Letters to a Sister (10 page)

Much love.

E.R.M.

5
October, [1939]

Dearest Jeanie,

… What can be the mysterious ‘contingency' which may arise (B.B.C. announcement) and cause us to have to fill in our addresses on our identity cards? How they love mysteries! I can't see what harm it could do to have them filled in now, and alter them if we moved. I think they are just childish. Latest news I get of peace-situation in War Cabinet is that they are 3 for peace-with-ignominy to 6 against. The 3 are Halifax, Simon, and Hoare. This is what Lord Ponsonby
²⁵
reports. He adds that Chamberlain is the most implacable of the lot, feeling that H. has personally affronted and betrayed him. Lord P. says there are 16 peers for p.w.i. (this phrase is mine, not his, by the way. I know that is the peace I want—

I mean, I think it's the only kind we shall be offered). The worst point about it would be not the ignominy, nor the triumph and scorn of our foes, but its probable shortness. He might turn on us when stronger, as this article suggests,
²⁶
and attack us. Anyhow, this is what they all think would happen. But time is on our side.

I am following with interest the Clackmannan election, where Andrew Stewart is a stop-the-war candidate. The results will be very informing.
²⁷

I'm glad you have a telephone now. I rang, but you were with that expectant mother. I hope her expectations are now fulfilled.

A sensible talk from some woman about evacuees the other day, I thought. She advised householders to learn to put up with a little dirt, and evacuees to learn to put up with a little soap & water. Very sound. Country cottages can never have been thought so clean before, I should think! It seems they are shocked at insects and dirty habits in a way that shows they never heard of them before.

Very much love.

E.R.M.

I am fighting for the establishment of a supreme authority in Europe whose laws and judgments shall be accepted by all European nations.

Flat
7,
8, Luxborough St, W.1
9 October, [1939]

Dearest Jeanie,

... I do agree about demanding a conference [of Nations] at once.
²⁸
The column to-day on p. 7 of the
News Chronicle
(‘War Diary') says what I feel about it, don't you think so?
²⁹
I enclose some other cuttings, to illustrate to 'Ubby and others what the various views on our war (or peace) aims are (but you'll never have time to read them). The best statement is H. N. Brailsford's.
³⁰
This is the view held by the majority of the (educated) people I meet. So, also, are the views expressed by the Dominions, and by the article from
The Times.
What they boil down to is that we will call the war off if (a) Hitler is prepared to evacuate Poland and Czecho-Slovakia at once (including removing his Gestapo from the latter) and make their restoration & independence a subject for negotiation at the conference (so far he has expressly excluded this); (b)… H. retires, and leaves us another government to deal with, which hasn't broken all its pledges. It is obviously absurd to be signing treaties and guarantees with a man who has shown that his promise means nothing to him but a trap to betray those who have also signed it. He guaranteed the independence of Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, and Poland, each separately, before marching into them and taking them, so naturally the other nations near him, including France and us, feel it is useless to deal with him again. He seems to be absolutely
without scruples in this respect; in fact, he has said in
Mein Kampf
that treaties aren't to be observed when the good of the nation demands their breaking—it would be like trying to bind an eel.

Anyhow,
all
nations, belligerent and neutral (except Italy & Hungary & Russia) feel that he makes lasting peace impossible (that America feels this is very important, as America might, if he were gone, take the lead in negotiations). So it seems to me that our first condition should be his abdication. If he
really
wanted to avoid a general war, and not merely to consolidate his gains while he prepares to spring again, he would resign now. Any patriotic leader would. It would at once end the whole business. But of course he won't, and of course he won't give up his conquests; he would rather have a war against us and France, though he is afraid of this, than give up the prestige and the material gains he has got, and hopes to get, out of them. He says that ‘Central Europe should be an indivisible block', under the Reich. That is what the rest of Europe is ready to fight against. As Brailsford says, it means slavery to all peoples who come under its rule.

I do understand these aims and this point of view, quite well. My own is, like yours, that they aren't worth a general war, and that an
immediate
conference should be called. It even might achieve some of the aims; in any case, it would gain time, and would, as Lloyd George said, force H. to state his terms clearly before the world—to ‘talk
to
us, not
at
us'—and be judged by the world in conclave. Then, L.G. says, if we couldn't agree, the war. That is where I should part company with him; but he is doing excellent work in urging the conference, and is receiving thousands of letters supporting him. I
do
hope it happens.

The Church is, as usual, behaving deplorably. It should be throwing all its weight on the side of calling off hostilities while we negotiate; instead, its spokesmen seem to be nearly all encouraging us to ‘endure the trial of war, and trust that
God will defend the right'. Canon Morris, chairman of the Peace Pledge Union
³¹
, is giving up his orders in disgust, which I think is a mistake; all clergy should stay in, and try and give the Church a less bad name. I am going to a small gathering to-night where Canon Raven (another pacifist) is speaking; he is v.g.—a very able Cambridge Master of a College.
³²
I shall be interested to hear his views. But mostly the clergy are deplorable. Better, however, than the R.C. ones. I went in for 10 minutes yesterday to the R.C. church near here,
³³
where there was a sermon going on. It was all about how the Supreme Being had created various orders of Angels, good and bad. I
cannot
think why we have endured all these centuries all this lifeless nonsense. I thought as I sat there, what if the congregation all rose up and mobbed the preacher, and beat him up, and the women scratched his face and the men kicked him, saying ‘We want something to the purpose, not angels & devils; give us bread not stones.' Why don't they? Or (at least) occasionally protest? (In all the Churches, I mean.)

I can't sympathise with Hitler, by the way. His origins don't at all excuse his extreme brutality and treachery. The kink in his brain does more, of course. But he is so
horribly
cruel. It is the quality that is hardest to get over in any one, I suppose. There is only one thing left for him to do—go. I think we should say this much more plainly than we do—though we do say we can't treat with him.

By the way, the cutting ‘Keep it dark' is for your opinion on whether halibut liver oil (full of Vit. A.) really helps one to see in the dark better. If so, I must take it. (It's not an advertisement, the article.)

Very much love….

E.R.M.

12 October, [1939]

Dearest Jeanie,

… Just heard Chamberlain.
³⁴
Obviously war will proceed, as the conditions seem to be that German troops must leave Poland and Czechoslovakia and that Hitler must make us believe his word. First condition he won't fulfil, second he can't, so that seems to be that, and I think we are for it.

No acknowledgment to our telegrams will be made, I fear!
³⁵

I've just read the debate on B.B.C. in Hansard—the papers give very little of it. I liked best the M.P.
³⁶
who said, let them give the best music etc. at stated times each day, and keep the whole thing from being vulgarized to suit the vulgarest tastes, which is what happens now. Others said it should be
more
vulgar—i.e. more Variety, and the news and talks more ‘bright & brotherly', which sounds like an Oxford Group meeting. The fact is we
can't
get on without 2 programmes; it's like setting us all down to read the same books.
³⁷
My experience of our taxi-drivers at the Ambulance Station is that they like it on, but don't listen; they play cards all through the News, however important it is, and talk loudly through it too, which prevents other people hearing. It just doesn't seem to strike them to listen. I wonder how common that is. The vulgarity at present is dreadful, as one M.P.
³⁸
said, crooners and jazz and silly facetiousness. However, there is the News. I don't complain, as some do, that this is ‘colourless'. Noel-Baker complained of our lack of propaganda and explanation of what we are fighting for. He would like the Trades Unions told what the Nazis do to trades unions
everywhere, the religious told about the Church treatment, every one told about the cruelty in the camps, and the spying, and about how the Poles are being treated.

When 'Ubby asks what the war is about, he would be told all this, and that (I suppose) we aim at stopping it, or at preventing it spreading. I don't know. It might only make all the 'Ubbies angry and full of hate—but perhaps this is the idea. It seems the neutral countries complain that they get only German propaganda. What a bore all this propaganda idea is. A new bore, too. In old-time wars, no one seemed to bother about it much; but I suppose they couldn't get it about, anyhow….

Very much love.

E.R.M.

Flat
7,
8, Luxborough St, W.1
Thursday [after 19 October, 1939}

Dearest Jeanie,

I am sending with King-Hall (who gets increasingly naval & military) a rather interesting analysis of Hitler by a psychoanalyst doctor, who is a professor of psychology at Oxford.
³⁹
I don't know if he has met H. A psycho-analyst who analysed H. would have a very exciting and alarming time. I think H. is probably too mad to be cured by it now, and would only be made worse, perhaps he would burst.

I have been thinking the situation over, and it does seem an appalling indictment of our civilization and intelligence that we can't remove from the scenes into a Home for the mentally unsound a man obviously so mad as he is now getting.

Shutting him up, on the published diagnosis of an international commission of alienists, would blow up and show up the whole Nazi business, I think (which murdering him might not do), and we could have peace at once. Instead of even
trying
to get down to this, we think to solve the question by massacring the innocent men of all the countries, who have nothing to do with any of it. Really I suppose strait waistcoats for all the governments are indicated, but we can't hope for that. But one for H. is imperative, and I think I shall start a League for it.

I was amused by the remark in the News to-night that, now ‘The Link'
⁴⁰
had been dissolved, its work was being carried on by ‘the British Council for the Christian Settlement of Europe', whose activities were being carefully watched by the Government….

Very much love.

E.R.M.

There is a gap in the surviving letters between mid-October 1939 and June 1940. By that time Rose's somewhat complaisant attitude towards Nazi aggression had changed into the frame of mind in which, amid bombing and the threat of invasion, she was to write to Jean, ‘The great thing here is to embattle everyone's
MIND.'

6 June, [1940]

Dearest Jeanie,

Here are various oddments... I hope you'll like the book,
⁴¹
when you get any time to read it. I'm afraid it's rather a lot of Spanish politics, which interest me but perhaps not you.
But it also has people in it. It comes out on 17th, probably timed for the big bombing of London.

I hear the most pessimistic prophecies from those who are best informed, but they can only be guesses, of course. I am sorry that so many of my friends are on the Nazi black-list, either as Left-Wing, anti-Nazi journalists, writers, publishers, public speakers, or what not. [David] Low is, for one, I hear. And, of course, the Jews, such as Victor Gollancz and Leonard Woolf, and Philip Guedalla, who are anti-Nazi also. Some people have schemes for taking the identity cards from corpses after raids and assuming new hames, but I fear the Gestapo will be up to that.

I hear hundreds of walkers, cyclists and motorists are now lost in the countryside, all sign-posts and names of villages taken down,
⁴²
and the public advised to give no information to enquirers, which seems cruel. I feel there should be some shibboleth. Mind you stop
at once
if a man with a gun tells you to, as they now have leave to shoot those who don't, and a lot of untrained men are wandering about with rifles looking for parachuters, who are often dressed as nurses. So do be careful. Dear me, what a fantastic world we have come to inhabit! Phillips Oppenheim, it seems.
⁴³

Marvellous weather. Did you hear the bombing in the eastern counties last night again? Portsmouth too seems to be getting it….

Very much love.

E.R.M.

University Women's Club, 2, Audley Square, W.1
14 June, [1940]

Dearest Jeanie,

Many thanks for your cards. I only read the first one after my clergyman
⁴⁴
had gone, as he came too early, and your card came just as he did. But I know he would say (and think) that the Church does teach universal love, though it doesn't practise it successfully, of course. Still, it would have been interesting to discuss it with him. Also clerical knowledge of psychology. At least—would it? He… has a habit of uttering slightly unanswerable clichés which aren't true—e.g. ‘Beauty is the
only
truth, isn't it'—this in the course of suggesting that novelists should concentrate wholly on ‘showing God' to their readers. I expect, not being one, he can't understand that novelists do much better when they write of some aspect of life as they see and know it, to the best of their ability, and aren't thinking about God and beauty, but about the human beings they are representing. One can't really argue about that. I think his is the professional point of view. He thinks I have ‘an immense power for good', and should ‘use it for God'. I have been often told that, but never by people who write, and know how novelists write their stuff best. He is vexed about the Churches pulling so little weight; but he himself, I gather, has quite a little clientele (largely of shop assistants) who come to his services and who consult him. I think he is probably eager to help people, but perhaps something of a humbug unconsciously…. However, he is really keen in his job, which is a great thing.