This week the war was a year old. Twelve months of anguish had trespassed on human hope. Young men with smiles had been struck down, boundaries had been swept aside as lightly as snow, loyalties had cringed and sickened, the whole world had learned to fear, suspect, hate. Among other things it had become plain that while Germans were without question the most meticulous, thorough, shrewd, methodical fighters in the world, Britons had dug down to the marrow of each British bone and to the ganglion of each British nerve, and demonstrated that despite gross muddleheadedness and inefficiency, Britain could fight.
The year's greatest irony was that Britons expected bombs in the year's first days but got them only in the last. Although war caught Britain unprepared, there was no panic. Munich, the most exhausting psychological experience a nation ever endured, had dulled the British capacity to react. The mood of Britain in the first week of September 1939 was utter depression. Win or lose, for better or for worse, the Britain they had known was ended. Instinctively all knew it.
A year ago in Britain the first thought was for protection. Shelter-building became a major industry. Civilians papered their windows, painted their curbs and even their horses and cows for blackout.
As international order gave way to universal insanity, even the laws of nature got mixed up. In Newcastle, 700 blind people offered to act as guides during total blackouts.
Britons were reluctant to give up their little luxuries—weekends at Brighton, afternoons messing about in the rose garden, outings with the children to Kew Gardens or the Zoo, drinks and darts in the pub around the corner. Being endowed with exaggerated poetic imagination, the nation got a mild case of "crisis stomach" worrying about bombing and gassing, about Mr. Chamberlain and what would happen after the war. But through it all ran a thin wire of pluck, which showed itself best in humor. Those were the days when a West End druggist put a placard in his window: "Bismuth as usual during altercations."
But Hitler let the British down; nothing happened. There grew up the curious notion that they could win the war "comfortably." Sacrifice on a national scale was not asked, hence not made. For eight precious months Britain slept on, until there was a rude noise in Norway.
Now the story was different. Bombs had begun to fall, by day and by night. The paraphernalia of A. R. P. were part of the landscape. Everyone was doing his bit—even the gentlewomen who practiced rifle shooting against the day when parachutists might land in their rose gardens. The amateur spirit was unconquerable.
"They'll be easier than grouse," remarked one post-debutante. "Too bad we can't eat them."