Many working-class Britons suspected they were “us” and that they were being called on to win the war for their social betters.

In time, a sense of duty and confiscatory tax rates would make the wealthy more like the rest of us; but in the winter of 1939–40, that time was still some way off. At the Dorchester, top-hatted doormen still greeted guests; at the Savoy, strawberries and cream were still available, at the Connaught, grouse, oysters, and partridge. And at the dinner parties of Lord Kemsley, the owner of the Times of London, guests were still attended by a “galaxy of footmen,” the food was still “vast and excellent, and the wine flowed like water.” In the East End, one of the poorest neighborhoods in London, a wealthy couple and their chauffeur descended upon a grocery store, snatched four twenty-eight-pound bags of sugar from the shelves, and carried them to the cash register. The store owner refused to sell the sugar. “I don’t think that sort of thing is right,” he said. “They don’t give the poor a chance.”

By January 1940, the absence of a real war was making many of the nanny state’s rules almost impossible to enforce. Hardly anyone carried a gas mask anymore, the blackout was honored more often in the breach, and tens of thousands of parents were reclaiming their evacuated children. Alarmed by this latter development, the Ministry of Health rushed out a cautionary poster, which depicted Hitler whispering into the ear of a British mother: “Take them back, take them back.” “Don’t do it, Mother,” a banner line at the bottom of the poster warned. The logic behind the poster was obscure. First, Hitler and the Working Man; now Hitler, the champion of maternal love? By January, most of the eight hundred thousand children evacuated in September were home; but with the schools still closed, the children had nothing to occupy them. Eventually the government would cobble together a home school network, but food, gasoline, and heating fuel shortages were left unaddressed, as were the dangers of the blackout, which caused four thousand civilian injuries in its first several months of operation and produced headlines such as “He Stepped from Train, Fell 80 Feet.” The harsh winter of 1939–40, the worst in decades, further soured the public mood. In Blackpool the snowdrifts were fifteen feet high; in Sheffield, four feet high; in London, where the Thames froze over, “snow lay deep and hard as iron beneath 25 degrees of frost”; and on January 21, the coldest day ever recorded in England, ice storms snapped tree branches and brought down telephone wires. “As the harsh days slowly [pass],” Vera Brittain wrote one day that winter, “my author friend writes me from the country that she is working with numb fingers in a room where in spite of the fire, there is ice inside the windows. ‘It is bitterly cold here,’ she reports. ‘So cold my brains seem frozen in my head.’ ” The fifteen-day blackout on weather news meant that technically the snow and freezing temperatures remained a state secret for two weeks, but in a concession to reality, officialdom allowed plows to clear the roads in the meanwhile.

In January 1940, Giuseppe Bastianini, the Italian ambassador in London, told Rome that there was “constant talk [here] of how the war could be liquidated. If severe military reverses were sustained, the social situation in this country might become serious.” Bastianini was overstating the fragility of British morale, but the government intrusions into everyday life, the shortages, the cold, and the confusion about what Britain was fighting were eroding support for the war. As a reward for their sacrifices, the British public wanted to be inspired, wanted to hear Nelson at Trafalgar: “England expects that every man will do his duty.” Instead they got

An elderly statesman with gout

When asked what the war was about

Replied with a sigh

My colleagues and I

Are doing our best to find out.

In October 1939, when the British Institute of Public Opinion asked, “Would you approve or disapprove if the British government were to discuss peace proposals with Germany now?,” only 17 percent of the public had approved. In early 1940, when the institute asked the question again, 29 percent, nearly a third of the public, favored immediate discussions.

“People call me defeatist,” Lloyd George told a journalist at the turn of the year. But “tell me how we can win! Can we win in the air? Can we win at sea, when the effect of our blockade is wiped out by . . . Russia? How can we win on land? When do you think we can get through the Siegfried Line [Germany’s version of the Maginot Line]? Not until the trumpet blows, my friend.”

On the Continent, the winter of 1939–40 was also severe. By early January, weeks of heavy snow had transformed northwestern Europe into an icy white plain where sky, earth, and river blended seamlessly into one another. In this almost featureless landscape villages, market towns, and tree lines became navigational aids for aircraft, tank crews, and lorry drivers. On the rare warm days when fog formed over the snow, the villages and towns would also disappear, and navigation often broke down completely. January 10, 1940, was such a day. That morning, the Essen–Cologne road was so fogged over that Major Erich Hoenmanns, a Luftwaffe pilot, turned his plane west and began searching for the Rhine, which also ran up to Cologne, where his wife was awaiting him. At some point Hoenmanns realized the river beneath him was not the Rhine, it was the Meuse; he was flying west toward the Allied lines, not north toward Cologne. Panicked, he began fumbling with the controls of the Messerschmitt BF-108 Taifun. The engine stalled, and a moment later the ground was coming up at Hoenmanns at several hundred miles an hour. A pair of trees sheared off the Taifun’s wings, and the plane landed in a snowy Belgian field with a hard thump. In the next few moments, danger and absurdity would intersect in a way that only happens in war.