Consequently, Stalin concluded that the western flank of the Soviet Union needed bracing. Under pressure from Moscow, the Baltic states—Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—agreed to grant the USSR military bases. Next, Stalin turned his attention north. In early October, the Finns were presented with a list of territorial demands, including the annexation of a large portion of the Karelian Isthmus, the thinly populated strip of high-forest, steep-hill, and marshy swamp that forms a land bridge between Finland and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). The Soviet demands were rejected; Stalin abrogated Moscow’s mutual assistance pact with Helsinki and assembled a twenty-one-division army along the Finnish border. Early on the morning of November 30, the preternatural quiet of the Karelian Isthmus was shattered by artillery fire. In between shell bursts, the clank of tanks could be heard approaching through the high forest from the east. Farther to the north, a second Soviet force stormed the arctic port of Petsamo. So confident were the Soviets of a walkover that the invasion forces brought along brass brands to celebrate their victory.

A month later the Red Army was bogged down in a bloody war of attrition on the Karelian Isthmus; the military reputation of the Soviet Union was in tatters; and Britain, France, and the United States were in the grip of Finnish “mania.” Like Spain before it, gallant little Finland had become an international symbol of democratic resolve. Here, at last, thought wakeful-minded Europeans and Americans weary of the ludicrous “phony war,” was “a real war, a man’s war.” Across Western Europe and America, balls and galas were held for Finnish relief and sweaters knitted for Finnish soldiers. At art galleries in New York, London, and Paris, the fashionable gathered under stark black-and-white photos of the Winter War to sip wine and lament the unhappy state of the Western democracy. “The fortified front of Karelia evokes, simultaneously, the Maginot Line and a season of winter sports,” wrote a Frenchman who likened the Finnish war to “a highly seductive glossy magazine for skiing amateurs.” In Allied chancelleries, maps of Finland were taken out and examined; eager fingers measured the distance between Finland and the iron ore fields of neutral Sweden, which fed the Nazi war machine; and eager minds imagined shifting the war’s center of gravity from France, with its lovely countryside and crowded cities, to the north, where the vast, empty wastes were perfect for a war of maneuver and the only civilians put in harm’s way would be the reindeer and the Finns.

Meanwhile, along the Western Front, barely a shot had been fired in anger. Well into the autumn of 1939, power plants in the German Saar were still providing French border towns with electricity, and when the French city of Strasbourg was evacuated, it was German Army searchlights that illuminated the way for the evacuees. “They are not wicked,” an indignant French soldier replied when a visiting British journalist asked him why he did not shoot the German soldier bathing in a river fifty meters away. In the winter of 1939–40, visitors could be forgiven for thinking that the primary function of the Western Front was to provide photo ops for the celebrated and glamorous. The Duke of Windsor was photographed visiting Fort Hochwald; the journalist Dorothy Thomas, shooting a French .75; and there was almost no place on the Western Front where Clare Boothe, playwright, journalist, scriptwriter paramour of Bernard Baruch and Joe Kennedy and soon to become Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, had not been photographed. The air of unreality that hung over the war that winter undermined military discipline and raised questions about the combat readiness of the Allied armies. French soldiers strolled around in bedroom slippers—cigarettes dangling from their lips, jackets unbuttoned, hands thrust in pockets. The British Expeditionary Force had a crisper, more disciplined air, but its troops were not trained up to the standard of the best German units; and the BEF’s commander, Lord John Gort, an amiable Anglo-Irishman, was more interested in the aspects of war that fascinated readers of Boy’s Own, such as how to mount a trench raid, than in the broader strategic questions that are the proper province of an army commander. Asked about the Maginot Line’s weaknesses, Gort exclaimed, “Oh, I haven’t had time to think about that!” “Queer kind of war,” William Shirer of CBS news wrote after a tour of the Western Front.

It seemed like a queer kind of war to civilians, too. The British public had expected the war to begin as the Great War had, with a series of epic encounter battles on the plains of Belgium and northern France. Instead, there was a brief French foray into the Saar, then nothing. The autumn of 1939 brought all the annoyances of war—price rises, blackouts, unheated flats, evacuations, censorship, conscription, long queues—without any of the dramatic events that make civilians feel their sacrifices have purpose and meaning. “It’s a war of nerves,” said a man in a Blackpool pub. “War of nerves, my arse,” said his companion. “It’s boring me bloody stiff.” “The British people [are] prepared to accept great sacrifices,” observed Sam Hoare, the home secretary. “But not minor irritations.”

In folk memory, Britain went to war to the voice of Vera Lynn, singing

They’ll be bluebirds over

The white cliffs of Dover . . .

In reality, Britain went to war to the voice of the nanny state admonishing the citizenry, in pamphlets and posters: “Don’t spit, it’s a bad habit”; “Make your family gargle before they go to the shelter”; “Keep your feet dry”; “Keep Calm and Carry On”; “Try not to lie on your back—you are less likely to snore”; “Make your home safe now!”; “Don’t dig a deep trench unless you know how to make one properly.” Even British officialdom’s attempts at inspiration, such as the poster “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution, Will Bring Us Victory” just sounded like Nanny in a patriotic mood. That poster also set people to wondering who this “us” was and for whom this “us” was going to win the war.