Uncoiled to his full six feet, four inches, the foreign secretary was an imposing figure. The enormous bald head rose above the face like a cathedral dome in miniature, and the voice, cultivated and effortlessly authoritative, suggested what the British Empire might sound like if it could speak. Halifax said Kordt had made the invasion sound more like a schoolyard fight than an invasion. Last night, the Poles had begun shooting across the border, and German troops had responded in kind.

The cabinet continued marching resolutely toward war until the conversation turned to what kind of note Britain should send Germany. The predicate for implementing the Polish guarantee was a German attack, and the early reports of air attacks on Warsaw and other Polish cities had the indefinite character of rumor. “At present,” said one minister, we have “no very definite information as to what hostile action had taken place in Poland.” Another believed that there might be “some further peace effort on Herr Hitler’s part.” A third warned that implementing the Polish guarantee would give Hitler a false sense of security, though how or why it would, the minister failed to explain. Chamberlain was also wobbling. “The big thing was a European settlement,” he told Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador. “It could be done, if only I could get the chance.” In cases of aggression, the prescribed formula was to send the aggressor nation an ultimatum with a deadline. The note Halifax sent Germany on the night of September 1 was only a warning, and the warning did not include a deadline. In France, Poland’s other guarantor, there were also signs of indecision; just before midnight the French news agency Haves reported that France had given a positive response to an Italian proposal for a conference to settle “the Polish question and all of Europe’s other difficulties.” The Duce was apparently eager to reprise the peacemaker role he had played in Munich.

The next morning, September 2, a good part of London was on a train to somewhere else. The statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus was gone—taken to a hiding place in Scotland. The paintings in the museums were gone—taken to Wales for safekeeping. The children were gone—scattered to thousands of villages, hamlets, and towns. The zoo animals were gone—on the morning train to Edinburgh. And the light was gone—a victim of the blackout that went into effect the previous evening. At 5:00 a.m., when the first filaments of sunlight crept over the silver barrage balloons above St. James Park, early-rising Londoners sighed in relief. Toward evening on September 2, Vera Brittain, whose Great War memoir Testament to Youth was a foundational text of the pacifist movement, stood on a rise in rural Hampshire, watching the parade of London refugees pass by. “The road [was] alive with a restless ribbon of traffic—lorries filled with troops; ‘relief’ buses crammed with passengers; small cars packed with children, their parents, perambulators, and cots; vans from furniture repositories loaded with household goods.” How different this war was from the one she had served in as a nurse, Brittain thought. In 1914–18, “the front was a limited area, and the lives lost were chiefly those of young men between eighteen and forty. Today, the suffering and suspense are universal. . . . There is no emotional barrier between men and women, parents and children, the old and the young; the battle is shared by all ages and both sexes.”

Lord Halifax began September 2 at the Buckingham Palace Gardens, with his number two at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan. Striding through the fields of freshly bloomed autumn crocuses, the two men made an odd pair. The six-foot, four-inch Hailfax, long-legged and physically awkward, resembled a large, ungainly water bird. The petite Cadogan, huffing and puffing behind him, looked like a gnome chasing his master. For both men, the garden visit would be the high point of a day otherwise crowded with sorrows. At 5:00 a.m., when the British ambassador in Warsaw made his first call of the day, the Luftwaffe had already carried out twenty air strikes against Poland. When the ambassador called again a few hours later, he simply said that the Germans had achieved “very pronounced air superiority.” In the interim there had been so many air strikes it was impossible to keep an accurate count. What the Germans called “Hitler weather”—sunny, dry days—had also proved a great boon to the Panzer columns traversing the dried-up rivers, marshes, and watercourses on the Polish plain.