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Gen. Sir Edmund Ironside, head of the British Army, wrote: ‘The French … put forward the most extravagant ideas. They are absolutely unscrupulous in everything.’ Gamelin said afterwards: ‘Public opinion did not know what it wanted done, but it wanted something else, and above all it wanted action.’ A French naval officer and later historian, Jacques Mordal, wrote contemptuously: ‘The idea was to do something, even something stupid.’ A British scheme for mining the Rhine became a new focus of friction: Paris feared that it would provoke German retaliation.

Almost nothing about these debates was known to the Allied peoples, who saw only their armies inert in the frontier snow, digging trenches and contemplating the Germans opposite. A sense of vacuity afflicted alike young and old, national leaders and humble citizens: ‘Everyone is getting married and engaged, or else having babies,’ wrote twenty-three-year-old Liverpool typist Doris Melling on 7 April. ‘Makes me feel rather stale and out of things.’ She was unimpressed, however, by columnist Lord Castlerosse’s flippant assertion in that day’s Sunday Express that any girl who had not found a husband by the end of the war was not really trying. ‘Most of my friends have made such messes of their married life – no proper homes, keeping in their jobs, and such.’

Maggie Joy Blunt, a thirty-year-old architectural writer of strong left-wing convictions, lived in Slough, west of London. She observed on 16 December 1939 that what seemed to her most remarkable about the war thus far was how little it changed most people’s lives:

We have had to suffer certain inconveniences – the blackout, petrol rations, altered bus and train services, a lack of theatrical entertainment, rising cost of food, scarcity of certain commodities such as electric light batteries, sugar, butter. A number of adults are doing jobs that they have never done before and never expected to do. But there has been no essential change in our way of living, in our systems of employment or education, in our ideas or ambitions … It is as though we were trying to play one more set of tennis before an approaching storm descends … A local MP … remarked that he was not in favour of this ‘half-asleep’ war. Scattering pamphlets [on Germany] is no more use than scattering confetti. I am sorry to have to say it, but we shall have to make the Germans suffer before we can make peace possible.

Had she and her compatriots known it, in the winter of 1939 the Nazis were troubled by many problems of their own. Germany had entered the war on the verge of bankruptcy, in consequence of Hitler’s armaments expenditure. There was so little money for civilian purposes that the railway system was crumbling, and desperately short of rolling stock: two bad train smashes killed 230 people, provoking fierce public anger. Far from the Nazis having made the trains run on time, industry suffered from disrupted coal deliveries, and the Gestapo reported widespread grumbling about the faltering passenger service. The Allied blockade had caused the collapse of Germany’s export markets and a serious shortage of raw materials. Hitler wished to launch a great offensive in the west on 12 November, and was furious when the Wehrmacht insisted on postponement until spring. The generals considered the weather wholly unfavourable to a major offensive, and recognised the deficiencies of their army’s performance in Poland: it was short of vehicles and weapons of all kinds. As the army expanded, the 24.5 million industrial workforce of May 1939 fell by four million. Industrial policy was characterised by wild vacillation and arbitrary production cuts, made necessary by steel shortages.

A decision was made that would influence German armaments production for years ahead: to focus immediate effort on manufacturing ammunition and Ju88 light bombers. The Luftwaffe convinced itself that the Ju88 was a war-winning weapon, and the plane indeed did notable service. Later, however, lack of