Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [92]
And what if there happened to be quiet? "Over the night, like a suffocating coverlet, lies that sinister silence, characteristic of all raid periods free from noise, which make us feel that a large number of unpleasant occurrences are happening somewhere else."
At the warning, many left their darkened rooms for the basement; for a corrugated metal Anderson shelter in the garden; for churches, schools, or the tube, where they waited for daylight as the air soured around them. Even deep underground, those seeking refuge could feel the percussive effects of the bombs as they rested their heads against the wall. People were most visible in hiding. "[They] had taken over the Underground.... It wasn't only on the platforms it was in an empty tunnel, too, where they were excavating to put a new line in.... I had never seen so many reclining figures," remembered sculptor Henry Moore, "and even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture." He drew them, faces nestled in the valleys of their bedclothes, some with their mouths slack and open, others with their jaws clenched, heads buried in the crook of an arm or turned to another. "And amid the grim tension, I noticed groups of strangers formed together in intimate groups and children asleep within feet of passing trains."
The day was "a pure and curious holiday from fear.... The night behind and the night to come met across every noon in an arch of strain. To work or think was to ache." Amid the dust and grit; the stopped clocks and shaken plaster; the vases, toilets, and tables set for dinner exposed to the street; the acrid smell of bombed factories, dye houses, and tanneries; the stink from broken sewer pipes and domestic gas lines—every seeping little loss—funerals crawled along the cobbles and amid the rubble. Summer seeds drifted in and took hold in what remained of kitchens and bedrooms. The dazed walked to their jobs, made their breakfasts, and polished broken glass.
Life was hardly different in Moscow, Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo, Paris, Dresden, Cologne: all enduring aerial bombardment, all under some kind of blackout order. Stone cities turned into dust. Wood cities burned. Hans Erich Nossack described his approach to Hamburg after a night of bombing:
What surrounded us did not remind us in any way of what was lost. It had nothing to do with it. It was something else, it was strangeness itself, it was the essentially not possible.... And already we were perplexed and did not know how to explain the strangeness. Where once one's gaze had hit upon the walls of houses, a silent plain now stretched to infinity.... Solitary chimneys that grew from the ground like cenotaphs, like Neolithic dolmens or admonishing fingers.... How many things we had learned in school, how many books we had read, how many illustrations we had marveled at, but we had never seen a report about anything like this.
The eastern seaboard of the United States remained protected from aerial bombardment by the ocean, by the inability of planes to fly across it without refueling. Even so, in 1941 New York began to prepare for a blackout, too. General civil defense planning had been under way for months. "There is said," reported the New York Times, "to be a genuine fear that the American people would embark on innumerable programs for the defense of their home cities—programs that might have no merit beyond the enthusiasm of the promoters. The [commission set up by the War Department aims] to forestall, by planning, the bungling of improvizations [sic]."
Manhattan was already subdued by the war, by rationing, and by the dimming of the lights in Times Square and along the waterfront,