II. ALL QUIET

1. PEACE TO WAR—SEVEN HOURS

England December, 1940

The phone rang in our hotel room in Lisbon, and we were told to be at the marine airport before daylight this morning. Don’t think I didn’t get all a-twitter. Our almost two solid weeks of waiting were drawing to an end, and Lait and I decided not even to go to bed.

Each of us left a small suitcase in Lisbon, to cut down the weight. I put my excess necessities in a white sugar sack which a boat steward had given me. And so today I arrived in England carrying a small yellow bag, a typewriter, and a knotted-up sugar sack over my shoulder.

It was cold and eerie in the dimly lighted airport building at Lisbon. We walked up and down to keep warm, until finally the captain said, “Let’s go.” We followed the crew along a pier, and got into a motorboat. We could make out dimly the shapes of two big flying boats at anchor. As our boat eased up to one of them, we jumped through the door.

The plane had four motors, and was bigger than the Baby Clippers of Pan American Airways, but not as big as the regular Clippers. She was camouflaged.

The cabin was partitioned into three compartments, with smoking permitted in the rear one. I had supposed that these planes were stripped of all peacetime travel comforts to save weight, but not so. The seats were deep and comfortable, the floor was carpeted.

The steward gave us blankets. The engines were started, the door closed, and we taxied far out into the river. We could see the lights of the city on each shore. Suddenly the motors roared, and spray blinded the windows. We ran for what seemed a long time, surging through the water, until finally we felt her break free. The windows cleared and the shore lights dropped farther and farther below. The hot exhaust rings of the motors shone dramatically red in the darkness. We were on the way to England.

It might have been a flight in peacetime. Every one on the plane immediately went to sleep. I slept for a while, but curiosity got the better of me, and from daylight on I stayed awake.

Dawn found us over the ocean, with no land in sight. I had been told the flight would take ten hours, but we picked up a howling tailwind and came through in less than seven hours. Time didn’t drag at all. Five hours out, I went through the plane and every passenger was asleep. As far as I could observe, not one person ever spoke to another during the trip. There were seven Americans aboard, one Swiss, and three Englishmen.

The steward served coffee and sandwiches, and later fruit. Then he came around and blacked out the windows so the passengers couldn’t see out. This was done by putting a section of frosted glass over the regular windows, with rubber suction cups. This lets in light but prevents you from seeing out. I presume it is done to keep passengers from seeing convoys in the water below. But the joke was that the steward blacked out every window except mine. Either he ran out of frosted panes or else he thought I was blind. At any rate I stared out the window the whole trip.

Land came into view on the left. It was dark brown and bare, a high, rugged coast. I thought it was Ireland. We flew along this coast for an hour. The air got rough, and five passengers were very sick. Somehow I escaped that. We passed only two ships, both small. One of them flashed a signal to us with a blinker. We did not see a single plane on the trip.

Suddenly the pilot throttled down his motors and we started losing altitude. Then I realized we had not been flying along Ireland, but along the coast of England itself. We landed far out from shore among a lot of boats at anchor and camouflaged planes resting on the water. As we struck the surface there was that familiar long ripping sound.

I felt like a character in a dream. The journey from America was over. We had arrived. But it didn’t seem really true. Any moment I expected to wake up and find myself still between those perpetual walls of the Hotel Europa in Lisbon.

A score of British officials, in raincoats and boots, came out in a motorboat and looked everything over, and a doctor took up the forms we had filled out. Then we all got into the boat. The men chatted with us all the way to shore. They said they would try to get us through the inspection in time to catch the mid-afternoon train to London, but they couldn’t promise.

It was raining. We walked a hundred yards along the docks, then into the main street of the little town. There were soldiers on the street, carrying tin hats and gas masks. There were women in khaki uniforms, and many people on bicycles. All the store windows were crisscrossed with strips of paper. This tends to prevent shattering from the concussion when bombs explode in the neighborhood. Strips of many colors, pasted in many designs, made the town look as though it had been decorated for Christmas instead of patched up for the war.

I wish you could see that village street. It was like a picture from a Dickens novel. The gabled buildings, the language of the signs, the many smoking chimney pots were all the England of fiction, so peaceful, neat and secure. I had not been ashore three minutes before I was in love with England.

We were escorted to a big ground-floor room, the temporary office of the British Overseas Airways. There were easy chairs and couches and a coal fire in the grate, and a boy was serving hot tea. It took us two hours to get through all the inspections. We were taken one at a time into a room where two men questioned us. They asked about our purpose in coming, about our money, about whom we knew, and so on. It was by no means a grilling. They did it in a way that made you feel you were just sitting there chatting. The procedure was more than courteous; it seemed genuinely friendly.

After that they went through our baggage minutely. They even read our letters. But so great is English courtesy that the customs man asked me to take each letter from its envelope for him. He evidently thought it would be prying for him to do so! And then as train time drew near he said we would have to hurry to catch it, so he closed the bags without finishing the inspection, gave us advice about trains and the blackout in London, and hustled us into a waiting car provided by the air line.

We drove for fifteen minutes through a thickly settled suburb. They told us bombs had fallen in the street a few afternoons ago, but we saw no evidence of it. The suburb was like a continuation of the main street of that first town—neat as a pin, snug, comfortable and beautiful.

The train came right on schedule. The porter, an old man, stowed our bags away carefully and told us just when we would get to London. It would be after dark, he said, and the Germans would probably be overhead, but he said for us not to worry.

My very first impression of England was of lovely, courteous people. And I don’t mean to us visitors so much as to each other. It is true that they are especially nice to Americans right now, but I noticed that they were just as thoughtful among themselves.

My only contact with English people before had been in the colonies. I had assumed that the ordinary Englishman had the same personality as those in far-off lands who gather in the clubs and hotels of an afternoon for their gin and tonic and who consider themselves superior to anything else on land or sea. But the Englishman in mass, at home, bears no resemblance at all to that. He always seems to have a pleasant little remark to make. He is interested instead of blasé. He is considerate, and he seems to enjoy being alive.

An English friend of mine says all this is true. But he says further that it is truer now than ever before. He says the war has done a lot for English character. He says it has drawn the people together, made them prouder of each other, made them humbler, and hence both mellower and stronger.

Anyway, I know that in all my traveling I have never visited a new country that in a few short hours filled me with the warmth that I feel for England.

2. “HE HASN’T COME YET, SIR.”

London, December, 1940

We rode in luxury on our way to London town. We rode in a private compartment. We smoked, and read London newspapers, and drank tea, and ate ham sandwiches. We traveled through a magnificently green countryside. The fields looked more like parks than farms. It seemed odd that everything should be so green in December. It was a beautiful afternoon, not too cold. It would rain a little while, then the sun would come out bright.

Our first three hours in England had been so pleasant, the country so serene, the tea so true to tradition, it didn’t seem possible that death and destruction could lie only three hours ahead. But it lay nearer than that.

We were drinking tea when Lait said “Look!” and there in the sky ahead silver barrage balloons were floating. There weren’t just a few, but scores, even hundreds. They stretched on for miles and miles. We knew their presence indicated we were coming to a good-sized city.

And then came the first sight of destruction. I don’t remember specifically what was the first bombed thing we saw, for we had barely seen the first when we saw a second and a third. Then wreckage became constant. I remember a crater in a suburban street, then wrecked houses near by, and a small factory burned. After that, for block after block, half the buildings we saw were wrecked. Some of the suburban stations where the train stopped were shattered, but people by the hundreds got off and on.

If I were to say there were strain and worry and fear on people’s faces I certainly would be overworking my imagination. Except for the ghastly scenery, life seemed thoroughly normal.

An old man got into our compartment and sat down. He was ragged and feeble, and until he spoke I couldn’t have told him from an eighty-year-old Missouri farmer. When the conductor looked in for the tickets he said to the old man, “Sorry, but you have to move back. You’ve got a third-class ticket, and here you are in first.” The old man, in an accent that would be British wherever the sun sets, said, “Oh dear, oh dear” feebly, and took himself up and out. We wished he could have stayed.

Back home I had seen newsreel pictures of bombed buildings, but somehow I thought the real thing would look different. It doesn’t. The only thing different is that now it’s real and you feel a revulsion and a small sinking feeling with the knowledge of the awful power of a single bomb. You feel what it could do to you personally.

Finally we left the city and its wreckage behind and were out in green country again. Every open field had something in it to keep enemy planes from landing. Some fields were crisscrossed with row after row of tall white poles. Others had rolls of wire. Some had shallow ditches. Some had mounds of earth piled up in rows so geometrically regular that you would have thought they were planting crops instead of building obstructions.

Occasionally you would get a glimpse of a silver balloon pulled down into a woods to nestle until nightfall. Twice we passed antiaircraft guns out in the fields under canvas canopies, painted so like shrubbery that we could hardly identify them.

Every tree, every field, every cricket ground, every house and street seemed to be doing its bit. In the backyards of suburban homes along the railroad tracks there were somber marks of what war has done to the English way of life. I mean private bomb shelters; almost every back yard had one.

From the train window a shelter looked like just a large mound of dirt. From closer up, it could be seen to be a half-underground cellar, walled with concrete and sheet metal and covered heavily with dirt, much like the outdoor cellars of our Western prairies. We were interested to see vegetables growing on the earthen tops of many shelters.

All this, you must remember, was still a long way from London.

Now dusk came on, and we could no longer see fields nor bomb shelters. The conductor came through and asked us to black out the compartment. The windows have black shades on rollers, which you pull down and hook at the bottom. The windows themselves are painted black except for a square in the middle, and this is fully covered when you pull the curtain. A faint blue light shines at the top of the compartment.

Thus we rode on toward London, sealed in a blacked-out compartment, growing increasingly jumpy as we came nearer that city where the wail of sirens and the thud of bombs are as routine every night as supper.

We were running late by now, and consequently couldn’t tell exactly how close we were getting to London. The train would stop frequently for several minutes at a time. At these stops we would turn out the light, then pull the blind and look out, trying to see something familiar. George had lived in London for years and he knows the landmarks for miles around.

We could not see anything at all. We seemed to be out in the country. “We’re apparently still a long way off,” George said. Then, on the next peek, not two minutes later, he said, “We’re here! We’re coming into the station!”

We had arrived in the very heart of London before we knew we had even approached the suburbs.

The very first words I heard spoken in London were, “Well, he hasn’t come yet, sir, he’s more than a bit late tonight.”

They were spoken by an aged station porter who opened our compartment door and reached for our bags. The station was lighted so dimly that I could barely see him, but his voice was old—though it had gayness in it too.

What the porter meant was that the Germans had not yet appeared over London this night. They usually arrive as punctually as the hands of a clock. Apparently they take off from fields across the Channel a few minutes before dark and arrive over London a few minutes after dark.

Our porter talked constantly as he carried our bags through the station and to the street. We dogged his heels, for we could barely see and we didn’t want to get completely lost in our first few minutes in London.

The porter said, “I had a gentleman a bit ago and he said ‘Could I speak with you for a second?’ I said ‘Yes indeed you may. Time’s up.’ The gentleman didn’t get it at first, and then he thought it was pretty good. You might as well have a bit of a laugh, I guess.”

Our station was right in the center of London. It had been hit at least three times, and once a German plane had fallen through the roof. Yet they clean up damage so quickly that we saw no sign of wreckage in the half-light.

In my first night here not a bomb was dropped on London. In fact, not a single German plane appeared over any part of the British Isles that night. Perhaps it was just as well, for if I had arrived in the middle of an inferno of explosion and fire they might have had a berserk American on their hands. Even as it was, those first few minutes in London will be a panorama running before my memory’s eye for a lifetime—a panorama more of impressions than of things actually seen.

The night was not entirely black. The moon was up, and you could dimly distinguish shapes if not details. You could see the black outline of a car a few yards away, and buildings stood out against the faint hint of light in the sky.

At the porter’s shout a taxi pulled up at the curb and we rumbled off into the darkness. There was very little traffic. Perhaps two cars to a block. Now and then there was a bus. You could see pin points of light moving down the street, but you could get no perspective on them. They were like slowly moving stars in the sky. Then as they came near they would be surrounded by a great black shape, and you could tell it was a bus—but not until you were abreast of it.

As the moon came out fuller it shone on the sides of the buildings and made them appear snow-covered. The city was ghostly silent. Only the low sound of our motor and the small purr of a passing car—that was all. There was no other sound in the streets of London. Yet it wasn’t the silence of a graveyard. That wasn’t the feeling at all. It was like something mysterious, darkly seen in a dream—shapes here, shadows there, tiny lights swimming toward you, dark bulks moving noiselessly away. And where I had expected to see block after block of vacant spaces and jumbled wreckage, there stood block after block of whole buildings.

I thought to myself: Is this nonsense? Or is London really still here? And I realized there in the dark, with a kind of incredulous excitement, that London was still here, and very much so.

As we drove along in our darkened taxi, Lait pointed things out to me—buildings that we could see only vaguely in the hazy light of the moon. We passed the Houses of Parliament, and saw Big Ben high up there in his tower. But he was not telling the time, either for us or for German fliers; he was all dark. We drove onto Victoria Embankment and along the Thames. We saw Westminster Bridge and a little later Waterloo Bridge. I was astonished to see them still standing. Since then I have found that all the Thames bridges are standing, every one of them open to traffic. We passed the great obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle, which was nicked by bombs from a Zeppelin in the last war but hasn’t been touched this time. Then we turned off into a maze of side streets that finally brought us to Fleet Street, the greatest newspaper street in the world. There Lait got out to go to his office, and the cab went on around the corner to my immediate destination.

The driver couldn’t locate the number. He yelled at the shadows of some men unloading something from a truck. He yelled at vaguely seen passers-by. Nobody knew where the number was. Finally the driver—and this was the only unpleasant thing I had encountered so far in England—told me to get out and hunt. It seemed that it was not his responsibility to get me there.

I said, “Good Lord, man, I’ve only been in London ten minutes and I was never here before in my life. How in heaven’s name am I going to find anything in this blackout?”

So he groused a little and yelled at some more passers-by and finally did locate the address. I paid him off and carried my bags and sugar sack up to the door. A tiny blue light shone over it. The entire front was packed high with sandbags.

I didn’t know whether I dared to enter or not, for fear of letting out light. The tenderfoot treads cautiously in London these nights. He doesn’t want to make a fool of himself. But finally I gingerly pulled open the glass door, reached in and touched a heavy curtain, and pulled that aside. There, behind it was a typical office-building lobby, lighted up. I was in the right place.

On an upper floor I found the men of the United Press at work. Their windows were blacked out. Tin hats and gas masks lay thrown on tables. The men were surprised to see a stranger walk in from America unannounced at that time of night.

They gave me suggestions about hotels and made several phone calls for me. All the calls went through immediately, just as though London had never been bombed. And they sent an office boy to dig up another taxi, for not many cabs cruise the streets at night.

We drove a few blocks in the dark and then pulled into what seemed to be an alley. It was as dead and silent and black as a pit.

“I hope I’m not being held up,” I thought.

At the end of the alley the taxi made a half turn and stopped. Someone outside opened the door and shone a flashlight on the floor of the taxi. Then I saw that he was a doorman and that we were at the entrance of one of London’s finest hotels, the Savoy.

I went through a revolving door, the panes of which were blacked out with cardboard, and stepped into the same luxury and brightness and crowds of people that you can find in any good New York hotel. The reception clerks were all in tuxedos. The bellboys were in gray uniforms. The elevator operators wore wing collars.

I laughed and apologized for my sugar sack, but I needn’t have done so. Anything is all right during the “emergency.” On my way through the reception room I noticed a man sitting at a table drinking coffee. He was on his way to sleep in the hotel’s basement shelter. He was in pajamas and bathrobe.

Imagine sitting in the lobby of the Mayflower in Washington or the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco in pajamas!

Before coming here I knew only one person in this city of eight million. This was Ben Robertson, now London correspondent of PM, the New York newspaper. I hadn’t seen him in years, but within forty-five minutes after stepping off the train in London I was shaking hands with Ben Robertson. Talk about being glad to see anybody! It was like striking gold.

I found him in the Savoy dining room eating with two young members of Parliament. One was Dick Law, son of England’s famous statesman, Andrew Bonar Law. Dick is financial secretary to the War Office. The other was Jim Thomas, parliamentary secretary to Anthony Eden.

I hadn’t eaten a real meal in twenty-four hours. So I ate one now—soup, chicken, mashed potatoes, a green salad, pastry, coffee. You could get practically anything you wanted. The dining room was packed and an orchestra was playing.

Bob Casey of the Chicago Daily News came by, and Larry Rue of the Chicago Tribune. Frank Owen, editor of Lord Beaverbrook’s London Standard, came and talked about how things were going for Britain.

My new English friends wanted to know what America thought; and they told queer bomb stories by the dozen. “You’re a welcome sight,” they said. “We’ve all told our bomb stories to each other so many times that nobody listens any more. Now we’ve got a new audience.”

What an introduction to London! I not only felt vastly relieved to be among friends, but also as snug as a bug and as big as a barrage balloon. To say nothing of feeling extremely brave, since there were no planes over England that night.

It was midnight when I got to bed. It was the first bed I had lain in for forty hours.

Everything was wonderful. “This can’t last,” I said to myself. “This isn’t the way the people live.” But it’s mighty good for your soul on your first night in London.

3. FIRST IMPRESSIONS

London, December, 1940

My first two days were consumed in getting signed up and identified. Now I have so many papers that I’ve had to buy an extra wallet, a leather case so big I have to carry it in a side pocket, and it is already stuffed full.

First you register with the police and get a booklet with your picture in it. You have to give them your whole life history. If you move, they must be notified.

Then there is the national registration. Here you get another booklet—and don’t you lose it! Then you get your food-ration book. Then you report to the Ministry of Information and get a pass with your picture on it. Then the ministry gives additional cards permitting you to stay out after midnight and enter prohibited areas, such as zones of military action.

Everywhere you go people are nice to you. At the police station it took half an hour to get my business done because a policeman had to tell me about the bombs in his neighborhood. I have never seen policemen at home so friendly and helpful. And it wasn’t just because I was an American. For I watched them at other desks, where other foreigners were registering, and these got the same courteous treatment.

My particular policeman lives in a quiet suburb on a rise of ground, with a good view. And he said that the night before I arrived London was a sight to see, with searchlights and noise and fires all over town. He said a bomb hit his block not long ago and wiped out thirteen houses. But only five people were hurt and nobody was killed.

“Imagine bombing a quiet, homey suburb like ours!” he said. “What military advantage could that possibly have?”

“Well,” I said, “I suppose the point is to try to break the spirit of the people.”

And he said, not boastfully but in an ordinary tone, “I guess so; but actually it’s having just the opposite effect.”

I asked him if he had a backyard shelter. He said he did, but never went into it. He preferred to sleep in his own bed, get a good rest and take his chances.

On my second afternoon here I got a haircut. The barber talked all the time, and for once I enjoyed it. He knew instantly that I was an American. We don’t look very different to me, but these Londoners can tell an American a mile off. It didn’t take the barber long to find out that I had just arrived and that my first two nights in London had passed without a single bomb being dropped. He said we’d have some before many nights.

“And I’ll tell you,” he said, “if you don’t get a little windy your first night, then you’re not much of a man. A fellow who doesn’t get his wind up at the first experience isn’t a man at all. He’s just an animal with no nerves in his body.”

I told the barber I was all prepared to be London’s biggest coward. He said not to be ashamed if I was scared and did something silly. He was an air-raid warden at night in his home suburb, he said, and what did I suppose he did in their very first raid? He dived for the nearest underground shelter. When he got down there, he said, he realized that was no place for a warden to be, and he was so ashamed he took off his badge so people wouldn’t know he was a warden.

But that was soon changed. Now his whole district is organized. They know exactly what to expect and what to do, and they go about it like a business. He goes to his post every night after supper. Every third night he is on duty all night, regardless of whether anything happens. On other nights he stays on if things are happening. He’s not afraid any more at all.

I’m mighty glad I got a haircut. The barber was a great solace. Before that talk I had been afraid of bombs, and also afraid to have anyone know I was afraid. Now I’m only afraid of bombs.

I had heard stories of new arrivals over here sleeping right through their first air-raid warning, but I never thought anything so drab would happen to me. It did.

This morning at nine-thirty a friend came to my room. “Did you hear the warning?” he asked. “Don’t make fun of me,” I said. “There wasn’t any warning.” But he was right. The sirens went off at 6 A.M. There was just one plane over town, and it didn’t drop anything. The all clear sounded at 6:30, and I slept through that too.

I think the English bed manufacturers should have me write a testimonial.

In my first few days here I have met an enormous number of people. The first thing everyone says—and I’ll bet I’ve heard it two hundred times—is this:

“Is it better or worse than you thought it would be?”

Then I have to explain to them that in the United States we had felt that perhaps, because of the censorship, we might not be getting a complete picture of the devastation. We had been afraid that London was more grievously wounded than we were being allowed to know. And now, having been prepared for any shock and having looked at London, I can truthfully answer that it is better off than I had expected.

I think the newspapers have given a proper estimate of the damage. True, the destruction has been immense. But these ghastly blows actually have hurt London less than it is possible to imagine or believe without seeing for yourself.

London as a living, enduring institution is not gravely injured. Not in its architecture, or in its mode of existence, or its utilities, or its transportation, or its health. And above all, not in its spirit. So far, the blitz on London is a failure. London is no more knocked out than the man who smashes a finger is dead. Daytime life in London today comes very close to being normal.

My reply of “better” seemed to please the questioners, with one exception. A girl said, “Oh, I’m sorry to hear you say that.” I think she probably felt that I didn’t appreciate what they had been through. Also, she may have thought that if I wrote such stuff back to the States it might lead people to believe that Britain didn’t need help as badly as she really does.

There are no restrictions on newspapermen here. They can travel wherever they like.

The two sections of London hardest hit are the poor East End and the rich West End. The latter would correspond to the Times Square and Fifth Avenue districts in New York; or to all of downtown Washington between the Capitol and the “Million Dollar” Bridge; or to San Francisco from Market Street to Russian Hill.

I haven’t been to the East End yet, but I have walked at least ten miles through the West End. I covered and re-covered the Parliament Buildings, Regent and Oxford Streets (the great shopping centers), Pall Mall and Piccadilly, Park Lane and Leicester Square, the Strand and Holborn Circus. And the best way I can describe it is to say this:

You may walk a block or two without seeing a single wrecked building. Then occasionally you will see a block that is half wiped out. But the typical block in the West End would have perhaps two buildings completely wrecked by bomb or fire, and half a dozen damaged but not destroyed. That still leaves a lot of whole, sound buildings.

There is in the West End no single great sweep of destruction, with everything flat—just a building damaged here and another there.

You are impressed when you see how little effect a bomb has on a building unless it is a bomb of the very heaviest type. A big modern building next door to us took a heavy bomb right on top, yet it stands there today whole and beautiful, only slightly damaged. Steel and concrete and stone usually stand up. It is the age-weary buildings of brick and dry mortar that have gone down in heart-sickening heaps.

Much of the damage is not visible to a person walking on the street. I was in a plant, the rear part of which had been blown to the ground, yet from the front it looked untouched. A house next door to doom may get nothing more than broken windows. The Savoy Hotel stands up as big as life, but it has been hit more than once. The famous Savoy Grill is closed while bomb damage is repaired. And when I was taking a gander out my window I discovered that the room next to mine was unoccupied—because a bomb had blown off a corner of it.

Yet the service—food, light, drink, attention—goes on as usual, even to the floor porter complaining that I hadn’t put my shoes out for him to shine. The British won’t let anything interfere with their being British.

The damage is terrific, but what impresses me most about it—and the point I want to get over—is this: it doesn’t make any difference!

That sounds heartless. But honestly, it’s the way the British look at it. They don’t feel that they have been hurt at all.

An American who has been here through it all says the most impressive thing to him is the way people who have been secure have abandoned their property sense. They can see their buildings go up in smoke, their savings blasted to bits, and apparently they don’t care—so long as “we get that guy in the end.”