Inferno - Max Hastings [23]
If there was little substance to Britain’s war effort, there were many symbols: sandbagged public buildings, barrage balloons floating above London, a rigorous blackout in the hours of darkness. Before peace came, accidents in the blackout killed more people than did the Luftwaffe: in the last four months of 1939 there were 4,133 deaths on the roads, 2,657 of these pedestrians, a figure almost double that for the same period in 1938. Many more people died as a consequence of nonhighway mishaps: some 18 percent of those interviewed by Princeton pollsters in December 1940 said they had injured themselves groping in the dark; three-quarters of respondents thought air-raid precautions should be eased. Defence regulations were so stringently enforced that two soldiers leaving the dock at the Old Bailey after being condemned to death for murder were rebuked for failing to pick up their gas masks. Two and a half million people were enrolled in civil defence.
Huge tracts of downland and urban public spaces were planted with corn and vegetables. A Wiltshire farmer, Arthur Street, ploughed up his grassland as the government ordered, and sent away his beloved hunter to be trained for harness work. Many riding horses took badly to this humble duty, but Street’s Jorrocks “trotted home like a gentleman,” in the farmer’s words, “and since that day he has hauled the milk, pulled the broadcast during wheat sowing, and done ploughing and all sorts of jobs with no mishap … What he thinks about it I don’t know. He has no notion of what it is that trundles and rattles behind him, and the position of his ears shows that he is somewhat worried about it. But as we have never let him down before, he reckons that we are not doing it now, and so does his war work like the gentleman he is.” Farmers who had struggled to escape bankruptcy in the 1930s suddenly entered a new era of prosperity.
Seven hundred fascists were interned, though most of the aristocrats who had flirted with Hitler were spared. “It certainly is breath-taking how all these lords get away with their pre-war affiliations to the Nazi regime,” complained the British communist Elizabeth Belsey in a letter to her soldier husband. If the British had emulated French policy towards communists, thousands of trades unionists and a substantial part of the intellectual class would also have been incarcerated, but these too were left at liberty. There was still much silliness in the air: the Royal Victoria Hotel at St. Leonards-on-Sea, advertising its attractions in The Times, asserted that “the ballroom and adjacent toilets have been made gas- and splinter-proof.” Published advertisements for domestic staff made few concessions to conscription: “Wanted: second housemaid of three; wages £42 per annum; two ladies in family; nine servants kept.” The archbishop of Canterbury declared that Christians were allowed to pray for victory, but the archbishop of York disagreed. While the war was a righteous one, he said, it was not a holy one: “We must avoid praying each other down.” Some clergymen urged their congregations to ask the Almighty’s help for charity: “Save me from bitterness and hatred towards the enemy.” There was anger among British Christians, however, when in November the pope sent a message of congratulation to Hitler on escaping an assassination attempt.
Hundreds of thousands of young men who had donned uniforms trained in England with inadequate equipment and uncertain expectations, though they assumed