Harold Nicolson: End-of-year excerpts from Diaries & Letters: 1939-45

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Harold Nicolson (1886 - 1968)

A few end-of-year excerpts from Diaries & Letters: 1939 - 45

Diary: 31 December, 1939

Cyril Joad* expounds pacifism after dinner. His line is that the ordinary person in England would be less unhappy after a Nazi victory than if he or she lost their sons, lovers or husbands. He thinks only of the greatest unhappiness of the greatest number, and accuses me of national and spiritual pride. It is a pleasure talking to him. He stirs up the mind. He is extremely imaginative about physical pain, and the picture of young men being gored by bayonets is so terrible to him that he would prefer sacrificing liberty to prevent it happening.

I do not stay to watch the New Year in or the Old Year out. I write this diary at 11.45 and shall not wait. The old year is foul and the new year terrifying. I think, as I go to bed, of Nigel and Ben, Ben and Nigel. How stupid life is. Not evil, only stupid. What shall I have to record this time net year?

* The author and philosopher. He was an old friend of H.N., with whom he had been associated during the days of the New Party in 1931. He was a leading pacifist at the beginning of the Second World War as he was in the First. 


Letter from H.N. to V.S.W.:  31 December, 1940
(In the train from Bristol to Cardiff)

I have found a new pleasure in life - travelling with a Private Secretary. One just walks about in a fur coat and things get done. Moreover, he keeps the purse and gives such tips as I should never dare to give. But it is at him the porters scowl, not me. I just walk away and gaze at the show-cases in the hall. 

I lunched with the Regional Commissioner yesterday to meet Alexander, the C. in C. of Southern Command. He thinks the Battle of England has already began - Coventry, Southampton, Bristol, the City. They will burn and destroy them one by one. 'Archie Wavell', he says, 'mops up 40,000 Libyans and we claim a victory. In two hours the Germans destroy 500 years of  our history.' I do think we are going through a hellish time.




Diary: 31 December, 1941

Read Rebecca West's book about Yugoslavia.*  Feed the famished swans. We stay up late listening to the wireless and hearing Maisky, Wellington Koo and John Winant exchanging polite messages. Then there is a Scottish service, in the middle of which Big Ben strikes and 1941 is finished. Not a year on which |I shall look back with any pleasure. I shall say no more about it than that. It has been a sad and horrible year.

* Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 



Diary: 31 December, 1942

Our present worry is (a) the U-boat campaign. It is very serious indeed. We can lose the war by this; (b) the badness of our Army. The cream of our officers and men have been drained off by the R.A.F. and the Commandos. What remains is pretty poor. With good troops we ought to have brought off the dash to Tunis.   As it is ...

I go down to the House to fire watch. I sit in the map-room feeling pretty glum. I hear Big Ben strike out the old year. There are distant shouts of Auld Lang Syne, sung with an American accent. Then the snoring in my dormitory resumes its sway.

Caroline Moorehead: Paris in the '30s

The following excerpt is from Caroline Moorehead's Martha Gellhorn: A Life

Caroline Moorehead (28 October 1944 - )

In the spring of 1930, when Martha arrived in Paris with two suitcases, a typewriter and $75, France was much envied by the rest of the world. The leading economic power in Europe, second only to Britain for the size and wealth of its colonies, its army was strong, its franc solid and French industry was said to be growing faster than any other. 

... On Friday and Saturday nights, the young Americans went dancing at the bals musette around the Luxembourg, or dropped in on the new nightclubs to listen to jazz or practice the charleston or the shimmy. Theatres kept their foyer floors highly polished, and provided orchestras, so that audiences could fox trot in the intervals. Musical reviews were more lavish than they had ever been, the dancing girls wearing great sheaths of feathers and plumes; at the Casino, Josephine Baker, and 'unforgettable female ebony statue', had already made her first appearance naked but for a single pink flamingo feather, in a show that included a live cheetah, a flight of trained pigeons, some roller skaters and an aerial ballet of stout Italian dancers. ... So essential were the fashions dictated by Chanel and Molyneux, that the New Yorker ran a regular column on what smart Parisians were wearing: lipstick, even by day, brightly coloured silk stockings, nail varnish, and perms that rippled the hair like a beach at low tide. Life was glamorous, full of experiments and agreeably cheap. It was a very long way from St Louis.

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Natalia Ginsburg: All Our Yesterdays

The following is an excerpt from Natalia Ginsburg's All Our Yesterdays.

Natalia Ginsburg (14 July 1916 - 7 October 1991)

Signora Maria related what she had heard in the shops and from the music master she still met sometimes on the road by the river. The Germans were sprinkling a kind of powder that made people stupid. The Allies were breathing in this powder and were fighting half asleep. And the French generals were accepting gold coins from the Germans to make wrong moves. And the Germans were dressing up as French peasants and fishermen and were cutting the telegraph wires and poisoning the rivers.And the roads of France were full of refugees, women running away with their children, and the children got lost and the Germans caught them and sent them off to their laboratories, where they used them for scientific  experiments like frogs or rabbits. Emanuele put his hands over his ears and besought them for goodness' sake to make her stop talking, his nerves were all to pieces and he couldn't control himself, one day perhaps he would strangle Signora Maria. Emanuele disliked the Belgians, the French, the English, the Russians who had allied themselves with the Germans, he limped up and down the room and kicked at the furniture. He disliked Signora Maria who was spreading panic. In his own home he also had Franz spreading panic. He wandered about like a ghost and said that the Germans by advancing in France would overflow into Italy. Emanuele told him he was behaving as though the Germans were already in Italy; but perhaps Mussolini was not sticking by the Germans. Franz said he was not afraid of Mussolini, he was only afraid of the Germans, if he found himself face to face with German soldiers he would go mad. At night he came to Emanuele's room and sat on his bed, and made him repeat that the Maginot Line was impenetrable. But the Germans went on penetrating it. One night he woke Emanuele to tell him that not only was his mother Jewish but his father too, he was completely Jewish and it was well known what the Germans were doing to the Jews, if the Germans came down into Italy the only thing for him to do would be to put a bullet through his head. So many times he had been on the point of going to America but he liked Italy too much, in Italy he felt he was safe even though for some time now there had been laws against the Jews, all you did was to pay a little and the police left you alone. But now he felt the Germans altogether too near, there they were in France behind the mountains and all they had to do was cross the mountains to get to where he was.

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George Orwell: Review of Mein Kampf

The following is an excerpt from George Orwell's review of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

George Orwell
(25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950)

... I should like to to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power - till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter- I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs - and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett's edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the  expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that there is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at, but at any rate the grievance is there. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero  who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous, half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

Also he has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers, tin pacifists somehow won't do. Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense, they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin's militarized version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation "Greatest happiness of the greatest number" is a good slogan, but at this moment "Better an end with horror than a horror without end" is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underestimate it emotional appeal.

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William Shirer: The first day of World War Two

William Shirer (February 23, 1904 - December 28, 1993)

From Berlin Diary

Berlin, September 3

Hitler's "counter attack" on Poland has on this Sabbath day become a world war! To record the date: September 3, 1939. The time: eleven a.m. At nine o'clock this morning Sir Nevile Henderson called on the German Foreign Minister and handed him a note giving Germany until eleven o'clock to accept the British demand that Germany withdraw her troops from Poland. He returned to the Wilhemstrasse shortly after eleven and was handed the German reply in the form of a memorandum. The extras are out on the streets now. The newsboys are giving them away. The D.A.Z. here. Its headlines:

BRITISH ULTIMATUM TURNED DOWN

ENGLAND DECLARES A STATE OF WAR

WITH GERMANY

BRITISH NOTE DEMANDS WITHDRAWAL

OF OUR TROOPS IN THE EAST

THE FUHRER LEAVING TODAY FOR THE FRONT

A typical headline over the official account:

GERMAN MEMORANDUM PROVES

ENGLAND'S GUILT.

I was standing in the Wilhelmplatz about noon when the loud-speakers suddenly announced that England had declared herself at war with Germany. Some 250 people were standing there in the sun. They listened attentively to the announcement. When it was finished, there was not a murmur. They just stood there as they were before. Stunned. The people cannot realize yet that Hitler has led them into a world war. No issue has been created for them yet, though as this day wears on,it is plain that "Albion's perfidy" will become the issue as it did in 1914. In Mein Kampf Hitler says the greatest mistake the Kaiser made was to fight England, and Germany must never repeat that mistake.

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Dorothy Thompson: Letter from Murnau (1934)

Dorothy Thompson (9 July 1893 - 30 January 1961)

In 1934, American newspaper columnist and broadcaster Dorothy Thompson drove through the German town of Murnau, passing a Hitler Youth camp that had been built to accommodate six thousand boys between the ages of ten to sixteen. "They were beautiful children," she wrote to a friend. "I did not think they would ever grow up to be thickset beer drinkers with rubber-tire necks. They sang together, and no people sing in unison as the Germans do, thousands of them, in the open air, young voices, still soprano, and the hills echoing! It made one feel sentimental.

"An enormous banner stretched across the hillside [and] dominated the camp. It was so huge that you could see it from the farthest point. It was so prominent that every child could see it many times a day. It was white, and there was a swastika painted on it, and besides that only seven words: YOU WERE BORN TO DIE FOR GERMANY!"

H. G. Wells: On meeting Stalin

H. G. Wells
(21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946)

In 1934, H.G. Wells, then one of the most famous writers in the English-speaking world, was received by Stalin in Moscow. "I have never met a man more candid, fair or honest," he wrote in An Experiment in Autobiography, " and to these qualities it is, and to nothing occult or sinister, that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendancy in Russia. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him, ..."