HERE at West End Farm, thirty miles from London, the immediate problems of the day are preventing the ducks from catching cold, the pigs from catching swine fever, and the cows from gnawing the branches off the peach trees. This is where Maureen and Oliver Stanley live and I have been staying here for the past few months writing this book. Maureen’s life has altered greatly in the last year; The Spectator and Harper’s Bazaar have been replaced by The Feathered World and The Egg; ambassadors are kept waiting on the telephone while she argues with the handyman about a new mash for the chickens; and we are all wise enough to know that the local auctioneer and the dairywoman must be treated with marked deference.

Maureen’s London house, 58 Romney Street, was wrecked the first month of the blitz; shortly afterwards, she moved down here and turned her hand to farming. Every now and then she travels north to make a speech for the Food Ministry or the Ministry of Information. A few weeks ago, I saw on her calendar: March twenty-fifth: Four of the fattest pigs go to market—Maureen speaks at Queen’s Hall. (Oliver’s comment: “Be sure you don’t get the two things mixed.”)

It is peaceful here in the country. At night you hear the German planes overhead, but so far this particular neighbourhood has had only one bomb. It landed in a pasture not far from the house. Duff Cooper was here for the week-end and village gossip insisted that was the reason why. I went out in the morning to look at the crater and found four cows staring at it with melancholy eyes. Cows don’t understand that sort of thing.

During the winter I have gone to London once a week to work in the library. The streets are more deserted now and there are many new caverns where houses have stood, but the spirit is as firm as ever. The other day I went to see Mrs. Sullivan. Her arm was in a sling and her leg was swollen from rheumatism (she had never been able to take up her A.R.P. duties), but her morale was undaunted. When I asked her how long she thought the war would last she said it would be over this year.

“Why?”

“Oh, those Germans are always the same. They start big, but old Sullivan says in the end they always fizzle out. Besides, with that common trash ’Itler, where can they expect to land except in the gutter? But, I say, miss, wasn’t that big blitz something! They did try to give it to us! I said to Sullivan it was just like someone sitting up there shelling peas. I went to bed with my clothes on. I didn’t want to be turned out in the street like some people with only a night-dress on. And I don’t mind telling you those whistles made me stop and wonder how good a life I’d led. But I suppose it’s all in getting used to things. As old Sullivan says, you’ll never hear the bomb what ’its you, so why worry?”

She beamed at me and I had a warm, comfortable feeling inside.

That morning I was on my way back to the farm. I remember it well, for when I passed through the village of Datchet and turned on to the country lane to Windsor the great castle on the hill loomed up with a breath-taking beauty. The grey towers rose out of a heavy white ground mist, as though they were floating in the heavens. I had made the same drive many times before and seen the castle at all times of the day; at noon, standing up boldly against a brilliant blue sky; in the evening, with its mighty contours mellowed by the fading light; in the early morning, glistening with a splendour that once occasioned Samuel Pepys to describe it as “the most romantique castle that is in the world”. But I had never Seen it more beautiful than on this particular morning.

As I drove along the winding road with the narrow stream of the Thames running through the fields and Windsor Park, guarded by its great craggy oak trees, stretching out before me, I thought of the long span of human history the Castle had marked. The Doomsday Survey of 1086 mentions a castle on a hill, and it was there that William the Conqueror held his Court. Edward the Third built the Round Tower to hold the Round Table for his Knights of the Garter; Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth completed the building of St. George’s Chapel; Charles the First built the drawbridge and Charles the Second planted the trees in the Park. It was from this Castle that King John went forth to sign the Magna Charta; it was here that Queen Elizabeth spent her childhood, hunting in the forests attended by “half a hundred ladies on hackneys”; it was here that Queen Victoria established herself and earned the name of “the widow of Windsor”.

The ramparts of the castle have looked down on nearly a thousand years of history, during which no invader has succeeded in setting foot on the shores of England. Through this long span they have watched the nation meet many violent changes and survive many hazardous wars. But now, in the year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and forty-one, they rise out of the April mists to witness the most perilous moment of all.

Not only is England’s existence at stake, but all the gain she has earned through the ages. On her victory the hopes of people in every corner of the world are pinned. I have seen some of them and they pass through my mind now in a long and vivid procession: the ragged soldiers fighting in the mountains near Madrid; the weeping women in the streets of Prague; the tragic refugees streaming across the Polish frontiers; the Finnish patrols slipping through the ice-bound forests of the Arctic; the terrified flow of humanity choking the roads from Paris to Tours.

Although the consequences will be far more reaching than in any previous conflict, what is happening to-day is not new. All through history, tyrants have arisen with a lust for power which they have sought to satisfy by the enslavement of their fellow-beings. All through history, men have struggled to keep their necks free of the yoke. With the teachings of Christ came the first great conception of the sanctity of individual life. On this conception the foundation of our civilization has been laid. The stones have been added with blood, sweat and inspiration. Like Windsor Castle itself, the structure has been supplemented and rebuilt throughout the years with the splendour of each addition marking our progress.

But progress is not inevitable. We have progressed because we have met and defeated every challenge to our conception of life. Now we are faced with the threat of a savage retrogression. The tyrants of our time have borrowed their creed from the era of barbarism. They kill, plunder and torture; they deny man the right to claim his soul.

Although the great mass of civilized people are revolted by these precepts, science has provided the oppressors with such formidable weapons that should they gain the ultimate victory human resistance will be broken with terrible finality.

Railways, roads, machines and wireless all play their part in the familiar pattern of corruption, devastation and subjection. Vast armies are set in motion, vast communities are destroyed, and vast areas held in subjection. If Napoleon had possessed the machinery of the present century with which to enforce his conquests, history might have told a different tale. Instead, the nations he broke rose up again like ghosts and, led by Great Britain, in the end destroyed him. Now no countries rise. When a conquest is accomplished, it is complete; only the dark night sets in.

How can such things have happened? Little over twenty years ago people all over the world were rejoicing in the Armistice. The war to end wars had been fought and won. “On that November evening,” wrote Winston Churchill, “the three men at the head of Great Britain, the United States and France, seemed to be the masters of the world…. Together they had reached their goal. Victory absolute and incomparable was in their hands. What would they do with it?”

The three men laid the foundation for the first international court of justice civilization has ever known. People had suffered badly and now peace was at a higher premium than ever before. Two decades later the structure was in ruins and amity had once more deserted the earth. The part I have seen of the collapse is small related to the whole, but I know that it was due less to neglect than to bewilderment in understanding how to preserve it. One by one, each of us preferred the expediency of the moment to the lasting pattern of the future. Although our pacifism provided the dictators with a powerful weapon and finally expedited the most terrible war of all, our widespread attachment to peace should not now be despised. It was a tremendous advancement in itself. If, when peace is re-born again, our devotion to it can be fortified with the wisdom to know how to guard and defend it from infancy onwards, there is every hope for the future.

Where did we fail? To-day the metaphor is so simple even a child can understand it. The world was our village and we were the people who had struggled desperately to rid our community of bandits. When the fight was won we threw away our weapons joyfully, convinced we had settled the matter once and for all. The very fact that we were unarmed attracted more bandits. Even so, we outnumbered them; if we had taken immediate and united action we could have destroyed them with little effort before they grew too strong. Instead, appalled by the prospect of more bloodshed, we locked the doors and bolted the windows, each one trusting that although his neighbour might be robbed and plundered, he himself would be spared. We failed to understand that our neighbour’s misfortune was our misfortune; that we are all part of the whole; that when the bells toll they toll for us.

Even now, we, the people of the United States, do not seem to understand it. Already we bear a grave responsibility to history. Of the three great Powers to whom the victory of 1918 belonged, we were the first to shrink from our obligations. We were the first to desert the whole. Because our house was removed from the centre of the community, we felt more secure than our neighbours. One by one their houses have been destroyed. Now, besides our own, only one strong point remains from which to resist them. We are still living on the outskirts of the village, but when the village has gone, even though our roof and walls may still be standing, we will be afraid to walk in the gardens and fields, or for that matter, even to take our pigs to market, for fear of being set upon. Our Isolationists still whisper to us to shut our eyes to the village fight; even though our children and our children’s children will be denied all freedom of action, with no fields to work or play in, they advise us to think only of the preservation of our own life and property. But it is unlikely that we shall even be successful there. The other houses in the village are in ashes; why should ours be spared?

On March 15th, four days after the signing of the Lease and Lend Bill, President Roosevelt said in a speech:

Do not let us deceive ourselves. We are not giving “all-out aid” to Britain. We cannot buy victory with our chequebooks. If we, at last, have come to realize that world progress is indivisible and that not only the future of European civilization is at stake but the future of our own civilization as well, why are our ships not fighting on the Atlantic? Why are our soldiers and airmen not defending our way of life? Our forebears gave us our heritage through the sweat of their achievements; they chained the mighty rivers and forests, blazed the trails west, and put down lawlessness in the deserted reaches of the continent. They shed their blood to establish the principle of justice and equality we take for granted. They fought their most savage war for the conception that has built us into the most powerful democracy the world has known: “United we stand, divided we fall.”

To-day, on a broader horizon, the same tenet applies. Divided we will fall. United—and only united—we will stand. With desperate conviction, I say: Let us recapture the virility of our forebears and rise up now, before it is too late, to declare war on the Nazi forces which threaten our way of life. Let us rise up now in all our splendour and fight side by side with Great Britain until we reach a victory so complete that freedom will ring through the ages to come with a strength no man dare challenge.