Most food prices in England are controlled by the government, but even

so the average cost of food has gone up 22 per cent since the war

started. As in all inflations, either in wartime or peacetime, wages

have not risen accordingly. Hence many people have a tough time making

both ends meet.

I will give you a list of representative food prices. Some of them

do not seem so extraordinarily high, but you must remember that the

average white-collar employee in England doesn’t make as much as we do

at home. Also, he pays out more in taxes.

Bacon is 35 cents a pound, in our money. The best butter is 35 cents,

with the average quality 32 cents, but you don’t get a pound a week

unless there are eight in your family. Margarine comes in two grades,

at 9 cents and 15 cents. Sugar runs around 7½ cents a pound, tea 50

cents, and joint steak costs about 42 cents a pound (when you can get

it). Stewing beef is around 30 cents, and joint roast about 36 cents a

pound.

In meats you take whatever the dealers happen to have. Often you have

to accept mutton instead of beef. There is no pork at all. The price

of turkeys for Christmas was controlled at 50 cents a pound; whereupon

chickens, which were not controlled, shot up to 60 cents a pound.

Eggs are 80 cents a dozen, but you can get only about four eggs a week

at the stores. Oranges are 3 cents apiece and are still obtainable,

although they are growing scarcer. You can get lemons and onions only

when a new shipment arrives, and they won’t be arriving much longer.

Lemons are 11 cents a pound. Apples have been up to 35 cents a pound,

which is three or four apples; but the price is now controlled at 20

cents a pound for the very best, running down to 11 cents. Soon there

will be no more apples, until England’s own crop comes in next fall.

Some grapefruit have been coming from the Bahamas and Palestine; they

run from 10 to 20 cents apiece.

Bread stands at about 14 cents for a four-pound loaf, and there is

plenty of flour. The government subsidizes the bread makers, for it

wants everybody to be able to buy bread cheaply. Bread will be one of

the last items ever to run short.

First-grade potatoes average 18 cents for seven pounds. Milk is 7½

cents a pint, but for children under five and nursing mothers it is 3½

cents. And all families with incomes of less than $8 a week can get

milk free. Some three million people are eligible for this free milk,

and two and one-half million of them are taking it.

The English feel deeply the present shortage of “biscuits” or, as we

would call them, sweet crackers. These biscuits are of many forms,

candied and filled, and the English people practically lived on them,

along with their tea. But they have almost gone out of existence.

Whenever a shipment of precious things comes in they are ladled out by

the grocer as great favors to his best customers.

An American friend of mine read in the papers about a new shipment of

onions, so she asked her grocer if he had any. He said he didn’t have a

one. But then he disappeared into a back room for a moment, and when he

returned he slyly handed her a sack and said, “Here are your oranges,

Madam.” When she got home she found two wonderful onions in the sack.

Most of my eating has been done in hotel dining rooms. They are packed

at night with wealthy-looking Englishmen and women. Almost daily I hear

some Englishman express a little shame at sitting there eating such a

fine meal, and a little revulsion at the sight of hundreds of well-fed

diners like himself around him, when so much of England’s population

can’t eat that way.

As for myself, I have ham and eggs every morning for breakfast, where

I had expected none at all. I couldn’t have this if I weren’t “eating

out”; and I, like the Englishmen who eat at hotels, feel a little guilt

at each mouthful I take.

With Germany bearing down harder in her U-boat strangulation campaign,

there is more talk in the newspapers and among groups about stricter

regulation of food. The striking thing about this talk--and I think it

is an example of British character--is that the people want the Food

Ministry to cut down on food faster than it is doing.

You can hardly conceive of the determination of the people of England

to win this war. They are ready for anything. They are ready to take

further rationing cuts. They are ready to eat in groups at communal

kitchens. Even the rich would quit their swanky dining rooms without

much grumbling.

If England loses this war it won’t be because people aren’t

willing--and even ahead of the government in their eagerness--to assume

a life of all-out sacrifice.

_3. STREET SCENE_

_London,

January, 1941_

Along the nearly two miles of Regent and Oxford Streets where the big

stores and fashionable shops are situated, I believe the windows have

been blown out of two-thirds of the buildings. But the store owners

have been ingenious about fixing up the damage.

They cover the great gaping front of a shop with wallboard, leaving a

rectangular opening about the size of a table top right in the center.

They put a pane of glass across this opening, and then they install a

window display just as before, except on a smaller scale. Often the

wallboard front is painted blue or brown or gray. Some of the stores

even have hunting scenes or marching soldiers painted like a frieze

across the top of the new wallboard front.

The result of all this is that instead of looking like patchwork, it

makes what seems to me a neater and more attractive line of store

fronts than before the bombings.

When a building is only slightly damaged by a bomb it is immediately

repaired. Workmen are busy day and night cleaning out rubble and

putting buildings together again. It is amazing how quickly they can

turn a scene of destruction back into something normal.

But if a building has been too badly damaged for repair it simply

stays that way until the war is over. No rebuilding from the ground up

is permitted. The government needs all materials too badly--cement,

bricks, steel. As a result, when the war is over England will probably

have the greatest building boom in the history of the world. And maybe

this very boom will be the thing to hold down unemployment and to ease

the terrible shock of nonproduction and depression that follows all

wars in all countries.

Maybe that will be one of England’s silver linings.

The most puzzling thing to me about all the work of repairing and

shoring up buildings and erecting shelters is where all the brick comes

from. There are so many hundreds of surface shelters, so many thousands

of bricked-up windows and protective walls, so much buttressing and

fortifying and repairing, that you’d think there couldn’t have been

that many bricks in the world. Yet you see more bricks stacked up

everywhere, in alleys, along sidewalks, even in lobbies of buildings,

ready for use. And these are all new, whole bricks.

Don’t tell me the British don’t have a sense of humor.

I never get tired of walking around reading the signs put up by

stores that have had their windows blown out. My favorite one is at a

bookstore, the front of which has been blasted clear out. The store is

still doing business, and its sign says, “More Open than Usual.”

A sign on a barber shops says, “Blown Over Here from Across the

Street.” A sign on a bomb-scarred pub says, “Even Hitler Can’t Stop Us

from Selling Watney’s Ale.” And in front of a beauty shop along the

Strand there is a sign saying, “Non-Stop Perming During Raids.”

* * * * *

The other day I noticed a piece of stone about the size of a walnut

lying under the radiator in my room. I picked it up and examined it.

It was rounded at one end, and you could tell from the other end that

it had been freshly broken off something. I studied it a long time,

and finally came to the conclusion that it was a toe off some statue,

or possibly from the sculptured frieze that adorns the roofline of our

hotel. But how did it get into my room?

It suddenly dawned on me. And when the maid came in to straighten up I

said, “Maid, have the windows ever been blown out of this room?”

“Why, yes,” she said; “just a few days before you came. But they put

them back in, you know.”

They did a nice job of clearing up my room, but they forgot to look

under the radiator. So I have a souvenir.

* * * * *

And now at last I am all equipped with a steel helmet and a gas mask.

A friend who has just left for America gave me his. As soon as he was

gone I brought the mask up to my room and tried it on. It is a big one,

issued by the American Embassy, and it is so complicated that I can’t

make head nor tail of it. If the gas ever comes I might as well throw

this contraption out the window and take a deep breath.

* * * * *

The famous fore-and-aft hat of the London bobby is gone for the

duration. Today all policemen wear steel helmets. These are painted

dark blue, with “Police” in white letters on the front.

London is fairly crawling with policemen. You meet half a dozen in

every block. I understand there are now 40,000 bobbies--just double

what there used to be. They are mostly young and soldierly looking, and

I have found that instead of being austere they are very friendly. In

fact, they will talk your head off if you stop to inquire your way.

* * * * *

London is plastered with posters and signs of warning, instruction

and advice. Many of them are illustrated. For instance, one of them

pictures a man and a woman gawking skyward, and the inscription says:

“Don’t stand and stare at the sky when you hear a plane.” Then it

explains that planes drop their bombs long before they are over the

objective, and warns that if you stop to look up when you hear motors

you may get one smack in the face.

A few blocks from my hotel is a huge store called His Majesty’s

Stationery Office. There you can buy for a few cents any one of

thousands of detailed booklets on wartime food, arms, shipping, air

raids, bombs, and so on, which the government has issued.

There is always a crowd in front of the counters, buying wartime

education.

* * * * *

Many automobiles have little printed signs on the windshields saying,

“Free lifts at your own risk.” These are driven by suburbanites who get

extra rations of gasoline for bringing other people to work. There are

20,000 of these now, but the arrangement is likely to be discontinued,

for public transportation is practically back to normal.

Newspaper cartoonists are having a lot of fun with these small details

of wartime life. For example, just after the British captured Bardia in

Libya, a _Daily Express_ cartoon showed Mussolini standing alone in the

desert thumbing for a ride, and Hitler flying over in a German plane

with a sign on it saying, “Free lifts at your own risk.”

Nearly all the stores and offices close at four o’clock so people can

get home before the blackout. At four-thirty the sidewalks and streets

resemble Broadway. At five-thirty they look like Main Street on a dull

Monday night.

Since gasoline is rationed, I was astonished by the heavy daytime

traffic. There is constantly a solid wall of those big red doubledecker

buses, and there are so many private cars that I don’t see how the

streets could hold any more. I hate to think what traffic was like in

peacetime.

A friend of mine says he thinks the autos here must run on air. People

get only a couple of quarts of gas at a time. When you get into a car

the gas needle always seems to register zero, but somehow they keep on

running.

* * * * *

I’ve just had my first air-mail letter from the United States. It was

eighteen days on the way, which I’m told is faster than usual. Many

air-mail letters take a month. American magazines and newspapers do

not arrive until six weeks after their appearance back home.

I remember reading that in September it took five days for a letter to

be delivered right here in London, but now I get mail in the morning

that was posted the evening before. The local postal service seems to

be completely normal.

London’s weather is not so bad as I had always heard, at least not

yet. Incidentally, the censors won’t let you cable anything about the

current weather--what it is like this morning, for instance. That might

give the Germans an idea.

* * * * *

Newsboys in the streets of London never open their mouths. I wish

our newsboys would develop that habit. Over here they just write the

biggest news of the day on small blackboards with chalk, or print it

on white paper, and prop these bulletins on the building walls beside

them. Most of the “newsboys,” incidentally, are old men.

Taxi meters here start at the equivalent of fifteen cents. A trip costs

about the same as, or perhaps less than, in New York. In the daytime

there are plenty of taxis everywhere, and the taxis are a sight to

behold. All of them look as though they had been designed in Queen

Victoria’s time and ought to be pulled by horses. But they run fine,

and I swear they can turn around in their own length.

One of the few things I have found that are cheaper here than at home

is a haircut. I paid only thirty cents the other day in the hotel

barbershop, and since then I’ve seen haircuts advertised at fifteen

cents. I’m going to get a haircut every day from now on--enough to last

me for a year or two.

_4. THIS IS THE WAY OF WAPPING_

_London,

January, 1941_

This is the way the people of London are.

Last night I was standing in the dimly lighted office of the marshal

of a big air-raid shelter in the East End. A bareheaded man with a

mustache, a muffler and a heavy overcoat was sitting in a chair tilted

against the wall. I hadn’t noticed him until he spoke.

“Have you been around Wapping?” he asked.

Wapping is a poor, crime-heavy, conglomerate, notorious section of

London. Also it has been terrifically bombed, as has all of London’s

waterfront.

“No, I haven’t,” I said, “but it’s one place I’d like to see.”

“Well,” said the man, “I’m a policeman and tomorrow’s my day off. I’d

like nothing better than to show you around Wapping if you would care

for me to.”

Would I care for it! To get around Wapping with a policeman as a

private guide--you can’t beat that if you’re out to see London. I

jumped at the chance.

So Mr. Ian Rubin, London bobby, and I walked six miles around Wapping.

We did back alleys and dark places, burned warehouses and wrecked

churches, block after block of empty flats. We did Wapping with a

fine-tooth comb. And so I’m in a position to say that as far as Wapping

is concerned there almost isn’t any Wapping any more.

Wapping is one part of the big borough of Stepney. Today its population

is a mere few hundred. The entire ward was compulsorily evacuated in

that first awful week of the blitz. They put people on boats and took

them down the Thames. Those who have come back are mostly men.

In normal times Wapping would be a swarming, noisy mass of humanity,

a population as dense as in our Lower East Side in New York. Today I

walked block after block and met only half a dozen people. There was no

sound in the streets. The place was dead. It was like a graveyard.

We walked into the big inner courtyard of a square of tenement flats.

Rear balconies on each floor formed the walls of a square. The windows

were all out; the walls were cracked; abandoned household belongings

lay where they had been thrown. In the balconies above, no faces peeped

over the railings. There was no sound, no movement, no life in the

whole block. It was the terrible silence of that Wapping courtyard that

got me.

Policeman Rubin and I walked on. We went into the station of a

demolition squad--the men who pull down dangerous walls before turning

over the general job of demolition to others. These are brave men.

Five of them, in workmen’s clothes, were sitting before a crackling

fireplace. There was nothing for them to do today--but there might be

any time.

They were very friendly, but I could barely understand their Cockney

speech. One of them asked me if it was possible to write a letter to

San Francisco. One of his fellow workers answered for me. “Sure, you

dummy,” he said. “You can write anywhere you want.”

Everyone of these men had been bombed out of his flat, one of them

three times. Their wives have been evacuated, but they stayed on to

work--a part of London’s great civilian army.

We stood now in a vacant lot where until last September there had

been a five-story block of flats. It was fully occupied when a bomb

hit. On the wall of a building across the alley you can still see the

handprints of a man who was blown from his flat and smashed to death

against the wall.

We stood amid the wreckage of a church, in which Policeman Rubin

himself had toiled all night helping to reach a mother superior who had

been buried in the debris. She was dead when they found her.

We went to see the Church of St. John of Wapping, well known to

American tourists. Only the steeple was left, and it was being torn

down for safety’s sake.

We passed a pub where in the old days pirates and smugglers used to

gather from the ends of the world to sell their illicit goods. It has

been boarded up since September.

We passed an undamaged warehouse, where big sacks of East Indian spice

were being loaded onto drays, and the smell was sweet and wonderful.

We came to a street sign that said, “Danger. Unexploded Bomb.” So we

walked around it.

Policeman Rubin showed me where a time bomb fell at the edge of a

school. They couldn’t get it out, so it lay there nine days before

blowing the school to smithereens. The wreckage of the school still lay

there in a heap.

I saw firemen damping down the inside of a warehouse in which a small

new blaze had sprung up after months of smoldering.

I saw great mounds of burned newsprint paper, and other mounds of

scorched hemp. I saw half walls with great steel girders hanging,

twisted by explosion and fire.

But I saw whole warehouses, too; for Hitler didn’t get them all.

We wandered back and forth through dead, empty streets, and looked at

hundreds of ground-floor apartments where rubble-covered furniture

stood just as it had been left. The owners probably will never come

back for it.

We walked for another hour, Policeman Rubin and I, and then suddenly we

came upon a small store with the wallboard front and little show-window

center which are today the badge of a bombed establishment that’s still

doing business. And when I saw that window it dawned on me that in a

solid hour of walking this was the first open store window I had seen.

Every other doorway and window in an entire hour of walking through the

heart of a city district was a doorway or a window into a room that no

longer held human beings or goods.

That is the way in Wapping today.

There will have to be a new Wapping when this is all over.

_5. THE PYNTED AWL_

_London,

January, 1941_

We got on a bus, a friend and myself, to see more of London’s

devastated East End, where the poor people live. London buses are

double-deckers, and you can smoke on the top deck, so we sat up there.

You don’t just pay a flat fare in London. The conductor comes around

and sells you a ticket to wherever you want to go. But we weren’t sure

just where we wanted to go, not knowing London well.

“I think we’d like to go around the Isle of Dogs,” I told the

conductor. So he told us where to change buses.

While waiting for the second bus we bought four apples (thirty cents)

and ate them. This second bus took us only a short way, and we had to

get off and walk two blocks, for the street had been blown up. A big

group of men in workmen’s clothes stood waiting for the next bus.

“Is this where we get a bus to the Isle of Dogs?” we asked.

One little stoop-shouldered fellow with yellow teeth and a frazzled

coat said, “Just where do you want to go?”

We said we didn’t know. He laughed and said, “Well, this bus will take

us there.”

So we all got on, and after a while a big man who was with the little

fellow moved back and said he and the little fellow were going to walk

through a tunnel under the Thames and would we like to get off and go

with them. We said, “Sure.”

It was a foot tunnel, not big enough for cars. These two men work on

barges carrying freight up and down the Thames. They leave home one

morning and don’t return until the next afternoon. They were carrying

tin lunch boxes now.

The big fellow had been to New York six times, before the first World

War, working on ships. He told us about it as we walked through the

tunnel.

At the other end we came out into what is known as Greenwich. The two

men walked us past Greenwich College, which is very old. We stopped

before some iron gates and peered through them at some far domes.

“Now that there,” said the little fellow, “that’s the fymous pynted

awl.”

“The what?” I said.

“The pynted awl,” he said. “You know, doncha, the fymous pynted

awl--the pynted ceilin’, you know.”

And then I realized he was saying “painted hall.” So we looked

appreciatively.

“All American tourists knows it,” he said. “The artist he lyed on his

back in a ’ammock for twenty years pyntin’ that ceilin’, and when he

got through he found a mistyke in it and he went cracked worryin’ about

it. Nobody else to this d’y has ever been ayble to find the mistyke.

You tell the Americans the bombs heynt touched the pynted awl.”

We came to the little fellow’s corner, so we shook hands and said

good-bye. The big fellow got on a double-decked trolley with us, and do

you know that this cockney, a complete stranger, insisted on paying our

fare--and him as poor as a church mouse! He said people had been nice

to him in New York. But that was twenty-five years ago.

After a while we said good-bye to him and got on another bus. It took

us down into Blackwall Tunnel, back under the Thames. Then we got out

and walked down into the neighborhood of the great West India docks.

They won’t let you onto the docks, but we could peep through.

It was raining now and very cold, and it was getting dark. We walked

amid wreckage and rubble and great buildings that stood, wounded and

empty. It was ghost-like and fearsome in the wet dusk. Poor, pitiful

East End! True, Londoners say the slums should have been knocked down

long ago, but this is a grievous way to go about it.

We got lost, and a policeman showed us the way again. At last we took

another bus back toward the city. At Aldgate East Station I got off to

change to the underground, while my friend continued on the bus.

It was pitch black now. I decided to get a bite to eat. I made out,

faintly, the form of a policeman, and asked him where I could find a

place to eat. He said there was a pub around the corner, three doors

away. I felt my way around, but couldn’t find the door of the pub.

In a minute a figure stood beside me. It was the policeman. He pushed

the door in the darkness but it didn’t give.

“It’s closed,” he said. “But you can get something across the street,

there where you see that little light behind the curtain.”

So I felt my way across and into a tiny place. It wasn’t very clean.

There were bare tables, sawdust on the floor, and three candles burning

on a counter.

“What kind of sandwiches have you got?” I asked.

“Hot or cold?” said the man behind the counter.

“Hot,” I said. Whereupon he dished up a great big fried fish, filled

the plate with crisp fried potatoes, and handed it over. I recognized

the dish as the famous “fish and chips.”

I wasn’t too eager to eat it in such a place, but one bite was all I

needed. I never tasted better fish or potatoes in my life. And my whole

supper cost a shilling--twenty cents.

I got back to the underground and bought a ticket to Charing Cross, the

station nearest my hotel. When I got to the station and came upstairs,

ready to venture out into the complete blackness, I asked the station

starter which direction I should take to walk toward the Strand.

All you have to do over here is open your mouth. In one word they

know you’re a stranger. And knowing that, they help you. The station

man took my elbow, led me outside and across a couple of drives and

sidewalks, and got me out into the middle of the street.

“Now go straight ahead,” he said, “right up this street, and you’ll

come to the Strand.”

He must have guided me for half a block. I made it to the Strand, and

made it clear back to the hotel, which was about eight blocks. I didn’t

get lost, or run into anybody, or fall down. I walked into the Savoy

feeling like King George himself.

_V. GUNS AND BOMBERS_

_1. TEA, WITH SOUND EFFECTS_

_London,

January, 1941_

If I was going to get by with calling myself a war correspondent, I

figured it was time to get out and see some shooting. So the War Office

fixed me up with a solemn, complicated pass to spend a night with an

antiaircraft gun crew. It took quite a while to arrange, but finally

the day arrived.

I waited until late afternoon, then put on my galoshes and my tin hat,

bought ten packs of cigarettes for the gun crew, got into a taxi and

went off to the war. When I got there I found that instead of ten men

there were hundreds.

A sentry took me to a little cabin where two officers were having tea.

They wrote down the number of my pass, and said some boob had told them

over the phone that my name was MacInernie. Then they asked me to have

tea with them.

The day had been dark and gloomy, and the clouds were hanging low. I

was disgusted, for my pass was only good for one night and it didn’t

look like flying weather to me.

“You can’t tell a thing about it,” one of the officers said. “Sometimes

they come over on the most illogical nights.”

Another officer, who was just going on twenty-four hours’ leave, said:

“They’ll be over. They always come when I go on leave. It’s never

failed yet.”

He left, and another officer came in and joined us at tea.

This hut was a sort of battlefront apartment. The officers don’t live

there, but they eat, sleep and work there, near the guns, while on duty.

A soldier in uniform poured our tea. As dusk came, he pulled down the

blackout blinds. It was nearing six o’clock. The officers don’t eat

dinner until about nine-thirty, so they were having very late tea.

Now it was all dark outside. And suddenly the sirens went off.

We all looked at each other.

“I told you they might come,” said an officer. But I could tell he was

really surprised.

A telephone rang. The officer on duty listened for a minute and then

pointed to a wall map, indicating a spot halfway between the Channel

coast and London.

“They’re right there now,” he said. “They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

He leisurely finished his tea, and had started to put on his overcoat

when the phone rang again.

“Righto,” he said over the phone. And to us he said, “The men are

running to the guns now. Come along, let’s see what’s up.”

Each of the guns was set down in a sort of concrete cistern. These gun

bases were built before the war started. One of the gunnery officers

used to play on this very ground as a child.

There were several small rooms, entirely underground and heavily

concreted. The instrument men sat down there, with headphones on,

making red marks on a map of London. Each red mark indicated a plane.

They’d erase the marks almost as fast as they put them down, and

indicate new positions.

Up above, right at the center of this antiaircraft settlement, was a

complicated instrument through which the artillerymen sight. In daytime

they can get the exact bearings of a plane with this instrument, but

at night it’s no good. So they have to use a sound detector. This is

a big revolving machine with phonograph horns, at which half a dozen

soldiers sit in the dark and read illuminated instruments. It is

extremely sensitive. The other night they got a Salvation Army band on

it. Honestly.

One man calls out the readings by telephone to the control room below,

where these are noted on charts.

I had got it into my head that these sound detectors were hooked

directly to the guns and that the guns just automatically pointed and

fired whenever the sound mechanism thought the time was propitious. But

it isn’t done that way. All the dope from the sound machine, and that

which comes over the phone from other instruments all over London, is

rapidly tabulated, and calculations are made, and the guns are then

aimed and fired manually at wherever they figure the plane should be by

that time.

The Germans were mighty busy this night. They were overhead constantly

for four hours, starting fires and dropping heavy explosives, many of

which we could hear blowing things to destruction around us.

“See!” said my friend the officer, standing there in the dark. “By all

rights it should have been a quiet night, and now look at this! You

were lucky.”

* * * * *

Now we are standing down below, on the floor of a huge concrete

“cistern” somewhere near London. It is a wet, chilly January night.

A huge gun sticks its snout up out of the cistern against the faint

light of a moon-tinted sky.

The base of the gun is half enclosed in a steel cabin, like the cab of

a locomotive. On each side of the gun barrel sits a man on a stool,

just like an engineer and fireman. The man on the right, by cranking a

wheel, keeps the gun moving around on a swivel, following the hand on a

dial which points toward the sound of motors in the sky. The man on the

left similarly raises and lowers the gun barrel.

Down in the pit are other men. They are all in uniform, but here in the

dark they are mere shapes. They might as well be woodcutters or farmers

for all you can tell.

Nobody says anything.

Three men stand just behind and to one side of the gun. Before them,

lying in a rack that moves with the gun, is a row of big shells. The

shells taper down to a pencil-point end. That end is a steel cap, shiny

bright, with figures and marks on it, and right in the end, like the

eye of a needle, there is a small hole. One man stands there with a

narrow steel punch stuck through this hole. He holds the punch in his

right hand. In his left is a shielded flashlight pointing down onto

the end of the shell so he can read those little figures which a few

seconds later will be bursting through thousands of feet of sky. He

stands there waiting--everybody is waiting--everybody is ready for the

order.

Off in the darkness, some yards away, technical information is being

relayed from one instrument man to another. The sound-detector boys

phone, “One three five one four zero one four five,” giving the course

of the enemy plane. Over the phone from somewhere else in London comes

the plane’s altitude. Mathematicians figure the angle, the range, the

bearing. They call out as they figure. It is all quiet, but it is tense

and rapid. The officer in charge stands alone there in the darkness. He

takes no part in the details. The enlisted men do all that.

Finally there is a shout: “Stand by to fire.” The voice carries to all

the gun crews, and each acknowledges with a yell.

We are about ready to shoot at a German. Let’s go back to one of the

gun pits.

The boys are waiting. Not a word is said. Then comes a yell: “One

five.” That’s the order for setting the time fuse. When that yell comes

it means that within a few seconds a shell will be on its way up into

the sky.

It is a dramatic thing, like the opening gong of a prize fight, ending

months of training.

At the yell, the man with the punch gives the tiny end of the shell a

little twist. He has set it at “one five”--in other words, he has set

it to explode fifteen seconds after leaving the gun.

It takes him less than a second. He steps back. The man next to him

already has this huge shell in his arms. He half throws it into the

arms of the man next to him. This one swings it onto a set of rollers

and shoves it upward to the man on the left side of the gun cab. He

jerks it off the rollers, switches it into a steel cradle alongside the

gun barrel. A lever rolls the cradle over and the shell is in the gun.

An automatic ram pushes it tight, the breech snaps shut and locks. It

is all done in the dark.

The gun is ready. We all step back.

There is utter silence, absolute suspension of all motion. A newcomer

puts his fingers to his ears and gets tense all over.

It seems like hours now that we have been waiting, although it is

probably only a few seconds.

Then, faintly, out of the darkness and into your muffled ears comes a

human voice, yelling “fire,” and all the guns go off at once.

* * * * *

Your first experience in a gun pit is truly a shocking one.

From every side you seem to have been struck by a terrific blast of air

that almost knocks you down. And somewhere around you--you don’t quite

place it--there are horrifying sheets of flame, as if everything on

earth had caught fire and exploded. And mingled with both these things

there is certainly the loudest noise you ever heard.

The whole thing shakes you, physically and spiritually. And before you

have really come back to your senses, you are following the crashing

shell on its journey. The terrible blast seems to go shattering and

crashing its way on up, up into the heavens, with a series of great

reverberations as though the climbing shells were bursting through

sheet after sheet of waxed paper stretched tight across the sky.

And then, if you wait maybe half a minute, you can hear faintly the

explosion of that very shell which a minute ago you saw being loaded

into the gun. Now it is flying into a thousand vicious little pieces,

miles up there in the darkness.

But by now the yell, “One seven,” has come through the night, the dark

shapes of boys in uniform have moved wordlessly in routine little

motions there in the open-air cistern, and another shell is already

tearing toward the moon.

Some people can’t stand heavy gunfire at all. And I’ll have to admit

that the first four or five times the guns were fired during my night

with the ack-acks I didn’t like it either. I wished I was home in bed.

But then I swear I got used to it.

Our battery fired close to a hundred rounds that night. It got so we

would stop talking a few seconds before the guns went off and then go

on with the conversation as soon as the noise was over.

Some of the gunners were telling me about a photographer who came up

one night to take pictures. On the first blast from the guns he started

running blindly away and charged right into a wire fence, which knocked

him down. But it was no disgrace, for people who are like that just

can’t help it.

The blast from these antiaircraft guns is almost beyond description,

but I can give you some examples.

The door to one of the underground concrete rooms where the men doze

during quiet periods had a brand-new steel latch. On my night with the

battery, the first salvo broke that steel latch in two and blew the

door open.

They use up light bulbs at a terrific rate. The concussion breaks the

filament. In the soldiers’ canteen only one light bulb was left out

of the original six when I went down after an hour’s firing. And in

the hut where the officers on duty have their meals, the blast rocks

the building, knocks dishes off the table, and puffs out the blackout

curtains so that they have to be readjusted each time.

Rubber earplugs are available, but the men don’t wear them. They get

used to the blast, and it doesn’t bother them.

An officer and I were standing in the dark listening to the Germans

overhead.

“They sound as if they were flying along evenly,” he said, “but they

aren’t. When there is a formation, they may be flying five hundred

feet above and below one another. If there’s just one, he flies a

zigzag course. Not only that, but he goes up and down, too, like a

roller-coaster. That’s so we can’t get a good sound gauge on him.”

It always sounded to me as if there were only one plane in the sky at

a time. But at the end of two hours I asked about it and the gunner

officer said:

“It’s hard to say, but I’d guess that anywhere from one to three

hundred had been over tonight.”

* * * * *

The value of antiaircraft guns is not measured necessarily by the

number of planes they bring down--although the guns are officially

credited with about 450 of the 3050 German planes shot down over

Britain since the war started. Their greater value is in keeping the

raiders high and keeping them jumping around, which makes accurate

bombing very nearly impossible. In fact, the average height at which

those 450 planes were plugged from the ground was 16,000 feet.

Searchlights are almost never used any more. Consequently, the gunners

can’t see how near their shells are coming to the target. But they did

have a fantastic sight a few nights ago. They were looking at the sky

through binoculars when suddenly they saw, silhouetted against the

moon, three German planes in formation. But before they could fire the

formation was out of sight.

The boys say the Germans occasionally watch for gun flashes, then take

a quick bearing and try to drop a bomb on the gun station.

Every morning the gun crews have drill. They can set the fuse, load and

fire in a few seconds, but they get even better. And after the regular

drills the boys practice voluntarily for hour after hour.

“Is that because they like guns,” I asked, “or is it because they want

to get ahead?”

“It’s literally because they’re that determined to win this war,” the

officer said.

* * * * *

This night with the antiaircraft gunners was my first glimpse into the

soldiers’ side of the war. I’ll long remember one moment late in the

evening when I stood between an officer and a sergeant there in the

darkness with the guns roaring and bombs crunching and planes grinding

overhead, and the British officer said:

“Isn’t this ridiculous--all of us trying to kill each other? And we

thought it would never happen again!”

_2. MISCELLANY_

_London,

January, 1941_

The brother of a man I know has a hobby of riding around on a bicycle

every morning looking for new bomb damage. He phoned this morning

to report that he had a big special one. (Reports of unusual bomb

damage are spread around town by mouth-to-mouth grapevine, since the

newspapers aren’t permitted to mention specific locations.) So we took

a bus to the scene about two miles from our hotel.

The report was correct, plenty. We learned later that the damage was

caused by a German plane which crashed with its full load of bombs.

They found little pieces of the plane.

All the nearby houses had been blown down. Big stone buildings

remained standing, but their office furniture was splintered and

smashed into ruin. There wasn’t a window left for six blocks in any

direction. And yet a policeman said only a dozen people were hurt and

nobody was killed. Many bomb explosions are as freakish as that.

All the public clocks in the area were stopped, but none at the same

minute. Among the half dozen that I saw there was a variance of half an

hour. The answer is that the blast moved the hands.

Some London buildings now have corrugated-steel shutters that are

pulled down at night over windows and doors. They don’t save the glass

if a bomb hits close by, but they do prevent shattered glass from

flying all around. In this particular explosion these steel shutters

were bent and twisted, some of them bashed in but others ballooned out

toward the street like a weak spot in an inner tube. That is another

freakish thing about bomb explosions--the pull is often greater than

the push.

* * * * *

I saw the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens today for the first

time. I think it must be the loveliest statue in the world. There is a

big bomb crater two hundred yards away, but the statue is untouched. I

think they ought to remove it and bury it for the duration.

The statue of Queen Victoria at Kensington Palace has several small

chips missing from the hem of the Queen’s dress, the result of a small

bomb that dropped a hundred yards away.

Many bomb craters in the parks are being filled with debris hauled from

bombed buildings.

Three-fourths of the windows of Buckingham Palace are blown out and

boarded up. In one window a torn, ragged blind has been hanging for

weeks. I’ll bet they wouldn’t fix it for ten thousand pounds, for it

shows all England that their King is taking it too.

* * * * *

While the checkrooms in restaurants will check tin hats and soldiers’

rifles, they aren’t supposed to accept gas masks, the point being to

make you keep your mask with you all the time, just in case.

The streets are full of soldiers on leave, but you rarely see a sailor.

There are so many different uniforms that I haven’t got them all

straight. But I can tell all the dominion soldiers, for they have the

name of their country--Canada or Australia or New Zealand--spelled out

on their shoulder tabs. And that is true also of foreign units in the

British Army. You very frequently see the word Poland or Czechoslovakia

or Belgium on officers’ shoulder tabs.

The Poles, incidentally, have been doing some wonderful fighting with

the British, especially in the air. They are highly skilled fliers, and

they fight with a terrible zeal. England looks upon the Polish airman’s

uniform with deep respect.

The uniform of the Royal Air Force is a pale blue. England idolizes the

R.A.F., as well it should. The uniform commands a deep-down gratitude

the minute it is seen, whether on a wing commander or a corporal

mechanic.

Another thing about soldiers on leave in this war--almost any place

you go you can see a private and a colonel and their two girls eating

together. No, it doesn’t mean that the war has brought true social

democracy to England. It merely means that conscription makes officers

of some aristocrats and privates of other aristocrats, and when they’re

on leave they’re both still aristocrats, regardless of their uniforms.

King Zog of Albania lives at a prominent hotel, and since he doesn’t

like to sleep in the hotel’s regular shelter he sleeps in the basement

dining room. The waiters have to clear out all diners shortly before

midnight so the King can go to bed.

* * * * *

Bombs or no bombs, you can still see plenty of movies in London. You

can also go to a play, or a ballet. You can play the dog races. You can

watch prize fights. You can ice-skate at public rinks. You can sit and

drink intoxicating spirits.

The government has just promised that there will be no rationing of

beer, and although I wouldn’t know personally, of course, my gumshoe

men report that whisky is readily obtainable. Wines are getting short.

A few of London’s movie theaters have been bombed out of existence,

and most of the legitimate theaters are closed, with signs saying “Due

to Present Conditions....” Yet several new plays have opened in the

last six weeks. Pantomimes are showing as usual. There are concerts by

the London Philharmonic, and the Anglo-Polish Ballet goes on twice a

day. A new idea is the “luncheon ballet,” which is becoming extremely

popular. There are two of them, already. And there is also “luncheon

Shakespeare.”

All this daytime stuff, of course, is the result of the nighttime

blackout and the German raids at night. With three or four exceptions,

the movie theaters are open only in the daytime. The movies start as

early as 10 A.M., and the last showing is usually around 5:30.

“The Great Dictator” is running at three theaters. You can also see

“They Knew What They Wanted,” “Northwest Mounted Police,” “Strike Up

the Band,” “The Thief of Bagdad,” “All This and Heaven Too” and “The

Return of Frank James.” This last one starts its last show as late as

seven o’clock. I suppose that’s because Frank is a tough guy.

Despite the winter weather there are plenty of open-fronted places

called sports gardens, which are packed with pinball and claw machines.

There is always a crowd playing them.

You have no trouble getting enough sleep these winter nights. The

Germans come over every night the weather is fit, but it gets really

noisy only a couple of nights a week. Even then it seldom lasts more

than two hours.

Britain manufactured millions of rubber earplugs when the raiding was

so bad last September and people couldn’t sleep. But the public didn’t

take to them. They’re uncomfortable, and anyhow people like to hear

what’s going on. At an Air Raid Precautions post the other night they

dragged out a three-gallon can full of these little plugs, which look

something like golf tees. The warden wanted me to take a quart of them.

I didn’t want any, but I took a handful to bring home as souvenirs.

War has given the English language some new words. At least, it has

made some obscure words commonplace--for instance, “stirrup pump.” That

word is as common today as automobile or cigarette.

A stirrup pump is a small hand pump with its complement of a few feet

of hose and a couple of buckets of water, for putting out incendiary

bombs and small fires. They are scattered all over London--thousands of

them--and everybody is supposed to know how to use one.

Sand is also all over the place. Right here in the Strand there is a

green sack of sand, resting on top of two bricks, leaning against

every lamppost. This is so everybody will know where the sand is;

if an incendiary bomb falls near you, you won’t have to run around

frantically looking for sand to throw on it.

Many buildings have sandbags stacked against their bases, but not many

new ones are being put up. For they don’t seem to serve much purpose.

To make this early precaution look more sightly, and also to protect

the bags from weathering, many places have boxed in their sandbags.

So now there appears to be just a huge toolbox sitting there on the

sidewalk up against the building.

* * * * *

People at home wonder about the censorship over here. Well, on the

whole it is not so strict. I know some American correspondents who

think it should be stricter than it is.

There are only a few general subjects that you’re forbidden to

mention--such as troop movements, the location of guns, and the

location of any specific bombings until after a certain amount of time

has elapsed. There are also other items, such as not giving current

weather conditions or the routes of ships or planes, or cabling

anything about a fire until it is out. (The rules were relaxed on

London’s big night of fire.)

The best thing about the press censorship here is that you always know

just what is being cut out. The censor calls you on the telephone.

And you can even argue with him. Of course you usually lose out, but

imagine arguing with the censor in some countries!

As far as my stuff is concerned, the censors have up to now cut out

a total of not more than six sentences, and these were nothing I

particularly cared about.

They don’t censor opinion. If you wanted to, you could say that you

think England stinks, and it would go through. I think the censorship

has allowed America to get a pretty honest picture of what has happened

over here.

* * * * *

There are no skyscrapers in London. Like Washington, the city has a

height limit for building, something like eleven stories. But spires

and belfries and cathedral domes reach to great heights.

I can’t think of a single really large modern building in London that

has been wholly destroyed by bombs, unless the bombing was accompanied

by fire.

I don’t believe there is an aerial bomb in existence that could knock

down the Empire State Building.

_3. THE BEAVER_

_London,

January, 1941_

I always thought that a member of the peerage gave off a constant white

light, like an incendiary bomb, and that if you got caught in this

light you became weak all over, your tongue froze and you were sort of

hypnotized. It had never occurred to me that an English lord, when you

actually met one, would be a human being. But now I’ve met one, and

I’m still shocked to realize that he spoke real words to me and that I

spoke words back to him.

The great man in question is Lord Beaverbrook, the big newspaper owner.

But right now he is much more than a newspaper owner--he’s the man who

is rolling out the planes with which Britain intends eventually to win

this war.

Lord Beaverbrook is Minister of Aircraft Production. There wasn’t

any such ministry until last May. Airplanes weren’t coming off the

line fast enough to catch up with Germany. Everybody was trying, but

everybody apparently was trying in all directions at once. So Mr.

Churchill put his finger on Lord Beaverbrook and said, “You’re it.”

I doubt if Lord Beaverbrook knew any more about aircraft production at

that moment than I did, but he did know how to get things done. He has

the American sense for ignoring tradition, and an almost inspired zeal

for accomplishment. He stepped into his new job with a bang and said,

“No, we won’t cut red tape; we’ll just ignore it.”

What he did, and how he did it, must still remain in the secret files,

but you can draw your own conclusions--Britain has been getting very

bold in the air of late. Daylight raids across the Channel have become

a steady occurrence.

People close to Lord Beaverbrook have a tenacious affection and respect

for him, but as a public figure he has collected his share of dead

cats. The English public considers him a robber baron. The aristocracy

regards him as a man in trade. Plenty of bricks are hurled at his

present success. People say, “Yes, he succeeded, but he did it by

ruthlessly robbing other ministries.”

I don’t know that Lord Beaverbrook ever answers these jibes, but if he

wanted to he could say, “Well, you all said the production of planes

was the most important thing in this war. If that’s true, then what was

wrong with taking things from other departments?”

Lord Beaverbrook likes a fight, and he doesn’t especially care for

applause. As one writer put it, he’d “rather be cleverly attacked than

fulsomely praised.” He likes to be in there swinging against odds. And

he has a vitality, both mental and physical, that exhausts the people

around him.

When he jumped into this thankless job last May he became a new man.

His asthma disappeared. He worked from nine in the morning till three

the next morning. Like Edison, he can exist on little sleep. And he had

his whole staff going at a high pitch. He loved it.

But now his asthma has come back, and he doesn’t keep the ridiculous

hours he did at first. When I said to him, “I’ll bet you love your job,

don’t you?” he smiled and said, “I’d like to be out of it.”

It’s my guess that Lord Beaverbrook has aircraft production ironed out

so well that it no longer tests him, and he is becoming bored with it.

To me, that’s just as pertinent an indicator of his success as the new

audacity of the R.A.F.

Lord Beaverbrook was born in Canada. Before he was thirty he had made

a million dollars. Then he came to England to make his mark. He was

elected to Parliament long ago, in 1910. During the first World War he

was Minister of Information. He is the best-known newspaper figure in

Britain. He has taken a big hand in politics, and now again he is doing

a vital war job for England. And yet he still sort of considers himself

a foreigner.

When I sat down across the desk from him, the first thing he said was,

“Well, what do you think of them, aren’t they wonderful?” He meant the

British people and the way they are taking the war.

“I’m a foreigner here, you know,” he said, “so I can see them as they

can’t see themselves. They’re the greatest race on earth. Nobody else

could have pulled themselves together like this. I doubt if we could

have done it in Canada.”

“Could we Americans have done it?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” he said. “At least in the East they could have.”

I damned well resented that, being an old Montana cowboy myself. But

then I remembered I was in Whitehall and not on the Powder River; so,

like the British, I pulled myself together and carried on.

* * * * *

A little knot of half a dozen or perhaps a dozen men will emerge at the

end of this war as the great leaders who pulled England through. Most

of them will be men who forgot politics for the duration, men who laid

aside their skittishness and slashed out and did things. They will be

men who kept pace with the British national character, not those who

were dragged along by it. Lord Beaverbrook, I have no doubt at all,

will be one of this select group. And for that reason I want to tell

you all the little things I know about him. He has already been written

about a great deal in America, but it takes a lot of writing to make

the public know a man, so I’ll just add my share.

He is of medium height, stocky though not heavy. His shoulders push

forward, and when he sits at a table he almost seems to crouch. His

face is sallow, and it leaves the impression of being square rather

than round. His mouth is big, his lips pursed. His black hair is thin

on top, but on the back of his head it is thick and heavy, almost down

to the collar line. He was dressed in black when I talked to him.

Lord Beaverbrook doesn’t speak like an Englishman. He still speaks like

a Canadian, which means like an American. He knows America intimately.

His last trip over was made in October, 1939, just after the war

started.

“You know my friend Dick Merrill, don’t you?” I asked.

“I certainly do,” he said. “He came down to the boat the last time I

was in New York. I sent him a cable when his new baby was born. I have

flown with him a lot.”

Lord Beaverbrook used to have his own airplanes. He still occasionally

flies about England, visiting aircraft factories, but he goes in

government planes now.

He owns three big London newspapers--the _Morning Express_, the

_Evening Standard_ and the _Sunday Express_. You’ve probably heard of

his modernistic black-glass Express Building in Fleet Street. Back

home, every time I read about Fleet Street being bombed I wondered if

Beaverbrook’s glass house had been hit. It has not, although buildings

a hundred feet away have burned. In October a bomb did go through the

roof of the Standard Building, however.

Since taking on the aircraft job, Lord Beaverbrook has paid almost

no attention to his newspapers. At the _Standard_ they didn’t hear

from him for weeks, until one day he called up and said, “What do you

mean by attacking the Presbyterians in my newspaper?” His father was

a Presbyterian minister and he himself knows the Bible intimately. He

almost always quotes from it in his speeches.

He is very much opposed to smoking. He used to play tennis avidly but

has given it up. Almost his only relaxation now is the movies. He is a

movie fiend, and has a projector at his country home. He’s crazy about

Marlene Dietrich. As one of his fellow workers said, Lord Beaverbrook

probably thinks the greatest contribution America could make to Great

Britain would be to send over more Dietrich films. They say he has seen

“Destry Rides Again” nine times.

Lord Beaverbrook loves to hear people singing together. He sings

himself--but, as somebody has said, he has more rhythm than tone. His

favorite songs are “Little Joe” and “See What the Boys in the Back Room

Will Have.”

Around town Lord Beaverbrook is known as “The Beaver.” At the aircraft

office he is spoken of as “The Minister.”

He is a great friend of Richard B. Bennett, former Prime Minister of

Canada, and he has Bennett at the ministry with him.

During the week Lord Beaverbrook sleeps at night in a heavily walled

room at one of his newspaper plants. Week-ends he goes to a place

outside of town, but even so he drops in at his office on Sundays.

He has two sons and a daughter. Max, the elder son, is in the R.A.F.

Lord Beaverbrook’s government office is a lovely one, in contrast to

the dark Victorian offices that many British statesmen occupy. It looks

out across a park and down upon the Thames. The office is a large one,

with rugs and deep leather chairs. On a table at Beaverbrook’s left are

four telephones--three black ones and a green one. The green one is for

intercabinet communication.

Outside the office is a large room where six secretaries, all men,

work. The door between is always open. Secretaries and technicians have

constant access to the Minister. They are in and out all the time.

It is usual for Beaverbrook to be talking to four or five people at

once about different things. He is a colossal asker of questions.

Before you sit down he has found out whether you smoke, drink, fight,

swim or speak Esperanto. At least, that’s what everybody says. But he

must have figured I didn’t know anything anyhow, for he didn’t pump me

much.

He seemed to me to be in complete repose. He didn’t impart any feeling

that he is the slashing dynamo he really is.

In personality Lord Beaverbrook runs the scale. He probably would have

been a great actor. He has one act of intimate confidence, one of

savage bullying, one of grave piety, one of profound and devastating

gloom. At times when he walks into a cabinet meeting, they say,

you can hardly keep from crying, he looks so tragic. But the chief

characteristic of Lord Beaverbrook is probably his wit. He has a

brilliant but left-handed humor. People who don’t know him well are

often unable to tell whether he’s serious or joking.

That wit of his can on occasion be scalding. They say he likes people

who can stand up to his barrages. He’s not a man who has to be agreed

with. And on the whole he doesn’t care what the public thinks or says

about him. He likes to fight, that’s all.

In getting things done he is not unlike Churchill. And that is the way

to win a war.

_4. SHOP TALK WITH THE R.A.F._

_An R.A.F. Bomber Station,

February, 1941_

Although I can’t tell you where it is, or give people’s names, I am

spending a few days with the Royal Air Force. The place is not near

London.

My pass for visiting this certain bomber station is good for two days.

The weather is nice here, but bad on the Continent, so nightly flights

have been called off. But I don’t care; for what I prefer, anyway, is

just to sit around as I used to do at home on bad weather days and do a

lot of “hangar flying”--in other words, just talk. These R.A.F. pilots

had never heard the expression “hangar flying,” but they thought it

very apt and have started using it, so I guess I have now given my

share of American aid to Britain.

There are many pilots at this field, and I have come to know some of

them very well indeed. The R.A.F. boys are just like any group of fine

aviators at home. They’re the cream of the crop, and swell guys, from

station commander on down.

A visitor is not permitted to describe an R.A.F. station, but I can say

this: My greatest surprise was at its close resemblance to a big Army

Air Corps field in the peacetime United States. I had expected to find

things tense and hectic, with secret hangars and everything camouflaged

to look like something else. I had expected to find the whole place

rather makeshift, for quick moving; and that everybody would be in

overalls and like firemen, ready to jump into their boots and go at a

second’s notice. It isn’t that way.

The officers have pleasant private rooms. The enlisted men live in big

permanent brick barracks. In the officers’ mess there is a great sunny

lounge room with a huge fireplace. It resembles a country club more

than a battle station. There is a game room, with billiard and pingpong

tables and a tiger rug on the floor. There is bar service, so that the

pilots can have a friendly drink at lunch and dinner time. During the

day they go about their normal duties, testing and checking aircraft,

practicing formation flying, attending to the countless clerical desk

tasks which are necessary in running a flying field.

Only in the early afternoon, when they gather around a big map-covered

table in the “briefing room” to lay out plans for that night’s flight,

and again when they take off one by one on the long journey to the land

of the enemy, and once more when they begin to drop down one by one

out of the black skies, is there any warlike feeling about the place.

Well, there is one other thing you notice, too. As we sat around

the great lounge before lunch, with many pilots in the room, I was

struck by the scarred faces of some of the men. There weren’t a lot of

them--half a dozen at most--but they were enough to prick the illusion

that this was a peacetime flying field. Yet the boys say they have

lost remarkably few bomber crews in the last bitter six months. Almost

everybody shot down over Germany has managed to land by parachute

and is now in a prison camp. Fatal crashes on home soil have been

comparatively few.

I asked how they got weather information from the other side, and they

said it was difficult but, with their own observations and certain

information that does come through, they were able to forecast pretty

accurately. I asked the station commander why some night, just for the

hell of it, he didn’t call up Berlin on the radio-telephone and ask how

the weather was over there. He laughed, and said he believed he would;

but of course he won’t. I’ll bet they’d be so flabbergasted the first

time that they’d tell him.

The R.A.F. boys have a high regard for the flying ability of their

foes, and a healthy respect for antiaircraft fire from the ground.

They don’t worry about shell fragments hitting their bombs and

exploding a whole plane in midair, for such a smack doesn’t set bombs

off. In fact, occasionally they can hear shrapnel striking the bombs

slung beneath their planes, and that’s a sound they are glad to hear,

for it means that the thick steel walls of the bombs have kept the

shrapnel from coming up through the fuselage and into the seat of the

pilot’s pants.

I asked one boy whether he ever had a funny little feeling in his

stomach when he sent a bomb on its way downward, and he said, no, not

actually, although sometimes he did indirectly when he got to thinking

about it later, back home. But any regret is overcome by the thought of

what the Germans did to Britain first.

Among the rumors we occasionally get back home is that German planes

are being turned out with very few and very poor instruments. The

R.A.F. boys say that is nonsense. German planes shot down over England

are all fully equipped with instruments, and these boys say their

workmanship is superb. The lads who have to face the music don’t fool

themselves, as we sometimes do at home.

An all-night flight to Germany or Italy in a bombing plane is a long

and grueling task. And it’s the sort of job you can’t keep on doing

night after night, as though you were going to work in a mill.

In the heavy days of the spring of 1940 bomber pilots were making as

many as five trips a week, but now the average is less. When they

have made a certain number of trips they are “posted” for other

duties--which means a rest. It usually involves transfer to a training

station as an instructor.

Although the boys are all disappointed when bad weather washes out any

one night’s operations, still I believe they are a little glad to have

the rest when it comes. It takes some months to work up the number of

trips necessary before a man is given a rest. This station has only one

man so far who is back on night bombing duty after having been posted.

He came back in less than the scheduled time--because at the training

station he talked so much about his experiences he drove his fellow

pilots almost crazy!

The funniest incident I have heard about at this station is about one

of their bombers that got lost and finally landed in Germany, just

after daylight. The fliers asked some German farmers where they were,

and the farmers told them. They got back in the plane and flew safely

home.

But they rarely get lost, for they are thoroughly skilled at instrument

flying when they arrive for duty.

I have a friend--the best one I’ve made, and whom I’m going to see

again in another part of the world--who was telling me about a crash

he’d been in. We were riding in a car as he talked about it--he and I

in the front seat. I asked him if this was his only accident. He said

“Yes,” and then reached around and said, “Where’s some wood to knock

on?” Three other pilots were riding in the back seat, and they yelled

as if they had caught somebody stealing jam: “Jimmy’s shooting a line!

Jimmy’s shooting a line! He must be, if he’s looking for wood to knock

on.”

You hear that term, “shooting a line,” more than any other expression

around an R.A.F. field. The boys razz each other with it. They don’t

spare anybody, no matter what he’s been through. Anyone who talks about

anything he has done is accused of shooting a line. And since everybody

talks, everybody is eventually accused. It’s all good-natured.

They had one pilot, now transferred, who was a colossal line-shooter.

He would come back from every trip with the most fantastic tales of his

adventures. He never repeated himself, and he never had a dull story.

The boys felt lonesome for weeks after he left.

At home we have only a few sergeant pilots in the Air Corps, but

Britain has many of them. It is not unusual for a great British bomber

to be captained by a sergeant, who all during the trip is in command

over the commissioned officers who make up his crew.

The greatest discomfort the bomber crews have is the cold. They almost

freeze to death. The planes are heated by hot air from the engines, yet

so much cold wind gets in that they really suffer. They’re now getting

electrically heated boots and gloves, which will solve the problem.

Unlike our airline transports, a bomber has only one set of controls.

The captain and the second pilot have to trade seats when they relieve

each other. One of the boys told me how one night over northern Italy,

when he was second pilot but was flying the plane at the time, the

motors suddenly went dead. So he nosed the plane over into a dive, and

while they were diving straight downward he and the captain changed

seats. The motors caught again at 3000 feet and they came home safely.

And incidentally, you know how worried we get on an airplane when one

motor goes out? Well, it is not unusual at all for these bombers to

come all the way from Berlin on one engine.

* * * * *

These young fellows admit that they do get scared sometimes.

Scared--yet on the whole they take it just as a matter of course.

Usually they circle over the objective for an hour or so, dodging

antiaircraft fire and getting a good sight on the target. One officer

told me that once when he was flying as a second pilot, and not at the

controls, he actually went to sleep right over Berlin--slept in his

seat for half an hour and didn’t wake up till the captain yelled at him

to work out a course for home.

I asked if they ever saw German night fighters in the air. Not often,

they said, but they’ve all had instances. One of my pilot friends says

he has ordered his tail-gunner never to fire if he sees a German plane

flashing past in the night, for there is always a chance the German

didn’t see them. This friend has had half a dozen cases where a German

fighter whizzed past so close there was almost a collision, but the

enemy never saw them at all.

The five men who go out in a bomber take a lunch of chocolate, cakes

and fruit and a thermos bottle of hot tea or coffee. One pilot said

he opened his hot tea one night and found that it was frozen solid.

Most of them aren’t interested in lunch while flying. What they really

look forward to is that hot breakfast when they get home, just before

daylight. One officer whom I know, a tail-gunner, doesn’t care much for

sweets and he always brings his bar of chocolate back with him from

Germany for his five-year-old daughter.

A pilot flies the same plane every trip. And he tries to keep the same

flying and ground crews. On days when he is not scheduled to go out

that night, he hangs around the plane getting it all fixed up just the

way he wants it. He comes to think of that plane as almost belonging to

him.

A man bent on a mission of death finds time to appreciate beauty, too.

One of the boys said the most beautiful sight he had ever seen was the

Alps on a clear moonlit night. He had never seen them before. They were

covered with snow, and their dark-shadowed sides gave the effect of a

ghostly etching.

Another pilot looked down one night on his way home and there were

stars right beneath him. He thought sure he had got bottom-side up, but

it turned out he was seeing a reflection from the sky in the English

Channel below.

Pilots have various slang terms for things. An automatic pilot is known

as George. An airplane is a kite. And of course the Germans are always

referred to as Jerry. It happens that I have a very close friend back

in America named Jerry. I hope when I get home she doesn’t try to bomb

me. If she does, I suppose I’ll just have to shoot her down.

_VI. THE CAVE DWELLERS_

_1. ALL I COULD BEAR_

_London,

February, 1941_

This war has driven millions of people to burrow underground like

moles. On an average, one-fourth of London’s population has slept

underground in the past six months.

On nights when the raids are bad, about half of London is below the

surface. And in certain sections, such as the Borough of Stepney in the

poor East End, with its population of a quarter of a million, they say

that on bad nights ninety-nine per cent of the people are down below.

It is a sorry life.

I have been in shelters night after night after night. I’ve been in

about fifty of them in all, from the lowliest to the most luxurious,

from vast stockyards of places that hold 14,000 people, on down to

refined little underground homes buttressed like Gibraltar.

It is going to be hard to describe a shelter so that you can picture

it; just as it would be hard to describe a ship to somebody who had

never seen one. For there must be as many kinds of shelters under

London as there are kinds of ships on the sea. But in general,

sheltering falls into four classifications: (1) the tubes, which is

to say the subways; (2) private shelters, under hotels and apartment

houses; (3) vast public shelters in the basements of thousands of

strong buildings, and (4) Anderson shelters--the artificial cave that

the home owner builds in the backyard for his family alone.

I suppose that back home we have read more about life in the tubes than

in any of the other shelters. Possibly that is because it is forbidden

to name other big shelters, for fear of directing German bombs to them.

Yet fewer people sleep in the tubes than in any of the three other

types of shelter.

Here are some figures to show just how much of London can get under

shelter at night, how much of it actually takes shelter, and where:

(The last column of figures comes from a shelter census taken

throughout Greater London on a recent quiet night.)

Capacity Census

Tubes 178,000 96,000

Private group shelters 930,000 209,000

Public Shelters 1,323,000 368,000

Anderson shelters 3,418,000 1,271,000

---------- ----------

Total 5,849,000 1,944,000

Taking into account the evacuation, on which there are no definite

figures, let us assume that the population of Greater London today

is eight million. Then these figures mean that there are shelter

accommodations for nearly three-fourths of the people, and that on

quiet nights only one-fourth of the population uses them. On bad nights

this figure doubles.

When I say that only a fourth of London is burrowing in these winter

nights, don’t get the idea that the other three-fourths are out around

the town. Only a few thousand are. The rest are at home, behind their

blackout curtains.

In the past few weeks bad weather has disrupted the raiders, and they

have been over London on an average only four nights a week. And only

about one night a week has there been really heavy raiding. People grow

nonchalant about it, possibly too nonchalant. But just let London get

two bad nights in a row and see what happens. You would see well over

half of London diving for the basements.

Today, after six months of hiding from bombs, the shelter population

has become pretty well settled. The same people go to the same shelters

each night. They sleep in the same spots, either in bunks or on the

floor. The Ministry of Health is installing bunks so fast there are now

some 350,000, and before spring the number will probably pass a million.

There are all kinds of opinion about the people who live in shelters.

Social workers think they’re wonderful. Some people consider them

cowards. As far as I can see, they have the same strengths and

weaknesses that people in the mass have everywhere, in war or out. They

are just people doing the best they can with a situation that is pretty

bad.

The shelters do harbor some conscription dodgers and petty thieves,

and a horde of young men who refuse to act as fire watchers or do much

of anything else. They are weak characters. At home they would be

drugstore cowboys; here they’re called “tube Cuthberts.”

When life has simmered down to the point where you have to choose

between being bombed and living like swine on the floor of a dungeon,

then life has indeed become pretty bleak. And this isn’t just in

London. All over England people are burrowing in shelters at night.

Millions of them are living through these sixteen-hour winter nights

like that--just down there waiting in a tube or a basement or a dugout.

There is no denying that it’s better than being dead, but it’s a hell

of a way to live.

I got my first view of an underground shelter crowd at the big

Liverpool Street tube station.

It was around eight o’clock on a raidless night. A policeman in the

upper vestibule told us just to go down the escalator and take a

look--as though it were a zoo. So we did.

Somehow I must have thought that there’d be nobody down there that

night, or that if there were they’d be invisible or something, because

I wasn’t emotionally ready at all to see people lying around by the

thousands on cold concrete.

In my first days in England I had seen terrible bomb damage. I had seen

multitudinous preparations for war. I had talked with wounded soldiers.

I had gone through London’s great night of fire-bombing. I had listened

for hours to the crack of guns and the crunch of bombs. And although I

didn’t especially know it at the time, none of these things went clear

down deep inside and made me hurt.

It was not until I went down seventy feet into the bowels of the

Liverpool Street tube and saw humanity sprawled there in childlike

helplessness that my heart first jumped and my throat caught. I know I

must have stopped suddenly and drawn back. I know I must have said to

myself, “Oh my God!”

We hunted up the shelter marshal, and talked to him for a long time.

He was immensely proud of his shelter, and I suppose he had a right

to be, for they say it is paradise now compared to what it was in the

beginning. He told us to take a walk through the shelter and then meet

him at the back entrance.

This is a new section of the tunnel, not yet used by trains. The tube

is narrower than most of New York’s subway excavations, and it is

elliptical in shape. It is walled with steel casing.

We walked to the far end, about an eighth of a mile, through one

tube, and then back in the parallel tube. On benches on each side, as

though sitting and lying on a long street-car seat, were the people,

hundreds of them. And as we walked on they stretched into thousands. In

addition, there was a row of sleeping forms on the wooden floor of the

tube, stretched crosswise. Their bodies took up the whole space, so we

had to watch closely when we put our feet down between the sleepers.

Many of these people were old--wretched and worn old people, people

who had never known many of the good things of life and who were now

winding up their days on this earth in desperate discomfort. They were

the bundled-up, patched-up people with lined faces that we have seen

sitting dumbly in waiting lines at our own relief offices at home.

There were children too, some asleep and some playing. There were

youngsters in groups, laughing and talking and even singing. There were

smart-alecks and there were quiet ones. There were hard-working people

of middle age who had to rise at five o’clock and go to work. Some

people sat knitting or playing cards or talking. But mostly they just

sat. And though it was only eight o’clock, many of the old people were

already asleep.

It was the old people who seemed so tragic. Think of yourself at

seventy or eighty, full of pain and of the dim memories of a lifetime

that has probably all been bleak. And then think of yourself traveling

at dusk every night to a subway station, wrapping your ragged overcoat

about your old shoulders and sitting on a wooden bench with your back

against a curved steel wall. Sitting there all night, in nodding and

fitful sleep. Think of that as your destiny--every night, every night

from now on.

People looked up as we came along in our good clothes and our

obviously American hats. I had a terrible feeling of guilt as I walked

through there--the same feeling that I have had when going through

penitentiaries, staring at the prisoners. I couldn’t look people in

the face; consequently I didn’t see very much of the human visage that

night, for I looked mostly at the floor. But I saw all I could bear. I

saw enough.

Since that first night I have seen so much of it I no longer feel

that way about the shelterers in mass. Repetition makes the unusual

become commonplace. Enough of anything dulls the emotions. But I still

think my first impression was a valid one. I still think it speaks the

frightening poverty of character in this world more forcibly than do

the bombs that cause it.

A bombed building looks like something you have seen before--it looks

as though a hurricane had struck. But the sight of thousands of poor,

opportunityless people lying in weird positions against cold steel,

with all their clothes on, hunched up in blankets, lights shining in

their eyes, breathing fetid air--lying there far underground like

rabbits, not fighting, not even angry; just helpless, scourged, weakly

waiting for the release of another dawn--that, I tell you, is life

without redemption.

_2. DOUBLE-X_

_London,

February, 1941_

I went into an East End shelter, beneath a railroad track, with a

friend who supervises repair work on shelter buildings.

This railroad runs through the city on a high grade, the top of which

is heavily arched over with stone. At the street level, under the

tracks, are large rooms. And here underneath the rumbling trains people

sleep at night.

It was about 11 P.M. when we went into one of the rooms. It was

dungeonlike and gloomy, with only a faint light, and very cold. About

twenty people lay on the floor on mattresses, covered with quilts.

Everyone was asleep, or so we thought.

My friend looked at the ceiling to see if recent work aimed at stopping

the seepage of water had been finished. We didn’t say anything, but

suddenly from among the recumbent forms came a woman’s voice:

“When are we going to get bunks--after the war’s over?”

The voice was old, but it wasn’t a complaining voice, or a bitter one.

There was even a note of gaiety in it.

The remark opened up other sleepers, and many of them put in an

oar. They lay on their backs and talked up to my friend about the

discomforts of this miserable place.

There were old men and women with lined faces. There were middle-aged

men who said nothing. There were children. And side by side lay two

girls--beautiful girls in their twenties--with nets on their hair and

cold cream on their faces. At Ohio State they would be popular coeds.

Here they lay on their backs on concrete floors, looking up as we stood

and talked for some fifteen minutes.

And then in the midst of this conversation I heard--if you’ll excuse

me--what seemed to be someone using the toilet. The room grew silent

for a moment, and the sound was magnified.

I didn’t believe it could be true--here in public before children and

elders and two lovely modern girls you’d have been proud to take to the

Ritz for dinner. It seemed impossible among civilized people. But it

was true. The only toilet in that room was a public bucket.

Nobody laughed or blushed. This vulgar intimacy had become accepted as

a way of life under the whip of war.

As we left, the old voice with the gaiety in it called to me and my

friend: “We’ll all be dead before you get this place fixed up, so you’d

better leave a deposit on a wreath for me.”

They were all laughing as we left.

* * * * *

Shelter Double-X is in the East End. I call it Double-X because I can’t

give its real name.

People feel sentimental about Double-X, they have been there so long.

Some ten thousand people live there every night. It is one of the

biggest shelters in London. It is so big it is like a state fair. It

takes you hours to go through it.

Openings have been walled up, and shock walls have been built a few

feet in front of the entrances. The great vaultlike space is divided

into bays, each holding more than a hundred persons. Each bay is

numbered, and each one has its own submarshals, selected by the people

themselves.

At first, ten thousand people slept on the floor. But now bunks are

going in.

Double-X has two big first-aid rooms, with Red Cross nurses in charge.

It has canteens. It has a wagon refreshment stand, run by a Negro. It

has one vast long promenade devoted to nothing but milling up and down

on parade, just like the boardwalk at Atlantic City, except under cover.

Double-X is not modern and not too immaculate, but it has the saving

grace of having become a social center. People like to be at Double-X

because they have so much fun. It’s full of young people, handsome

young people, walking and talking and laughing. And it’s cosmopolitan.

There must be somebody there from every nation on earth.

Everything happens at Double-X, from births to deaths. Evening

classes for adults are held. There is a library. There are romances.

Multitudinous soldiers on leave go there to find girls. Double-X

is a big, jolly city, all under one roof. Its inconveniences are

overshadowed by its personality. It is a gigantic human omelet, fried

in war.

* * * * *

Now to a private Anderson shelter.

This is a half-above-ground cellar, usually built in a backyard. As

I have said before, there are thousands upon thousands of them in

Britain--in the suburbs, the small towns and the country they hold more

people than all other kinds of shelters put together.

Any person making less than $20 a week is supplied free with the

material for an Anderson. Others must buy their own.

An Anderson shelter is formed of walls of sheet iron, heavily banked on

the outside with dirt. A direct hit will demolish an Anderson, but it

is good insurance against a nearby blast and flying debris. The other

day I saw one standing quite unharmed not 15 feet from a bomb crater

that was 20 feet across.

But four people are miserably cramped in an Anderson shelter. Often the

owners have trouble with water seeping up through the floor. And it is

a problem to heat them without suffocating.

At first the Andersons were considered wonderful, but now the

government is threshing over a new policy of shoring up and fortifying

one room in your house as a healthier and safer shelter.

* * * * *

The average Londoner who sleeps underground every night has done a lot

of shopping around before settling down in a particular shelter for the

duration. It is something like looking for a new apartment to rent. The

choice is based on what looks safest, and on whether you like the crowd

or not.

As horrible as shelter life seems to me, one marshal told me he felt

sure that after the war many people would want to keep on living

underground. Londoners are gregarious. They like to be in a crowd.

I’ll have to admit that the people I’ve seen in many shelters seemed to

be making a picnic of it. Also, people have a feeling that the more of

them there are together, the safer they are.

I was in a good-sized room that was only half-filled, and the people

were grumbly and unhappy. The marshal said that if you’d pack fifty

people in there they’d be as happy as June bugs.

Some people, of course, do prefer the quiet and privacy of the smaller

public shelters, where just a few people can sit around, sew, play

cards and talk.

I went into one basement that held only two dozen people, and they had

a piano. They were all singing when I walked in. And they happened to

be singing “Marching Through Georgia.”

In Soho I visited two or three shelters in the basements of small

office buildings. They were cozy and pleasant, and you had at least a

feeling of privacy. In the small shelters you can fix up a bunk in a

corner with some permanency, and get a few little homey things around

you.

People often go long distances to sleep in their favorite shelters.

They say people travel by bus and subway four or five miles to sleep in

the big, jolly Double-X shelter; yet other people who live within two

blocks of Double-X will travel four or five miles nightly by tube to

sleep underground at Marble Arch.

Although people in all the public shelters have to take their bedding

home every morning, “guests” in some shelters are so permanent that

they are allowed to install their own iron beds and chairs. You see

whole rows of deep old leather chairs right out of the sitting rooms at

home, with old people sitting up asleep in them. And there are hundreds

of canvas deck chairs that people sleep in all night.

Whenever, late in the afternoon, you see somebody with a cheap brown

suitcase going down the street, he is on his way to a shelter for the

night. I wish I had been in the cheap-brown-suitcase business this past

year. You even see people going to shelters in taxis, but with their

cheap brown suitcases.

At Double-X you see hundreds of baby buggies parked around the walls.

They didn’t bring babies; they brought bedding. Officials think they

may be forced to forbid baby buggies, for people bring so much stuff in

them. It takes up too much room. Some people come practically ready to

set up housekeeping.

I was amazed at the number of soldiers in the shelters. That seemed

dreadful to me. A soldier comes home on a few days’ leave for some

life, liberty and a little fling at happiness. And then, because his

home has gone or his folks have moved, he has to spend his leave lying

on a dungeon floor.

However, not all the soldiers go to shelters because they have to. Lots

of them go there to pick up girls. And officials at Double-X hint that

some of the girls are not of the whitest virtue. The wardens worry

about this; but virtue or not, I will say that there are girls at

Double-X in the poor East End who are the loveliest I have seen in all

London.

Incidentally, the girls over here are wearing coats with those

Alaska-type parkas, of the same material, that pull over the head. And

they look snappy.

Many people, after trying the new shelter bunks installed by the

government, go back to the floor. The bunks are less than two feet

wide, and too short for comfort. On the floor, people have room to

stretch and roll around.

Most of the bunks are three-deckers. Those in the tube stations are

made of steel. All the rest are of wood, pegged together at the joints

so they can easily be knocked down and moved. They are unfinished, and

look very home-made. Some have slat bottoms, others canvas bottoms.

The other night I was in a shelter that had not had the bunks installed

yet, and the marshal said the people had taken a vote and only two out

of the three hundred wanted bunks. But they have to take them anyway,

for the Ministry of Health says so.

A few people, in the better shelters, bring pajamas and put them on

before going to bed. But they are very few. Most people sleep with

all their clothes on, even their hats. I have been surprised at how

few slacks I’ve seen on women. I should think they would be ideal for

shelter sleeping.

Before leaving home I was told by a British friend to bring a ski

suit. He said it was just the thing for jumping into quickly, and for

shelter wear. But I’ve been practically living in shelters for a week,

and I haven’t seen a ski suit yet. Anyway, I would feel sort of silly

stretched out here on a deep sofa in room 672 of the Savoy Hotel in a

ski suit.

_3. STARS AND STRIPES_

_London,

February, 1941_

A lot of mighty fine sacrificing is being done in the bomb shelters of

London.

I don’t care where you go, whether to one of the vast corral-like

shelters or to a small neat one in the West End, there is somebody

there who is giving his time and his strength and his heart for his

fellow humans.

Take one big basement shelter in the East End which holds around three

thousand people. There in that vast hotel of sorts is a tiny, dwarfed

man named Mickey Davis. He comes only to my waist. You have to lean

over when you talk to him.

He has not been out of that shelter since last September except for an

occasional walk. He works day and night. And he doesn’t get a cent for

it. People idolize him.

“There’s something queer about living underground,” he told me. “You

stay down here so long you don’t even want to go outside. Then when you

do go out and get accustomed to the fresh air again you don’t want to

come back down.”

There are thousands and thousands of “Davises” serving these harassed

people of London.

I have a friend who works as an accountant all day and then serves most

of the night as a shelter marshal, without pay. I’ve seen girls who

clerk all day in a ten-cent store and then go to an East End shelter

to serve thousands of people over the canteen counter till ten o’clock

at night. And they are up at five in the morning to serve early tea

and coffee. They do that every night, and they get no pay for it. In

the West End I saw women of comfortable means who go every night to

sit on stools and make sandwiches by the thousands to be sold to the

shelterers at cost.

Britain’s civil army has its big blitz heroes who are the greatest this

war has produced. But it also has its little heroes by the tens of

thousands. I think it’s lots harder to be a little hero, because you

have to keep so everlastingly at it.

Back in September, shelter management was in a state of chaos. They

were just learning then. So great were the crowds that women would

fold up their bedding and go out the front door of a shelter at eight

o’clock in the morning, and then turn right around and stand there all

day in line, waiting to get back through the same door at four that

afternoon.

But now the population of each shelter is pretty well settled down into

permanent residence. Also, each section or bay of a shelter is somewhat

self-governing. A deputy marshal, chosen by the people, knows everybody

in his particular bay, and where they sleep, so they no longer have to

wait in line. The marshal reserves space for them.

All these deputy marshals are volunteers, serving without pay. Chief

marshals get about $13 a week, and how they work for it!

It was amazing and touching the way the Christmas spirit was kept up

during the holidays. People banded together and got up Christmas trees,

and chipped in to buy gifts all around. I visited more than thirty

shelters during the holidays, and there was not a one that was not

elaborately decorated.

In all the shelters used by Greeks, the people have fixed up composite

pictures of King George of England and King George of Greece alongside

each other. Every shelter has a flag and at least one big picture of

the King and the usual “God Save Our Home” mottoes. And that brings

me back to a little incident up at the vast and conglomerate Double-X

shelter, which has a heavily Jewish population.

The shelter marshal there asked me if I knew where he could get an

American flag.

“It’s funny your coming here tonight,” he said, “for I just had that

request this morning. Most of the people here have relatives in the

States. They want an American flag. They say England and America are

the only two countries left in the world.”

Well, I’m not much on flags, but I figured it was up to me. So I went

down to Selfridge’s, bought the last American flag they had and took it

out to Double-X.

The next day the shelter marshal called up, practically agog with

gratitude, and said the people had made a great fuss over it. He said

the women had started already making copies of it to hang all over the

place. He said he had put twenty-four Greeks from a torpedoed merchant

ship in that bay the night before, and they cheered when they saw the

flag.

So I guess Ernest has done his good deed for 1941. The flag cost $2.50

too. I’m all torn now over whether I should be a hero and pay for it

myself, or be a heel and put it on my expense account. I guess maybe

I’ll wait until I can be a more expensive heel.

* * * * *

I want to tell you about two remarkable shelters in London. Both of

them come under the head of private group shelters. They are not open

to the public.

The first one I saw, I was taken into privately and half

surreptitiously, for few people even know that it exists. It must be

one of the safest shelters in all London. It is in the basement of an

apartment building, in a business section, and there is a bank on the

ground floor. The shelter is the basement vault of the bank.

They’ve spent more than $10,000 fixing it up. Not a cent of this went

for fancy trimmings, for the shelter isn’t fancy at all. Every penny

went for the physical strengthening of this vault.

There are five stories of strong building above the vault, and the

ceiling of the vault itself is five feet of concrete. The vault

consists of two rooms. In the smaller one, concrete has been added to

make the ceiling eight feet thick. The walls are more than three feet

thick. The doors are of heavy steel. On two sides of the vault are

hallways, and beyond these another thick wall. Surrounding all four

walls is old Mother Earth.

An elaborate arrangement of huge cogwheels manipulates a heavy steel

trapdoor in the ceiling. This is an emergency escape door. Above this

door, which leads to the ground floor, is the heaviest table I ever

saw. Its legs are oaken posts a foot thick, and it has a heavy steel

top to keep debris from choking down on top of the door.

The steel doors of the vault close on rubber strips, which make it

gas-proof. If the lights are knocked out there is an auxiliary lighting

plant, run from batteries. The ordinary escape doors out in the hall

have been shored up with lengths of railroad iron to support debris.

* * * * *

At the door of the Savoy Hotel’s shelter a man in a tuxedo sits at a

desk. He checks in those residents of the hotel who wish to sleep in

the shelter.

Inside, the shelter is softly lighted and quiet as a grave. It is

air-conditioned. Great heavy satin draperies hang at the doorways, and

other draperies divide the shelter into bays holding about twenty beds

each. There is a wide aisle down the center, and the curtains make it

all resemble a gigantic Pullman car made up for the night.

The beds are soft and deep. They have mattresses of the same type as

are found in the regular hotel rooms. The linen is fresh.

There is a separate lounge in one corner where you can sit in deep

chairs at tables and drink coffee. Just one floor up is a small bar.

The whole shelter is shored up with an intricate framework of heavy

steel piping to brace the ceiling against the weight of bomb debris. At

the entrance are three separate doors, one after the other, and each

has a gas-proof curtain that can be lowered.

The shelter has its own maids and porters. It also has a full Red Cross

unit, manned by seven part-time nurses. During the early September

raids they treated many bomb casualties brought in off the streets.

The Savoy shelter can sleep more than two hundred people. Many of the

hotel’s guests sleep there every night, whether there’s a raid or not.

Single men and single women are assigned separate bays, and there are

bays for married couples. And carrying shelter etiquette to the nth

degree, they even have a separate compartment for chronic snorers. They

just herd ’em all together and let ’em snore it out. In fact, when the

blitz first started, and before they hit on the idea of segregating the

noisy ones, the hotel had one man on its night staff whose sole duty

was to go around and shake up snorers!

_4. LOOKING AHEAD_

_London,

February, 1941_

As a whole, life in London’s public air-raid shelters reminds me of

nothing so much as our own makeshift depression camps at home.

They sprang up suddenly out of a desperate need and amid considerable

chaos. Like our camps, they are gradually getting better. As in our

Okie camps, the people have set up a form of self-government. They

elect their own leaders, and they have committees and representatives

who sit on higher councils for making shelter rules and demanding

better conditions--and God knows there is plenty of room for better

conditions in some of the shelters.

The body heat of thousands of packed people makes some shelters

stifling. In others, deep beneath stone arches and with concrete

floors, the chill dampness is deadly. At one church in Stepney, people

were actually sleeping until recently in stone coffins that once held

corpses.

It wasn’t until my second week of visiting shelters, when I was taken

purposely to certain places, that I saw what a modernized shelter can

begin to look like.

Let us take the Borough of Stepney as an example of what they are

trying to do. This borough of a quarter of a million people has 300

shelters. They are not at regular intervals, but they are never many

blocks apart. Most of them are not marked. At night you have to know

ahead of time which door to go in. It is possible to walk along a dark

sidewalk at night right past a door behind which there are lights and

three thousand people and not realize that there is a soul within miles.

All these basements are leased by the borough. When the blitz started

they weren’t ready, and ever since they’ve been working on these

basements right in the midst of all the people, trying to make them

more habitable. But now Stepney has a program. More basements are

constantly being rented and converted into shelters. When the program

is finished, if it ever is finished, they hope to have 500 shelters.

Both for safety from bombs and for reasons of health, they want to

disperse--to get the shelters thinned out. Under the new program they

pick a strong basement, then work on it for weeks until it is fully

ready before letting anybody in. At first it is shored up with a maze

of brick walls, which also divide the basement into rooms housing

twenty or thirty people each. Then wooden bunks are installed in rows.

The ceilings are sealed with concrete so water can’t seep through.

The floors are concreted, if they were not already. A first-aid

room is installed, with medical supplies. Banks of modern private

toilets are built. Some shelters will even have shower baths, for

the disinclination of poor people to bathe is worrying the doctors.

Canteens are installed so the shelterers can get something warm at a

reasonable price. Last, and best of all, a system of forced ventilation

is put in. It is really air-conditioning--it can blow in either hot or

cold air, and suck out dead air.

That is what Stepney is aiming at. And other boroughs are doing the

same. When all this program is finished, London’s shelters will be

quite habitable underground dormitories. But right now too many of them

are little better than underground Hoovervilles.

The churches have really done a great work in this shelter emergency.

Many thousands of people are spending their nights in the lower depths

of strongly built churches. In fact, of all the public shelters I

have seen I like best the one in the basement of the Church of St.

Martin’s-in-the-Fields, in Trafalgar Square.

This old church is known to all American tourists who have been in

London. Until a year and a half ago its extensive crypts were filled

with the bones of the ancient dead. But the rector had these taken out

and buried elsewhere about eighteen months ago, preparatory to using

these rooms for social activities. They got the job finished just

in time for the war. The newly emptied crypts made perfect air-raid

shelters. And that is what they are today.

The crypts are filled with double-decked bunks. Central heating has

just been installed. Also banks of private toilets. Everything is

clean. There is a separate crypt for mothers with small babies. There

is an all-night restaurant for people in uniform. There is a canteen

for civilians.

You don’t have to listen to a mission sermon, either. There are

billiard and pingpong tables in the big central hall. It is more like a

clubhouse than a church.

St. Martin’s can sleep 500 people. Although it is in the rich West End,

anybody can come. And anybody does--well-dressed men of the world, old

Jewish mothers, soldiers, girls, and a great run of just average people

like you and me.

You warm to St. Martin’s as you do to a new acquaintance whom you like

immensely. There is character here.

When you see a church with a bomb hole in its side and 500 fairly safe

and happy people in its basement, and girls smoking cigarettes inside

the sacred walls without anybody yelling at them, then I say that

church has found a real religion.

Before I started over here I had a horror of being caught in some

big wartime epidemic this winter. Well, it hasn’t happened. So far,

England’s wartime health apparently is excellent. How or why, I don’t

know; for it seems to me that with a fourth of London’s population

crammed into holes beneath the earth’s surface an epidemic would be a

setup.

It’s true that the city has been full of colds this winter. Many people

who use the air-raid shelters suffer from something called “shelter

throat.” There is always much coughing--heavy coughing. I’ve had my

cold, along with the rest. It kept me in bed for nearly a week, and I

didn’t feel so good. But I wasn’t half as sick that week as I was the

day I got my doctor’s bill--$38.

Scarlet fever and diphtheria have actually shown a decline this winter.

Pneumonia is up just a little. There has been no outbreak of real

influenza. Typhoid has caused no worries. The only disease that has

really gone up is cerebrospinal meningitis, known as spotted fever.

This has jumped from 1500 cases in 1939 to 12,500 cases in 1940.

Right now London is in the midst of its most critical two winter

months, and the doctors are keeping their fingers crossed, knocking

on wood and throwing salt in seven directions. If they can go another

month they’ll be over the winter hump, and if they do get through

without an epidemic I think they should salaam three times to

Allah--and then start on preparations for next winter.

Those shelters have got to be improved faster than they are being

improved now, regardless of cost. An epidemic in London might give

Hitler the opening he’s waiting for. These people simply can’t go

on living through winters this way without grave trouble. It seems

to me that before another winter every big shelter must have a

system of forced ventilation, sanitary toilets, adequate heating and

warmer floors. They must be made dry. They must have better medical

departments.

They did the best they could this winter. The biggest shelters have

nurses. There are some doctors on duty. But most of the smaller ones

have nothing of this sort. I visited one where the people themselves

had chipped in to buy a medical kit; and the shelter marshal, who knew

nothing at all about medicine, was acting as doctor and nurse. In

another, the medical box was padlocked, and whoever had the key hadn’t

been around for days.

I remember reading a report by British doctors early last fall, saying

that the lice and flea population of London was increasing alarmingly.

I’ve asked about this at several of the poorest shelters, and so far as

I can tell this increase has been halted. The smell of disinfectants is

strong in all the big shelters, for they are cleaned and sprayed every

morning. But, to my mind, they still aren’t clean enough.

The first-aid rooms in the larger shelters are really miniature

hospitals, staffed by Red Cross nurses and doctors who volunteer their

services nightly. At the Double-X shelter I looked over their records

for the last two months. About a fourth of the cases they had treated

were of people suffering from boils. This seemed odd, so I asked about

it, and one of the nurses said it was the result of the poor people’s

diet. Blood, toil, tears, sweat--and boils.

Shelter life in London, even at its best, is no bargain. I had thought

I might find it exciting, or even romantic in spots, but I didn’t. It

seems to me there is something degrading to the human spirit in lying

all night, crowded among other people, on a basement floor, within

arm’s reach of open toilets, in bad air and under constant supervision

even on nights when no raid is in progress. I fear eventually it will

do the same thing to weaken characters that being in prison does.

There are millions of people in London who prefer to take their chances

in their homes, or somewhere else above ground. And I believe I am one

of them.

_VII. EXPEDITION TO THE NORTH_

_1. FEAR, WITH LAUGHTER_

_York,

February, 1941_

Yesterday I received notice that if I didn’t get a move on I was to be

expelled in disgrace from the Guild of Perpetual Travelers. So after

six weeks of gathering moss in London, I packed my old sugar sack,

shouldered my tin hat and gas mask, and hopped a northbound train to

see how the war was getting on in the hinterland.

I took a 4 P.M. train out of London on the 160-mile ride to York. I got

to the station half an hour early, and a good thing too, for within a

minute after the train backed into the station there was hardly a seat

left.