Inferno - Max Hastings [12]
Few people were as clear-thinking as Lt. David Fraser of the Grenadier Guards, who observed harshly: “The mental approach of the British to hostilities was distinguished by their prime faults—slackness of mind and wishful thinking … The people of democracies need to believe that good is opposed to evil—hence the spirit of crusade. All this, with its attempted arousal of vigorous moral and ideological passions, tends to work against that cool concept of war as [an] extension of policy defined by Clausewitz, an exercise with finite, attainable objectives.”
Many British airmen anticipated their own likely fate. Pilot Officer Donald Davis wrote: “It was a marvellous autumn day as I drove up past the Wittenham Clumps and Chiltern Hills I knew so well, and I remember thinking that I should be dead in three weeks. I stopped to view the scene and ponder for a few minutes. [I decided that] were I to be faced by the same decisions I should still have decided to fly and join the RAF if I could.” To Davis’s generation around the world, the privilege of being granted access to the sky fulfilled a supreme romantic vision, for which many young men were content to make payment by risking their lives.
At Westminster, with monumental condescension a government minister told the Polish ambassador, “How lucky you are! Who would have thought, six months ago, that you would have Britain on your side as an ally?” In Poland, news of the British and French declarations of war prompted a surge of hope, boosted by the new allies’ extravagant rhetoric. Varsovians embraced in the street, danced, cried, hooted car horns. A crowd gathered outside the British embassy on Aleje Ujadowskie, cheering, singing, stumbling through a version of “God Save the King.” The ambassador, Sir Howard Kennard, shouted from the balcony: “Long live Poland! We shall fight side by side against aggression and injustice!”
These tumultuous scenes were repeated at the French embassy, where a crowd sang “La Marseillaise.” In Warsaw that night, a government bulletin announced triumphantly: “Polish cavalry units have thrust through the armoured German lines and are now in East Prussia.” Across Europe, some enemies of Nazism embraced brief delusions. Mihail Sebastian was a thirty-one-year-old Romanian writer, and a Jew. On 4 September, after hearing news of the British and French declarations of war, he was naïvely astonished that they did not immediately attack in the west. “Are they still waiting for something? Is it possible (as some say) that Hitler will immediately fall and be replaced by a military government, which will then settle for peace? Could there be radical changes in Italy? What will Russia do? What’s happening to the Axis, about which there is suddenly silence in both Rome and Berlin? A thousand questions that leave you gasping for breath.” Amid his own mental turmoil, Sebastian sought relief first in reading Dostoyevsky, then Thomas De Quincey in English.
On 7 September, ten French divisions moved cautiously into the German Saarland. After advancing five miles, they halted: this represented the sum of France’s armed demonstration in support of Poland. Gamelin was satisfied that the Poles could hold off Hitler’s Wehrmacht until the French rearmament programme was further advanced. Slowly, the Polish people began to understand that they were alone in their agony. Stefan Starzyński, a former soldier in Piłsudski’s Legions, had been Warsaw’s inspirational mayor since 1934, famous for making his city a riot of summer flowers. Now, Starzyński broadcast daily to his people, denouncing Nazi barbarism with passionate emotion. He recruited rescue squads, summoned thousands of volunteers to dig trenches, comforted victims of German bombs who were soon numbered in the thousands. Many Varsovians fled east, the rich bartering cars for which they had no fuel to procure carts and bicycles. A sixteen-year-old Jew, Ephrahim Blaichman, watched long columns of refugees of his own race trudging