? As I rode I swivelled my eyes in the darkness. Not since the birth of time had man invented anything like this.

Light - and darkness. These two are the greatest symbols of all. Even war, in the past, was a thing of camp-fires gleaming in the night, and soldiers' songs echoing across the fields, of men-at-arms roystering in the brightly-lit inns. But this! This black emptiness - and the be-snouted masks. Was mankind in the grip of fiends, bent not only on the destruction of his body, but of his soul, or was there something inveterately evil in man himself, would he one day find a means of destroying the very planet? My brief experience on that insignificant planet told me that man, in the majority, was infinitely credulous, the slave of the leaders he found himself delivered to, and that he could be made good or bad by them. Were they, then, fiends of some kind?

I heard a question once, put to that small circle of disputants which we call The Brains Trust: 'Why is the effect of propaganda for evil always great, and insignificant for good?' They gave this and that explanation, and each explanation irrelevant, because the question was false. Propaganda for good has never been tried.

I rode on, accompanied only by Memory, a-pillion behind me, and the wind, blowing in from the sea, which ushered me briskly up to the top of the Downs and said indifferently, 'So long, little man', as I dropped behind them, out of reach of his help. Darkness, loneliness and memory joined forces to scourge my thoughts into a tumult.

I thought of Salvador, the Seer, with his deft hands, his mock-humble gestures, his hey-presto and abracadabra, his medicine-man-like patter, his monkish garb, and his glittering, wily gaze fixed upon the empty, gaping faces before him, his soothsayings and his paydays. I had a vision of the little envelope marked 'Mr. Salvador, with compliments'.

If the gods, or the fiends, whichever they be, had willed it, the man might have been Herr Salvador Der Führer or Signor Salvador Il Duce. He had all the tricks. He would have been paid respectful compliments one day by Mr. Neville Salvador, Lord Halvador, Sirs John and Samuel Salvador, and would have been called the devil incarnate by them, the next. The gaping crowd, everywhere, would have applauded just as lustily. The little pay-envelopes would have arrived, regularly, with compliments.

For a moment, I saw the planet as an obscene circus, with Signor Salvador the Circus Master, twirling his moustaches, and many Clown Salvadors, grinning satanically behind their paint, putting the little dog, Mankind, through the hoop, and sometimes throwing it a crumb of sugar and sometimes giving it a swish with the whip, and then suddenly, before the little dog knew what was afoot, producing a great fiery hoop from behind their backs and putting it through that, until it became badly singed, and quite frantic from fear and the desire to please, and at last it went mad and chased all the Salvadors and the circus tent caught fire and collapsed in a mass of flames, to the noise of shouts and shrieks and barks and yelps and rending timber.

The patient reader who has toiled with me through the night will discern that I am trying to say something.

It is, first, that I believe, as the result of the things I have seen since 1928, that wars do not just recurrently happen, as a law of nature or act of God, but are made on this planet; second, that these wars are more difficult to bring about than to prevent; third, that the systematic duping of the people is necessary to achieve them, and that the condition of this success is their chronic credulity, which repeatedly makes them the stupefied victims of the Salvadors and the same pea-under-a-thimble trick; fourth, that I think the human species cannot, without reverting to cave-and-jungle conditions, survive a continuance of the wars we have known in this century; and fifth, that, although we may survive this war, no prospect has emerged yet to promise security from another.

A man who saw the brewing of the war that was resumed in 1939 cannot believe in the 'honest mistake' explanation; and these wars of the twentieth century are not as those other wars in which camp fires gleamed through the night.

The Crimean War, for most British people, was but a sentimental tear, quickly dried, for the poor British soldier on that peninsula and a few oleographs of Florence Nightingale (oh no, it was also a much-admired saying of good Queen Victoria about 'no depression in this house, we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat, they do not exist, ho caitiff, bring on the tea and toasted scones').

Then the King of Prussia's wars were but fleeting pangs of compassion, for gallant little Denmark and for dear Austria ('the Empress is so lovely, my dear'), and for the poor Emperor Salvador III, looking pathetic in his waxed moustaches and beardlet and corkscrew trousers at Sedan; Salvador III was generally held to be a humane and peaceloving man, the friend of freedom and democracy, quite unlike his ancestor, that loathsome tyrant Salvador Bonaparte, the first Emperor, and as for the dear Prince Salvador Imperial, killed fighting the Zulus for us, why, if Hitler seemed likely to have a great-grand-nephew or whatnot the Gods in High Olympus, helpless with laughter, would to-day be putting him down for a commission in the Coldstream Guards about the year 2000.

Then the South African War was but 'Good-bye, My Bluebell' and Bobs, V.C., and that rampageous Young Churchill getting captured, and Mafeking.

But these wars are different. The graves of the dead in the first one 'girdled the world', said one of those windy phrases which go to make the bubble, Glory. The graves of the dead in the odd wars that have been going on here and there, particularly in China, since that war was suspended would twice girdle the world, if that benefit anybody. The killing in this resumed war has barely begun.

But not even the slaughter is the whole story. There are the unborn children; or the children, born but orphaned, or with a taint of fear and apprehension in their blood. These wars set millions in flight - in China, in Russia, in Serbia. Their insatiable fingers reach into homes in every country, every continent. They leave peoples weak, exhausted, despairing of the future, stricken in spirit - that was the real reason why France collapsed in 1940, because France had never been able to recover from the bloodshed, greater in proportion for her than for any other country, of the 1914-1918 war. Families are scattered and never reunited. Betrothals are pledged but never joined. The last shreds of privacy are torn, by an ever-growing and soulless officialdom, from the lives of simple people; the last vestiges of liberty are harshly wrested from them in those countries where the cause of liberty is, by the leaders, most loudly proclaimed.

Sacrifice everything, give everything, save everything, for victory, the people are told, and they sacrifice, give and save their all, or have it taken from them, their hopes, their homes, their husbands, their children, their lives, because victory is now the one last light, shinin