“Of course, sir.”
“Good. We’ve got some commanding to do first, though.” He led me into the manor house.
Marlborough emerged from his short depression inspired and went immediately on to his tactically brilliant victory at Oudenarde. Napoleon rebounded from his mental paralysis to lead his troops to victory at the Battle of Wagram.
General Clay roared back, too. The feat for which he will always be remembered was yet in front of him.
19
English courage when confronted by invaders has long been the subject of fanciful speculation. In A.D. 793, the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote that when the Vikings were rumored to be on their way, “Dire forwarnings came over the land…, and miserably terrified the people.” Written long after the event, this can be little more than conjecture. In 1771, Captain Guy Carleton forecast that “amidst the first panic terrors” upon the appearance of a French fleet on the horizon, “The people will naturally fly.” The French never came, and the people never flew.
In truth, no people are less alarmed or less easily cast down by reverses than the British. A mad rush, with Londoners choking the roads, sweeping away all in front of them in a frenzied and fearful stampede, never materialized. Instead, Londoners met the approaching disaster with their usual phlegm.
With the German horde at hand, British imperturbability was vast and, to me, unfathomable. Let me give a few examples. After the war, I spoke with Clyde Lamb, of Lamb Brothers, the Bond Street tailor. I asked him if he had given thought to fleeing the city. He made a show of furling his brow and staring at the wall in thought before answering, “I might have, had I not promised Sir James Stamford his four suits by the end of the week.”
I asked Professor Fenton Swain of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington why he was not tempted to abandon the city. Swain was the noted paleozoologist who had painstakingly over seven years reconstructed the bones of the dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii, measuring over eighty-five feet long. Astonished at the question, he replied, “What, and abandon Dippy?”
One episode was recounted by the London Times. The woman was unnamed by the newspaper, but among her circle was easily identified because the article carried the titles of several of her paintings. Apparently she could not determine a way to spirit her artwork out of the city, so two days after S-Day, she rushed into Sotheby’s and demanded of their lead auctioneer, Powell Prescott, that he immediately auction off her Pre-Raphaelite collection, which included John Everett Millais’ Garden of the Lady and William Holman Hunt’s The Stable of Christ. According to the Times, Prescott removed his spectacles and said, “Madam, to sell them now would be unseemly.”
Simon Durwin admits he had hoped to profit from the war. Durwin was the owner of a leading London wine shop, Durwin Wine Merchants on Brompton Road. He had kept in reserve hundreds of cases of his best product, waiting for the inevitable spiraling prices caused by war shortages.
“I waited too long,” he told me after the war. “I was pinched by my own greed, don’t you see?”
Durwin was tormented by his dilemma. “In my cellar I had the rarest Chateau Lafite and Chateau Margaux, the finest years. I had sixteen bottles of sixty-year-old Dom Pérignon. I had two thousand bottles of priceless…” His voice diminished as the memory bit him. “And after General Clay’s reverses, I knew German soldiers would soon be drinking the lot of it. It would be the drunken melee of the conqueror, an unthinkable blasphemy against those precious vintages.”
The wine merchant considered destroying his collection. “I actually had a hammer in my hand, intent on descending those steps and smashing each and every bottle. And then a better idea struck me.”
Durwin hastened down into the cellar and carried up the Dom Pérignon. He stepped into the street and passed them out one by one to surprised passersby. To each he said, “For the days to come.”
In the next three hours, he handed out his entire inventory. There was no rush from Londoners, no crowd with grasping hands thrust forward. Each took a bottle, nodded thanks, and carried on. I spoke with a number of recipients of Durwin’s largess. The bottles proved to be needed restoratives in the days ahead.
Elizabeth Stanhope’s mother, Beatrice, had labored on her daughter’s wedding for six months. As the joyous day approached, so did the Wehrmacht. Beatrice feared the celebration would not be attended by any of the hundred invited guests. She could hardly blame them. She, too, was tempted to run in front of the invaders, who had landed two days before the planned event.
The wedding was to be in the Chelsea Old Church, a portion of which dated from pre-Norman times. The nave, tower, chancel, and chapels were added over the centuries. In 1528, Sir Thomas More remodeled the south chapel, and all but that chapel had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. But just that chapel, with its glorious history and its bomb blast dust covering everything, would be sufficient for Beatrice Stanhope, if only her friends would fill it.
Fill it, they did. Of the hundred invitees, eighty-two attended. The wedding, with its rented cardboard cake for lack of sugar and flour, was a giddy success. Beatrice was doubly proud of the newlyweds when they postponed their honeymoon in the Cotswolds because they did not want to appear to be fleeing the city.
There were over forty thousand horses in Greater London early in the war. Thirty of them were owned by Jasper Anson, who was the proprietor of the Highpark Stable near Hyde Park. He employed ten stable boys and claimed his quarter horses were the finest for let in the city.
“No hobbling nags under my roof, I will tell you.”
The business had been in Anson’s family for four generations. Above the stable was a warehouse of bridles, halters, and harnesses, most not used since the automobile had come to London.
His horses’ fate was clear to Anson. “Some German mess sergeant was going to push them through a meat grinder and stuff them into sausage sleeves.”
So two days after S-Day, Anson began giving them away. “Anyone who needed a horse got one.”
Although there was no rush north, many London citizens—those who suspected German security services would soon be searching for them—knew it prudent to leave. Few cars and trucks had gasoline. Anson let it be known that he could make a few lorries useful again.
He told me, “Quarter horses aren’t draft animals, but they’ll do for a while. I put together twelve hauling teams, using old harnesses, some dating from the Crimean War, back when they were used on horses hauling artillery.”
“Last I’d see of them, my quarter horses would be pulling a loaded flatbed lorry, a family in the cab, all their possessions on the bed, and the driver perched on the bonnet trying to manage the reins.”
Anson admitted it was an odd sight. He stayed behind. “I had to look after my stable, even if it was empty.”
Clara Lowell had obeyed when ordered to “Dig for Victory,” and had planted a vegetable garden covering every inch of her yard near Osterly Park. Gardening was not her only contribution to the war effort. She had also been a member of the WVF, the Women’s Voluntary Service, a civil defense organization which, among other duties, aided in finding homes and clothes for evacuees.
“We called ourselves Widows, Virgins, and Spinsters.” She laughed. “But no one else dared.”
Most of her garden was still too green to harvest just after S-Day, and she feared the Germans would commandeer her produce. “So after months of lovingly tending my plantings, coaxing them from the ground, watering and feeding them, I ripped them all out of the ground, weeping all the while.”