56. Poetry and the Microphone

About a year ago I and a number of others were engaged in broadcasting literary programmes to India, and among other things we broadcast a good deal of verse by contemporary and near-contemporary English writers — for example, Eliot, Herbert Read, Auden, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, Alex Comfort, Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden, D. H. Lawrence. Whenever it was possible we had poems broadcast by the people who wrote them. Just why these particular programmes (a small and remote outflanking movement in the radio war) were instituted there is no need to explain here, but I should add that the fact that we were broadcasting to an Indian audience dictated our technique to some extent. The essential point was that our literary broadcasts were aimed at the Indian university students, a small and hostile audience, unapproachable by anything that could be described as British propaganda. It was known in advance that we could not hope for more than a few thousand listeners at the most, and this gave us an excuse to be more “highbrow” than is generally possible on the air.

If you are broadcasting poetry to people who know your language but don’t share your cultural background, a certain amount of comment and explanation is unavoidable, and the formula we usually followed was to broadcast what purported to be a monthly literary magazine. The editorial staff were supposedly sitting in their office, discussing what to put into the next number. Somebody suggested one poem, someone else suggested another, there was a short discussion and then came the poem itself, read in a different voice, preferably the author’s own. This poem naturally called up another, and so the programme continued, usually with at least half a minute of discussion between any two items. For a half-hour programme, six voices seemed to be the best number. A programme of this sort was necessarily somewhat shapeless, but it could be given a certain appearance of unity by making it revolve round a single central theme. For example, one number of our imaginary magazine was devoted to the subject of war. It included two poems by Edmund Blunden, Auden’s “September 1941”, extracts from a long poem by G. S. Fraser (“A Letter to Anne Ridler”), Byron’s “Isles of Greece” and an extract from T. E. Lawrence’s Revolt in the Desert. These half-dozen items, with the arguments that preceded and followed them, covered reasonably well the possible attitudes towards war. The poems and the prose extract took about twenty minutes to broadcast, the arguments about eight minutes.

This formula may seem slightly ridiculous and also rather patronizing, but its

advantage is that the element of mere instruction, the textbook motif, which is quite unavoidable if one is going to broadcast serious and sometimes “difficult” verse, becomes a lot less forbidding when it appears as an informal discussion. The various speakers can ostensibly say to one another what they are in reality saying to the audience. Also, by such an approach you at least give a poem a context, which is just what poetry lacks from the average man’s point of view. But of course there are other methods. One which we frequently used was to set a poem in music. It is announced that in a few minutes’ time such and such a poem will be broadcast; then the music plays for perhaps a minute, then fades out into the poem, which follows without any title or announcement, then the music is faded in again and plays up for another minute or two — the whole thing taking perhaps five minutes. It is necessary to choose appropriate music, but needless to say, the real purpose of the music is to insulate the poem from the rest of the programme. By this method you can have, say, a Shakespeare sonnet within three minutes of a news bulletin without, at any rate to my ear, any gross incongruity.

These programmes that I have been speaking of were of no great value in themselves, but I have mentioned them because of the ideas they aroused in myself and some others about the possibilities of the radio as a means of popularizing poetry. I was early struck by the fact that the broadcasting of a poem by the person who wrote it does not merely produce an effect upon the audience, if any, but also on the poet himself. One must remember that extremely little in the way of broadcasting poetry has been done in England, and that many people who write verse have never even considered the idea of reading it aloud. By being set down at a microphone, especially if this happens at all regularly, the poet is brought into a new relationship with his work, not otherwise attainable in our time and country. It is a commonplace that in modern times — the last two hundred years, say — poetry has come to have less and less connexion either with music or with the spoken word. It needs print in order to exist at all, and it is no more expected that a poet, as such, will know how to sing or even to declaim than it is expected that an architect will know how to plaster a ceiling. Lyrical and rhetorical poetry have almost ceased to be written, and a hostility towards poetry on the part of the common man has come to be taken for granted in any country where everyone can read. And where such a breach exists it is always inclined to widen, because the concept of poetry as primarily something printed, and something intelligible only to a minority, encourages obscurity and “cleverness”. How many people do not feel quasi-instinctively that there must be something wrong with any poem whose meaning can be taken in at a single glance? It seems unlikely that these tendencies will be checked unless it again becomes normal to read verse aloud, and it is difficult to see how this can be brought about except by using the radio as a medium. But the special advantage of the radio, its power to select the right audience, and to do away with stage-fright and embarrassment, ought here to be noticed.

In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of one. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually. More than this, it is reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably sympathetic, the audience has no power over you. It is just here that a broadcast differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public

speaking knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known as “personality”. If you don’t do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid embarrassment. That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob. And it is at bottom the same difficulty — the fact that a theatre audience is not a selected one — that makes it impossible to get a decent performance of Shakespeare in England. On the air these conditions do not exist. The poet feels that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as sound rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer.

It already exists at the poet’s end of the aether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

However, what is happening at the other end cannot be disregarded. It will be seen that I have been speaking as though the whole subject of poetry were embarrassing, almost indecent, as though popularizing poetry were essentially a strategic manoeuvre, like getting a dose of medicine down a child’s throat or establishing tolerance for a persecuted sect. But unfortunately that or something like it is the case. There can be no doubt that in our civilization poetry is by far the most discredited of the arts, the only art, indeed, in which the average man refuses to discern any value. Arnold Bennett was hardly exaggerating when he said that in the English-speaking countries the word “poetry” would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose. And as I have pointed out, a breach of this kind tends to widen simply because of its existence, the common man becoming more and more anti-poetry, the poet more and more arrogant and unintelligible, until the divorce between poetry and popular culture is accepted as a sort of law of nature, although in fact it belongs only to our own time and to a comparatively small area of the earth. We live in an age in which the average human being in the highly civilized countries is aesthetically inferior to the lowest savage. This state of affairs is generally looked upon as being incurable by any conscious act, and on the other hand is expected to right itself of its own accord as soon as society takes a comelier shape. With slight variations the Marxist, the Anarchist and the religious believer will all tell you this, and in broad terms it is undoubtedly true. The ugliness amid which we live has spiritual and economic causes and is not to be explained by the mere going-astray of tradition at some point or other. But it does not follow that no improvement is possible within our present framework, nor that an aesthetic improvement is not a necessary part of the general redemption of society. It is worth stopping to wonder, therefore, whether it would not be possible even now to rescue poetry from its special position as the most hated of the arts and win for it at least the same degree of toleration as exists for music. But one has to start by asking, in what way and to what extent is poetry unpopular?

 

On the face of it, the unpopularity of poetry is as complete as it could be. But on second thoughts, this has to be qualified in a rather peculiar way. To begin with, there is still an appreciable amount of folk poetry (nursery rhymes etc.) which is universally known and quoted and forms part of the background of everyone’s mind. There is also a handful of ancient songs and ballads which have never gone out of favour. In addition there is the popularity, or at least the toleration, of “good bad” poetry, generally of a patriotic or sentimental kind. This might seem beside the point if it were not that “good bad” poetry has all the characteristics which, ostensibly, make the average man dislike true poetry. It is in verse, it rhymes, it deals in lofty sentiments and unusual language -all this to a very marked degree, for it is almost axiomatic that bad poetry is more “poetical” than good poetry. Yet if not actively liked it is at least tolerated. For example, just before writing this I have been listening to a couple of B.B.C. comedians doing their usual turn before the 9 o’clock news. In the last three minutes one of the two comedians suddenly announces that he “wants to be serious for a moment” and proceeds to recite a piece of patriotic balderdash entitled “A Fine Old English Gentleman”, in praise of His Majesty the King. Now, what is the reaction of the audience to this sudden lapse into the worst sort of rhyming heroics? It cannot be very violently negative, or there would be a sufficient volume of indignant letters to stop the B.B.C. doing this kind of thing. One must conclude that though the big public is hostile to poetry, it is not strongly hostile to verse. After all, if rhyme and metre were disliked for their own sakes, neither songs nor dirty limericks could be popular. Poetry is disliked because it is associated with unintelligibility, intellectual pretentiousness and a general feeling of Sunday-on-a-weekday. Its name creates in advance the same sort of bad impression as the word “God”, or a parson’s dog-collar. To a certain extent, popularizing poetry is a question of breaking down an acquired inhibition. It is a question of getting people to listen instead of uttering a mechanical raspberry. If true poetry could be introduced to the big public in such a way as to make it seem normal, as that piece of rubbish I have just listened to presumably seemed normal, then part of the prejudice against it might be overcome.

It is difficult to believe that poetry can ever be popularized again without some deliberate effort at the education of public taste, involving strategy and perhaps even subterfuge. T. S. Eliot once suggested that poetry, particularly dramatic poetry, might be brought back into the consciousness of ordinary people through the medium of the music hall; he might have added the pantomime, whose vast possibilities do not seem ever to have been completely explored. “Sweeney Agonistes” was perhaps written with some such idea in mind, and it would in fact be conceivable as a music-hall turn, or at least as a scene in a revue. I have suggested the radio as a more hopeful medium, and I have pointed out its technical advantages, particularly from the point of view of the poet. The reason why such a suggestion sounds hopeless at first hearing is that few people are able to imagine the radio being used for the dissemination of anything except tripe. People listen to the stuff that does actually dribble from the loudspeakers of the world, and conclude that it is for that and nothing else that the wireless exists. Indeed the very word “wireless” calls up a picture either of roaring dictators or of genteel throaty voices announcing that three of our aircraft have failed to return. Poetry on the air sounds like the Muses in striped trousers. Nevertheless one ought not to confuse the capabilities of an instrument with the use it is actually put to. Broadcasting is what it is, not because there is something inherently vulgar, silly and dishonest about the whole apparatus of

microphone and transmitter, but because all the broadcasting that now happens all over the world is under the control of governments or great monopoly companies which are actively interested in maintaining the status quo and therefore in preventing the common man from becoming too intelligent. Something of the same kind has happened to the cinema, which, like the radio, made its appearance during the monopoly stage of capitalism and is fantastically expensive to operate. In all the arts the tendency is similar.

More and more the channels of production are under control of bureaucrats, whose aim is to destroy the artist or at least to castrate him. This would be a bleak outlook if it were not that the totalitarianization which is now going on, and must undoubtedly continue to go on, in every country of the world, is mitigated by another process which it was not easy to foresee even as short a time as five years ago.

This is, that the huge bureaucratic machines of which we are all part are beginning to work creakily because of their mere size and their constant growth. The tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it. The modern state needs, for example, pamphlet-writers, poster artists, illustrators, broadcasters, lecturers, film producers, actors, song composers, even painters and sculptors, not to mention psychologists, sociologists, biochemists, mathematicians and what-not. The British Government started the present war with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it; yet after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the B.B.C. and even those who enter the armed forces tend to find themselves after a while in Public Relations or some other essentially literary job. The Government has absorbed these people, unwillingly enough, because it found itself unable to get on without them. The ideal, from the official point of view, would have been to put all publicity into the hands of “safe” people like A. P. Herbert or Ian Hay: but since not enough of these were available, the existing intelligentsia had to be utilized, and the tone and even to some extent the content of official propaganda have been modified accordingly. No one acquainted with the Government pamphlets, A.B.C.A.22 lectures, documentary films and broadcasts to occupied countries which have been issued during the past two years imagines that our rulers would sponsor this kind of thing if they could help it. Only, the bigger the machine of government becomes, the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it. This is perhaps a small consolation, but it is not a despicable one. It means that in countries where there is already a strong liberal tradition, bureaucratic tyranny can perhaps never be complete. The striped-trousered ones will rule, but so long as they are forced to maintain an intelligentsia, the intelligentsia will have a certain amount of autonomy. If the Government needs, for example, documentary films, it must employ people specially interested in the technique of the film, and it must allow them the necessary minimum of freedom; consequently, films that are all wrong from the bureaucratic point of view will always have a tendency to appear. So also with painting, photography, script-writing, reportage, lecturing and all the other arts and half-arts of which a complex modern state has need.

22. The Army Bureau of Current Affairs.

The application of this to the radio is obvious. At present the loudspeaker is the

enemy of the creative writer, but this may not necessarily remain true when the volume and scope of broadcasting increase. As things are, although the B.B.C. does keep up a feeble show of interest in contemporary literature, it is harder to capture five minutes on the air in which to broadcast a poem than twelve hours in which to disseminate lying propaganda, tinned music, stale jokes, faked “discussions” or what-have-you. But that state of affairs may alter in the way I have indicated, and when that time comes serious experiment in the broadcasting of verse, with complete disregard for the various hostile influences which prevent any such thing at present, would become possible. I don’t claim it as certain that such an experiment would have very great results. The radio was bureaucratized so early in its career that the relationship between broadcasting and literature has never been thought out. It is not certain that the microphone is the instrument by which poetry could be brought back to the common people and it is not even certain that poetry would gain by being more of a spoken and less of a written thing.

But I do urge that these possibilities exist, and that those who care for literature might turn their minds more often to this much-despised medium, whose powers for good have perhaps been obscured by the voices of Professor load and Doctor Goebbels.

Written [Autumn 1943]; New Saxon Pamphlet [No. 3, March 1945]; S.J.; E.Y.E.; C.E.

Wartime Diaries

57. Wartime Diary:

28 May 1940 - 28 August 1941

[During the first three years of the war Orwell kept two diaries covering the periods 28 May 1940

to 28 August 1941 and 14 March 1942 to 15 November 1942. Both were handwritten, but the first diary no longer exists in that form, the version of it printed here being the selection that Orwell himself typed up from it. The cuts he made are indicated by five dots. Any cuts made by the editors to avoid repetitions or libel are indicated by three dots or by four dots to coincide with the end of a sentence.

The second diary is taken direct from the handwritten original but the editors have made some cuts to avoid wounding, the feelings of the people mentioned and these cuts are indicated by three or four dots as the case may be.

Orwell refers to many people in these diaries by initials, but only where the editors are certain who is being referred to have the initials been supplied with names.]

28 May 1940

This is the first day on which newspaper posters are definitely discontinued… . .

Half of the front page of the early Star1 devoted to news of the Belgian surrender, the other half to news to the effect that the Belgians are holding out and the King is with

them. This is presumably due to paper shortage. Nevertheless of the early Star’s eight pages, six are devoted to racing.

1. A London evening newspaper of the time.

For days past there has been no real news and little possibility of inferring what is really happening. The seeming possibilities were: (i) that the French were really about to counterattack from the south (ii) that they hoped to do so but that the German bombers were making it impossible to concentrate an army (iii) that the forces in the north were confident of being able to hold on, and it was thought better not to counterattack till the German attack had spent itself, or (iv) that the position in the north was in reality hopeless and the forces there could only fight their way south, capitulate, be destroyed entirely or escape by sea, probably losing very heavily in the process. Now only the fourth alternative seems possible. The French communiqués speak of stabilizing the line along the Somme and Aisne, as though the forces cut off in the north did not exist.

Horrible though it is, I hope the B.E.F.2 is cut to pieces sooner than capitulate.

2. The British Expeditionary Force, i.e. the British troops in France at the time of the fall of France.

People talk a little more of the war, but very little. As always hitherto, it is impossible to overhear any comments on it in pubs etc. Last night E.3 and I went to the pub to hear the 9 o’clock news. The barmaid was not going to have turned it on if we had not asked her, and to all appearances nobody listened.

3. Eileen, Orwell’s wife.

29 May

One has to gather any major news nowadays by means of hints and allusions. The chief sensation last night was that the 9 o’clock news was preceded by a cheer-up talk (quite good) by Duff Cooper,4 to sugar the pill, and that Churchill said in his speech that he would report again on the situation some time at the beginning of next week, and that the House must prepare itself for “dark and heavy tidings”. This presumably means that they are going to attempt a withdrawal, but whether the “dark tidings” mean enormous casualties, a surrender of part of the B.E.F., or what, nobody knows. Heard the news between acts at a more or less highbrow play at the Torch Theatre. The audience listened a good deal more attentively than would have been the case in a pub.

4. Alfred Duff Cooper (1890-1954), Conservative politician, diplomat and author. After his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty through disagreement with Chamberlain over Munich, he became the figurehead of the patriotic Right. Churchill made him Minister of Information in his Government in May 1940. Always a francophile, Duff Cooper became Ambassador to France at the end of the war and was created Viscount Norwich.

E. says the people in the Censorship Department where she works lump all “red”

papers together and look on the Tribune5 as being in exactly the same class as the Daily Worker.6 Recently when the Daily Worker and Action7 were prohibited from export, one

of her fellow-workers asked her, “Do you know this paper, the Daily Worker and Action?”

5. The Socialist weekly, then edited by Raymond Postgate.

6. The English Communist Party daily newspaper.

7. The journal of the British Union of Fascists.

Current rumours: that Beaverbrook8 since his appointment has got 2,000 extra aeroplanes into the air by cutting through bottlenecks. That the air raids, possibly on London, are due to begin in two days’ time. That Hitler’s plan for invading England is to use thousands of speed-boats which can ride over the minefields. That there is a terrible shortage of rifles (this from several sources). That the morale of the ordinary German infantry of the line is pitiably low. That at the time of the Norway business the War Office were so ill-informed as not even to know that the Norwegian nights are short, and imagined that troops which had to disembark in broad daylight would have the cover of darkness.

8. In May Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper proprietor, had been appointed Minister of Aircraft Production by Churchill.

30 May

The B.E.F. are falling back on Dunkirk. Impossible not only to guess how many may get away, but how many are there. Last night a talk on the radio by a colonel who had come back from Belgium, which unfortunately I did not hear, but which from E.’s account of it contained interpolations put in by the broadcaster himself to let the public know the army had been let down (a) by the French (not counterattacking), and (b) by the military authorities at home, by equipping them badly. No word anywhere in the press of recriminations against the French, and Duff Cooper’s broadcast of two nights ago especially warned against this… . . Today’s map looks as if the French contingent in Belgium are sacrificing themselves to let the B.E.F. get away.

Borkenau9 says England is now definitely in the first stage of revolution.

Commenting on this, Connolly10 related that recently a ship was coming away from northern France with refugees on board and a few ordinary passengers. The refugees were mostly children who were in a terrible state after having been machine-gunned etc.

etc. Among the passengers was Lady –—, who tried to push herself to the head of the queue to get on the boat, and when ordered back said indignantly, “Do you know who I am?” The steward answered, “I don’t care who you are, you bloody bitch. You can take your turn in the queue.” Interesting if true.

9. Franz Borkenau, writer and refugee from Hitler Germany, author of The Spanish Cockpit and The Communist International. See I, 101 and 138.

10. Cyril Connolly (1903- ), the writer and critic, a lifelong friend of Orwell, editor of Horizon 1940-50.

Still no evidence of any interest in the war. Yet the by-elections, responses to appeals for men, etc. show what people’s feelings are. It is seemingly quite impossible for them to grasp that they are in danger, although there is good reason to think that the

invasion of England may be attempted within a few days, and all the papers are saying this. They will grasp nothing until the bombs are dropping. Connolly says they will then panic, but I don’t think so.

31 May

Last night to see Denis Ogden’s play The Peaceful Inn. The most fearful tripe.

The interesting point was that though the play was cast in 1940, it contained no reference direct or indirect to the war.

Struck by the fewness of the men who even now have been called up. As a rule, looking round the street, it is impossible to see a uniform… . . Barbed wire entanglements are being put up at many strategic points, e.g. beside the Charles I statue in Trafalgar Square… . . Have heard on so many sides of the shortage of rifles that I believe it must be true.

1 June

Last night to Waterloo and Victoria to see whether I could get any news of [Eric].11 Quite impossible, of course. The men who have been repatriated have orders not to speak to civilians and are in any case removed from the railway stations as promptly as possible. Actually I saw very few British soldiers, i.e. from the B.E.F., but great numbers of Belgian or French refugees, a few Belgian or French soldiers, and some sailors, including a few naval men. The refugees seemed mostly middling people of the shopkeeper-clerk type, and were in quite good trim, with a certain amount of personal belongings. One family had a parrot in a huge cage. One refugee woman was crying, or nearly so, but most seemed only bewildered by the crowds and the general strangeness. A considerable crowd was watching at Victoria and had to be held back by the police to let the refugees and others get to the street. The refugees were greeted in silence but all sailors of any description enthusiastically cheered. A naval officer, in a uniform that had been in the water and parts of a soldier’s equipment, hurried towards a bus, smiling and touching his tin hat to either side as the women shouted at him and clapped him on the shoulder.

11. Laurence (Eric) O’Shaughnessy, Eileen Blair’s brother to whom she was greatly attached, an eminent heart and chest surgeon and a major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, was killed in Flanders while awaiting evacuation from Dunkirk. His death was announced in The Times, 8 June 1940.

Saw a company of Marines marching through the station to entrain for Chatham.

Was amazed by their splendid physique and bearing, the tremendous stamp of boots and the superb carriage of the officers, all taking me back to 1914, when all soldiers seemed like giants to me.

This morning’s papers claim variously four fifths and three quarters of the B.E.F.

already removed. Photos, probably selected or faked, show the men in good trim with their equipment fairly intact.

 

2 June

Impossible to tell how many of the B.E.F. have really been repatriated, but statements appearing in various papers suggest that it is about 150,000 and that the number that originally advanced into Belgium was about 300,000. No indication as to how many French troops were with them. There are hints in several papers that it may be intended to hang on to Dunkirk instead of evacuating it completely. This would seem quite impossible without tying down a great number of aeroplanes to that one spot. But if 150,000 have really been removed, it will presumably be possible to remove large numbers more. Italy’s entry into the war is now predicted at any time after 4 June, presumably with some kind of peace offer to give it a pretext… . . General expectation that some attempt will now be made to invade England, if only as a diversion, while Germany and Italy endeavour to polish off France… . . The possibility of a landing in Ireland is evidently believed in by many people including de Valera. This idea has barely been mentioned until the last few days, although it was an obvious one from the start.

The usual Sunday crowds drifting to and fro, perambulators, cycling clubs, people exercising dogs, knots of young men loitering at street corners, with not an indication in any face or in anything that one can overhear that these people grasp that they are likely to be invaded within a few weeks, though today all the Sunday papers are telling them so.

The response to renewed appeals for evacuation of children from London has been very poor. Evidently the reasoning is, “The air raids didn’t happen last time, so they won’t happen this time.” Yet these people will behave bravely enough when the time comes, if only they are told what to do.

Rough analysis of advertisements in today’s issue of the People: 12

12. A popular Sunday newspaper.

Paper consists of 12 pages=84 columns. Of this, just about 26½ columns (over ¼) is advertisements. These are divided up as follows:

Food and drink: 5¾ columns.

Patent medicines: 9⅓.

Tobacco: 1.

Gambling: 2⅓.

Clothes:

Miscellaneous: 6¾.

Of 9 food and drink adverts, 6 are for unnecessary luxuries. Of 29 adverts for medicines, 19 are for things which are either fraudulent (baldness cured etc.), more or less deleterious or of the blackmail type (“Your child’s stomach needs —”). Benefit of doubt has been allowed in the case of a few medicines. Of 14 miscellaneous adverts, 4

are for soap, 1 for cosmetics, 1 for a holiday resort and 2 are government advertisements, including a large one for national savings. Only 3 adverts in all classes are cashing in on the war.

3 June

 

From a letter from Lady Oxford13 to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies:

13. Margot Asquith (1864-1945), widow of Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister 1908-16, created Earl of Oxford and Asquith 1925.

“Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining… . . in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels.”

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 per cent of the population exists.

6 June

Both Borkenau and I considered that Hitler was likely to make his next attack on France, not England, and as it turns out we were right. Borkenau considers that the Dunkirk business has proved once for all that aeroplanes cannot defeat warships if the latter have planes of their own. The figures given out were 6 destroyers and about 25

boats of other kinds lost in the evacuation of nearly 350,000 men. The number of men evacuated is presumably truthful, and even if one doubled the number of ships lost it would not be a great loss for such a large undertaking, considering that the circumstances were about as favourable to the aeroplanes as they could well be.

Borkenau thinks Hitler’s plan is to knock out France and demand the French fleet as part of the peace terms. After that the invasion of England with sea-borne troops might be feasible.

Huge advert on the side of a bus: “FIRST AID IN WARTIME FOR HEALTH, STRENGTH AND FORTITUDE. WRIGLEY’S CHEWING GUM”.

7 June

Although newspaper posters are now suppressed, one fairly frequently sees the paper-sellers displaying a poster. It appears that old ones are resuscitated and used, and ones with captions like “R.A.F. raids on Germany” or “Enormous German losses” can be used at almost all times.

8 June

In the middle of a fearful battle in which, I suppose, thousands of men are being killed every day, one has the impression that there is no news. The evening papers are the same as the morning ones, the morning ones are the same as those of the night before, and the radio repeats what is in the papers. As to truthfulness of news, however, there is probably more suppression than downright lying. Borkenau considers that the effect of the radio has been to make war comparatively truthful, and that the only large-scale lying hitherto has been the German claims of British ships sunk. These have certainly been

fantastic. Recently one of the evening papers which had made a note of the German announcements pointed out that in about 10 days the Germans claimed to have sunk 25

capital ships, i.e. 10 more than we ever possessed.

Stephen Spender said to me recently, “Don’t you feel that any time during the past ten years you have been able to foretell events better than, say, the Cabinet?” I had to agree to this. Partly it is a question of not being blinded by class interests etc., e.g. anyone not financially interested could see at a glance the strategic danger to England of letting Germany and Italy dominate Spain, whereas many right-wingers, even professional soldiers, simply could not grasp this most obvious fact. But where I feel that people like us understand the situation better than so-called experts is not in any power to foretell specific events, but in the power to grasp what kind of world we are living in. At any rate, I have known since about 1931 (Spender says he has known since 1929) that the future must be catastrophic. I could not say exactly what wars and revolutions would happen, but they never surprised me when they came. Since 1934 I have known war between England and Germany was coming, and since 1936 I have known it with complete certainty. I could feel it in my belly, and the chatter of the pacifists on the one hand, and the Popular Front people who pretended to fear that Britain was preparing for war against Russia on the other, never deceived me. Similarly, such horrors as the Russian purges never surprised me, because I had always felt that — not exactly that, but something like that — was implicit in Bolshevik rule. I could feel it in their literature… …Who would have believed seven years ago that Winston Churchill had any kind of political future before him? A year ago Cripps14 was the naughty boy of the Labour Party, who expelled him and refused even to hear his defence. On the other hand, from the Conservative point of view he was a dangerous Red. Now he is ambassador in Moscow, the Beaverbrook press having led the cry for his appointment. Impossible to say yet whether he is the right man. If the Russians are disposed to come round to our side, he probably is, but if they are still hostile, it would have been better to send a man who does not admire the Russian régime.

14. Sir Stafford Cripps (1889-1952) started his career as a successful lawyer, becoming a Labour M.P. in 1931. Frequently in trouble with the Labour Party leadership during the thirties, he was considered a brilliant theoretical mind, while his personal austerity and the rigidity of his Socialism gained him respect if not affection. He was Ambassador to Moscow 1940-42. He then joined the War Cabinet in February 1942

as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons and in March-April went as special envoy to India. In October of the same year became Minister of Aircraft Production. In the postwar Labour Government he was Chancellor of the Exchequer 1947-50.

10 June

Have just heard, though it is not in the papers, that Italy has declared war… . .

The allied troops are withdrawing from Norway, the reason given being that they can be used elsewhere and Narvik after its capture was rendered useless to the Germans. But in fact Narvik will not be necessary to them till the winter, it wouldn’t have been much use anyway when Norway had ceased to be neutral, and I shouldn’t have thought the allies had enough troops in Norway to make much difference. The real reason is probably so as not to have to waste warships.

This afternoon I remembered very vividly that incident with the taxi-driver in

Paris in 1936,15 and was going to have written something about it in this diary. But now I feel so saddened that I can’t write it. Everything is disintegrating. It makes me writhe to be writing book reviews etc. at such a time, and even angers me that such time-wasting should still be permitted. The interview at the War Office on Saturday may come to something, if I am clever at faking my way past the doctor. If once in the army, I know by the analogy of the Spanish war, that I shall cease to care about public events. At present I feel as I felt in 1936 when the Fascists were closing in on Madrid, only far worse. But I will write about the taxi-driver some time.

15. See III, 67, where Orwell describes the incident referred to.

12 June

E. and I last night walked through Soho to see whether the damage to Italian shops etc. was as reported. It seemed to have been exaggerated in the newspapers, but we did see, I think, shops which had had their windows smashed. The majority had hurriedly labelled themselves “British”. Gennari’s, the Italian grocer’s, was plastered all over with printed placards saying “This establishment is entirely British”. The Spaghetti House, a shop specializing in Italian foodstuffs, had renamed itself “British Food Shop”. Another shop proclaimed itself Swiss, and even a French restaurant had labelled itself British. The interesting thing is that all these placards must evidently have been printed beforehand and kept in readiness.

… . . Disgusting though these attacks on harmless Italian shopkeepers are, they are an interesting phenomenon, because English people, i.e. people of a kind who would be likely to loot shops, don’t as a rule take a spontaneous interest in foreign politics. I don’t think there was anything of this kind during the Abyssinian war, and the Spanish war simply did not touch the mass of the people. Nor was there any popular move against the Germans resident in England until the last month or two. The low-down, cold-blooded meanness of Mussolini’s declaration of war at that moment must have made an impression even on people who as a rule barely read the newspapers.

13 June

Yesterday to a group conference of the L.D.V.,16 held in the Committee Room at Lord’s17… . . Last time I was at Lord’s must have been at the Eton-Harrow match in 1921. At that time I should have felt that to go into the Pavilion, not being a member of the M.C.C.,17 was on a par with pissing on the altar, and years later would have had some vague idea that it was a legal offence for which you could be prosecuted.

16. Local Defence Volunteers, which later became the Home Guard.

17. Marylebone Cricket Club, whose grounds are at Lord’s, London.

I notice that one of the posters recruiting for the Pioneers, of a foot treading on a swastika with the legend “Step on it”, is cribbed from a Government poster of the Spanish war, i.e. cribbed as to the idea. Of course it is vulgarized and made comic, but its

appearance at any rate shows that the Government are beginning to be willing to learn.

The Communist candidate in the Bow18 by-election got about 500 votes. This a new depth-record, though the Blackshirts have often got less (in one case about 150). The more remarkable because Bow was Lansbury’s19 seat, and might be expected to contain a lot of pacifists. The whole poll was very low, however.

18. A working-class constituency in the East End of London.

19. George Lansbury (1859-1940), Labour M.P. and leader of the Labour Party 1931-5, a fervent advocate of pacifism.

14 June

The Germans are definitely in Paris, one day ahead of schedule. It can be taken as a certainty that Hitler will go to Versailles. Why don’t they mine it and blow it up while he is there? Spanish troops have occupied Tangier, obviously with a view to letting the Italians use it as a base. To conquer Spanish Morocco from French Morocco would probably be easy at this date, and to do so, ditto the other Spanish colonies, and set up Negrin20 or someone of his kind as an alternative government, would be a severe blow at Franco. But even the present British Government would never think of doing such a thing. One has almost lost the power of imagining that the Allied governments can ever take the initiative.

20. Juan Negrin, Prime Minister of the Spanish Government during the last phase of the Civil War, after which he set up a Spanish Government in exile.

Always, as I walk through the Underground stations, sickened by the advertisements, the silly staring faces and strident colours, the general frantic struggle to induce people to waste labour and material by consuming useless luxuries or harmful drugs. How much rubbish this war will sweep away, if only we can hang on throughout the summer. War is simply a reversal of civilized life; its motto is “Evil be thou my good”, and so much of the good of modern life is actually evil that it is questionable whether on balance war does harm.

15 June

It has just occurred to me to wonder whether the fall of Paris means the end of the Albatross Library,21 as I suppose it does. If so, I am £30 to the bad. It seems incredible that people still attach any importance to long-term contracts, stocks and shares, insurance policies, etc. in such times as these. The sensible thing to do now would be to borrow money right and left and buy solid goods. A short while back E. made inquiries about the hire-purchase terms for sewing machines and found they had agreements stretching over two and a half years.

21. One of the earliest paperback publishers in Paris producing books in English for the continental market.

Their publications included many of the most interesting books of the time, several of which were banned in Britain.

 

P.W.22 related that Unity Mitford,23 besides having tried to shoot herself while in Germany, is going to have a baby. Whereupon a little man with a creased face, whose name I forget, exclaimed, “The Fuehrer wouldn’t do such a thing!”

22. Victor William (Peter) Watson (1908-56), a rich young man who after much travel decided in about 1939 to devote his life to the arts. He was co-founder with his friend Cyril Connolly of the magazine Horizon which he financed himself besides providing all the material for the art section. In 1948 he was one of the founders of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was always an admirer of Orwell’s writing.

23. The Hon. Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914-48), fourth daughter of the second Lord Redesdale. From 1934, when she first met Hitler, she was his admirer. In January 1940 she was brought back to England from Germany suffering from bullet wounds in the head. Thereafter she lived in retirement.

16 June

This morning’s papers make it reasonably clear that, at any rate until after the Presidential election, the U.S.A. will not do anything, i.e. will not declare war, which in fact is what matters. For, if the U.S.A. is not actually in the war, there will never be sufficient control of either business or labour to speed up production of armaments. In the last war this was the case even when the U.S.A. was a belligerent.

It is impossible even yet to decide what to do in the case of German conquest of England. The one thing I will not do is to clear out, at any rate not further than Ireland, supposing that to be feasible. If the fleet is intact and it appears that the war is to be continued from America and the Dominions, then one must remain alive if possible, if necessary in the concentration camp. If the U.S.A. is going to submit to conquest as well, there is nothing for it but to die fighting, but one must above all die fighting and have the satisfaction of killing somebody else first.

Talking yesterday to M., one of the Jewish members of my L.D.V. section, I said that if and when the present crisis passed there would be a revolt in the Conservative Party against Churchill and an attempt to force wages down again, etc. He said that in that case there would be revolution, “or at least he hoped so”. M. is a manufacturer and I imagine fairly well off.

17 June

The French have surrendered. This could be foreseen from last night’s broadcast and in fact should have been foreseeable when they failed to defend Paris, the one place where it might have been possible to stop the German tanks. Strategically all turns on the French fleet, of which there is no news yet… . .

Considerable excitement today over the French surrender, and people everywhere to be heard discussing it. Usual line, “Thank God we’ve got a navy”. A Scottish private, with medals of the last war, partly drunk, making a patriotic speech in a carriage in the Underground, which the other passengers seemed rather to like. Such a rush on evening papers that I had to make four attempts before getting one.

Nowadays, when I write a review, I sit down at the typewriter and type it straight out. Till recently, indeed till six months ago, I never did this and would have said that I

could not do it. Virtually all that I wrote was written at least twice, and my books as a whole three times — individual passages as many as five or ten times. It is not really that I have gained in facility, merely that I have ceased to care, so long as the work will pass inspection and bring in a little money. It is a deterioration directly due to the war.

Considerable throng at Canada House, where I went to make inquiries, as G.24

contemplates sending her child to Canada. Apart from mothers, they are not allowing anyone between 16 and 60 to leave, evidently fearing a panic rush.

24. Gwen O’Shaughnessy, widow of Laurence (Eric), Eileen Blair’s brother.

20 June

Went to the office of the –— to see what line they are taking about home defence.

C., who is now in reality the big noise there, was rather against the “arm the people” line and said that its dangers outweighed its possible advantages. If a German invading force finds civilians armed it may commit such barbarities as will cow the people altogether and make everyone anxious to surrender. He said it was dangerous to count on ordinary people being courageous and instances the case of some riot in Glasgow when a tank was driven round the town and everyone fled in the most cowardly way. The circumstances were different, however, because the people in that case were unarmed and, as always in internal strife, conscious of fighting with ropes round their necks… . . C. said that he thought Churchill, though a good man up to a point, was incapable of doing the necessary thing and turning this into a revolutionary war, and for that reason shielded Chamberlain and Co. and hesitated to bring the whole nation into the struggle. I don’t of course think Churchill sees it in quite the same colours as we do, but I don’t think he would jib at any step (e.g. equalization of incomes, independence for India) which he thought necessary for winning the war. Of course it’s possible that today’s secret session may achieve enough to get Chamberlain and Co. out for good. I asked C. what hope he thought there was of this, and he said none at all. But I remember that the day the British began to evacuate Namsos25 I asked Bevan26 and Strauss,27 who had just come from the House, what hope there was of this business unseating Chamberlain, and they also said none at all. Yet a week or so later the new government was formed.

25. Seaport in Norway held by the British, April-May 1940, during the unsuccessful Norway campaign.

26. Aneurin (Nye) Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Member of Parliament and Minister of Health in the postwar Labour Government. One of England’s greatest orators, he was loved by the Left and feared and disliked by the Right. He resigned from the Labour Cabinet in 1951 over a split in policy but remained a member of the Party and the symbol of its Socialist aspirations. As a director of Tribune he gave Orwell freedom to write exactly as he pleased even when he wrote against the Labour line of the moment, e.g., when Orwell denounced the Soviet régime during the crucial phases of the Russo-British war effort. In 1949 Orwell said to a friend, “If only I could become Nye’s éminence grise we’d soon have this country on its feet.”

27. G. R. Strauss, a Labour M.P. and co-director, with his friend Aneurin Bevan, of Tribune.

The belief in direct treachery in the higher command is now widespread, enough so to be dangerous… . . Personally I believe that such conscious treachery as exists is only in the proFascist element of the aristocracy and perhaps in the army command. Of

course the unconscious sabotage and stupidity which have got us into this situation, e.g.

the idiotic handling of Italy and Spain, is a different matter. R. H.28 says that private soldiers back from Dunkirk whom he has spoken to all complain of the conduct of their officers, saying that the latter cleared off in cars and left them in the soup, etc. etc. This sort of thing is always said after a defeat and may or may not be true. One could verify it by studying the lists of casualties, if and when they are published in full. But it is not altogether bad that that sort of thing should be said, provided it doesn’t lead to sudden panic, because of the absolute need for getting the whole thing onto a new class basis. In the new armies middle-class people are bound to predominate as officers, they did so even, for instance, in the Spanish militias, but it is a question of unblimping. Ditto with the L.D.V. Under the stress of emergency we shall unblimp if we have time, but time is all.

28. Rayner Heppenstall.

A thought that occurred to me yesterday: how is it that England, with one of the smallest armies in the world, has so many retired colonels?

I notice that all the “left” intellectuals I meet believe that Hitler, if he gets here, will take the trouble to shoot people like ourselves and will have very extensive lists of undesirables. C.29 says there is a move on foot to get our police records (no doubt we all have them) at Scotland Yard destroyed. Some hope! The police are the very people who would go over to Hitler once they were certain he had won. Well, if only we can hold out for a few months, in a year’s time we shall see red militia billeted in the Ritz, and it would not particularly surprise me to see Churchill or Lloyd George at the head of them.

29. Cyril Connolly.

Thinking always of my islands in the Hebrides, which I suppose I shall never possess nor even see. Compton Mackenzie says even now most of the islands are uninhabited (there are 500 of them, only 10 per cent inhabited at normal times), and most have water and a little cultivable land, and goats will live on them. According to R. H. a woman who rented an island in the Hebrides in order to avoid air raids was the first air-raid casualty of the war, the R.A.F. dropping a bomb there by mistake. Good if true.

The first air raid of any consequence on Great Britain the night before last.

Fourteen killed, seven German aeroplanes claimed shot down. The papers have photos of three wrecked German planes, so possibly the claim is true.

21 June

No real news. I see from yesterday’s paper that Chiappe30 has been elected president of the Paris Municipal Council, presumably under German pressure. So much for the claim that Hitler is the friend of the working classes, enemy of plutocracy, etc.

30. Jean Chiappe (1878-1940), Corsican head of the Paris Police 1927-34; proFascist, responsible for severely repressive measures against the Left.

 

Yesterday the first drill of our platoon of the L.D.V. They were really admirable, only 3 or 4 in the whole lot (about 60 men) who were not old soldiers. Some officers who were there and had, I think, come to scoff were quite impressed.

22 June

No real news yet of the German terms to France. They are said to be “so complicated” as to need long discussion. I suppose one may assume that what is really happening is that the Germans on the one side and Pétain and Co. on the other are trying to hammer out a formula that will induce the French commanders in the colonies and the navy to surrender. Hitler has in reality no power over these except through the French government… . . I think we have all been rather hasty in assuming that Hitler will now invade England, indeed it has been so generally expected that one might almost infer from this that he wouldn’t do it… . . If I were him I should march across Spain, seize Gibraltar and then clean up North Africa and Egypt. If the British have a fluid force of say ¼ million men, the proper course would be to transfer it to French Morocco, then suddenly seize Spanish Morocco and hoist the Republican flag. The other Spanish colonies could be mopped up without much trouble. Alas, no hope of any such thing happening.

The Communists are apparently swinging back to an anti-Nazi position. This morning picked up a leaflet denouncing the “betrayal” of France by Pétain and Co., although till a week or two ago these people were almost openly pro-German.

24 June

The German armistice terms are much as expected… . . What is interesting about the whole thing is the extent to which the traditional pattern of loyalties and honour is breaking down. Pétain, ironically enough, is the originator (at Verdun) of the phrase “ils ne passeront pas”, so long an anti-Fascist slogan. Twenty years ago any Frenchman who would have signed such an armistice would have had to be either an extreme leftwinger or an extreme pacifist, and even then there would have been misgivings. Now the people who are virtually changing sides in the middle of the war are the professional patriots. To Pétain, Laval, Flandin and Co. the whole war must have seemed like a lunatic internecine struggle at the moment when your real enemy is waiting to slosh you… . . It is therefore practically certain that high-up influences in England are preparing for a similar sell-out, and while e.g. –— is at –— there is no certainty that they won’t succeed even without the invasion of England. The one good thing about the whole business is that the bottom is being knocked out of Hitler’s pretence of being the poor man’s friend. The people actually willing to do a deal with him are bankers, generals, bishops, kings, big industrialists, etc.

etc. … . Hitler is the leader of a tremendous counterattack of the capitalist class, which is forming itself into a vast corporation, losing its privileges to some extent in doing so, but still retaining its power over the working class. When it comes to resisting such an attack as this, anyone who is of the capitalist class must be treacherous or half-treacherous, and will swallow the most fearful indignities rather than put up a real fight. .

 

… Whichever way one looks, whether it is at the wider strategic aspects or the most petty details of local defence, one sees that any real struggle means revolution. Churchill evidently can’t see or won’t accept this, so he will have to go. But whether he goes in time to save England from conquest depends on how quickly the people at large can grasp the essentials. What I fear is that they will never move until it is too late.

Strategically, all turns upon hanging on until the winter. By that time, with huge armies of occupation everywhere, food almost certainly running short and the difficulty of forcing the conquered populations to work, Hitler must be in an awkward position. It will be interesting to see whether he rehabilitates the suppressed French Communist Party and tries to use it against the working class in northern France as he has used Pétain against the Blimp class.

If the invasion happens and fails, all is well, and we shall have a definitely leftwing government and a conscious movement against the governing class. I think, though, people are in error in imagining that Russia would be more friendly towards us if we had a revolutionary government. After Spain, I cannot help feeling that Russia, i.e. Stalin, must be hostile to any country that is genuinely undergoing revolution. They would be moving in opposite directions. A revolution starts off with wide diffusion of the ideas of liberty, equality, etc. Then comes the growth of an oligarchy which is as much interested in holding onto its privileges as any other governing class. Such an oligarchy must necessarily be hostile to revolutions elsewhere, which inevitably reawaken the ideas of liberty and equality. This morning’s News Chronicle announces that saluting of superior ranks has been reinstituted in the Red army. A revolutionary army would start by abolishing saluting, and this tiny point is symptomatic of the whole situation. Not that saluting and such things are not probably necessary.

Orders to the L.D.V. that all revolvers are to be handed over to the police, as they are needed for the army. Clinging to useless weapons like revolvers, when the Germans have submachine guns, is typical of the British army, but I believe the real reason for the order is to prevent weapons getting into the “wrong” hands.

Both E. and G. insistent that I should go to Canada if the worst comes to the worst, in order to stay alive and keep up propaganda. I will go if I have some function, e.g. if the government were transferred to Canada and I had some kind of job, but not as a refugee, nor as an expatriate journalist squealing from a safe distance. There are too many of these exiled “anti-Fascists” already. Better to die if necessary, and maybe even as propaganda one’s death might achieve more than going abroad and living more or less unwanted on other people’s charity. Not that I want to die; I have so much to live for, in spite of poor health and having no children.

Another government leaflet this morning, on treatment of air-raid casualties. The leaflets are getting much better in tone and language, and the broadcasts are also better, especially Duff Cooper’s, which in fact are ideal for anyone down to the £5 a week level.

But there is still nothing in really demotic speech, nothing that will move the poorer working class or even be quite certainly intelligible. Most educated people simply don’t realize how little impression abstract words make on the average man. When Acland was sending round his asinine “Manifesto of Plain Men” (written by himself and signed on the dotted line by “plain men” whom he selected) he told me he had the first draft vetted by the Mass Observers, who tried it on working men, and found that the most fantastic misunderstandings arose… . . The first sign that things are really happening in England

will be the disappearance of that horrible plummy voice from the radio. Watching in public bars, I have noticed that working men only pay attention to the broadcasts when some bit of demotic speech creeps in. E. however claims, with some truth I think, that uneducated people are often moved by a speech in solemn language which they don’t actually understand but feel to be impressive, e.g. Mrs A. is impressed by Churchill’s speeches, though not understanding them word for word.

25 June

Last night an air-raid warning about 1 a.m. It was a false alarm as regards London, but evidently there was a real raid somewhere. We got up and dressed, but did not bother to go to the shelter. This is what everyone did, i.e. got up and then simply stood about talking, which seems very foolish. But it seems natural to get up when one hears the siren, and then in the absence of gunfire or other excitement one is ashamed to go to the shelter.

I saw in one of yesterday’s papers that gas masks are being issued in America, though people have to pay for them. Gas masks are probably useless to the civilian population in England and almost certainly so in America. The issue of them is simply a symbol of national solidarity, the first step towards wearing a uniform… . . As soon as war started the carrying or not carrying of a gas mask assumed social and political implications. In the first few days people like myself who refused to carry one were stared at and it was generally assumed that the non-carriers were “left”. Then the habit wore off, and the assumption was that a person who carried a gas mask was of the ultra-cautious type, the suburban rate-payer type. With the bad news the habit has revived and I should think 20 per cent now carry them. But you are still a little stared at if you carry one without being in uniform. Until the big raids have happened and it is grasped that the Germans don’t, in fact, use gas, the extent to which masks are carried will probably be a pretty good index of the impression the war news is making on the public.

Went this afternoon to the recruiting office to put my name down for the Home Service Battalions. Have to go again on Friday to be medically examined, but as it is for men from 30 to 50 I suppose the standards are low. The man who took my name etc., was the usual imbecile, an old soldier with medals of the last war, who could barely write. In writing capital letters, he more than once actually wrote them upside down.

27 June

It appears that the night before last, during the air-raid alarm, many people all over London were woken by the All Clear signal, took that for the warning and went to the shelters and stayed there till morning, waiting for the All Clear. This after ten months of war and God knows how many explanations of the air-raid precautions.

The fact that the Government hasn’t this time had to do a recruiting campaign has had a deadening effect on propaganda… . . A striking thing is the absence of any propaganda posters of a general kind, dealing with the struggle against Fascism, etc. If only someone would show the M.O.I. the posters used in the Spanish war, even the

Franco ones for that matter. But how can these people possibly rouse the nation against Fascism when they themselves are subjectively proFascist and were buttering up Mussolini till almost the moment when Italy entered the war? Butler,31 answering questions about the Spanish occupation of Tangier, says H.M. Government has “accepted the word” of the Spanish Government that the Spaniards are only doing so in order to preserve Tangier’s neutrality — this after Falangist demonstrations in Madrid to celebrate the “conquest” of Tangier… . . This morning’s papers publish a “denial” that Hoare32 in Madrid is asking questions about an armistice. In other words he is doing so. Only question — can we get rid of these people in the next few weeks, before it is too late?

31. R. A. Butler (1902- ), Conservative politician, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1938-41. Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Foreign Secretary in the Conservative Government of 1951-64.

32. Sir Samuel Hoare, Bt, Viscount Templewood (1880-1959), politician and lawyer of extreme rightwing views, at this time British Ambassador to Spain. As Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1935 he appeased Italy in the Italo-Ethiopian war, negotiating the Hoare-Laval Pact handing Ethiopia over to Italy despite existing international agreements.

The unconscious treacherousness of the British ruling class in what is in effect a class war is too obvious to be worth mentioning. The difficult question is how much deliberate treachery exists… . . L. M.,33 who knows or at least has met all these people, says that with individual exceptions like Churchill the entire British aristocracy is utterly corrupt and lacking in the most ordinary patriotism, caring in fact for nothing except preserving their own standards of life. He says they are also intensely class-conscious and recognize clearly the community of their interests with those of rich people elsewhere.

The idea that Mussolini might fall has always been a nightmare to them, he says. Up to date L. M.’s predictions about the war, made the day it began, have been very correct. He said nothing would happen all the winter, Italy would be treated with great respect and then suddenly come in against us, and the German aim would be to force on England a puppet government through which Hitler could rule Britain without the mass of the public grasping what was happening… . . The only point where L. M. proved wrong is that like myself he assumed Russia would continue to collaborate with Germany, which now looks as if it may not happen. But then the Russians probably did not expect France to collapse so suddenly. If they can bring it off, Pétain and Co. are working the same kind of doublecross against Russia as Russia previously worked against England. It was interesting that at the time of the Russo-German Pact nearly everyone assumed that the pact was all to Russia’s advantage and that Stalin had in some way “stopped” Hitler, though one had only to look at the map in order to see that this was not so… . . In western Europe Communism and Left extremism generally are now almost entirely a form of masturbation. People who are in fact without power over events console themselves by pretending that they are in some way controlling events. From the Communist point of view, nothing matters so long as they can persuade themselves that Russia is on top. It now seems doubtful whether the Russians gained much more from the pact than a breathing-space, though they did this much better than we did at Munich.

Perhaps England and the U.S.S.R. will be forced into alliance after all, an interesting instance of real interests overriding the most hearty ideological hatred.

33. L. H. Myers (1881-1944), the novelist, author of The Near and the Far.

 

The New Leader34 is now talking about the “betrayal” by Pétain and Co. and the “workers’ struggle” against Hitler. Presumably they would be in favour of a “workers”

resistance if Hitler invaded England. And what will the workers fight with? With weapons. Yet the I.L.P. clamour simultaneously for sabotage in the arms factories. These people live almost entirely in a masturbation fantasy, conditioned by the fact that nothing they say or do will ever influence events, not even the turning-out of a single shell.

34. The organ of the Independent Labour Party.

28 June

Horribly depressed by the way things are turning out. Went this morning for my medical board and was turned down, my grade being C in which they aren’t at present taking any men in any corps… . .What is appalling is the unimaginativeness of a system which can find no use for a man who is below average level of fitness but at least is not an invalid. An army needs an immense amount of clerical work, most of which is done by people who are perfectly healthy and only half-literate… . .

One could forgive the government for failing to employ the intelligentsia, who on the whole are politically unreliable, if they were making any attempt to mobilize the man-power of the nation and change people over from the luxury trades to productive work.

This simply isn’t happening, as one can see by looking down any street.

The Russians entered Bessarabia today. Pratically no interest aroused, and the few remarks I could overhear were mildly approving or at least not hostile. Cf. the intense popular anger over the invasion of Finland. I don’t think the difference is due to a perception that Finland and Rumania are different propositions. It is probably because of our own desperate straits and the notion that this move may embarrass Hitler — as I believe it must, though evidently sanctioned by him.

29 June

The British Government has recognized de Gaulle, but apparently in some equivocal manner, i.e. it has not stated that it will not recognize the Pétain government.

One very hopeful thing is that the press is on our side and retains its independence… . . But contained in this is the difficulty that the “freedom” of the press really means that it depends on vested interests and largely (through its advertisements) on the luxury trades. Newspapers which would resist direct treachery can’t take a strong line about cutting down luxuries when they live by advertising chocolates and silk stockings.

30 June

This afternoon a parade in Regent’s Park of the L.D.V. of the whole “zone”, i.e.

12 platoons of theoretically about 60 men each (actually a little under strength at present).

 

Predominantly old soldiers and, allowing for the dreadful appearance that men drilling in mufti always present, not a bad lot. Perhaps 25 per cent are working class. If that percentage exists in the Regent’s Park area, it must be much higher in some others. What I do not yet know is whether there has been any tendency to avoid raising L.D.V.

contingents in very poor districts where the whole direction would have to be in working-class hands. At present the whole organization is in an anomalous and confused state, which has many different possibilities. Already people are spontaneously forming local defence squads, and hand-grenades are probably being manufactured by amateurs. The higher-ups are no doubt thoroughly frightened by these tendencies… . . The General inspecting the parade was the usual senile imbecile, actually decrepit, and made one of the most uninspiring speeches I ever heard. The men, however, very ready to be inspired.

Loud cheering at the news that rifles have arrived at last.

Yesterday the news of Balbo’s35 death was on the posters as Connolly and the M.s and I walked down the street. C. and I thoroughly pleased, C. relating how Balbo and his friends had taken the Chief of the Senussi up in an aeroplane and thrown him out, and even the M.s (all but pure pacifists) were not ill-pleased, I think. E. also delighted. Later in the evening (I spent the night at Crooms Hill)36 we found a mouse which had slipped down into the sink and could not get up the sides. We went to great pains to make a sort of staircase of boxes of soap flakes etc., by which it could climb out, but by this time it was so terrified that it fled under the lead strip at the edge of the sink and would not move, even when we left it alone for half an hour or so. In the end E. gently took it out with her fingers and let it go. This sort of thing does not matter… . . but when I remember how the Thetis disaster37 upset me, actually to the point of interfering with my appetite, I do think it a dreadful effect of war that one is actually pleased to hear of an enemy submarine going to the bottom.

35. Marshal Balbo, the head of the Italian Air Force responsible for the bombing of Abyssinia in the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935-6.

36. In Greenwich. The home of Gwen O’Shaughnessy.

37. In June 1939 the British submarine Thetis failed to surface from its first dive immediately after its launching. All the crew were drowned.

1 July

… . . Rumours in all today’s papers that Balbo was actually bumped off by his own side, as in the case of General von Fritsch.38 Nowadays when any eminent person is killed in battle this suggestion inevitably arises. Cases in the Spanish war were Durruti39

and General Mola.40 The rumour about Balbo is based on a statement by the R.A.F. that they know nothing about the air-fight in which Balbo is alleged to have been killed. If this is a lie, as it well may be, it is one of the first really good strokes the British propaganda has brought off.

38. General Werner von Fritsch (1880-1939), an old-guard member of the German General Staff who never concealed his contempt for Hitler. His death in action in 1939 was always thought to have been engineered by Hitler.

39. Buenaventura Durruti (1896-1936), head of the Spanish Anarchists at the beginning of the Civil War, a gunman who became a General and popular leader. Killed in the defence of Madrid, possibly by

Communists. His funeral gave rise to a great popular demonstration in Barcelona.

40. General Mola (1887-1937), an equal colleague of Franco under General Sanjurjo, killed in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War before the question of primacy with Franco could arise.

3 July

Everywhere a feeling of something near despair among thinking people because of the failure of the Government to act and the continuance of dead minds and proFascists in positions of command. Growing recognition that the only thing that would certainly right the situation is an unsuccessful invasion; and coupled with this a growing fear that Hitler won’t after all attempt the invasion but will go for Africa and the Near East.

5 July

The almost complete lack of British casualties in the action against the French warships at Oran makes it pretty clear that the French seamen must have refused to serve the guns, orat any rate did so without much enthusiasm… . . In spite of the to-do in the papers about “French fleet out of action” etc. etc., it appears from the list of ships actually given that about half the French navy is not accounted for, and no doubt more than half the submarines. But how many have actually fallen into German or Italian hands, and how many are still on the oceans, there is nothing in the papers to show… . . The frightful outburst of fury by the German radio (if rightly reported, actually calling on the English people to hang Churchill in Trafalgar Square) shows how right it was to make this move.

10 July

They have disabled the French battleship Richelieu, which was in Dakar harbour.

But no move to seize any of the French West African ports, which no doubt are not strongly held… . . According to Vernon Bartlett,41 the Germans are going to make a peace offer along the lines I foresaw earlier, i.e. England to keep out of Europe but retain the Empire, and the Churchill Government to go out and be replaced by one acceptable to Hitler. The presumption is that a faction anxious to agree to this exists in England, and no doubt a shadow cabinet has been formed. It seems almost incredible that anyone should imagine that the mass of the people would tolerate such an arrangement, unless they have been fought to a standstill first… . . The Duke of Windsor has been shipped off as Governor of the Bahamas, virtually a sentence of exile… . .

41. Vernon Bartlett (1894- ), well-known liberal political journalist, for many years on the News Chronicle where he reported on all the world crises connected with Hitler, Mussolini and the Far East.

The book Gollancz has brought out, Guilty Men, the usual “indictment” of the Munich crowd, is selling like hot cakes. According to Time, the American Communists

are working hand in glove with the local Nazis to prevent American arms getting to England. One can’t be sure how much local freedom of action the various Communists have. Till very recently it appeared that they had none. Of late however they have sometimes pursued contradictory policies in different countries. It is possible that they are allowed to abandon the “line” when strict clinging to it would mean extinction.

16 July

No real news for some days, except the British Government’s semi-surrender to Japan, i.e. the agreement to stop sending war supplies along the Burma road for a stated period. This however is not so definite that it could not be revoked by a subsequent government. F. thinks it is the British Government’s last effort (i.e. the last effort of those with investments in Hong Kong etc.) to appease Japan, after which they will be driven into definitely supporting China. It may be so. But what a way to do things — never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest.

W. says that the London “left” intelligentsia are now completely defeatist, look on the situation as hopeless and all but wish for surrender. How easy it ought to have been to foresee, under their Popular Front bawlings, that they would collapse when the real show began.

22 July

No real news for days past. The principal event of the moment is the pan-American conference, now just beginning, and the Russian absorption of the Baltic states, which must be directed against Germany. Cripps’s wife and daughters are going to Moscow, so evidently he expects a long stay there. Spain is said to be importing oil in large quantities, obviously for German use, and we are not stopping it. Much hooey in the News Chronicle this morning about Franco desiring to keep out of war, trying to counter German influence etc. etc. … . It will be just as I said, Franco will play up his pretence of being pro-British, this will be used as a reason for handling Spain gently and allowing imports in any quantity, and ultimately Franco will come in on the German side.

25 July

No news, really… . .Various people who have sent their children to Canada are already regretting it… . . Casualties i.e. fatal ones, from air raids for last month were given out as about 340. If true, this is substantially less than the number of road deaths in the same period… . .The L.D.V., now said to be 1,300,000 strong, is stopping recruiting and is to be renamed the Home Guard. There are rumours also that those acting as N.C.O.s are to be replaced by men from the regular army. This seems to indicate either that the authorities are beginning to take the L.D.V. seriously as a fighting force, or that they are afraid of it.

 

There are now rumours that Lloyd George is the potential Pétain of England… . .

The Italian press makes the same claim and says that L.G.’s silence proves it true. It is of course fairly easy to imagine L.G. playing this part out of sheer spite and jealousy because he has not been given a job, but much less easy to imagine him collaborating with the Tory clique who would in fact be in favour of such a course.

Constantly, as I walk down the street, I find myself looking up at the windows to see which of them would make good machine-gun nests. D. says it is the same with him.

28 July

This evening I saw a heron flying over Baker Street. But this is not so improbable as the thing I saw a week or two ago, i.e. a kestrel killing a sparrow in the middle of Lord’s cricket ground. I suppose it is possible that the war, i.e. the diminution of traffic tends to increase bird life in inner London.

The little man whose name I always forget used to know Joyce,42 of the split-off Fascist party, commonly credited with being Lord Haw-Haw. He says that Joyce hated Mosley43 passionately and talked about him in the most unprintable language. Mosley being Hitler’s chief supporter in England, it is interesting that he should employ Joyce and not one of Mosley’s men. This bears out what Borkenau said, that Hitler does not want a too-strong Fascist party to exist in England. Evidently the motive is always to split, and even to split the splitters. The German press is attacking the Pétain Government, with what motive is not absolutely certain, and so also are elements of the French press under German control. Doriot44 is of course to the fore here. It was a shock to me when the Sunday Times also stated that the Germans in Paris are making use of Bergery.45 But I accept this with caution, knowing how these small dissident Left parties are habitually lied about by the Right and the official Left alike.

42. William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw supposedly from his way of speaking, was an American citizen who never acquired British nationality, although he spent most of his life in England and was a rabid nationalist. He became a Fascist for whom Sir Oswald Mosley’s line was too mild. In August 1939 he went to Germany and in 1940 became a naturalized German. Throughout the early part of the war he broadcast propaganda to England from Germany. He was executed by the British at the end of the war.

43. Sir Oswald Mosley, Bt (1896- ), politician, successively Conservative, Independent and Labour Member of Parliament. In 1931 he broke away from the Labour Party to form the New Party. Later he became fanatically pro-Hitler and turned his party into the British Union of Fascists.

44. Jacques Doriot (1898-1945), French politician who, from being a Communist, became a Fascist leader and active collaborator with the Germans.

45. Gaston Bergery, French deputi, an intellectual, who moved from the extrame Left to the extreme Right and, after the fall of France, became a collaborator.

8 August

The Italian attack on Egypt, or rather on British Somaliland, has begun. No real news yet, but the papers hint that Somaliland can’t be held with the troops we have there.

The important point is Perim, loss of which would practically close the Red Sea.

H. G. Wells knows Churchill well and says that he is a good man, not mercenary

and not even a careerist. He has always lived “like a Russian commissar”, “requisitions”

his motor cars etc., but cares nothing about money. But –— says Churchill has a certain power of shutting his eyes to facts and has the weakness of never wanting to let down a personal friend, which accounts for the non-sacking of various people. –— has already made a considerable row about the persecution of refugees. He considers that the centre of all the sabotage is the War Office. He believes that the jailing of anti-Fascist refugees is a perfectly conscious piece of sabotage based on the knowledge that some of these people are in touch with underground movements in Europe and might at some moment be able to bring about a “Bolshevik” revolution, which from the point of view of the governing class is much worse than defeat. He says that Lord S–- is the man most to blame. I asked him did he think it was a conscious action on Lord –—’s part, this being always the hardest thing to decide. He said he believed Lord –— knows perfectly well what he is doing.

Tonight to a lecture with lantern slides by an officer who had been in the Dunkirk campaign. Very bad lecture. He said the Belgians fought well and it was not true that they surrendered without warning (actually they gave three days’ warning), but spoke badly of the French. He had one photograph of a regiment of Zouaves in full flight after looting houses, one man being dead drunk on the pavement.

9 August

The money situation is becoming completely unbearable… . . Wrote a long letter to the Income Tax people pointing out that the war had practically put an end to my livelihood while at the same time the government refused to give me any kind of job. The fact which is really relevant to a writer’s position, the impossibility of writing books with this nightmare going on, would have no weight officially… . . Towards the government I feel no scruples and would dodge paying the tax if I could. Yet I would give my life for England readily enough, if I thought it necessary. No one is patriotic about taxes.

No real news for days past. Only air battles, in which, if the reports are true, the British always score heavily. I wish I could talk to some R.A.F. officer and get some kind of idea whether these reports are truthful.

16 August

Things are evidently going badly in Somaliland, which is the flanking operation in the attack on Egypt. Enormous air battles over the Channel, with, if the reports are anywhere near the truth, stupendous German losses. E.g. about 145 were reported shot down yesterday… . . The people in inner London could do with one real raid to teach them how to behave. At present everyone’s behaviour is foolish in the extreme, everything except transport being held up but no precautions taken. For the first 15

seconds there is great alarm, blowing of whistles and shouts to children to go indoors, then people begin to congregate on the streets and gaze expectantly at the sky. In the daytime people are apparently ashamed to go into the shelters till they hear the bombs.

On Tuesday and Wednesday had two glorious days at Wallington.46 No

newspapers and no mention of the war. They were cutting the oats and we took Marx47

out both days to help course the rabbits, at which Marx showed unexpected speed. The whole thing took me straight back to my childhood, perhaps the last bit of that kind of life that I shall ever have.

46. A village in Hertfordshire where Orwell had lived since 1936.

47. The Orwells’ dog.

19 August

A feature of the air raids is the extreme credulity of almost everyone about damage done to distant places. George M. arrived recently from Newcastle, which is generally believed here to have been seriously smashed about, and told us that the damage there was nothing to signify. On the other hand he arrived expecting to find London knocked to pieces and his first question on arrival was “whether we had had a very bad time”. It is easy to see how people as far away as America can believe that London is in flames, England starving etc. etc. And at the same time all this raises the presumption that our own raids on western Germany are much less damaging than is reported.

20 August

The papers are putting as good a face as possible upon the withdrawal from Somaliland, which is nevertheless a serious defeat, the first loss of British territory for centuries… . . It’s a pity that the papers (at any rate the News Chronicle, the only one I have seen today) are so resolute in treating the news as good. This might have been made the start of another agitation which would have got some more of the duds out of the government.

Complaints among the Home Guards, now that air raids are getting commoner, because sentries have no tin hats. Explanation from Gen. Macnamara, who tells us that the regular army is still short of 300,000 tin hats — this after nearly a year of war.

22 August

The Beaverbrook press, compared with the headlines I saw on other papers, seems to be playing down the suggestion that Trotsky’s murder was carried out by the G.P.U. In fact today’s Evening Standard, with several separate items about Trotsky, didn’t mention this suggestion. No doubt they still have their eye on Russia and want to placate the Russians at all costs, in spite of Low’s48 cartoons. But under this there may lie a much subtler manoeuvre. The men responsible for the Evening Standard’s present pro-Russian policy are no doubt shrewd enough to know that a Popular Front “line” is not really the way to secure a Russian alliance. But they also know that the mass of leftish opinion in England still takes it for granted that a full anti-Fascist policy is the way to line up Russia on our side. To crack up Russia is therefore a way of pushing public opinion leftward. It

is curious that I always attribute these devious motives to other people, being anything but cunning myself and finding it hard to use indirect methods even when I see the need for them.

48. David Low (1891-1963), Kt, 1962, a political cartoonist of leftwing views who worked first for the Evening Standard and later for the Manchester Guardian.

Today in Portman Square saw a four-wheeler cab, in quite good trim, with a good horse and a cabman quite of the pre-1914 type.

23 August

This morning an air-raid warning about 3 a.m. Got up, looked at the time, then felt unable to do anything and promptly went to sleep again. They are talking of re-arranging the alarm system, and they will have to do so if they are to prevent every alarm from costing thousands of pounds in wasted time, lost sleep etc. The fact that at present the alarm sounds all over a wide area when the German planes are only operating in one part of it, means not only that people are unnecessarily woken up or taken away from work, but that an impression is spread that an air-raid alarm will always be false, which is obviously dangerous.

Have got my Home Guard uniform, after 2½ months.

Last night to a lecture by General –—, who is in command of about a quarter of a million men. He said he had been 41 years in the army. Was through the Flanders campaign, and no doubt limogé for incompetence. Dilating on the Home Guard being a static defensive force, he said contemptuously and in a rather marked way that he saw no use in our practising taking cover, “crawling about on our stomachs”, etc. etc. evidently as a hit at the Osterley Park training school.49 Our job, he said, was to die at our posts.

Was also great on bayonet practice, and hinted that regular army ranks, saluting, etc., were to be introduced shortly… . . These wretched old Blimps, so obviously silly and senile, and so degenerate in everything except physical courage, are merely pathetic in themselves, and one would feel rather sorry for them if they were not hanging round our necks like millstones. The attitude of the rank and file at these would-be pep-talks — so anxious to be enthusiastic, so ready to cheer and laugh at the jokes, and yet all the time half feeling that there is something wrong — always strikes me as pathetic. The time has almost arrived when one will only have to jump up on the platform and tell them how they are being wasted and how the war is being lost, and by whom, for them to rise up and shovel the Blimps into the dustbin. When I watch them listening to one of these asinine talks, I always remember that passage in Samuel Butler’s Notebooks about a young calf he once saw eating dung. It could not quite make up its mind whether it liked the stuff or not, and all it needed was some experienced cow to give it a prod with her horn, after which it would have remembered for life that dung is not good to eat.

49. A training centre for the Home Guard, founded and run by Tom Wintringham with Hugh (Humphrey) Slater, where they taught guerilla warfare and street fighting based on their experiences in the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

 

It occurred to me yesterday, how will the Russian state get on without Trotsky?

Or the Communists elsewhere? Probably they will be forced to invent a substitute.

26 August

(Greenwich.) The raid which occurred on the 24th was the first real raid on London so far as I am concerned, i.e. the first in which I could hear the bombs. We were watching at the front door when the East India docks were hit. No mention of the docks being hit in Sunday’s papers, so evidently they do conceal it when important objectives are hit… . . It was a loudish bang but not alarming and gave no impression of making the earth tremble, so evidently these are not very large bombs that they are dropping. I remember the two big bombs that dropped near Huesca when I was in the hospital at Monflorite. The first, quite 4 kilometres away, made a terrific roar that shook the houses and sent us all fleeing out of our beds in alarm. Perhaps that was a 2,000 lb. [sic] bomb and the ones at present being dropped are 500 lb. ones…

29 August

Air-raid alarms during the last 3 nights have totalled about 16-18 hours for the three nights… . . It is perfectly clear that these night raids are intended chiefly as a nuisance, and as long as it is taken for granted that at the sound of the siren everyone must dive for the shelter, Hitler only needs to send his planes over half-a-dozen at a time to hold up work and rob people of sleep to an indefinite extent. However, this idea is already wearing off… . . For the first time in 20 years I have overheard bus conductors losing their tempers, and being rude to passengers. E.g. the other night, a voice out of the darkness: ” ‘Oo’s conducting this bus, lady, me or you?” It took me straight back to the end of the last war.

… . . E. and I have paid the minimum of attention to raids and I was honestly under the impression that they did not worry me at all except because of the disorganization, etc., that they cause. This morning, however, putting in a couple of hours’ sleep as I always do when returning from guard duty, I had a very disagreeable dream of a bomb dropping near me and frightening me out of my wits. Cf. the dream I used to have towards the end of our time in Spain, of being on a grass bank with no cover and mortar shells dropping round me.

31 August

Air-raid warnings, of which there are now half a dozen or thereabouts every 24

hours, becoming a great bore. Opinion spreading rapidly that one ought simply to disregard the raids except when they are known to be big-scale ones and in one’s own area. Of the people strolling in Regent’s Park, I should say at least half pay no attention to a raid warning… . . Last night just as we were going to bed, a pretty heavy explosion.

Later in the night woken up by a tremendous crash, said to be caused by a bomb in Maida

Vale. E. and I merely remarked on the loudness and fell asleep again. Falling asleep, with a vague impression of anti-aircraft guns firing, found myself mentally back in the Spanish war, on one of those nights when you had good straw to sleep on, dry feet, several hours’

rest ahead of you, and the sound of distant gunfire, which acts as a soporific provided it is distant.

1 September

Recently bought a forage cap… . . It seems that forage caps over size 7 are a great rarity. Evidently they expect all soldiers to have small heads. This tallies with the remark made by some higher-up to R.R.50 in Paris when he tried to join the army -“Good God, you don’t suppose we want intelligent men in the front line, do you?” All the Home Guard uniforms are made with 20-inch necks… . . Shops everywhere are beginning to cash in on the Home Guard, khaki shirts etc. being displayed at fantastic prices with notices “Suitable for the Home Guard”. Just as in Barcelona, in the early days when it was fashionable to be in the militia.

50. Richard Rees.

3 September

Yesterday talking with Mrs C. who had recently come back from Cardiff. Raids there have been almost continuous, and finally it was decided that work in the docks must continue, raids or no raids. Almost immediately afterwards a German plane managed to drop a bomb straight into the hold of a ship, and according to Mrs C. the remains of seven men working there “had to be brought up in pails”. Immediately there was a dock strike, after which they had to go back to the practice of taking cover. This is the sort of thing that does not get into the papers. It is now stated on all sides that the casualties in the most recent raids, e.g. at Ramsgate, have been officially minimized, which greatly incenses the locals, who do not like to read about “negligible damage” when 100 people have been killed, etc. etc. Shall be interested to see the figures for casualties for this month, i.e. August. I should say that up to about 2,000 a month they would tell the truth, but would cover it up for figures over that.

Michael estimates that in his clothing factory, evidently a small individually owned affair, time lost in air raids cost £50 last week.

7 September

Air-raid alarms now frequent enough, and lasting long enough, for people habitually to forget whether the alarm is on at the moment, or whether the All Clear has sounded. Noise of bombs and gunfire, except when very close (which probably means within two miles) now accepted as a normal background to sleep or conversation. I have still not heard a bomb go off with the sort of bang that makes you feel you are personally involved.

 

In Churchill’s speech, number killed in air raids during August gives us 1,075.

Even if truthful, probably a large understatement as it includes only civilian casualties…

. . The secretiveness officially practised about raids is extraordinary. Today’s papers report that a bomb fell in a square “in central London”. Impossible to find out which square it was, though thousands of people must know.

10 September

Can’t write much of the insanities of the last few days. It is not so much that the bombing is worrying in itself as that the disorganization of traffic, frequent difficulty of telephoning, shutting of shops whenever there is a raid on etc. etc., combined with the necessity of getting on with one’s ordinary work, wear one out and turn life into a constant scramble to catch up lost time…

The delayed-action bombs are a great nuisance, but they appear to be successful in locating most of them and getting all the neighbouring people out until the bomb shall have exploded. All over South London, little groups of disconsolate-looking people wandering about with suitcases and bundles, either people who have been rendered homeless or, in more cases, who have been turned out by the authorities because of an unexploded bomb… . .

Most of last night in the public shelter, having been driven there by recurrent whistle and crash of bombs not very far away at intervals of about a quarter of an hour.

Frightful discomfort owing to overcrowding, though the place was well-appointed, with electric light and fans. People, mostly elderly working class, grousing bitterly about the hardness of the seats and the longness of the night, but no defeatist talk… . .

People are now to be seen every night about dusk queuing up at the doors of the shelters with their bedding. Those who come in first grab places on the floor and probably pass a reasonably good night. Day raids apart, the raiding hours are pretty regularly 8 p.m. to 4.30 a.m. i.e. dusk to just before dawn.

I should think 3 months of continuous raids at the same intensity as the last 4

nights would break down everyone’s morale. But it is doubtful whether anyone could keep up the attack on such a scale for 3 months, especially when he is suffering much the same himself.

12 September

As soon as the air raids began seriously, it was noticeable that people were much readier than before to talk to strangers in the street… . . This morning met a youth of about 20, in dirty overalls, perhaps a garage hand. Very embittered and defeatist about the war, and horrified by the destruction he had seen in South London. He said that Churchill had visited the bombed area near the Elephant and at a spot where 20 out of 22

houses had been destroyed, remarked that it was “not so bad”. The youth: “I’d have wrung his bloody neck if he’d said it to me.” He was pessimistic about the war, considered Hitler was sure to win and would reduce London to much the same state as Warsaw. He spoke bitterly about the people rendered homeless in South London and eagerly took up my

point when I said the empty houses in the West End should be requisitioned for them. He considered that all wars were fought for the profit of the rich, but agreed with me that this one would probably end in revolution. With all this, he was not unpatriotic. Part of his grouch was that he had tried to join the Air Force 4 times in the last six months, and always been put off.

Tonight and last night they have been trying the new device of keeping up a continuous A.A. barrage, apparently firing blind or merely by sound, though I suppose there is some kind of sound-detector which estimates the height at which they must make the shells burst… . . The noise is tremendous and almost continuous, but I don’t mind it, feeling it to be on my side. Spent last night in Stephen Spender’s place with a battery firing in the square at short intervals through the night. Slept through it easily enough, no bombs being audible in that place.

The havoc in the East End and South London is terrible, by all accounts… . .

Churchill’s speech last night referred very seriously to danger of imminent invasion. If invasion is actually attempted and this is not a feint, the idea is presumably either to knock out our air bases along the South Coast, after which the ground defences can be well bombed, at the same time causing all possible confusion in London and its southward communications, or to draw as much as possible of our defensive forces south before delivering the attack on Scotland or possibly Ireland.

Meanwhile our platoon of Home Guards, after 3½ months, have about 1 rifle for 6

men, no other weapons except incendiary bombs, and perhaps 1 uniform for 4 men. After all, they have stood out against letting the rifles be taken home by individual men. They are all parked in one place, where a bomb may destroy the whole lot of them any night.

14 September

On the first night of the barrage, which was the heaviest, they are said to have fired 500,000 shells, i.e. at an average cost of £5 per shell, £2½ millions worth. But well worth it, for the effect on morale.

15 September

This morning, for the first time, saw an aeroplane shot down. It fell slowly out of the clouds, nose foremost, just like a snipe that has been shot high overhead. Terrific jubilation among the people watching, punctuated every now and then by the question, “Are you sure it’s a German?” So puzzling are the directions given, and so many the types of aeroplane, that no one even knows which are German planes and which are our own.

My only test is that if a bomber is seen over London it must be a German, whereas a fighter is likelier to be ours.

17 September

Heavy bombing in this area last night till about 11 p.m… . . I was talking in the

hallway of this house to two young men and a girl who was with them. Psychological attitude of all 3 was interesting. They were quite openly and unashamedly frightened, talking about how their knees were knocking together, etc. and yet at the same time excited and interested, dodging out of doors between bombs to see what was happening and pick up shrapnel splinters. Afterwards in Mrs C.’s little reinforced room downstairs, with Mrs C. and her daughter, the maid, and three young girls who are also lodgers here.

All the women, except the maid, screaming in unison, clasping each other and hiding their faces, every time a bomb went past, but between-whiles quite happy and normal, with animated conversation proceeding. The dog subdued and obviously frightened, knowing something to be wrong. Marx is also like this during raids, i.e. subdued and uneasy. Some dogs, however, go wild and savage during a raid and have had to be shot.

They allege here, and E. says the same thing about Greenwich, that all the dogs in the park now bolt for home when they hear the siren.

Yesterday, when having my hair cut in the City, asked the barber if he carried on during raids. He said he did. And even if he was shaving someone? I said. Oh, yes, he carried on just the same. And one day a bomb will drop near enough to make him jump, and he will slice half somebody’s face off.

Later, accosted by a man, I should think some kind of commercial traveller, with a bad type of face, while I was waiting for a bus. He began a rambling talk about how he was getting himself and his wife out of London, how his nerves were giving way and he suffered from stomach trouble, etc. etc. I don’t know how much of this kind of thing there is… . . There has of course been a big exodus from the East End, and every night what amount to mass migrations to places where there is sufficient shelter accommodation.

The practice of taking a 2d. ticket and spending the night in one of the deep Tube stations, e.g. Piccadilly, is growing… . . Everyone I have talked to agrees that the empty furnished houses in the West End should be used for the homeless; but I suppose the rich swine still have enough pull to prevent this from happening. The other day 50 people from the East End, headed by some of the Borough Councillors, marched into the Savoy and demanded to use the air-raid shelter. The management didn’t succeed in ejecting them till the raid was over, when they went voluntarily. When you see how the wealthy are still behaving, in what is manifestly developing into a revolutionary war, you think of St Petersburg in 1916.

(Evening) Almost impossible to write in this infernal racket. (Electric lights have just gone off. Luckily I have some candles.) So many streets in (lights on again) the quarter roped off because of unexploded bombs, that to get home from Baker Street, say 300 yards, is like trying to find your way to the heart of a maze.

21 September

Have been unable for some days to buy another volume to continue this diary because, of the three or four stationers’ shops in the immediate neighbourhood, all but one are cordoned off because of unexploded bombs.

Regular features of the time: neatly swept-up piles of glass, litter of stone and splinters of flint, smell of escaping gas, knots of sightseers waiting at the cordons.

Yesterday, at the entry to a street near here, a little crowd waiting with an A.R.P.

 

man in a black tin hat among them. A devastating roar, with a huge cloud of dust, etc.

The man with the black hat comes running towards the A.R.P. headquarters, where another with a white hat is emerging munching at a mouthful of bread and butter.

The man with the black hat: “Dorset Square, sir.”

The man with the white hat: “O.K.” (Makes a tick in his notebook.) Nondescript people wandering about, having been evacuated from their houses because of delayed action bombs. Yesterday two girls stopping me in the street, very elegant in appearance except that their faces were filthy dirty: “Please, sir, can you tell us where we are?”

Withal, huge areas of London almost normal, and everyone quite happy in the daytime, never seeming to think about the coming night, like animals which are unable to foresee the future so long as they have a bit of food and a place in the sun.

24 September

Oxford Street yesterday, from Oxford Circus up to the Marble Arch, completely empty of traffic, and only a few pedestrians, with the late afternoon sun shining straight down the empty roadway and glittering on innumerable fragments of broken glass.

Outside John Lewis’s, a pile of plaster dress models, very pink and realistic, looking so like a pile of corpses that one could have mistaken them for that at a little distance. Just the same sight in Barcelona, only there it was plaster saints from desecrated churches.

Much discussion as to whether you would hear a bomb (i.e. its whistle) which was coming straight at you. All turns upon whether the bomb travels faster than sound… . .

One thing I have worked out, I think satisfactorily, is that the further away from you a bomb falls, the longer the whistle you will hear. The short whizz is therefore the sound that should make you dive for cover. I think this is really the principle one goes on in dodging a shell, but there one seems to know by a kind of instinct.

The aeroplanes come back and come back, every few minutes. It is just like in an eastern country, when you keep thinking you have killed the last mosquito inside your net, and every time, as soon as you have turned the light out, another starts droning.

27 September

The News Chronicle today is markedly defeatist, as well it may be after yesterday’s news about Dakar.51 But I have a feeling that the News Chronicle is bound to become defeatist anyway and will be promptly to the fore when plausible peace terms come forward. These people have no definable policy and no sense of responsibility, nothing except a traditional dislike of the British ruling class, based ultimately on the Nonconformist conscience. They are only noisemakers, like the New Statesman etc. All these people can be counted on to collapse when the conditions of war become intolerable.

51. In September 1940 a British expedition, cooperating with Free French forces under General de Gaulle, made an attempt to recapture the port of Dakar, West Africa, from the Vichy government. The expedition was a failure.

 

Many bombs last night, though I think none dropped within half a mile of this house. The commotion made by the mere passage of the bomb through the air is astonishing. The whole house shakes, enough to rattle objects on the table. Of course they are dropping very large bombs now. The unexploded one in Regent’s Park is said to be “the size of a pillar box”. Almost every night the lights go out at least once, not suddenly flicking off as when a connexion is broken, but gradually fading out, and usually coming on again in about five minutes. Why it is that the lights dip when a bomb passes close by, nobody seems to know.

15 October

Writing this at Wallington, having been more or less ill for about a fortnight with a poisoned arm. Not much news — i.e. only events of world-wide importance; nothing that has much affected me personally.

There are now 11 evacuee children in Wallington (12 arrived, but one ran away and had to be sent home). They come from the East End. One little girl, from Stepney, said that her grandfather had been bombed out seven times. They seem nice children and to be settling down quite well. Nevertheless there are the usual complaints against them in some quarters, e.g. of the little boy who is with Mrs –—, aged seven: “He’s a dirty little devil, he is. He wets his bed and dirties his breeches. I’d rub his nose in it if I had charge of him, the dirty little devil.”

Some murmurings about the number of Jews in Baldock. –— declares that Jews greatly predominate among the people sheltering in the Tubes. Must try and verify this.

Potato crop very good this year, in spite of the dry weather, which is just as well.

19 October

The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

21 October

With reference to the advertisements in the Tube stations, “Be a Man” etc. (asking able-bodied men not to shelter there but to leave the space for women and children), D.

says the joke going round London is that it was a mistake to print these notices in English.

Priestley,52 whose Sunday night broadcasts were by implication Socialist progaganda, has been shoved off the air, evidently at the insistence of the Conservative Party… . . It looks rather as though the Margesson53 crew are now about to stage a come-back.

52. J. B. Priestley (1894- ), prolific popular novelist, dramatist and man of letters. During 1940 and 1941 he gave a series of famous weekly talks on the radio urging the nation to determination and unity in the

struggle against Hitler so as to make the country more democratic and egalitarian.

53. D. R. Margesson (1890-1965), Conservative M.P. for Rugby 1924-42. Government Chief Whip 1931-40; doggedly loyal to each Prime Minister he served, backing Chamberlain until his downfall from the Premiership in May 1940. Under Churchill he continued as Joint Government Whip and after six months was appointed Secretary of State for War. He was created Viscount Margesson in 1942 after Churchill had relieved him of office in the spring of that year.

25 October

The other night examined the crowds sheltering in Chancery Lane, Oxford Circus and Baker Street stations. Not all Jews, but I think, a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd of this size. What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so. A fearful Jewish woman, a regular comic-paper cartoon of a Jewess, fought her way off the train at Oxford Circus, landing blows on anyone who stood in her way. It took me back to old days on the Paris Métro.

Surprised to find that D., who is distinctly Left in his views, is inclined to share the current feeling against the Jews. He says that the Jews in business circles are turning pro-Hitler, or preparing to do so. This sounds almost incredible, but according to D. they will always admire anyone who kicks them. What I do feel is that any Jew, i.e. European Jew, would prefer Hitler’s kind of social system to ours, if it were not that he happens to persecute them. Ditto with almost any Central European, e.g. the refugees. They make use of England as a sanctuary, but they cannot help feeling the profoundest contempt for it. You can see this in their eyes, even when they don’t say it outright. The fact is that the insular outlook and the continental outlook are completely incompatible.

According to F., it is quite true that foreigners are more frightened than English people during the raids. It is not their war, and therefore they have nothing to sustain them. I think this might also account for the fact — I am virtually sure it is a fact, though one mustn’t mention it — that working-class people are more frightened than middle-class.

The same feeling of despair over impending events in France, Africa, Syria, Spain — the sense of foreseeing what must happen and being powerless to prevent it, and feeling with absolute certainty that a British government cannot act in such a way as to get its blow in first.

Air raids much milder the last few days.

16 November

I never thought I should live to grow blasé about the sound of gunfire, but so I have.

23 November

The day before yesterday lunching with H.P., editor of –—. H.P. rather

pessimistic about the war. Thinks there is no answer to the New Order, i.e. this government is incapable of framing any answer, and people here and in America could easily be brought to accept it. I queried whether people would not for certain see any peace offer along these lines as a trap. H.P.: “Hell’s bells, I could dress it up so that they’d think it was the greatest victory in the history of the world. I could make them eat it.”

That is true, of course. All depends on the form in which it is put to people. So long as our own newspapers don’t do the dirty they will be quite indifferent to appeals from Europe. H.P., however, is certain that –— and Co. are working for a sell-out. It appears that though –— is not submitted for censorship, all papers are now warned not to publish interpretations of the government’s policy towards Spain. A few weeks back Duff Cooper had the press correspondents up and assured them “on his word of honour” that “things were going very well indeed in Spain”. (The most one can say is that Duff Cooper’s word of honour is worth more than Hoare’s.)

H.P. says that when France collapsed there was a Cabinet meeting to decide whether to continue the war or whether to seek terms. The vote was actually 50-50 except for one casting vote, and according to H.P. this was Chamberlain’s. If true, I wonder whether this will ever be made public. It was poor old Chamberlain’s last public act, as one might say, poor old man.

Characteristic wartime sound, in winter: the musical tinkle of raindrops on your tin hat.

28 November

Lunching yesterday with C.54 editor of France… . . To my surprise he was in good spirits and had no grievances. I would have expected a French refugee to be grumbling endlessly about the food, etc. However, C. knows England well and has lived here before.

54. Pierre Comert, French journalist and ex-diplomat, who came to England after the armistice in 1940.

He says there is much more resistance both in occupied and unoccupied France than people here realize. The press is playing it down, no doubt because of our continued relations with Vichy. He says that at the time of the French collapse no European looked on it as conceivable that England would go on fighting, and generally speaking Americans did not either. He is evidently somewhat of an anglophile and considers the monarchy a great advantage to England. According to him it has been a main factor in preventing the establishment of Fascism here… . . It is a fact that, on the whole, anti-Fascist opinion in England was pro-Edward; but C. is evidently repeating what was current on the continent.

C. was head of the press department during Laval’s Government. Laval said to him in 1935 that England was now “only an appearance” and Italy was a really strong country, so that France must break with England and go in with Italy. On returning from signing the Franco-Russian pact he said that Stalin was the most powerful man in Europe.

On the whole Laval’s prophecies seem to have been falsified, clever though he is.

Completely conflicting accounts, from eye witnesses, about the damage to Coventry. It seems impossible to learn the truth about bombing at a distance. When we

have a quiet night here, I find that many people are faintly uneasy, because feeling certain that they are getting it badly in the industrial towns. What every one feels at the back of his mind is that we are now hardened to it and the morale elsewhere is less reliable.

1 December

That bastard Chiappe is cold meat. Everyone delighted, as when Balbo died. This war is at any rate killing off a few Fascists.

8 December

Broadcasting the night before last… . . Met there a Pole who has only recently escaped from Poland by some underground route he would not disclose… . . He said that in the siege of Warsaw 95 per cent of the houses were damaged and about 25 per cent demolished. All services, electricity, water, etc. broke down, and towards the end people had no defence whatever against the aeroplanes and, what was worse, the artillery. He described people rushing out to cut bits off a horse killed by shell-fire, then being driven back by fresh shells, then rushing out again. When Warsaw was completely cut off, the people were upheld by the belief that the English were coming to help them, rumours all the while of an English army in Danzig, etc. etc. … . .

During the bad period of the bombing, when everyone was semi-insane, not so much from the bombing itself as from broken sleep, interrupted telephone calls, the difficulty of communications, etc. etc. I found that scraps of nonsense poetry were constantly coming into my mind. They never got beyond a line or two and the tendency stopped when the bombing slacked off, but examples were:

An old Rumanian peasant

Who lived at Mornington Crescent

and

And the key doesn’t fit and the bel doesn’t ring,

But we al stand up for God save the King

and

When the Borough Surveyor has gone to roost

On his rod, his pole or his perch.

29 December

From a newspaper account of a raid (not ironical): “Bombs were falling like manna.”

 

2 January 1941

The rightwing reaction is now in full swing, and Margesson’s entry into the Cabinet is no doubt a deliberate cash-in on Wavell’s victory in Egypt. Comically enough, a review of Wavell’s life of Allenby which I wrote some months ago was printed in Horizon55 just at the time when the news of Sidi Barrani came through. I said in the review that, as Wavell held so important a command, the chief interest of the book was the light that it threw on his own intellect, and left it to be inferred that I didn’t think much of this. So the laugh was on me — though, God knows, I am glad enough to have been wrong.

55. Horizon (1940-50), a magazine of literature and art, edited by Cyril Connolly. Orwell’s review of Allenby: a Study in Greatness by General Sir Archibald Wavell appeared in Horizon, December 1940.

The word “blitz” now used everywhere to mean any kind of attack on anything.

Cf. “strafe” in the last war. “Blitz” is not yet used as a verb, a development I am expecting.

22 January

–— is convinced, perhaps rightly, that the danger of the People’s Convention racket is much under-estimated and that one must fight back and not ignore it. He says that thousands of simple-minded people are taken in by the appealing programme of the People’s Convention and do not realize that it is a defeatist manoeuvre intended to help Hitler. He quoted a letter from the Dean of Canterbury56 who said “I want you to understand that I am wholeheartedly for winning the war, and that I believe Winston Churchill to be the only possible leader for us till the war is over” (or words to that effect), and nevertheless supported the People’s Convention. It appears that there are thousands like this.

56. The Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson (1874-1966), Dean of Canterbury 1931-63. Publications include The Socialist Sixth of the World, Soviet Strength and Christians and Communism. He became known as “The Red Dean” for his pro-Russian sympathies.

Apropos of what –— says, it is at any rate a fact that the People’s Convention crew have raised a lot of money from somewhere. Their posters are everywhere, also a lot of new ones from the Daily Worker. The space has not been paid for, but even so the printing, etc. would cost a good deal. Yesterday I ripped down a number of these posters, the first time I have even done such a thing. Cf. in the summer when I chalked up “Sack Chamberlain” etc. and in Barcelona, after the suppression of the P.O.U.M., when I chalked up “Visca P.O.U.M.” At any normal time it is against my instincts to write on a wall or to interfere with what anyone else has written.

The onion shortage has made everyone intensely sensitive to the smell of onions.

A quarter of an onion shredded into a stew seems exceedingly strong. E. the other day knew as soon as I kissed her that I had eaten onions some 6 hours earlier.

 

An instance of the sort of racketeering that goes on when any article whose price is not controlled becomes scarce — the price of alarm clocks. The cheapest now obtainable are 15s. — these the sort of rubbishy German-made clocks which used to sell for 3s. 6d. The little tin French ones which used to be 5s. are now 18s. 6d., and all others at corresponding prices.

The Daily Express has used “blitz” as a verb.

This morning’s news — the defences of Tobruk pierced, and the Daily Worker suppressed. Only very doubtfully pleased about the latter.

26 January

Allocation of space in this week’s New Statesman:

Fall of Tobruk (with 20,000 prisoners) — 2 lines.

Suppression of the Daily Worker and the Week 57 108 lines.

57. A Communist newsletter for private subscribers, edited by Claud Cockburn.

… . . All thinking people uneasy about the lull at this end of the war, feeling sure that some new devilry is being prepared. But popular optimism is probably growing again and the cessation of raids for even a few days has its dangers. Listening-in the other day to somebody else’s telephone conversation, as one is always doing nowadays owing to the crossing of wires, I heard two women talking to the effect of “it won’t be long now”, etc. etc. The next morning, going into Mrs J.’s shop, I happened to remark that the war would probably last 3 years. Mrs J. amazed and horrified. “Oh, you don’t think so! Oh, it couldn’t! Why, we’ve properly got them on the run now. We’ve got Bardia, and from there we can march on into Italy, and that’s the way into Germany, isn’t it?” Mrs J. is, I should say, an exceptionally sharp, level-headed woman. Nevertheless she is unaware that Africa is on the other side of the Mediterranean.

7 February

There is now more and more division of opinion — the question is implicit from the start but people have only recently become aware of it — as to whether we are fighting the Nazis or the German people. This is bound up with the question of whether England should declare her war aims, or, indeed, have any war aims. All of what one might call respectable opinion is against giving the war any meaning whatever (“Our job is to beat the Boche — that’s the only war aim worth talking about”), and this is probably bound to become official policy as well. Vansittart’s58 “hate Germany” pamphlet is said to be selling like hot cakes.

58. Robert Vansittart (1881-1957), Kt. 1929, created Baron Vansittart of Denham 1941, diplomat and writer, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1930-38, chief diplomatic adviser to the Foreign Secretary 1938-41. Well known before and during the early part of the war for his outspoken criticism of Germany and the Germans. The pamphlet referred to here was Black Record: Germans Past and Present, 1941.

 

No definite news from France. It is obvious that Pétain will give in about taking Laval into the Cabinet. Then there will be a fresh to-do about the passage of troops through unoccupied France, bases in Africa, etc., another “firm stand”, and then more giving in. All depends on the time factor, i.e. whether the Germans can obtain a footing in Africa before the Italian armies there finally collapse. Perhaps next the guns will be turned against Spain, and we shall be told that Franco is making a “firm stand” and that that shows how right the British Government were to take a conciliatory attitude towards Spain, until Franco gives in and attacks Gibraltar or allows the German armies to cross his territory. Or perhaps Laval, when in power, will for a short time resist the more extreme German demands, and then Laval will suddenly turn from a villain into a patriot who is making a “firm stand”, like Pétain now. The thing that British Conservatives will not understand is that the forces of the Right have no strength in them and exist only to be knocked down.

12 February

Arthur Koestler is being called up this week and will be drafted into the Pioneers, other sections of the forces being barred to him, as a German. What appalling stupidity, when you have a youngish gifted man who speaks I do not know how many languages and really knows something about Europe, especially the European political movements, to be unable to make any use of him except for shovelling bricks.

Appalled today by the havoc all round St Paul’s, which I had not seen before. St Paul’s, barely chipped, standing out like a rock. It struck me for the first time that it is a pity the cross on top of the dome is such an ornate one. It should be a plain cross, sticking up like the hilt of a sword.

Curiously enough, there don’t seem to have been any repercussions to speak of about that old fool Ironside59 taking the title of “Lord Ironside of Archangel”. It really was an atrocious piece of impudence, a thing to protest against whatever one’s opinion of the Russian régime.

59. Field Marshal Lord Ironside (1880-1959), Chief of the Imperial General Staff 1939-40, Head of the Home Defence Forces 1940. In 1918 Ironside was Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces against the Bolsheviks at Archangel which led him to choose “of Archangel” as the title of his peerage.

1 March

The B.s, who only came up to London a few weeks ago and have seen nothing of the blitz, say that they find Londoners very much changed, everyone very hysterical, talking in much louder tones, etc. etc. If this is so, it is something that happens gradually and that one does not notice while in the middle of it, as with the growth of a child. The only change I have definitely noticed since the air raids began is that people are much more ready to speak to strangers in the street… . . The Tube stations don’t now stink to any extent, the new metal bunks are quite good, and the people one sees there are reasonably well found as to bedding and seem contented and normal in all ways — but

this is just what disquiets me. What is one to think of people who go on living this sub-human life night after night for months, including periods of a week or more when no aeroplane has come near London?… . It is appalling to see children still in all the Tube stations, taking it all for granted and having great fun riding round and round the Inner Circle. A little while back D.J. was coming to London from Cheltenham, and in the train was a young woman with her two children who had been evacutated to somewhere in the West Country and whom she was now bringing back. As the train neared London an air raid began and the woman spent the rest of the journey in tears. What had decided her to come back was the fact that at that time there had been no raid on London for a week or more, and so she had concluded that “it was all right now”. What is one to think of the mentality of such people?

3 March

Last night with G. to see the shelter in the crypt under Greenwich church. The usual wooden and sacking bunks, dirty (no doubt also lousy when it gets warmer), ill-lighted and smelly, but not on this particular night very crowded. The crypt is simply a system of narrow passages running between vaults on which are the names of the families buried in them, the most recent being about 1800… . . G. and the others insisted that I had not seen it at its worst, because on nights when it is crowded (about 250 people) the stench is said to be almost insupportable. I stuck to it, however, though none of the others would agree with me, that it is far worse for children to be playing about among vaults full of corpses than that they should have to put up with a certain amount of living human smell.

4 March

At Wallington. Crocuses out everywhere, a few wallflowers budding, snowdrops just at their best. Couples of hares sitting about in the winter wheat and gazing at one another. Now and again in this war, at intervals of months, you get your nose above water for a few moments and notice that the earth is still going round the sun.

14 March

For the last few days there have been rumours everywhere, also hints in the papers, that “something is going to happen” in the Balkans, i.e. that we are going to send an expeditionary force to Greece. If so, it must presumably be the army now in Libya, or the bulk of it. I had heard a month back that Metaxas before he died asked us for 10

divisions and we offered him 4. It seems a terribly dangerous thing to risk an army anywhere west of the Straits. To have any worthwhile ideas about the strategy of such a campaign, one would have to know how many men Wavell disposes of and how many are needed to hold Libya, how the shipping position stands, what the communications from Bulgaria into Greece are like, how much of their mechanized stuff the Germans

have managed to bring across Europe, and who effectively controls the sea between Sicily and Tripoli. It would be an appalling disaster if, while our main force was bogged in Salonika, the Germans managed to cross the sea from Sicily and win back all the Italians have lost. Everyone who thinks of the matter is torn both ways. To place an army in Greece is a tremendous risk and doesn’t offer much positive gain, except that once Turkey is involved our warships can enter the Black Sea; on the other hand if we let Greece down we have demonstrated once and for all that we can’t and won’t help any European nation to keep its independence. The thing I fear most is halfhearted intervention and a ghastly failure, as in Norway. I am in favour of putting all our eggs in one basket and risking a big defeat, because I don’t think any defeat or victory in the narrow military sense matters so much as demonstrating that we are on the side of the weak against the strong.

The trouble is that it becomes harder and harder to understand the reactions of European peoples, just as they seem incapable of understanding ours. Numbers of Germans I have spoken to have exclaimed on our appalling mistake at the beginning of the war in not bombing Berlin promptly but merely scattering fatuous leaflets. Yet I believe all English people were delighted at this gesture (we should still have been so if we had known at the time what drivel the leaflets were), because we saw it as a demonstration that we had no quarrel with the common people of Germany. On the other hand, in his book which we have just published, Haffner60 exclaims that it is folly on our part to let the Irish withhold vitally important bases and that we should simply take these bases without more ado. He says that the spectacle of our allowing a sham-independent country like Ireland to defy us simply makes all Europe laugh at us. There you have the European outlook, with its non-understanding of the English-speaking peoples. Actually, if we took the Irish bases by force, without a long course of propaganda beforehand, the effect on public opinion, not only in the U.S.A. but in England, would be disastrous.

60. Sebastian Haffner, anti-Hitler expatriate German journalist, correspondent on German affairs for the Observer. Earlier in the year Orwell and T. R. Fyvel had published his Offensive Against Germany in their series, Searchlight Books, published by Seeker & Warburg.

I don’t like the tone of official utterances about Abyssinia. They are mumbling about having a British “resident”, as at the courts of Indian rajahs, when the Emperor is restored. The effect may be appalling if we let it be even plausibly said that we are swiping Abyssinia for ourselves. If the Italians are driven right out we have the chance to make the most tremendous gesture, demonstrating beyond argument that we are not simply fighting for our own hand. It would echo all round the world. But will they have the guts or decency to make it? One can’t feel certain. One can foresee the specious arguments that will be put forward for grabbing Abyssinia for ourselves, the rot about slavery etc. etc.

A considerable number of German planes shot down in the last few nights, probably because they have been clear nights and favourable to the fighters, but there is much excitement about some “secret weapon” that is said to be in use. The popular rumour is that it is a net made of wire which is shot into the air and in which the aeroplane becomes entangled.

 

20 March

Fairly heavy raids last night, but only 1 plane brought down, so no doubt the rumours about a “secret weapon” are all boloney.

A lot of bombs at Greenwich, one of them while I was talking to E. over the phone. A sudden pause in the conversation and a tinkling sound: I: “What’s that?”

E.: “Only the windows falling in.”

The bomb had dropped in the park opposite the house, broke the cable of the barrage balloon and wounded one of the balloon barrage men and a Home Guard.

Greenwich church was on fire and the people still sheltering in the crypt with the fire burning overhead and water flowing down, making no move to get out till made to do so by the wardens.

German consul in Tangier (the first time since 1914). It appears that in deference to American opinion we are going to let more food into France. Even if some kind of neutral commission is set up to supervise this it will do no good to the French. The Germans will simply allow them to keep such wheat, etc. as we send in and withhold a corresponding quantity elsewhere. Even while we make ready to allow the food ships in, there is no sign of the government extorting anything in return — e.g. expulsion of German agents from North Africa. The proper course would be to wait till France is on the verge of starvation and the Pétain Government consequently rocking, and then hand over a really large supply of food in return for some substantial concession, e.g. surrender of important units of the French fleet. Any such policy totally unthinkable at present, of course. If only one could be sure whether –—, –— and all their kind are really traitors, or only fools.

Looking back through this diary, I see that of late I have written in it at much longer intervals and much less about public events than when I started it. The feeling of helplessness is growing in everyone. One feels that the necessary swing of opinion cannot now happen except at the price of another disaster, which we cannot afford and which therefore one dare not hope for. The worst is that the crisis now coming is going to be a crisis of hunger, which the English people have no real experience of. Quite soon it is going to be a question of whether to import arms or food. It is a mercy that the worst period will come in the summer months, but it will be devilish difficult to get the people to face hunger when, so far as they can see, there is no purpose in the war whatever, and when the rich are still carrying on just as before, as they will be, of course, unless dealt with forcibly. It doesn’t matter having no war aims when it is a question of repelling invasion, because from the point of view of ordinary people keeping foreigners out of England is quite a sufficient war aim. But how can you ask them to starve their children in order to build tanks to fight in Africa, when in all that they are told at present there is nothing to make clear that fighting in Africa, or in Europe, has anything to do with the defence of England?

On a wall in South London some Communist or Blackshirt had chalked “Cheese, not Churchill”. What a silly slogan. It sums up the psychological ignorance of these people who even now have not grasped that, whereas some people would die for Churchill, nobody will die for cheese.

 

23 March

Yesterday attended a more or less compulsory Home Guard church parade, to take part in the national day of prayer. There was also contingents of the A.F.S.,61 Air Force cadets, W.A.A.F.s,62 etc. etc. Appalled by the jingoism and self-righteousness of the whole thing… . . I am not shocked by the Church condoning war, as many people profess to be — nearly always people who are not religious believers themselves, I notice.

If you accept government, you accept war, and if you accept war, you must in most cases desire one side or the other to win. I can never work up any disgust over bishops blessing the colours of regiments, etc. All that kind of thing is founded on a sentimental idea that fighting is incompatible with loving your enemies. Actually you can only love your enemies if you are willing to kill them in certain circumstances. But what is disgusting about services like these is the absence of any kind of self-criticism. Apparently God is expected to help us on the ground that we are better than the Germans. In the set prayer composed for the occasion God is asked “to turn the hearts of our enemies, and to help us to forgive them; to give them repentance for their misdoings, and a readiness to make amends”. Nothing about our enemies forgiving us. It seems to me that the Christian attitude would be that we are no better than our enemies — we are all miserable sinners, but that it so happens that it would be better if our cause prevailed and therefore that it is legitimate to pray for this… . . I suppose the idea is that it would be bad for morale to let people realize that the enemy has a case, though even that is a psychological error, in my opinion. But perhaps they aren’t thinking primarily about the effect on the people taking part in the service but are simply looking for direct results from their nationwide praying campaign, a sort of box barrage fired at the angels.

61. Auxiliary Fire Service.

62. Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

24 March

The reports of German heavy cruisers in the Atlantic somehow have the appearance of being a false rumour to draw British capital ships away. That might conceivably be a prelude to invasion. Expectation of invasion has much faded away, because it is generally felt that Hitler could not now conquer England with any force he would be able to bring here, unless British sea and air power had been greatly worn down beforehand. I think this is probably so and that Hitler will not attempt invasion until he has had a spectacular success elsewhere, because the invasion itself would appear as a failure and would need something to offset it. But I think that an unsuccessful invasion meaning the loss of, say, 100,000 or even 500,000 men, might well do his job for him, because of the utter paralysis of industry and internal food supply it might cause. If a few hundred thousand men could be landed and could hold out for even three weeks they would have done more damage than thousands of air raids could do. But the effects of this would not be apparent immediately, and therefore Hitler is only likely to try it when things are going conspicuously well for him.

Evidently there is very serious shortage of Home Guard equipment, i.e. weapons.

 

… . On the other hand, the captures of arms in Africa are said to be so enormous that experts are being sent out to inventory them. Drawings will then be made and fresh weapons manufactured to these specifications, the captured ones being sufficient as the nucleus for a whole new range of armaments.

7 April

Belgrade bombed yesterday, and the first official announcement this morning that there is a British army in Greece — 150,000 men, so they say. So the mystery of where the British army in Libya has gone to is at last cleared up, though this had been obvious enough when the British retreated from Benghazi. Impossible to say yet whether the treaty of friendship between Jugoslavia and the U.S.S.R. means anything or nothing, but it is difficult to believe that it doesn’t point to a worsening of Russo-German relations.

One will get another indication of the Russian attitude when and if the Emperor of Abyssinia is restored — i.e. whether the Russian Government recognizes him and sends an ambassador to his court.

… . . Shortage of labour more and more apparent and prices of such things as textiles and furniture rising to a frightening extent… . . The secondhand furniture trade, after years of depression, is booming… . . It is evident that calling-up is now being consciously used as a way of silencing undesirables. The reserved age for journalists has been raised to 41 — this won’t bring them in more than a few hundred men, but can be used against individuals whenever desired. It would be comic if after having been turned down for the army on health grounds ten months ago it were suddenly found that my health had improved to just the point at which I was fit to be a private in the Pioneers.

… . . Thinking always of our army in Greece and the desperate risk it runs of being driven into the sea. One can imagine how the strategists of the Liddell Hart63 type must be wringing their hands over this rash move. Politically it is right, however, if one looks 2-3 years ahead. The best one can say is that even in the narrow strategic sense it must offer some hope of success, or the generals concerned would have refused to undertake it. It is difficult to feel that Hitler has not mistimed his stroke by a month or thereabouts. Abyssinia at any rate is gone, and the Italian naval disaster can hardly have been intended. Also if war in the Balkans lasts even three months the effects on Germany’s food supply in the autumn must be serious.

63. Captain B. H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970), military expert and author of numerous works on war and warfare. See 40.

8 April

Have just read The Battle of Britain, the M.O.I.’s best bestseller (there was so great a run on it that copies were unprocurable for some days). It is said to have been compiled by Francis Beeding, the writer of thrillers. I suppose it is not as bad as it might be, but seeing that it is being translated into many languages and will undoubtedly be read all over the world — it is the first official account, at any rate in English, of the first great air battle in history — it is a pity that they did not have the sense to avoid the

propagandist note altogether. The pamphlet is full of “heroic”, “glorious exploits” etc., and the Germans are spoken of more or less slightingly. Why couldn’t they simply give a cold, accurate account of the facts, which, after all, are favourable enough? For the sake of the bit of cheer-up that this pamphlet will accomplish in England, they throw away the chance of producing something that would be accepted all over the world as a standard authority and used to counteract German lies.

But what chiefly impresses me when reading The Battle of Britain and looking up the corresponding dates in this diary, is the way in which “epic” events never seem very important at the time. Actually I have a number of vivid memories of the day the Germans broke through and fired the docks (I think it must have been the 7th September), but mostly of trivial things. First of all, riding down in the bus to have tea with Connolly, and two women in front of me insisting that shell-bursts in the sky were parachutes, till I had a hard job of it not to chip in and correct them. Then sheltering in a doorway in Piccadilly from falling shrapnel, just as one might shelter from a cloudburst. Then a long line of German planes filing across the sky, and some very young R.A.F. and naval officers running out of one of the hotels and passing a pair of field glasses from hand to hand. Then sitting in Connolly’s top-floor flat and watching the enormous fires beyond St Paul’s, and the great plume of smoke from an oil drum somewhere down the river, and Hugh Slater sitting in the window and saying, “It’s just like Madrid — quite nostalgic.”

The only person suitably impressed was Connolly, who took us up to the roof and, after gazing for some time at the fires, said “It’s the end of capitalism. It’s a judgement on us.” I didn’t feel this to be so, but was chiefly struck by the size and beauty of the flames. That night I was woken up by the explosions and actually went out into the street to see if the fires were still alight — as a matter of fact it was almost as bright as day, even in the N.W.

quarter — but still didn’t feel as though any important historical event were happening.

Afterwards, when the attempt to conquer England by air bombardment had evidently been abandoned, I said to Fyvel,64 “That was Trafalgar. Now there’s Austerlitz,” but I hadn’t seen this anology at the time.

64. T. R. (Tosco) Fyvel (1907- ), writer, journalist and broadcaster; a friend of Orwell.

The News Chronicle very defeatist again, making a great outcry about the abandonment of Benghazi, with the implication that we ought to have gone for Tripoli while the going was good instead of withdrawing troops to use in Greece. And these are exactly the people who would have raised the loudest squeal if we had gone on with the conquest of the Italian empire and left the Greeks in the soup.

9 April

The budget has almost knocked the Balkan campaign out of the news. It is the former and not the latter that I overhear people everywhere discussing.

This evening’s news has the appearance of being very bad. The Greek C. in C. has issued a statement that the Serbs have retreated and uncovered his left flank. The significance of this is that people don’t officially say things like that — practically a statement that the Serbs have let the Greeks down — unless they feel things to be going very badly.

 

The Home Guard now have tommy guns, at any rate two per company. It seems a far cry from the time when we were going to be armed with shotguns — only there weren’t any shotguns — and my question as to whether we might hope for some machine-guns was laughed off as an absurdity.

11 April

Reported in yesterday’s papers that Britain is arranging to lend £2,500,000 to Spain — as a reward for seizing Tangier, I suppose. This is a very bad symptom.

Throughout the war it has always been when we were in exceptionally desperate straits that we have begun making concessions to the minor totalitarian powers.

12 April

The idea that the German troops in Libya, or some of them, got there via French ships and French African territory, is readily accepted by everyone that one suggests it to.

Absolutely no mention of any such possibility in the press, however. Perhaps they are still being instructed to pipe down on criticisms of Vichy France.

The day before yesterday saw fresh-water fish (perch) for sale in a fishmonger’s shop. A year ago English people, i.e. town people, wouldn’t have touched such a thing.

13 April

No real news at all about either Greece or Libya… . . Of the two papers I was able to procure today, the Sunday Pictorial was blackly defeatist and the Sunday Express not much less so. Yesterday’s Evening Standard had an article by “Our Military Correspondent”… . . which was even more so. All this suggests that the newspapers may be receiving bad news which they are not allowed to pass on… . . God knows it is all a ghastly mess. The one thing that is perhaps encouraging is that all the military experts are convinced that our intervention in Greece is disastrous, and the military experts are always wrong.

When the campaign in the Near East is settled one way or the other, and the situation is in some way stabilized, I shall discontinue this diary. It covers the period between Hitler’s spring campaigns of 1940 and 1941. Some time within the next month or two a new military and political phase must begin. The first six months of this diary covered the quasi-revolutionary period following on the disaster in France. Now we are evidently in for another period of disaster, but of a different kind, less intelligible to ordinary people and not necessarily producing any corresponding political improvement.

Looking back to the early part of this diary, I see how my political predictions have been falsified, and yet, as it were, the revolutionary changes that I expected are happening, but in slow motion. I made an entry, I see, implying that private advertisements would have disappeared from the walls within a year. They haven’t, of course — that disgusting Cough Syrup advert is still plastered all over the place, also He’s Twice the Man on

Worthington and Somebody’s Mother isn’t Using Persil — but they are far fewer, and the government posters far more numerous. Connolly said once that intellectuals tend to be right about the direction of events but wrong about their tempo, which is very true.

Registering on Saturday, with the 38 group, I was appalled to see what a scrubby-looking lot they were. A thing that strikes one when one sees a group like this, picked out simply by date of birth, is how much more rapidly the working classes age. They don’t, however, live less long, or only a few years less long, than the middle class. But they have an enormous middle age, stretching from thirty to sixty.

14 April

The news today is appalling. The Germans are at the Egyptian frontier and a British force in Tobruk has the appearance of being cut off, though this is denied from Cairo. Opinion is divided as to whether the Germans really have an overwhelming army in Libya, or whether they have only a comparatively small force while we have practically nothing, most of the troops and fighting vehicles having been withdrawn to other fronts as soon as we had taken Benghazi. In my opinion the latter is the likelier, and also the probability is that we sent only European troops to Greece and have chiefly Indians and Negroes in Egypt. D., speaking from a knowledge of South Africa, thinks that after Benghazi was taken the army was removed not so much for use in Greece as to polish off the Abyssinian campaign, and that the motive for this was political, to give the South Africans, who are more or less hostile to us, a victory to keep them in a good temper. If we can hang on to Egypt the whole thing will have been worth while for the sake of clearing the Red Sea and opening that route to American ships. But the necessary complement to this is the French West African ports, which we could have seized a year ago almost without fighting.

Non-aggression pact between Russia and Japan, the published terms of which are vague in the extreme. But there must presumably be a secret clause by which Russia agrees to abandon China, no doubt gradually and without admitting what is happening, as in the case of Spain. Otherwise it is difficult to see what meaning the pact can have.

From Greece no real news whatever. One silly story about a British armoured-car patrol surprising a party of Germans has now been repeated three days running.

15 April

Last night went to the pub to listen to the 9 o’clock news, and arriving there a few minutes late, asked the landlady what the news had been. “Oh, we never turn it on.

Nobody listens to it, you see. And they’ve got the piano playing in the other bar, and they won’t turn it off just for the news.” This at a moment when there is a most deadly threat to the Suez canal. Cf. during the worst moment of the Dunkirk campaign, when the barmaid would not have turned on the news unless I had asked her… . . Cf. also the time in 1936

when the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland. I was in Barnsley at the time. I went into a pub just after the news had come through and remarked at random, “The German army has crossed the Rhine.” With a vague air of remembering something, someone murmured

“Parley-voo.” No more response than that… . . So also at every moment of crisis from 1931 onwards. You have all the time the sensation of kicking against an impenetrable wall of stupidity. But of course at times their stupidity has stood them in good stead. Any European nation situated as we are would have been squealing for peace long ago.

17 April

Very heavy raid last night, probably the heaviest in many months, so far as London is concerned… . . Bomb in Lord’s cricket ground (schoolboys having their exercise at the nets as usual this morning, a few yards from the crater) and another in St John’s Wood churchyard. This one luckily didn’t land among the graves, a thing I have been dreading will happen… . . Passed this morning a side-street somewhere in Hampstead with one house in it reduced to a pile of rubbish by a bomb — a sight so usual that one hardly notices it. The street is cordoned off, however, digging squads at work, and a line of ambulances waiting. Underneath that huge pile of bricks there are mangled bodies, some of them perhaps alive.

The guns kept up their racket nearly all night… . . Today I can find no one who admits to having slept last night, and E. says the same. The formula is: “I never closed my eyes for an instant.” I believe this is all nonsense. Certainly it is hard to sleep in such a din, but E. and I must have slept quite half the night.

22 April

Have been 2 or 3 days at Wallington. Saturday night’s blitz could easily be heard there — 45 miles distant.

Sowed while at Wallington 40 or 50 lb. of potatoes, which might give 200 to 600

lb. according to the season, etc. It would be queer — I hope it won’t be so, but it quite well may — if, when this autumn comes, those potatoes seem a more important achievement than all the articles, broadcasts, etc. I shall have done this year.

The Greek-British line seems to have swung south, hinging on Janina, to a position not far north of Athens. If the newspaper reports are truthful, they got across the plain of Thessaly without being too much damaged. The thing that disturbs everyone and is evidently going to raise a storm in Australia, is the lack of real news. Churchill in his speech said that even the Government had difficulty in getting news from Greece. The thing that most disturbs me is the repeated statement that we are inflicting enormous casualties, the Germans advance in close formation and are mown down in swathes, etc.

etc. Just the same as was said during the battle of France… . . Attack on Gibraltar, or at any rate some adverse move in Spain, evidently timed to happen soon. Churchill’s speeches begin to sound like Chamberlain’s — evading questions, etc. etc.

British troops entered Iraq a couple of days ago. No news yet as to whether they are doing the proper thing, wiping up German agents, etc. People on all sides saying, “Mosul will be no good to Hitler even if he gets there. The British will blow up the wells long before.” Will they, I wonder? Did they blow up the Rumanian wells when the opportunity existed? The most depressing thing in this war is not the disasters we are