Though not members of the group, two powerful press barons, Lord Rothermere, publisher of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, and Lord Beaverbrook, publisher of the Daily Express and the London Evening Standard, also feared that the British Empire would not survive another total war.

Should war come, the government would have to take these various strains of opinion into account in making decisions about war aims, defense spending, rationing, and a host of other related issues. And should the war go badly for Britain, the government would have to be prepared for the eventuality that all or some of these strands of opinion would coalesce and demand a negotiated peace settlement to save the country from another four years of “death and death and death.”

I. In actual fact, between 1939 and 1945, 40,000 Britons died from bombing—a significant number, but far less than the predicted number. Things to Come also got a couple of other things wrong. Despite the round-the-clock Allied bombing campaign, German war production continued to rise, reaching a peak in 1944, the fifth year of the war. Not until a good part of the Luftwaffe had been destroyed in the Russian campaign and the bombers acquired fighter escorts capable of accompanying them to and from targets in Germany, did airpower begin to achieve the kind of results predicted by its prewar enthusiasts, and not until the atomic bomb did it become a decisive weapon.

CHAPTER TWO

AGAIN

In August 1914, war had come all at once, in a frightening rush on a glorious August day from a faraway land. One minute the country was at the seashore; the next, everyone was waving miniature Union Jacks, singing “Rule Britannia,” and young men were marching off to France. In the summer of 1939, war approached like the “slow ticking of a clock in a dentist’s office,” recalled one woman. Occasionally an event would shatter the summer calm. The Hitler-Stalin pact, announced on August 23, produced a terrific shock, but a week later everyone had gone back to complaining about the weather. July and early August of 1939 were frightful—heavy rain almost every day. Then, abruptly, just after the signing of the pact, the sun reappeared, and, as if to make amends for its absence, produced two weeks of brilliant, warm, sunny weather. People hiked the Lake County, walked the beaches of Blackpool, Bath, and Brighton, took day trips to Calais, and organized cake sales and cricket matches, secure in the knowledge that Britain’s astrologers and spiritualists unanimously agreed: there would be no war in 1939. Polling in late August showed that only one person in five expected a war, and one in three felt that “anything” would be better than one. When war finally did come on Friday morning, September 1, it came as quietly as a church lady. “There was no bravura, no sudden quickening of the blood, no secret anticipation,” Margery Allingham remembered. “We seemed to go to war as a duty, a people elderly in soul, going in stolidly to kill or be killed.”

The morning that the wireless announced the German invasion of Poland, the smell of bonfires, which drifts across rural England in late summer, hung in the air in Margery’s village. She went out to the garden, sat down in the old wicker chair she had been meaning to get rid of for ages, and finally removed her gas mask from its pouch. Margery had no idea what an elephant fetus looked like, but running her hands across the large plastic eyes and long, trunk-like rubber nozzle, she imagined it must look something like a government gas mask. Elsewhere in Britain that morning, millions of people were already being swept up in the gravitational pull of war. The first news of the German attack had come at about 4:00 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time; by 8:00 a.m. preparations were under way to transport hundreds of thousands of mothers and children, tens of thousands of hospital patients, and enormous quantities of food to safe zones in rural Britain. Parks bristled with antiaircraft batteries, fields with antiparatrooper defenses; barrage balloons floated above London, Birmingham, and Manchester; in the London zoo, the snakes were put down. Later in the morning, veterinarian clinics across the country would be inundated by pet owners eager to euthanize the family dog or cat before the air raids began. At 1:00 p.m. television screens in the Greater London region went black just as a Greta Garbo–like cartoon character was saying: “Ay tank, Ay, go home.” The war had shut down the world’s first television service.

In Downing Street, Neville Chamberlain opened the morning cabinet with a requiem for “peace in our time.” We “meet under the gravest possible conditions,” the prime minister told his colleagues. “The events against which we have fought so long and so earnestly have come upon us. But our consciences [are] clear. There should be no possible question now where our duty lay.” After Chamberlain finished, Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, rose to brief the cabinet on his early morning talk with the German chargé d’affaires, Dr. Theo Kordt.