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finally accepted that they could appease Hitler no longer. Thus began the six months Anticipation Stage of the `phoney war, as armies massed along the Western front for the immense conflict which now seemed inevitable. On 10 May, following his lightning seizure of Denmark and Norway, Hitler launched his blitzkrieg on Holland, Belgium and France. In London the discredited Chamberlain gave way to the towering figure who was to lead his country through the next five years. That summer, as the skies of southern England provided the stage for the Battle of Britain, giving way in the autumn and winter of 1940 to Hitler's blitz on London and other cities, Churchill's rock-like presence focused his countrymen's resolve with a manly strength they had not known in their leaders for decades.

The prevailing archetype in British life changed with startling speed. The heroes of the hour were the gallant young pilots of the RAF; the sailors of the Royal Navy who had already raised the spirits of the nation by pulling off such dazzling victories as that over the pocket-battleship Graf Spee; the troops and the crews of the `little ships' who turned defeat into moral victory at Dunkirk.

In archetypal terms what these new national heroes represented was the `light masculine': strength and bravery made positive by the fact that, like the indomitable will of Churchill himself, it was being exercised selflessly. But behind this was the spirit of a whole nation, welded together in common cause, showing `the spirit of the Blitz' and determined that, come what may, it would stand up to this assault by the forces of darkness until final victory was assured.

The real archetype now coming into play in British life was that of the Self: giving each individual a part to play in a cosmic battle between the powers of darkness and those of light. Men were again liberated to play a fully masculine role. Women could again become feminine, courageously representing those values of heart and soul for which so much was now being risked. Everyone was caught up in the new-found national spirit. From the King and Queen, venturing out from a bomb-damaged Buckingham Palace to tour the blitzed slums of London's East End, down to a country village clustered round its ancient church or the shipyards of the `Red Clyde, the British people had never before felt so united: as was nowhere better symbolised than by the eagerness with which they clustered round radio sets to listen to the speeches of the robust `father-figure' who was now their leader.

The reason why an entire nation could become possessed by the archetype in this way was that the `dark power' they were up against so obviously represented its opposite: a complete inversion of the Self. Much more than in the First World War, the `enemy, personified in Hitler's evil genius, now represented unalloyed darkness. By so clearly representing the extreme dark pole of the human psyche, this had now constellated in the hearts and minds of the British people the archetype which was its light opposite.

We have noted before how the Second World War was to give rise to immeasurably more `stories, from fictional films and novels to factual documentaries, than any other event in history. One reason for this was that, in real life, the war was made up of countless individual episodes, air and sea battles, campaigns on land, each of which in due course could lend itself to retelling as a story in its own right. But what really made this possible, apart from the fact that advances in technology made World War Two much more far-reaching and fast-moving than its predecessor, was precisely that the conduct of the Germans and their Japanese allies, so much more obviously than in World War One, cast them so unequivocally into the archetypal role of the `monster'.

This was why, first for the British, then for their other allies, the pattern which shaped their emotional response to the war was that of participation in a huge, real-life Overcoming the Monster story: an archetypal drama in which everyone felt involved, and which