Chapter I: Part 1

_Ernie Pyle_
in England

ROBERT M. McBRIDE & COMPANY

_New York_

ERNIE PYLE IN ENGLAND

COPYRIGHT, 1941, BY
SCRIPPS-HOWARD NEWSPAPER ALLIANCE

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA

FIRST EDITION

AMERICAN BOOK--STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

_For
That Girl
Who Waited_

CONTENTS

PAGE
_FOREWORD_ xi

_I ON MY WAY_

1. Qualms 1
2. Crossing 1
3. Way Station 5

_II ALL QUIET_

1. Peace to War--Seven Hours 11
2. “He Hasn’t Come Yet, Sir.” 16
3. First Impressions 24

_III MOST HATEFUL, MOST BEAUTIFUL_

1. Ringed and Stabbed with Fire 30
2. Night Stroll, Illuminated 33
3. The Landmarks 36
4. Roughing It 42
5. Whooo-issshhh! 45
6. Sounds and Sights 48
7. Blindfolded in Sahara 53

_IV THE HEROES ARE ALL THE PEOPLE_

1. It’s All True 57
2. The Cupboard’s Not Bare 60
3. Street Scene 68
4. This Is the Way of Wapping 74
5. The Pynted Awl 77

_V GUNS AND BOMBERS_

1. Tea, with Sound Effects 82
2. Miscellany 90
3. The Beaver 96
4. Shop Talk with the R.A.F. 102

_VI THE CAVE DWELLERS_

1. All I Could Bear 110
2. Double-X 115
3. Stars and Stripes 122
4. Looking Ahead 127

_VII EXPEDITION TO THE NORTH_

1. Fear, with Laughter 133
2. Yorkshire Farm 138
3. Visit to Scotland 140
4. A Scottish Family 146
5. The Red Clyde 149
6. Defense in Depth 156

_VIII MURDER IN THE MIDLANDS_

1. Train Talk 162
2. Factories--Everywhere 165
3. Blitzkiss in Coventry 167
4. Notes on the Cuff 175

_IX YOU HAVEN’T SEEN ANYTHING_

1. The War in Wales 179
2. Miner 183
3. No Man’s Land 185
4. Longshore Pub 191
5. Back to London 194

_X BOMBS DO THE DAMNEDEST THINGS_

1. “Shut Up, They’ll Hear You!” 201
2. Germans, Arise and Flee 205
3. A Visit with Low 211
4. Ready for Hitler 217
5. Good-bye to All That 222

_EPILOGUE_ 227

FOREWORD

Last fall when the great air battles were being fought out over England and the first full reality of the bombed torment that was London’s came over the cables to us in America, there grew in me an almost overpowering urge to be there amidst it all. To this day I cannot quite put into words just what my feelings were. I am a professional traveler, but it was not curiosity “to see what it was like” that made me want to go. And I am a newspaperman, yet the “story” I might send back hardly entered my mind at all. I simply wanted to go privately--just inside myself I wanted to go.

For it seemed to me that in London there was occurring a spiritual holocaust--a trial of souls--that never again in our day could be reenacted. I felt that to live your span in this time of ours, and to detour around an opportunity of sharing in the most momentous happening of that time, was simply to be disinterested in living. It seemed to me somehow that anyone who went through the immersion into fear and horror of the London bombings, could not help but be made fuller by it.

So I went. Things didn’t turn out just as I had expected. For one thing, it never seemed dramatic to me when I was there. All the elements I had visioned were there, yet apparently I had not the capacity for being erupted by them up into a great new nobleness of mind and heart. What I mean is that, so far as I can analyze myself, I feel no different than before I went. I don’t feel cleansed in spirit or exalted in stature. I merely toasted my shins awhile before the grate of war; they--the people of England--are the embers and coals and licks of flame that constitute the very fire itself. We who go and come away again cannot be other than small beside them.

* * * * *

From the day war was declared, I felt keenly for the side of Britain. But I am no intellectual curator of the world’s morals; the thinkers who take up the war as a “cause” leave me bewildered. I simply wanted England to win because it seemed to me safer and sounder for England to be running the world than for Germany to run it. And now that I’ve been there, I still feel exactly the same about it.

Somehow it seems inevitable that there shall be one dominant nation in the world. I guess it’s just the same principle that makes Ivory Soap float, or that makes one horse, instead of all the entrants, win a race. Whichever nation is dominant sets the tempo for a good part of the world. And if the tempo-setter must be either England or Germany, it seems to me simple sanity that England should continue to be that nation.

The actual policy of a world rule is formed not so much by the leaders and individual representatives of a country as by the background of basic character of the whole people. And if I had never known it before, I discovered this winter that the national character of the British is a noble character. Sure, there are things about them we despise; there are intolerable Englishmen by the scores of thousands. Yet if you judge them by their massed heart and their massed way of dealing with life--which you must do if you’re deciding who is to dominate the rest of the world--then the English seem to me to come off as leaders more nearly perfect than any other nation on earth.

I have almost no feeling at all against the Germans. I never did, and I still don’t today, even after they had filled the sky with bombs above my own private and precious head. I don’t see how anyone can blame Germany for wanting to be Mr. Big in this world. Doesn’t England want to be Mr. Big too? And does America want to play second fiddle to Italy or Germany or Japan? Of course not.

You cannot help but be anguished at death and destruction, and sometimes you sink into a despair of abysmal hopelessness when you stand in the center of a complete ravage--and yet it’s war and I can’t blame Germany for fighting nor England for fighting back. They’re both in there punching, and may the best man win. And if England isn’t the best man, may she win anyhow, dammit.

* * * * *

As for my own case history, in the event you care, I’m a farmer who has forgotten how to farm, and a newspaperman of so many years’ tenure that I no longer know how to do anything else on earth but work on and write for newspapers. I can’t even sew on a button anymore.

It has been eighteen years since I quit school and went to work on a small Indiana daily, and every minute of that time has been spent on newspapers. I’ve run the gamut, as they say. I’ve worked every job on a newspaper from cub reporter to managing editor.

Nearly all of those eighteen years have been with the Scripps-Howard Newspapers. I doubt there has ever been a happier association with a business institution than mine. I’ve never had a boss who wasn’t a gentleman; never had a superior who wasn’t also my friend. Scripps-Howard has always been good to me, and liberal too. It was a nutty idea when I began pestering them, some six years ago, to let me cut loose from the desk and start wandering around in my car, writing a daily column about anything that popped into my head.

But they said okay, go ahead and try it. Since then I’ve covered 200,000 miles and been on five of the six continents and crossed both oceans and delved into every country in the Western Hemisphere and written upward of 1,500,000 words in that daily column.

It has been a joyous life. I’ve gone down the Yukon River on a stern-wheeler, and lived with the lepers in Hawaii, and petted llamas in the high Andes, and reveled in the strange lazy beauties of Rio. There isn’t a state of the Union we haven’t been in at least three different times.

By “we” I mean the other half of this gypsy combination, who is known to the readers of the column as “That Girl.” Almost everywhere I have been, she has been too. She uses up her time by reading books and working Double-Crostix puzzles and absorbing knowledge and keeping me from jumping out of my skin. In all our little triumphs and all our big despairs, she has been along.

And then came England. That was different. The government wouldn’t let her go. Hers was the far greater task of staying and waiting. But now the “Great Experience” is over, and we have hit the trail together again, in the old fashion, just wandering around talking to people and writing about the rain and things. At least I think we have. But maybe we’re only fooling ourselves. Maybe we’re just pretending that we’ve picked up the world where we left it last fall. For there is probably something to the theory that our lives, in common with all others, can never again be just as they were before 1940.

ERNIE PYLE

_Los Angeles_
_July, 1941_

_Ernie Pyle_
in England

_I. ON MY WAY_

_1. QUALMS_

_New York,
November, 1940_

A small voice came in the night and said, “Go.”

And when I put it up to the boss he leaned back in his chair and said, “Go.”

And when I sat alone with my so-called conscience and asked it what to do, it pointed and said, “Go.”

So I’m on my way to London.

Never before have I set out on a long trip with anything but elation in my heart. It is not so with this trip. This one is no lark. It will be tough and I know it.

I will be scared. I know I will feel small and in the way among a people who are doing a job of life and death.

_2. CROSSING_

_Aboard_ S.S. Exeter,
_December, 1940_

The sailing of a ship, the world over, is a gay event. A ship carries people out of reality, into illusion. People who go away on ships are going away to better things. But that was not true as we sailed for Europe. There was no gayety on the _Exeter_. Never, on any ocean or in any climate, have I seen a ship sail so drearily. I doubt there is a single person on board who goes joyously. Certainly no one is going for the fun of it. The _Exeter_ takes its human cargo into the land of heavy reality, rather than from it.

There were no farewell parties aboard ship. What few people had visitors to see them off sat in the lounges in small, quiet groups, talking seriously.

That Girl came to the ship with me. And so did an old friend we hadn’t seen for years--Jim Moran, the fellow who hunted the needle in the public haystack, and who sold an icebox to an Eskimo. Maybe you’ve read about him. We knew Moran back when he was just an amateur crazy-man. He was a gay fellow to have around this day, and we were grateful for him. He tried his best to add a touch of joviality to the long-faced atmosphere of departure.

“Look at these passengers,” Moran said. “Spies all over the place. Secret Agent Y-32. There goes Mata Hari of 1940. Everybody trying to eavesdrop on everybody else.

“Ernie, you need a dispatch case. Get an important-looking dispatch case and stuff it full of newspapers. Put a big padlock on it. Carry it everywhere with you. Carry it to meals. Walk the deck with it. Never put it down. Then, about four days out, walk away from your deck chair and leave it lying there. I’ll bet half the people on board would get maimed in the rush to grab it.”

And I said, “Oh Moran, shut up.”

* * * * *

We were to sail at 11 A.M. But the word passed around that we wouldn’t get away till several hours later. The uncomfortable quiet of anticlimax went over the ship.

Moran sat down and wrote four postcards for me to mail in Lisbon, so his friends would think he was over there.

They left the ship at noon--Moran and That Girl. We couldn’t sit there any longer, just waiting for the last moment to come. I walked out into the pier shed with them. She slipped me a note she had written, and I put it in my pocket. We have known each other a long time.

We didn’t try to say anything but just good-bye. And we made it quick. For a minute I watched them walking away, down the long pier shed. Then I went to my cabin and shut the door.

Finally, at two o’clock, we sailed. Everybody had gone. The dock was empty and dead. There was no shouting, no confetti, not even a handkerchief waved. The lonely dock simply drew away. Nothing more, as we sailed on a cold gray afternoon in November toward the darkness of Europe.

* * * * *

We have just thirty-one passengers aboard. That is only a quarter of the ship’s normal capacity, and only a sixth of what it carries on the return trips. Coming back, they put cots in the lounge and pack in 180 or 190 people. But there are so few of us that everybody has a cabin to himself. Mine is a big one with two beds, a sofa-couch, a private bathroom and two portholes. Furthermore, it has a sunny veranda just outside the door. It is, I believe, the most comfortable cabin I’ve ever had aboard ship. All I need to set up housekeeping is a base-burner and a side of bacon.

We weren’t two hours out of New York when we had boat drill.

There wasn’t any monkey business about it, either. They swung out the boats, and tested the radio in No. 1 boat.

I figured that, due to the instability of world conditions (as some people call it), we would have boat drill every day. But there wasn’t another until the seventh day out, when the whistle blew and the bells rang at eleven o’clock in the morning.

It turned into quite an experience for a British girl on board. She had just got up, and was taking a shower. When she heard the bells it never occurred to her that it might be a drill. She said to herself, “My God, this is it!” So she jumped out of the shower and into slacks and sweater without even drying. The lifebelts are on racks under the beds, and she got her lifebelt stuck and practically had to tear the bed down to get it out. She couldn’t find her money, so she ran off without it. She tarried not for lipstick nor rouge. She arrived on deck pale and breathless--to find that we were only playing.

* * * * *

We are now getting into waters where ships do get sunk occasionally. But there is no anxiety on board about our safety. We are fully lighted at night, and on each side of the ship is painted a big American flag, with a spotlight rigged to shine on it. Every night I’ve been meaning to lay out my heavy clothes on the other bed and have everything all ready to jump into--just in case. But we’re almost there now, and I haven’t got around to it.

Some of the passengers have been hoping something exciting would happen. One favors picking up a couple of lifeboats from a sunken ship. Another wants a raider to stop us and search. One extremist even favors being fired at mistakenly by a submarine--on condition that the torpedo misses. As for me, I don’t want to see anything in this ocean but waves. And on second thought I don’t even want to see waves. For I’m seeing them right now; and to put it bluntly, they make me sick.

The run to Lisbon is tough these days for the dining room and cabin stewards. Going over, there are so few people their tips don’t amount to much. And coming back, although the ship is loaded to the hilt, everybody is broke, so the tips are still small. But the crew does get a war bonus of $1 a day for working this run.

We have one Englishman aboard who is the most satisfactory listener I’ve ever talked with. He considers everything you say the most fascinating thing he’s ever heard, and says so with a repertoire of ejaculations completely new to me.

For instance, you say you’ve been at sea a month this year, and he almost jumps out of his chair and says, “No! How extraordinarily remarkable!” You say something else, and he says, “God save us! Would you believe it?” You remark that planes are landing completely blind by radio beam these days, and he leans forward as if about to leap, and comes out with: “God’s teeth! You don’t say it!”

That last one is worth the whole voyage to me.

_3. WAY STATION_

_Lisbon,
December, 1940_

You must call it “Leeze-bone,” this only free seaport city left in Europe. If you say “Leeze-bone,” then you’re a bona-fide European traveler. If you say “Leeze-bo-ah” you’re a Portuguese and live here. If you say “Liz-bun” you’re a plain American.

Today Lisbon is the temporary pasture for all those of Europe fortunate enough to escape. It is the needle’s eye through which must pass all non-fighting travel between Europe and anywhere else. A month ago it was estimated there were 20,000 refugees in Portugal. There are probably fewer now, for they are being worked out gradually, and Portugal has tightened her borders against newcomers. You can’t get a visa for Portugal today unless you can show a ticket to take you on beyond.

Most of the refugees are in or around Lisbon. A good portion of them hope some day to get to North America. Others go to South America and the Belgian Congo; and since our arrival a whole shipload of Greeks has left for the Dutch East Indies. The majority of the refugees had money originally, or they couldn’t have greased their flight from their home countries. But most of them couldn’t bring much with them. And living costs in Lisbon, although low by our standards, are high by European standards. So the refugees live close to their belts. Lisbon is not a gay place of high night life.

The staff of the American consulate has been greatly enlarged, yet they are working as intensely as newspapermen just before edition time. All day long thick groups of people shove and push and wave papers before the consulate counters, trying to be next in line to argue for a visa for that haven of havens--America. Desperation drives people to many ruses. The consulate clerks have heard so many phony stories that they practically suspect everybody. Yet they seem to have an attitude of tenderness toward them all, too, as if to say “You poor devils!”

Most of the refugees are German Jews and people from the Balkan countries. But now there are a large number of Belgians and French too. Many of them are trying to get to England. And England will take them in, if they can get there.

Restaurants in Lisbon are excellent. There are half a dozen that would satisfy any international epicure. Last night I had the best steak since Buenos Aires, and with all the trimmings it came to only eighty cents. Food abounds here; they pile it on, they even waste it--while the rest of Europe draws closer to starvation.

This is a hilly city--a beautifully hilly city. There are streets here nearly as steep as those in San Francisco. It is very white, and from a distance it glistens. And it is vastly larger than I had expected--nearly a million people--and there are traffic jams just as at home.

The sidewalks are made of flat-topped stones, walnut size, laid in weird designs of black and white as are the sidewalks in Rio. The streets are practically all of cobblestone. The city is dotted with parks and circles and statues.

There are some palm trees, and the other trees still have their leaves on them. But don’t let such greenery, and such bright sun, and such blue skies, pull any wool over your eyes. A friend’s description of southern California fits Lisbon perfectly right now. He said, “You can lie down under a rosebush in full bloom and freeze to death.” That’s Lisbon too, in December.

* * * * *

Three great warring nations all run regular passenger air lines into Lisbon. You can see planes take off every day for Berlin and Rome; and several times a week for England and the U.S. The downtown ticket offices of the English and German lines are next door to each other. In fact, I got into the German office by mistake, and naively asked about planes to London. The young man behind the counter directed me, in excellent English, to the British Overseas offices next door.

Theoretically, the air line to England is a commercial line. But the British Air Attaché here tells them whom to take, and when. When you arrive from the United States, England-bound, you register in a book at the ticket office of British Overseas Airways. That’s all there is for you to do. That’s all you can do. Some afternoon maybe a week later, maybe two months later, the ticket office will call up and tell you to get ready.

Passengers are chosen in the order of their “priority.” Nobody goes without priority. This is arranged in London only, and the average traveler can’t get priority at all. Being a newspaperman, I have priority. If I didn’t have, I might as well go home. But when it will get me to London is anybody’s guess. All you can do is wait.

What applies to us, applies to thousands here awaiting transportation. Trains are crowded. The Rome plane is booked three weeks ahead. Time is heavy on people’s hands, and as the weeks drag on they draw their financial belts closer and closer. But at cocktail hour the bars are crowded, and you hear a dozen different tongues. Americans mostly gather at the Avenida, and give each other the day’s developments--if any--in their struggle to get wherever they’re going.

Even transportation to America is difficult. They say three hundred people are sitting here waiting for the Clipper. Seats on the Clipper have been “scalped” for $1000--and then the buyer finds he has bought nothing, for Panair doesn’t permit transfer of reservations. The American Export Line runs a weekly steamer to the United States, and it is booked two months ahead. But many of these bookings are for people who haven’t even arrived from their home countries yet. Hundreds who have made reservations will never get their papers to go. They say that when the weekly boat sails, carrying out about two hundred people, it pretty well clears out those who are free to leave.

* * * * *

As far as I can tell, sentiment in Portugal is overwhelmingly pro-British. Some friends say they sense a lot of feeling for Germany here, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. True, you see an occasional German army uniform on the streets. And you hear a good many people speaking German. But there is no way to tell whether these latter are fifth columnists or refugees.

* * * * *

Along with George Lait of the International News Service, who was a fellow passenger on the _Exeter_, I put up for several days at a pension, which is something halfway between a boarding house and a hotel. And from my slight experience with pensions in this and other countries, you can have them, and welcome. But by pulling wires, the two of us finally got a room in a hotel.

The new room is about twenty feet square, and it has two big windows that look onto a narrow street. Early each morning they bring all the newsboys and street vendors of Lisbon up to this street and test their lungs. If they can’t wake us up, then they are weak and sick and are sent home for the day with a black mark.

Our room is old-fashioned, yet quite comfortable (except for temperature). The ceiling is far, far above us, and is covered with colossal scrollwork in purple plaster. The bathroom is simply one corner of the room walled off by movable panels, which stop five feet short of the ceiling. Our bathtub has three faucets, one marked cold, and two marked hot. The point is that one is a little hotter than the other. I don’t know why it’s done this way. All I care about is that one or the other should give off hot water; and they really do--plenty hot. But our radiator does not have the same virtue. It is a centuries-old custom not to have heat over here. All radiators are vaguely warm; none is ever hot. They have no effect at all on the room’s temperature.

I’ve been cold all over the world. I’ve suffered agonies of cold in Alaska and Peru and Georgia and Maine. But I’ve never been colder than right here in this room. Actually, the temperature isn’t down to freezing. And it’s beautiful outside. Yet the chill eats into you and through you. You put on sweaters until you haven’t any more--and you get no warmer.

The result is that Lait and I take turns in the bathtub. I’ll bet we’re the two most thoroughly washed caballeros in Portugal. We take at least four hot baths a day. And during the afternoon, when I’m trying to write, I have to let the hot water run over my hands about every fifteen minutes to limber them up. I’m telling the truth.

* * * * *

We went down to see the _Exeter_ sail. You’d never have recognized it as the placid and sparsely populated ship we came over on. In the lounge stood row after row of cots. Two-by-fours, with holes bored in them, had been laid over the rugs. The cot legs were set in these holes, to keep them from sliding in rough weather. Down below, every cabin was jammed. Cabins with three beds had four people in them. The ship was alive with children. Luggage was stacked everywhere.

The stewards were about to go completely crazy. Everybody was wanting something. And nobody could understand anybody. Bernie Garland, my steward coming over, said he could recognize about every language in Europe but he had a cabinful speaking something he’d never heard before.

On these homebound trips you’re lucky to be aboard at all. Which made the request of one haughty woman sound ridiculous. I overheard it myself. She was in one of the best cabins, but she didn’t like it. She came to the steward and asked if she was in first class. He told her there was only one class. So she said, “Well, you must have better cabins. Change my cabin right away, even if I pay more for it.” She wanted to change--and with eighty people sleeping in public on cots!

_II. ALL QUIET_

_1. PEACE TO WAR--SEVEN HOURS_

_England
December, 1940_

The phone rang in our hotel room in Lisbon, and we were told to be at the marine airport before daylight this morning. Don’t think I didn’t get all a-twitter. Our almost two solid weeks of waiting were drawing to an end, and Lait and I decided not even to go to bed.

Each of us left a small suitcase in Lisbon, to cut down the weight. I put my excess necessities in a white sugar sack which a boat steward had given me. And so today I arrived in England carrying a small yellow bag, a typewriter, and a knotted-up sugar sack over my shoulder.

It was cold and eerie in the dimly lighted airport building at Lisbon. We walked up and down to keep warm, until finally the captain said, “Let’s go.” We followed the crew along a pier, and got into a motorboat. We could make out dimly the shapes of two big flying boats at anchor. As our boat eased up to one of them, we jumped through the door.

The plane had four motors, and was bigger than the Baby Clippers of Pan American Airways, but not as big as the regular Clippers. She was camouflaged.

The cabin was partitioned into three compartments, with smoking permitted in the rear one. I had supposed that these planes were stripped of all peacetime travel comforts to save weight, but not so. The seats were deep and comfortable, the floor was carpeted.

The steward gave us blankets. The engines were started, the door closed, and we taxied far out into the river. We could see the lights of the city on each shore. Suddenly the motors roared, and spray blinded the windows. We ran for what seemed a long time, surging through the water, until finally we felt her break free. The windows cleared and the shore lights dropped farther and farther below. The hot exhaust rings of the motors shone dramatically red in the darkness. We were on the way to England.

* * * * *

It might have been a flight in peacetime. Every one on the plane immediately went to sleep. I slept for a while, but curiosity got the better of me, and from daylight on I stayed awake.

Dawn found us over the ocean, with no land in sight. I had been told the flight would take ten hours, but we picked up a howling tailwind and came through in less than seven hours. Time didn’t drag at all. Five hours out, I went through the plane and every passenger was asleep. As far as I could observe, not one person ever spoke to another during the trip. There were seven Americans aboard, one Swiss, and three Englishmen.

The steward served coffee and sandwiches, and later fruit. Then he came around and blacked out the windows so the passengers couldn’t see out. This was done by putting a section of frosted glass over the regular windows, with rubber suction cups. This lets in light but prevents you from seeing out. I presume it is done to keep passengers from seeing convoys in the water below. But the joke was that the steward blacked out every window except mine. Either he ran out of frosted panes or else he thought I was blind. At any rate I stared out the window the whole trip.

Land came into view on the left. It was dark brown and bare, a high, rugged coast. I thought it was Ireland. We flew along this coast for an hour. The air got rough, and five passengers were very sick. Somehow I escaped that. We passed only two ships, both small. One of them flashed a signal to us with a blinker. We did not see a single plane on the trip.

Suddenly the pilot throttled down his motors and we started losing altitude. Then I realized we had not been flying along Ireland, but along the coast of England itself. We landed far out from shore among a lot of boats at anchor and camouflaged planes resting on the water. As we struck the surface there was that familiar long ripping sound.

I felt like a character in a dream. The journey from America was over. We had arrived. But it didn’t seem really true. Any moment I expected to wake up and find myself still between those perpetual walls of the Hotel Europa in Lisbon.

* * * * *

A score of British officials, in raincoats and boots, came out in a motorboat and looked everything over, and a doctor took up the forms we had filled out. Then we all got into the boat. The men chatted with us all the way to shore. They said they would try to get us through the inspection in time to catch the mid-afternoon train to London, but they couldn’t promise.

It was raining. We walked a hundred yards along the docks, then into the main street of the little town. There were soldiers on the street, carrying tin hats and gas masks. There were women in khaki uniforms, and many people on bicycles. All the store windows were crisscrossed with strips of paper. This tends to prevent shattering from the concussion when bombs explode in the neighborhood. Strips of many colors, pasted in many designs, made the town look as though it had been decorated for Christmas instead of patched up for the war.

I wish you could see that village street. It was like a picture from a Dickens novel. The gabled buildings, the language of the signs, the many smoking chimney pots were all the England of fiction, so peaceful, neat and secure. I had not been ashore three minutes before I was in love with England.

We were escorted to a big ground-floor room, the temporary office of the British Overseas Airways. There were easy chairs and couches and a coal fire in the grate, and a boy was serving hot tea. It took us two hours to get through all the inspections. We were taken one at a time into a room where two men questioned us. They asked about our purpose in coming, about our money, about whom we knew, and so on. It was by no means a grilling. They did it in a way that made you feel you were just sitting there chatting. The procedure was more than courteous; it seemed genuinely friendly.

After that they went through our baggage minutely. They even read our letters. But so great is English courtesy that the customs man asked me to take each letter from its envelope for him. He evidently thought it would be prying for him to do so! And then as train time drew near he said we would have to hurry to catch it, so he closed the bags without finishing the inspection, gave us advice about trains and the blackout in London, and hustled us into a waiting car provided by the air line.

We drove for fifteen minutes through a thickly settled suburb. They told us bombs had fallen in the street a few afternoons ago, but we saw no evidence of it. The suburb was like a continuation of the main street of that first town--neat as a pin, snug, comfortable and beautiful.

The train came right on schedule. The porter, an old man, stowed our bags away carefully and told us just when we would get to London. It would be after dark, he said, and the Germans would probably be overhead, but he said for us not to worry.

* * * * *

My very first impression of England was of lovely, courteous people. And I don’t mean to us visitors so much as to each other. It is true that they are especially nice to Americans right now, but I noticed that they were just as thoughtful among themselves.

My only contact with English people before had been in the colonies. I had assumed that the ordinary Englishman had the same personality as those in far-off lands who gather in the clubs and hotels of an afternoon for their gin and tonic and who consider themselves superior to anything else on land or sea. But the Englishman in mass, at home, bears no resemblance at all to that. He always seems to have a pleasant little remark to make. He is interested instead of blasé. He is considerate, and he seems to enjoy being alive.

An English friend of mine says all this is true. But he says further that it is truer now than ever before. He says the war has done a lot for English character. He says it has drawn the people together, made them prouder of each other, made them humbler, and hence both mellower and stronger.

Anyway, I know that in all my traveling I have never visited a new country that in a few short hours filled me with the warmth that I feel for England.

_2. “HE HASN’T COME YET, SIR.”_

_London,
December, 1940_

We rode in luxury on our way to London town. We rode in a private compartment. We smoked, and read London newspapers, and drank tea, and ate ham sandwiches. We traveled through a magnificently green countryside. The fields looked more like parks than farms. It seemed odd that everything should be so green in December. It was a beautiful afternoon, not too cold. It would rain a little while, then the sun would come out bright.

Our first three hours in England had been so pleasant, the country so serene, the tea so true to tradition, it didn’t seem possible that death and destruction could lie only three hours ahead. But it lay nearer than that.

We were drinking tea when Lait said “Look!” and there in the sky ahead silver barrage balloons were floating. There weren’t just a few, but scores, even hundreds. They stretched on for miles and miles. We knew their presence indicated we were coming to a good-sized city.

And then came the first sight of destruction. I don’t remember specifically what was the first bombed thing we saw, for we had barely seen the first when we saw a second and a third. Then wreckage became constant. I remember a crater in a suburban street, then wrecked houses near by, and a small factory burned. After that, for block after block, half the buildings we saw were wrecked. Some of the suburban stations where the train stopped were shattered, but people by the hundreds got off and on.

If I were to say there were strain and worry and fear on people’s faces I certainly would be overworking my imagination. Except for the ghastly scenery, life seemed thoroughly normal.

An old man got into our compartment and sat down. He was ragged and feeble, and until he spoke I couldn’t have told him from an eighty-year-old Missouri farmer. When the conductor looked in for the tickets he said to the old man, “Sorry, but you have to move back. You’ve got a third-class ticket, and here you are in first.” The old man, in an accent that would be British wherever the sun sets, said, “Oh dear, oh dear” feebly, and took himself up and out. We wished he could have stayed.

Back home I had seen newsreel pictures of bombed buildings, but somehow I thought the real thing would look different. It doesn’t. The only thing different is that now it’s real and you feel a revulsion and a small sinking feeling with the knowledge of the awful power of a single bomb. You feel what it could do to you personally.

Finally we left the city and its wreckage behind and were out in green country again. Every open field had something in it to keep enemy planes from landing. Some fields were crisscrossed with row after row of tall white poles. Others had rolls of wire. Some had shallow ditches. Some had mounds of earth piled up in rows so geometrically regular that you would have thought they were planting crops instead of building obstructions.

Occasionally you would get a glimpse of a silver balloon pulled down into a woods to nestle until nightfall. Twice we passed antiaircraft guns out in the fields under canvas canopies, painted so like shrubbery that we could hardly identify them.

Every tree, every field, every cricket ground, every house and street seemed to be doing its bit. In the backyards of suburban homes along the railroad tracks there were somber marks of what war has done to the English way of life. I mean private bomb shelters; almost every back yard had one.

From the train window a shelter looked like just a large mound of dirt. From closer up, it could be seen to be a half-underground cellar, walled with concrete and sheet metal and covered heavily with dirt, much like the outdoor cellars of our Western prairies. We were interested to see vegetables growing on the earthen tops of many shelters.

All this, you must remember, was still a long way from London.

Now dusk came on, and we could no longer see fields nor bomb shelters. The conductor came through and asked us to black out the compartment. The windows have black shades on rollers, which you pull down and hook at the bottom. The windows themselves are painted black except for a square in the middle, and this is fully covered when you pull the curtain. A faint blue light shines at the top of the compartment.

Thus we rode on toward London, sealed in a blacked-out compartment, growing increasingly jumpy as we came nearer that city where the wail of sirens and the thud of bombs are as routine every night as supper.

* * * * *

We were running late by now, and consequently couldn’t tell exactly how close we were getting to London. The train would stop frequently for several minutes at a time. At these stops we would turn out the light, then pull the blind and look out, trying to see something familiar. George had lived in London for years and he knows the landmarks for miles around.

We could not see anything at all. We seemed to be out in the country. “We’re apparently still a long way off,” George said. Then, on the next peek, not two minutes later, he said, “We’re here! We’re coming into the station!”

We had arrived in the very heart of London before we knew we had even approached the suburbs.

* * * * *

The very first words I heard spoken in London were, “Well, he hasn’t come yet, sir, he’s more than a bit late tonight.”

They were spoken by an aged station porter who opened our compartment door and reached for our bags. The station was lighted so dimly that I could barely see him, but his voice was old--though it had gayness in it too.

What the porter meant was that the Germans had not yet appeared over London this night. They usually arrive as punctually as the hands of a clock. Apparently they take off from fields across the Channel a few minutes before dark and arrive over London a few minutes after dark.

Our porter talked constantly as he carried our bags through the station and to the street. We dogged his heels, for we could barely see and we didn’t want to get completely lost in our first few minutes in London.

The porter said, “I had a gentleman a bit ago and he said ‘Could I speak with you for a second?’ I said ‘Yes indeed you may. Time’s up.’ The gentleman didn’t get it at first, and then he thought it was pretty good. You might as well have a bit of a laugh, I guess.”

Our station was right in the center of London. It had been hit at least three times, and once a German plane had fallen through the roof. Yet they clean up damage so quickly that we saw no sign of wreckage in the half-light.

In my first night here not a bomb was dropped on London. In fact, not a single German plane appeared over any part of the British Isles that night. Perhaps it was just as well, for if I had arrived in the middle of an inferno of explosion and fire they might have had a berserk American on their hands. Even as it was, those first few minutes in London will be a panorama running before my memory’s eye for a lifetime--a panorama more of impressions than of things actually seen.

The night was not entirely black. The moon was up, and you could dimly distinguish shapes if not details. You could see the black outline of a car a few yards away, and buildings stood out against the faint hint of light in the sky.

At the porter’s shout a taxi pulled up at the curb and we rumbled off into the darkness. There was very little traffic. Perhaps two cars to a block. Now and then there was a bus. You could see pin points of light moving down the street, but you could get no perspective on them. They were like slowly moving stars in the sky. Then as they came near they would be surrounded by a great black shape, and you could tell it was a bus--but not until you were abreast of it.

As the moon came out fuller it shone on the sides of the buildings and made them appear snow-covered. The city was ghostly silent. Only the low sound of our motor and the small purr of a passing car--that was all. There was no other sound in the streets of London. Yet it wasn’t the silence of a graveyard. That wasn’t the feeling at all. It was like something mysterious, darkly seen in a dream--shapes here, shadows there, tiny lights swimming toward you, dark bulks moving noiselessly away. And where I had expected to see block after block of vacant spaces and jumbled wreckage, there stood block after block of whole buildings.

I thought to myself: Is this nonsense? Or is London really still here? And I realized there in the dark, with a kind of incredulous excitement, that London was still here, and very much so.

As we drove along in our darkened taxi, Lait pointed things out to me--buildings that we could see only vaguely in the hazy light of the moon. We passed the Houses of Parliament, and saw Big Ben high up there in his tower. But he was not telling the time, either for us or for German fliers; he was all dark. We drove onto Victoria Embankment and along the Thames. We saw Westminster Bridge and a little later Waterloo Bridge. I was astonished to see them still standing. Since then I have found that all the Thames bridges are standing, every one of them open to traffic. We passed the great obelisk called Cleopatra’s Needle, which was nicked by bombs from a Zeppelin in the last war but hasn’t been touched this time. Then we turned off into a maze of side streets that finally brought us to Fleet Street, the greatest newspaper street in the world. There Lait got out to go to his office, and the cab went on around the corner to my immediate destination.

The driver couldn’t locate the number. He yelled at the shadows of some men unloading something from a truck. He yelled at vaguely seen passers-by. Nobody knew where the number was. Finally the driver--and this was the only unpleasant thing I had encountered so far in England--told me to get out and hunt. It seemed that it was not his responsibility to get me there.

I said, “Good Lord, man, I’ve only been in London ten minutes and I was never here before in my life. How in heaven’s name am I going to find anything in this blackout?”

So he groused a little and yelled at some more passers-by and finally did locate the address. I paid him off and carried my bags and sugar sack up to the door. A tiny blue light shone over it. The entire front was packed high with sandbags.

I didn’t know whether I dared to enter or not, for fear of letting out light. The tenderfoot treads cautiously in London these nights. He doesn’t want to make a fool of himself. But finally I gingerly pulled open the glass door, reached in and touched a heavy curtain, and pulled that aside. There, behind it was a typical office-building lobby, lighted up. I was in the right place.

On an upper floor I found the men of the United Press at work. Their windows were blacked out. Tin hats and gas masks lay thrown on tables. The men were surprised to see a stranger walk in from America unannounced at that time of night.

They gave me suggestions about hotels and made several phone calls for me. All the calls went through immediately, just as though London had never been bombed. And they sent an office boy to dig up another taxi, for not many cabs cruise the streets at night.

We drove a few blocks in the dark and then pulled into what seemed to be an alley. It was as dead and silent and black as a pit.

“I hope I’m not being held up,” I thought.

At the end of the alley the taxi made a half turn and stopped. Someone outside opened the door and shone a flashlight on the floor of the taxi. Then I saw that he was a doorman and that we were at the entrance of one of London’s finest hotels, the Savoy.

I went through a revolving door, the panes of which were blacked out with cardboard, and stepped into the same luxury and brightness and crowds of people that you can find in any good New York hotel. The reception clerks were all in tuxedos. The bellboys were in gray uniforms. The elevator operators wore wing collars.

I laughed and apologized for my sugar sack, but I needn’t have done so. Anything is all right during the “emergency.” On my way through the reception room I noticed a man sitting at a table drinking coffee. He was on his way to sleep in the hotel’s basement shelter. He was in pajamas and bathrobe.

Imagine sitting in the lobby of the Mayflower in Washington or the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco in pajamas!

* * * * *

Before coming here I knew only one person in this city of eight million. This was Ben Robertson, now London correspondent of _PM_, the New York newspaper. I hadn’t seen him in years, but within forty-five minutes after stepping off the train in London I was shaking hands with Ben Robertson. Talk about being glad to see anybody! It was like striking gold.

I found him in the Savoy dining room eating with two young members of Parliament. One was Dick Law, son of England’s famous statesman, Andrew Bonar Law. Dick is financial secretary to the War Office. The other was Jim Thomas, parliamentary secretary to Anthony Eden.

I hadn’t eaten a real meal in twenty-four hours. So I ate one now--soup, chicken, mashed potatoes, a green salad, pastry, coffee. You could get practically anything you wanted. The dining room was packed and an orchestra was playing.

Bob Casey of the Chicago _Daily News_ came by, and Larry Rue of the Chicago _Tribune_. Frank Owen, editor of Lord Beaverbrook’s London _Standard_, came and talked about how things were going for Britain.

My new English friends wanted to know what America thought; and they told queer bomb stories by the dozen. “You’re a welcome sight,” they said. “We’ve all told our bomb stories to each other so many times that nobody listens any more. Now we’ve got a new audience.”

What an introduction to London! I not only felt vastly relieved to be among friends, but also as snug as a bug and as big as a barrage balloon. To say nothing of feeling extremely brave, since there were no planes over England that night.

It was midnight when I got to bed. It was the first bed I had lain in for forty hours.

Everything was wonderful. “This can’t last,” I said to myself. “This isn’t the way the people live.” But it’s mighty good for your soul on your first night in London.

_3. FIRST IMPRESSIONS_

_London,
December, 1940_

My first two days were consumed in getting signed up and identified. Now I have so many papers that I’ve had to buy an extra wallet, a leather case so big I have to carry it in a side pocket, and it is already stuffed full.

First you register with the police and get a booklet with your picture in it. You have to give them your whole life history. If you move, they must be notified.

Then there is the national registration. Here you get another booklet--and don’t you lose it! Then you get your food-ration book. Then you report to the Ministry of Information and get a pass with your picture on it. Then the ministry gives additional cards permitting you to stay out after midnight and enter prohibited areas, such as zones of military action.

Everywhere you go people are nice to you. At the police station it took half an hour to get my business done because a policeman had to tell me about the bombs in his neighborhood. I have never seen policemen at home so friendly and helpful. And it wasn’t just because I was an American. For I watched them at other desks, where other foreigners were registering, and these got the same courteous treatment.