Inferno - Max Hastings [219]
This was true, within a limited social milieu. The week before D-Day, as 250,000 young American and British soldiers made final preparations for hurling themselves at Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, in London Evelyn Waugh wrote in his diary: “Woke half drunk and had a long, busy morning—getting my hair cut, trying to verify quotations in the London Library, which is still in disorder from its bomb, visiting Nancy [Mitford, at her bookshop]. At luncheon I again got drunk. Went to the Beefsteak [Club], which I have just joined … Back to White’s [Club]—more port. Went to Waterloo in an alcoholic stupor, got the train to Exeter and slept most of the way.”
Waugh was untypical; many of the friends with whom he caroused were on leave from active service, and several were dead a year later. The German V-weapon assault was about to commence, inflicting fresh death and destruction on war-weary Britons. But, just as life in New York or Chicago was much more comfortable than life in London or Liverpool, so Londoners were vastly better off than the inhabitants of Paris, Naples, Athens, or any city in the Soviet Union or China. The Lancashire housewife Nella Last reflected in October 1942 that her war had thus far inflicted little hardship or suffering, “in comparison to three-quarters of Stalingrad being demolished during the first bombardment. We have had food, shelter and warmth when millions have had none—what will be the price we will have to pay?—we cannot expect to go on ‘escaping,’ there is no escape for any of us. I saw a neighbour’s baby today and I felt a sudden understanding for those who ‘refuse to bring babies into the world now.’ All this talk of ‘new worlds’ and ‘after the war,’ no talk of the suffering, the anguish, before all this is over.”
Mrs. Last was unusually sensitive; most of her compatriots were too preoccupied by their own present troubles to concern themselves with the larger but remote miseries of others. On 22 November 1942, Phyllis Crook, another housewife, wrote to her thirty-two-year-old husband serving in North Africa: “Christmas is going to be a beastly time and I’m hating the thought of it. However it’s got to be got on with ‘as usual’ and I have been busy trying hard to get things for all the kids of our acquaintance. It would be so easy to say ‘I can’t get anything’ and leave it at that. It is so cold … How I wish I could retire for the winter instead of constantly shivering. Chris [their small son] asked God to make you a good boy tonight! Well my love news seems very scarce and I must say goodnight. Life seems too mouldy for words. I wonder when we shall see you again. It all seems horribly far away and doesn’t bear too much thinking about. Look after yourself, my dear and don’t go going into any danger, as Daddy would say! All my love always, dearest Phil. PS Joyce is now working in a factory 11 hours a day. John Young has had malaria.”
Mrs. Crook’s woes would seem trivial, her self-pity contemptible, to many people of war-ravaged nations. Her own life and those of her children were unimperilled, and they were not even hungry. But separation from her husband, the necessity to occupy lodgings far from her east London home, the drab monotony of wartime existence seemed to her, like many others, sufficient causes for unhappiness. And ten days after writing that letter she became a widow when her husband was killed in action.
News of the violent and premature deaths of distant loved ones was a pervasive feature of the wartime experience. Often, little was known of their fate, as J. R. Ackerley noted in a poem published in the Spectator:
We never knew what became of him, that was so curious;
He embarked, it was in December, and never returned;
No chance to say Good-bye, and Christmas confronting us;
A few letters arrived, long after, and came to an end.
The weeks dragged into months, and then it was December.
We troubled the officials, of course, and they cabled about;