November 4th 1940

Monday November 4th

The eve of the Presidential Elections in America*, and a week from the day upon which Greece was attacked by Fascist Italy**.

The peculiar thing about this diary is that the more pressing the need becomes to record events, the less they are recorded. When there was nothing doing it went into intolerable prosy discussions of war aims, ambitions and emotions. Now that there is every reason to write often and well, great deeds to recall and noble sentiments to chronicle, nothing comes***. Perhaps it is natural.

Last night was the first night since September 17th that London has not had an air-raid alarm.

I am so proud of my countrymen. I am even a little proud of myself, although I have done nothing but give advice from a comparatively safe distance.

There are simply no words to describe the bravery of quite ordinary humdrum people whom you have known all your life. Nobody dramatises what they have been through; mostly they depreciate it and say that it isn’t half as bad as they were afraid it would be. Perhaps it isn’t, but I think it is more true to realise that Leonidas’ men at Thermopylae**** were to their fellows only just humdrum everyday Greeks, no larger or smaller than the everyday Greek landscape. Drake’s men who beat the Armada were average Elizabethans who looked exactly like everybody else. Such an attitude of mind releases one from the intolerable starched nonsense of the doctrine of the superman which Nazis and Prussians have thrust upon Germany at her cost.

“For God founded his Church, not upon John the loved disciple, that lay so close to his heart. And knew his mind, - not upon John but Peter. Peter the liar, Peter the coward, Peter the rock, the common man”*****

* 'Roosevelt led in all pre-election polls and won a comfortable victory' according to the Wikipedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_United_States_presidential_election

** The Greco-Italian War (Italo-Greek War, Italian Campaign in Greece; in Greece: War of '40) ran between 28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Italian_War

*** Lorna last wrote in her war diary on 24th September 1940.

**** This is a reference to the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae

***** This is a quotation from Dorothy L Sayers' play The Zeal of Thy House which was first performed at the Canterbury Festival in June 1937. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_plays_by_Dorothy_L._Sayers