Death and the Hazards

(See Cover) REWARD--DEAD OR ALIVE: Englishman, 25 years old, about 5 ft. 8 in. tall, indifferent build, walks "with a forward stoop, pale appearance, red-brownish hair, small and hardly noticeable mustache, talks through his nose and cannot pronounce the letter S properly.

On the walls and poles of the Transvaal this handbill was pasted one day during the Boer War. It described a young newspaper reporter who had fought like a professional soldier when a British armored train was ambushed by Boers; had been captured and held as prisoner of war, had climbed over the ten-foot iron fence of his prison with no map or compass, but a little money and some cubes of chocolate in his pockets, and had eventually taken refuge at the bottom of a mine. It described and--with the exception of the age and the mustache, which was just a medal of not-quite-certain manhood--still does describe Winston Churchill.

Young Winnie Churchill's fabulous escape from Pretoria made him world-famous while he was still trying to prove he could grow whiskers. But the escape has a wider significance than that. It symbolizes Winston Churchill as Winston Churchill so aptly and lovingly symbolizes Great Britain's unwillingness to give up when apparently cornered.

There is an extraordinary fact about English democracy--namely, that at almost any given time some English leader turns out to be a perfect symbol of his people. At the time of Edward VIII's abdication, Stanley Baldwin was the typical Englishman. At the time of the Munich crisis, Neville Chamberlain was pathetically typical. But as of the fourth week of September 1940, Winston Churchill was the essence of his land. The three men are as dissimilar as fog, rain and hail, which are all water. But the country they ruled has changed. This England is different.

Winston Churchill is tough. The first important thing he does when he is awakened at 7:15 every morning is light a cigar. The only thing his tongue is afraid of is still that S. His mind requires and retains whole libraries of facts. His spirit loves good food, good drink, pretty and witty women. His body tolerates terrific burdens. He wears out whole squads of secretaries. He talks down platoons of men who have hated and now love him. He is no umbrella-fancier, and he carries a cane not to support his 65-year-old body but to prod, strike and point with. He is persistent. The way he got the unwilling Lord Beaverbrook into his Cabinet was to call him up every two hours, day and night, for 36 hours. He knows no fear. During air raids he often rushes into the gardens of No. 10 with no protection but a "battle bowler." He loves life and liberty so much that he has nearly killed and thoroughly enslaved himself a hundred times over in the past six months. Dorothy Thompson calls him "the great life-affirmer." This week Miss Thompson praised him as a man of action--"as soldier, war correspondent and public servant in high places. . . . One sometimes has the feeling that the man has skipped a century, harking back to less pedestrian and comfort-loving times, to older and more tested virtues. The timorous understatement characteristic of bourgeois decline is swept away in a lofty eloquence. . . . Addressing the people, 'We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival,' he restores to the leadership of Britain the nobleman, in its exact sense of being a man and being noble."

Britain's men of action are men to fear when the Union Jack gets tattered. Hitler fears Churchill, and implicitly admitted it when he made it clear in a speech at Saarbrucken that the inclusion of Winston Churchill in the Cabinet would be considered an act of hostility. So supine was Britain then that the country's leaders, who also feared this man of thick blood, grasped at the Hitler threat as an excuse to keep Churchill down.

Like the tragic Britain of which he is trademark, Churchill is eloquent. The measured sequences of Pitt, the roars of Samuel Johnson, the lisps of Addison, the thunder of Milton, the heroic triviality of Kipling tremble in his sagging, pouting, one-sided mouth. He is ruthless in his larceny of others' vocabulary, but has a bottomless wit of his own. His reports to Parliament and the nation, which with Chamberlain were about as poetic as a brick wall, are often almost epic. Last fortnight he spoke of Hitler, and gave his people something real to fight for:

"This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatreds, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shames, has now resolved to try to break our famous island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction.

"What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts here and all over the world which will glow long after all traces of the conflagrations he has caused in London have been removed.

"He has lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burned out of Europe and until the Old World and the New can join hands to rebuild the temples of man's freedom and man's honor upon foundations which will not soon or easily be overthrown."

Two Britains. Winston Churchill represents the elite of Britain's past, the humble of her present. He is descended from a long line of aristocratic leaders, but he is the son of a younger son. Descendant of the first Duke of Marlborough, who commanded at Blenheim and Mal-plaquet, grandson of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, but also grandson of a New York City newspaperman, he sums up two Britains, both of which are in the present war up to the hilt: the Britain of military aristocracy and that of the people who, like Churchill, have difficulty pronouncing a letter--theirs is h. He could, if he wanted, wear his old school (Harrow) tie; instead he wears a cocky, defiant bow. He is a Tory, an imperialist, and has been a strikebreaker and Red-baiter; and yet, when he tours the gutted slums of London, old women say: "God bless you, Winnie."

It is well that Winston Churchill has this double appeal, because last week, for the first time, there appeared in London an ominous, terrifying thing. One of these two Britains -- the one Adolf Hitler had hurt most cruelly -- seemed to be shaken. Discontent incubated and spread like a dread disease. London realized that this was an overwhelming war against people; and people did not like it.

An ironic slogan went the rounds of London last week: "Join the Army and escape the war." Before the House of Commons Winston Churchill declared that, of 2,000 deaths in two weeks' raids, only one-fortieth were military casualties. Noncombatants were really getting it. One Army officer, surveying the ruins of an Oxford Street store, remarked: "Thank God I'm not a civilian."

Disruptions. Death, though the worst, was not the only civilian hazard. When the poor lost their homes, they lost every thing. When factories were bombed they lost next to everything -- their jobs. Cer tain occupations, such as dancing in cho ruses and picking up men on street corners, were completely bombed out. Pub owners lost most of their business. Luxury shops did no selling. Crime, or at least its detection, took a holiday: for the first time in the memory of living men the Bow Street Police Court booked no charges for a whole day.

Important communications held up all right (the equivalent of about three ships' worth of food was destroyed, while 200 with food and munitions arrived), but civilian communications were badly disrupted. Commuters were badly delayed by subways which had been damaged or which lay near unexploded time bombs. Post offices shut down during raids. Let ters took three days to get across London, five to reach the country; and telegrams were almost as bad. Long-distance tele phoning was practically impossible. Euston, Victoria and Waterloo railway sta tions were badly damaged; the Victoria train shed, a massive thing of girder and glass, was crushed across tracks.

Civilians lost sleep and work. Each night from 10 p.m. until dawn the noise of bombs and "ack ack" (signaling lingo for A. A. -- antiaircraft) was almost unbearable, though the defense barrage was comforting. It was also expensive -- -L-250,000 nightly -- and brought down only 3% to 5% of bagged planes. The siren was a nerve-tearing noise. Dr. Henry Albert Wilson, Bishop of Chelmsford, was dead in earnest when he wrote: "I suggest a gay cockadoodle-doo repeated half a dozen times would be in the nature of a whistle to keep our courage up instead of a dole ful wail which depresses all but the most stouthearted."

Into the Earth. But the biggest problem of the week was that of shelter. In the first months of the war the Government distributed Anderson shelters (named for Minister for Home Security Sir John Anderson), light steel affairs for back yards. They were designed to 'stop splinters, not bombs, and have proved ad mirable for that limited purpose. Their great fault was that they were not big enough to sleep in.

As early as 4 p.m. thousands began queuing up at public shelters. As they once did for theatre crowds, street singers stood by with their melancholy entertainment. Tens of thousands paid three halfpenny (about 3-c-) tube fares for a grimy plot of platform on which to sleep. Working-class people, with dirty blankets, tattered pillows, paper bags containing desperate entertainments--such as knitting and cards--and nourishment--such as beer and bananas--crowded the ill-ventilated way stations. The Home Secretariat ordered the police to clear the subways, but the police dared not carry out the order. The smelly air was not improved by portable lavatories grudgingly provided by the Transport Ministry. Over the huddled clerks, waitresses, street sweepers, hairdressers, tarts, hung a danger almost as bad as the bombs from which they felt safe--epidemic.

The newspapers loudly called for adequate shelters. What if the whole winter had to be spent underground? There simply were not enough good shelters. One of the only really safe ones, aside from the Underground, was the vaults of the Bank of England. Its Board of Directors declared a 6% dividend there last week, but the populace of London could not be kept in the Bank of England's vaults.

Answers. All this pressed hard against the heart of Winston Churchill. Both from the military and the humane point of view, the shelter problem was of first importance. By his own choice the Prime Minister was grossly overworked. Besides daily War Cabinet meetings, raid or no raid, besides reading and editing some 100 State papers, he took all the civilian grievances on his own hunched shoulders. He knew how dangerous they were. He knew that excessive preoccupation with them was just the precondition for invasion which Adolf Hitler wanted.

The Prime Minister set the Ministry for Home Security to work. Vaguely Sir John Anderson promised ventilation, light, warmth. Department stores opened their basements, and when the big John Lewis & Co. building was hit, 700 trooped safely out to another shelter. To keep people happy, Minister of Information Alfred Duff Cooper announced plans for portable cinemas against dreary winter evenings. The Arts Theatre Club and ballets moved their performances to the lunch hour. Winston Churchill each day perused particulars of civilian casualties and property damage. He accelerated systems of pension and relief, and marshaled 2,200 doctors and nurses against epidemics.

Often he went among the poor to show them his interest. The pressure on him to order murderous but militarily wasteful retaliation on Berlin was tremendous, but he--held himself in. On one of his tours the dispossessed shouted: "What about reprisals? These were our homes. What about Berlin?" The Churchill jaw set grimly, the underlip went out, and the Prime Minister growled: "Don't worry, they'll get it back." Later one of his colleagues said: "Churchill is a very full-blooded gentleman. Hitler has often mentioned the shortness of his patience, but Churchill's patience, as well as the British public's on this subject, now depends on a rapidly thinning thread."

For the time being, retaliatory horror had to be withheld. For the R. A. F. needed all its energies to pound hard and continuously at potential German invasion bases. The equinox came, but not the enemy. The time for a fair-weather invasion ended, and the time for a foul-weather one arrived. Gales lashed the Channel, and along the French coast barges and small vessels were reported cast loose in confusion. And the air was thick with another kind of wind--that of rumor. The Germans were said to be returning small boats requisitioned from Norwegians. They were reported still sending troops out in barges, making them jump overboard and get ashore in practice landings, drowning not a few in the process. One German airman, when shot down over England, asked to be sent to the nearest German Army station. Told that it was across the Channel, he said: "It's at Reading. It's useless to lie to me. I know all about it."

But the most serious suspicion growing in British minds was that invasion might be off for the present. The very fact of this increasing relaxation of expectancy led Winston Churchill and his colleagues to be more on the alert than ever. If by letting the equinox go past, Hitler was just confusing the British, the guard must stay up. If by letting it pass he had abandoned invasion, turning his attention southward (see p. 27, p. 29}, Britain might not be so likely to win as if he made the attempt now. The British were confident last week as they feared they might not be next spring. Ole Bill, Captain Bruce Bairnsfather's famous cartoon philosopher-private, recently said: "It'd be just like that Hitler to play us a dirty trick, like not trying to invade us."

As the Luftwaffe continued to come over in short nuisance raids and careful military attacks during the day, and in long merciless strangulation by night, Britain's leaders grew more & more concerned about the discomfort and discontent of little people. If anyone could hold their confidence, it was old Winnie. His fond grip on them grew every hour. Rich and poor alike paid him honor. Britain felt that it was cornered, but that Winnie would find a fence to climb over and a mine to hide in.

In Parliament his position was stronger than ever. Last week the 1922 Committee, a group of ultra-conservatives who have continuously criticized him, wrote him a letter of confidence. But the most touching thing that has happened to him since war began had to do with Britain's and Churchill's greatest love, the sea.

One day, as a gale whipped white saliva on to the sharp tongues of the Channel rip, and fog set in thick about Dover, Winston Churchill turned the House over to First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander. As the Prime Minister leaned busily over some notes, the First Lord announced that the destroyers bought from the U. S. would be given names of towns which lie in both Britain and the U. S., that the first flotilla would be given the initial C, and that the flotilla leader would be called Churchill. The Prime Minister busily leaned and fumbled, but the bald top of his head blushed.

Cheering and happily laughing, M. P.s shouted: "Hold your head up." Like a little boy caught out in pleasant mischief, Winston Churchill raised his pouting face to the Mother of Parliaments.

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