_X. BOMBS DO THE DAMNEDEST THINGS_
_1. “SHUT UP, THEY’LL HEAR YOU!”_
_London,
March, 1941_
I suppose every person in England who has had a bomb within a block
of him has his own freak bomb story to tell. Bombs seem to do the
damnedest things. Every raid brings a flock of incidents as miraculous
as the old one about the tornado blowing a straw through a tree.
Most of the unusual bomb stories have to do with escapes. Air Raid
Precautions men say there are more freakish escapes than freakish
deaths. For example, one bomb on a recent night came right through
the roof of a building and smack into a pub full of men sitting there
drinking beer. It blew the place all to pieces, killed some people in a
house across the street--and hurt no one in the pub.
In another case, a bomb glanced off a roof and landed in the open. It
apparently had a delayed fuse. Two policemen went up to inspect it, and
it went off. No trace ever was found of one policeman, but the other
one--well, the blast blew his tin hat onto the roof of a five-story
building, and blew all the buttons off his coat, but he wasn’t hurt.
In Stepney a policeman was doing roof-spotting duty on top of a
seven-story building. A bomb hit the building and blew the policeman
off the roof. He fell seven stories, and landed on concrete. He went
to work as usual the next day.
* * * * *
In my room I have a circular lead nosepiece from a German bomb. It
is about half as big as a saucer, and must weigh two pounds. It came
screaming into the apartment of a friend of mine one night, and this
friend gave it to me. It arrived in his place through a window, flying
horizontally and spinning furiously. It hit a wall, and it was spinning
so fast it circled three walls of the room, just like a hippodrome
motorcycle racer who rides against the vertical wall of a bowl. But the
astounding thing is that in its mad rush this heavy disk raced right
across the glass doors of a built-in china closet in one corner and
never even cracked the glass.
One surprising thing about bomb explosions is that the suction toward
the explosion is almost as great as the blast away from it. That’s
because the explosion creates a vacuum, and then as air rushes back
into the vacuum it does so with just about the same hideous force with
which it rushed away. Because of that you’ll see wreckage from the same
bomb hurled in opposite directions. Say a bomb lands in a street. On
one side it may blow a house inward, but on the other side the whole
front of a house may be sucked out. I know one case where the suction
of a bomb pulled a rug off the floor right from underneath two tables
and a piano, and left them standing just as they were.
And then there is the story--my man says he saw it--of a skilletful of
frying fish being blown off a stove in one house and landing upright on
a stove in a house four doors away. My man does go so far as to admit
that the skillet lost its contents on the way.
I believe all those stories. It would be hard to tell me a bomb story
I wouldn’t believe. But here’s one even I must take with a grain of
salt:
A gentle lady of culture and means was sitting in front of a fireplace
on the ground floor of her home one evening. Her housemaid, having
finished her work, was sitting in her little attic bedroom on the
fourth floor. A bomb came through the roof, plunged through four
successive stories, and exploded in the basement. When it was all over
the gentle lady was sitting in her maid’s attic rocking-chair and the
maid was sitting downstairs in front of the fireplace.
Both were unhurt, of course. And both quite unruffled, you may be sure.
Maybe lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but bombs do.
I could show you a narrow brick-row house in London that has been hit
five times, yet not another house in the block has been touched. Also,
I know cases where a bomb has fallen through the darkness for four
miles and landed in the center of a crater blown by a previous bomb.
There is an odd belief in London that corner buildings attract bombs.
It doesn’t seem reasonable, yet I have seen scores of corner places
blown down, with everything else all around them untouched. At Coventry
I saw one street corner where four separate bombs had taken out the
four corner houses.
On the other hand, just two blocks from my hotel there is a small
crater in the middle of a street intersection, where a traffic cop
would normally be standing, and none of the corner buildings has been
touched.
Those who hold with the corner theory think air currents, caused by the
funneling of air through the streets, force a bomb to deviate just a
little at the last second. I can’t see it.
A Fleet Street friend of mine went out one night and got himself tight.
He managed to drive his car home through the blackout, but the entrance
of his garage was narrow and, being three and a half sheets in the
wind, he decided just to leave the car out in the street. During the
night his garage was demolished.
I have been told of a woman in a suburb who thought she heard a knock
at the door. As she opened it a small bomb came sailing through,
kerplunk onto the living-room floor. The lady gave a yell and dashed
out the door. About three seconds later she saw her house fly into a
million pieces.
One of my best friends here is an American who has a horror of crossing
a street during the blackout. He has lived here several years and knows
hundreds of people. Two close friends of his were killed by autos in
the blackout, yet he has never known anyone, even casually, who was
killed by a bomb.
Friends are always telling me about shrapnel falling around them. I
have been out in the streets a lot at night but I’ve heard only one
piece of shrapnel fall.
I do know, however, that if you’re out when the guns are firing
pretty heavily you find yourself edging over toward the inside of the
sidewalk, against the building walls. No matter how hard you pull
yourself out toward the curb, you discover you’re still walking along
close to the buildings.
I have a friend who was driving into town one night when a piece of
shrapnel hit the street, just missing the car. But it bounced so hard
it came back up through his fender from underneath and left a big hole.
Another funny thing about raids--when you hear planes overhead you have
a feeling that you must be very quiet or the German pilots will hear
you. If I’m in my room I unconsciously stop typing for fear of making
a noise and attracting the bomber’s attention. Often, while planes are
overhead, you can hear people down in the street in the dark yelling
for taxis at the top of their lungs. I always feel like opening a
window and yelling, “Shut up, you fools, they’ll hear you!”
* * * * *
Some people seem to attract exciting incidents as though they were
magnets. George Lait hadn’t been here a week till he had been blown off
the seat of a car, had put out incendiaries that came through his roof,
and had seen shrapnel smack the sidewalk within three feet of him.
But me--the nearest I have been to drama was one night when we
had seven incendiaries on the roof of our hotel and a bomb around
the corner, and that happened to be the night I was visiting an
antiaircraft gun station miles away! It’s probably just as well. Maybe
I wasn’t cut out to be a hero anyhow.
_2. GERMANS, ARISE AND FLEE_
_London,
March, 1941_
Tex Bradford walked into my room at seven-thirty in the evening and
said he had only a few minutes. He took off his coat and threw it on
the bed, and asked if he could wash up. He left at two-thirty the next
morning and hadn’t washed up yet.
Tex is one of the many Americans over here serving with the Canadian
Army. He’s a good old boy from down in Texas. He looks like Texas, too,
and it’s a shame he can’t wear a ten-gallon hat with his uniform.
He doesn’t smoke or drink, but how he can cuss! He says alcohol
doesn’t mix with nitroglycerin, and using nitroglycerin is his
normal business. For by vocation and hobby Tex is an oil-well fire
fighter. He says there are only three men in America doing his kind of
fire-fighting. And he says he’s the best-looking one of the three.
Tex loves fires more than anything on earth. He almost goes crazy
thinking of all the wonderful fires here in London, and him way down in
southern England drilling recruits. But Britain is beginning to wake
up to Tex. He has a technical education and a lifetime of experience
that are wasted on the drill ground. So now he is frequently called to
London to make speeches and confer with fire fighters.
When he’s in the city he pays his own hotel expenses. He makes about
thirty appointments a day. When he leaves a message for anybody he
signs it with a rubber stamp that he carries in his pocket. He already
knows every important name in the city. He goes around in the rough
battle dress of a Canadian sergeant, but admirals and generals don’t
faze him. In fact, I’m sure he must faze them.
You ought to hear Tex talk. He says more words in one hour than any
human being I’ve ever met. He talks all over the place. He hadn’t been
in my room five minutes before he was running back and forth like a
madman, pulling a theoretical fire hose up to a theoretical blaze.
When a friend of mine walked in Tex was down on his knees loading my
wastebasket with theoretical nitroglycerin to put out a big crater fire
in Texas.
He carries with him constantly an immense black briefcase that weighs
fifty pounds. He calls it Bradford University. It is a traveling
encyclopedia. No matter what subject or name you mention, Tex will dig
in there and find some reference to it. He is inseparable from this
briefcase. He works with it the way a ventriloquist works with his
dummy. Before you know it the floor is covered with his papers and
letters. He reassembles them and puts them back in the briefcase, then
litters the floor with them again a dozen times during the evening.
Tex closed his big oil-field fire-fighting business in Corpus Christi
last summer, stored all his equipment, sent his family to California,
went to Canada and joined up. He did it because he was in Germany after
the last war and he says Germans are not the people he wants to run the
world. Also, he has an itchy foot.
Mrs. Bradford knew the minute war was declared that Tex would get in it
sooner or later. So she was resigned to it.
They have three sons--one working in Death Valley, one in college and
one in high school.
Tex was born in Australia, of Texas parents. I asked him if that made
him American or Australian, and he said: “If your cat went next door
to an oyster shop and gave birth to a litter, would they be oysters or
kittens?” At any rate Tex is a Texan.
He fought with Pancho Villa in Mexico. He has been on the Panama
police force. He was a friend of Jack London in California. He
battled Hoover’s soldiers the time they burned the Bonus Army out of
Washington, even though he wasn’t in the bonus march and didn’t believe
in it. He has never collected his own World War bonus.
He is a fanatical admirer of President Roosevelt, and donated three
months of his time in 1936 to help reelect him. He has been an
engineer superintendent at a CCC camp in Shiloh Park, Tennessee. He
has followed oil fields on every continent on the globe. He has gone
to military school and six or eight universities and taken dozens of
correspondence courses, and he wishes he could live 300 years so he
could do all the things he wants to.
Tex is rough-fibered and tough-minded, yet he is informed on every
subject under the sun. He uses unusual words and uses them easily and
correctly. His mind seethes and foams. He can’t tell a single thing
without telling twenty other things along with it. He gets continents
and decades away from the subject, but he always remembers to get back
to it. He just has so much to tell he tries to tell everything at once.
Tex is busier than two dozen bird dogs. He is just fighting this
war to a standstill. He wrote more than 700 letters to senators and
congressmen urging them to hurry with help for Britain. He carries a
hundred indexed file cards of the names of people he must see in London.
He is a friend of Major George Fielding Eliot, of Pat Hurley, of
Congressman Dick Kleberg, of Frederick Delano, of Dale Carnegie. He
admires Lowell Thomas. He loves to make public speeches.
Tex weighs 190, and has a chest like an ox. He lets you hit him with
all your might right in the stomach, and it is like hitting a stone
wall. He marches fourteen miles a day carrying a seventy-pound pack and
comes home ahead of the column, doing a jig. Officers tell me Tex is
one of the greatest inspirations the Canadian Army has. He is tough and
he is smart. And he is burning for a fight.
Yet Tex is as bald as an owl, he is slightly deaf, he wears glasses to
read with, and he is a grandfather.
Germans, arise and flee from this transplanted scourge of the plains!
Maybe you would like to hear something about the other Americans in
England.
Well, there are approximately 4000 of them. If you would tell that to
any individual American who lives here he would be amazed, because the
most gregarious one probably doesn’t know more than a hundred. Outside
of newspapermen, I haven’t met a dozen Americans altogether. But 4000
is the Embassy’s figure.
They fall into three groups: Those in business or holding jobs. Those
of dual nationality who married Englishmen. Those who came here to
retire.
Some 1600 of those 4000 want to go home, and have notified the Embassy
to that effect. But there is no way for them to get there unless they
fly to Lisbon, and you have to have pull to get a seat on the plane to
Lisbon. Unless the United States sends another ship to Ireland, these
people are here for the duration. Most Americans think it is ridiculous
that our government refuses to let them travel home on British ships,
because of the danger, yet forces them to stay here amid constant
danger.
Of these 4000 Americans, not more than 200 take an active part in
American doings. The rest just go their own ways. They are scattered
all over England. The retired people mostly live in the country, out of
harm’s way. So far as I can learn, only one American has been killed by
a bomb in England, and only a few have been hurt. The number of those
who have been scared green is not available at the moment.
Americans over here have been very active in donating money to British
relief. Furthermore, some sixty American businessmen have formed a
mobile division to help fight the invasion if it comes. They furnish
their own cars, which have been camouflaged and equipped with machine
guns, rifles and “Molotov cocktails.” They drill, and wear British
uniforms, but they will see action only if the invasion comes as far
as London. I understand they would like to enlarge the unit but can’t
find any more interested Americans.
There are many Americans (not counted in those 4000) serving here with
Canadian troops, but they are hard to count because most of them claim
to be Canadians. Many of them are like the fellow who was asked the
other day where he came from and said “Vancouver, Saskatchewan”--which
was like saying Seattle, Nebraska.
The busiest American over here, I think, is a fellow named Gilbert
Carr. Back home in 1920 he would have been a typical Babbitt. He
belongs to every lodge and society you’ve ever heard of. He has lived
in England twelve years, and represents the Sunmaid Raisin Company.
Through an arrangement with the government, Mr. Carr is allowed to keep
his staff of thirty-five people at work by handling dried fruits from
Greece, Smyrna and Australia. He used to handle 15,000 tons of American
raisins a year, but now he handles only about half that amount, and
they are not American raisins.
Mr. Carr knows all about bombs. Acting on the theme of dispersal, he
packed up most of his clothes and took them to his warehouse, just in
case his house should get hit. That night a bomb went clear through the
warehouse, blew it apart, set it afire and burned it to the ground. Mr.
Carr lost all his raisins, his records and his pants.
The next night a bomb exploded outside his office window and shattered
the place, but nobody was in the office at the time. They cleared up
the glass and went back to work. At his house, in Croydon, a bomb fell
in the back yard next door and broke all his windows, cracked the walls
and blew the doors off the garage. He had a man come the next morning
to put the doors back on. That night they were blown off again.
Mr. Carr still lives in the house, with the windows boarded up. He gets
home about eight at night, and works on his papers till he goes to
sleep, stretched out between two chairs. He is downtown at eight in the
morning.
He spends two hours a day on the raisin business. The rest of the day
he is working for Britain. He is a director of the American Ambulance,
secretary of the American Committee for Air-Raid Relief, and a director
of the recently opened Eagle Club for Americans serving with the
British forces. He is also a governor of the American Club, a director
of the American Chamber of Commerce, adjutant of the American Legion
post, and just now he is acting head of the Allied Relief Fund in this
country.
He has desks all over town, and shoots around from here to there. He is
the guy who is always called on to do things. He has a big heart and a
good physique. He’s not afraid of bombs, but he says he gets bored with
them.
So do I. Bored limp sometimes.
_3. A VISIT WITH LOW_
_London,
March, 1941_
It would be hard to say, I suppose, who is the greatest cartoonist in
the world today. But a good many people think it is David Low, and I
wouldn’t be a bit surprised myself if he were.
Low draws for Lord Beaverbrook’s London _Evening Standard_. He draws,
at the most, three cartoons a week. Occasionally he gets a dry spell,
calls up the office and says he’s tired, and drops down to one a week.
When he does this, he finds it just as hard to produce one cartoon a
week as three. And yet I think this respite from the daily grind must
have some bearing on Low’s greatness. As he says, nobody in the world
can produce a good cartoon every day.
I went to see Low with fear and trembling, since great names affect me
that way. But I needn’t have. He is pleasant and companionable, and you
feel at ease with him.
His cartoons are the most powerful, often the most scalding, that I
have ever seen. Low’s own philosophy is toward the socialistic, and he
is pugnacious and caustic in his thinking. Yet as he sits in front of
his fireplace puffing at his pipe, his voice is soft and his manner
gentle. He reminds you of a very young “Foxy Grandpa.”
Low is fifty. He is neither big nor small. His hair is nearly gone on
top. His eyebrows are black and extremely wide. He has a grand little
smile.
For many years he put himself in his cartoons now and then, in just
a few quick lines down in the corner. It was mostly eyebrows. You
wouldn’t think it could be anybody. Yet when you see Low, he looks
exactly as in those cartoons.
He wore a beard until a few months ago. He finally shaved it off
because it made him a marked man. Everybody recognized him, and he
couldn’t get any peace. He is no recluse, however. He loves to walk,
and is out a good deal. He has many friends and goes out often to
dinners and entertainments.
Low speaks with the confidence of one who knows he is a master in
his field, yet he speaks with the quiet of a professor, and not as a
braggart. And he has a nice sense of self-ridicule too, for he says:
“A cartoonist has it over newspapermen who write, because if somebody
doesn’t like your cartoon you can always say, ‘Well, you just don’t
understand it.’”
Low is a New Zealander. He has always been a cartoonist. He came to
England twenty-two years ago, via the United States, and has never been
back to New Zealand. He has a sentimental feeling about his homeland,
and fears that a return to the old scenes and old friends after all
these years would be disillusioning.
He says he has never felt thoroughly settled in London. He feels that
an Australian or New Zealander is more at home in America than in
England. His last visit to America was in October, 1936. He saw Jack
Dempsey and Father Divine and President Roosevelt.
The Lows subscribe to many American magazines, including _Life_ and
the _New Yorker_. Mrs. Low scans the new fashions in the ads. “We
can’t buy anything,” she says, “so the next best thing is to look at
the pictures.” The only thing they don’t like about American magazines
these days is that so many of the cartoons are on the war, and they see
enough war cartoons at home.
Low drew for _Collier’s_ a while last year, but had to work so many
weeks ahead that he felt his cartoons lost their punch, so it was
dropped.
He has two daughters--Prudence and Rachel--in their late teens.
Both are political-minded. In fact, the whole Low family is a very
important part of Low’s greatness. The family breakfast is literally
a conference. The four of them thresh over the world news for cartoon
ideas. As Low says, “We digest it, argue it, analyze it, sing it, act
it out, and balance it on our noses.”
Out of this intellectual jamboree usually comes a cartoon idea. But not
always. For like all great men, Low finds his head nothing but clay
sometimes. The day of my visit was an example.
“I got up this morning a complete blank,” he told me. “Here historical
events by the hundred were just crashing about us, and I couldn’t get a
thing. Didn’t have anything by lunchtime either. Finally at two o’clock
I got an idea.
“You can always work when you have to. I started at two, and the
cartoon was finished by four. But I’m not going to look at Monday’s
paper.”
Low works at home, and the paper sends a messenger out for his cartoon.
He has had a tough winter. Because of air raids, the _Standard’s_
engravers wouldn’t work after dark. So he had to have his cartoon in
their hands by shortly after lunch. “That meant getting up at seven,
two hours before daylight, and trying to be funny,” Low says. “You
ought to try that sometime.”
People say David Low is the highest-paid cartoonist in the world. He
also makes money from books and radio. Yet his tastes are simple. He
says, “I actually prefer a nine-penny seat in the cinema, and I really
like cheap cigars better than expensive ones. Just happened to be born
that way.”
But the Low house in North London is charming and comfortable. It has
deep furniture, floor lamps, a cozy log fire and books on each side of
the mantel. A nice girl in brown maid’s dress lets you in and serves
tea. It is more like an American home than an English one.
The house is a $1.10 taxi ride from the Strand. Low himself rides the
subways. I did too coming back into town, and had to change three
times. At one place when I asked directions of a woman subway guard she
said, “Change at Leicester Square, dearie, they’ll put you right.”
The Low house is a rambling two-story brick one, with a big green
garden behind. There have been a good many bombs near by. Low’s mother
and aunt, who lived a few blocks away, had their house blown up a few
days after they had felt a premonition and moved out of it. Despite his
eminent position, Low serves his regular turn as firebomb watcher in
his block every Monday night. He has put out many incendiaries.
Low had always worked in a studio some fifteen minutes’ walk from his
house. The studio had no telephone, no messages were delivered, and he
received no callers. But he now works at home, because of the bombs. He
has an elaborate backyard shelter, with an expensive pumping system to
keep it dry. But he was never satisfied with it, so he finally shored
up one room of his house with heavy steel beams and brick. The whole
family sleeps in this room when the raids are bad. The house also is
full of buckets of sand, buckets of water, and stirrup pumps.
Low seldom goes to the _Standard_ office. His drawing paraphernalia is
spread on a long table at one end of his den. He works at an elbow-high
drawing table, and draws standing up. On the average, it takes him
about six hours to do his cartoon.
He is his own man. His position in British journalism is unique.
Beaverbrook gives him a free hand. He does not have to follow policy.
It’s not unusual for Beaverbrook to see himself cruelly lampooned by
his own cartoonist in his own paper.
Low is very busy and gets busier every day. He says he can’t stand
having any kind of challenge made to him without taking it up. For
instance, he always hated to write, and never felt he could write. But
some years ago a publisher asked him to write a book. He couldn’t bear
to have the publisher think he wasn’t capable of it. So he wrote one.
Now he has four going all at once.
It was the same way about public speaking. He can now make a public
address without getting sick at his stomach. In fact, he broadcasts
to America every two weeks, and gets a great satisfaction from it. He
feels that you can convey a hundred per cent more with your voice than
you can through the printed page.
Low is crazy about the movies. Good or bad, he still likes them. He is
also a great fellow to try games. He has played practically every game
ever invented, from golf to pinochle. But his interest in such things
quickly ebbs. Many of his games he has played only once. He used to sit
by the hour playing the player-piano in his living room, but now it’s
never touched.
I am no autograph collector, yet I couldn’t bear to return to America
without one of Low’s cartoons. So I asked the _Evening Standard_ for
one of his originals.
The one they gave me would make you dance with gratitude. I don’t
know why I was so honored. To begin with, it is a gruesomely powerful
war cartoon. A few weeks ago the _Standard_ had it on exhibition in a
front window. A bomb fell in the street outside, and blew a jagged hole
right through the center of this Low masterpiece. How is that for a
double-barreled war souvenir?
I took the cartoon with me out to Low’s house. He had not known about
the bomb incident. When he saw the hole, it was as though I had
handed him the Pulitzer Prize. You never saw anybody so delighted. He
thumbtacked the cartoon onto his drawing-board, and inscribed it to me.
Then he started walking around the room, thinking and chuckling. To
Mrs. Low he said, “I want to put something funny on it. Come on, help
me be funny.”
But before Mrs. Low could be funny he said, “I’ve got it,” and went to
the drawing-board and started writing. And this is what he wrote, in
the white space right next to the jagged hole:
“Dear Hitler--Thanks for the criticism. Yours, Low.”
And he beamed like a child as he rolled it up and handed it to me.
_4. READY FOR HITLER_
_Dover,
March, 1941_
All day long I rode around southeastern England, skirting the coast
from the mouth of the Thames to Dover. And somehow I got an impression
that Germans wouldn’t be welcome in these parts.
I never hope to see again in my lifetime so much barbed wire and so
many highway obstructions and roadside blockhouses as I saw in this one
day.
Right at the moment the military arm is sick of visitors, so I couldn’t
get a pass to see all the heavy stuff and the hidden stuff and the
trick stuff that Britain has evolved to foil the encroaching villain.
But just driving around, almost like a tourist, you are constantly
in such a maze of soldiers, camouflaged trucks, half-hidden guns,
trenches, pillboxes, lookout towers, blocked roads and endlessly
stretching barbed wire that when you finally leave it you begin to feel
lonesome and unsafe.
The censorship doesn’t permit a description of camouflage, but I saw
camouflaged things that would make you split with laughing if it
weren’t so deadly serious.
Many farmhouses stand empty, for they will be in the line of battle if
battle comes. Sheep graze in the fields while soldiers occupy the sheep
sheds. A farmer’s simple thatched home may be a general’s headquarters.
Every roadside wood doesn’t cover a gun, but you don’t know which one
does and which one doesn’t.
The public is barred from this whole area covering the Channel coast
and extending for many miles inland. Those who live in the area can
move about freely, but nobody can come in from outside without a
special pass.
Each town along the coast is so heavily defended in front that it seems
to me impossible for the Germans to make a landing in force directly
by water. So the next assumption is that they would land men and tanks
and guns inland, by air, and then try to push back and capture a port
to establish a bridgehead for water-borne troops. Consequently the
cities are as well defended behind as in front. For miles, in a great
semicircle behind each city, the fortifications are complex. Roads
and fields and fence-rows are entangled and blocked. Behind them are
hundreds of gun posts in natural craters.
Everywhere in the whole area are soldiers. They stand guard at nearly
every side road, and at most of the side streets in the towns and
villages. You can see them running, drilling and practicing out in
the fields. You meet them in long lines marching down the road, in
full kit. Maybe they don’t look exactly like men from Mars, but they
certainly don’t resemble Englishmen.
Although the whole country is already solid with obstruction and
defense, men are still working constantly on more and more of the same.
If they put much more concrete down here I think the whole end of this
island will sink into the sea.
Surprisingly, the towns in this area don’t seem like ghost towns at
all. Only about a third of the people have been evacuated, and new
soldiers coming in more than make up for this decrease in population.
In Dover, Ramsgate and Deal the streets are filled with people. The
pubs and picture shows operate as usual. The shops are well stocked.
Nobody seems to be going around casting haunted looks over his shoulder.
It is next summer that the difference will be really apparent. For this
is the Atlantic City and Coney Island section of England, where half
a million Londoners come on a holiday to stroll and bathe and lounge.
They won’t come next summer. For one thing, most of the big hotels are
evacuated. For another, the great beaches and promenade decks up on the
cliffsides are now all tangled with barbed wire and concrete blocks.
And the sands where massed thousands used to lie and relax are now bare
and blocked off.
All this is reason enough for the crowds not coming next summer. But
the best reason is--the government won’t let anybody in. Not even the
Germans.
* * * * *
Dover, as you know, is the English city that is closest to France. It
is subject both to air raids and to shelling from German guns across
the Channel.
I suppose most of you picture Dover as a deserted city, a half-wrecked
ghost town. It isn’t at all. It is quite alive. Thousands of people are
living here and going on with their business. In fact, Dover is not as
badly damaged--not nearly so--as Coventry or Bristol. The waterfront
is pretty well battered, and most of the buildings there have been
evacuated. But the rest of the city carries right on.
The Grand Hotel, where all the American newspapermen stayed during the
great air-raiding days of September, 1940, has since had one whole end
bombed off. This end simply fell away from the rest of the hotel as
though a giant hand had cut it off with a knife. If you look way up
at the naked standing wall, which used to be an inside wall, you will
see one lone white washbowl still screwed to the wall. They say a
newspaperman went away hurriedly, leaving his razor lying on the bowl,
shortly before the hotel was hit. Presumably the razor is still there,
but there’s no way to get to it.
The Dover area gets a bunch of shells from the other side about once a
week. But even the ones that land right in town do little damage.
Even a newcomer like myself, after a few minutes of practice looking,
can go around town and say, “This was a bomb” or “This was a shell.” A
shell seems to knock down only just what it hits, instead of wrecking
everything all around the way the big bombs do. I saw buildings in
Dover that had received direct hits by shells yet had lost only a few
feet of brick and stone off one corner.
German planes cross the coast so frequently that cities in this area
have six or eight siren warnings a day. In fact, these coastal towns
have recently put in effect a dual warning system. The regular siren
goes when the planes are first caught by the sound detectors. Then, if
the planes come directly overhead, a local warning is sounded. This
may be a steam whistle or a compressed-air squawker different from the
regular siren.
There was a first warning in Ramsgate while we were there, in
midafternoon, and I noticed lots of people take to the shelters.
Ramsgate, incidentally, has a public shelter system that is unique.
It is a vast network of tunnels in the chalk rock, winding around
underneath the city at an average of sixty feet below the surface. The
total length of this network is three and a half miles, and it can be
entered from twenty-three different points.
In the event of a night-long blitz the entire population of Ramsgate
could crowd into these tunnels. They were started the year before the
war and took more than two years to build. In places the tunnel is so
big you could lay two railroad tracks side by side. In this part the
city has built little “apartments.” These cubicles are merely wooden
frameworks covered with black burlap. They are about six feet high and
have no roof, but they do give some privacy.
These apartments are permanent homes for 1700 Ramsgate people. They
live down there like prehistoric people in caves. Some of them have
been bombed out of their homes; others are people who are just afraid.
I’ll tell you something to show you how wide awake this coastal defense
area is. A friend from Tunbridge Wells drove me around. We drove all
day, and covered 150 miles. Of course we had the necessary passes to
enter the area, but we didn’t have any special route mapped out for
ourselves and had sent no word ahead.
In midafternoon we drove into Ramsgate, a good seventy-five miles from
London. We stopped at a busy corner and asked a traffic policeman the
way to the Lord Mayor’s office. The policeman was a nice-looking,
pleasant young fellow. He told us the way, then looked in the car and
said:
“Is this Mr. Pyle?”
My first impulse was to dismount from the car and bow to the passing
throng, on the assumption that my prowess as a literary gentleman was
now recognized in the uttermost corners of the earth. But logic stayed
this action. No such conclusion was permissible under the cold light of
fact.
The truth is simply that the police all over the area were being
notified from one city to the next who we were and what we were about.
In cases like this it is soothing to know that your past life is
an open book and your bib is clean. I’m glad now I never even stole
watermelons as a boy.
_5. GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT_
_London,
March, 1941_
The time has almost come for me to start home.
I came over here originally for only a month. Somehow that has
stretched on into a fourth month, almost without me being aware of
it. The truth is, I like it over here. But I don’t like any place as
well as America, and I guess it’s time I was getting out of England
anyway. I don’t yet say “rahther” nor “bloody,” but I do find myself
automatically looking in the right direction for traffic. Another month
and I would probably be standing for Parliament from Hants.
After three months in Great Britain I still have no fears about
Britain’s “sticking it.” Of course I would like to say that everybody
was made of steel, that nobody ever got scared or panicky, and that
every single soul was working himself to the bone for the war. But I
have run into people who were petrified by bombs. I have one friend who
loses several pounds during every bad raid. I have also been in some
badly blitzed places where spirits were getting pretty low and people
were wondering just how much more they could take. I have found a good
many stories of selfishness and of running away by people who could
afford to run away.
But none of these is expressive of the national character. What you
have read in the daily papers back home about Britain’s courage and
calmness as a nation is absolutely true. Maybe there is something that
would break them, but it hasn’t come yet.
Britain as a whole is of one mind. I have never heard any defeatist
or appeasement talk. Even on the Clyde-side and in Wales I heard very
little of “this is a capitalistic war” kind of talk.
It is my feeling that the people are ahead of the government in the
national will to win; that much of the government still waits to cast a
timid political eye at the tides of opinion and the shades of precedent
before acting; and that only a few are of the stripe of Churchill
and Beaverbrook, with the capacity for complimenting their people’s
intelligence by moving boldly.
On the whole I have worked up a feeling, from 2000 miles of travel
over Britain, that the war effort is not yet supreme. Thousands and
thousands of people want to do something to help but are given no
direction, no orders. The organization of the war effort seems to me
far from perfect. Talent and time and desire to serve are wasted.
As far as I could gather during my travels, the mass of the British
people aren’t thinking much about war aims. They haven’t any very
specific ideas of their own. They hope for a better world somehow, but
they are pretty vague about it. The chief thought right now is to get
the war finished, and then fix it so Germany can’t do this thing again
to the next generation.
* * * * *
The most important person in the British government, as far as I am
concerned, is a Welsh girl named Gwyn Barker who handles the wants
of American newspapermen at the Ministry of Information. She is
the most thorough, punctual and altogether satisfactory government
representative I’ve ever dealt with. Furthermore, she is personally
delightful. In Welsh her name is spelled “Gwynedd.”
It seems to me Americans are wasting their time worrying about what the
war will do to the characters of the children. They fall so quickly
into a familiarity with the ways of war that it becomes wholly natural
to them.
One afternoon in Bristol I called on the Rev. Mr. Murray, vicar of St.
Michael’s Church. The Murrays have a very robust young son named John,
nineteen months old, who paddles around the room and says a few words.
A few months ago when he heard a plane, John would go to the door,
point up and mumble “Airplane.” But now when he hears one he points up
and says, “Airplane--boom!”
London is “cleaner” than when I came here. Bomb wreckage, except
that of the previous two or three nights, is all pushed back of the
sidewalks. Many places have been entirely cleared away and now stand as
vacant lots. Every day the great rubble heap on the grass of Hyde Park
grows bigger. It now covers acres, and it is only one of many.
The open basement of what was Lewis’ great store is now almost clear. A
new sidewalk is being laid in front of the hole. Almost no streets are
now closed by that strange English sign “Diversion.”
Things are growing tighter daily. There will soon be meatless days
officially, and in hard fact they are here already. Only a few silk
stockings are left on sale. Radio sets are limited from now on. The
railroads may soon raise their fares again. The Home Guards must wear
their uniforms to work. Conscription of labor is in the balance.
Gas drills are being held in various suburbs. Recent tests showed some
masks “out of fit”--gas gets in through the side. Four hundred masks a
day are being lost or left on subway trains. The newspapers continually
berate the public about not carrying masks, yet not one person in a
hundred does it.
Now that the lend-lease bill is law, the British talk more frankly to
Americans. “Why shouldn’t you give us the stuff?” my barber asks. “You
don’t ask a man to repay you a shilling when you’re both running for
your lives.”
It is the belief of most Americans I know over here that America is
headed rapidly toward war. Their feeling seems about fifty-fifty for
and against the idea.
More and more Americans are rolling in--here to study this, and study
that.
Books about the war are coming out by the dozen, but no masterpiece
seems to have been written yet.
New stage plays are opening all the time. “Gone With the Wind” is
running into its second year, and you have to get seats ahead of time.
Leslie Howard is making a film. Lawrence Olivier has passed his R.A.F.
medical examination.
The air war is picking up. There is a lot of sudden dying in London
every night. It is hit-and-skip dying. It is death dealt by mystic
lottery. A lone bomber three miles above in the dark lets one loose.
That bomb will hit some small spot in a big area thirty miles across,
it will pick out some doomed handful from among London’s eight million
people. Until it hits, nobody knows.
Ten may die tonight out of the eight million. What marked those ten to
be drawn in the lottery instead of us? What fate drew a bomb to their
special hundred square feet? My room is the same size as theirs, why
didn’t it come here? There is no answer. That’s why you get so you
don’t pay any attention.
There is no feeling of stringency or acuteness in daily life. People
seem to live even more laxly than when I first came here. They know
something is bound to come--but I am certain the public is not worrying
about it.
The war is not dramatic to the British people. They go from day to day
and take care of whatever happens. There is no fury, no frenzy, no
great hatred, no general fear, no fanaticism. Faces look the same as in
peacetime. There is no urgency in the British demeanor. In three months
I have not met an Englishman to whom it has ever occurred that Britain
might lose the war.
* * * * *
Now it is time to go. It is not easy to leave. There is something about
leaving England in wartime that you cannot bear. I have been all around
to say my good-byes, and I have told them all that it was not good-bye
forever, that I would be back.
Spring comes early in England, and it is a lovely thing. Already the
days are soft and gentle. It is wonderful to be alive when warmth and
freshness spreads over the land. All through England people are looking
forward to the real, blooming fulness of spring. For many of them, it
will never happen. I could not bear to think that for me there might
never, never be another spring.