The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  It is not sure at all that gas is a practical weapon against civilian populations, but it has been proved in Spain and China that a 500-pound bomb is a real horror. However, underground shelters against high-explosive bombs are not being built, because they are too expensive; and the main plan of A.R.P. is dispersal, which means that when the sirens howl out the warning, the citizens of England are supposed to go home and wait and try to think about something else. The people are told that they can make their homes gasproof by sticking old rags and strips of adhesive tape over leaky walls, and can keep their windowpanes from shattering when bombs fall in the neighborhood by pasting three sheets of cellophane over their windows. They are sold (for $7.50) with a sand bucket and a shovel and a small fire hose: the idea is that you hurry forth (perhaps wearing dark glasses against the glare of burning London) with the shovel and scoop up an incendiary bomb and plop it into the sand bucket and then turn on the fire hose. Seven booklets are put out by the Home Office, to teach people how to behave during air raids, easy lessons for beginners. Also, you are informed in advance that—if you work in A.R.P.—you get $5,000 if you die or are blinded, or lose both feet or a hand and a foot. You get $2,500 if you are half blind or lose only one foot or hand, and so down the list of miseries.

  In fact, A.R.P. is not the joke that people think and say it is, though as adequate precaution against air raids it is far from perfect. But the usefulness of it is propaganda: the people are being accustomed to the idea of war, after twenty years of excellent and effective peace propaganda on the part of pacifists and the League of Nations supporters. Also, the government very likely feels that a prepared civilian England cannot be terrorized into demanding a quick armistice. Moreover, this huge organization of personnel means that everyone in England will be under surveillance by some government authority, and when the air-raid wardens are instructed to keep up the “morale” of the people, it is no idle order.

  Meantime classes go on all over England, teaching citizens how to act while being bombed. One particular class was being held in the home of a peeress, and the butler was very busy finding pencils for the ladies who had forgotten to bring theirs. You paid to join the class, thus insuring that no strangers would get in and worry you while taking notes. The lecturer was instructing the ladies (all attentive, the feathered hats and veils bowed over notebooks) on air-raid warnings. His voice, cool and educated, droned over the pale green drawing room: “the alarm will be two minutes of a varying note on the sirens—the all-clear is two minutes of a steady note—have you got that?—the warning for gas attacks will be given by the police and the air-raid wardens, who are to sound rattles. Of course you can't smoke in your shelter rooms, because of saving oxygen—it would be just as well to take tinned foods with you into your shelters, and as you're going to be down there for some little time, you might as well take games that can be played without physical exertion . . .” I thought of the people of Spain, the dark-faced women, drawn with hunger and anxiety, standing in doorways as the bombers passed over, silver and immaculate, dropping death. I thought of the crazy-eyed children running through the streets in hope of shelter and of the old people who could not run. I also thought that in Spain no one ever had time to think of panic, and that I had never heard anyone suggest taking games into a bomb cellar, where hundreds of desperately silent people wait for the planes to pass. I remembered how we stood on the balcony in the dawn in Barcelona and watched the searchlights hunting, and listened to the explosions, and never went anywhere for safety, believing that with bombers over a city you are lucky or nothing.

  Reflecting on these things, I heard a voice and looked up to see a white-haired lady with small pearls in her ears, saying some-what crossly to the lecturer, “I do think ten minutes is an awfully small warning; it doesn't give you much time to turn off the lights and close the windows and get everything ready to go down into the shelter.” Whereupon the lecturer said apologetically, “Well, I'm afraid you'll have to expect that.” The English are fortunate, I thought, they haven't any imagination at all. I asked the gentle-woman who was secretary of this course (and she stared at me) whether anyone here knew what was being talked about: had any of them considered Spain and China. Had anyone the remotest idea of the exhausting, persistent menace of death from the air. She said: “You do lifeboat drill on a ship, don't you, but you don't expect the ship to sink. . . .”

  The poor are pretty indifferent to all this: they haven't the money to buy gasproof rooms and have no gardens in which to sink bombproof cellars, and besides they aren't told very much, because there's no use disturbing them. But at John Lewis, Silk Mercers, in London, you can get your sitting room gasproofed for a minimum $60 and up to $2,500; you can buy an oilskin suit, like a fisherman's, that has been specially treated against gas, and in which you will look a fright but never mind, for about $15; you can buy a really efficient gas mask for the same sum, and you can buy special electric torches and air purifiers and all sorts of contraptions. Business is booming.

  Another firm called Air Guard Limited will build you a cozy cellar against high-explosive bombs in your garden, where four people can be quite at home for $500. And if you have the money you can live in Bentinck Close, out near Regent's Park, a “lovely location” as the agent will tell you, where there is a fine gas- and bombproof cellar provided for the tenants. The prospectus of this apartment house prints a map of the bombproof cellar with all details; there are lockers and bunks and shower rooms and special air purifiers. As the minimum rent is $2,150 a year, not many young people live there.

  The organized Left complains bitterly about A.R.P. saying that the rich can buy individual protection in cities, or else leave for safer areas, but that the poor are stuck with three sheets of cellophane as protection against high-explosive bombs. Moreover, as Miss Ellen Wilkinson, Labor M.P., asked, “Is the government aware of how the women of the country feel at having this matter of grave importance to them all put entirely into the hands of society ladies and debutantes.” Besides this sort of comment, there are endless jokes: the young man-about-town who suggested that the next great scandal would be when a duchess, with inkstained fingers, was caught cheating at her A.R.P. warden exams. ... But despite talk, A.R.P. goes on, and it is the greatest peacetime effort England has ever made to prepare her people for the idea of war.

  Obviously, no one, except the general staff and other responsible authorities, knows exactly what England will do in time of war. However, the main effort now is to protect England, the heart of the empire, and London, the heart of England. It is generally felt that if London were knocked out, by successive surprise air raids in the early days of a war, everything would go to pot. So the plans of England are defensive: England is going to protect itself first.

  On authority, one learns that the east coast is protected by a triple line of defense: this defense consists in airfields, from which fighting planes can rise for immediate combat, antiaircraft guns and searchlights. The air force, as far as can be determined, is 2,382 planes of which 1,500 are stationed in England. The latest fighter, called the Hawker Hurricane, is supposed to have a speed of 400 miles an hour and probably hasn't. At any rate, as various pilots point out, it is doubtful whether a man (and after all a pilot cannot be constructed but has only regulation heart and lungs) could fight at that speed. Everybody knows that pilots can and often do lose consciousness momentarily, rounding pylons. If a plane cruises at 400 m.p.h., it would be diving and maneuvering at a superior speed. All this is speculation; the people who know about the Hawker Hurricanes are those who make them and run them. At any rate, this plane is the present flower of the combat air force, and one of the mainstays in the defense scheme.

  The gun that is to bring down enemy planes is the famous 3.7 gun, of which there are supposed to be twelve in England, and about which talk rages in the press and Commons. A military authority estimates the ceiling of this gun at 40,000 feet; it is stated to have a shell-burst four times as great as that of the o
ld 3-inch guns, and the time of flight of the shell between gun and target is supposed to be halved. All of which means that it's a dangerous gun, with the highest ceiling and the largest shell-burst of any now made, and if there are 1,000 of them, as desired, it would be extremely uncomfortable for enemy planes to fly over England. The air defense is being enlarged into five divisions, with a man power of 100,000. The duty of these men will be to serve the antiaircraft guns and work the searchlight barrage.

  The searchlights are the third defense measure: it is planned to have England so organized that planes flying in from the sea would be caught in a beam of light immediately and would be carried, from searchlight battery to searchlight battery, in an unending band of light all the way inland. Presumably, this same system of airfields, gun and searchlight batteries would encircle important manufacturing cities and be cross-stitched across Great Britain. Coupled with planes, guns and lights are the sound detectors, located in greatest profusion along the east coast, from which direction the enemy will come; they will serve to warn both the army defense forces and the civilian population. The worry of all Englishmen who think about it is: have we enough planes, guns, searchlights, sound detectors, and men trained to handle these things? The answer they give you is: No.

  Germany is supposed to have 2,600 planes and an air force of 130,000 men. Italy is suppsed to have 2,100 planes and 50,000 in its air force. So England is building planes like mad and trying to increase the personnel of her air force from its present 83,000 as rapidly as possible, and meanwhile England stalls, for all the world to see, and her people say: Well, in a year we'll be ready. . . .

  “Various other defense measures are talked about. There is the famous and fantastic balloon barrage. The idea is to send up a fleet of small balloons, hitched together, which will float at a certain height. They could be a sort of fence along the coast, or a circular aerial wall above London, or both. Hanging from these balloons, which will be resting in the ether about 3,000 meters or more high, will be steel cables, like the railings on an iron fence but very long. If you hit a bird, going 400 m.p.h. in the air, it can be fatal. It is evident that if the balloon barrage stayed in place (and people seem to think it can be perfectly controlled) it would create a deadly obstacle. At best it would make night flying suicidal, and at the least it would keep enemy planes so high that they could not do accurate bombing.

  There is also mention of the possible evacuation of London and the Channel coast, the moving of factories to the west coast, where supposedly they would be out of range of bombers. There is likewise talk of underground petrol and arms depots on the west coast. You cannot find out to what extent work has started on camouflaging or building underground munitions factories.

  England needs 50,000 tons of imported food per day, and must control the seas or give up. When the new and rushed construction program is completed, England will have an approximate 399 naval units: capital ships, destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, etc. The fleet would probably again blockade the North Sea, but no one seems too concerned over the Mediterranean. You are told that after all, England hasn't always had the Suez Canal, and that commerce could be diverted around the Cape of Good Hope and be protected as it crossed the Atlantic (not hostile water anyhow, until nearing England) by the fleet. You are told that the Mediterranean could simply be bottled up, and there—you suppose—the Italian fleet would harry French communications with Africa, but that is the lookout of the French.

  It is assumed that a blockade of the North Sea would greatly help England's allies (a very sound assumption, considering the last war) and that England would also send an air force to the Continent to aid her allies. You do not hear any plans for shipping a huge land army to the Continent, as was done in the last war, and Captain Liddell Hart, one of England's ranking military authorities, strongly warns against sending a large land army aborad. The English have always had the privilege of fighting their wars somewhere else, but now England is preparing to fight in her own air, over her own fields and cities, and the prospect is pleasing to no one.

  The soundest reasoning of those who do not believe in an oncoming war goes like this: You bomb Sheffield, we bomb Cologne; you bomb Newcastle, we bomb the Saar. Who gets anything? It's equal, hopeless, crazy, and no one is going to start it. . . . As one prominent military man said: “No one can really win a war now. The only hope is to convince your adversary first that he certainly can't win it.”

  We went to call on the swellest bit of army I ever saw. The Territorial Army is all volunteer, and in time of war it would be rushed into the defense of England. A thousand of these Territorials belong to the Honorable Artillery Company, which has its headquarters in the financial center of London, the City, and drills on a smooth stretch of green lawn, whose turf is no doubt worth its weight in gold. You cannot get into the Honorable Artillery Company unless you are propsed and seconded, as if you were joining a swank club. It is really an officers’ training school; in time of war more than 60 per cent of their men get commissions. At six o'clock in the evening the young stockbrokers begin drifting in with their rolled umbrellas, derby hats and stiff collars, and presently they emerge on the lawn in khaki mechanic uniforms to drill. They must go to fifty evening drills a year for four years, and to two-weeks camp per year and then they are graduated, so to speak, and put on the reserve list. After an evening's drill, they meet in a long, low dining room and eat excellent food, and later go into the great hall, where their old flags hang in lacy blackened shreds from the paneled walls and have their drinks and the comfortable snobbish feeling of belonging to the oldest military organization in the world.

  Conversation ran like this. The colonel: “There's been a great revolution in English thought in the last few years.”

  I: “Really?”

  The colonel: “Yes. A few years ago everyone was pacifist and soppy but now they're coming round to seeing reason.”

  The lieutenant: “Everybody's fighting disarmament. A really strong army will keep us out of war.”

  The captain: “We're twenty per cent overstrength right now. There was a rush of recruiting, after Hitler went into Austria.”

  The lieutenant: “We had some of those Nazi chaps over here last week. Gruppenfuehrer, I think they're called. Very nice people. Had a fine time with them. They thought our miniature gun range a marvel.’’

  But no one wondered whom England was arming against, or whom England was trying to stay out of war with, or what a war might be about.

  The auxiliary air force, a civilian volunteer branch of the regular air force, consists of 13 squadrons, with airfields throughout England. One combat group has its planes and clubroom at Hendon and we went there to lunch with some young gentlemen who are pilots. Like the Honorable Artillery Company, this particular squadron is very chic. The gentleman pilots were delightful and would speak of anything but war. They come out and fly during week ends, and those who do not work fly almost all the time. There is a theory that boys of nineteen make the best pilots and some qualifications are whether you drive a fast car, ride to hounds or ski, all dangerous and expensive sports.

  So England for one year alone spends $1,715,000,000 rearming. And young men volunteer for the land and air forces and civilians join the Air Raid Precautions work, and the regular army and navy recruit. But such questions as, Where is the war coming from, and why? When will it happen? What will bring it about, and can it be stopped? are not common questions at all. And old war horse, a retired colonel with a game leg, showing me gas-mask depots, said: “You just declare war and get together some redcoats and some brass bands and there'll be no trouble recruiting. People didn't know what they were fighting about in the last war, and they won't know in this one, and no one asks. Why should they?”

  I drove north to Newcastle, through that smoky belt of cities where armaments are manufactured, through Coventry, Birmingham, Middlesborough, Stockton and Sheffield. I believed that if I went where the planes and guns, the tanks and shells, the s
hips and bombs were being made, I'd find people thinking and talking, asking themselves what all this was about, this rush and boom, this prosperity built on destruction. I was, however, wrong.

  In Coventry, they were having a parade with floats, to raise money for the local hospital. A lady with a huge muslin rose like a headlamp on her hat, standing in the crowd, started the conversation. A float had just passed called “The League of Notions,” and thereupon she remarked that people who fought against bolshies were the only ones who were really trying to protect England. From that she went into A.R.P. Lady Beatrice Something-or-Other, the local aristocrat, was apparently heading up the good work, and my friend remarked: “I always think blue blood tells, don't you?” I said I knew very little about the subject. Then I spoke of recruiting, and she said: “Of course, the young men all say they won't fight, but they will as soon as it starts.” And meanwhile the parade went on with gypsy floats and Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs and everything you can name, and Coventry is rich because cars are built here and planes, and everyone has work and money to spend and hoop-la for tomorrow.

  In a Birmingham pub, the truck driver, with tobacco-stained stringy mustaches, said proudly, over his beer, “The old country can't be beat.” A sailor came in and sat down at the next table with two women. The first woman said to the second, “Don't your feet ache, dearie?” From that a discussion of the weather started that interested everyone. The second woman wore rimmed glasses and black cotton gloves and was fat and a charwoman, and full of spirit. She was ready to fight all England's enemies but wasn't clear as to who exactly had bombed those boats in Spain, anyhow it was a scandal. Two old people came in, sat down, ordered beer and drank it in total silence. They had very white hair and steady, unseeing blue eyes, both of them. This was Saturday night and the pub would stay open until ten and everyone was having a fine time. They all spoke to one another practically in whispers, very shy. No one was reading a newspaper, and no one talked politics. (Remember Czechoslovakia, the papers eagerly read and the speculation? We're on an island now, and the world is someplace else. This is England and tomorrow there is probably a cricket match.)