diff --git "a/data_all_eng_slimpj/shuffled/split2/finalzzsece" "b/data_all_eng_slimpj/shuffled/split2/finalzzsece" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/data_all_eng_slimpj/shuffled/split2/finalzzsece" @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@ +{"text":"\n\nDear Reader,\n\nReaders often want to know how I got my start as a writer. When I tell people that my first books were romance novels for Bantam's Loveswept line, they're sometimes surprised. Although this genre may seem completely different from the suspense I write now, the two have more in common than it seems.\n\nFor me, every good story has two indispensible components to it: characters to fall in love with and root for, and a mystery to figure out\u2014whether it's an unsolved crime or that confusing and complex emotion that baffles us most of all\u2014love. Even the most detailed murder plot can't compare to the intricate mechanics of the human heart.\n\nIn _Heart of Gold_ , the first book in a trilogy about a group of college friends, Faith Kinkaid is trying frantically to escape her past, which includes her ex-husband who is on trial for bribery. Despite building a new life for herself and her daughter in the charming seaside town of Anastasia, California, and starting her own bed and breakfast, Faith wants to bring her husband to justice, and agrees to testify against him in a high-profile case. There's just one catch: The Justice Department decides she needs a bodyguard. When Shane Callan shows up on Faith's doorstep, she realizes that her new protector has a deep, vulnerable side beneath his impeccable physique and quick wit. Can Faith overcome her fears to break through Shane's stoic demeanor and give both of them a second chance at love?\n\nFaith and Shane's story touched my heart all those years ago, and I hope that you'll enjoy it as much today.\n\nAll my best,\n\nTami Hoag\n**_PRAISE FOR THE BESTSELLERS OF_**\n\n**Tami Hoag**\n\n_**THE ALIBI MAN**_\n\n\"Captivating thriller... [Elena] is a heroine readers will want to see more of.\"\n\n\u2014 _Publishers Weekly_\n\n\"Hard to put down.\"\n\n\u2014 _The Washington Post_\n\n\"A superbly taut thriller. Written in a staccato style that will have readers racing through the pages... Will leave readers breathless and satisfied.\"\n\n\u2014 _Booklist_\n\n\"A suspenseful tale, with a surprising ending; the author once again has constructed a hard-hitting story with interesting characters and a thrilling plot.\"\n\n\u2014 _Midwest Book Review_\n\n\"Elena Estes [is] one of Hoag's most complicated, difficult and intriguing characters.... Hoag enhances a tight mystery plot with an over-the-shoulder view of the Palm Beach polo scene, giving her readers an up-close-and-personal look at the rich and famous.... _The Alibi Man_ is her best work to date.\"\n\n\u2014BookReporter.com\n\n\"An engrossing story and a cast of well-drawn characters.\"\n\n\u2014Minneapolis _Star Tribune_\n\n\"[Hoag] gets better with every book. One of the tautest thrillers I have read for a long while.\"\n\n\u2014 _Bookseller_ (U.K.)\n\n\"Hoag certainly knows how to build a plot and her skill has deservedly landed her on bestseller lists numerous times.\"\n\n\u2014 _South Florida Sun-Sentinel_\n\n\"Hoag has a winner in this novel where she brings back Elena Estes.... Hoag is the consummate storyteller and creator of suspense.\"\n\n\u2014 _Mystery News_\n\n\"Tami Hoag weaves an intricate tale of murder and deception.... A very well-written and thought-out murder\/mystery. Hoag is able to keep you guessing and you'll be left breathless until all the threads are unwoven and the killer is revealed.\"\n\n\u2014FreshFiction.com\n_**PRIOR BAD ACTS**_\n\n\"A snappy, scary thriller.\"\n\n\u2014 _Entertainment Weekly_\n\n\"Stunning... Here [Hoag] stands above the competition, creating complex characters who evolve more than those in most thrillers. The breathtaking plot twists are perfectly paced in this compulsive page-turner.\"\n\n\u2014 _Publishers Weekly_ (starred review)\n\n\"A chilling thriller with a romantic chaser.\"\n\n\u2014New York _Daily News_\n\n\"A first-rate thriller with an ending that will knock your socks off.\"\n\n\u2014 _Booklist_\n\n\"An engrossing thriller with plenty of plot twists and a surprise ending.\"\n\n\u2014 _OK!_ magazine\n\n\"A chilling tale of murder and mayhem.\"\n\n\u2014 _BookPage_\n\n\"The in-depth characterization and the unrelenting suspense are what makes _Prior Bad Acts_ an outstanding read. Gritty and brutal at times, _Prior Bad Acts_ delivers a stunning novel of murder, vengeance and retribution.... Riveting and chilling suspense.\"\n\n\u2014 _Romance Reviews Today_\n_**KILL THE MESSENGER**_\n\n\"Excellent pacing and an energetic plot heighten the suspense.... Enjoyable.\"\n\n\u2014 _Chicago Tribune_\n\n\"Everything rings true, from the zippy cop-shop banter, to the rebellious bike messenger subculture, to the ultimate, heady collision of Hollywood money, politics, and power.\"\n\n\u2014Minneapolis _Star Tribune_\n\n\"Hoag's usual crisp, uncluttered storytelling and her ability to make us care about her characters triumph in _Kill the Messenger.\"_\n\n\u2014 _Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel_\n\n\"A perfect book. It is well written, and it has everything a reader could hope for.... It cannot be put down.... Please don't miss this one.\"\n\n\u2014 _Kingston Observer_\n\n\"[A] brisk read... it demonstrates once again why [Hoag's] so good at what she does.\"\n\n\u2014 _San Francisco Chronicle_\n\n\"Action-filled ride... a colorful, fast-paced novel that will keep you guessing.\"\n\n\u2014 _Commercial Appeal_\n\n\"High-octane suspense... Nonstop action moves the story forward at a breath-stealing pace, and the tension remains high from beginning to end.... Suspense at its very best.\"\n\n\u2014 _Romance Reviews Today_\n\n\"Hoag's loyal readers and fans of police procedural suspense novels will definitely love it.\"\n\n\u2014 _Booklist_\n\n_\"Kill the Messenger_ will add to [Hoag's] list of winners.... This is a fast-moving thriller with a great plot and wonderful characters. The identity of the killer is a real surprise.\"\n\n\u2014 _Somerset Daily American_\n\n\"Engaging... the triumph of substance over style... character-driven, solidly constructed thriller.\"\n\n\u2014 _Publishers Weekly_\n\n\"Hoag upholds her reputation as one of the hottest writers in the suspense genre with this book, which not only has a highly complex mystery, multilayered suspense and serpentine plot, but also great characterizations... an entertaining and expertly crafted novel not to be missed.\"\n\n\u2014CurledUp.com\n_**DARK HORSE**_\n\n\"A thriller as tightly wound as its heroine... Hoag has created a winning central figure in Elena.... Bottom line: Great ride.\"\n\n\u2014 _People_\n\n\"This is her best to date.... [A] tautly told thriller.\"\n\n\u2014Minneapolis _Star Tribune_\n\n\"Hoag proves once again why she is considered a queen of the crime thriller.\"\n\n\u2014Charleston _Post and Courier_\n\n\"A tangled web of deceit and double-dealing makes for a fascinating look into the wealthy world of horses juxtaposed with the realistic introspection of one very troubled ex-cop. A definite winner.\"\n\n\u2014 _Booklist_\n\n\"Anyone who reads suspense novels regularly is acquainted with Hoag's work\u2014or certainly should be. She's one of the most consistently superior suspense and romantic suspense writers on today's bestseller lists. A word of warning to readers: don't think you know whodunit 'til the very end.\"\n\n\u2014 _Clute Facts_\n\n\"Suspense, shocking violence, and a rip-roaring conclusion\u2014this novel has all the pulse-racing touches that put Tami Hoag books on bestseller lists and crime fans' reading lists.\"\n\n\u2014 _Baton Rouge Advocate Magazine_\n\n\"Full of intrigue, glitter, and skullduggery... [Hoag] is a master of suspense.\"\n\n\u2014 _Publishers Weekly_\n\n\"Her best to date, an enjoyable read, and a portent of even better things to come.\"\n\n\u2014 _Grand Rapids Press_\n\n\"A complex cerebral puzzle that will keep readers on the edge until all the answers are revealed.\"\n\n\u2014 _Midwest Book Review_\n\n\"To say that Tami Hoag is the absolute best at what she does is a bit easy since she is really the only person who does what she does.... It is a testament to Hoag's skill that she is able to go beyond being skillful and find the battered hearts in her characters, and capture their beating on the page.... A superb read.\"\n\n\u2014 _Detroit News & Free Press_\n**BANTAM TITLES BY TAMI HOAG**\n\nThe Alibi Man \nPrior Bad Acts \nKill the Messenger \nDark Horse \nDust to Dust \nAshes to Ashes \nA Thin Dark Line \nGuilty as Sin \nNight Sins \nDark Paradise \nCry Wolf \nStill Waters \nLucky's Lady \nThe Last White Knight \nStraight from the Heart \nTempestuous\/The Restless Heart \nTaken by Storm \nHeart of Dixie \nMismatch \nMan of Her Dreams \nRumor Has It \nThe Trouble with J.J. \nMcKnight in Shining Armor\n\n# PROLOGUE\n\nUniversity of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana Spring 1977\n\n\"OKAY, EVERYBODY, THIS is it. The final portrait of the Fearsome Foursome. Make sure your caps are on straight, ladies. I'm setting the timer now.\" Bryan Hennessy hunched over the thirty-five-millimeter camera, fussing with buttons and switches, pausing once to push his glasses up on his straight nose.\n\nFaith Kincaid adjusted the shoulders of her graduation gown and checked her cap, poking back long spirals of burnished gold hair that had escaped the bondage of barrettes. She settled herself and her sunny smile in place.\n\nThey stood on the damp grass near the blue expanse of Saint Mary's Lake, not far from the stone grotto that was built into the hillside behind Sacred Heart Church\u2014a replica of the shrine at Lourdes. The clean, cool air was sweet with the scents of spring flowers, new leaves, and freshly cut grass. Bird song mingled with Alice Cooper's _School's Out_ blasting from a boom box in a distant dorm.\n\nTo Faith's right stood Alaina Montgomery, tall, cool, and poised. To her left stood petite Jayne Jordan, all wide eyes and wild auburn hair. Bryan hustled around to stand behind her, his cap askew. He was tall and athletic with a handsome, honest face and tawny hair that tended to be a bit shaggy, because Bryan tended to forget little details like barber appointments.\n\nThese were her three best friends in the entire world. Faith loved them as if they were family. Jayne was artsy and odd, warm and caring. To most people Alaina seemed aloof, but she was fiercely loyal and sharply insightful. Bryan was sweet and eccentric\u2014their surrogate big brother, their confidant.\n\nThey had banded together their freshman year.\n\nFour people with nothing in common but a class in medieval sociology. Over the four years that followed they had seen each other through finals and failures, triumphs and tragedies, and doomed romances. They were friends in the truest, deepest sense of the word.\n\nAnd they were about to graduate and go their separate ways.\n\nFaith sucked in a breath and valiantly blinked back tears.\n\n\"Okay, everybody smile,\" Bryan ordered, his voice a little huskier than usual. \"It's going to go off any second now. Any second.\"\n\nThey all grinned engagingly and held their collective breaths.\n\nThe camera suddenly tilted downward on its tripod, pointing its lens at one of the white geese that wandered freely around Saint Mary's Lake. The shutter clicked, and the motor advanced the film. The goose honked an outraged protest and waddled away.\n\n\"I hope that's not an omen,\" Jayne said, frowning as she nibbled at her thumbnail.\n\n\"It's a loose screw,\" Bryan announced, digging a dime out of his pants pocket to repair the tripod with.\n\n\"In Jayne or the camera?\"\n\n\"Very funny, Alaina.\"\n\n\"I think it's a sign that Bryan needs a new tripod,\" said Faith.\n\n\"That's not what Jessica Porter says,\" Alaina remarked slyly.\n\nThe girls giggled as Bryan's blush crept up to the roots of his hair. Faith knew while there had never been any romantic developments within their ranks, outside of his unusual friendship with them Bryan had an active... er... social life.\n\n\"If you want a sign, look behind you,\" he said through gritted teeth as he fussed unnecessarily with the aperture setting on the camera.\n\nFaith turned as her two friends did, and her dark eyes widened at the sight of the rainbow that arched gracefully across the morning sky above the golden dome of the administration building.\n\n\"Oh, how beautiful,\" she said with a gasp, the hopeless romantic in her shining through. Lord, she wasn't even gone yet and already she was feeling nostalgic about the place.\n\n\"Symbolic,\" Jayne whispered.\n\n\"It's the diffusion of light through raindrops,\" Alaina said flatly, crossing her arms in front of her.\n\nBryan looked up from fiddling with the camera to frown at her, his strong jaw jutting forward aggressively. \"Rainbows have lots of magic in them,\" he said, dead serious. \"Ask any leprechaun. It'd do you some good to believe in magic, Alaina.\"\n\nAlaina's lush mouth turned down at the corners. \"Take the picture, Hennessy.\"\n\nBryan ignored her, his wise, warm blue eyes taking on a dreamy quality as he gazed up at the soft stripes of color. \"We'll each be chasing our own rainbows after today. I wonder where they'll lead us.\"\n\nThey each recited the stock answers they'd been giving faculty, friends, and family for months. Alaina was headed to law school. Jayne was leaving to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood as a writer and director. Bryan had been accepted into the graduate program of parapsychology at Purdue. Faith was headed to a managerial position in a business office in Cincinnati.\n\n\"That's where our brains are taking us,\" Bryan said, pulling his cap off to comb a hand back through his hair as he always did when he went into one of his \"deep-thinking modes.\" \"I wonder where our hearts would take us.\"\n\nIf anyone knew the answer to that, it was Bryan, Faith thought. He was the one they told all their secret dreams to. He was the one she had confided in that she aspired to nothing more than having a husband and children and a small business to run. That was the end of her heart's rainbow.\n\nIt probably would have seemed an exceedingly boring dream to Jayne and Alaina. Faith herself admitted it lacked pizzazz and had nothing in the way of driving ambition, but Bryan had assured her it was a wonderful dream.\n\n\"That's the question we should all be asking ourselves,\" Jayne said, wagging a slender finger at her friends. \"Are we in pursuit of our true bliss, or are we merely following a course charted by the expectations of others?\"\n\n\"Do we have to get philosophical?\" Alaina asked with a groan, rubbing her temples. \"I haven't had my mandatory ten cups of coffee yet this morning.\"\n\n\"Life is philosophy, honey,\" Jayne explained patiently, her voice a slow Kentucky drawl that hadn't altered one iota over the four years she'd spent in northern Indiana. The expression on her delicately sculpted features was almost comically earnest. \"That's a cosmic reality.\"\n\nAlaina was nonplussed for a full twenty seconds. Finally she said, \"We don't have to worry about you. You'll fit right in in California.\"\n\nJayne smiled, her eyes twinkling. \"Why thank you.\"\n\nFaith chuckled at the look on Alaina's face. \"Give up, Alaina. You can't win.\"\n\nAlaina winced and held her hands up as if to ward off the words. \"Don't say that. I _abhor_ losing.\"\n\n\"Anastasia,\" Bryan declared loudly. He gave a decisive nod that set the tassel on his cap dancing. The statement would have seemed straight out of left field to anyone who didn't know Bryan Hennessy and the workings of his unconventional mind.\n\nImmediately Faith's heart-shaped face lit up. Anastasia was the small town on California's rugged northern coast where the four of them had spent spring break, a beautiful village nestled in a quiet cove. She smiled now at the memory of the plans they had made to move there and pursue idealistic existences. Jayne's dream had been to have her own farm. Alaina had grudgingly admitted a secret desire to paint. Bryan had wanted to play the role of local mad scientist. An inn with a view of the ocean had been Faith's wish.\n\n\"That's right,\" she said. \"We'd all move to Anastasia.\"\n\n\"And live happily ever after.\" Alaina's tone lacked the sarcasm she had undoubtedly intended. She sounded almost wistful instead.\n\n\"Even if we never end up there, it's a nice dream,\" Jayne said softly.\n\nA nice dream, Faith thought. Something to hang on to, something to take along on the journey into the big world. Like their memories of Notre Dame and each other, warm, golden images they could hold in a secret place in their hearts to be taken out from time to time when they were feeling lonely or blue.\n\nJust the thought made her feel empty inside.\n\nBryan set the timer on the camera once again, then jogged around to stand behind her. \"Who knows? Life is full of crossroads. You can never tell where a path might lead.\"\n\nAnd the camera buzzed and clicked, capturing the moment on film for all time. The Fearsome Foursome\u2014wistful smiles canting their mouths, dreams of the future and tears of parting shining in their eyes as a rainbow arched in the sky behind them.\n\n# ONE\n\n\"MAMA, WHERE DO babies come from?\"\n\nFaith stopped in her tracks on her way across the spacious old kitchen. Her gaze shot first to her daughter, Lindy, who sat on the floor pretending to feed her doll from a toy baby's bottle, then lifted skyward. \"Couldn't she have waited another year or two?\" she whispered urgently.\n\nLindy looked up at her expectantly, her warm brown eyes shining with love and trust.\n\nFaith tugged a hand through her mop of curls, a gesture of frustration that only added to their disarray. Loose spirals of dark honey-blond shot through with tints of red tumbled across her forehead. She blew at them as she searched frantically for an answer that would satisfy a four-year-old's natural curiosity.\n\nIn some distant part of the house a doorbell chimed.\n\nSmiling lovingly at her daughter, Faith breathed a huge sigh of relief. \"I have to get the door, sweetie.\"\n\nLindy had already lost interest in the conversation. She was all wrapped up in putting her doll to bed in the little toy cradle Mr. Fitz had found for her in one of the attics. Faith started for the front of the house, trying to determine which of the doorbells was ringing.\n\nThe house she had purchased to renovate and open as a bed-and-breakfast inn was actually a complex of several houses. The builder, an eccentric sea captain named Argyle Dugan, had added one house onto another over the years as his fortune from his shipping business had increased. The end result after fifty-some years of work was an architectural monstrosity.\n\nThe main building was a three-story Victorian mansion, complete with a widow's walk. The front side of the house was graced with a large porch and ornately carved double doors flanked by etched glass panels. These were the doors Faith went toward, following the impatient sound of the bell.\n\nWho could be in such an all-fired hurry, she wondered. It had to be a tourist. No one from Anastasia would be that anxious about anything. She swung back one of the heavy doors, and everything inside her went still.\n\nElegance was the first word that came to her mind. The man standing on her porch seemed to radiate it. Odd, she thought, because he wasn't dressed in formal attire. He wore black trousers and a dark gray shirt with a black tie. His long gray raincoat hung open, the collar turned up against the brisk wind coming in off the ocean. Still, as he stood there in the late afternoon gloom, with the fog bank for a backdrop, there was a sense of elegance about him. Elegance and danger.\n\nFaith's gaze darted nervously to the suitcase on the floor of the porch, then back up a good six feet to the man's face. He was handsome. No one could have argued that fact. His was a lean, angular face with high cheekbones, a bold straight nose, and pale gray eyes that stared down at her with wary disdain. There was something of the arrogant aristocrat in his looks, and something that wasn't quite civilized in his cool silver eyes. The wind ruffled his night black hair, which was cut short on the sides\u2014for practicality rather than fashion, she guessed.\n\nHe looked like a no-nonsense sort. A no-nonsense sort with no sense of humor.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Faith said at last, a thin nervous tremor in her voice. The fingers of her right hand automatically went to the necklace at her throat, sliding the heart medallion back and forth. \"We won't be open for business for a few more days. I can give you directions to\u2014\"\n\n\"Are you Faith Gerrard?\" His low voice made her think of whiskey and smoke and rumpled sheets.\n\n\"Kincaid,\" she corrected him, swallowing hard. Heaven help her, the man had a bedroom voice. Tingles raced over her skin like hedonistic fingers. She felt as if his voice had reached out and touched her intimately. Knock it off, Faith, she told herself, this is no time to fall into a romantic fantasy. \"Umm\u2014Faith Kincaid. Yes, I am.\"\n\nHe reached into an inside pocket of his overcoat and extracted what looked to Faith like a wallet, but when he flipped it open, there was a gold shield inside, as well as an identification card. His photograph frowned out at her with the kind of brooding quality that made _GQ_ models rich.\n\n\"Shane Callan. The Justice Department sent me.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Faith nodded, one hand gripping the door for support as her knees quivered. In spite of his heart-stopping looks, she should have recognized the glower. The people she had encountered in her dealings with the Justice Department had all been similarly humorless. With good reason, she supposed. Well, Mr. Callan's humor wasn't likely to improve when he heard what she had to say.\n\nOutwardly she appeared calm and collected. She even managed a perfectly pleasant smile. She had learned that kind of control as a tool of self-preservation during her marriage to Senator William Gerrard. In truth her heart was racing and her hands were clammy. Just do it, Faith, she told herself as nerves scrambled around inside her stomach like crabs on the beach.\n\n\"I told Mr. Banks it wasn't necessary to send you.\" The words came tumbling out of her mouth, defying punctuation. \"I'm sorry you came all this way for nothing, Mr. Callan. You'll find a hotel in Anastasia. Good day.\"\n\nShane stared in disbelief at the door that had just been shut in his face. This wasn't quite the greeting he had imagined receiving from Senator Gerrard's ex-wife. But then, he admitted, he hadn't imagined the senator's ex-wife would be running around in a worn-out Notre Dame sweatshirt and faded old jeans that lovingly molded her curvy little figure either.\n\nHe could easily call to mind every detail of the photographs he had casually glanced at when going through her file. Silk and mink. Hundred-dollar hairstyles and flawless makeup. The woman who had answered the door had looked more like a maid than the owner of the Keepsake Inn.\n\nPretty, he noted, then stubbornly ignored the sweet ache of physical attraction. It didn't make a bit of difference to him that she had the kind of feminine appeal that made the average man's blood heat to the boiling point. His blood was only just simmering, and he was in complete control of it.\n\nFaith Gerrard, or Kincaid, or whatever the hell she wanted to call herself, was no woman to get tangled up with. Senator Gerrard had found her angelic expression and sparkling dark eyes irresistible too. Now the senator was under indictment for bribery, racketeering, and conspiracy to defraud the federal government, and Faith was lolling her days away under protection of the Justice Department\u2014probably because she had cut some kind of deal for herself.\n\nHe punched the doorbell again, irritation rubbing against his raw nerve endings. He didn't need this. He didn't need this wimpy assignment, didn't need the headache a woman like Faith was bound to inspire. But orders\u2014no matter how distasteful\u2014were orders. Banks had sent him there to do a job. No delectable little slip of a woman was going to keep him from doing it.\n\nWhen she swung the door back on its hinges this time, Shane snatched up his bag and stepped inside in a move more graceful than any door-to-door salesman had ever mastered.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" Faith murmured, wide-eyed. Agent Callan looked awfully determined to stay. The prospect sent another flurry of tingles down her limbs. \"Umm\u2014Mr. Callan, I don't think you understand. It's like I told you\u2014\"\n\n\"I know what you told me,\" Shane said, staring down at her. Annoyance scratched at his temper when he realized his gaze was being drawn to the O of Notre Dame on her sweatshirt, where the letter distinctly outlined her nipple.\n\nHe cleared his throat and glared at her as if her body's involuntary response had been planned deliberately to distract him. \"Now let me tell you a thing or two, Mrs. Gerrard. Mr. Banks believes you need protection. I take orders from Mr. Banks. When the Justice Department sends an agent to look after you, you can't just say no thank you and slam the door in his face. That may work with encyclopedia salesmen, but it doesn't work with me.\"\n\nFaith stared open-mouthed at him for a full thirty seconds before she could scrape together a response. With her small chin set at a mutinous angle, she decided to fight arrogance with arrogance\u2014provided she could fake it. Arrogance wasn't high on the list of things this man was making her feel.\n\n\"The last I knew the United States was a democracy, not a police state,\" she said in her most businesslike tone. \"My taxes pay your wages, Mr. Callan. That makes me your boss.\"\n\nImmediately her imagination raced to consider the possibilities of having this government hunk at her beck and call. Her skin heated.\n\n\"That's an interesting theory,\" Shane said, successfully suppressing a chuckle. She was a feisty little thing... but that didn't interest him in the least. In an effort to keep his eyes off her breasts, his gaze wandered lazily around the spacious entrance hall, taking in the heavy mahogany reception desk, the polished walnut wainscoting, and the freshly papered wall above it. \"Maybe you should join a debate club.\"\n\nFaith cast a longing glance at his shins, wondering what the penalty would be for giving a federal agent a good swift kick. Her thoughts segued quickly into speculation about what his legs looked like under his fashionable trousers. Probably muscular, probably hairy, prob\u2014\n\nWith a little gasp of surprise at the suddenly sensuous bend her mind was taking, she snapped her gaze back to focus just to the right of his handsome face.\n\n\"I really don't appreciate your attitude, Mr. Callan,\" she said primly. \"You're awfully snippy.\"\n\nSnippy? Shane had to rub a hand across his mouth to hide his amusement. He'd been called a lot of things in his day. Snippy was not among them. Damn, she was cute... but it wasn't his job to think so.\n\nWhen his gaze swung back to her, it held the sharp glint of steel. \"Mrs. Gerrard, the federal government is willing to spend time and manpower protecting that pretty little fanny of yours. The least you could do is cooperate.\"\n\n\"All I've done from the start of this nightmare is cooperate,\" Faith insisted, trying unsuccessfully to ignore the fact that he'd commented on her derriere. She crossed her arms in front of her to keep from running her hands over the seat of her jeans. \"I've been a veritable paragon of cooperation.\"\n\n\"Mama?\"\n\nShane watched with keen interest as Faith went to her daughter and knelt down. The little girl was adorable. Four years old, the file had said, a cherub with a heart-shaped face framed by red-gold waves. There was a smudge of flour on her button nose. Her eyes were the same sable shade as her mother's, and they sparkled with curiosity as she peered over Faith's shoulder at him.\n\n\"Who's that, Mama?\" she asked shyly.\n\n\"Nobody, sweetheart,\" Faith said, trying nonchalantly to scoot around so Agent Callan wouldn't be able to stare at her behind.\n\nShane scowled. Nobody, huh? The little one smiled sweetly and waved a chubby hand at him. Something caught hard in his chest. He tried to ignore the feeling as he awkwardly lifted a hand to return her salute and then self-consciously ran it back through his hair.\n\nRolling her eyes, Faith frowned at him, then turned back to Lindy. \"Sweetie, it's almost time for supper. Why don't you take your baby to your room and put her to bed?\"\n\nLindy shook her head, an impish smile curving her mouth. \"She's not sleepy.\"\n\n\"She will be by the time you get to your room,\" Faith assured her. She pressed a kiss to her daughter's forehead. \"Go on now. Be a good girl.\"\n\nTossing Shane a heart-stealing smile, Lindy snuggled her doll, then turned and headed back down the hall. Faith remained on her knees for a moment, watching her daughter walk away. A day didn't go by that she didn't thank God for Lindy. When everything else in her world had seemed bleak and hopeless, Lindy had unfailingly provided her with sweetness and light. She was doing it still, Faith realized as she rose and turned to face Shane Callan once more.\n\n\"I imagine we can clear all this up with a phone call,\" she said pleasantly. After all, she'd been raised to have good manners. And she had learned to deal with all sorts of people during her twelve years in Washington.\n\nOf course, none of them had rattled her the way this man had. Not even the Arab sheik who had offered her former husband nine camels for her.\n\nShe could feel Callan's gaze as he followed her. Electricity ran down her back in warm rivulets. Beneath her sweatshirt her nipples were tight knots. She became suddenly, acutely aware of her rear end. He must have been staring at it, the infuriating man. She tugged her sweatshirt down and tried not to wiggle as she led the way down the hall.\n\nThe inn's office was a small room, neatly kept, but crowded with a walnut desk and a four-drawer filing cabinet. The wallpaper was feminine and flowery with a background that women probably called mauve, Shane thought.\n\nHe shook his pounding head in disgust. Lord, he was losing his edge, going on about wallpaper. But then he had known he was losing his edge. He had just spent a week in a hospital nursing a bullet wound that proved it. Now Banks had stuck him on this glorified guard duty. After three years spent in undercover work, this was probably just the kind of assignment he needed, but that didn't make him like it any better.\n\nHe leaned against the doorjamb in a negligent pose as Faith went behind the desk. All he wanted right now was a hot meal and a soft pillow. The thought of a hot, soft woman was judiciously edited from the list as he dragged his gaze from Faith for the hundredth time. He was nursing a major case of jet lag and the remnants of a hangover. For two cents he would have bid this assignment adieu and gone south for some sun, but it was too late for that.\n\nTo escape his own introspection, Shane forced himself to study Faith with the cool, impersonal professionalism he was known for. A frown tugged at her mouth, but it wasn't petulance. She looked upset as she sat in the old swivel chair behind the desk and dialed the phone number from memory. While she waited for someone to pick up on the other end of the line, she studiously avoided looking at him. The fingers of her right hand toyed nervously with the small pendant that hung on a chain around her neck.\n\nNice neck, he thought, his mind drifting traitorously. It was a sleek ivory column that was mostly exposed because her dark blond hair had been cut into a mop of unruly curls. The smooth, soft-looking skin beckoned for the touch of a man's lips. Unconsciously he ran his tongue over his, then ground his teeth at the surge of desire that stirred in his loins.\n\n\"Mr. Banks, please,\" Faith said to the receptionist on the other end of the line.\n\nHer eyes darted to the man filling her office doorway. When she met his cool appraisal, her gaze dived to the ink blotter. Lord above, the man was a hunk!\n\nShe scolded herself for thinking about that. What did it matter to her that Shane Callan's looks could have put any Hollywood star to shame? It didn't. What did it matter to her that this gorgeous tower of masculinity found her fanny fascinating? It didn't matter a bit. She reminded herself he was thoroughly irritating, and as soon as she spoke with Mr. Banks, he was going to be gone.\n\n\"I'd like a tour of the house right away,\" Shane said, a smug smile tilting the corners of his lips.\n\nFaith sat back in her desk chair and gave him the most disgruntled look she could muster, considering she found his smile utterly sexy. She didn't need sexy. She didn't need Adonis lurking around her house, making her bones go limp every time she looked at him. How would she ever get any work done going around with limp bones?\n\nBut John Banks had just shown her that he was not only as emotionless as the Rock of Gibraltar, he was as immovable as well. He had told her in no uncertain terms that she was stuck with Agent Handsome, whether she thought she needed him or not.\n\n\"I don't understand your attitude, Mrs. Gerrard,\" Shane said, perching a hip on one corner of her desk. He folded his arms across his chest. \"You're being offered protection. All things considered, you ought to be grateful.\"\n\n\"It's not that I don't appreciate the thought,\" Faith said sincerely, her sable eyes begging for understanding. Her slim shoulders lifted in a shrug. \"It's just that I don't need protection. You'll be wasting your time.\" And upsetting my hormones, she added silently.\n\n\"That's not what Banks thinks. Your ex-husband and his pals have been making noises about you testifying in the DataTech trial next month.\"\n\n\"I know William.\" She winced a bit at the memory of the man she had once pledged to love until death. \"He's very good at threats, but I don't think he has the guts to make good on this one.\"\n\nDoubt immediately surfaced inside her. She didn't believe William would physically hurt her, but then she'd been wrong about William Gerrard time and again. There was a time when she hadn't believed him capable of betraying his country either.\n\n\"It doesn't take much in the way of guts to hire someone else to carry out threats,\" Shane said softly, almost gently.\n\nFaith refused to consider that possibility. It was too remote, too unreal, like something from a television crime drama. To reassure herself, she said, \"He doesn't have any idea where I am.\"\n\nShane simply lifted an eyebrow as if to say that was a minor problem that could be easily solved.\n\nRubbing a trembling hand across her forehead, Faith heaved a ragged sigh. She didn't want to deal with any of this. She and her daughter were building a new life there on the northern coast of California. She didn't want William Gerrard to intrude in any way.\n\nMore than anything, she wanted to forget about the way he had lied to her, the way he had used her and Lindy. She didn't want any memories of that tainting her new life. Shane Callan was a reminder that she didn't have any say in the matter\u2014at least not until the trial was over.\n\n\"That tour, Mrs. Gerrard?\"\n\n\"Please don't call me that,\" she whispered. \"I divorced William Gerrard ten months ago.\"\n\n\"Just in the nick of time,\" Shane muttered half under his breath as he rose and motioned for her to precede him out the door. It wouldn't do for him to forget that she may well have played a role in her ex-husband's scheme. He reminded himself of that and pushed away the foreign feelings of sympathy that had been niggling at him as he'd stared down into Faith's fathomless brown eyes.\n\nFaith just caught his comment and bit back a retort. What did she care what Callan thought of her? Why waste her breath telling Shane Callan that a charming politician on his way to big things had swept a naive girl from the farm country of Ohio off her feet, that he had wooed her with words of love because he had believed she would be an asset to his \"down-home\" image. What would a man like Shane Callan know of the heartbreak she had lived with bound to a man who didn't love her by vows she felt she couldn't break?\n\nNo, she told herself. She was stuck with Shane Callan. The best thing she could do would be to ignore him.\n\nPulling herself up to her full height, she tilted her head back and looked Callan in the eye. Heavens, he was tall\u2014six feet four if he was an inch\u2014and his shoulders seemed to take up half the room. There was an awful lot of him to ignore, and every inch was to-die-for handsome.\n\n\"I'll show you around the house and give you a room, but I'll ask that you stay out of the way,\" she said primly. \"This inn opens in five days, and there's still a great deal of work to be done. I don't need some brooding cop hanging around leaving the toilet seats up.\"\n\nShane forgot himself and let go a rusty-sounding laugh. Damn, she had more spunk than he would ever have given her credit for. He had to force a frown; he wasn't supposed to find her amusing... or cute... or alluring...\n\n\"Take your time doing the work,\" he said as he followed her down the hall toward the central staircase. \"You won't be opening for business until after the trial.\"\n\nFaith wheeled on him with a stern look that brought him up short. \"I most certainly will. I have guests booked. My friends have been staying here helping me get ready for the grand opening.\"\n\n\"Friends?\"\n\nShane stopped her on the stairs with a hand on her upper arm. Turning her around, his fingertips brushed the soft outer swell of her breast. The shock of the contact instantly derailed his train of thought. How would it feel to cup his hand beneath that firm, womanly globe of flesh? Heat surged through him in a wildfire of desire.\n\nLocking his gaze on hers, he held his breath tightly in his lungs and willed his concentration back. The strain came through his sandpaper voice. \"Nobody said anything to me about your having friends.\"\n\n\"I don't doubt the concept is foreign to you,\" Faith said weakly, her breath running out of her in fluttering ribbons.\n\nHer breast seemed to heat and swell at his touch. A burning sensation ran from her chest downward to pool and swirl in the most feminine part of her. Self-preservation made her jerk her arm from Shane's grasp.\n\n\"Jayne and Alaina are out running errands for me right now,\" she said, trying to turn her mind away from sex. To her dismay she found her mental power steering had gone out, and her thoughts kept veering back to the feel of Callan's hand on her breast. It had been forever since a man had touched her, even accidentally. Stifling a groan, she cleared her throat and forced her thoughts back to the conversation. \"I'm lucky to have such good friends. Setting up an inn takes a lot of work.\"\n\nAnd a lot of money, Shane figured, dragging his gaze off the well-rounded female fanny that was now at eye level three steps ahead of him. The cost of this property alone, which was in a prime location along the coast less than two hours north of San Francisco, had to be astronomical.\n\n\"A thrifty way to invest your divorce settlement,\" he commented mildly as he joined her in the second-floor hall.\n\nFaith's dark eyes flashed. \"The money I took from William in the divorce was for Lindy. All I wanted for myself was to get out.\"\n\n\"Ah, well, what would you need with alimony when you no doubt had your cut of the money from the defense contracts safely stashed away,\" he said, pushing his coat back and tucking his hands into his trouser pockets.\n\nFaith sucked in her breath. She knew William had tried to implicate her in his scheme after the fact. She also knew that the Justice Department had found nothing to substantiate his claims. That Shane Callan nevertheless believed she was guilty hurt her pride. She might have told herself it didn't matter what he thought, but that didn't take the sting out of his snide remarks.\n\n\"I bought this inn with a bank loan and money invested by friends. That's the truth. Believe it or don't.\" With that she turned on the heel of her sneaker and marched down the hall like a petite field general.\n\nAs she took Callan through the various floors and wings of the rambling house, she recited the history of the place in the manner of an uninspired tour guide. She hoped she was boring him to death. He was nothing but trouble, and she didn't want him anywhere near her, she reminded herself, resolutely pushing the memory of the sensation of his fingers on her breast far, far away.\n\nSetting a brisk pace, she led him down one hall after another. They passed through guest rooms and sitting rooms. On the main floor they wandered through a library and a room Lindy called the \"Aminal Room,\" where Captain Dugan had covered the walls with mounted heads of exotic beasts. They cut through the ballroom, where murals adorned three walls and a grand piano sat near an outer wall that was made almost entirely of glass.\n\nAgent Callan didn't seem to appreciate the high ceilings and polished wood floors or the antiques or the views of the ocean. As Faith took him from the Victorian section of the house to the smaller Italianate section, then back to the Cape Cod and the original two-room cottage, his mood grew darker than the beard that shadowed his lean cheeks. By the time they arrived back at their starting point, he was swearing under his breath.\n\n\"This damn place is indefensible,\" he said, scowling at Faith as if it were her fault. \"There are so many ways in and out of here, it would take an army to watch them all.\"\n\nFaith laughed. This situation was so weird it was funny. What did the man think, that she should live in a bomb shelter?\n\n\"Apparently Captain Dugan never considered the paranoid needs of the average G-man when he built the place,\" she said dryly, then checked her watch and sighed. \"If you'll excuse me, Mr. Callan, I have to see to dinner.\"\n\nHis scowl bounced right off her as she turned with her pretty nose in the air and headed for the kitchen. With grudging admiration Shane gave her points for standing up to him. She had a lot of sass... and a fabulous fanny.\n\n\"Ms. Kincaid?\" His low, rough voice made her turn around in her tracks. \"I need a room.\"\n\nFaith nibbled at her lip. Her first impulse was to stick him in the farthest corner of the house, but she doubted he would go for that.\n\n\"Which room is yours?\"\n\nBefore she could catch herself, she looked right at the door to her bedroom, not three feet from Callan. Shane gave her a sly, sexy smile and checked the room behind him, the room directly across the hall from hers.\n\n\"I'll take this one.\" Before she could voice a protest, he picked up his suitcase and went inside.\n\nThe room was small but tastefully decorated with period antiques. A fancy reproduction of a hurricane lamp squatted on a square oak table that served as a nightstand. There was an afghan folded on the seat of a pressed-back rocker in one corner. A pitcher and bowl sat on an embroidered runner on top of the dresser. The decor was decidedly feminine. Tiny flowers and vines covered the cream-colored background of the wallpaper. Ruffles and flounces adorned the four-poster bed. Dried wreaths hung on the wall, and the scent of something sweet drifted on the air. There was a very homey feel to the place.\n\nShane frowned. Home. What would he know about it? It had been so long since he'd been home, the memory of it seemed unreal to him.\n\nGoing through a routine that was automatic, he popped open his suitcase and began to unpack. The first thing that came out was a book of poetry. The second was a sterling flask of Irish whiskey. He poured himself a shot and tossed back half of it. He needed it. His head was pounding, his shoulder hurt like the very devil, and a black mood was crawling around the edges of his consciousness.\n\nRecruits were taught that agents didn't drink on the job. Shane had been on the job long enough to know agents did whatever they had to do.\n\nHe unpacked his clothes and hung them neatly in the small armoire that stood along one wall. He hung up his raincoat as well, then carefully shrugged off his shoulder harness and placed his gun on the dresser.\n\nPain burned in his left shoulder as he gingerly rotated his arm and felt threads of scar tissue tear loose inside where the bullet wound was still healing. Kicking off his shoes, he bent and removed the .25 caliber pistol strapped to his ankle.\n\nFinally he stretched out on the bed to allow himself a few moments' relaxation. That elusive sweet scent\u2014powder-soft, flower-delicate\u2014drifted up from the pillow as he eased his head down. The image of Faith Kincaid filled his head.\n\nShe had surprised him, and dammit, he hated surprises. He had expected her to welcome the protection the government was offering her as a key witness in what the press called DataScam. Instead she had politely said no thank you and closed the door on him as if he were a Boy Scout selling magazine subscriptions. He had expected her to be decked out in designer finery, trailing a plume of expensive fragrance. Instead she looked like an ordinary housewife who'd been caught with no makeup on.\n\nThe lack of lipstick and eye shadow didn't make her any less appealing. Lighting a cigarette, Shane ground his teeth at the memory of the way her backside filled out a pair of jeans. His fingertips had discovered some equally delectable curves hidden under her sweatshirt. He nearly groaned aloud at the memory of her soft, womanly fullness.\n\nNo doubt about it, Faith Kincaid was a lovely little package. Too bad there was a very good chance she was a scheming little backstabber as well.\n\n\"Arrogant jerk!\"\n\nFaith's knife sliced down, viciously mutilating the head of lettuce on the chopping block. She needed to take her temper out on something. Better it be the salad she had to prepare for dinner than Agent Callan's thick head. And it seemed infinitely safer to recall her anger with him than to recall such things as his rare sexy smile and the seductive undercurrent of attraction that ran between them like a billion watts of electricity. Under her breath she muttered a stream of uncomplimentary observations about the man as she threw the lettuce into a bowl. Errant shreds of roughage flew all over the blue-tiled counter.\n\nNothing, _nothing_ galled her more than being accused of something she hadn't done. She was a decent, honorable person, a woman of integrity. When she had discovered William Gerrard was involved in a scam to profit from defense contracts, she had gone straight to the authorities and told them all she knew. She had done the patriotic thing, and now she was paying for it by having to put up with a cynical cop who seemed to think she had masterminded the entire evil plan.\n\nWhile she hacked up a stalk of celery, she tried her best to dismiss the incident on the staircase. Unfortunately the memory of that incidental contact was a stubborn one. She thought she could still feel the tips of his fingers pressing into her breast. A traitorous flush washed over her, and Faith cursed herself and her breast and Shane Callan and all men everywhere.\n\nWith brown eyes narrowed and sparking with anger, she planted a huge onion on the chopping block and bisected it with one violent slice of the knife. Little flecks of white exploded off the wooden surface as she chopped with a vengeance.\n\n\"Mama, can I help?\" Lindy asked, tugging at Faith's pant leg.\n\n\"No, Lindy, this is Mama's work,\" she said, dismissing her daughter and letting her mind turn back to nasty speculation as to the species occupying space in Shane Callan's family tree.\n\n\"But I'm a mama too,\" Lindy protested crossly. \"I put my baby to bed, and now I have to make supper.\"\n\n\"Not tonight.\"\n\nLindy stamped her foot in a rare show of temper. \"Yes!\"\n\n\"Lindy.\" Faith heaved an impatient sigh, put her knife down, and lifted a hand to push her bangs back from her forehead. Burning, stinging tears rose immediately in her eyes from the strong onion scent that drenched her fingers.\n\nBiting her tongue on a string of curses, she grabbed a towel and sank to the floor with her back to the cabinets, feeling frustrated and defeated and tired and just plain mad. Lindy stared at her with wide, worried brown eyes.\n\n\"Don't cry,\" she said, her bottom lip trembling threateningly. \"I don't like it when you cry, Mama.\"\n\nFaith held her arms out to her little daughter and was immediately engulfed in a warm hug, the smell of baby powder and little girl washing over her. \"I'm sorry, sweetie. Mama's not having a very good day.\"\n\nLindy hugged her tighter and patted her back consolingly. \"Poor Mama.\"\n\nPoor Mama, Faith agreed silently, as she took comfort from holding her child. She had foolishly believed all her troubles had been left behind. The width of a continent separated her from the man who had imprisoned her in an empty, miserable life. But her problems weren't over. There was one big, disgustingly handsome one right down the hall, waiting for her to call him to dinner.\n\n\"A mansion in the mist,\" the man said softly to himself as he lowered his binoculars and sat back against the plush leather seat of the rented Jag. An evil smile turned his lips upward as he ran a loving hand over the gun that lay on top of a folder full of illegally reproduced Justice Department reports. Briefly he wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed that one lowly secretary had never returned from her hastily requested vacation. Just as quickly the thought was dismissed, and he stared once again at the inn perched at the cliff's edge. \"A mansion in the mist. How very Gothic. How very apropos. The perfect setting for a murder.\"\n\n# TWO\n\n\"IS THAT _REALLY_ NECESSARY, Mr. Callan?\" Faith asked as she passed him the salad bowl.\n\nShane followed the path of her startled dark eyes to the place where his tweed jacket opened just enough to give her a glimpse of the nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson strapped to his shoulder.\n\n\"It's just part of the uniform,\" he said blandly, his cool, level gaze drinking in her appearance. She had traded her sweatshirt for a soft, aquamarine V-neck sweater, but she still wore no makeup and no jewelry except for the simple heart necklace. Even so, he had all he could do to pull his gaze off her.\n\n\"It's a fashion accessory I'd rather not see around my home,\" Faith said weakly. Strange, contradictory thrills ran through her at the thought that Shane Callan would look good holding a gun.\n\nShane gave her a dangerous smile full of predatory promise. \"Then stop staring at my chest. Please pass the pepper.\"\n\nTrying to ignore the rough sensuality of his low voice, Faith handed him the pepper mill. His hand closed around it, briefly trapping her fingers beneath his. Like metal filings to magnets, her gaze flew up to meet his as her heart vaulted into her throat. Shane's expression gave away nothing, yet the message that passed between them was very clear on a basic, instinctive level. Faith shivered as he allowed her to draw her hand away.\n\nHoly smoke, she thought, staring down at her plate. In twelve years of marriage she had never experienced such a powerful physical reaction as she had when this man touched her\u2014and he didn't even do it on purpose. What rotten luck that she would find that kind of attraction with a man who was a total creep. A handsome creep, but a creep just the same, she decided, trying to dredge up some of the anger she had wallowed in earlier.\n\nShane took note of the color that tinted Faith's fair complexion, then forced his attention away again as he felt his body responding to subliminal messages. Dammit, she got him hot\u2014and she wasn't even trying! Lord help him if she ever decided it would be to her advantage to seduce him, Shane thought, disgusted with this unusual lack of self-control.\n\nThey were seated at one of several tables that occupied the inn's large, elegant dining room. Apparently Captain Dugan had built this section of the house during the boom years of his shipping trade, he thought, as he took in the white marble fireplace and the heavy mahogany antiques that filled the room.\n\nSurreptitiously he studied the other members of the dinner party. Across from him sat Jayne Jordan, petite and pretty with rather funky taste in clothes. She wore a man's houndstooth jacket over a silk-and-lace camisole. Opposite Faith sat her other friend, Alaina Montgomery, all cool poise and designer labels.\n\nThe women made an interesting trio, Shane mused as he absently raised a forkful of salad to his mouth and began to chew. His eyes widened as his teeth stopped working in midchew. He glanced at the other two women seated at the table. They both wore similar looks and had frozen with their forks lifted halfway to their mouths.\n\nAt the other end of the table Alaina Montgomery swallowed first and delicately dabbed at her lush mouth with a rose-colored cloth napkin. \"Onion salad,\" she said with a hint of humor in her husky alto voice. \"Is this a new recipe, Faith?\"\n\nFaith took in the expressions of the other adults at the table. What had she done to the salad? As everyone watched her expectantly, she took a bite of hers and choked.\n\nLord, she'd thrown the entire chopped onion into the bowl!\n\n\"Sorry,\" she said, shooting Shane a look that mixed amusement with annoyance. \"I guess I was a little distracted in the kitchen tonight.\"\n\n\"Any other surprises we ought to know about?\" he asked, one dark brow crooking upward as he took the bread basket she thrust at him.\n\n\"I laced your coffee with arsenic,\" she said sweetly.\n\nHe barely managed to keep his laughter locked in his chest. His eyes sparkled with rare good humor. \"How thoughtful of you.\"\n\n\"What's arsnip, Mama?\" Lindy asked, pausing in her game of stir-the-peas-on-the-plate.\n\n\"That's something we give to very special guests, like Mr. Callan,\" Faith said, her expression deadpan.\n\nSomething about him just brought out the devil in her, she thought, as she leaned over to cut her daughter's meat. She had never teased William that way. Of course, expending emotion on William Gerrard had been a wasted effort. She had learned that early on in their marriage.\n\nWhat William had wanted from her had nothing to do with emotion. That had been a very unpleasant reality for a young woman who had a wealth of love inside her. For a long time she had waited and hoped and prayed he would change, that she could change him, but over and over her love had been tossed back in her face. Her husband hadn't had the time or the capacity to love another human being. His hunger for power and money had overridden that.\n\n\"Gee, Mom, I think I'm grown-up enough to cut my own meat,\" Shane said dryly.\n\nFaith jerked her head up, her startled gaze colliding with his. Out of habit she had sliced Lindy's roast, then her own, and had somehow ended up with her knife on Shane's plate. Her breath stuck in her throat as she stared at him. Lord, he was good-looking, and he was definitely grown-up enough to cut his own meat.\n\nManaging to scrape together some bravado, she sat back and gave him a sassy look. \"Well, you didn't tell me you were housebroken.\"\n\n\"Heck, yes, ma'am.\" He sent her a dazzling smile. \"I'm potty trained and everything.\"\n\n\"What a pleasant surprise,\" Faith commented, fighting to keep a straight face. She refused to be charmed by a man who thought she was a criminal.\n\n\"Don't take it personally, Mr. Callan,\" Jayne Jordan said, her eyes sparkling with laughter as she looked across the table at him. She tossed her mane of auburn hair over her shoulder as she shot a teasing grin at her friend. \"Faith is hyper-maternal. She'll probably try to button your coat up for you too.\"\n\nShane couldn't stop the fleeting image of Faith _un_ buttoning his clothes. Stabbing a chunk of beef, he cursed his suddenly rebellious libido.\n\n\"I'll try to stop myself short of spitting on my fingers and combing your hair,\" Faith pledged.\n\n\"Gee, thanks.\"\n\nAs everyone settled into the task of devouring the excellent meal, Shane focused his attention on work. This case was a far cry from what he was accustomed to, but he was determined to do the job right. He had already been on the phone chewing out Banks about the shoddy background work that had been done. If he had been a few days later in getting here, the place would have been crawling with suspects. Faith Kincaid and her DataScam testimony might have been lying at the bottom of a cliff, shoved off by a supposed guest of the Keepsake Inn.\n\n\"What will you tell your guests when you call to cancel their reservations?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Faith said with false calm as she buttered a dinner roll. \"I'm not going to call them, because I'm not going to cancel.\"\n\n\"Yes, you are,\" Shane said, carefully enunciating each word for emphasis. He leaned toward her, trying to intimidate her with his size as well as his cool stare.\n\n\"No, I'm not,\" Faith said just as clearly. She leaned forward as well, a dizzying rush of adrenaline surging through her as she met his challenge. It was a heady feeling, one that walked a fine line between anger and passion. As she looked up at him, she felt herself teetering on that line.\n\n\"Faith,\" Alaina said cautiously, \"if Mr. Callan thinks\u2014\"\n\n\"If Mr. Callan thinks, I'll consider it a real bonus for my tax dollar.\" She could see a muscle jerk in his strong jaw, but the warning didn't stop the recklessness he inspired in her. \"Canceling my grand opening isn't any more necessary than Mr. Callan's presence here is.\"\n\nTension sang in the air like an overloaded power line as brown eyes warred with gray. Faith thought she could feel the heat of his rising temper rolling off him like steam.\n\nLindy, happily oblivious to what was going on between the adults at the table, picked up the oddly shaped bun on her plate and held it out toward Shane. \"Lookit,\" she said, giving him her shy smile. \"I made it all by myself.\"\n\nThe anger drained out of Shane as Faith Kincaid's little daughter caught his attention. What a heart stealer. So sweet, so innocent. When was the last time anything that pure and good had come within ten feet of him, he wondered.\n\nGiving the bun a serious look, he cleared his throat and said, \"That's very nice.\"\n\nLindy beamed. \"It's a bun.\"\n\nFaith released a pent-up breath and ran a slightly unsteady hand over her daughter's hair. Lindy to the rescue again, she thought with a tender smile. No telling where her reckless abandon would have landed her had she pushed Callan another step. He was obviously a man whose authority was seldom questioned. \"Lindy likes to help me in the kitchen. Don't you, sweetie?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" To Shane she explained, \"I'm gonna be a mama when I grow up.\" She slid down off her chair and went around the table to present her doll to Shane. \"This is my baby. Her name is Mary.\"\n\nOrdinarily Faith would have herded her daughter back to her chair with a gentle reprimand for disturbing a guest's dinner, but she was too busy watching Callan handle the situation. Something in his expression changed drastically as he looked at Lindy. The icy quality melted from his gray eyes, all the hard edges of his face softened. He looked almost... vulnerable. He accepted Lindy's doll a bit awkwardly, but with all the care he would have shown had Mary been a real baby rather than a hand-me-down doll with frizzy brown hair and one eye that liked to stick shut.\n\nIt hit Faith that she knew nothing about him. Perhaps he had a wife and children of his own someplace, and he was separated from them because he had to be here watching out for her. Maybe he was lonely. Maybe... maybe she was romanticizing the situation, as usual.\n\nOh, Faith, she sighed inwardly, haven't you learned your lesson? There's no such thing as happily ever after. You, of all people, should know that.\n\n\"See,\" Lindy said to Shane, pointing at her doll. \"She has real eyelashes.\"\n\nShane bent his dark head down as he handed the doll back to the little girl. \"She's a very pretty baby,\" he said gravely.\n\nLindy readily agreed. \"Uh-huh. She used to be my mama's baby when Mama was little like me.\" She cradled the doll expertly in her arms and looked up at Shane. \"Do you know where babies come from?\"\n\nAll three women at the table stifled giggles as the super-cool Agent Callan blushed like a teenager. Even his ears turned red.\n\n\"Uh\u2014umm\u2014well,\" Shane stammered.\n\nLindy gazed up at him, patiently waiting for an answer. He looked to Faith, his expression comically desperate. She offered nothing more helpful than a placid smile.\n\nJayne finally took pity on him and came around the table to take Lindy's hand. \"Let's go get that pudding we made this afternoon, sugar plum.\"\n\nHer earthshaking question easily dismissed, Lindy gave Shane a look that was pure flirtation and said, \"It's chocolate.\"\n\n\"Do you have children, Mr. Callan?\" Faith asked nonchalantly, not willing to admit to herself that she was holding her breath in anticipation of his answer.\n\n\"No.\" Shane stared at his plate, angry at feeling so unsettled. Dammit, Faith Kincaid had thrown him badly enough, he didn't need her daughter knocking his feet out from under him as well. It was just that they seemed so... _normal_. And everything he had seen in the last few years had been a perversion of normal life.\n\n\"Are you\u2014\"\n\n\"I'd rather not discuss my personal life,\" he said curtly.\n\nDeep inside him was the hollow ring of derisive laughter. He didn't have a personal life to discuss. His job was his life, because that was the way it had to be. He lived in a sort of vacuum, existing with no emotional entanglements, because emotional entanglements were dangerous to all parties involved. He had learned that lesson in the cruelest way possible.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Faith said quietly, not sure where the words had come from. A sudden sense of emptiness ached in her chest as she looked at Shane. The pain was so sharp, it nearly took her breath away.\n\n\"Mr. Callan, how seriously are you taking these threats that have been made against Faith?\" Alaina asked.\n\n\"Considering her value as a witness in the Data-Tech case, we have to take every precaution,\" Shane said, glad to have something concrete to focus his attention on. \"We have every reason to believe Gerrard and his accomplices will make good on the threats if given the chance.\"\n\n\"The whole thing is ridiculous,\" Faith grumbled. \"William isn't violent; he was only out for the money.\"\n\n\"Well, you would know more about that than I,\" Shane remarked dryly, his face showing nothing of the unrest inside him. A part of him stubbornly insisted she was guilty. Another part of him wanted to believe in her innocence. And everything male in him simply ached looking at her.\n\nWhere had his concentration gone? What had happened to his ability to detach himself emotionally? Faith Kincaid was a job. It made no difference to him if she was guilty or not. So why did he suddenly have this war raging inside him?\n\nHe sat back in his chair with a frustrated sigh and reached inside his coat for a cigarette as Jayne and Lindy returned from the kitchen with the pudding.\n\n\"Unless you intend on eating your pudding with that cigarette, I'll have to ask you to leave, Mr. Callan,\" Faith said with as much haughty disdain as she could muster. \"This dining room is a smoke-free environment.\"\n\nShane stared at her, nonplussed. \"You're joking.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid she's not,\" Alaina said, rising from her chair with a wry smile. \"Come along, Mr. Callan. We'll banish ourselves to the front porch.\"\n\nOutside the evening had turned a darker shade of gray. The lights that flanked the double doors created a small pool of warm light on the porch. Shane automatically shunned it in favor of a darker spot with a sweeping view of the grounds, where he could put his back to the wall and maintain a cautious vigil.\n\n\"Where were you practicing law before you came here?\" He lit Alaina's cigarette for her and waited for an answer he already knew. Banks had hurriedly scraped up facts on Alaina Montgomery and on Jayne Jordan, a film critic who had been based in LA until two months ago.\n\n\"Chicago,\" she said on a stream of smoke.\n\n\"Strange coincidence, isn't it?\" Shane lit his own cigarette and took a long, deep pull on it. \"That you were living in the same city as DataTech headquarters.\"\n\n\"Life's funny,\" she said, but her tone held no laughter.\n\n\"What made you give up a lucrative practice and move out here?\"\n\n\"I was burned out.\"\n\nShe wasn't telling him everything, but then he'd known she wouldn't. Alaina was a woman who gave away only what was absolutely necessary, automatically holding facts in reserve. He didn't envy anyone going up against her in a courtroom.\n\nAs she looked up at him, Shane recognized something in her direct, measuring gaze\u2014cynicism, wariness; two of his own best friends.\n\n\"I didn't ask you out here to discuss the vagaries of fate, Mr. Callan. I want to talk about Faith.\"\n\n\"What about her?\"\n\n\"I don't want to see her hurt\u2014either by William Gerrard or you.\"\n\n\"Do you want to see her dead?\" he asked point-blank. He could see the question confused her for only a split second; then her mind put together the same puzzle pieces his had.\n\nShe laughed, seemingly amused by his deduction. Almost admiringly she said, \"My, you're a bastard.\"\n\n\"I'm a realist.\" He picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue, his eyes never leaving Alaina's. \"You came here about the same time Faith did. You obviously ran with a flashy crowd. No reason you couldn't have known the DataTech big shots.\"\n\n\"What's my motive for killing my best friend?\" she asked, obviously intrigued by his theory.\n\n\"Money is always a nice neat one. Lord knows there's a load of it to be had in the defense contracts game\u2014honestly or otherwise. Greed is a great motivator.\"\n\n\"Don't I know it,\" Alaina said, a hint of bitterness in her tone.\n\nShe was silent for a moment as she finished her cigarette and ground the butt out on the porch railing. She gave Shane a long, measuring look. \"My friends and I moved here because we needed a change of scenery. We all came to a crossroads in our lives and decided to take the same new path. I wouldn't hurt Faith or Jayne if you held a gun to my head. We're friends; we care about one another.\"\n\n\"And look out for one another?\"\n\n\"Faith needs someone to look out for her. In spite of everything she went through with Gerrard, she's too trusting.\"\n\n\"And you're not?\"\n\n\"No. I don't trust people, and I don't romanticize their motives. If you hurt her, I'll see that you pay for it.\" She gave him a shrewd smile. \"As you guessed, I have some very influential friends.\"\n\n\"Why would I hurt her?\" He dismissed her threat. A man who had nothing, had nothing to lose. \"I'm here to see she doesn't get hurt.\"\n\nAlaina's gaze was steady and as cool as the fog that surrounded the house. \"Then we won't have a problem, will we?\"\n\nShane tossed his cigarette off the porch as he watched her saunter toward the front door. More amused than angry, he asked, \"Who appointed you watchdog?\"\n\nShe tossed him a saucy look over her shoulder. \"It's a self-appointed role. I'm the only Doberman in the pack.\"\n\n\"Somebody should call Clint Eastwood,\" Jayne said as she carried plates into the kitchen, \"to tell him this Callan guy has his voice.\"\n\nFaith's smile was distracted and halfhearted at best. Jayne gave her a little nudge. \"You do it, honey. I've been on Clint's bad side since I told a few billion people his last movie wasn't worth eating stale popcorn for.\"\n\nFaith stepped aside from the dishwasher and leaned back against the counter, hugging herself and fighting back tears that had been threatening for hours. She felt as if all her emotions were suddenly ganging up on her, and Jayne's attempt to lighten the mood only made her feel worse.\n\n\"Hey,\" Jayne teased gently, though her eyes were full of concern. \"Don't worry about Clint. He'll bounce back.\"\n\n\"I don't think she's upset about Clint,\" Alaina said as she walked in. \"It's our own real-life version of Dirty Harry, isn't it?\"\n\nThe last subject Faith wanted to discuss was Shane Callan. Nor did she care to go into the strange emotions he drew out of her, charming her one minute and accusing her the next. She decided instead to focus on the reason Callan was there, which was equally unpleasant but easier to understand.\n\nShe gave her friends an apologetic look. \"I didn't want to involve the two of you in any of this trial business. I'm sorry.\"\n\nJayne slid an arm around Faith's shoulders and gave her a reassuring squeeze. \"Honey, what's the use in having friends if you can't depend on them in a crisis?\"\n\nAlaina crossed her arms in front of her and nodded decisively. \"She's right.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Faith murmured, wiping a tear from her lashes.\n\nIt had been years since she'd had the solid support of her friends. During her marriage to William she had had no one to depend upon except herself. Now Alaina and Jayne were offering her their shoulders to lean on, and she felt torn between the desire to accept and the ingrained habit of handling her troubles herself.\n\n\"I really wanted to believe I'd left everything associated with William behind when I left Washington,\" she said, shaking her head in dismay. \"Now I've got a federal agent skulking around.\"\n\n\"Look on the bright side.\" Jayne winked at her. \"At least he's not hard on the eyes.\"\n\nThat was a fact, Faith thought. It was a fact that made her feel distinctly uneasy. There was something vitally, basically male in Shane Callan that all but reached out and touched the most feminine parts of her. Just the thought of his hard, aristocratic good looks was enough to send heat rushing under her skin. He was making her crazy. What was she doing feeling attracted to the man, knowing what he thought of her?\n\n\"He does a hell of a job of fraying nerves, though,\" Alaina concluded.\n\nJayne gazed off into space. \"He does seem rather hostile, doesn't he? I wonder what motivates that feeling,\" she said, trying to dissect Shane's performance as if he were a character in a movie. Her brow knitted. \"He could be out of touch with his aura.\"\n\n\"Aura my Aunt Sadie.\" Alaina sniffed. \"He's a cop. The attitude is a prerequisite for the job.\" Dismissing the topic, she turned toward Faith. \"Call it a night. Jayne and I can take care of the kitchen. Go read Lindy a bedtime story or something.\"\n\nFaith turned to dump her leftover onion salad into the trash. \"She's already asleep; she wasn't feeling well. Besides, I can't leave you two to handle Robo-Cop alone, when I'm the reason he's here. Where is he anyway?\" she asked, swearing to herself it was only idle curiosity that made her ask, not unbridled lust.\n\n\"On the porch.\"\n\n\"Shane Callan,\" Jayne mused dreamily. \"With that name and that voice and those looks, it is a crime against humanity that he hasn't found his way to Hollywood.\"\n\n\"I only wish he hadn't found his way here,\" Faith complained, fanning herself with a pot holder as her hormones threatened to riot.\n\n\"Your safety is important,\" Alaina said, shaking a serving spoon at her. \"And not only to the Justice Department. If they think there's some reason to assign you protection, then you ought to accept it.\"\n\n\"They're overreacting,\" Faith insisted.\n\n\"Are they overreacting or are you _under_ reacting?\" Jayne questioned gently. \"Honey, no one could blame you for not wanting to believe your life is in danger.\"\n\nFaith twisted the pot holder in her hands. \"I don't know anymore. The trial is a month away yet. I'd rather not think of it at all, but now I'll be reminded of it every time I turn around and find Eliot Ness watching me as if I'm public enemy number one.\"\n\n\"He's a real piece of work, isn't he?\" Jayne gave a half laugh, then made a stern face and propped her hands on her hips. \"Shane Callan\u2014he's not just a man, he's an adventure.\"\n\nEven Faith managed to laugh. Maybe Jayne was right in trying to find a lighter side to the situation. It was absurd for a federal agent to suspect her of wrongdoing. She was the most ordinary of women. Her needs were simple, she aspired to nothing beyond being a good mother. Yet this cynical, world-weary cop was watching her with an eagle eye. The joke was on Shane Callan.\n\nBut Shane Callan wasn't laughing when he burst in the back door of the kitchen. His gun wasn't laughing either. He pressed the nose of it to the head of the frazzled gray-haired man he shoved into the room ahead of him. Faith and Jayne both shrieked and jumped as Callan roughly spun the man around and slammed him back against the kitchen wall, causing three copper molds to clatter to the floor.\n\n\"Who the hell are you, and what the hell were you doing under that window?\" Shane growled the words in the older man's face.\n\nThe old man sputtered right back, though he was in no position to make demands. \"Let me go, ye sly devil!\" he ordered in an oddly lilting voice. \"Who do ye think ye are, wavin' a gun about!\"\n\nShane's fist wound tighter into the knot of fabric he clutched beneath the man's bearded chin. \"I'm the man who's going to make you very unhappy if you don't start answering questions.\"\n\nThe control on Faith's temper snapped like a toothpick when she realized whom Shane was holding at gunpoint. Furious, without a thought as to what Callan's reaction would be, she stormed across the room.\n\n\"For Pete's sake, put that gun down before you hurt someone! That's my caretaker you're assaulting, you overgrown bully.\"\n\nShane loosened his hold on the man's dirty brown work jacket and half turned to glare at Faith, lowering his pistol as he did so.\n\n\"Give me that,\" she snapped, snatching the gun from his slack hand. \"You obnoxious jerk! You can't just bust into my home with guns a-blazing like some kind of reincarnated John Wayne, scaring everybody half to death! You could have given poor Mr. Fitz a heart attack!\"\n\nMr. Fitz stepped away from the wall and his captor, somehow managing to look down his hooked nose at Shane, who stood a head taller. He adjusted his jacket, which reeked of fish, like a king arranging his cloak, then stroked a smoothing hand over his shaggy gray beard.\n\nShane ignored the old geezer in favor of riveting Faith with a burning look. He was furious with himself for letting her take his gun. What the hell was wrong with him? Was he so off his game he could let a slip of a woman get the drop on him? Or was it just this particular woman, an annoying little voice asked him. He was acting like a green rookie, and it was all Faith Kincaid's fault. He scowled at her.\n\nSuddenly realizing she had his pistol in her hand, she grimaced at it as if it were a slimy dead fish and offered it back to him, holding it pinched between her thumb and forefinger. \"Here. Take this awful thing and put it away,\" she said in her sternest motherly tone. For added oomph she shook her finger at him. \"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, pulling a gun on poor Mr. Fitz. He's no killer.\"\n\nShane holstered the pistol, an ominous frown pulling his black brows low over his eyes. Lord, she made him feel as if he were ten all over again, in trouble for throwing spit wads in school. \"How was I supposed to know that? No one bothered to tell me there was a Mr. Fitz.\"\n\nAlaina stepped between them, defusing the situation with an introduction as the telephone rang in the background. \"Mr. Callan, this is Faith's caretaker, Jack Fitz. Mr. Fitz, this is Agent Callan. The government sent him to keep an eye on Faith because of that trial business.\"\n\nMr. Fitz snorted like an infuriated billy goat, his whiskered chin set at a defiant angle. \"That better be all ye keep on her, ye big rascal.\"\n\nShane rolled his eyes and heaved a much-put-upon sigh. Half under his breath he said, \"This place is unbelievable.\"\n\n\"Feel free to go back to Washington to report that,\" Faith said. She was still seething. She'd had it with him upsetting her household and her nervous system. A quiet life was all she wanted. \"You're not welcome here, Mr. Callan. You're not wanted, and you're not needed.\"\n\n\"You've made that first part abundantly clear, Ms. Kincaid,\" he said, his voice low and silky as he leaned over her.\n\nFaith met his cool, intense stare with one of her own. Shane's look was that of a man who could have stared down the devil himself. Perhaps he had. And underlying the anger that snapped between them like a live wire she could feel a pull, an attraction she neither wanted nor welcomed. A strange tingling raced over her skin as the moment stretched out between them.\n\n\"Faith,\" Jayne called, breaking the tension. \"Telephone.\"\n\nAlmost weak with relief, Faith turned away from the confrontation. Her knees wobbled a bit as she crossed the room to take the receiver from Jayne.\n\n\"Hello, this is Faith Kincaid.\"\n\n\"How would you like to be dead, Mrs. Gerrard?\" a man's voice questioned very softly.\n\nBlinding, instantaneous fear lodged in Faith's throat. She felt as if she had suddenly been encased in ice, and yet her palms were sweating as she clutched the receiver to her ear. The only thing she could think to say was ridiculous, but she said it anyway, her voice shot through with trembling threads of panic. \"Who is this?\"\n\n\"A friend,\" the man answered, but there was nothing friendly in his voice; it held all the silky menace of a viper, dark and evil. \"A friend who thinks it would be better if you didn't testify, because I'd hate to have to kill you.\"\n\nFor a long moment Faith listened to the silence after the soft click on the other end of the line. Finally she hung up and turned slowly to face the other people in the room. If she had felt weak before the call, she felt faint now, and she knew she had turned as white as the kitchen appliances. She was certain no one could feel as cold and terrified as she did and still have a red blood cell left in her body.\n\nEveryone in the room stared at her, their faces grim with worry. They seemed miles away, even though they were in the same room.\n\nShe didn't turn to her friends. Her gaze went directly, instinctively to Shane Callan and locked on him desperately, as if she could somehow draw strength from merely looking at him. Faith didn't question her reaction; fear had stripped away the ability to question and reason.\n\nManaging to draw a shaky breath into her lungs, she said, \"It would seem I was a bit hasty in saying you aren't needed here.\"\n\n# THREE\n\nHE COULDN'T SLEEP. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how detached he claimed to be, he couldn't blank the image from his mind. Every time he closed his eyes all he could see was Faith Kincaid, looking small and terrified, her face washed of color, her dark eyes staring up at him, wide and shining with tears of fear.\n\nShe had looked to him in that instant, and his first and strongest instinct had been to take her in his arms and hold her.\n\nShane swore softly, exhaling a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. What the hell was the matter with him?\n\nLurking not so far in the back of his mind was the fear that after sixteen years on the job, maybe it was time to move on to something else. But when he tried to see the future, it simply stretched before him, a barren gray plain. His dedication to duty had distanced him from everyone and everything he had ever cared about. Now he had nothing to move on to.\n\nWithout turning on the light he sat up and reached for the tumbler on the nightstand and took a swallow of velvet-smooth whiskey.\n\nBanks had wanted him to take R and R after the Silvanus case. Correction, Shane thought with a wry smile, as he took another long drag on his cigarette, Banks had _ordered_ him to take R and R after the Silvanus case. He probably should have listened. Instead, he'd picked one hell of a fight with his boss, and now he was stuck here. This was Banks's way of punishing him. When Shane thought of the woman lying in bed just across the hall from him, and his blood surged hot in his veins, he had to say it was cruel and unusual punishment.\n\nWhat a pretty little bundle of trouble Faith Kincaid was. In the first place he wanted to believe she was as guilty as her ex-husband where DataScam was concerned. That alone should have kept him from feeling this damnable attraction. Under the tarnish of cynicism he was still a patriot. And if she really was as innocent as those big brown eyes of hers claimed, she was a civilian under his protection. That meant hands off.\n\nBut, oh, how he'd wanted to touch her when she had hung up that phone and turned to him. He had felt every facet of her fear, had known she was looking to him for strength, for protection. The protection she had been so certain she didn't need.\n\nShane told himself his job was keeping Faith safe and sound until the trial. He had men stationed at strategic points on the property, well hidden from view. Tomorrow Del Matthews would arrive to tap the phones. They would construct a safety net around Faith, hoping to catch whoever was after her rather than simply frighten them away.\n\nHe stubbed his cigarette out in the little porcelain dish that was intended for bedtime mints and rubbed the back of his neck. Everything was under control. Repeating that in his head, he lay back down on the rumpled sheets and tried to relax. Everything was under control.\n\nEverything had been under control in the Silvanus case. All the players in the Silvanus operation were now either dead or under indictment. Except Strauss. It haunted Shane that the most lethal of Silvanus's cohorts had escaped, but that case was over. Here and now, everything was under control.\n\nEverything had been under control at Quantico ten years ago too. Still, Ellie was dead.\n\nCold swept over him in a sheen of damp sweat. Where had that memory come from? He had buried it along with Ellie. Why had it surfaced now?\n\nThe image of Faith Kincaid floated through his mind, but Shane stubbornly ignored the clue and hauled himself out of bed to pace naked back and forth across the width of the small room. With a strength of will few men possessed, he pushed the memories out of his mind. This wasn't Quantico. Nobody was going to get to Faith Kincaid because it was his job to keep her safe. End of story.\n\nAs those words branded themselves in his mind, a sound penetrated his thoughts, snatching hold of his attention. It was faint, overhead on the second or third floor, but it was distinct. Ker-thump... ker-thump... ker-thump...\n\nHastily he pulled on a pair of pants, grabbed his gun, and slipped from the room.\n\nShe couldn't sleep. She couldn't begin to relax, not even after her friends had forced a glass of brandy on her. The one instant she had finally begun to doze off she had been awakened by an itching sensation on her chest where the pendant of her necklace lay.\n\nGreat. Not only were there killers after her, she was developing an allergy as well, Faith thought, as she sat up and switched the bedside lamp on.\n\nIn the soft light she studied the delicate gold filigree heart as she often did. The intricate lacework of the piece had always enchanted her. When Bryan had given her the necklace as a graduation present, he had claimed there was magic in it. Of course, for her friend Bryan Hennessy there was magic in everything. Where was the magic now, Faith wondered, now that she and Lindy were in danger.\n\nTrembling, she pulled the covers up even though she wasn't cold. She had felt so safe here. All it had taken to shatter that sense of well-being was a phone call. That easily, evil had violated her home, her peace. The overwhelming sense of vulnerability that swept through her at the thought was frightening. And with the helplessness came anger. She had always taken care of her own problems. This was one she couldn't begin to handle on her own.\n\nShane Callan, a presence she had wanted removed from her life earlier in the day, had suddenly become her savior. It made little sense. She hardly knew him, yet she had immediately turned to him. The whole episode had taken on a surrealistic quality in her memory. Had she really seen concern in his translucent gray eyes, or had she imagined it? Had she imagined the softer quality in his low voice as he had questioned her, or had that been genuine?\n\nAll she was really certain of was that her world had been turned upside down yet again. How could such an ordinary person find herself constantly thrown into extraordinary circumstances, she wondered. She was just a girl from the farm country of Ohio. What did she know of spies and assassins?\n\nNeeding to do something that was comforting in its normalcy, she tossed the covers aside, slipped out of bed, and padded barefoot across the rug to the door that connected her room to Lindy's. She looked in on her daughter and frowned. Lindy was tossing and turning too, but at least she was asleep. Faith doubted she was going to get any rest at all.\n\nShe pulled a light blue robe on over her nightgown and quietly slipped out of her room, intending to go to the library to find something to read. Then she heard it. Ker-thump... ker-thump... ker-thump...\n\n\"Never misses a night,\" she murmured, a faint smile turning her lips.\n\nInstead of going to the library, she turned and crept up the grand staircase.\n\nShe barely glimpsed the dark figure that bolted out from behind the drapes flanking the Palladian window on the second-floor landing. Before she could scream, she found herself pressed back against the wall with a large hand clamped over her mouth, a gun pressed to her temple, and a hard male body pressed along the length of her. Terror surged through her, pebbling the texture of her skin and drawing her nipples into tight knots.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing here?\" Shane uttered the words through clenched teeth. He slid his hand from her mouth to the wall beside her head. His eyes looked cold and silvery in the moonlight that fell through the arched window.\n\nFaith pulled a shaking breath into her lungs. \"This _is_ my house,\" she whispered. \"I'm free to roam it at will, aren't I?\"\n\n\"That depends on why you're roaming.\"\n\nShe made a face. There was no way he was going to believe her if she told him the truth, so she settled on half of it. \"I couldn't sleep. What's your excuse?\"\n\n\"I don't need one.\"\n\nFaith frowned at him. \"You're an absolute menace, sneaking around, manhandling people, holding that awful gun to their heads. You're liable to end up killing somebody.\"\n\nShane never took his eyes off her as he tucked his pistol into the back of his pants. Nor did he move, keeping her pinned against the wall with his own weight. She was soft against him, trembling. Her nipples seemed to burn him through the sheer silky fabric of her nightgown.\n\nAnger swelled inside him, right along with desire. Dammit, she was trouble. He could keep only half his mind on the job. The other half was preoccupied savoring the feel of her against him, wondering what it would be like to have her warm and willing beneath him. He had to fight to keep from staring at her sweet, full mouth just inches below his.\n\n\"Who am I liable to kill up here?\" he asked. \"No one has a room in this part of the house... unless there's someone else you neglected to mention to me. Is there, Faith?\"\n\n\"No,\" she murmured.\n\nWhy didn't he back off and give her some room? Being wedged between the wall and his body was having a devastating effect on her mind. Her eyes kept drifting to the bare width of his shoulders and chest. A sculptor couldn't have carved a more artistic representation of the male animal. His muscles flexed and rippled in the moonlight. A square pad of white gauze was taped to his left shoulder, but it didn't detract from his masculine beauty; it only emphasized the fact that he was a dangerous man.\n\n\"Then there's nothing to worry about if I decide to go upstairs, is there?\" he said.\n\nFaith felt she had plenty to worry about\u2014the coil of desire tightening inside her, the feel of Shane's rock-hard thighs imprisoning her, the fact that she seemed to want to stare at the sharp, firm lines of his mouth. At the moment she was more afraid of this immediate threat than the one she had received over the phone.\n\n\"No,\" she whispered, not certain whether she was answering his question or denying the sudden ache of needs long neglected.\n\n\"No,\" Shane echoed, very aware of what he was denying. He could feel himself growing heavy and hard against the pillow of Faith's body as she stared at his mouth. It was a toss-up as to whether he was angrier with her for tempting him or with himself for knowing he was about to give in to that temptation.\n\n\"There's nothing to worry about,\" he said in a low, rough voice, \"unless this is what you came looking for.\"\n\nIt was more an assault than a kiss. Shane's mouth slanted across Faith's, angry and demanding. His fingertips dug into her shoulders, pulling her even more firmly against his bare chest. She bent back like an archer's bow under the pressure, her hips arching into his in a way that made his state of arousal very apparent.\n\nFaith's first instinct was to get away from him, but that response was almost immediately overtaken by another, more powerful instinct she seemed to have no control over\u2014the instinct to give in to him. The desire was so strong that she sagged against him and her lips softened beneath his, allowing his tongue access to her mouth. Pure fire seared her veins at the intimate invasion, at the heady taste of him.\n\nWhen Shane's right hand slipped inside her open robe to cup her breast, she nearly cried out, the pleasure was so intense. His long fingers explored her through the silky fabric of her gown, his thumb flicking across the nipple that was already hard and aching. All the while his tongue plunged and receded in the warmth of her mouth, his message more than clear. He wanted her.\n\nHe wanted her. He didn't respect her. He didn't seem particularly fond of her. In fact, he had insinuated she was a criminal.\n\nThen what in the world was she doing kissing him, Faith asked herself as common sense returned in a painful rush. It was accompanied by a sharp dose of self-loathing. What was wrong with her that she could feel attracted to this man who thought so little of her? Lord, he had all but said she'd come upstairs looking for this!\n\nTearing her mouth from beneath his, she jerked out of his arms and slapped him hard. The sound was like a shot in the still of the night. Shane stared at her, his expression a mix of anger, surprise, and thwarted passion.\n\nFaith cursed herself again at the rush of desire she felt looking at him. He was only half-dressed. With his black hair tousled and his features outlined in the moonlight, he looked like an elegant savage.\n\n\"What's the matter, Faith?\" he asked, his voice a menacing, silky purr. \"Isn't seducing a federal agent in your repertoire?\"\n\nHis sarcasm cut her to the quick. She took a step back and started to turn, ready to run to the sanctuary of her room, but she stopped herself.\n\nWho did he think he was, accusing her of wrongs she hadn't committed, pushing her around in her own home, taking advantage of her and then blaming her for it? No more. She wasn't going to put up with one more insult. When she had left William, she had vowed never to let another man manipulate or use her again. It was time to honor that vow.\n\n\"I've had it with you and your sarcastic insinuations,\" she began. \"Who are you to judge me? You don't know anything about me except what bare facts you read in some file. Well, here are a few more facts for you, Mr. Callan.\n\n\"William Gerrard married me because he thought I would be good for his image. I stayed with him because I was fool enough to believe I could change him. But he was a cold, unfeeling son of a bitch, just like you. He used me when I fit his needs and ignored me the rest of the time. And when I accidentally found out what he was up to with the DataTech people, I left him, because I couldn't keep a vow to a man who cheated on both his wife and his country.\n\n\"I went to the Justice Department because I believed it was the right thing to do, not because I was trying to protect myself from prosecution. _I haven't done anything wrong.\"_ Tears flowed freely down her cheeks, and she reached up to wipe them away, never taking her eyes off Shane. Her mouth trembled, but she held her chin at a stubborn, defiant angle, refusing to back down from him. \"The only crime I committed was believing William Gerrard ever loved me.\"\n\nShane looked away, raising a hand to rub the back of his neck, his own anger thoroughly doused by shame. She was telling the truth. He could hear it. Her voice rang with it. He could see it in her eyes. It cut through the barrier of his cynicism and made him face the fact that he had wanted her to be guilty because it was easier for him to deal with lies and deception than with innocence. Lord, what had he become?\n\n\"I wanted my husband to love me. What's the penalty for that, Mr. Callan?\" she asked him in a voice soft with tears and pain. She sniffed and added on a bitter note, \"Besides having to put up with you, I mean.\"\n\n\"That seems to be punishment enough,\" he murmured, turning to stare out the window.\n\nFog obscured the view, but he didn't really care. In his mind's eye all he could see was Faith standing there in her silky nightgown, her bare toes peeking out from under the hem, her full breasts rising and falling with each jerky breath, her eyes shining with tears, her mouth swollen from the kiss he had forced on her.\n\nGlancing down, he could clearly see the imprint of her heart pendent on the skin of his chest where he had all but crushed her against him. His cheek still stung from the slap she'd given him, but it didn't burn in quite the same way as the mark on his chest did.\n\nOnce upon a time he had been a man of honor and principles. Somewhere along the way he had stopped believing in innocence. He had submerged himself in a gray world where there were only the guilty and the less guilty. And his strongest motivation had become staying alive so he could put the worst of the lot behind bars.\n\nFaith Kincaid wasn't a part of that world, but when he turned to tell her so, she was gone.\n\n\"I'm not being a coward,\" Faith mumbled to herself as she fussed with Lindy's covers.\n\nHer daughter had dropped off to sleep. There was really no reason for Faith to sit by the bed. Lindy had come down with a normal case of childhood chicken pox, not malaria. Now would have been the perfect opportunity to slip out for a while and get a few things accomplished in the house. Still, she lingered, as she had lingered all morning.\n\nNo matter how many times she told herself otherwise, she knew she was avoiding Shane. She had spent the night alternately reliving their kiss and reliving her fury. Much of her anger had been directed at herself for that brief moment when she had surrendered to him and her own desire. Shame burned in her cheeks every time she thought about it. This time, though, she headed it off at the pass.\n\nWhat did she have to be ashamed of? It was Shane's fault. He had taken advantage of her when she had been startled and confused. She had no reason to hide from him. This was her home. She was going to have to put up with him skulking around, but she'd be damned if she was going to jump behind a door every time she saw him coming.\n\nHer resolve sufficiently bolstered, Faith marched to the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall\u2014directly into the path of Shane Callan. His arms went around her in an automatic reaction to save her from falling. The contact of body against body was brief, and yet Faith felt as if she had run directly into the sun, the heat was so intense. Sexual awareness exploded through her, shattering her sense of calm into a million shards.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Shane mumbled. He felt knocked off balance. Not by Faith's slight weight, but by the instantaneous rush of feeling their collision had brought on. It overrode even the burning pain in his shoulder. He shook his head to clear it, then fixed his gaze just to the left of Faith's head.\n\nBusiness. They had things to discuss that had nothing to do with the way she felt in his arms. \"I need to speak with you about certain aspects of the surveillance. Agent Matthews has arrived to tap the phones. He'll need an operations base, and I would prefer it be outside the main house. The caretaker's cottage would be ideal.\"\n\n\"You'll have to take that up with Mr. Fitz. He owns the cottage outright,\" Faith said, struggling not to notice how sleekly handsome he looked in navy trousers and a blue striped dress shirt, a silk tie neatly knotted beneath his square chin.\n\nShe knew for a fact that she looked like a bag lady. She hadn't gotten a moment's sleep and had been waiting on Lindy since before dawn. Her clothes were rumpled, her hair looked like a squirrel's nest. It irked her that Shane didn't seem to notice, and it irked her that she cared.\n\n\"We also need a list of the guests you've booked in advance as well as a list of any household help you've hired,\" he went on.\n\nFaith pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. \"You're going to check them all out? It was a man who called. With the exception of Mr. Fitz all the help I've hired are women.\"\n\n\"That doesn't mean they couldn't be connected in some way. Someone had to tell him where you are.\"\n\n\"Do what you have to,\" Faith said tiredly, wishing with all her might she could just close her eyes and will all this mess away.\n\nSomething in Shane ached at her expression. She looked so small and fragile... and innocent. He cursed himself again for having been such a bastard toward her. Her life was complicated enough right now without having the man who was supposed to protect her harassing her as well.\n\nHe cleared his throat in a rare show of nerves. What the hell did he know about relating to a woman like Faith? \"Um\u2014how's Lindy? Ms. Jordan mentioned she'd come down with something.\"\n\nFaith shrugged, glad for the change of subject and touched by his show of concern. \"She's resting for the moment. She's uncomfortable. I'm sure you remember how it was to have the chicken pox.\"\n\n\"Actually, no. I never had them.\"\n\n\"Figures,\" Faith mumbled.\n\n\"Faith.\" Apologizing was something he'd never been good at. The words stuck in his throat like peanut butter. \"About last night, I\u2014\"\n\n\"I think we said everything that needed saying.\" Her voice was a little shaky, but she managed to look him square in the eye as she took another step back from him.\n\n\"Mama?\" Lindy's voice drifted out from her room.\n\n\"If you'll excuse me, Agent Callan, my daughter needs me.\"\n\nShane nodded, sighing in frustration as Faith went back into Lindy's room. Maybe it would be for the best if he let her go on thinking he was an obnoxious jerk. Ordinarily the opinion of others mattered little to him. He conducted himself as he saw fit, and to hell with the rest of the world. But it bothered him that he had treated her badly. Deep down, in a place inside him no person had touched in a very long time, it mattered what Faith Kincaid thought about him.\n\nSwearing under his breath, he stalked off down the hall.\n\nIt just wouldn't do for him to become attached to her in any way, and still he could feel the pull, the attraction. He had felt it the instant he'd first seen her, even though he had believed she was involved in the DataTech scam. Now that he knew she wasn't, the desire was only going to be stronger.\n\nHe'd lain awake imagining what it would be like to go into her room and take her gently in his arms, to hold her and kiss her fears away. Every inch of his body had throbbed as he'd thought of what it would be like to make love to her until she forgot she'd ever known William Gerrard. And he had cursed himself to hell and gone for being so foolish. Faith Kincaid was a job. For both their sakes she could be nothing more.\n\nShane wandered through the halls of the big silent house, trying to unwind. In one hand he cradled a snifter of cognac, the other hand he stuffed into his trouser pocket. His shoulder throbbed with hot, sharp pain that defied mere aspirin. He was bone tired, as if he had spent the day doing hard physical labor under a hot sun. And yet an aching restlessness snaked through him, keeping him from falling into his bed.\n\nThe situation was well in hand. After a royal battle with the querulous Mr. Fitz, Matthews had gotten set up in the caretaker's cottage. The phones were tapped. The other agents were in place and inconspicuous. Background checks were being conducted on all inn employees, including the cantankerous Jack Fitz. All he had to do now was wait... and watch Faith.\n\nHe had seen little of her after their encounter in the hallway. Shane told himself that was for the best. Yet he had found himself at Lindy's door not five minutes earlier, checking to see if Faith would speak to him. It seemed what was left of his conscience was bent on apologizing to her. He just had to remember not to let it go any further than that.\n\nHe had found her asleep, propped up against the headboard of Lindy's narrow bed with one arm wrapped protectively around her sleeping child. Mother and child asleep in the golden glow from a small lamp with a teddy-bear base. The scene had easily, effortlessly breached Shane's defenses and left an ache near his heart.\n\nHis world was so remote from theirs. Now, for a short time, their paths would cross. Then he would go on alone into the gray shadows. The thought left him feeling hollow. Hollow and so alone.\n\nWithout turning on a light, he crossed the polished wood floor of the ballroom to the grand piano that sat in the far corner, moonlight spilling across it through the large windows. He set his glass down and flipped on the brass light that illuminated the keyboard. Then he sat down and began to play, the music flowing from his memory and his soul.\n\nFaith awoke suddenly from a sound sleep. She scratched absently at the place where her heart charm lay against her skin as she looked down on Lindy.\n\nLotion and baths with baking soda added to the water had soothed her daughter's itching enough to let her sleep peacefully for a few hours. Her fever was down. Luckily her case of chicken pox wasn't very severe.\n\nCareful not to wake her, Faith eased herself off the bed and went to the door, stretching cramped muscles. When she stepped out into the hall, she stopped and listened.\n\nMusic. It was faint, but she was immediately stricken by the poignancy of the piece. Every note was filled with longing, with an aching tenderness. The passage swelled with the pain of dreams unfulfilled. Loneliness hung in the silences between the notes.\n\nShe followed the sound to the door of the ballroom. Her heart lodged in her throat as she leaned against the doorjamb. Shane sat at the keyboard of the piano, his fingers caressing the ivory keys with the care of a lover. He played with his eyes closed, his face pale in the glow of the piano light. And she could see in his expression every emotion she heard in his music.\n\nThe song went on, slow and sad, rising and falling, wrapping itself around her, drawing her into its sensual web. Faith's eyes filled with tears. Whatever she had chosen to think of Shane Callan, she couldn't discount what she was hearing now. He was a lonely, haunted man. Those feelings reached out to her and penetrated her soul. They filled her with a sense of abject emptiness so sharp, she nearly cried out from it.\n\nShe knew nothing about him. What she had seen thus far hadn't been Shane, but his defenses. She realized it in a blinding flash, and the knowledge both comforted and terrified her. Knowing there was more to him than cynicism and machismo didn't change the fact that he was a dangerous man.\n\nHis fingers slowed on the keys as the piece softened to its close, a low minor chord that echoed in the still room.\n\n\"That was lovely,\" Faith said, her voice hushed with reverence.\n\nShane looked up, startled that she had been able to approach without him knowing it. He was startled too by how lovely she seemed, He couldn't figure out why. She was wearing jeans and a blue sweatshirt that was much too large for her. Her clothes were rumpled. Her mop of rusty blond curls was in complete disarray, looking as if an impatient lover had run his fingers through the mass over and over.\n\nPerhaps this was how she would look after making love\u2014tousled, a rosy blush tinting the apples of her cheeks, her dark eyes sleepy. A fresh wave of heat swept over him at the thought.\n\nSuddenly aware he was staring, he caught himself. Damn, he felt as awkward as an untried kid. Squelching the feeling, he said, \"I hope I didn't wake you.\"\n\nFaith shook her head, then amazed herself by sitting down beside him on the bench. She faced the opposite direction, her thigh no more than an inch or two from his. It seemed tantamount to going into a cage to lie down beside a panther. But somehow, after hearing his music, she felt less wary of him. He didn't look like a man to be frightened of now. He looked tired and bleary-eyed and lonely. If that was how he felt, then they had a lot in common.\n\n\"How's Lindy?\"\n\n\"She'll be back to herself in a day or so.\" She folded her hands on her lap to keep from fidgeting. \"Is everything... in place?\"\n\n\"Yes. Now we wait for him to make the next move.\"\n\nShe shivered at the prospect of receiving another threatening call. Every time she let her guard down, she could hear the ugly menace beneath the silky, faceless voice that had promised death.\n\nUnable to stop himself, Shane lifted a hand and brushed back a curl from her cheek. \"He won't get to you. I won't let him.\"\n\n\"I don't mean to be a coward,\" she whispered, trying hard to ignore the warmth of his knuckles against her skin. She told herself she had imagined the possessive tone of his words. She was romanticizing again. \"This all just seems so... unreal.\"\n\nShane nodded. He imagined it did seem unreal to her. The threat of death was something that belonged in his world, not hers. Chicken pox and pot roast should have been the extent of her worries. \"You're no coward,\" he said. \"I think you're very brave.\"\n\n\"A compliment?\" She had to force the smile, but the surprise in her eyes was genuine, and so was the warmth that blossomed in her heart. \"I didn't know you had it in you.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm full of surprises,\" Shane said with a wry, weary grin that made him look devilishly handsome. \"Not all of them are unpleasant.\"\n\nFaith said nothing but rubbed her pendant absently between her thumb and forefinger as she looked down at the floor. He was full of surprises all right, just like Pandora's box. And like the girl in the story, Faith knew an irresistible urge to open the box. Not smart, Faith, she told herself.\n\n\"You realize now you have no choice but to delay the opening of the inn.\"\n\n\"I know. I'll call everyone and tell them the plumbing isn't ready. Nothing puts people off quite like the thought of malfunctioning commodes.\"\n\nShane chuckled, ignoring the throbbing it set off in his head. He was surprised Faith had any sense of humor left. She'd been threatened and bullied and run ragged over the last couple of days, yet she seemed to have a reservoir of inner strength to call on when she needed it. There was a hell of a lot more to the former Mrs. William Gerrard than met the eye. And what met the eye held a lot more appeal than it should have.\n\n\"Faith,\" he began, fighting the urge to touch her again. He was beginning to have trouble concentrating on anything other than the delicate shape of her mouth and the memory of how sweet she had tasted. He had to apologize now, just get it over with and get away from her. \"I was out of line last night. I had no right to accuse you of anything. I've seen the worst side of people for so long, I guess I've just come to expect it. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"First a compliment, now an apology.\" Faith shook her head. \"Really, Mr. Callan, you're making me giddy,\" she said, teasing lights sparkling in her dark eyes as she fanned herself with her hand.\n\n\"Is the apology accepted?\"\n\nShe nodded but didn't look at him. Was he apologizing only for his belief in her culpability or for the kiss as well?\n\nOverhead the sound began. Ker-thump... ker-thump... ker-thump...\n\nShane tensed. Faith smiled. \"It's Captain Dugan.\"\n\nHe stared at her as if she'd suddenly begun speaking Portuguese. \"Who?\"\n\n\"The man who built the place.\"\n\n\"He's dead.\" His statement held all the finality of the fact.\n\nFaith rolled her eyes. \"I know that. It's his ghost. Ask anyone in Anastasia. They'll all tell you the same thing. This house is haunted.\"\n\n\"Californians,\" Shane grumbled, scowling darkly.\n\n\"Skeptic,\" Faith countered. A man like Shane Callan wouldn't believe in anything that couldn't be admitted as evidence in a court of law. She suddenly found the trait oddly endearing and decided she was losing her marbles. \"Of course it's Captain Dugan. He had a peg leg. The other ghosts here don't make any racket at all.\"\n\nShane's brows lifted. No one had warned him he would be guarding a crazy woman. \"Other ghosts?\"\n\nFaith's look was one of feminine wisdom and mystery. \"You don't believe in ghosts, do you, Mr. Callan?\"\n\nNot the kind that haunted houses, he thought. He knew well the ghosts that haunted one's soul were all too real, but dead sea captains with peg legs were a whole different thing.\n\nHe frowned at Faith as he rose from the piano bench, his head swimming as he did so. He ignored the dizziness as he had all day. It was nothing more than fatigue.\n\nEasing his gun from its holster, he said dryly, \"I believe in justice, football, and Smith and Wesson. Go to your room, lock your door, and stay put.\"\n\nFaith shook her head as she watched him leave. Of all the cops in the world she had to get stuck with Dirty Harry. And darn it, she had a terrible feeling she was falling for him.\n\n# FOUR\n\n\"THE STRESS IS making you irrational,\" Faith muttered to herself as she paced the width of her bedroom. \"That's the only logical explanation. You're not really falling for Shane Callan.\"\n\nHer entire body seemed to reject the statement she'd just made. An ominous sense of certainty descended on her.\n\nShe had to admit the physical attraction had been there from the beginning, from the minute she'd opened the front door and looked up into his silver eyes, from the instant she'd first heard his sexy bedroom voice. She hadn't been able to deny it even when he had all but accused her of treason.\n\nLust. There wasn't anything rational or logical about it.\n\nBut this was more than mere lust.\n\nFaith's slim shoulders rose and fell with her sigh of defeat. She couldn't have picked a more difficult man if she had held auditions for the part. Shane was jaded, sardonic, a loner... he was battered and tired and alone. Just the memory of him sitting at the piano, pouring out feelings he would never have revealed otherwise, brought a pang to Faith's heart. There were no two ways about it\u2014the darn man needed love.\n\n\"But I don't have to be the one to give it to him,\" she declared with a shake of her head, half wishing he'd never apologized to her for suspecting she was in on the DataTech conspiracy.\n\nAt least before his apology his suspicion had been an effective barrier between them. Now that wall was gone. Now Faith knew there was a lot more to Shane than what pleasingly met the eye. Now she was in real peril.\n\nShe had a wealth of love inside her, stored up from years of being married to a man who had looked on her as nothing more than an asset. But she knew she would have to be a fool to try to give those feelings to a man like Shane.\n\nShane Callan was a dangerous stranger, there because it was his job to protect her. Their lives would run on the same track only until the DataScam trial. In a matter of weeks Shane would be gone to fight someone else's battles. To become involved with him would only be asking to have her heart broken.\n\nNo, Faith announced inwardly, she wouldn't make that mistake. She had settled there to rebuild her life, not to tear it apart all over again.\n\nA knock at her door jolted her from her brooding. Alaina stuck her head in the room. \"I just got in and saw your light. Is something going on?\"\n\nFaith rolled her eyes. \"Rambo is upstairs trying to hunt down Captain Dugan.\"\n\nAlaina's wry smile tilted up one side of her lush mouth as she came in and closed the door behind her. \"I don't suppose it did you any good to explain to him about the captain?\"\n\n\"A complete waste of good breath. The man has a head harder than granite.\" And the rest of him wasn't exactly Play-Doh, either. The thought sneaked into her conscious mind from her memory, bringing a telltale flush to her cheeks.\n\n\"He's not the type to believe in things he can't point a gun at,\" Alaina said.\n\nLike love and romance. Faith cursed her brain for letting thoughts like that form and surface. She resumed her pacing, hoping the movement, coupled with the dim light in the room, would keep Alaina from reading too much in her expression. Her friend had an uncomfortably sharp eye when it came to reading people.\n\n\"Well.\" Alaina shrugged, sticking her hands in the pockets of her red cashmere cardigan. \"He'll find out for himself that there's nothing up there worth arresting. He can't very well slap handcuffs on an apparition. How's Lindy? Still itching?\"\n\nFaith smiled in appreciation for the change of subject. Her whole body relaxed visibly as she leaned against the carved cherry foot post of her canopied bed. \"She's much better tonight. This might be the world's easiest case of chicken pox, which means I have something to be grateful for after all. How was the movie?\"\n\nIt was Alaina's turn to roll her eyes. \"Let me give you a piece of sound advice,\" she said, prowling the small bedroom as if it were a courtroom and Faith a juror who needed to hear a convincing argument. Her elegant hands moved in harmony to emphasize her words. \"Never go to the movies with a film critic. Our dear friend Jayne, whom I find to be perfectly pleasant in most respects, is a fanatic. She takes her vocation much too seriously.\"\n\n\"She didn't like the movie?\"\n\n_\"Roget's Thesaurus_ doesn't hold as many synonyms for the word bad,\" Alaina said dryly.\n\nAs if summoned, a head of rich auburn waves poked into the room. \"Is there something exciting going on?\"\n\nOn cue a thud sounded overhead. Alaina grinned and motioned her inside. \"You'll love this. Callan is upstairs playing ghostbusters.\"\n\n\"Bad casting,\" Jayne said, making a face as she slipped into the room and shut the door behind her. \"I have serious doubts about Faith's Mr. Callan playing comedy. He doesn't seem particularly fun loving. My guess is he's a Capricorn.\"\n\n\"He's not _my_ Mr. Callan.\" Faith protested so quickly the words seemed to tumble over each other on their way out of her mouth. She looked on in horror as her friends exchanged a significant glance. \"I mean, he's here because of me, but I don't _want_ him. I mean, I don't want him _here_. Not that I'd want him _anywhere.\"_\n\nShe groaned under her breath and knocked her forehead against the bedpost. She'd just managed to make it fairly obvious that she was attracted to the man. She jumped as Jayne's hand settled gently on her shoulder.\n\n\"Honey, if you'd ever care to translate that into understandable English, I'd be more than willing to listen.\" Jayne shot a questioning look at Alaina, who physically backed away from the topic.\n\n\"Don't look at me for advice on this. I'm a lawyer. I'm the last person you want to talk to about romance, unless it concerns community property.\"\n\n\"No,\" Faith said dejectedly. \"Shane Callan is the last person I want to talk to about romance. The man wears a gun strapped to his ankle, for heaven's sake! I saw it when he was tying his shoe. A gun! That's not the kind of thing that fits readily into my lifestyle. That's something that should be in a movie!\"\n\n\"It was,\" Jayne said earnestly. She poked her hands into the patch pockets of her wildly flowered dress. \"Didn't you see _Deadly Justice?\"_\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Just as well. The script sucked swamp water.\"\n\nFaith shook her head, both to clear it and to get her thoughts back on track. Jayne was infamous for losing the thread of a conversation. In another few sentences she could have them discussing metaphysics.\n\n\"I can't afford to be attracted to a man like Shane Callan,\" Faith announced, as if saying it aloud could steel her resolve.\n\nAn authoritative knock sounded at the door. Without waiting for an invitation, the object of her dismay stepped inside the bedroom, his expression that of a thwarted hunter. He directed his ferocious frown at Faith.\n\n\"I told you to lock the door.\"\n\n\"It doesn't have a lock,\" Faith said, shrugging, as she pushed herself away from her bed. She knew his sense of caution was for her own safety, but she hated the idea of having to be a virtual prisoner in her own home. Dryly she said, \"I was about to push the dresser in front of it when Jayne and Alaina came in.\"\n\n\"We're not armed, honey, and we're only slightly dangerous,\" Jayne assured him with a wink.\n\nShane scowled at her and holstered his pistol, wincing at the pressure the wide leather strap exerted against his aching shoulder. It felt like a branding iron burning into his sensitive flesh. He managed to ignore both the pain and his blurring vision. \"After that phone call I'd think you'd be taking this business seriously.\"\n\n\"We are, Mr. Callan,\" Alaina said, stepping forward to defend her friends. \"We're just trying to make the best of a bad situation.\"\n\nSuddenly feeling weak, he let the subject drop as he leaned back against the door. Once again his gaze fell on Faith, who stood beside her bed. Desire stirred through the haze of pain. Desire to stretch out with her on cool crisp sheets and feel her small soft hands on his fevered skin. Her eyes widened slightly as she took in his predatory expression.\n\n\"You didn't find anything, did you?\" she blurted out, crossing her arms to keep her hands from fidgeting.\n\nDon't let him see he makes you nervous, she thought, then groaned inwardly. Lord, Faith, he's a man, not a charging rhinoceros. Besides, she was fairly certain he wouldn't have come running had she announced she was having hopelessly romantic notions about him. At the moment his mind was occupied with things other than the mysteries of biological attraction.\n\nShane took in the feminine decor of the room in a narrow-eyed glance, not answering. He hated to admit defeat. He had followed thumping noises all over the upstairs of the main house and not gotten so much as a glimpse of the cause. Every time he'd thought he'd cornered the culprit, the thump had sounded three rooms away.\n\nIt irked the hell out of him. If only he weren't so damned tired. If only he could clear the fuzz out of his brain, he was sure he could have figured out what was going on up there. At the moment he didn't believe he could figure out two plus two.\n\n\"No.\" The word was the next best thing to a growl. \"I didn't find anything, but that doesn't mean there wasn't anything up there.\"\n\nFaith nearly chuckled at the disgruntled scowl that tugged down his straight black brows and the corners of his mouth. She gave him a smug smile, unable to resist. \"I told you so.\"\n\n\"I'm not about to swallow that ghost story,\" he declared. He started to lift his left hand to wag a finger at her, but the pain in his shoulder stopped him. He gritted his teeth against it as it rocketed through his chest and arm, and he leaned back against the door again to steady himself.\n\n\"We have a friend who is a psychic investigator who could no doubt explain it to you better than I,\" Faith said, trying to imagine Shane Callan and Bryan Hennessy embroiled in a debate over paranormal phenomena. \"But he's working in Britain right now, and the best I can do is tell you in plain English\u2014this house is haunted.\"\n\nJayne plopped down cross-legged on the pink-and-cream-colored quilt that covered Faith's bed, her voluminous skirt billowing around her. \"You should talk to Mr. Fitz about it. He's full of ghost stories about this place.\"\n\nShane scowled harder at mention of the irascible old caretaker. \"Ghost stories aren't the only thing he's full of, nor are they what I want to hear.\"\n\n\"I can't offer another explanation,\" Faith said.\n\n\"You've been through the whole house. Your men have been watching it constantly. No one could have gotten in.\"\n\n\"Unless they had help from inside.\"\n\nAlaina shook her head as his cool gray gaze settled on her. \"We've had this conversation before.\"\n\nHe turned to Jayne, who started in surprise at his suspicion. \"Don't look at me, honey! I don't even like violence in film. I'm a firm believer in the transcendental rise of man above his baser physical nature.\"\n\nShane opened his mouth to comment, but Faith cut him off with a friendly warning. \"Shane, please, stop accusing my friends.\"\n\n\"It's my job,\" he said, exasperated by her overabundance of blind trust.\n\n\"Well, you're very good at it. The only person who's managed to escape your jaundiced eye is Lindy.\"\n\nShane did a better job of ignoring her sarcasm than he did of ignoring the way her crossed arms lifted her breasts. The womanly mounds plumped together beneath the fabric of her sweatshirt, the outline of hard nipples clearly indicating she wore no bra. Business, Shane, he told himself. Strictly business.\n\n\"What about secret passages? Have you found any as you've been working on the house?\"\n\nThe man was remarkable. \"Who do we look like, Charlie's Angels?\" Faith asked. \"I'm opening the place as an inn, not a spook house.\"\n\n\"You're the one going on about ghosts,\" Shane grumbled. He rubbed at the incessant pounding in his right temple. Damn, but his head was feeling fuzzy. He barely heard Faith's next words through the thick, cotton-wool fog that enveloped his brain.\n\n\"We have them.\" She shrugged, knowing she probably wouldn't have been able to convince Shane had Captain Dugan materialized at her side that very moment, peg leg and all. \"What can I say?\"\n\nShane pushed himself away from the door, his legs feeling as thick and heavy as tree trunks. The puzzle would have to wait until morning to be solved. He couldn't think anymore. Damned if he was going to be able to move. He had to find a place to sit down for a couple of minutes.\n\nFaith's heart lurched as she realized how pale he looked. His face had gone as white as the apparitions he refused to believe in. Alarm streaked through her as he took another step and dropped like a rock at her feet.\n\n\"We've got to get him to the hospital. Jayne, go call the ambulance.\"\n\n\"No. No ambulance. We can't attract the attention. The whole case will be shot to hell.\"\n\n\"Damn your case!\"\n\nShane could hear the conversation going on above him. He recognized the voices as those of agent Del Matthews and Faith Kincaid. Del sounded unflappable. Faith sounded frantic. They both sounded far away.\n\nHe tried to rouse the strength to stand, but his body was nothing more than dead weight, oblivious to the commands of his considerable will. He couldn't even muster the energy to offer an opinion on the situation. It took every scrap of power he had to concentrate, to keep from slipping over the edge into the black void of unconsciousness.\n\n\"I can handle this, Ms. Kincaid. I was a medic in 'Nam. It's not as serious as it looks.\"\n\n\"He'll need medication\u2014\"\n\n\"It'll be taken care of ma'am.\"\n\nShane forced his eyes open a slit and caught the look Alaina Montgomery shot at Del. \"Lord, they're worse than the damn Boy Scouts\u2014always prepared.\"\n\nSuddenly Mr. Fitz loomed overhead like a giant billy goat, scratching at his snaggled whiskers, an unholy light in his eyes. The smell of fish hung around him like an acrid cloud. \"Lord, ladies, what did ye do to the rascal? Did he have it comin'?\"\n\n\"Mr. Fitz, please stand back,\" Matthews asked, exasperated. The towheaded agent leaned over Shane with a penlight, checking his pupils for response.\n\nShane squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, Faith was bent over him, concern etched in every feature of her heart-shaped face. She sure was pretty, he noted, needing something to fasten his mind on. Her teeth dug into her full lower lip. He remembered how sweet that lip tasted\u2014like cherry soda. She reached down and stroked his cheek with fingertips that felt like icicles on his burning skin.\n\nShe was worried about him. It was there in her lovely sable eyes, but Shane could feel it more than see it. He grasped it with a sense that had no name and wasn't counted among the five most normally used. He could feel Faith's concern. And he wondered, just before he lost consciousness, what it would be like to let down his guard and let this woman's concern touch his innermost self, the lonely man he kept locked inside him behind walls of wariness and cynicism.\n\nHeaven. It would be like heaven, but heaven was a long way out of his reach.\n\nThe dream he fell into was an old one. For months it had been his nightly companion, but he had gradually banished it. In recent years it had returned to haunt him only when he had been too weak to fight it off. This was one of those times. The shiver that coursed through his big body as the scene began to unfold in his mind was one of dread. A sick sense of anticipation twisted like a knife in his chest.\n\nEllie Adamson. She stood at the end of a long, white corridor, nothing more than a dark silhouette at first. As he rushed toward her, her features became visible. She looked so young, with her pixie face and short fair hair.\n\nSweet, idealistic Ellie. She shouldn't have been the one to stumble across the conspiracy at the training center in Quantico. Shane knew he should have been able to talk her out of involving herself in the case. He shouldn't have fallen in love with her. He shouldn't have let her die.\n\nIt was his fault. Ellie had stayed in because of him. She had died because of him. And his punishment was to watch it happen again and again in his dreams.\n\nAlways it happened in slow motion, increasing Shane's belief that he should have been able to prevent the tragedy. But he hadn't been able to move fast enough in reality, and he never could in his dreams either. Every time it was the same. He could see her turning toward him, see the light of recognition in her eyes, see her reach out to him, see the bullet explode into her chest.\n\nAs he held her and felt the life seep out of her, he brushed her hair back... and looked down on the face of Faith Kincaid.\n\n\"No!\" he shouted.\n\nIt wouldn't happen again. He wouldn't let it happen again. Gathering what strength he had, he pushed Faith from his arms and the nightmare from his mind.\n\nPromptly he fell into another dream. The Silvanus bust. He'd spent three years submerged in their organization. They were men who dealt daily in drugs and extortion, then went home at night to families. They talked about contracts on people's lives the same way ordinary businessmen talked about mergers and acquisitions. They were men who took the idea of the American dream and twisted it inside out until it was an ugly, surrealistic nightmare.\n\nShane had despised them for what they were. By the end of the case he had nearly come to despise himself. He had gotten too close, lost his focus, lost his edge, and nearly lost his life because of it. He could still see Adam Strauss's face twisted in rage, still hear the hoarse cry as the man realized Shane was the one who had betrayed him and the organization he worked for. Once again Shane felt the bullet slam into his shoulder.\n\nThe dream became even more disjointed then. There were bits and pieces of memory from the emergency room and the hospital. He listened again to John Banks's slow monotone explanation of Strauss's escape, and to reassurances spoken in the same emotionless tone of voice.\n\n\"He'll never find you, Shane. We covered your tracks so well, it looks like you vanished into thin air.\"\n\nThen he saw himself floating through the black void of space, touching nothing and no one.\n\nFaith dipped the washcloth into the pan of water again, wrung it out, and lifted it to Shane's forehead. He tried to push her away and twisted restlessly on the sheets. Dodging his arm, she shushed him and pressed the cool cloth to his brow.\n\nMatthews had diagnosed the problem as an infection to the gunshot wound in Callan's shoulder. The necessary medications had magically appeared and been administered. He had assured Faith all they had to do now was wait for the drugs to kick in. Shane would be fine in a day or so. This wasn't anything he hadn't gone through before.\n\nA gunshot wound. That ought to tell you something, Faith Kincaid, she thought with a sigh, as she sat back in her chair beside his bed. This was a man to steer clear of. He wasn't a part of the world in which she wanted to exist. She was an ordinary woman with ordinary needs and dreams.\n\nAt any rate she wasn't the sort of person who craved a lot of excitement. She didn't need to get involved with people who took getting shot in stride as a normal hazard of their everyday lives.\n\nBut when Shane moaned in his sleep, she bent over him to stroke a soothing hand along the hot, rough, beard-shadowed plane of his cheek. The action was as automatic as breathing. She responded to him on an instinctive level. Just as she had turned to him when she had been stricken with fear, she could not turn away from him while he was stricken with fever.\n\nFever wasn't all that was plaguing him, she thought, as she tried to quiet him. He moaned and mumbled protests, his head snapping from side to side on the pillow. Sweat beaded again on his forehead as he struggled with some hidden demon. Faith thought of the emotions she had heard in his music\u2014the longing, the loneliness\u2014and wondered if there was any connection to what haunted his dreams.\n\nRomanticizing again, Faith, she scolded herself, and nibbled on her lip.\n\nIn all fairness it was difficult not to fantasize, considering the circumstances. She felt like the heroine of a historical novel, a damsel nursing a fallen knight\u2014who happened to be more handsome than the devil himself. With a sigh she sat back and studied him as he settled into a deeper sleep.\n\nAgain the lines of his face struck her as being aristocratic\u2014the high cheekbones, the straight nose, the finely chiseled mouth. Even in sleep it was a strong face. And the strength continued down the corded muscles of his neck to his broad shoulders. Whorls of black hair adorned the planes of his chest and swirled down in a line bisecting his abdomen, disappearing beneath the sheet he kept trying to kick off. Faith's cheeks bloomed fuchsia as her imagination rushed to picture the half of him covered by eyelet-edged ecru linen. If the top half of him was anything to go by, the bottom half of him had to be breathtaking.\n\nWho was he, she wondered, trying frantically to get her mind off his anatomy. Where was he from? What was his family background? How could she be so attracted to him without knowing these vital bits of information? She wasn't the sort to fall for a man based on looks alone.\n\nHer gaze wandered around his room, taking in every detail that might give her some clue to the enigma that was Shane Callan. He was neat. His clothes hung in the armoire rather than over the furniture. What few personal items he left out were on the oak nightstand. There was a silver flask, a pack of cigarettes, two guns, and a book of poetry.\n\nSmith and Wesson, and William Butler Yeats.\n\nHe was a riddle inside a puzzle inside an elegantly handsome facade.\n\nUnable to stop herself, Faith reached out with one finger and traced the length of his arm. It was a trail that followed the hills and valleys of muscle of a man who used his body as well as his mind. The hair on the back of his forearm rasped gently against her fingertips, and tingles of awareness shot through her. She pulled her hand away as if his fevered skin had singed her. Her gaze jerked back up to his shoulder, where a fresh bandage covered the bullet wound that was giving him such grief.\n\nShe wanted a simple life, a quiet life.\n\n\"No, Faith,\" she whispered to herself. Even now attraction tugged between them, but she denied it. \"You don't want to get involved with this man.\"\n\n# FIVE\n\n\"YOU LOOK LOTS better.\"\n\nShane's brows shot up as he opened his eyes and slowly turned his head on the pillow to see little Lindy planted beside his bed, staring up at him with an expression of almost adult certainty on her cherubic face. Remnants of her bout with the chicken pox dotted her cheeks and forehead, but her dark eyes glowed with energy.\n\n\"Me and Mama are taking care of you,\" she informed him, lifting a small red plastic case onto the bed. Opening it, she revealed an array of miniature doctor's tools and a stash of candy. \"It's my turn now 'cause Mama's busy. We have to see if you have a temp'ture. Open up!\"\n\nObediently Shane opened his mouth and let Lindy stick a toy thermometer between his teeth. She pulled a pint-sized stethoscope out of her case, stuck the ends in her ears, and pressed the business end to his muscular biceps.\n\n\"Hmm...\" she mused, pursing her lips, her eyebrows pulling together in thought.\n\n\"Well, nurse,\" he asked soberly, \"what do you think?\"\n\nLindy beamed a smile at him, dimples cutting into her rosy cheeks. \"I think you're all better enough to color for a little while, but Mama will probably make you take a nap after that.\"\n\nPushing her doctor's bag aside, she scrambled up on the bed beside him with a coloring book and box of crayons clutched to her.\n\nKeeping a discreet hold of the quilt that covered him, Shane eased himself up so he could lean back against the headboard. He tucked the blankets tightly around his waist, and Lindy settled in against his good side, as content and trusting as if she had known him her whole life.\n\nA mysterious knot lodged itself in Shane's throat. He swallowed it down and told himself he was just thirsty. He wasn't in the least affected by this sweet, innocent darling with the unruly blond curls. Not in the least.\n\n\"This is the color book Aunt Jayne gave me for having the chicken spots,\" Lindy explained as she opened the book to a fresh page and offered Shane his pick of the crayons. \"I'm sharing it with you because I think you're nice.\"\n\nOh, hell, Shane thought, selecting a stubby blue crayon, of course he was affected. He and little Lindy were from opposite ends of the spectrum. She was everything good, and he had seen everything evil, yet Faith's daughter cuddled against his side in her fuzzy pajamas, completely unconcerned. How could that irony not bring out all his protective instincts?\n\n\"Aunt 'Laina gave me that nurse game,\" Lindy explained as she started in enthusiastically on a picture of the Care Bears. \"She said I could grow up to be a doctor, and she would chase the am'blances.\" She scrunched up her little pixie face and giggled. \"Isn't that silly?\"\n\nShane chuckled. He should have been hauling himself out of bed and seeing to the case, but somehow the idea didn't appeal to him as much as sharing these few moments with this child.\n\nYou're losing it, Callan, his little inner voice muttered. For once he managed to ignore it.\n\nFaith froze in the doorway, then sagged against the jamb. Nothing had prepared her for the sight before her or for the effect it had on her heart. Shane, sitting up in bed, bare-chested, black hair tousled, looking impossibly masculine and sexy and in need of a shave. And Lindy curled up against his side in her pink pajamas, jabbering away a mile a minute as the pair of them colored.\n\n\"Lord, don't do this to me,\" Faith whispered despairingly. She was too exhausted, too emotionally drained right now to fight off the wave of feelings that assaulted her on seeing that big tough cop coloring with her four-year-old daughter. Wearily she closed her eyes.\n\nIn a flash every memory she had of Shane Callan passed through her mind\u2014his initial arrogance, the intense sadness of his music, his vulnerability as he'd lain sick with fever and whatever memories tortured his sleep. She thought of the book of poetry she'd found on his nightstand. She thought of the incredible physical magnetism that drew her to him. Then she opened her eyes and looked at him again as he bent his dark head and murmured something that made Lindy giggle.\n\nAnd in that instant Faith fell hopelessly, totally in love.\n\nIt wasn't a pleasant thing. It wasn't flowers and church bells and bird song. It was a long hard fall down a bumpy hill to the rocks of reality. She was in love with a man who distanced himself from people. He kept to himself behind a wall of cynicism and distrust. She didn't want to be in love with him. Any woman with an ounce of common sense would have taken one look and known Shane Callan was nothing but a heartbreaker.\n\nThat had to mean she didn't have a shred of intelligence then, because she was looking at him now, and all she wanted was to go join him on that bed and have him take her in his strong arms and hold her.\n\nThe fingers of her left hand curled around the smooth wood of the door frame as if to keep her from giving in to that desire. It seemed she didn't have the strength or the sense to keep from loving the wrong man. First William Gerrard, now Shane Callan.\n\n\"Darn it all,\" she muttered on a sigh of resignation. Why did she have to be such a blasted romantic? Bryan had always counseled her to hang on to that trait. He'd said the world needed more romantics. Maybe that was true, Faith thought, but why the heck did she have to be one of them?\n\n\"Hi, Mama!\" Lindy chirped, shooting her a grin that was lacking a tooth on the upper right-hand side. \"Me and Shane are coloring!\"\n\nFaith gathered herself together and stepped into the room, trying to look unruffled. \"Lindy, sweetie, you shouldn't be in here. Mr. Callan needs his rest.\"\n\n\"But he's all better,\" Lindy said earnestly. Twisting around to look up at Shane, she said in a loud whisper, \"Told you she'd make you take a nap.\"\n\n\"Scoot, pumpkin.\"\n\nLindy crumpled against her oversize playmate and sent her mother her most plaintive look. \"Can't we color a little more? Please, Mama. Shane's real good. He stays inside the lines.\"\n\nShane lifted the book for her perusal, looking up at her with smoky eyes as a lock of night black hair tumbled across his forehead. \"See, Mom?\"\n\nHis voice was low and rough, more so than usual. This was probably what he sounded like first thing in the morning or just after making love. Faith's skin blossomed with heat at the images that thought evoked.\n\n\"Very nice.\" She shot him a wry look and motioned her daughter toward the door. \"Lindy, go on and see what Aunt Jayne is watching on TV.\"\n\nPouting, Lindy gathered her toys together and climbed down from the bed. A disgruntled frown marred her forehead as she grumbled, \"All she ever watches is movies, and I fall asleep 'cause I'm too little.\"\n\nFaith shook her head as she watched her daughter shuffle dejectedly out into the hall.\n\n\"I'll have to have a talk with her about wandering into people's rooms before the inn opens for business,\" she said. \"That could be a very embarrassing habit for her to get into.\"\n\n\"Not to mention prematurely educational,\" Shane quipped, enjoying the color that rose in Faith's cheeks. He had to admit he found her modesty refreshing and sweet, and damned if it didn't turn him on. Desire stirred lazily inside him as he wondered whether or not she would be shy with him in bed.\n\n\"I'm sorry if she woke you.\"\n\n\"She didn't bother me at all,\" he said, a little surprised that it was true. It had been so long since he'd had the chance to be around small children, he'd forgotten how much he enjoyed their company. \"Anyway, I have a feeling it's time I got up.\"\n\n\"You're in no condition to get up,\" Faith protested, planting her hands on her gently rounded hips and giving him a look of maternal command, even though maternal was the last thing she felt when she looked at him.\n\n\"That never stopped me before.\" He actually found the makings of a smile to send her. Unconsciousness had done wonders for his temperament.\n\nIf he had looked sexy before, Faith thought, he looked doubly so now, alone in the bed with the covers riding low on his flat belly. Darn it, why couldn't the government have sent her a fat, balding toad of a special agent?\n\nBreathlessly she asked, \"How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"Fine.\" His brain felt like steel wool, his shoulder throbbed, and his skin hurt all over, but these complaints seemed minor enough to fit under the heading of \"fine.\" By the look of her Faith wasn't able to make the same claim.\n\nShadows hung under her dark eyes in violet crescents. The pallor of her skin was a sharp contrast to the soft pink sweater she wore above a mauve cotton skirt that was gathered at the waist and hung down well past her knees. She was unquestionably as nervous as a cat and looked as if she had never even heard of a good night's sleep, let alone enjoyed one.\n\n\"How long have I been out?\" Shane asked, scratching at the stubble that covered his lean cheeks.\n\n\"About nineteen hours,\" she answered as she flitted about his room like a hyperactive butterfly, straightening things that had already been straightened a dozen times and had never needed it in the first place. She could have told him how long he'd been out to the minute, but she didn't think it would be a wise thing to reveal, considering how it would reflect on her.\n\n\"Agent Matthews says the wound in your shoulder is infected.\" She started leaning in the direction of the door, eager to make her escape. \"I should go get him. He'll want to see you.\"\n\nShane's right hand snaked out and closed quickly but gently around her delicate wrist, snaring her alongside his bed. Her eyes rounded in alarm.\n\n\"That can wait,\" he said. \"I want to talk to you first. What happened?\"\n\n\"You passed out.\" Somehow Faith knew it wasn't the answer he was looking for, but it was the only one she wanted to give him.\n\nHe shook his head impatiently. \"While I was out, what happened?\"\n\nShe frowned at his suddenly wary look. \"You didn't reveal any state secrets, if that's what you're worried about. You growled and snarled and were generally unpleasant, but that wasn't anything I hadn't already experienced.\"\n\n\"What else?\" he prodded.\n\n\"Nothing, really.\"\n\nShe was a terrible liar. Her teeth dug into her lower lip, and her gaze darted around the room, landing everywhere but on him. She was keeping something from him. Even if it hadn't been written all over her lovely face, Shane could sense the tension in her.\n\nInstead of wanting to shake the truth out of her, he found himself wanting to pull her into his arms and coax it out of her with gentle kisses. That was a bad idea, but he was darn near beyond caring about job ethics where Faith Kincaid was concerned. Just looking at her, even now when he was only at half strength, he wanted her. He was beginning to think they were simply going to have to deal with that desire sooner or later, because it obviously wasn't going to go away.\n\nAt the moment, though, his first concern had to be finding out what had happened while he'd been dead to the world.\n\n\"Faith?\"\n\nShe trembled as his smoky voice caressed her like velvet. His thumb gently rubbed circles at the paper-thin flesh on the inside of her wrist. She felt faint from trying to fight her own emotions. Darn him anyway, what did he want to know? That she had sat beside him during the worst of his fever trying to comfort and soothe him? That she had just fallen in love with him because he had stayed inside the lines when he colored Bedtime Bear? That she was so stressed out, all she wanted to do was find a quiet place, curl into a ball, and cry?\n\n\"Did you get another call?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said too quickly. \"And Agent Matthews is handling everything, so you don't have to worry\u2014\"\n\nShane cut her off with a virulent expletive. \"The bastard called again. Get me my pants.\"\n\nFaith jerked her arm from his grasp and retreated two steps but faced him with a look of determination. \"I will not get you your pants, Shane Callan. You are going to stay in bed at least another day.\"\n\n\"The hell I am.\"\n\nWithout warning or compunction he tossed back the covers and hauled himself to his feet, absolutely, magnificently naked.\n\nFaith's jaw dropped. He was everything she had imagined he would be and then some. Six feet, four inches of beautifully sculpted, elegantly built man. Someone should have bronzed him and put him on display in a museum. His powerful chest tapered to gracefully slim hips that led to muscular thighs and impressive evidence of his gender.\n\n\"Sweetheart,\" he said in a voice like raw silk, \"if you keep looking at me that way, neither one of us is going to need clothes in a minute.\"\n\nAs impossible as it seemed, Faith was certain she blushed an even deeper shade of red. The heat in her cheeks rose another million degrees. Arrogant, presumptuous man! Never mind that her insides were melting like ice cream under a hot July sun, he needn't have commented on it.\n\nQuickly she turned and reached into the wardrobe. She yanked out one of the fresh bath towels she had stocked it with and thrust it at him.\n\n\"You are not leaving this room,\" she announced, refusing to look at him another second for fear that she'd faint dead away. It seemed all her bones had turned to butter.\n\n\"I'm here to take care of you,\" Shane pointed out, accepting the towel. \"Not the other way around.\"\n\n\"It seemed a moot point when you were unconscious.\"\n\n\"I'm not unconscious anymore.\"\n\n\"So I noticed,\" Faith grumbled between her teeth, forcing her eyes to remain riveted to the pattern of the wallpaper.\n\n\"This is my case,\" Shane said as he slung the swath of deep green terry cloth around his hips and secured it out of deference to Faith's modesty. \"I'm perfectly capable of handling it.\"\n\n\"Yes, I seem to remember you mumbling something to that effect as Mr. Matthews and Mr. Fitz hauled your semiconscious body from the floor of my room.\"\n\nShane ignored her sarcasm and abruptly went to the heart of the matter. \"Was it the same caller? Did Matthews have time to trace it?\"\n\n\"It was a letter, not a call,\" Faith admitted in a low voice. Lust was instantly forgotten. She trembled as she thought of the note that had come in the morning mail. It seemed impossible for a scrap of paper to be such a terrifying thing, but it had shaken her almost as badly as the phone call had. She didn't want Shane to know that, though. The pigheaded man belonged in bed. \"Everything is under control. Your men are watching the house, and Agent Matthews is taking care\u2014\"\n\n\"What kind of letter?\"\n\n\"A nasty one,\" she said, her voice soft and tight. \"It was typed on plain notebook paper and stuck in a cheap envelope postmarked Fort Bragg. No fingerprints, according to Mr. Matthews.\"\n\n\"Damn,\" Shane muttered.\n\n\"My sentiments exactly.\"\n\nShe looked so fragile suddenly, so small and alone it tore at Shane. She stood there, looking away from him, staring at one of the wreaths of dried flowers that adorned the wall. Her arms were crossed tightly in front of her as if to keep her upright. The lady was putting on a hell of a show at being strong enough to handle this ugly business. Even as he cursed the man who was causing her trouble, he had to admire Faith's courage.\n\n\"You could back out on testifying, you know,\" he said softly, giving in to the need to offer her an option. Banks wouldn't have liked it, but Banks wasn't there watching this sweet flower tremble under the pressure. \"It would hurt the case, but no one would blame you.\"\n\nFaith shook her head. She would not back down. Especially not now. William Gerrard had manipulated her for too long. She had run across the country to escape him, and he was still trying to control her. She wasn't going to let him go on doing it.\n\n\"Everything's going to be fine,\" she said, almost to herself. \"No one can actually get to me. Banks said so. You said so. Agent Matthews said so. Anyway, he's just trying to scare me.\"\n\nAnd doing a damn good job of it, Shane thought. When he got his hands on the man responsible for terrifying her... In the meantime, he wanted to get his hands on Faith. The first time she had turned to him in fear, he had wanted to take her in his arms, but he had stopped himself. He didn't try to stop himself this time, nor did he question the wisdom of his decision. This was what she needed, and he was going to give it to her.\n\nGently he wrapped his good arm around her slender shoulders, frowning when she tensed at his touch. \"You are scared,\" he said simply.\n\nHer answer was little more than an exhalation of breath. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"It's all right,\" he whispered, drawing her to his chest. When she gave in and leaned against him, he stroked his big hand over her soft tangle of fiery gold curls. \"I'll take care of you.\"\n\nFaith let her arms sneak around his lean waist. She let her cheek press against the warm flesh of his bare chest. She indulged herself for this one moment. It felt so good to be in his arms. She felt a sense not only of safety, but of rightness. Something deep inside her told her it was where she belonged. Whether that was true or not, it was where she wanted to be.\n\nShane was warm and real, an anchor in the storm, her battered knight sworn to protect her. That was a romantic notion of a very unromantic situation, but Faith didn't care. She let her mind shut down and her senses take over. She thought of nothing but the way it felt to be held. She drank in the warm male scent of Shane. She listened to the strong, steady beat of his heart beneath her ear. Her fingertips memorized the marble-smooth planes of his back.\n\nFor a long moment they just stood there, bathed in the amber glow of the small hurricane lamp on the nightstand. Faith felt as if she were drawing strength from Shane, even though he had to have precious little to spare. The past few days had worn her down to nothing. Between dealing with threats and intrusions and Lindy's chicken pox and Shane's fever, she had depleted every milliliter of energy she had. But standing there with Shane's arm around her and her arms around him, she felt her power level rise.\n\n\"I'll be all right,\" she said, managing a smile as she looked up at him.\n\nThe impact of his gaze was like a physical blow that knocked the wind out of her lungs. His silver-gray eyes captured hers with a stare that was intense and predatory and possessive and so very basically male, everything feminine inside her responded. In that instant all the complications of their situation seemed to fall away, leaving just the two of them, just a man and a woman and a desire that was not to be denied.\n\nShane's mouth swooped down, trapping Faith's, taking hers in a kiss that was surprisingly tender, but barely tame. She let herself be swept along on the tide of passion as his tongue swept against hers. His fingers tangled in her hair as he tilted her head, giving him a better angle so he could deepen the kiss even more.\n\nIt was incredible how quickly and powerfully he could arouse the dormant woman inside her, Faith thought dimly, the woman her husband had never really wanted, the woman who had longed for love and passion. The needs of that woman caught fire like dry tinder touched to flame. Her body molded herself to his powerful frame, seeking total contact. Her breasts swelled against the steel of his chest. His good arm banded around her waist, lifting her and pulling her against his arousal.\n\nDesperation and desire swirled together inside Faith like a whirlpool. She had waited a lifetime to feel what she was feeling now with Shane Callan, but once the danger had passed, he would be gone, and she would be left with a lifetime to wish she'd never laid eyes on him.\n\nShane was fighting his own inner battle. He knew to get too close to Faith Kincaid emotionally would be disastrous for both of them. Circumstances dictated that he offer her nothing but protection. Still, he had never known such a fierce desire to possess.\n\n\"I want you,\" he whispered against her lips, simplifying the problem to the lowest common denominator. The ache of his need was not going to lessen. Their circumstances were not going to change. The only solution was to draw a line\u2014satisfy the physical desire, safe in the knowledge that neither would ask for anything more from the other.\n\nFaith didn't have to hear the words to know what Shane was proposing. He wasn't the kind of man to make empty promises. He wasn't talking about love, but sex. For her there would be no separation of the two. As much as she wished she weren't, she was in love with him. She wanted him, but she wanted his heart as well as his body. And while he stood nearly naked in the circle of her arms, more than ready to make good on his claim, she knew his body was all he was willing to give her.\n\n\"I don't know if I can deal with this,\" she said, deciding to take the coward's way out for the moment. She stepped out of his embrace, immediately feeling cold and alone. \"You should go back to bed. You need your rest.\"\n\n\"That's not my only need. What about you, Faith? A woman has needs too.\"\n\nHow true, she thought. She had physical needs, needs that had long been neglected, needs that seemed to double and triple when she was in the same room with him. At this very moment her whole body was throbbing with the need he aroused in her. Her breasts swelled for his touch. The feminine core of her ached with an emptiness she wanted only Shane to fill. But her needs went beyond the physical, and his offer didn't.\n\nShane sighed and raked a hand back through his tousled hair. \"I won't lie to you, Faith. I want a physical relationship with you, but I can't give you anything more. That may sound callous, but it's necessary. I think it's best to be honest up front.\"\n\nShe wanted to call him a liar despite what he'd said. He wouldn't want her to be honest. He wouldn't want to hear she was in love with him. Faith knew that as sure as she knew her own name. Shane was a man who shunned emotional entanglements. Even in his sleep he had tried to push her away. The man needed love, but she was certain he wouldn't want it if she offered it to him on a platter.\n\n\"I have to put Lindy to bed,\" she said, turning away from him, exhaustion weighing down on her like a huge stone.\n\nShane nodded, letting her walk away even though his body was aching for release. If she felt half the attraction he did, she wouldn't be able to deny it for long. If nothing else, she would end up using it as an excuse to escape her other problems for a few brief hours. And that would be just as well, he thought, for all concerned. That kind of escape was the only thing he had to offer her. \"I'll be here when you change your mind.\"\n\nFaith paused at the door, almost smiling at his choice of words. She didn't look back at him as her heart asked the question she didn't dare voice\u2014 _You'll be here when I change my mind, but will you be here afterward?_\n\n# SIX\n\n\"WE'RE ONE STEP closer,\" Shane said into the phone, wishing he had more to report to his boss. He took a long drag on his cigarette and leaned back in the squeaky desk chair, his gaze idly wandering around Faith's little office. \"The letters have all been postmarked in nearby towns. The call we managed to trace came from a phone booth in Ukiah. We know he's in the immediate area.\"\n\n\"The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: Where?\" Banks asked in his typical sardonic tone.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Shane admitted, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the neatly typed, utterly nasty missive lying on the walnut desk before him. It was the third Faith had received in a week. Tension coiled in his gut. He didn't like playing a waiting game. He was a hunter by nature. But in this scenario he was relegated to the role of fisherman\u2014waiting for their boy to take the bait so he could reel him in.\n\n\"How's our witness holding up?\"\n\nShane thought of Faith. She had an inner strength that never failed to amaze him. The constant tension was taking a toll on her, but every time he expected her to give in or give up she reached deep down inside for a little more grit. \"She's a remarkable lady.\"\n\n\"Yes, she is. Give her my regards... and my condolences for having to put up with you day in and day out.\"\n\nA wry smile quirked up one corner of Shane's mouth as he tossed out a rather lewd suggestion about what his superior could do with the rest of his day.\n\n\"Hang tight, pal,\" Banks advised, chuckling at Callan's characteristic disregard for authority figures. \"Gerrard's request for a later court date has been denied. He'll be sweating bullets soon if he doesn't hear word of Faith backing out on testifying. They'll make a move soon.\"\n\n\"I'll be here when they do,\" Shane promised. He could almost taste the vengeance. Damn, that wasn't like him. An agent couldn't take cases personally and hold together for long. Pushing the thought from his mind, he changed the subject. \"Any word on Strauss?\"\n\n\"Interpol says he was spotted in Argentina.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Shane said slowly, that knot of tension tightening in his belly as he called to mind the image of his archnemesis from the Silvanus organization. During his three years on the case he had come to know the man as well as he knew himself. Adam Strauss may have had Argentina in mind as a new base of operations, but Shane knew with a cold certainty he wouldn't be there yet. \"That's not his style.\"\n\n\"Meaning he'd kill you first before retiring to a tropical paradise?\"\n\n\"He swore he would. As incongruous as it sounds, Adam Strauss is a man of his word.\"\n\n\"Can't happen, my friend. There's no way he can find you.\"\n\nAfter Shane ended the conversation and hung up the phone, he sat back. Where there's a will, there's a way, he thought with an odd kind of detachment. But Adam Strauss wasn't his immediate concern.\n\nStubbing out his cigarette, he forced his mind back to the matter at hand. His gaze devoured the letter Faith had received the day before. There simply wasn't anything about it that pointed in any one direction. The only thing they could discern from it was that the perpetrator had a violent imagination and a solid command of grammar.\n\n\"Damn,\" he muttered, shaking another cigarette out of the rapidly depleting pack. He dangled it from his lip and momentarily forgot about it.\n\nHe was getting itchy. Patience was the name of the game on a case like this one, but his was wearing thin around the edges. He wanted a suspect, and they didn't have one. He didn't like Faith's caretaker, Mr. Fitz, but so far the only thing he could accuse the man of was being ill-tempered and malodorous.\n\nMaybe, Shane mused, the real reason he was getting edgy was because there was something he wanted more than a suspect\u2014Faith. Nearly a week had passed since their encounter in his bedroom. She hadn't taken him up on his offer of a physical relationship, but that wasn't because she wasn't interested. It was obvious she was very aware of him as a man. She was skittish around him, a kind of nervousness that sprang from sexual tension.\n\nLying in bed every night, knowing she was just across the hall, was an experience Shane considered on a level with Chinese water torture. He couldn't remember ever wanting a woman the way he wanted her. He was a relatively young, healthy male with strong sexual appetites, but this transcended mere physical need. Want of her seemed to have invaded every level of his being. The idea made him uncomfortable, but he couldn't escape it. If he didn't get her into bed soon and slake this need, it was going to drive him right over the edge.\n\nAll he had to do was push her a little. Faith was too inexperienced to resist a skilled seduction. But he couldn't do that and live with himself afterward. As unappealing as the idea was, he was just going to have to bide his time.\n\n\"Good Lord!\" Faith choked as she opened the door. Blinking rapidly as she entered the office, she waved an arm in front of her as if she were cutting her way through a jungle with a machete. \"What are you trying to do, give yourself lung cancer in one sitting?\"\n\nShane frowned but couldn't quite stop himself from snatching the unlit cigarette from his lip. Faith's voice had that innate motherly quality that could make even a grown man feel contrite. \"We'll have the place fumigated for you after we leave.\"\n\nFaith almost flinched at the words. After he left. The thought caused an alarming amount of pain. Forcing herself past the sensation, she said, \"Alaina and Jayne are both gone for the day. I gave them time off for good behavior above and beyond the call of duty. I'm going to take Lindy down to the beach for the afternoon. I thought you'd want to know.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" Shane pushed himself to his feet with the lazy, deceptive grace of a big cat. \"I'll go with you.\"\n\nIt was on the tip of her tongue to say no, but Faith bit the automatic response back. In the first place it wouldn't do any good. Mules had nothing on Shane Callan when it came to being stubborn. In the second place, it wasn't what she really wanted. The thought of spending the day on the beach with him held the appeal of forbidden fruit. It may not have been wise, but she allowed herself to yield to the temptation.\n\n\"All right. We'll be ready as soon as I pack the picnic basket.\"\n\nBeauty was something Shane had had little room for in his life in recent years. Now it surrounded him. He felt it wash over him like the golden sunlight pouring down out of the clear blue sky. He could feel it warming him and healing him\u2014not just the wound in his shoulder, but the scars that lacerated his soul as well. He could feel it seeping inside him and filling up all the dark corners.\n\nBeauty was the fresh, cool salt air, the temporary absence of tension, Lindy's laughter as bubbling little waves chased her up the beach.\n\nNatural beauty was obvious all around. They had set up their little picnic site on a secluded strip of soft, silvery sand. Shane lay stretched out on a blue plaid blanket, propped up on his right elbow, his gaze automatically sweeping the area. A hundred feet or so above them, at the top of a rugged cliff, stood the inn, its assortment of roof peaks zigzagging across the azure sky. Before them stretched the Pacific, shining like a jewel in the setting of a perfect day. Fishing boats dotted the far horizon, and gulls swooped and called overhead.\n\nAlso coming under the heading of natural beauty was Faith. She walked along the water's edge, helping her daughter hunt for seashells. Somewhere during the last week Shane had lost his mental image of her as William Gerrard's wife, the polished society lady. That wasn't Faith. Faith was scrubbed-fresh skin and unruly curls, faded jeans and canvas sneakers. She was a sweet smile and an intricately wrought golden heart. She was beauty\u2014outwardly and inwardly.\n\nHer kind of beauty was something a man could grow used to in a hurry and live with a long time.\n\n\"What are you thinking?\" Faith asked with a guileless smile as she plopped down on the blanket to sit cross-legged beside him.\n\nThrough the dark lenses of his sunglasses Shane studied her for a moment before answering. She shoved up the sleeves of her baggy navy sweatshirt and snagged back a handful of wind-tossed hair. The sun had raised soft color in her cheeks and teased out a smattering of freckles on her nose.\n\n\"That you're beautiful,\" he said simply, his statement carrying almost none of the emotion that was struggling to come to life inside him.\n\nFaith was stunned to absolute silence. Her heart did a swan dive into her stomach. The last thing she had expected from a man like Shane was pretty words. For a long moment she sat staring at him like a doe caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck.\n\nEven in this setting he looked tough and dangerous. He had donned jeans and a black sweatshirt for their outing, leaving his shoulder holster behind, but not his pistol. The gun had been his contribution to the picnic basket.\n\nA man who packed guns in picnic baskets had told her she was beautiful, had stated it as if it were a plain, irrefutable fact. A smart woman wouldn't have gone marshmallow soft inside over that. Faith decided her brain shouldn't enter into the debate. It didn't seem to function well at all when it came to this man.\n\nA frown tugged at the corners of Shane's mouth. \"You act as if you've never had a man tell you that.\"\n\n\"I haven't,\" she admitted. \"Not someone who really meant it.\"\n\n\"Then your ex-husband is blind as well as stupid.\"\n\nShe sighed as she absently drew patterns in the sand with her finger. \"Disinterested is probably the more accurate word.\"\n\n\"A fool.\"\n\n\"Let's not talk about him, okay?\" she said, flashing Shane a brittle smile. \"Let's just enjoy this beautiful day.\"\n\nShe brought her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. Turning her face to the sun, she closed her eyes and concentrated on absorbing the warmth. The whole point of coming to the beach had been to get away from her problems. Shane himself was a reminder, but Faith had decided simply to pretend he wasn't a government agent. For this afternoon he was just a man, they were just ordinary people enjoying the beach and the sun.\n\nShe didn't have time to do more than register the shadow that suddenly blocked the warm rays from her face. Before she could even open her eyes to see what was happening, Shane's mouth had settled against hers, and she was enveloped by warmth of another kind.\n\nThis was an inner heat that blazed whenever he touched her. Faith let it sweep through her. She didn't try to fight the feelings that engulfed her. She'd been fighting them for too long. For this one kiss logic and reality could just butt out. She'd had enough reality to last her. This was escape, a wonderful fantasy, and she welcomed it.\n\nInstinctively her hands came up to steady herself. She wound her arms around Shane's neck as he parted her willing lips and deepened the kiss. Masterfully he explored her mouth, tasting and claiming territory that had lain fallow for too long. Desire awakened inside her and came to life like a seed in the spring.\n\nSlowly he eased her down to the blanket, never breaking the kiss. His left hand stole under the hem of her sweatshirt, and his fingers teased the silky flesh of her belly. She sucked in a breath as he dragged his lips across her cheek and jaw and slid his hand up to claim one aching breast.\n\n\"Shane,\" she managed to whisper, forcing her eyes open. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nHis eyes were the color of storm clouds when he lifted his head and looked down at her. He rubbed his thumb over the pebble-hard nub of her nipple and smiled with satisfaction as she gasped. His voice was like warm silk when he spoke. \"I'm enjoying this beautiful afternoon.\"\n\nA perfectly reasonable answer, Faith thought as her eyes drifted shut and her concentration focused on the incredible sensation of his hand on her breast. His long, elegant musician's fingers stroked and kneaded the soft globe of flesh. His thumb continually massaged the sensitive center. Tingling waves of sensation radiated from that point, shooting directly to the pit of her belly where they swirled in an ever tightening whirlpool.\n\nLord, she'd never known a man's touch could incite her senses to riot. This was incredible. This was something she had never experienced. She suddenly felt cheated. She'd been a wife and had never known this kind of physical pleasure. She was a grown woman with a child....\n\n\"Lindy\u2014\" she said, abruptly trying to sit up and finding it a futile task with Shane half-sprawled on top of her.\n\n\"She can't see us.\" He raised up just enough to peer over the wicker food hamper that shielded their activities from Lindy's view. Faith's daughter sat playing in the sand a good thirty feet away. \"She's completely absorbed in counting her seashells.\"\n\n\"That won't take long,\" Faith said on a breathless laugh. \"She can only make it to ten.\"\n\n\"Lindy!\" Shane called.\n\n\"I'm real busy!\" she called back, not even lifting her head from her task.\n\n\"Okay. You give a holler when you're not busy anymore.\"\n\n\"Okie-dokie!\"\n\nShane turned his attention from daughter to mother. Faith's heart-shaped face was flushed, her lips were love-swollen and glistened from his kiss. Possessive desire pounded through him in waves.\n\n\"I don't think this is a very good idea,\" Faith said weakly, thrills rippling through her at the hungry look on his face.\n\n\"Really?\" One black brow quirked upward as Shane began to lower his head. \"Then you're going to hate this.\"\n\nHe kissed her again, slowly, deeply, as if they had years for just this one kiss. Faith wished they did. She wished they had forever. Surely the love she'd stored up in her heart would last that long and then some. But they didn't have forever. They had only the present. Shane would be with her only a few weeks at the most.\n\nWould the heartache be any less when he left if she said no to a physical relationship with him? Or would it be even more painful with the addition of regret for not taking as much as he was willing to give her?\n\nShane felt his heart twist when he raised his head and looked down into sable eyes swimming with tears of confusion. He cursed himself for complicating her already complicated situation. He had no business wanting Faith Kincaid in the first place. What the hell did he think he was doing pushing her this way? Not more than a few hours ago he'd told himself he wouldn't pressure her into anything.\n\nGently he brushed a crystal drop of moisture from the corner of her eye with his thumb. \"No tears,\" he whispered, his expression more tender than he would have believed possible. \"Today is too perfect for tears.\"\n\nHe was right, Faith thought, her heart aching with love for him as she traced her fingertips over the angular planes of his aristocratic face. There would be time enough for tears later.\n\n\"I want you, Faith,\" he said, his smoky voice a caress to her already-aroused senses. \"But I won't push you. It has to be your choice.\"\n\nLindy's voice floated to them on the breeze. \"I'm all done being busy now!\"\n\nA rare smile lit Shane's face as he sat up and put his sunglasses back on. \"I think that's our call to duty.\"\n\n\"Duty?\" Faith questioned, slowly gathering her scattered wits. She took Shane's hand and let him help her up from the blanket.\n\n\"Construction crew. I promised Lindy I'd help her build a sand castle.\"\n\n\"You're a talented man, Mr. Callan.\"\n\nHe slid an arm around her shoulders as they headed up the beach. \"I told you before, I'm full of surprises.\"\n\nFaith leaned against him, silent, wondering if she dared hope one of the surprises inside him would be love.\n\nHe watched from the deck of the cabin cruiser, one eye pressed to the eyepiece of a state-of-the-art telescope. His blood heated as he watched them kiss and embrace. \"Ah, yes,\" he murmured, \"love is a many-splendored thing.\"\n\nSitting back in the comfortable helm seat on the navigation bridge, he propped his legs up on the railing and lazily polished the dull blue barrel of a semiautomatic pistol. \"Love and death. How poetic. Soon Mrs. Gerrard, Agent Callan. Soon.\"\n\n# SEVEN\n\nONE SAND CASTLE turned into two and eventually became a minor megalopolis on the little beach. After the construction boom came a well-deserved cookie break, then Lindy curled up on the blanket with her bedraggled doll tucked to her chest and fell into the deep, blissful sleep of a happy child.\n\nFaith gazed down on her daughter, gently rubbing a hand back and forth over Lindy's back as she slept. Shane watched quietly, his expression pensive as feelings tumbled loose inside him. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt such a sense of peace. There was no denying that the source of that peace was the lady sitting across from him, and the little girl with the sun-blushed cheeks and yellow Big Bird sweatshirt.\n\n\"She's pretty special, isn't she?\" he murmured, reaching out hesitantly to touch Lindy's silky hair. A curl wound around his finger.\n\nFaith shot him a grin. \"I hope you're not expecting an unbiased opinion. Personally I think the sun rises and sets on this little one.\"\n\n\"I've got a slew of nieces and nephews,\" Shane announced, almost as startled as Faith was that he had revealed something personal. Suddenly uneasy, he looked out at the ocean where fishing boats bobbed on the horizon. \"I haven't seen them in a long time.\"\n\n\"Because of your job?\"\n\n\"The life I lead is not conducive to emotional complications.\"\n\nFaith didn't attempt to hold back her harsh laugh. \"How clinically put.\"\n\n\"It's the truth.\" His answer was almost as sharp as the look he leveled at her. \"Would you rather I lie to you, Faith?\"\n\n\"No,\" she whispered. \"I've been lied to enough.\"\n\nShane bit back an oath. He wasn't accustomed to explaining himself to anyone\u2014quite the opposite, in fact\u2014but one look at Faith's expression compelled him to tell her more. \"If an agent lets emotions get in his way, he can screw things up. A clear head can mean the difference between life and death.\"\n\n\"So you just turn it off like a faucet?\" she asked. That kind of control was well beyond her. She both envied and pitied him for it.\n\nShane let the question hang in the air. He didn't want to think about it today. Today the sun was shining on him. Today he could be with Faith and her daughter. He could pretend to be a normal man for a few hours. The shadows would swallow him up again soon enough.\n\nFaith didn't press for an answer. She had more questions to ask, but she didn't voice any of them. Wasn't it a lonely way of life? She knew it was, she'd sensed the loneliness in him, she'd heard it in his music. Had he ever thought of quitting? That question was too dangerous. \"No\" would have been too painful an answer to hear.\n\n\"When I was a kid,\" he said, staring out at the sea again, \"my family had this place on the coast of Maine. We used to spend the whole summer there at the ocean.\"\n\nRelieved that the sudden tension between them had evaporated, Faith soaked up the information he offered. She felt a little like a squirrel hoarding nuts in preparation for a long, bleak winter, secreting away what tidbits she could about this man. He liked poetry and music and children and summers by the sea. There was a side of him that wasn't dangerous at all. There was a side of him that was just a man, a man full of memories and loneliness, a man who needed love.\n\nA week ago she had wondered if she had the strength to keep from loving him. Now her perspective was changing, and she began to wonder if she had the strength to give him her love. Could she offer the bounty of her heart, knowing he needed it but might not take it? Could she risk that kind of rejection again? Did she really have a choice?\n\nThey put off going back to the inn for as long as they could, trying to squeeze the most out of their golden afternoon. But as the fog bank began to drift in, they surrendered and gathered their things together.\n\nThe walk was made in near silence, with Lindy the only one in the mood for conversation. Shane was reticent by nature, but Faith thought she could sense another reason for his silence as they climbed the wooden stairs that zigzagged up the cliff from the beach\u2014sadness.\n\nFor once she didn't scold herself for romanticizing. They had shared something very special. She was certain Shane was as reluctant to leave it behind as she was.\n\nFaith watched him as he carried her daughter across the lawn toward the sprawling house, his head bent, expression serious as he listened attentively to Lindy's plans for the shells she had gathered. He was so patient and gentle with Lindy. William had offered his attention to his daughter only when there had been a press camera trained on him.\n\nStopping in her tracks, Faith hugged the folded blanket to her as she came to a decision. She loved Shane Callan. It didn't matter why. It didn't matter that he believed he could promise her nothing. She loved him, and she would take what time they had together to give him that love. If a future came of it, she would embrace that future wholeheartedly. If nothing came of it, she would embrace the memories and harbor no regrets.\n\nShane stood beside his bed frowning as he slipped off his watch and put it on the nightstand. Sleep was going to be a long time coming tonight. Restlessness stirred within him. The day that had healed him with peace and sunlight was a memory now, and somehow that left him feeling unsettled.\n\nDamn, he thought as he pulled his shirt off, he was getting melancholy in his old age. He was supposed to be thinking about surveillance and suspects, but his mind wanted to linger on thoughts of the beach and Lindy... and Faith. Faith the woman, not the witness.\n\nA soft knock drew his attention to the door.\n\n\"Shane?\"\n\nHer voice was soft and tentative, yet it seemed to reach through the door to caress him. His skin heated instantly at the thought. Before his hormones could run amuck, he called out, \"Come in.\"\n\nFaith slipped into the room like a thief, closing the door quietly behind her. When she turned to face him, Shane felt as though he'd taken a punch to the solar plexus. Faith stood there, her doe eyes wide and uncertain, the amber glow of the lamp teasing out the red lights in her hair. She wore an ivory satin robe that was belted at the waist and fell to the floor. Framed by the V neckline of her robe was the necklace she always wore. The delicate bit of gold glittered warmly above her heart.\n\n\"You said you'd be here when I changed my mind,\" she said, her gaze holding him captive. Her teeth grazed her lower lip, further betraying her nervousness. She swallowed and her breasts gave a little jump as she sucked in a breath. \"I've changed my mind.\"\n\nShane held himself utterly still, as if he were afraid she would vanish if he moved. A heavy warmth surged through his body, settling in his groin. \"Are you sure?\"\n\nFaith nodded, her heart in her throat. He had to be the sexiest thing on two legs, standing there beside the bed wearing nothing but his jeans. The look he leveled at her from under his straight black brows was fiercely intense, searching for any hint of uncertainty in her. \"I'm sure.\"\n\nStepping away from the door, she closed the distance between them. Shane felt the level of his desire for her rise with every step she took. He wanted her. There was no need to question that, but he had to know she had no delusions about what this would mean. For both their sakes he couldn't afford to let it be anything more than a few sweet hours of bliss.\n\nWhen she was standing no more than a caress away, he lifted a hand and tenderly brushed his knuckles against her cheek. \"I can't make promises. You know that.\"\n\n\"I'm not asking for any,\" she whispered, her eyes downcast so he couldn't see that, while she wasn't asking him for promises, she was praying for a miracle. She would take whatever he would give her, but her heart was hoping that would be a lifetime.\n\nShane tipped her chin up, but before he could comment on what he saw in her gaze, she said, \"I'd like to know what it is to have a man want me.\"\n\nIt was the truth. Sex with William had been infrequent and unsatisfying. Her ex-husband had never set her on fire with a look or a touch. He had viewed their physical relationship as a necessary evil, and she had accepted that with a mix of guilt and relief. It was Shane who had awakened the latent sensuality in her. It was Shane who made her feel like a woman, who made her yearn for a man's touch\u2014for _his_ touch.\n\nNow he bent his head to hers, his gray eyes glowing with desire. \"Lord, Faith,\" he said on a growl, \"how could any man look at you and not want you?\"\n\nHe kissed her with barely restrained passion, groaning as she melted willingly against him. With trembling hands he pushed the ivory robe back off her shoulders, exposing her bare skin to his touch. Satin whispered to the floor at their feet, and she was naked in his arms.\n\nHis lips trailed along her jaw to her throat as his fingers trailed down her supple back, and lower, to the full curve of her buttocks. He lifted her, fitting her against the erection that swelled and strained against the front of his jeans, letting her know just how much he wanted her.\n\nFaith shuddered with raw anticipation. She gasped at the feel of him pressing intimately against her, and at the feel of her nipples burrowing into his chest hair. Need ribboned through her, brushing every nerve ending to awareness so that when Shane stood her away from his body, she nearly cried out at the sudden deprivation.\n\nMesmerized, she stared at him, her eyes passion-glazed and heavy-lidded as she watched him slowly lower the zipper of his jeans. Her breath held fast in her lungs as he peeled the denim from his lean hips and let the pants drop to join her robe on the floor. This wasn't the first time she had seen him naked, but the sight still sapped the strength from her knees. He was beautiful and completely unselfconscious as she feasted her eyes on him.\n\nTime ticked by unheeded. Shane's gaze roamed as hungrily over Faith's body as hers did over his. She was utterly feminine, all soft curves and creamy flesh. Her breasts were full, their swollen mauve tips begging for his attention. Her small waist flared into womanly hips. The delta of soft curls at the juncture of her thighs was more red than gold, and Shane's whole body throbbed with the need to discover the sweet secrets that lay beyond.\n\nRuthlessly checking his own rampant desire, he reached out and took her hand. If passion was all he could give her, then he would make it as perfect for her as he knew how.\n\n\"It's been a long time for me,\" she said shyly.\n\nShane drew her into his arms and kissed her tenderly. \"Don't worry, honey. I'll take care of you. Just lie back and let me love you.\"\n\nAs they sank to the bed, Faith breathed in the mingled scents of potpourri and man. Shane slid down her body, his hands tracing every line and curve of her. He caressed her breasts, his fingers stroking and kneading. Gently he fastened his lips around one nipple and sucked at the eager peak. She moaned and writhed beneath him. Her back arched off the bed, pressing her breast even deeper into the heat of his mouth.\n\nShane swept one hand down her side and across her hip. His fingers slid through the downy curls that covered her femininity and delved between her parted thighs to stroke the essence of her. She responded with tight little whimpers that spurred him on. His own need was a savage ache in his groin, but his focus was on Faith. Her body was begging for release. He could sense how close to the edge she was, and he coaxed her closer still with his hand and mouth.\n\n\"No!\" she whimpered, tears of disappointment sliding from the outer corners of her eyes as her pleasure crested abruptly in a blinding flash.\n\nShane was beside her in an instant to kiss the moisture from her temples. \"Shhh, honey, don't cry. What's wrong? Did I hurt you?\"\n\n\"I wanted you... with me.\"\n\n\"I will be,\" he promised, nuzzling her cheek.\n\n\"You don't understand,\" Faith mumbled, feeling miserable and inadequate. \"That won't happen for me again, Shane. I\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't think so?\" he asked, smoothing a hand back through her tousled hair. His smile was uncharacteristically soft. \"That was your first trip to heaven, sweetheart, but I promise you it won't be the last time I take you there tonight.\"\n\nHe couldn't promise her much, but that was one pledge he would definitely keep. He was a long way from being finished making love to this lady. His hunger for her was beyond anything he'd ever known. It was a hunger not only to take pleasure but to give it as well.\n\nIn the soft glow of lamplight be bathed her with kisses, his lips lingering over every detail of her face, her throat, her shoulders. He drank in the taste of her and the powder-soft rose-petal scent of her, absorbing every detail of her body, every nuance of her response.\n\nObediently passive beneath his tender assault, Faith discovered she had erogenous zones she had never dreamed of. Shane's tongue flicking across the inner crease of her elbow made her gasp. A kiss planted on the back of her knee stopped her breathing altogether. And when he parted her thighs and settled his mouth against the most feminine part of her, she thought she would die of the pleasure.\n\nHer first impulse was to push him away, but that response was quickly overruled by need, the need to have him touch her and love her and cherish her in every way he wanted. So she opened herself to his intimate kiss and this time when completion rushed through her, stunning her with shock wave after shock wave, she let herself be swept along on the tide. This time when he came back to her, she greeted him with a smile instead of tears.\n\n\"Can I touch you?\" she asked softly.\n\nShane's eyes darkened from smoke to midnight at her request. He brought her hand up to his chest and abandoned it. \"Please do.\"\n\nLovingly Faith stroked her fingertips over his chest, carefully avoiding the bandage on his left shoulder. Feeling wonderfully bold and uninhibited, she leaned over him and flicked her tongue across his flat brown nipple, then sent him a smile that was pure wickedness when he sucked in his breath. Her hand strayed down over his taut belly, following the line of downy black hair that ended in a thicket on his groin.\n\nGently she closed her hand around his arousal. Her groan of appreciation echoed Shane's. He was warm and hard, steel sheathed in velvet, throbbing with need for her... as she was for him.\n\nShe turned to him with a look of near desperation and breathed his name. Shane needed no more invitation than that. He rolled Faith beneath him and kneeled between her thighs as he took care of protection. An instant later he was sinking into her embrace\u2014the embrace of her arms and the embrace of her womanhood. Lifting her hips into his, she accepted him gradually, her tight warmth closing around him, welcoming him. He closed his eyes for a moment savoring the sensation of sweet bliss.\n\nHe loved her tenderly, gently, with slow, deep strokes that seemed to reach to the very heart of her. Faith held him, moved with him, letting her love for him pour out of her every way she could without actually speaking the words. She let her body tell him with each caress, with each sigh. And this time, when the end came for them both, the tears that filled her eyes were tears of love.\n\nShane turned onto his back and settled Faith against his side with her head pillowed on his good shoulder. He was exhausted, spent, which was to be expected, but there were other feelings he hadn't expected. Rightness, comfort, and a fullness in his chest he refused to name.\n\nHe had sought physical release in Faith's arms. He had told himself this would be only to ease the restless ache in his gut and to give Faith a few hours of escape from her worries. He hadn't expected the sweetness, the warmth this completion had brought. In giving him her body, Faith had given him much more. In her arms he had felt peace and tenderness and understanding.\n\nFor one unguarded moment he let himself wonder what it would be like to take what she offered\u2014a haven, salvation, a place to rest and heal a world-weary heart. The thought of it was so beautiful, so tempting, it was frightening.\n\n\"I never knew,\" Faith whispered, her breath warm against his cooling skin. \"In twelve years of marriage, I never knew anything like this.\"\n\nSilently Shane cursed the bastard who had married this gentle, giving woman only to further his career. William Gerrard deserved to be imprisoned for that alone.\n\nHis hand came up to stroke her hair possessively. \"Why did you stay with him?\" he asked, fighting to keep the harsh edge from his voice. \"Did you love him?\"\n\n\"At first,\" she said with a sad smile. \"William can be very charming when it suits him. He swept me off my feet. Then, after he won his Senate seat and we moved to Washington, his interest in me waned. I blamed his job. I blamed myself. Eventually I got around to blaming William, but I made the mistake of believing he could change, that I could change him. I couldn't.\"\n\n\"Twelve years is a long time to spend trying to change somebody.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'd given up hope on him long before that.\"\n\n\"Then why did you stay with the bastard?\" At one time he might have suspected her of marrying Gerrard for his money or for the glamour or power, but no such suspicions surfaced now. He had come to trust Faith as he trusted very few people.\n\n\"Because I'd taken a vow,\" she said, feeling both foolish and defensive. \"I'd pledged to be his wife for better or worse. I believe in those vows. I know that sounds old-fashioned, but I do.\"\n\nShane wrapped his arms around her and pressed a kiss to her forehead. The cynic in him labeled her naive, but if she had been naive, she was also good and honest and sincere. Those were qualities he'd seen precious little of in the last few years. It made him feel old and jaded now to lie there with this treasure of a woman in his arms. He didn't deserve the chance to touch her, but damned if he could stay away from her.\n\nThe only thing he could offer her was protection from the man who had so callously used her. And that Shane pledged to her and to himself. \"He'll never hurt you again, Faith. I'll see to it.\"\n\n# EIGHT\n\nFAITH STUDIED SHANE'S face in the soft light of predawn. He frowned even in his sleep. She reached out and gently rubbed at the line between his dark eyebrows with the pad of her thumb, and a wave of love swept through her as he grumbled and tried to snuggle closer.\n\nHe'd been such a tender lover. Insatiable but tender, and considerate of their difference in size and of her lack of experience. She imagined Shane had been called many things in his time, and tender was probably not at the head of the list; but he had been tender with her, and she loved him for it.\n\nCarefully, skillfully he had shown her fulfillment as she had never known it. He'd coaxed her away from inhibitions and uncertainties. He'd made her acutely aware of her femininity and her potential for sensuality. As they had made love, the cynical man had faded away, leaving a man she wanted to give her heart to, a sensitive man with musician's hands and the soul of a poet.\n\nWhen he opened his eyes and looked across the pillow at her, Faith knew she had to tell him. It might have been safer to say nothing. Shane would no doubt have preferred she say nothing. But she couldn't keep this love to herself. Her heart was overflowing with it. There was every chance he wouldn't accept it, but Faith knew she had to offer it to him nevertheless.\n\n\"I want to tell you something,\" she whispered, lifting her hand to touch his beard-roughened cheek.\n\nShane turned his head and pressed a kiss to her palm. \"What?\"\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\nNothing had prepared Shane for the feelings that rushed through him at those words. The power of it was stunning... and terrifying. He raised up on one elbow and looked down at Faith, his ready argument against emotional entanglement sticking in his throat like a tennis ball.\n\nLord, she was so pretty, so sweet, and everything that was in her heart was in her eyes as well.\n\nLonging surged within him to battle with logic. He couldn't let this happen. He had drawn the line, set the rules of their relationship for a reason. They couldn't step across that line. It wasn't safe.\n\n\"Faith, no\u2014\"\n\nShe silenced his denial with two slender fingers pressed to his lips. \"I know it's not something you wanted to hear, Shane. I don't expect you to respond in kind. But you said you wanted us to be honest about our feelings up front, so that's what I'm doing.\"\n\n\"Faith, I\u2014we\u2014damn.\" He bit back a sigh. This was certainly proving his point. His emotions were short-circuiting his brain. All he wanted to do was look down at her. She was so lovely, so fragile, like something made of fine porcelain. He touched her cheek as if to assure himself she was indeed real. Then his fingers trailed down to her throat to brush across the gold heart she wore. When he spoke again, he chose his words carefully. The last thing he wanted was to hurt her. \"Honey, you're in a high-stress situation. I'm here to protect you. We're attracted to each other. What you're feeling\u2014\"\n\n\"Is love,\" Faith said, heading him off at the pass.\n\n\"It's\u2014\"\n\n\"Love,\" she insisted, her delicate brows lowering over her eyes. The hardheaded man. He may not have appreciated the sentiment, but she wasn't about to let him talk her out of it either. \"I know what's in my own heart, Shane. I can't say I was very happy about it when I first figured it out, but I can't deny it either. I love you whether we like it or not.\"\n\nA ghost of a smile turned up the corners of Faith's lips as she took in Shane's dark expression. She'd been right in thinking he wouldn't want the love she offered, the love he needed, the love she needed to give. Being right was small consolation, but the struggle he seemed to be waging within himself gave life to a spark of hope. Maybe, if they could just have a little time together, maybe...\n\nMaybe what, Faith, she asked herself. Maybe Shane would change, the way she had believed William would change? Maybe they could live happily ever after? Maybe she was being a fool.\n\n\"I have to go back to my room,\" she whispered as tears filled her eyes. She blinked them back determinedly. \"Lindy will be getting up soon. I just wanted you to know how I feel. We can have a few weeks together; I'll take whatever you're willing to give me. But if you decide you want more, we can have more.\"\n\nWe can have forever, she added silently.\n\nShe started to turn away from him to slide out of bed, but Shane's big hand on her shoulder stopped her. Without saying a word, he bent down and settled his mouth against hers in a hot, deep kiss, a kiss of raw, primitive possession. He swept a hand down her side to her hip to steady her as he kneed her thighs apart and eased into her with one slow thrust. Faith moaned at the feel of him filling her. Automatically her hips lifted to make his entrance easier.\n\n\"This is what I can give you, Faith,\" he murmured darkly against her lips as his body moved against her and within her, seeking the mind-numbing solace he found only with her.\n\nFaith wrapped her arms around him and held him tight, riding out the storm of passion with him and praying there would be something left of her heart when it was all over.\n\n\"Mama, I want toast,\" Lindy announced, kneeling on her chair at the kitchen table, her place setting overrun with tiny plastic dinosaurs.\n\n\"Yes, sweetie, I know,\" Faith said. She was trying simultaneously to handle the coffee maker and the toaster while keeping one eye on the eggs that were cooking on the stove.\n\n\"I'll do the coffee,\" Alaina volunteered as she and Jayne entered the room. She took the pot from Faith's slightly trembling hand, giving her friend a sharp, speculative glance. \"You look tired. Did you get any sleep last night?\"\n\nFaith felt her cheeks flush instantly. She'd hardly slept a wink, but the reason had nothing to do with insomnia. \"Um\u2014I'm all right,\" she mumbled.\n\nBlast it, couldn't she be a little more sophisticated? Did she have to blush as if Alaina had come right out and asked if she'd just spent the last six hours between the sheets with Shane Callan? And for heaven's sake, she was a grown woman. It wasn't as if Shane was the first man she'd ever gone to bed with.\n\nHe was the second.\n\nHe was the only man she'd ever made love with in the truest sense of the term\u2014whether he admitted his heart was involved or not. She had to believe it was. Nothing that beautiful had ever come from simple physical need.\n\n\"Mama, can I have my toast now?\"\n\n\"Yes, Lindy, I'm coming.\" She put her daughter's breakfast on a plate and dropped it off at the table on her way to check the eggs.\n\nLindy made a face and lifted one square of bread by the corner. \"I don't want this kind.\"\n\n\"It's the only kind we have.\"\n\n\"I want the kind with raisins.\"\n\n\"We're all out of the raisin kind.\"\n\n\"Can we go to the beach today?\"\n\n\"No, honey, not today,\" Faith said, sighing, putting the teakettle on to heat. \"Mama's got work to do.\"\n\n\"Work, work, work,\" Lindy grumbled, folding her toast in half and mushing it with her fist. \"All grown-ups ever do is work.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know about that, sugar plum,\" Jayne said, pausing in her task of pouring orange juice to lean across the table and tweak Lindy's nose. \"Grown-ups have fun sometimes too, don't we, Faith?\"\n\nFaith couldn't have looked more guilty had she been wearing a sign around her neck that spelled out \"strumpet\" in big glossy red letters. \"Who, me?\"\n\nAlaina's mouth lifted in a wry smile as she leaned back against the counter and crossed her arms. \"I believe the question was rhetorical, not accusatory. At any rate, most kinds of fun aren't against the law, are they, Mr. Callan?\"\n\nIf Faith's cheeks had been red before, they were fuchsia now as she looked up and her gaze collided with Shane's. He strolled into the kitchen looking impossibly handsome in black jeans and a gray polo shirt, his black hair glistening, wet from his shower. It seemed to Faith the look in his eyes was blatantly male and possessive as he came toward her. He didn't even glance at Alaina when he answered her.\n\n\"Like you said, counselor, a rhetorical question.\"\n\nHe stopped within inches of Faith\u2014too close for his own sanity\u2014and lifted a hand to brush his knuckles against her cheek. He had told himself in the shower that he was going to take a step back from her, cool things off a little so she could get some perspective. But his stern, cold dictates had vaporized the instant he'd walked into the kitchen. It seemed his knack for detachment couldn't hold a candle to Faith's appeal. Looking at her now, all he wanted to do was wrap her up in his arms and carry her back to bed. If he hadn't been dimly aware of their captive audience, he would have done just that.\n\nDammit, she brought every primitive feeling he had rushing to the surface. Every time he got within three feet of her he felt more like a caveman than a man with an Ivy League education. When Faith looked up at him the way she was doing now, her big brown eyes all soft and shining, he felt as if he were going to go up in smoke\u2014not unlike the pan of scrambled eggs on the stove.\n\n\"Faith?\"\n\n\"Hmmm?\" she asked as the air seeped out of her lungs. During the long night her body had become very well acquainted with Shane's, to the point that the slightest signal from him could set off every sensual alarm she had. At the moment her whole body was humming. It was a wonder she even heard him.\n\n\"Your eggs are burning,\" he said with a devastatingly soft, sexy smile.\n\n\"They're not the only thing,\" Jayne mumbled from her ringside seat. Alaina shushed her as she slid down on a chair.\n\nFaith's eyes rounded in shock as she turned back to her smoking pan. She yanked it off the burner and tossed the contents with a spatula to see if the food was salvageable.\n\n\"I don't want any eggs, Mama,\" Lindy announced as she toddled across the floor to take Shane by the hand. She sent him her sunny smile. \"Come and have some toast, Shane. I'm sorry it's not the kind with raisins.\"\n\nFaith managed to sit through a half hour of breakfast conversation without finishing a single piece of raisinless toast. While her friends discussed the errands they had to run and Lindy lobbied Shane for another day at the beach, Faith sipped her tea and fidgeted.\n\nShe wasn't quite certain how she was supposed to act. She'd never had a lover before. Including her husband, she added ruefully. One night with Shane made twelve years with William Gerrard pale in comparison.\n\n\"Earth to Faith. Earth to Faith,\" Jayne called across the table, waving a hand back and forth in front of her.\n\nFaith jerked to attention, blushing furiously. \"What? I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"And I thought I was the flake of the Fearsome Foursome!\" Jayne drawled, shaking her head. She stared into Faith's eyes and spoke very distinctly, as if English were Faith's second language. \"Honey, what are your plans for the day?\"\n\n\"Oh, um, I've got book work to do, then I thought I'd put the finishing touches on the captain's suite and some of the other guest rooms.\"\n\n\"We could go to the beach,\" Lindy suggested hopefully.\n\n\"Not today, Lindy,\" Faith said firmly, pinning her daughter with a stern look. \"Now I don't want to hear another word about it. If you're finished with your breakfast, go brush your teeth.\"\n\nSullen, Lindy gathered up her herd of plastic dinosaurs and slid down off her chair. She made the most of her exit, giving her mother a disappointed, teary-eyed glare. \"When I'm a mama, I'm gonna take my babies to the beach _every_ day!\"\n\nFaith heaved a sigh, propping her chin in one hand and letting the other fall to the tabletop. \"Great. Now I'm Attila the Mom.\"\n\nShane reached over and gave her hand a squeeze, a move that drew not only Faith's surprised gaze but Jayne's and Alaina's as well. They all stared at him, slack-jawed. Hell, Shane thought, he was shocked himself, but the action had been automatic. It felt like the right thing to do, and he was a man who usually trusted his instincts. Swallowing down his confusion, he said, \"She'll get over it.\"\n\nThe smile of appreciation Faith sent him hit him like a hammer between the eyes. Lord, what was the matter with him? All this woman had to do was glance at him and he damn near forgot who he was and what he was doing. And who was he to offer sage advice? What the hell did he know about kids, anyway? Nothing. He had no business offering advice. He had no business getting involved with Faith and her daughter at all. He was there to do a job.\n\nAbruptly he pushed his chair back from the table and stood. \"I've got rounds to make,\" he said, suddenly all businesslike. \"I have to check with my men on the perimeter.\"\n\n\"You might want to look in on Mr. Matthews in the caretaker's cottage,\" Alaina suggested dryly. \"I think he and Mr. Fitz are on the brink of divorce.\"\n\n\"I think their karmas clash,\" Jayne said.\n\nShane didn't so much as crack a smile. He started to turn away, but Faith's voice stopped him.\n\n\"Shane,\" she said softly. \"Thank you.\"\n\nShe watched him struggle to mask confused emotions. His granite will won out, and he merely gave her a curt nod, then strode purposefully out of the room. The silence he left in his wake was almost painful.\n\nFinally Jayne cleared her throat and said delicately, \"Correct me if I'm wrong here, honey, but I think we just witnessed a very significant moment.\"\n\nFaith's only answer was another delicate blush. How was she supposed to explain what was going on between Shane and herself when even she wasn't certain where they were headed?\n\nAlaina's expression was a cross between wary and worried. \"I thought you didn't want to get involved with him.\"\n\n\"I don't seem to have a choice,\" Faith said, staring at the door Shane had left through. \"I'm in love with him.\"\n\nThe captain's suite was Faith's favorite room in the inn. Located on the second floor of the Victorian part of the house, Captain Dugan's bedroom had a large window that overlooked the ocean and allowed the afternoon sun to spill in. The furniture in the room was big and masculine\u2014a massive mahogany bed with a flat canopy of cream-and-black brocade, marble-topped tables, an enormous chest of drawers, a regal-looking William and Mary arm chair with a black velvet seat cushion.\n\nShe had painted the room a rich shade of cream and accented it with pristine white and deep red. Many of the captain's personal possessions had been used as decorative pieces, including his brass-bound sea chest, which now served as a storage place for extra blankets at the foot of the bed. Adjacent to the bedroom was a luxurious bath, and beyond that was a small, comfortable sitting room. Faith was certain this suite would quickly become a favorite with patrons of the inn.\n\nDeep in thought, she wandered around the bedroom tucking potpourri sachets into drawers, wondering what to do about Shane. When the bedroom door swung open and he stepped inside, her heart squeezed painfully at his expression. He was definitely back to being guarded and wary. Her gentle lover had vanished, slipped behind his cold wall of isolation.\n\n\"So,\" he said, his gaze roaming the elegantly appointed room, \"this is where the infamous captain spent his nights.\"\n\n\"Yes. I think he still does.\" She managed a small laugh at the sharp glance her statement earned her. \"Things get moved around in this room without my help.\" She motioned to a small, perfectly horrible, oil painting of a ship that hung above the dresser. \"Twice I've taken that down and put it in the attic. Twice it's been back hanging on that wall the next morning. I'm told the ship in the painting was the captain's favorite.\"\n\nShane scowled at both the painting and the implication, and began prowling around the room, taking in every detail of the walls and floorboards.\n\nFaith watched him with weary amusement. Ever the skeptic, she thought with a dying smile. He was skeptical about everything\u2014love included. In fact, it was probably at the head of his list. She had taken hope for a few moments this morning at the breakfast table when he had reached out to give her support. Shane's concern for her had overridden his deep-seated sense of caution, but his guard had quickly slipped back into place.\n\nNow he flipped the light on in the closet and walked in, running his fingertips along the newly painted walls, pressing gently. Faith rolled her eyes as she crossed her arms over her chest and leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb. \"Shane, you've been over every inch of this house. There are no secret passages.\"\n\n\"I'm just doing my job.\"\n\n\"So you keep reminding me,\" she muttered, unable to keep the bitter edge from her voice.\n\nHe turned and looked at her, his gray eyes stormy. \"It's best if we both remember why I'm here.\"\n\n\"You're right, of course,\" Faith said, her voice suddenly tight with unshed tears. She pushed herself away from the closet door and went to stand by the table where her sachet supplies were neatly laid out. She stared down at the squares of lace, bits of satin ribbon, and dish of fragrant rose petals and lavender, unable to work up the strength to touch any of it.\n\nShe didn't have any right to hurt, she thought. Shane had warned her he couldn't get involved. But to be perfectly honest, she had to admit the romantic in her had never quite accepted that. All along she had secretly believed giving him her love would unlock his heart and free him to love her in return.\n\nWould she never learn?\n\nShane swore under his breath and left his search to follow her. He stood behind her, staring at the rigid set of her slender shoulders, willing himself not to touch her. \"Faith, I don't want to hurt you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she whispered, reaching down deep inside for a scrap of strength and wondering when that well was going to run dry. \"I'm a big girl. I knew the rules going in. You don't have to worry about me. I told you I didn't expect promises. Please don't let what I said this morning ruin what time we have together.\"\n\n\"You didn't ruin anything,\" he said thickly, not surprised that his resolve was crumbling. He could no more keep from touching her than he could keep from breathing. His hands came up to cup her shoulders, his fingers gently rubbing at the tension in her muscles. \"It's just... more complicated now.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she murmured automatically. Immediately she wanted to take the words back. What did she have to be sorry for?\n\n\"No,\" she said angrily, turning to face him with dark eyes blazing. \"I'm tired of having to apologize. I love you, and I won't feel sorry for it. If that makes your job or your life complicated, that's just too darn bad.\"\n\nShane swore\u2014more at the conflict within himself than at Faith. His professionalism was being torn to shreds because of his attraction to this woman. The frightening thing was that a part of him didn't give a damn. Arguments chased each other around in his head. All the while he stared down at Faith's heart-shaped face, the defiant expression she wore. Slowly logic receded until all he could focus on was the lush bow of her mouth and the heat of desire glowing inside him.\n\nFaith trembled as Shane's hands tightened on her shoulders, his fingers biting into her flesh, burning her through the fabric of her cotton sweater. The look he wore was primitive, almost savage. His eyes held a silver light that seemed capable of boring straight through her. A muscle in his strong jaw flexed as he lowered his head toward hers.\n\n\"You make me crazy,\" he said, his voice little more than a growl.\n\nThen his mouth was on hers, taking, plundering, and Faith could hear nothing but the blood pounding in her ears. The heat that flared between them burned away everything but desire. She surrendered to it immediately, melting against Shane's big hard body, her hands going up to clutch at his broad shoulders. She welcomed the thrust of his tongue, drinking in the taste of him.\n\nFor Shane arousal was instantaneous. The truth was it had never left him. Even after a night of making love with her, he wanted more. Desire had not been burned out; he had simply banked it, and now it flared up full force, searing him with an inner heat that demanded release.\n\nHe swept a hand down the curve of Faith's supple back to cup her bottom, his fingers kneading her soft flesh and gathering up the fabric of her gauzy cotton skirt. Lifting her, he pulled her hips to his, pressing her against the hard ridge of his masculinity. A deep groan rumbled up from his chest as Faith ran her leg up the outside of his thigh and squirmed to get even closer to him.\n\nThe shrill ring of the telephone brought them both back from the edge of sensual oblivion. It was on the tip of Shane's tongue to tell Faith to let the damn thing ring, but he caught himself at the last instant and stood her away from him.\n\nThis could be the call that would break the case. The case was why he was there.\n\nFaith went to the table beside the bed, trembling so, she thought it was a wonder she couldn't hear her knees knocking together. It was simply amazing the way that man could sap the strength from her. Amazing and exciting. And frightening. Taking a deep breath, she tried to clear her head before she picked up the receiver.\n\n\"Keepsake Inn. Faith Kincaid speaking.\"\n\n\"Hello, Faith.\"\n\nFear shot through her like a bolt of lightning at the sound of the too-familiar whisper. She jerked around to face Shane, pale and wide-eyed, her heart pounding. His face grim, he came forward and took her free hand, his strong grasp offering her support and comfort.\n\n\"Have you seen the error of your ways?\"\n\nTrying to draw strength from Shane's steady gaze, Faith swallowed down the knot in her throat and said, \"I'm going to testify.\"\n\n\"That's a bad decision, sweet. You know I'm watching you, don't you? You and your darling daughter. You wouldn't want anything bad to happen to little Lindy, now would you?\"\n\nFaith's stomach rolled over at the thought of this faceless monster even knowing about Lindy. It was hard enough that this ugliness should intrude on her own life, but for it to touch Lindy in any way... she couldn't bear the idea.\n\n\"I could take her and kill her. I could take her anytime I want.\"\n\nAbruptly it was all too much. The tension that had been building over the course of this terrorism crested with the power of a tidal wave, sweeping Faith's control away. \"Stop it!\" she screamed into the phone. \"Just stop it! Leave us alone!\"\n\nShe slammed down the receiver, her face wet with tears as she turned and was met by Shane's solid form. She sagged against him like a rag doll as he pulled her into his embrace, his arms banding around her like steel.\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\n\"Lindy,\" she said between choking sobs. A fresh wave of fear surged through her. She tried to push herself away from Shane, but he held firm. \"Please,\" she begged, struggling in his grasp. \"I have to see Lindy.\"\n\nShane released her. Matthews would have the conversation on tape. It seemed much more important at the moment to let Faith go to her daughter. He followed her down the grand staircase, anger rolling in his gut. When he got his hands on the bastard who was doing this to her...\n\n\"Lindy!\" Faith called, running down the hall to her daughter's bedroom. Terror slammed into her anew when she found the room empty and silent, the only movement the curtains stirring in the breeze. \"Lindy?\"\n\nHer questioning call was met with ominous silence.\n\n\"Lindy!\" she yelled, panic clawing at her as she recalled the words _I could take her and kill her_. The fear that exploded inside her was absolute and all consuming and more terrible than anything she had ever experienced or even imagined. Her child was missing.\n\nShe nearly screamed when Shane's hands closed on her shoulders and he gave her a shake. \"Faith, calm down,\" he ordered.\n\n\"I can't find Lindy,\" she choked out, her eyes wild. \"Shane, I can't find my daughter. He said he'd kill her. He said he'd kill my baby!\"\n\nShane called on the cool professionalism he was known for. \"We'll find her, honey. She's probably playing in some other part of the house or out in the yard. He can't get to her here.\"\n\n\"He said he'd kill her,\" Faith repeated, anguish tearing her apart inside. How could anyone be so vicious as to hurt an innocent child? \"She's just a baby.\"\n\n\"We'll find her,\" Shane promised. \"He can't get to her, Faith.\"\n\nThey searched the house. Faith, Shane, Agent Matthews, and Mr. Fitz went over every inch of the sprawling mix of structures that made up the inn. They found no trace of Lindy.\n\nShane's anxiety grew as they moved outside and went through the outbuildings on the property. Sweet, trusting Lindy. If that monster or some accomplice of his had somehow slipped through their security and gotten close to her, she would never have thought to be frightened.\n\nThe search party met on the lawn on the north side of the house. Fitz tugged anxiously at his gray beard. Matthews looked grim. Faith was on the verge of hysteria. Shane took her in his arms, needing to comfort her and not giving a damn about what his fellow agent would think.\n\n\"We'll find her,\" he said, half shouting to be heard above the wind and the sound of the sea crashing against the beach below them.\n\nThe beach.\n\nHis heart pounding, Shane bolted for the edge of the cliff and the wooden steps that snaked down it. He hit the beach running, sand kicking up behind him. Frantically his eyes scanned the area. For the first time in a long, long time he started praying, praying that Lindy hadn't fallen over the cliff or wandered too close to the surf and been swept out by the treacherous waves this coast was known for.\n\nThen he spotted her. He stopped in his tracks, air sawing in and out of his lungs like hot razors. Lindy sat in the sand, half-hidden behind a boulder, playing happily with her herd of plastic dinosaurs. Her ever-present doll was propped up against the rock, watching the proceedings with one eye stuck shut. She danced her dinosaurs around a lopsided sand castle, all the while singing at the top of her lungs \"Don't Worry, Be Happy.\"\n\nRelief rolled over Shane with all the power of the waves that were crashing against the shore fifty feet away, leaving him so weak he nearly went down on his knees. Lindy looked up at him suddenly, and a smile lit up her pixie face like a sunbeam.\n\n\"Hi, Shane! Did you come to play with me?\"\n\nHe couldn't answer her for the knot in his throat.\n\nFaith ran across the sand, her legs feeling like lead, her lungs on fire. She pushed past Shane and dropped down in the midst of the dinosaurs, scooping her daughter into her arms. Sobbing, she hugged Lindy until the little girl squirmed.\n\n\"Oh, baby, you're safe!\" With a shaking hand she brushed at her child's silky red-gold curls. \"I was so scared!\"\n\nLindy's lip quivered as she looked at her mother. \"Don't cry, Mama. I don't like it when you cry.\"\n\nFaith tried to smile and laugh, but in the end all she could do was hold her baby close and let go of all the tears fear had built inside her.\n\n\"I could have lost her.\"\n\nFaith sat on the edge of Lindy's bed, watching her daughter sleep, running her fingertips over her child's hair. Hours had passed since the crisis of the afternoon, and still the fear lay just under the facade of her calm, threatening to erupt at any second.\n\nShe felt as if something had shattered both inside her and around her. The last of her sense of safety had been fragmented. Through all of this hideous business the one thing Faith had clung to was the knowledge that she would always have Lindy. Now that too had been snatched away from her.\n\nShe'd been forced to realize that Lindy could be taken away. In the blink of an eye her child could be gone. It hadn't happened today. Today Lindy had simply taken herself to the beach. But that didn't mean it wouldn't happen in the future. Faith could still hear that evil silky voice promising to kill the most important person in her life\u2014her child. A shudder snaked through her body and tears welled up in her eyes yet again.\n\n\"I love her so much,\" she murmured brokenly. \"I'd die if something happened to her.\"\n\n\"She's all right, Faith,\" Shane said softly. With a gentle grip he took her arm and drew her up from the bed and gathered her close against him, not bothering to wonder where all this tenderness was coming from. \"We'll make sure nothing happens to her. She'll have a full-time babysitter from now on. And tomorrow you're having a fence installed with a locked gate at the top of those steps.\"\n\nFaith looked up at him, her expression so bleak it nearly broke his heart. As the tears slipped past her dark lashes and spilled down her cheeks, she said, \"I've never been so scared.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nHe knew because the same fear had raked its talons through him, the force of it leaving him shaken. Not so long ago Shane had thought himself incapable of caring that deeply. He had believed the job had robbed him of that basic human quality, but he'd been wrong.\n\nHe ran a hand into Faith's tangled curls and eased her head to his chest where she wept silently, her tears soaking into his shirt. She felt so small in his arms, so fragile, so in need of his protection.\n\n\"Come on, honey,\" he murmured, leading her toward the door that connected her room to Lindy's. \"You need to get some rest.\"\n\nReluctantly Faith went with him. She was so exhausted she couldn't think straight. Shane was probably right, she needed rest. But the thought of being alone with her fear made her throat tighten convulsively.\n\n\"Don't leave me,\" she whispered.\n\nQuietly closing and locking the door that connected the two rooms, Shane turned to face her. With no thought about professionalism or detachment or objectivity, he took her in his arms and hugged her. Rubbing his cheek against the top of her head, he whispered, \"I won't leave you.\"\n\nHe bent his head and softly kissed the remnants of her tears from her pale cheeks. Faith murmured his name, her trembling hands running up and down the bulging muscles of his arms. He was so strong, so solid, and he possessed the power to make her forget everything. In his arms she could lose herself, she could escape.\n\nShe tilted her face up, her trembling mouth capturing his in a kiss that was as soft and fragile as a rose petal. When she spoke, the plea was in her eyes as well as her voice. \"Make love to me, Shane. Please. I need you.\"\n\nShane's heart ached as he looked down at her. He didn't question her need or her motives. In truth he needed this union as badly as Faith did. She needed to lose herself in the sweetness of their lovemaking. He needed to comfort her and reassure himself that she was safe, that she was his to care for and protect.\n\nThey came together not in a blaze of passion, but with exquisite tenderness and a deep hunger that each sought to prolong. Faith savored every kiss, every caress, blocking her mind to everything but her need to be loved by this man. She focused on the incredible sensations he aroused in her body as he lavished attention on her breasts with his mouth and probed the honeyed warmth between her thighs with his gentle musician's fingers. Desire built slowly over the foundation of desperation, until she felt encompassed by it.\n\n\"Shane.\" She groaned his name as her fingernails raked the hard muscles of his back. \"Now. Please take me now.\"\n\nAt her command he slid into her in one powerful thrust, filling the tight hot sheath of her womanhood, reaching deep to stroke the very center of her need. Faith let go the last tattered threads of her control. Wrapping her legs around his lean hips, she surged upward beneath him, meeting his powerful thrusts and begging for more, begging for the ecstasy that would blind her to all else.\n\nShane felt the end rushing toward them. He wrapped one strong arm around Faith, lifting her so that her nipples burrowed through his chest hair to rub against his burning flesh. He brushed her damp hair back from her face and kissed her deeply, almost wildly, thrusting his tongue into her mouth in the same rhythm as he thrust himself between her legs, branding her as his in the most basic way he could.\n\nFaith's hands stroked down his back to his hips, her fingers digging into the tight muscles of his buttocks. With one last stroke he took her over the edge, and the inner pulsing that signaled her fulfillment triggered his. A hoarse cry tearing from his throat, Shane arched against her and spilled himself in her.\n\n\"I love you,\" Faith whispered as Shane's body relaxed on top of her, his weight bearing down on her with a delicious warmth. Her lips brushed across the roughness of his evening beard as she murmured the words again, then fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.\n\nShane raised up on one elbow above her and studied her face in the soft light from the bedside lamp. _I love you_. He didn't say the words aloud, but they reverberated throughout his whole being. Despite all his warnings he had fallen in love with Faith Kincaid.\n\nHe'd never felt so vulnerable in his life. And, at the same time, the truth warmed him. After years of living in cold gray shadows, Faith's love was reaching out to him like a beacon. This sweet, good woman was offering him a chance to start over, and every weary corner of his warrior's heart wanted to accept.\n\nIt felt as if he were standing on a threshold with the darkness of his past behind him and the possibility of a future with Faith before him. Faith was standing in that doorway as well. Their pasts were intertwined now, and until they could shut that door, until this case was over, their future would have to wait.\n\nStill, Shane thought as Faith cuddled close against him, he had a future, and for the first time in a long time it didn't look bleak or empty.\n\n# NINE\n\n\"WE TRACED THE call to a phone booth in Mendocino,\" Shane reported, drumming his fingertips on the computer printout that lay on the table before him.\n\n\"And?\" John Banks prompted, his typically sardonic tone not made any more pleasant by the fact that he'd dragged himself out of bed and onto a plane at the crack of dawn. His thick head of steel gray hair was so unruly, he looked as though he had come through a wind tunnel. He needed a shave. His disposition was as rumpled as the dark suit that covered his sturdy frame.\n\n\"No distinguishable prints. Fiber evidence isn't worth a damn at this point\u2014a hundred people go in and out of that phone booth every day.\"\n\n\"Wonderful.\" Banks pulled off his glasses to rub at the bridge of his big nose. Replacing them, he stabbed Shane with a pointed look.\n\n\"He's playing games with us,\" Shane said. \"Each of the letters he's sent has a different postmark. Each of the calls we've managed to trace has been from a different town\u2014all within a fifty-mile radius. We've got them on tape, but his voice is either too muffled or mechanically altered to make them of any use.\"\n\n\"Suggestions?\"\n\n\"I want Faith and Lindy moved to a safe house,\" Shane said in a tone of voice that did not invite an opposing opinion. He took a strong pull on his cigarette and leveled his gaze at Faith, daring her to defy his plan.\n\nThey had been over this already. At three o'clock in the morning. Shane had awakened to find Faith pacing back and forth beside her bed, anxious and angry over the situation her ex-husband had embroiled her in and the feelings of helplessness that had all but overwhelmed her.\n\nNow they sat at one of the larger tables in the inn's dining room with afternoon light streaming in through the tall windows. The setting was different, but it was quite clear by the angle of Faith's chin that the argument was going to be the same. Under all her sweetness, behind those gorgeous brown eyes the lady had a true Irish temper.\n\nThe door to the kitchen swung open, and Alaina and Jayne walked in, Alaina looking very official with her dark hair pulled back and black-rimmed glasses framing her arctic blue eyes. Jayne's expression was one of wide-eyed intensity, as if she had just been thrust into a scene in a movie. Shane bristled at the intrusion, but Faith cut him off before he could voice his objection.\n\n\"I asked Alaina and Jayne to sit in on this meeting,\" she said. Shane shot a burning look her way. Her slim shoulders stiffened, and she stuck her chin out a little farther. \"Alaina is my attorney, and Jayne is... well... Jayne is my friend.\"\n\n\"And spiritual confidant,\" Jayne added, sliding down on a chair.\n\nShane rolled his eyes. Banks frowned, but it was hard to discern whether he was frowning at the addition to the powwow or at Jayne's outfit\u2014a wildly flowered dirndl skirt that hung to her dainty ankles and an oversize Notre Dame T-shirt, the end of which was tied in a knot at her waist.\n\n\"As I was saying,\" Shane began in a tight voice, when the door swung open again and Mr. Fitz marched in.\n\n\"Here I am, as ye asked, lassie,\" he said, nodding purposefully to Faith as he tugged on the bottom of his smelly brown coat.\n\nThe glower Shane turned on her was almost enough to make Faith swallow her bravado. \"Are you the least familiar with the concept of the need-to-know basis?\" he questioned in a dark, silky voice.\n\n\"Um... Mr. Fitz lives here,\" she said, not wanting to admit she had wanted all these people present for moral support more than anything. \"He needs to know.\"\n\nShane's hands clenched the edge of the table like vise clamps as he struggled with his temper. \"Why don't we just call the Anastasia _Gazette_ and tell them everything that's going on here?\"\n\nFaith sniffed. \"You don't have to get snippy.\"\n\n\"I'm drawing the line here, Faith,\" Shane said through his teeth. He turned to the bearded, bedraggled caretaker. \"You can go, Mr. Fitz. You _don't_ need to know.\"\n\nThe old man's beetle brows waggled furiously as he gave Shane a hard stare, then turned and left, grumbling under his breath.\n\n\"Can we get on with this, please?\" Banks asked pointedly.\n\n\"Yes.\" Shane turned toward Faith once again and gave her a direct order. \"Pack what you need. We're moving you out of here.\"\n\n\"No.\" She watched Shane blow smoke out of his nose and wondered how much of it could be attributed to his mood rather than his cigarette. He didn't like her plan, but her mind was made up. She was all through playing this hellish waiting game. The scare she'd had over Lindy's disappearance the day before had pushed her to take the offensive. Her chin came up a notch, and she turned toward Banks, meeting his bloodshot green eyes with a fierce look.\n\n\"I want the man caught. I want him punished.\"\n\nBanks opened his mouth to comment, but Shane ignored his boss. All his attention was focused on the woman he had just discovered that he loved. \"I want you safe, Faith.\"\n\n\"That's what I want too,\" Faith insisted, her eyes begging him to understand. \"I can't go on like this, living in a state of terror, waiting and waiting. I can't go on letting William Gerrard victimize me.\"\n\nShane's stubborn expression didn't alter a fraction. \"Then we'll put you in a safe house until the trial is over.\"\n\n\"And then what? What do I do if you never catch this madman? Am I supposed to go on forever waiting for William's accomplice to take revenge?\"\n\nShe wasn't going to like his next suggestion, Shane knew, but it was the only foolproof solution. It was the solution the frightened man inside him wanted put into motion immediately\u2014anything to keep Faith safe. The idea of anyone hurting her or Lindy scared the hell out of him. \"Then we put you in the witness protection program.\"\n\n\"Absolutely not. This inn is my home, Shane, my dream. I came here with my friends to start a new life. I will not let William steal that from me. When I left him, I vowed I would never let him manipulate me again. That's exactly what I'd be doing if I went into hiding. I want this ended now.\" She turned back toward Banks. \"I want to set a trap.\"\n\nAgain when Banks opened his mouth to offer an opinion, Shane jumped in ahead of him. His low, rough voice had the razor edge of steel in it, which matched the glint in his gray eyes perfectly. He brought Faith's attention back to himself by snatching hold of her wrist, as if he thought he could change her mind with the strength of his grip. \"No way in hell am I letting you set yourself up as bait.\"\n\nFaith glared up at him, her dark eyes blazing. \"Isn't that what I've been all along?\"\n\nShane ground his teeth. He couldn't deny it. From the beginning the plan had been to construct a loose net around Faith in order to capture the missing piece from the DataScam puzzle. The difference\u2014the very big difference\u2014was that Shane hadn't been in love with Mrs. William Gerrard, the woman he had been sent here to watch over. He was very much in love with Faith Kincaid, the woman who had quietly stolen her way into his heart over the past few weeks.\n\nIt went against everything in him to allow her to put herself in danger. In fact, the idea terrified him. It was the kind of fear that reached deep inside, past all his barriers to the lonely man who had distanced himself from others all these years. He hated the feeling, hated the way it interfered with his logic.\n\n\"What you're talking about is entirely different.\" He fairly growled the words as he ground out his cigarette on the delicate china saucer before him.\n\nFaith met his fierce gaze without flinching. A corner of her mind was aware that Shane's attitude was stemming from something other than professional judgment, but she couldn't wonder about that right now. This was not the time for romantic fantasies. It was time for her to take control of her fate. \"What I'm talking about is putting an end to this so I can get on with my life.\"\n\n\"If we follow your damn fool plan, you may not have a life to get on with!\" Trying to dominate her with his size, he leaned over her until they were practically nose to nose. Faith didn't so much as blink.\n\n\"I'm with Shane,\" Alaina announced. Faith's expression clearly branded her a traitor, but that didn't sway Alaina's judgment. \"You're under no obligation to help catch this person, Faith. The burden of his arrest is on the government, as is your right to protection. As your legal counsel and your friend, I advise against your scheme.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm with Faith,\" Jayne said, always ready to stick up for the underdog. \"A person can live in suspense for only so long\u2014about the length of a Hitchcock movie. This has already gone on too long. And if Faith strongly feels it's her destiny to help capture this man... well, then maybe it's just her karma,\" she said with a decisive nod. She gave Faith her most supportive look. \"As long as there's a hundred cops around and no chance of you getting hurt, I think it's a good idea.\"\n\nAlaina slanted her a look. \"This from someone who thought mood rings were a good idea.\"\n\n\"They were,\" Jayne grumbled, crossing her arms over her meager bosom. \"Just because yours was always black\u2014\"\n\n\"May I interject a thought here?\" Banks questioned dryly, raising his big square hands in supplication. \"After all, I did just fly the width of the continent to be in on this discussion.\"\n\nShane shot his boss a glare of pure annoyance. \"What?\"\n\n\"I think Ms. Kincaid has a point.\"\n\nShane's answer to that was a rude snort. He slumped back in his chair like a sulky teenager and scowled at Faith. \"I think Ms. Kincaid has a screw loose.\"\n\nFaith's temper boiled over abruptly. She was operating on too much anxiety and too little sleep. Her chair scraped back against the polished wood floor as she pushed herself to her feet.\n\n\"Just what is your problem?\" she demanded, bracing her small hands on the tabletop and leaning over Shane for a change. \"You came here perfectly willing to use me as cheese to trap this rat. Now that I'm willing to play an active part in your plan, you suddenly want to put me under lock and key! It doesn't make any sense!\"\n\nShane shoved his own chair back from the table and stood, regaining his considerable height advantage.\n\n\"It doesn't have to make sense,\" he declared, his voice a menacing purr as he moved a step closer to her, his hands jammed at the waistband of his gray trousers.\n\nFaith leaned toward him, heedless of the muscle twitching in his rock-solid jaw. They'd been arguing this same point for hours, never getting past it. She'd had it with his wall of arrogant reserve.\n\n\"Why?\" she prodded, bent on breaking that cool control of his and getting a straight answer out of him. She inched ahead until the toes of her small canvas sneakers butted up against Shane's black loafers. \"Because you're in charge? Because you're on some typically male power trip that dictates you have to have control over a mere woman? Because\u2014\"\n\n\"Because I'm in love with you, dammit!\" he bellowed.\n\nThe room went suddenly, utterly still. Faith was certain she could hear the dust motes settling on the furniture. She stared at Shane with her mouth hanging open as his words sank in. He was in love with her. He was in love with her, but he didn't appear to be very happy about it. Well, she thought, her head swimming, that definitely gave them something in common.\n\nJohn Banks cleared his throat discreetly, breaking the tense silence. Faith hauled a deep breath into her lungs as she stepped away from the confrontation, her cheeks turning pink. Shane's broad shoulders sagged as he forced the tension from his muscles. He stared down at the floor, not quite able to believe he had just blurted out his deepest feelings\u2014in front of witnesses, no less.\n\n\"Agent Callan,\" Banks said neutrally as he rose from his chair, brushing ineffectually at his wrinkled suit, \"may I speak with you in private?\"\n\nWithout a word or a glance for anyone, Shane turned on his heel and led the way out through the French doors onto the stone terrace. He stalked to the farthest corner and faced the sea as he lit another cigarette, noting with grim amusement that his hands were shaking.\n\nDammit, he was losing it completely, losing his edge, losing his perspective... losing his heart... losing his mind.\n\n\"I should have taken the R and R,\" he said, wryly referring to the advice his boss had given him after the Silvanus bust.\n\nBanks leaned back against the stone wall that surrounded the terrace, his tired eyes calmly studying his best agent. \"What? And miss all this fun?\"\n\nShane shot him a venomous look that had the older man chuckling wearily and mumbling under his breath, \"The bigger they are...\"\n\nSidestepping the comment, Shane went back to what the professional in him considered the heart of the matter\u2014the case. \"I won't let her play bait in this game.\"\n\n\"She's serious about ending this thing, Shane. She wouldn't have called me in otherwise.\"\n\n\"I don't care how serious she is. She's not calling the shots here; she's a civilian.\"\n\n\"Yes, she's a civilian. Meaning she doesn't have to take orders from us. If she wants to walk down the main street of Anastasia and invite this creep to take a shot at her, you couldn't do a damn thing to stop her.\"\n\nShane's eyes narrowed and glittered dangerously as he said, \"You want to make a bet?\"\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" Banks asked with a sarcastic laugh. \"Hit her over the head with your dinosaur bone and carry her off to your cave? This is the modern era, pal. Ladies have minds of their own, believe me. Besides, she does have a say in this; it's her life we're tinkering with.\"\n\nLooking every inch like a cornered panther, Shane wheeled on the man who knew him better than anyone. \"I mean it, John. I won't have her put in any more danger than she's already in.\"\n\nBanks didn't flinch at the outburst, didn't blink. \"What's the problem here, Shane? What Faith is proposing is our original scenario taken just one step further. We're dealing with a single player, a single variable who may or may not be dangerous. So far he's been long on threats and short on action.\"\n\nShane gave a harsh laugh. \"That's supposed to make it okay? He hasn't actually killed her yet, so we should give him one good shot at it\u2014just in case he's really serious?\"\n\nIgnoring the sarcasm, Banks pressed on. \"We can make certain he won't have a chance of getting to her.\"\n\nShane's jaw clenched as he turned to stare out at the ocean again. His voice was low and strained. \"There's always a chance.\"\n\nFor a long moment the only sound was that of the ocean pounding the shore a hundred feet below. The wind whipped at Banks's wildly mussed hair as he turned and leaned his forearms on top of the stone wall. \"This isn't Quantico, Shane,\" he said softly, his voice almost gentle. \"She's not Ellie.\"\n\nShane's heart clenched at the comparison. He had loved Ellie Adamson. He had lost her because his emotions had clouded his judgment. Now he prayed his old friend and colleague was right, because he knew with bleak certainty that if he lost Faith, he would lose everything. She was his hope, his salvation, his one slim chance at a future that wasn't empty. What he felt for her was so intense, it was like a fire in his soul where for so long there had been nothing but cold and darkness.\n\n\"We'll do it her way.\" Banks made the announcement, then took a deep breath and changed the subject. \"Rumor has it Strauss bought a boat in Mazatlan. Looks like he's taking his act south after all.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Shane commented absently, not really listening. His gaze had fallen on Faith as she came through the French doors and onto the terrace.\n\nHe loved her. He'd forgotten how painful love could be. It was a relentless ache inside him\u2014knowing he loved her and being terrified of losing her.\n\nHow had such an innocent woman become entangled in such a dangerous situation? Faith didn't belong in the world of espionage. Of course, Shane acknowledged the irony, he never would have met her otherwise. Bitterly he wondered if they wouldn't have both been better off. Certainly she would have been.\n\n\"If you'll excuse me, Ms. Kincaid,\" Banks said, straightening away from the wall. He smoothed his hands over the lapels of his hopelessly rumpled suit and gave Faith a wry smile. \"I believe I'll go freshen up before we discuss this further.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Faith murmured, her eyes on Shane as his boss made his exit.\n\n\"You're getting your wish,\" he said flatly, tossing down his cigarette and grinding it against the flagstone with his shoe.\n\nFaith wondered if he realized the thing she had wished for most was his love. He was giving her that, albeit begrudgingly\u2014but it was a start at least. The next step was to close the door on her past so they could be free to look for a future together. It was clear by Shane's stony expression that her idea for achieving that end was the wish he was talking about.\n\nShe folded her arms over her chest as the wind cut through the yellow Shaker sweater she wore. \"It's the best way.\"\n\nHis expression incredulous, Shane barked a laugh. \"You're an expert?\"\n\nFaith met his angry gaze, though tears rose in her eyes. She was all through backing away from trouble, even when it came in a six-foot-four-inch package. \"I'm an expert at feeling helpless and afraid and manipulated. I have to put an end to that, Shane. Please understand.\"\n\nHe stared at her for a long moment, unable to reconcile the conflicts within himself. She was asking for his support, but he was simply too afraid to give it to her. She wanted to risk her life and have his blessing to do it. Anger burned in his chest. How dare she make him love her, then ask him to let her get killed. Dammit, why couldn't she have left his heart alone? That was where he belonged\u2014alone, in the shadows.\n\nEmotions roiling inside him like an angry sea, he said, \"Do what you want.\"\n\nFaith squeezed her eyes shut against the pain and held her breath as she listened to him walk away.\n\nIt wasn't a bad evening by coastal standards, Faith thought as she wandered away from the house, strolling through the lush grass twenty yards in from the edge of the cliff. Clouds had rolled in, promising rain later on, but the fog bank that was such a constant this time of year was nothing more than wisps tonight. Bits of it floated past her like thin strips of cotton candy. She tucked her hands into the pockets of her cardigan, hunched her shoulders against the chill, and walked on.\n\nDinner had come and gone, a vague memory of frozen pizza eaten during the discussion of the case. Setting a trap to catch the man terrorizing her had been Faith's idea, but she remembered little of the conversation. Shane had occupied her attention almost to the exclusion of all else.\n\nHer heart ached\u2014not so much because of him as _for_ him. He'd declared his love for her, but there was little doubt in her mind he would sooner have cut out his tongue. Immediately he had withdrawn from her\u2014physically and emotionally\u2014pulling back behind those gray granite walls of his. The tension that had thickened the air between them since that moment had driven her out of the house.\n\nOh, it wasn't Shane alone, she admitted as her steps led her down a gentle slope toward the caretaker's cottage. It was everything\u2014Shane, the case, thoughts of her life with William, memories of the Fearsome Foursome and their days at Notre Dame. All of it had crowded in on her until she'd begun to feel claustrophobic. As soon as she had tucked Lindy in and watched her daughter drift off to sleep, she had slipped out a side door in search of fresh air and solitude.\n\nShe let her mind drift now to thoughts of her friends\u2014Alaina and Jayne and Bryan. Their lives had taken such different paths. The dreams they had shared with one another had been altered or left behind or attained, only to discover there was no gold at the end of the rainbow. More than a decade had passed since they had each rushed off with youthful enthusiasm to find their futures. Life had led three of them to meet once again at the same crossroads, and together they had chosen the path that had brought them to Anastasia, to what had once been a fantasy dreamed up by college kids on spring break.\n\nWhat did the future hold for her now, Faith wondered as she stopped to look out at the sea that was as gray as liquid pewter. Absently she rubbed her keepsake between her thumb and forefinger, and her thoughts turned back to Shane.\n\nHe wasn't an easy man to love, but love him she did with all her heart. Could they have a future together? He'd told her from the start he couldn't make promises. A man like Shane was married to his profession, and it was a profession that demanded he be a loner. It was a profession that had locked a tender, sensitive man behind walls of cynicism.\n\nShe had to hope that after all this madness was past, she would be able to convince Shane the time had come for him to let go of the shadows shrouding his soul, because she was convinced right down to her toes that he was the man she had been waiting for forever. They could have a life together there at Keepsake, a nice, quiet life. And a family. Tingles fizzed through her like champagne bubbles at the thought of carrying Shane's baby, of holding it and nursing it at her breast while Shane looked on, proud and content.\n\nTurning away from the ocean, she let her gaze wander over the lovely, rolling land that belonged to her, to the eccentric complex of houses that made up her inn. Due west of her, beyond her long driveway and to the other side of the road, the wild meadowland gave way abruptly to rugged hills beautifully cloaked in deep green forest that looked nearly black now in the fading light. And just a few yards to the north of where she stood sat the caretaker's cottage\u2014a small whitewashed stone building with a slate roof and a bright red door. It marked the northern border of her property with a distinctively Irish flare.\n\nYes, this would be a perfect place to raise a family. It would be a perfect place for Shane to settle and shed the shell he'd encased his tender feelings in to protect them from a world of grim reality. Faith closed her eyes and pictured the scenes clearly in her mind, praying with all her might that she wasn't just wasting her time romanticizing, letting her heart chase rainbows.\n\nShe checked her watch and heaved a sigh. It was time to head back to the house. Banks wanted to go over the particulars of their plan once again. But as long as she was so close, she decided she would stop in to check on Agent Matthews first. The poor guy had scarcely been allowed to set foot out of the cottage because he was the expert when it came to the phone tap and that was where his equipment had been set up. She bit her lip and winced at the thought of having to share living space with the noisome, irascible Mr. Fitz. Del Matthews deserved some kind of commendation for sacrifice above and beyond the call of duty.\n\nBringing her fist up to knock at the door, Faith frowned when it moved inward on its hinges as she applied pressure. \"Mr. Matthews?\" she called as she stuck her head inside.\n\nThe place seemed dead quiet. The lights had not been turned on. Shadows swallowed up all the corners of the cluttered living room, giving the place an eerie cast. The furniture was old and worn. Books were jammed haphazardly into a built-in case in one wall. An angry-looking steelhead trout stared down at her from its mount above the cold stone fire place.\n\n\"Mr. Matthews?\" Faith called again, inching her way inside. \"Mr. Fitz?\"\n\nSilence was her answer. Gooseflesh rippled the skin on her arms, but she ignored it and continued on into the cottage.\n\nShe found Matthews in the small main-floor bedroom sitting with his back to the door, monitoring his machines, earphones clamped on his head. Faith breathed a sigh of relief, only briefly wondering why he hadn't turned on a light.\n\n\"There you are,\" she said, crossing the room. She stopped beside his chair, but the questions that had formed in her mind never made it any farther than her throat. She tapped Del Matthews on the shoulder, and his body suddenly slumped sideways and sprawled onto the floor at her feet.\n\nFaith clamped a hand to her chest as if to keep her racing heart from leaping out. For just an instant she froze as her mind absorbed the visual information. Del Matthews was dead. Realizing that, she took two steps backward, ready to whirl and run. She had to get to Shane.\n\n\"How thoughtful of you to come down to the cottage, Faith,\" a dark, silky voice murmured in her ear. \"You've saved me a great deal of trouble.\"\n\nAt the sound of that voice every muscle in her body tensed with a speed and intensity that was painful. She didn't have to turn around to know it was the barrel of a gun she felt pressing into her spine. The metallic taste of fear washed through her mouth. The need to see her tormentor surged through her but was overridden by the feel of the pistol in her back. The sensation of a weight crushing her chest reminded her to start breathing again, though the tension in her muscles prevented much more than a shallow gasp.\n\n\"Who are you? Why are you doing this?\" she asked, managing nothing more than a raw whisper.\n\n\"Why, I'm an old friend of Agent Callan's,\" he said, sarcasm edging his curiously pleasant, well-modulated tone. \"My name is Adam Strauss.\"\n\n# TEN\n\nSHANE SAT AT the piano, playing softly. As he had time and again in his past, he let the music sort his feelings through for him.\n\nHe loved Faith Kincaid. Damned if he hadn't wanted to throttle her for it earlier in the day, but he was getting used to the idea now. What he wasn't comfortable with was the plan to use her openly as bait to catch a possible killer.\n\nIt might have been a different story if they'd had a better handle on their perpetrator, but they didn't have a clue as to who the man might be, what his connection to Gerrard was, what his background was. The guy might have been a mild-mannered former mail clerk from DataTech, or he might have been a hired gun. Whoever he was, he hadn't taken one false step. Shane couldn't shake the feeling that the man was a pro.\n\nThe thought of setting Faith up for the creep made his blood run cold.\n\nBut they would deal with it. The decision had been made, and he would follow orders. But he vowed he would bring Faith through this without so much as a scratch. No harm was going to come to the woman he loved\u2014not if he had anything to say about it. And when it was over, he was going to tell her he loved her\u2014not shout it at her, not say it as if it were a curse, but whisper it to her, kiss the words across her skin, give voice to the feelings that had invaded his previously empty soul.\n\nHe was going to make love to her until there was no doubt in her mind about his feelings for her. The future still held uncertainties, but there was one thing he was feeling more and more sure of\u2014he wanted that future to include Faith...\n\n\"Hi, Shane.\"\n\n... and Lindy.\n\nShane's fingers stilled on the keys, and he turned, his heart warming instantly at the sight of little Lindy standing beside the piano bench in her Care Bears pajamas. She had a choke hold on her doll with her right arm and was rubbing at her sleepy eyes with her other hand.\n\n\"What are you doing out of bed, honey?\" he asked softly, not even trying to stop himself from reaching out to brush at the little girl's tousled blond curls.\n\nWithout waiting for an invitation, Lindy scrambled up onto the padded bench and situated herself on Shane's lap. \"I had a bad dream about dinosaurs. Where's my mama?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" He and Faith had gone their separate ways after dinner in a tacit agreement to cool off before they discussed the case further. \"Isn't she with Alaina and Jayne?\"\n\nLindy shook her head, an earnest expression on her face as she stared up at him with her thumb inching toward her mouth. \"Huh-uh.\"\n\nA sliver of fear skimmed his nerves, but Shane dismissed it. There was no danger. Faith wouldn't have left the property, and the property was under surveillance.\n\n\"I want my mama 'cause I need a hug real bad,\" Lindy said soberly. Her lower lip plumped out, and her brow furrowed with the threat of oncoming tears.\n\nLetting go a little more of his reserve, Shane scooped her up in his arms and held her tight, deeply inhaling Lindy's warm, powder-soft scent. \"How about if I give you a good hug now, and then we'll go together and find your mama?\"\n\nLindy hooked one arm around his neck and squeezed for all she was worth. \"Okie-dokie, but I still get a hug from Mama too.\"\n\n\"Deal.\"\n\nFaith wasn't in her office or her bedroom or his bedroom or the kitchen. Shane had to fight to keep the cold wave of fear from sweeping over him as he carried Lindy through the rambling old house. The place had twenty-seven rooms and four attics. Faith could be anywhere, putzing around with decorating details or hunting through old trunks left behind by long-dead residents. She liked to do that kind of thing when she was nervous or angry.\n\nMaybe she had gone upstairs to search for that ridiculous ghost she believed so strongly in. His brain spewed out a dozen possible simple explanations for her disappearance, while the sixth sense he had relied on so many times over the years told him with ever-increasing volume that something was very wrong.\n\nOne thing was certain. When he found her, he was going to take her in his arms and not let go of her until morning. He kicked himself mentally for having been such a bastard about the case. He could understand her need to end it, to try to get back some control over her life. He could have shown her that understanding instead of snarling at her like a wounded lion. He would\u2014just as soon as he found her.\n\nThey had been through a dozen rooms when Shane realized Lindy had fallen asleep in his arms. He gently tucked her into her bed, brushed a kiss to her cheek, and slipped back out into the hall, quietly closing the door behind him. When he turned, he was met by a grim-faced John Banks.\n\nImmediately Shane's pulse picked up a beat. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"We need to talk.\"\n\nThey stepped into Faith's office, and Banks closed the door.\n\n\"Matthews is dead,\" he said in a tight voice.\n\nThe words set off an explosion of panic in Shane's chest. He stared at his boss, praying to God he'd heard wrong. \"What?\"\n\n\"He's dead. The caretaker found him. Timmons and Cerini are at the scene now. Where's Faith?\"\n\nDragging his hands back through his hair, Shane swore viciously. \"I don't know. I can't find her.\"\n\nThe silence that hung between the two men was as brittle as spun glass; the ringing of the telephone shattered it.\n\nSwallowing down the knot in his throat, Shane grabbed up the receiver. \"Callan.\"\n\nEverything inside him turned to ice at the sound of the voice on the other end of the line. It was cultured, sardonic, and deadly. \"Shane, my old friend. Long time no see.\"\n\n\"Strauss.\"\n\nAdam Strauss chuckled, a sound that managed to embody evil rather than humor. \"And here I thought perhaps you had forgotten me.\"\n\n\"Never.\" Cradling the receiver between his shoulder and ear, Shane pulled his gun from his shoulder holster and checked the clip.\n\n\"That's a comfort. I certainly haven't forgotten about you, dear friend. In fact, I'm rather anxious to see you. As is Ms. Kincaid.\"\n\nAdam Strauss had Faith. In a terrible flash of insight Shane realized he had never truly known terror until this moment. Now it threatened to swallow him whole. Adam Strauss was a cold-blooded killer, a man without a soul, and he had Faith.\n\nQuestions about Faith's status roared through his head, but Shane forced himself not to ask them. Showing an interest in her would only make her situation more tenuous... if it wasn't too late already. Pushing the thought to the back of his mind he tried to concentrate on keeping the conversation going, all the while straining to catch background noises that could give him a clue as to where Strauss was.\n\n\"I heard you'd gone to Argentina.\"\n\n\"Tsk, tsk,\" Strauss said mockingly. \"After everything we went through together, you didn't really think I'd leave without saying good-bye, did you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Shane admitted. \"I didn't.\"\n\n\"You and I have a little unfinished business to take care of, _mon ami_.\"\n\n\"Where are you?\"\n\nThe laughter that floated over the phone lines rang with rich amusement. \"Nice try, Agent Callan, but I'd rather not have an army of your compadres descending on our little soiree. What we have to settle is between you and me.\"\n\n\"Why the theatrics with the Kincaid woman, then?\" he asked, fighting to keep emotion out of his voice. He holstered his pistol and wiped a sweating palm on the leg of his pants. \"She's got nothing to do with this.\"\n\n\"Doesn't she? Ah, well, you know me, Shane. I always have had a flare for the dramatic. Remember our foray into the theater district that time\u2014\"\n\n\"Can the bull, Strauss,\" Shane cut him off. He wanted no reminders of his time inside the Silvanus operation. He'd come too close to the edge, too close to losing what it was that made him human rather than a cunning, vicious animal like Adam Strauss. Now he forced a sigh and a bored tone. \"I've had a long day. Where do you want to meet?\"\n\n\"Testy tonight, aren't we?\" Strauss taunted lazily, then turned businesslike. \"I'll give you ten minutes to drive to Anastasia, to the phone booth outside Dylan's Bar and Bait Shop. I'll call you there and give you further instructions.\"\n\nShane swore at his nemesis in disgust. \"You've seen too many Dirty Harry movies.\"\n\n\"Don't be insulting, Irish,\" Strauss said on a laugh. \"Oh, and need I remind you?\" he added as an afterthought. \"Come alone.\"\n\nShane stared blindly at the stretch of road that was illuminated by nothing more than the headlights of the car. The night was as black as the heart of the killer he was on his way to meet.\n\nThe road dipped and curved, turned and cut back along the cliff edge. Frequent signs advised caution and a prudent speed limit. He ignored them. The sedan hugged the pavement, though its driver was operating on nothing more than reflexes and subconscious memory.\n\nStrauss had Faith. It was Shane's worst nightmare come true. Instead of protecting the woman he had grown to love, the woman who had offered him a future, the woman who had offered him her heart, he had put her life in grave danger. There was no question in his mind\u2014Strauss was there because of him, to even the score. This had nothing to do with William Gerrard. It had nothing to do with defense contracts. It was vengeance.\n\nHe had expected it to happen sooner or later. It was just a matter of his past catching up with him. But now Faith was caught up in it as well. She could die, and it would be his fault.\n\nDammit, he thought, this was why he had avoided involvement. Long ago he had set the rules that governed his life. Those boundaries had made his life a lonely one but that had been the price for doing a very important job, a job he believed in. By breaking those rules he had endangered the one person who had touched his life and left him feeling better for it.\n\nThe twinkling lights of Anastasia came into view as the road eased around a bend and down a slope. The tourist town that was home to two thousand permanent residents was nestled in a quiet cove. With its restored Victorian buildings and busy harbor, Anastasia was picture-postcard lovely, but its beauty was lost on Shane. His entire being was focused on one goal\u2014rescuing Faith from the clutches of the most evil man he'd ever known.\n\nDylan's Bar and Bait Shop was located on the waterfront, in the heart of Anastasia's tidy, thriving marina area. It was a popular establishment, busy most nights, and this night was no exception. Warm amber lights glowed through the building's windows, a welcoming beacon to passersby. Music and laughter floated through the front door as patrons came and went.\n\nParking his car in the small lot, Shane got out, his narrowed eyes scanning the area as he strode toward the phone booth that stood to the left of the bar's entrance. The scents of fish and fuel and the sea filled his nostrils, but danger was what he sensed stronger than anything. Strauss was nearby; he could feel it.\n\nThe phone inside the booth was out of order. Strauss's idea of a joke, Shane supposed, though he found no humor in it. Taped to the glass of the booth was a note with the name _Brutus_ and a pier number written in Strauss's neat, almost feminine hand. Using the pen that hung on a frayed string beside the phone book, Shane scrawled BANKS across the top of the note and left the missive taped in place.\n\nHe had come alone, as Strauss had instructed, but Banks wouldn't be far behind him. There hadn't been time to argue about strategy. Shane had wanted time to try to deal with Strauss on his own\u2014certain that bringing in more cops would further endanger Faith\u2014so he had given himself a head start.\n\nAs he pulled his gun from his shoulder holster, he wondered just how much trouble he would get into for knocking out his boss. It didn't matter. The odds were against him coming out of this at all, he thought as he started toward a boat called _Brutus_ and a confrontation with the man who had sworn to kill him.\n\nThe _Brutus_ was a powerboat, a midsize luxuriously appointed cabin cruiser fitted out for deep-sea sport fishing. But fishing wasn't on the mind of the man who owned the boat, Faith thought as she sat on the cabin's small built-in sofa, trying her best to keep from shaking visibly.\n\nWilliam had owned a boat very like this one. He hadn't been much interested in fishing either. The _Getaway_ had been for impressing people, an ostentatious toy, a place to hold clandestine meetings. But if William Gerrard's uses for his boat had been less than honorable, Adam Strauss's were evil.\n\n\"In a way, I'm going to regret killing Shane Callan,\" Strauss said from his leather-upholstered chair in the corner. In his left hand he held a snifter of cognac. His right hand absently stroked the semiautomatic weapon lying in his lap as if it were a beloved pet cat. A Mozart symphony played in the background.\n\n\"A very shrewd, intelligent man, Shane. Well brought up, you know. A Princeton man.\" He smiled at Faith. \"I myself graduated from Brown. A doctorate in behavioral psychology.\"\n\nFaith guessed she was supposed to be impressed, but she was too damn scared to pull it off. Tugging her cardigan closer around her, she merely stared at her captor with wide, unblinking eyes.\n\nHe was a handsome man in a cold, sharp-featured way. Thinning brown hair was combed straight back from his high forehead. The arch of his eyebrows above his narrow dark eyes could only be described as sinister looking. They went well with the cruel, thin line of his wide mouth. He was well dressed and meticulously groomed\u2014right down to his neatly manicured nails. Somehow the fact that he was an educated, fastidious man made him seem even more diabolical in his madness.\n\nIn a little corner of her mind Faith noted that this entire scenario was insane. She was just a former business major from Notre Dame, a mother, a woman trying to pursue a quiet dream. How on earth had she ended up on a boat listening to Mozart while an assassin reminisced about his college days?\n\n\"What do you need me for?\" She blurted the question out, amazed that she had dredged up the nerve.\n\nStrauss's face lit with amusement. \"Why, bait, of course. You should be very familiar with the role by now, I should think.\"\n\nFaith's skin crawled.\n\n\"This has all been a very amusing little game.\" He took a sip of his cognac, savoring the amber liquid for a moment before continuing. \"I managed to acquire a copy of Shane's current case file, thanks to an obliging little secretary at the Justice Department. Pity I had to kill her. At any rate, I thought it rather a clever game to play the part of your tormentor. Rouse all of gallant Shane's protective instincts and so on.\"\n\nA chill went through her at his calm dismissal of murder, and another shot through her at the thought that she had been used as bait to get to Shane. \"You never had anything to do with DataTech or William?\"\n\nHis lips curled upward as he shook his head.\n\nFaith's eyes strayed to the window. She would have given anything to feel Shane's arms around her now. At the same time she had to hope she wouldn't see him, because the man in the corner was planning to kill him, and she didn't think she could survive watching that happen.\n\n\"Rest assured, Ms. Kincaid. He'll arrive presently.\"\n\nSetting his brandy aside, Strauss rose from his chair only to settle beside Faith on the cushioned bench. She couldn't suppress a shudder of revulsion as he coiled one arm around her shoulders.\n\n\"You see,\" he said in his lazy voice, \"I know Shane very well. His strengths, his weaknesses. His likes and dislikes. For a time we were nearly as close as brothers.\" He brought his pistol up to caress the silencer against her temple almost lovingly, and his voice turned as cold as the steel of the gun. \"Then he betrayed me.\"\n\nBile rose in Faith's throat as tears stung her eyes.\n\n\"Ah, but alas,\" Strauss said, his voice heavy with mock regret as he glanced at his gold Rolex, \"we have no time to discuss such things.\" With his arm still around her, he stood and drew Faith along with him. \"Our hero should be arriving any minute now. Let's go out on the deck to greet him, shall we?\"\n\nRaw fury surged through Shane as he approached the _Brutus_ , his gaze focused on Faith and the man who held a gun to her head. Close on fury's heels was fear. He tried to will both emotions away. A clear head was essential in a situation as deadly as this one. Emotions got in the way; they clouded judgment and slowed the thinking process. But it was impossible for Shane to look at Adam Strauss\u2014one arm around Faith's shoulders and a pistol pressed to her temple\u2014and not have a riot of feeling tear loose inside him.\n\nHis hand tightened on the grip of his gun as the dark desire to kill snaked through him. He may have been raised in an upper-class home. He may have been educated in one of the finest schools in the country. But primitive instinct easily cut through generations of civilized behavior. Beneath the cop, the scholar, the musician, he was a man, and Faith Kincaid was his woman. If Strauss had hurt her...\n\nHell, Shane thought, he wanted to kill the man for touching her. Despite all she'd been through, Faith was an innocent. Adam Strauss represented everything evil. The two didn't belong on the same planet, let alone on the same boat.\n\n\"Hello, Shane, my old friend,\" Strauss said in a silky tone that raised Shane's hackles. \"How do like my little boat? _Brutus_. I named it after you.\"\n\n\"I'm flattered all to hell,\" Shane remarked dryly as he crossed the gangplank and stepped aboard.\n\n\"I knew you would be. Drop the gun overboard, Irish.\"\n\nReluctantly Shane tossed the Smith and Wesson over the side. Strauss smiled at the soft splash that sounded as the gun hit the water.\n\n\"Now the little surprise you have tucked into the back of your trousers.\"\n\nScowling in the pale glow of the security light, Shane reached behind him and gently eased a small pistol out of his waistband. It joined its companion on the bottom of the Anastasia marina.\n\n\"And that little darling you're wearing for a sock garter.\" Strauss's laughter floated eerily on the damp night air as Shane muttered a stream of curses. \"Ah, yes, my friend. I know all your secrets.\"\n\n\"Yeah, you're a regular genius,\" Shane commented. His expression a blank, stony mask, he turned to Faith. \"Are you all right, Ms. Kincaid?\"\n\nFaith winced a bit at his cool, businesslike tone. This was not the same man who had held her and loved her fears away. This was Shane the cop, the man who leashed his emotions and instinctively lived in the shadows.\n\nShe prayed she would get the chance to see that other Shane again. The one who was so patient with her daughter, who was a tender lover full of sad, sweet music, the one who sometimes looked at her as if he couldn't quite believe she was real. She told herself she would see that man again. All they had to do was get through this nightmare.\n\nFinding her voice with some difficulty, she managed to stutter, \"I\u2014I'm f-fine, Agent Callan.\"\n\nShe was terrified, Shane knew, but as she had so many times over the last few weeks, Faith managed to dredge up a little more strength from that well that ran so deep inside her. He watched her swallow down her fear and stick out her little chin. How one woman who seemed so ordinary could have so much heart and courage was a mystery to him, but he loved her for it.\n\nHe loved her, and now she could die because of him. The knowledge twisted in his gut like a knife.\n\n\"Shane, you cut me to the quick,\" Strauss said, pouting like a petulant lover. \"I've been a perfect gentleman.\"\n\n\"Gentlemen don't kidnap innocent women and hold guns to their heads,\" Shane pointed out, his voice low and smoky.\n\nStrauss grinned. \"Point taken. Let's call it a temporary breach of conduct\u2014rather like your seduction of a federal witness.\"\n\nThe bastard. He knew. He'd been watching them. A muscle jumped in Shane's jaw. His hands clenched at the thought of wrapping them around Strauss's throat. The idea that this piece of scum had any knowledge of the tender, loving relationship that had blossomed between himself and Faith made him sick. But the wisest course would be to ignore the remark as if it meant nothing to him.\n\n\"Let her go, Strauss. Your argument is with me.\"\n\nStrauss's eyes narrowed as if in consideration, but his hold only tightened on Faith's shoulders. \"I think not. I know you, Irish. I know your weaknesses, few though they may be. I know your flaws\u2014melancholy, gallantry, and good Irish whiskey. I mean to take advantage of your gallantry. You won't try anything as long as I hold the lovely lassie. Never make an enemy of a friend, my dear Lancelot,\" he advised. \"That enemy will slay you with your own sword.\"\n\nShane heaved a sigh and hitched his hands to his lean hips. \"You're boring me, Strauss. If you want to kill me, then kill me and be done with it.\"\n\n\"Oh, no.\" A thread of rage tangled with the madness in his cultured voice. \"I won't make it that easy for you, I mean to see you suffer.\" Jerking his head in the direction of the dock, he ordered, \"Cast off. We're going to take a little midnight cruise. Revenge should be a very private thing, I think.\"\n\nShane weighed the odds. He couldn't rush Strauss now, Faith would never have a chance. For the moment the deck was stacked in the killer's favor. Obviously Strauss didn't realize it, but sea would take some of his advantage away. So Shane went about the task of setting the _Brutus_ free, skills he had learned as a boy surfacing without effort. The Atlantic had been a second home to him when he'd been growing up. He could only hope the Pacific would prove to be as good a friend.\n\nKeeping a firm grip on Faith, Strauss motioned Shane toward the ladder that led to the navigation bridge. \"You're driving, Captain Callan.\" He flashed a wicked grin in the dim yellow light that spilled out of the cabin. \"As you can see, I have my hands full.\"\n\nThe muscles in Shane's jaw tightened against the snarl that threatened to curl his lip as he turned and hauled himself up the ladder. He didn't care if he died trying\u2014his life hadn't seemed worth much for a long time\u2014but Adam Strauss was going to pay for putting his hands on Faith.\n\nFaith wasn't sure if the wave of nausea that sloshed through her stomach was seasickness or fear or both. The _Brutus_ had been under way for ten or fifteen minutes, bucking through choppy water, when Strauss ordered Shane to cut the engine. Now it bobbed like a cork on the black water, dipping and swaying beneath their feet as the three of them stood in the cockpit behind the cabin.\n\nIt was all Faith could do to keep her balance, and she half fell against her captor as the powerboat rocked. Annoyed, Strauss took her hand and pressed it to the gin pole. \"Hold on to that, Ms. Kincaid. If you let go, I'll shoot you.\"\n\nShe couldn't keep from looking to Shane for some kind of sign. He was nearly invisible with his dark hair and clothing, like a panther in the night, but she caught his almost imperceptible nod. Her hand closed around the cold metal pole, and her fingertips brushed across a loosely knotted rope. As Strauss's attention swung away from her, she stole a glance.\n\nA heavy block-and-tackle rig hung down from the top of the gin pole and was secured to it with nothing more than a flimsy piece of nylon. Praying wildly Strauss would keep his focus on Shane, Faith began trying to work the knot loose with her fingers. She didn't want to think about what the madman had planned for her, but she knew he meant to kill Shane, and she had to do everything she could to stop him.\n\n\"You betrayed me, Shane,\" Strauss said, raising his voice so his dramatic accusations could be heard above the wind and the sea and the creaking of the boat. He stood with his feet braced slightly apart, his Italian loafers offering footing that was less than sure on a deck slick with mist. The gun he had pressed to Faith's temple was now leveled at Shane. \"We were like brothers. You were my friend.\"\n\nShane answered him with a curse. \"I was doing my job, Strauss. I'd sooner make friends with a cobra.\"\n\n\"I know differently. We're two sides of the same coin, you and I, my darling Shane.\"\n\nThe statement was so close to being accurate, it nearly made Shane sick. He had come so close to that edge, but he had pulled back. He had struggled with the darker side of himself. For a time he had felt he would never escape the shadow of it. Then Faith had let sunlight into his life, and he had felt his soul begin to heal.\n\nAbruptly he pulled back from his thoughts. He had to concentrate, had to find some way to get Strauss's gun away from him. Strauss had said he wanted to play on Shane's weaknesses. Two could play at that game. Adam Strauss had an enormously overinflated ego. It was time to start punching holes.\n\n\"I'm sick of your theatrics, Strauss,\" he said, caustically. He let one foot inch ahead as the deck swayed beneath his sneakers. \"Besides being a lousy actor, you're nothing but a two-bit killer with a fake diploma.\"\n\nEven in the faint light that glowed out of the cabin Shane could see the man's eyes flash with insane outrage. \"How dare you! I am a scholar\u2014\"\n\n\"What's the plan? Kill me, dump me overboard, and make a run for South America with the woman? You'll never make it.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me what I can or can't do, Agent Callan,\" Strauss fairly spat out the words, his wild-eyed stare riveted to the harsh planes of Shane's face. The boat lurched, and he had to grab hold of the small freezer behind him with his free hand, but he kept his gun and his gaze leveled at Shane. \"I mean to kill you both. You'll watch her die little by little, then you'll join her\u2014one drop of blood at a time. And I _will_ get away with it. You of all people should know I am capable of anything.\"\n\n\"Too bad for you your abilities don't live up to your ego,\" Shane said with a sneer, inching another step closer as Strauss slipped again. \"You were never anything more than a pathetic little hood with delusions of grandeur. I was never your friend. I loathed you and I pitied you.\"\n\nStrauss's control snapped. A wild, inhuman cry erupted from his throat as he brought his gun up with both hands on the grip. At that same instant Faith freed the block and tackle and swung it with all her might. The heavy rope and pulley caught Strauss across the chest, knocking his arm aside just as the pistol bucked in his hand.\n\nShane pounced across the deck with the grace of a striking cougar, his big body slamming Strauss's back into the freezer. Faith bolted for the ladder but froze on the third rung, her attention riveted to the life-and-death struggle in the cockpit.\n\nThe two rolled across the small deck of the cockpit, wrestling for control of the handgun Strauss had managed to hang onto. Shane knocked the pistol free by slamming Strauss's arm against the deck. Strauss relinquished the weapon but gained the upper hand in the fight, rolling Shane beneath him and smashing a fist into his face. His second blow met nothing but the solid deck as Shane dodged sideways at the last instant.\n\nAs Strauss howled in pain, Shane threw him aside and struggled to his feet. He reached inside the loose sleeve of his sweatshirt and jerked a .25 caliber pistol free of the small holster that was strapped to his forearm, raising it just as Strauss rushed him with a knife.\n\nFaith's scream split the air an instant before the Crack! Crack! of the gunshots.\n\nThe expression on Strauss's face as the bullets slammed into his chest was one of utter surprise. Dropping the knife, he stopped in his tracks and looked down at the dark stain spreading across his silk shirt. His legs buckled beneath him.\n\nWith the smoking pistol in his hand, Shane stared down at the man who lay sprawled on the deck with his head cocked at an unnatural angle.\n\n\"And you thought you knew all of my secrets,\" he said softly, unable to call up a single ounce of remorse. This man had threatened Faith's life and would certainly have killed her. She would have been only one of many to die by Strauss's hand. Now Adam Strauss would never kill again. \"You were wrong, pal. Dead wrong.\"\n\nFaith eased herself down the ladder, her heart pounding so, she thought it would explode. In her mind's eye she could still see Strauss lunging at Shane, his knife gleaming in the light from the cabin as the blade slashed through the air. Shane could have been killed. But he was still standing, and Faith had never needed anything the way she needed to put her arms around him. On legs that were as wobbly as noodles, she made her way across the short stretch of deck.\n\n\"Shane?\"\n\nHer voice seemed nothing more than a whisper, but he heard her. He turned and caught her as she threw herself into his arms, burying her face against his chest.\n\n\"It's all right,\" he said in a rough voice as he clutched her to him, relishing the feel of her, soft and alive against him. \"You're all right, honey. He can't hurt you now. No one will ever hurt you again.\"\n\nFaith hugged him with what little strength she had left. \"He wanted to kill you. I was so afraid he was going to kill you.\"\n\nShe had been afraid for him. Guilt lashed out inside him. Faith could have lost her life because of him, because of his past, but she had been afraid for him.\n\n\"Faith,\" he said as he stood her away from him.\n\nWhatever else he had meant to say was lost in the next horrible split second.\n\nThe faint glint of light on metal caught Faith's eye. As Adam Strauss lifted the gun that had been dropped on the deck during the struggle, she shrieked Shane's name and shoved him aside. The pistol fired once before Strauss fell back, dead. And Faith collapsed to the deck, pain burning through her in one bright, blinding flash before darkness swallowed her up.\n\n\"Faith!\" Shane screamed, the sound tearing up from the depths of his soul. \"Faith!\"\n\nHe fell to his knees on the pitching deck, turning her over and lifting her limp body in his arms. With shaking fingers he found the pulse in her throat, then he dug a handkerchief out of his hip pocket and pressed it to the wound in her shoulder where blood gushed freely, soaking into the white polo shirt she wore beneath her cardigan.\n\nTears of anguish streamed down Shane's face. He'd done it. He'd killed the one good person in his life. He'd known from the start not to touch Faith Kincaid. She wasn't from his world, but he'd dragged her into it, and like everything good she would be destroyed by it.\n\n\"God, please don't let her die,\" he mumbled, stroking her damp curls back from her cool, pale cheek. A horrible, empty ache filled his chest as he sucked in a breath. \"Please don't let her die.\"\n\nWith gentle, trembling fingers he lifted the delicate heart pendant she wore and pressed a kiss to it. Then he simply held her and sobbed as the spotlight of a coast guard helicopter cut through the gloom and fell on the deck of the _Brutus_.\n\n# ELEVEN\n\n\"WELL, WHAT'S THE verdict, doctor?\"\n\nPulling the ear tips of her plastic stethoscope down to hang around her neck, Lindy stepped back from her mother's bed. She pursed her lips and planted her chubby hands on her hips. \"You're gonna be okay, but I think you prob'ly need lots of ice cream, and you have to take naps when I say so.\"\n\nThe love that shown in Faith's eyes as she smiled at her daughter was absolute and unrestricted. She couldn't begin to describe how it had felt to see Lindy again after the ordeal she'd been through. The thought had crossed her mind more than once when Strauss had held a gun to her head that she would never see Lindy again, that she would be robbed of the joy of watching her daughter grow up.\n\nOn returning home from the hospital the first thing she'd wanted to do was take her baby in her arms and hold her for hours on end, but the sling binding her left arm to her body had prevented her. It would be a week or two before she could give Lindy a proper hug. For the time being she contented herself with running her right hand over her daughter's soft curls.\n\n\"I'd say that's very sound medical advice, young lady.\"\n\nLindy beamed a smile up at Dr. Moore. The pudgy, bespectacled doctor slipped her a lollipop from the pocket of his tweed jacket and winked at her.\n\nAnastasia's general practitioner of two decades had insisted on seeing Faith settled in at home. He had advised a longer stay in the hospital, but two days had been more than enough for Faith. She had been driven by the need to go home to Keepsake, to surround herself with familiar things and familiar faces\u2014Lindy's chief among them. Having survived a nightmare, Faith had felt compelled to return to the house that had been her dream.\n\nNow the good doctor gave her a very paternal look, his bushy gray eyebrows drawing together over twinkling green eyes. \"I want you to get plenty of rest. You're darn lucky that b-u-l-l-e-t didn't do any major damage,\" he said, spelling the word out so as not to upset Lindy. \"As it is, you'll be a few days getting your strength back. Just lie back and let your friends wait on you hand and foot.\"\n\n\"Sounds good to me,\" Faith murmured obediently, though the idea of having people wait on her had never set very well with her. She had always done for herself. As weak as she felt, though, she figured she could stand having Jayne and Alaina turned loose in her kitchen for a few days, despite their decided lack of domestic skills. The two of them together couldn't boil water.\n\n\"I'll check in on you again tomorrow, honey,\" Dr. Moore said, moving toward the door, black bag in hand. \"Call me if you need me.\"\n\nFaith thanked him, tucking her smile into the corners of her mouth. Dr. Moore had let the women's movement bypass him entirely. He still doled out casual endearments as easily as he did lollipops. Faith knew he didn't mean to be condescending or disrespectful in any way. He was just a nice, fatherly old gentleman who treated all his patients as if they were his own children. It was that kind of friendly warmth that had drawn her to Anastasia in the first place.\n\nJayne and Alaina stuck their heads in the door as soon as the doctor was through it.\n\n\"Feeling up to having visitors?\" Alaina asked.\n\n\"For a little while,\" Faith answered, wondering if one of her visitors would be Shane. She hadn't had a minute alone with him since the ordeal. In fact, she thought, with a little shiver of fear, it almost seemed as though he had been avoiding her.\n\nShe remembered none of what had happened on the boat after Strauss had shot her. Her memory held fragments of the emergency room\u2014the bright lights, the metallic sounds and antiseptic scents, the sense of urgency as people rushed around. There was no doubt in her mind that Shane had held her\u2014the sense of safety she recalled was unique to being in his arms. But in the hours since he had kept his distance.\n\n\"Honey, if you're too tired, we can come back later.\"\n\nFaith jerked herself out of her musings, looking almost startled to see her friends. Jayne had pulled a chair up beside the bed, and Lindy had immediately scrambled up onto her lap. Alaina, holding herself a little apart as she always did, was leaning against the foot post, a worried frown tugging down her lush mouth.\n\n\"No, no, I'm fine,\" Faith assured them.\n\nAlaina's frown only deepened. \"I don't think many people would agree with you, considering what happened.\"\n\n\"It could have been worse.\" Faith forced a bright smile, needing desperately to lighten the mood. The last thing she wanted was to relive the horror of what had happened. As it was, she knew the black memory would haunt her for the rest of her life. \"Like they say in the movies\u2014it's just a flesh wound.\"\n\nJayne rolled her eyes, readily taking Faith's cue. \"How clich\u00e9.\"\n\n\"What's that mean?\" Lindy asked, twisting around on Jayne's lap.\n\n\"It's what writers in Hollywood get paid for, sweetheart,\" Jayne replied with a saccharine sweetness that was lost on Lindy. She hugged the little girl and shot Faith a teasing look. \"Look on the bright side. When this is all over, I can write your story into a screenplay, Alaina can negotiate the deal, and we'll make a million selling it to TV for a miniseries. Mr. Callan can play himself and become a star.\"\n\n\"Pass,\" Faith said, shaking her head against the pillows that had been plumped up behind her. \"I think I've had about all the notoriety I can stand.\"\n\nJayne pouted prettily, tucking a strand of her wild auburn hair behind her ear. \"There goes my big break.\"\n\n\"I thought you were all through with Tinsel Town,\" Alaina remarked dryly.\n\n\"I am. It never hurts to have connections, though. What if one of my llamas is destined to become the next Mr. Ed?\"\n\nAlaina sniffed. \"Sounds like a good argument for owning a library card.\" She pushed herself away from the bedpost and reached out to tousle Lindy's hair. \"Speaking of breaks, I think we'd better give Faith one.\"\n\nFaith didn't argue the suggestion. The medication Dr. Moore had given her was kicking in, making her feel numb and fuzzy-headed. She managed a smile for her friends, wondering what she would have done without them. \"Thanks again for staying with me, you guys. I really appreciate it.\"\n\nAlaina took hold of Faith's good hand and gave it a squeeze that revealed more of her feelings than she would ever verbalize. \"What are friends for if not to trash your house and eat everything in your freezer while you're laid up?\"\n\nOn her way out Alaina stopped in her tracks and whirled around. \"I almost forgot!\" she exclaimed, digging a perfectly manicured hand into the deep pocket of the loose-fitting raw silk jacket she wore. \"This came for you in today's mail. It's from Bryan. I thought you'd want to open it right away.\"\n\nIt was uncanny how Bryan's little gifts always seemed to turn up when his friends were most in need of a spiritual lift. But Faith had learned not to question it. Bryan didn't seem to think it unusual at all. His only explanation of the phenomenon had been a shrug and a smile.\n\nShe examined the small brown package, Christmas-like excitement momentarily overriding the other complex mix of emotions she had been experiencing. The return address on the box was a castle in Ireland. That sounded like a good place for ghost hunting. Faith could only wonder what else Bryan had found there to catch his fancy.\n\n\"I can't open it,\" she said, frowning at her bandaged arm. \"I don't have enough hands.\"\n\nAlaina dispensed with the small box's wrapping and opened the square jeweler's case inside. Faith gave a little gasp. Nestled on a bed of frayed green satin was a man's ring. Hesitantly she lifted it out. It was obviously very old. The gold had mellowed in color with time and wear. Inside the band was an inscription in what Faith presumed to be Gaelic. But the most remarkable feature of the ring was the crest it bore\u2014two intricately intertwined hearts. They were so worn, parts of them were nearly gone, but there was no mistaking what they were.\n\nThey were identical to the pendant that seemed suddenly warm against her skin.\n\nThe note inside the box read:\n\n_Dear Faith_ ,\n\n_I found this in Kilkenny and thought you should have it. I think you'll want it when you find the end of your rainbow. I envy the man you give this to. He'll be getting a heart_ _more pure and bright than anything made of gold_.\n\n_All my love to you and the rest of the Fearsome Foursome_ ,\n\n_Bryan_\n\n\"It's lovely,\" Alaina said softly. \"But why would he send you a man's ring?\"\n\nFaith didn't answer. She merely stared at the ring, then closed it in her hand when a knock sounded at her bedroom door.\n\n\"Come in.\"\n\nShane opened the door but came only halfway through it, as if he were uncertain of the reception he would receive. Faith's gaze met his, and a hundred unspoken questions sang in the air between them.\n\nAlaina glanced from the hard-bitten warrior in the doorway to her friend's tightly closed fist, and shook her head. \"Uncanny,\" she muttered, then cleared her throat delicately. \"I'll leave you two alone.\"\n\nShane moved into the room but didn't so much as glance at Alaina as she left. All his attention was focused on the woman who lay in the canopied bed. She looked so fragile, so vulnerable. Her pale skin almost matched the prim cotton nightgown she wore. Shadows lingered beneath her shining dark eyes. Shane's heart ached at the thought that she was in that bed because of him.\n\nFaith's heart was pounding as she took in every aspect of Shane's appearance, from the tips of his black shoes to his elegantly cut dark trousers, the dress shirt that spanned his broad shoulders and tapered to his trim waist. His handsome, aristocratic face wore a carefully closed expression, but it didn't quite mask the emotions in his eyes.\n\nWhat she read in those silvery depths frightened her. Regret. Pain. A tortured anguish that seemed to reach out and clutch at her heart.\n\nShe had gotten her wish. Shane had come to see her, but she knew with an ominous sense of foreboding that she didn't want to hear what he had come to say. Digging down deep, she found she had a little scrap of strength left. She wrapped herself around it and prayed it would get her through whatever was to come.\n\n\"Hi, stranger,\" she said, a soft smile curving the delicate bow of her mouth. She gripped that bit of courage a little harder when Shane didn't return her smile with one of his own. Lord, she'd have given anything to see his mouth quirk up on one side in that devastatingly sexy way of his, to have him reach out and caress her cheek with his elegant musician's hand. But he merely stood, a half step back from the side of her bed, out of reach both physically and emotionally.\n\n\"How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"A little woozy.\" But not woozy enough to dull the pain that came from looking into his eyes.\n\n\"I won't stay long. You need to rest,\" he murmured, stuffing his hands into his pants pockets. Every inch of him ached to hold her, to feel her soft warmth against him one last time, but he wouldn't allow himself the pleasure. If he touched her now, he'd never be able to let her go\u2014and that was exactly what he had to do. \"Banks spoke with the prosecuting attorney in Washington. He said he could push back the date of your testimony. He can get a continuance\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Faith interrupted. \"I'll be fine by then. I don't want him to delay anything. The sooner it's over, the better.\"\n\nThe sooner I'm out of your life, Shane added silently. It was astounding how much that thought hurt. All these years he'd gone along on his own, touching no one, needing no one. In a few short weeks this one small woman had so captured him, it would be like tearing his heart out to leave her. And it would be doubly painful because until Faith, he had stopped believing he had a heart to lose.\n\n\"I'm leaving for Washington in the morning,\" he said abruptly, his voice gruffer and more clipped than usual. \"Agent Timmons will stay on and escort you back for the trial.\"\n\nHe set his jaw at a stubborn angle and resolutely refused to look at Faith. But then, he didn't need to see her face to know her reaction. He could feel the shock and hurt roll off her in waves that battered his wall of self-control.\n\n\"Why?\" she asked in a stunned whisper, managing to put all her painful questions into that one word.\n\nHe wasn't strong enough to look her in the face and answer. She sounded so hurt, and Lord knew the last thing he wanted was to hurt her more than he already had. He'd known all along she wasn't for him, but he hadn't been strong enough to resist her. His weakness had nearly gotten her killed.\n\nStruggling with the guilt, he prowled around her room and further punished himself by memorizing every detail of it. The wallpaper was a delicate floral print. She had snapshots of Lindy tucked into the frame of the beveled glass mirror above her cherry dresser. There was also a photograph of Faith and her friends in their graduation caps and gowns with Notre Dame's gold dome behind them and a rainbow arching over their heads. The dresser top held a porcelain pitcher and bowl filled with dried flowers.\n\nEverything about the room was delicate and feminine and old-fashioned. The air was sweet with that soft lavender scent he would forever associate with Faith.\n\nForcing his mind back to the issue, he said, \"You knew from the start I couldn't stay. I was nothing less than honest with you, Faith.\"\n\nShe couldn't argue with that. Shane had warned her on more than one occasion that he couldn't make promises, that their relationship would span only the time it took to solve the case. She had known that going in, but it still hurt to hear him reconfirm it. Lord, it hurt. The pain was so sharp, it cut through the haze of medication and eclipsed the throbbing ache in her shoulder.\n\nStupid, romantic fool, she berated herself. How many times did she have to learn the same lesson before it would sink in? Shane had come right out and told her she would never possess more of him than his body. Still, she had plunged in headfirst, brimming with Pollyanna optimism, sure that she would be able to change his mind, that she would be the one person able to get behind his defenses and touch the vulnerable, lonely man who lived behind those gray walls of isolation.\n\nStopping at the foot of the bed, Shane's left hand gripped the carved cherry wood post as if he needed something to steady himself against. \"I came to apologize,\" he said.\n\nFor breaking my heart? Faith wondered bleakly. Don't bother. I should be used to it by now.\n\nBut when she met his gaze, it was his pain she felt, not her own. It hit her like a blast of cold wind, stunning her, confusing her.\n\n\"You could have been killed because of me,\" he said, his voice thickening with the emotion he had worked so hard to suppress. His hand tightened on the bedpost until his knuckles turned white. \"You'll never know how sorry I am that happened.\"\n\nShe would never know the regret he felt not only for her injuries but over what he had lost as well. The dream of a future with her had been within his grasp until reality had intruded in the form of Adam Strauss. Now Strauss was dead, but the reality was just as alive, just as harsh. He had chosen a lifestyle that didn't allow for dreams.\n\n\"Is that why you're leaving?\" Faith whispered, her heart immediately taking hope. \"Shane, I don't blame you for what happened.\"\n\nIt was clear, though, that he blamed himself. The guilt that etched lines into his handsome face was almost unbearable to see.\n\n\"Shane, I love you.\"\n\nHe shook his head, not to deny her statement, but to keep her from elaborating on it. \"Faith, don't. It can't work between us. I knew that from the start, and dammit to hell, I should have had sense enough to stay away from you.\"\n\n\"You said you loved me.\"\n\n\"That was a mistake.\"\n\nWell, he wasn't mincing words, was he? Faith had no idea how she kept from crying out at the pain. It was as sharp as a knife in her chest. Getting shot didn't even compare. She didn't try to keep the tears from rising in her eyes. They flooded her field of vision and brimmed over the barrier of her thick dark lashes. Her throat tightened on a knot of them. That she managed to comment at all was a minor miracle. \"I see.\"\n\nShane damned himself to yet another eternity in hell as he took in the stricken look on Faith's delicate heart-shaped face. For a man with a degree in literature he had a way with words that no doubt had the great poets rolling in their graves right about now.\n\nPushing himself away from the foot post, he moved to the chair that had been pulled up beside the bed. Sitting down, he leaned his forearms on his thighs and heaved a sigh. \"No, you don't see. I shouldn't have let myself fall in love with you, Faith. It's just not allowed.\"\n\nShe wasn't about to pretend she was sophisticated enough to understand the rules that governed men like Shane Callan. She wasn't. She didn't want to be sophisticated enough to understand a world that left no room for love. \"You're not allowed to be human?\"\n\nSince he knew he was all too human, Shane chose not to answer her question. \"The job I do is important, Faith. It's also very demanding and dangerous. I chose this way of life knowing the limitations, knowing the rules. I broke those rules, and now you're the one paying the penalty.\"\n\n\"But I told you, I don't blame you for what happened.\"\n\nNo, it wasn't in Faith to lay blame, but that was beside the point as far as he was concerned. \"Don't you see, honey? Our worlds don't exist on the same plane. What happened with Strauss only proved that.\"\n\nFinally giving in to the need to touch her, he reached out and gently closed his hand over the fist she clenched so tightly in her lap. \"I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm sorry you were hurt because of me. I should never have let it happen.\"\n\n\"You're talking as if I never had any say in the matter,\" Faith said with a harsh laugh. The man was a rampaging chauvinist, going on about how he should have made this decision or that decision about what _she_ did, as if she wasn't capable of making a rational choice herself. \"I'm a grown woman, Shane Callan. I make my own decisions.\"\n\nRaking a hand back through his black hair, Shane looked away from her. \"Let it go, Faith. It just won't work. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Faith.\"\n\nThe look in his pewter gray eyes stilled the debate on her tongue. He wasn't going to listen to her. The awful truth tolled inside her head like a death knell. Faith squeezed her own eyes shut against the pain, not opening them even when Shane's fingers curved beneath her chin and his mouth brushed across hers. She didn't watch him leave but listened to his footsteps as he rounded the foot of her bed and crossed the hardwood floor. When the door clicked shut behind him, she squeezed her hand tighter around the ring that burned like ice in her fist, and she cried.\n\nShe loved Shane Callan with her life, and he was leaving her.\n\n# TWELVE\n\nHE WAS DOING the right thing, Shane told himself for the hundredth time as he wandered through the dark, silent house. He had touched Faith's life only briefly, and look what had happened.\n\nShe had touched his life, and he would never be the same. Faith had given him a glimpse of joy, a sample of peace and contentment. Damn, but it hurt to have that slip through his hands! It had nearly killed him to walk out of her room that after noon, knowing she was hurting too. He would rather have taken her in his arms and kissed her tears away. But he was the reason she was in pain. Her life would be much better without him in it.\n\nHe leaned back against the door frame of the ballroom, a cigarette dangling from his lip, his whiskey flask in his hand. Hell, his life would be fine without the complication of a relationship; it had been for years. People didn't try to get close to him. Even when he'd been young, he had always stood a little apart from the crowd. He was a loner. He had always accepted that.\n\nTaking a pull on the flask, he thought about the future. A shudder ran through him that had nothing to do with the fine Irish liquor warming his belly. A few days ago he had sat on the beach with the sun on his face and the wind in his hair, his eye on the sweet serene woman beside him, his ears filled with the sounds of the sea and the laughter of a child. And he had let himself pretend that he could have that life. Now that image had faded, and all he saw once again was a bleak, gray plane. Shadows were his life, not sunshine, not rainbows.\n\nHe didn't belong with Faith. Hers was a heart of gold; his was a heart of darkness.\n\nCrossing the polished floor as silently as a cat, he went to the grand piano and flipped on the brass light. Shutting out all conscious thought about both the future and the past, he sat down and spread his long fingers across the cool ivory keys. Closing his eyes, he let his feelings flow directly from his soul to the keyboard.\n\nFaith sat up in her bed, defying her doctor's orders and nature as well. She was exhausted, but she couldn't sleep. She couldn't cry either. She had long since run out of tears. Rubbing her keepsake between her thumb and forefinger, she sat back against the pillows and stared unseeing into the shadows of her bedroom.\n\nShane would be leaving in the morning. Not because he didn't love her, but because he _did_ love her. He loved her and he was leaving her. Did that make any sense at all? Not to a woman, it didn't. It especially didn't make sense to Faith, who had always let her heart rule her head. But it made sense to Shane, and that was what she had to worry about.\n\nShe thought of the guilt and pain she had seen in his eyes, and her heart ached for him. Regardless of what she had told him, he blamed himself for what had happened to her, and some deep-seated, antiquated male sense of chivalry dictated that he let her go because of it. Men. Faith shook her head. No wonder the world was such a goofed-up place\u2014men were in charge of it.\n\nThe question was. What could she do about Shane's decision to leave? He had made her no promises. She had asked for none. What right did she have to try to hold him there?\n\nLove.\n\nLove gave her the right. If ever she'd known a man who needed love, it was Shane. Wary, cynical, spending his life in the shadows, he needed someone to reach out to him. That wasn't simply Faith's overactive sense of romanticism talking, it was the truth. She knew it with a certainty that radiated a sense of warmth throughout her entire being.\n\nShe loved Shane Callan. She hadn't been looking for love when he'd barged into her life with his brooding black scowl and suspicious nature, but she'd found it nevertheless. Perhaps the fact that she hadn't been expecting it made it all the more special. Certainly it made her realize what a gift that love was.\n\nA gift so exceptional deserved to be kept and cherished. She couldn't let Shane walk back into the shadows of a lonely existence without at least trying to make him understand, without at least trying to give him the love he so desperately needed in his life. As hardheaded as he was, he wouldn't be easily convinced to accept it, but she had to try at least.\n\nMoving to Anastasia and buying Keepsake had been a lifelong dream, but deep inside her Faith had nurtured another dream as well\u2014to someday find a man to whom she could give the wealth of love she had stored up inside her, a man who would need her love and cherish her love and love her in return. She knew Shane was that man.\n\nBut what if she couldn't change his mind?\n\nThe possibility he might reject her sent little jets of fear shooting along under the surface of her skin. After the years of rejection and indifference she had endured with William, she had no great desire to go through it again. And her feelings for William had been nothing compared to what she felt for Shane. If she laid her heart at his feet, and he still walked away...\n\nGamely she swallowed down the knot of panic that had lodged in her throat like a stone. No, she wasn't going to consider the possibility of defeat. There was no point in it. If a person let fear stand in the way, she would never attain any dream, and if she'd ever had a dream worth reaching for, it was this one.\n\nSqueezing her little gold heart, Faith lifted it and pressed a kiss to the keepsake for good luck. She eased herself out of bed, amazed at the amount of strength that simple action sapped from her. If getting out of bed left her breathless, following her dream was going to be a heck of a workout, she thought, as she stuffed her good arm into the sleeve of her ivory satin robe and awkwardly pulled the left side up to cover her injured shoulder.\n\nUsing the wall for support, she slowly made her way down the hall, music leading her as it had on a fateful night not so long ago. The first time she had heard Shane play had been her first glimpse of the man behind the stony facade, the man she had fallen in love with. The notes that now drifted to her softly through the still, dark house were just as revealing.\n\nThe piece he was playing was achingly tender, soft and sweet. And it filled her with hope. The longing in Shane's music was real and strong. It reached out to her with a poignancy that brought tears to her eyes. This was not the music of a man who had coldly made the decision to walk away from love. This was the music of a man who wanted a dream but felt he couldn't reach for it; who wanted a home but believed he couldn't have one; who ached for love but let duty deny him of it.\n\nPausing to gather her strength, Faith leaned back against the wall and let the tears roll down her cheeks. They were tears for the beauty of Shane's song, for the pain beneath it. Lord, please let me convince him, she prayed, her teeth digging into her full lower lip as a wave of emotion swept through her.\n\n_Ker-thump_.\n\nThe music stopped abruptly and silence hummed in the air.\n\n_Ker-thump_.\n\nFaith held her breath as footsteps sounded faintly on the wood floor of the main hall. As they drew nearer, she caught the unmistakable sound of Shane grumbling. She pressed a fist to her mouth to stifle the giggle that threatened\u2014a giggle that became a groan when she heard the soft creak of protest the fourth step of the grand staircase gave every time it was asked to bear weight.\n\nDarn it all. Confronting Shane in her present condition wasn't the most appealing idea she'd ever had, but she was determined, and confront him she would.\n\n\"I don't believe in ghosts,\" Shane muttered under his breath. He crept along the second-floor hall, walking on the balls of his feet so as not to make any sound that might scare off the ker-thumping \"spook.\" \"There's no such thing as ghosts.\"\n\n_Isn't there?_ The question came to him as clearly as if he had spoken it out loud.\n\nNo, he answered, only the slight hesitation in his step betraying his uncertainty. He ordered himself to drop the internal dialogue and concentrate on finding whoever or whatever it was clomping around in the middle of the night. It was probably Mr. Fitz. There was a weird old geezer if ever there was one. Ghosts? Bah, humbug.\n\n_What about Ellie?_ that clear, unrelenting inner voice questioned.\n\nShane bit back a curse as he paused at the end of the hall, his hand tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing on the grip of his gun. Ellie's dead.\n\n_And her ghost is haunting your soul. Ellie died, and you blamed yourself. You've carried her ghost inside you all these years. Now you're blaming yourself for what happened to Faith. Will you let her ghost haunt you as well?_\n\nFaith isn't dead, no thanks to me. She'll be fine as soon as I get out of her life.\n\n_Will she?_\n\nThe image of her crying flashed quickly through his mind. The memory was as bright and sharp as a bolt of lightning, and it cut him to the quick. But he pushed the image away and answered the question with a firm yes.\n\n_Will you?_\n\nThe question hung suspended in his mind. He refused to answer it, and it refused to leave him.\n\n_Ker-thump_.\n\nHe breathed an unconscious sigh of relief as his attention focused once again on the mysterious noise. This time it sounded as if it had come from behind him. He could have sworn it had originated in this end of the hall. Damn, he thought, as he turned and headed back toward the stairs, his concentration wasn't worth spit anymore. He was going to stay up there and find the source of this sound if it took the whole blasted night.\n\nFlattening himself back against the wall, he narrowed his eyes, searching the shadows for any sign of movement. He saw nothing in the pale silver light that fell through the Palladian window. His hearing was sharp enough to pick up the slightest disturbance of the quiet. There were the sounds associated with an old house settling, like the creak of an elderly matriarch's joints as age seeped into them. In the far distance was the indistinct whoosh of the sea surging against the shore. Nearer there was the unmistakable groan of a floorboard.\n\nShane's even teeth flashed in the dark as a predatory smile tugged at his lips. Ghosts didn't make the floors creak. Every muscle ready to spring to action, he moved along the wall with deceptive laziness. He had his quarry cornered. The sound had come from Captain Dugan's suite, and there was only one way out\u2014the door that was standing ajar before him.\n\nThe taste of victory was sweet, Shane reflected, as he slipped his hand around the polished brass knob and eased the door open. He had the bastard who'd been driving him nuts all these nights. And if it did turn out to be Jack Fitz, Shane was going to shake the old coot until his false teeth rattled. If it turned out to be a squirrel, he'd make a fur rug out of the little beast. If it turned out to be\u2014\n\n\"Faith!\"\n\nHow she kept from screaming, Faith didn't know, but the sound seemed to get jammed crosswise in her throat. To have him suddenly behind her shouting her name, had her heart slamming against her breastbone. She wheeled wide-eyed, clutching her nightgown in a white-knuckled fist against her chest.\n\nShane flipped on the floor lamp that stood in the corner near the window. The scowl that took the place of surprise on his face was blacker than the night. \"What the hell are you doing out of bed?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Faith gasped, leaning heavily against the carved post at the foot of the enormous tester bed. She felt as limp and drained as a deflated balloon, but she wasn't about to admit that to Shane. \"Don't bother apologizing for scaring me near to death!\"\n\n\"Scaring you?\" Shane said on a growl, his temper only burning hotter as he took in her pallor. She didn't have any business climbing two stairs, let alone two flights of them! \"I ought to give you the scare of your life. I ought to take you across my knee! You're not supposed to be out of bed.\"\n\n\"Pardon me for wanting to spare myself the job of filling in bullet holes in my walls,\" she said dryly, shooting a pointed glance at his brand-new Smith and Wesson. \"You can't shoot Captain Dugan, you know. He's been dead for nearly a hundred years already.\"\n\nHe shoved the gun into his shoulder holster, feeling just a tad bit foolish for having pulled it in the first place. \"Don't change the subject,\" he grumbled. \"Dr. Moore let you come home on the condition you stay in bed.\"\n\n\"Why should you care?\" Faith asked, tilting her little chin up to the unmistakable angle of challenge. \"You're leaving in a few hours anyway.\"\n\nShane's shoulders sagged. He dragged a hand back through his hair, heaving a weary sigh as he glanced down at the floor. \"Dammit, Faith, you know I care.\"\n\n\"I know you're leaving.\"\n\n\"I have to.\" Why did she have to make this harder than it already was, he wondered as he turned and stared out the window. The only thing he saw as he looked out was the reflection of a lonely man. \"My life is back in Washington. What happened to you reminded me of that in a way nothing else could. I don't belong here, Faith.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said, wincing as she forgot herself and tried to shrug. \"Then I'm going with you.\"\n\nShane wheeled and glared at her. \"What?\"\n\n\"You heard me. I'll go downstairs and pack right now.\"\n\n\"You can't come to Washington with me.\"\n\nShe arched a delicate brow in arrogant question. \"No? Just you try and stop me, Shane Callan. It's a free country. I can go to Washington if I want to.\"\n\n\"Faith,\" he said tightly, advancing on her, pointing a forefinger at her as if it were the barrel of a gun. \"I'm warning you\u2014\"\n\n\"Warn me all you want,\" she said with a sassy toss of her head. \"I'm going.\"\n\n\"What about the inn?\"\n\n\"I'd rather be with you than the inn. Lord only knows why.\"\n\nTemper brought a rush of color to Shane's high cheekbones and flared his nostrils. He jammed his hands on his hips just to keep from reaching out and shaking the infuriating little vixen. \"Of all the damn, stubborn\u2014\"\n\n\"You'd better believe it, mister,\" Faith said, her chin coming up another notch. \"I've had it up to here with men manipulating my life. I will not let you walk away just because you think it's best for me. _I_ know what's best for me.\"\n\n\"Oh? Was getting kidnapped good for you? Was getting shot good for you?\"\n\n\"Is running away from love good for you?\" Her question was met with a silence so tense it seemed brittle. Shane stared at her as if she had slapped him. She'd hit a nerve. Thank heaven. Oh, please, she prayed as she drew in a slow, deep breath. \"That's what you're doing. Running. We have something special between us, Shane. It won't be good for either one of us if you push that away.\"\n\nRetreating a step, Shane felt all the anger rush out of him. \"I'm just trying to save you, Faith. Can't you see that? The life I live doesn't allow for love.\"\n\n\"Then leave it,\" she said softly, never taking her eyes from his face. \"If that's all that's standing between us, leave it. I know your job is important, and I'll share you with it if I have to, but I'll be damned if I'm going to let it take you away from me.\"\n\nShane squeezed his eyes shut. Didn't she know how badly he wanted to take what she offered? Didn't she realize he was doing the right thing by turning away?\n\n_Are you?_ that inner voice questioned.\n\n\"Even if I did quit the agency,\" he said, trying to answer his own doubts as much as he was trying to answer Faith's, \"the job would always be a part of me. The things I've done...\" His words trailed off on a tight sigh, and he started over. \"I've crossed swords with a lot of bad people, honey. I thought I'd left Adam Strauss in the past, but the past will never be entirely behind me. I can't guarantee something like that won't happen again.\"\n\n\"And one of these days while you're busy worrying about it, you're going to step off the curb and get hit by a bus.\"\n\nHer strange statement pulled Shane away from his melancholy mood. He shot her an annoyed glance, his dark brows riding low over flashing silver eyes. \"What the hell is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"It means worrying about something that might never happen is irrational. We can't know what the future will hold. All we can do is grab what we have now and hang on.\" Taking a big chance that her legs were strong enough to hold her up, she let go of the bedpost and stepped toward him. She locked her earnest gaze on Shane's wary gray eyes. Her heart beat a wild rhythm of hope and fear. \"I love you, Shane Callan. You love me. Please don't walk away from that. What we have is far too special to let ghosts and fears steal it away from us.\"\n\nOh, Lord, Shane thought as he stared down into those soft dark eyes, I don't think I'm strong enough to walk away from her.\n\nOr was it staying that took more courage? This sweet, good woman was willing to share her life with him. Did he have the guts to put his past behind him and start a fresh new life? He had dreaded the bleakness of his future without Faith, but the idea of loving her and having her love him in return scared the hell out of him. What did he know of love and family? Nothing. Did he even deserve the chance to find out?\n\nWith a hand that was trembling slightly, Shane reached out and cupped Faith's rounded cheek. She was so soft. His fingertips tingled where they rubbed against the fine silk of her dark gold curls. The desire to wrap her up and hold her forever was an ache in his chest he was certain would never leave him. She fit in his arms like a puzzle piece that had been missing from his life. He knew he would never feel complete without her.\n\n\"I'm a jaded, cynical cop,\" he said. \"I've seen too much of the ugly side of life. I've been a part of that too long. What do I have left to offer you, Faith?\"\n\nHer mouth lifted in a smile of infinite feminine wisdom. The love that shone in her eyes was warmer than the sun. \"I can live with what you are, with who you've been, but I don't want to live without you, Shane. Offer me your heart, your love.\"\n\n\"You already have them,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Then there's nothing else I'll ever need.\"\n\nThe sense of deliverance, of salvation was so strong, it brought tears to his eyes. The taste of it as he bent his head and settled his mouth softly against Faith's was like nourishment to his starving soul, it was like wine to a man who'd been through a desert. He drank deeply and slowly, savoring every drop.\n\nFaith reached up with her good hand to clutch at Shane's broad shoulder. Relief swept the last of her strength away, and she leaned into him, knowing he would hold her, knowing he would never let her fall. His strong arm banding around her back proved her trust was warranted. Safe in his arms, safe in the knowledge that he was hers, she concentrated on their kiss, on the warm, wild taste of him and the tenderness of his possession.\n\nWhen he lifted his head, she looked up at him and said, \"I have something for you.\"\n\nReaching into the pocket of her robe, she pulled out the ring Bryan had sent her and handed it to Shane. He examined it in the soft lamplight, his pulse skipping as he compared the intertwined golden hearts on the face of the ring with the delicate charm that rested against Faith's creamy skin. He read aloud the inscription etched inside the gold band, his voice soft and smoky with emotion. \"Two hearts, one destiny.\"\n\n\"You can read Gaelic?\" She sounded every bit as incredulous as she looked.\n\nShane merely blinked at her, as if to say \"Can't everyone?\" She shook her head and stepped back into the circle of his arms, cuddling against him as best she could, considering her arm was in a sling.\n\n\"It figures,\" she murmured with a soft, sweet smile.\n\nAnd they held each other for a long time, neither one of them noticing the soft _ker-thump_ that sounded in the hall as the bedroom door swung gently shut.\nDon't miss the next book in this \nromance trilogy by Tami Hoag\n\n**_Reilly's Return_**\n\nREILLY WAS GOING to show up sooner or later. It was fate, destiny, an ominous portent that had appeared in her morning horoscope. She could feel it in the bottom of her belly, that deep, hollow sense of impending doom. She could feel it in the weight of the antique gold bracelet that circled her left wrist with tingling warmth. That was a sure sign.\n\nIt wasn't going to matter a bit that she had left Hollywood and moved up the coast to Anastasia\u2014hundreds of miles away from Tinsel Town in more ways than just distance. The year of waiting was over, and he was going to find her.\n\nJayne Jordan abandoned the wall she'd been washing, dropping her sponge in the metal bucket full of soapy water that sat beside her. Tucking her feet beneath her, she took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes shut as if preparing to dunk her head under water. Heedless of the fact that she was sitting on a scaffolding eight feet above the floor of the stage, she released the air from her lungs and willed herself to relax. Strains of a Mozart serenade floated through her mind as she attempted to banish the sense of dread from her body. Unfortunately, the sweet joyous notes that had poured unblemished from the composer's soul did nothing to erase the image of Pat Reilly from her mind.\n\nShe could see him clearly. His image was indelibly etched on her memory. Those breathtaking sky-blue eyes, pale and opalescent, staring out at her from beneath straight dark gold brows; eyes set in a face that was ruggedly masculine. She could feel the intensity of those eyes penetrating her aura, burning through her veneer of restraint and searing her basic feminine core.\n\nIt had been that way from their first meeting, and she had cursed both him and herself for it. It had been that way at their last meeting, and it would be that way again, once he found her. And he _would_ find her. Pat Reilly was many things, not all of them admirable, but he was nothing if not a man of his word.\n\nJayne could still feel the mist on her face. She could see the green of the hills and the gray of her husband's headstone and Reilly as he'd stood before her with the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the wind. She could still taste his kiss, the only kiss they had ever shared, a kiss full of compassion and passion, wanting and guilt, sweetness and hunger. And she could hear his voice\u2014that low, velvety baritone with the Australian lilt that never faded, vowing in a year's time he would return to her. When they both had had a chance to lay Joseph MacGregor's ghost to rest, he would be back.\n\nThe year was up.\n\nJayne sucked in another deep breath as a wave of panic crashed over her. In a valiant effort to fight off the feelings and the memories, she pinched her thumbs and forefingers together to make two circles, held her hands out before her, and began chanting. \"Oooommm... oooommm... oooommm...\"\n\nThe community theater was empty for the moment. Because she hadn't been able to sleep, Jayne had shown up at the crack of dawn to begin cleaning up the building that had stood unused for the past six years. But it wouldn't have mattered if there had been a hundred people present. She would have gone right on chanting had her entire staff of volunteers been gathered around. When a person needed to meditate, a person needed to meditate. It wasn't good for a body to block out its spiritual needs.\n\n\"Oooommm... oooommm... oooommm...\" She scrunched her eyebrows together in an expression of absolute concentration and _ooommmed_ for all she was worth, but it didn't do a darn bit of good. In the theater of her mind the memories played out, undaunted, in all their Technicolor glory. Memories of Reilly proved to be as stubborn as the man himself.\n\nThe theater was dark and dank, an unpleasant contrast to the sunny spring morning outside. Pat Reilly ignored the atmosphere. His mind was on more important things than the musty state of the auditorium. He ignored the clutter of junk that had been piled haphazardly backstage, stepping over and around the stuff when necessary, but barely sparing it a glance.\n\nHe had followed Jayne Jordan's trail to Anastasia, wondering how long it would take actually to track her down once he got there. But luck had been with him. Driving into the picture postcard coastal village, he had spotted her car\u2014a vintage red convertible MG\u2014slanted drunkenly into a parking spot on a side street with one chrome-spoked wheel on the curb.\n\nIf he'd had any doubts about the vehicle being hers\u2014and he hadn't because only Jayne would desecrate the beauty of an antique car with a Save Catalina's Wild Goats bumper sticker\u2014the building the car was parked beside would have settled the question. The marquee was missing several letters, making the building look like an old crone whose teeth were dropping out one by one, but there was enough of the words left so they were understandable. It was the Anastasia Community Theater\u2014a fitting place to find the woman he was looking for.\n\nNow he wound his way through the rubble to the stage proper, following a weird chanting sound. That would be Jayne, he thought, a wry grin tugging at his mouth. The glue beneath the false beard he wore pulled at his skin and he winced. Damn, he probably should have taken five minutes to peel off the disguise. It was his fans he was trying to hide from, not Jayne.\n\nHe'd done enough hiding from Jayne and his attraction to her. The time had come for both of them to face facts. Mac was dead and there was nothing standing in their way. It was time to face this damnable attraction that had burned between them from the first time they'd laid eyes on each other, this attraction both of them had denied and cursed and fought against. She had been his best friend's bride, and Lord knew Pat Reilly would have sooner died than betray a mate. But Mac was gone now. A year had passed since they laid him to rest. And there was no reason for the living to go on feeling guilty.\n\nHe stopped in the wings, stage left, his booted feet spread slightly. He jammed his big hands at the waist of his well-worn jeans and shook his head as he got his first look at the woman he had come there to find.\n\nJayne sat atop a rickety-looking scaffolding, her legs twisted into an impossible pretzel design that probably had something to do with yoga or some equally mystical malarkey. She was just as he remembered her: pretty in a way that had nothing to do with cosmetics or fashion. Especially not fashion. Jayne's outfits would have made any other woman look like a refugee from Goodwill. This morning she wore gray thermal underwear bottoms, a purple T-shirt, and a man's gray plaid sport coat that swallowed up her petite frame.\n\nStill, she looked damned appealing to Reilly, proving that hers was an inner beauty that was enhanced by delicate features and eyes like huge pools of obsidian. Her hair was spread around her shoulders in a dark auburn cloud that was nearly black in this light and so wild, Reilly would have bet she couldn't get a comb through it to save her life. But it was soft and silky. He knew that because he'd once buried his hands in it. He'd dreamed of it nearly every night since; every night for a year.\n\n\"Oooommm... oooommm...,\" she chanted, her face a study in concentration as Reilly moved closer.\n\nShe had a beautifully sculpted mouth. It was wide and expressive with full, ripe lips. Painted a lush shade of mulberry, those lips curved seductively around the _O_ sound she made and closed softly on the _M_. Reilly's skin warmed and his mouth went dry as he stared. He could remember exactly the texture and taste of those lips, though he'd sampled them only once, and he had certainly kissed a dozen women since. It was Jayne's taste that lingered on his tongue, sweet and sad and frightened, full of longing and guilt and loneliness. He had craved that taste as if it had been wine. Its memory had haunted him just as the memory of her sweet Kentucky drawl had haunted him.\n\nMemories of Jayne had haunted him more than memories of Mac had, but the thing that had haunted him most was guilt. Now that he saw her, he was all through feeling guilty.\n_Heart of Gold_ is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 1990 by Tami Hoag\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nPublished in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.\n\nBANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.\n\nOriginally published in paperback in the United States by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1990.\n\neISBN: 978-0-553-90744-5\n\nwww.bantamdell.com\n\nv3.0\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":"\n## Fateful Choices\n\n## IAN KERSHAW\n\n## Fateful Choices\n\nTen Decisions That Changed the World, \n1940\u20131941\n\nTHE PENGUIN PRESS\n\nNEW YORK\nTHE PENGUIN PRESS\n\nPublished by the Penguin Group \nPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. \nPenguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 \n(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) \nPenguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England \nPenguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland \n(a division of Penguin Books Ltd) \nPenguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia \n(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) \nPenguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi\u2013110 017, India \nPenguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand \n(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) \nPenguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa\n\nPenguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: \n80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England\n\nFirst published in 2007 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Ian Kershaw, 2007 \nAll rights reserved\n\nISBN: 978-1-1012-0237-1\n\nWithout limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.\n\nThe scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.\n\n## Contents\n\n List of Illustrations\n\n List of Maps\n\n Acknowledgements\n\n Dramatis Personae\n\n Forethoughts\n\n[1 London, Spring 1940 \nGreat Britain Decides to Fight On](fatefulchoices_ch01.html#ch01)\n\n[2 Berlin, Summer and Autumn 1940 \nHitler Decides to Attack the Soviet Union](fatefulchoices_ch02.html#ch02)\n\n[3 Tokyo, Summer and Autumn 1940 \nJapan Decides to Seize the 'Golden Opportunity'](fatefulchoices_ch03.html#ch03)\n\n[4 Rome, Summer and Autumn 1940 \nMussolini Decides to Grab His Share](fatefulchoices_ch04.html#ch04)\n\n[5 Washington, DC, Summer 1940\u2013Spring 1941 \nRoosevelt Decides to Lend a Hand](fatefulchoices_ch05.html#ch05)\n\n[6 Moscow, Spring\u2013Summer 1941 \nStalin Decides He Knows Best](fatefulchoices_ch06.html#ch06)\n\n[7 Washington, DC, Summer\u2013Autumn 1941 \nRoosevelt Decides to Wage Undeclared War](fatefulchoices_ch07.html#ch07)\n\n[8 Tokyo, Autumn 1941 \nJapan Decides to Go to War](fatefulchoices_ch08.html#ch08)\n\n[9 Berlin, Autumn 1941 \nHitler Decides to Declare War on the United States](fatefulchoices_ch09.html#ch09)\n\n[10 Berlin\/East Prussia, Summer\u2013Autumn 1941 \nHitler Decides to Kill the Jews](fatefulchoices_ch10.html#ch10)\n\n Afterthoughts\n\n Notes\n\n List of Works Cited\n\n Index\n\n## List of Illustrations\n\nPhotographic acknowledgements are given in parentheses.\n\n1 French infantry soldiers surrender, May 1940 (akg-images)\n\n2 Allied troops, Dunkirk, 1940 (Alinari Archives)\n\n3 Churchill with Lord Halifax in Downing Street, 1940 (akg-images\/ullstein bild)\n\n4 Grand Admiral Erich Raeder (akg-images)\n\n5 Hitler and Franco at a French border station, October 1940 (akg-images\/ullstein bild)\n\n6 Molotov with Ribbentrop in Berlin, 1940 (akg-images)\n\n7 Japanese Panzer tanks in southern China, 1941 (akg-images\/ullstein bild)\n\n8 Prince Konoe Fumimaro (akg-images)\n\n9 The signing of the Tripartite Pact in Berlin, September 1940 (Alinari Archives)\n\n10 Rally at the Italian entry into the war, June 1940 (akg-images)\n\n11 Mussolini, Hitler, Ciano and Ribbentrop, October 1940 (akg-images\/ullstein bild)\n\n12 Italian artillery fire on Greek positions, March 1941 (akg-images\/ullstein bild)\n\n13 Roosevelt talking to Cordell Hull, 1940 (akg-images)\n\n14 George C. Marshall and Henry L. Stimson (Time Life Pictures\/Getty Images)\n\n15 Stalin and Molotov (akg-images)\n\n16 Captured Soviet soldiers, June 1941 (Roger-Viollet\/Topfoto)\n\n17 Stranded Soviet tanks, summer 1941 (Topfoto)\n\n18 Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill aboard HMS Prince of Wales, August 1941 (AP\/Empics)\n\n19 General Tojo Hideki (Bettmann\/Corbis)\n\n20 Emperor Hirohito conducting a military review, December 1941 (akg-images)\n\n21 Japanese air-raid on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941 (akg-images)\n\n22 Nazi column advancing towards Moscow, August 1941 (Topfoto)\n\n23 German Panzer tank near Moscow, 1941 (AP\/Empics)\n\n24 Hitler declares war on the USA, 11 December 1941 (akg-images)\n\n25 Heinrich Himmler (Time Life Pictures\/Getty Images)\n\n26 Reinhard Heydrich (Corbis)\n\n27 The Babi Yar massacre, Poland, September 1941 (Hulton Archive\/Getty Images)\n\n28 Men and women search among the dead after mass shootings in Lemberg, July 1941 (akg-images)\n\n## List of Maps\n\n1 Western Europe, 1940\n\n2 The Far East, 1940\u201341\n\n3 The Balkans, 1940\u201341\n\n4 The North Atlantic, 1941\n\n5 The Eastern front, 1941\n\n## Map 1 Western Europe, 1940\n\n## Map 2 The Far East, 1940\u201341\n\n## Map 3 The Balkans, 1940\u201341\n\n## Map 4 The North Atlantic, 1941\n\n## Map 5 The Eastern front, 1941\n\n## Acknowledgements\n\nA chance conversation in our kitchen gave me the idea for this book. Laurence Rees had come up to Manchester to discuss with me the concept for what would become the television series Auschwitz. The Nazis and the 'Final Solution'\u2013the third series on which we had collaborated. While we were waiting for the kettle to boil, Laurence happened to mention that, were he a historian, he would want to write a book about the year 1941\u2013in his view, the most momentous year in modern history. The thought stuck. But it was obvious that the crucial events of 1941\u2013most obviously the German invasion of the Soviet Union (which triggered the rapid descent into full-scale genocide against the Jews), the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into the European war\u2013were the logical consequence of a number of vital decisions that had flowed from Hitler's astonishing triumph in western Europe in spring 1940. A study of the interlocking key decisions by the leaders of the major powers during those extraordinary months between May 1940 and December 1941 started to take embryonic shape in my mind. So my first warm thanks are owing to Laurence for the initial impulse to undertake this book.\n\nAs usual, numerous other debts of gratitude have been incurred along the way and my brief acknowledgement here can only offer a cursory expression of my thanks. It is right, however, to single out the Leverhulme Foundation, for whose generosity I am once more deeply grateful. Much of the book was written during the final year of a wonderfully generous award which freed me from university commitments.\n\nFinding my way through the less familiar territory that I had to traverse in the research and writing was greatly eased through being able to call upon the expertise of colleagues. I am extremely grateful to David Reynolds, who made very helpful comments on the typescript and shared with me some of his profound knowledge of Churchill and of British relations with the United States. Patrick Higgins kindly let me see his unpublished paper on R. A. Butler, and offered valuable comments on the May crisis of 1940. MacGregor Knox, beyond his own superb work on Fascist Italy, not only answered some detailed queries about the Italian armed forces but also, most generously, made available photocopies of the unpublished Roatta letter-diaries. The late Derek Watson (especially), Robert Davies, Robert Service, Moshe Lewin and, in Moscow, Sergei Slutsch were of enormous help on Stalin and the Soviet Union. Patrick Renshaw, Richard Carwardine and Hugh Wilford answered queries about the workings of the Roosevelt administration. In Tokyo Maurice Jenkins and Ms Owako Iwama were extraordinarily helpful in locating materials I required. I also received useful advice from Ken Ishida and, closer to home, Sue Townsend and Gordon Daniels. On more familiar terrain, Otto Dov Kulka in Jerusalem offered, as always, valuable reflections on the harrowing subject of the Nazi onslaught on the Jews. I profited, too, from a discussion about the emergence of the 'final solution' with \u00c9douard Husson, a younger French historian of Nazi Germany, whose fine work will surely soon become more widely known. I also benefited greatly from discussions, during a stay in Freiburg, with Gerhard Schreiber, J\u00fcrgen F\u00f6rster and Manfred Kehrig. To all these colleagues and friends I offer my sincere thanks. Naturally, they have no responsibility for any errors or flaws in what I have written.\n\nPart of Chapter 2 appeared as a contribution to Jeremy Noakes' Festschrift (Nazism, War and Genocide, Exeter, 2005), and I am grateful to the editor, Neil Gregor, and the University of Exeter Press for their agreement to its inclusion here.\n\nLack of linguistic competence was a severe shortcoming and enormous frustration in researching the chapters on the Soviet Union, Japan and, to some extent, also Italy (where Latin and French helped with the gist, but not with a refined understanding). So I am extremely grateful to my good friend Constantine Brancovan (under great pressure of time) and to Christopher Joyce, who willingly and ably stepped in to help, for translating important documents from Russian for me; to Darren Ashmore for providing translations of some works in Japanese; and to Anna Ferrarese for speedily translating some Italian material I needed.\n\nThe staff of Sheffield University Library, and especially of the Inter-Library Loans section, who had to labour under my numerous requests, offered, as always, extremely friendly as well as efficient help. I also encountered only the best possible service at the Public Record Office (now renamed the National Archives), the British Library and the London School of Economics Library, the Churchill Centre in Cambridge, the Borthwick Institute in York, Birmingham University Library, the Politisches Archiv des Ausw\u00e4rtigen Amtes in Berlin, the Bundesarchiv\/Milit\u00e4rarchiv in Freiburg and the Institut f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte in Munich.\n\nI would like to thank my colleagues, academic and secretarial, in the excellent Department of History at the University of Sheffield for their continued collegial support. Quite especially, it is a great pleasure to express my gratitude once more to Beverley Eaton, my long-standing (and long-suffering) Personal Assistant, who helped greatly in locating obscure and arcane works as well as dealing, with legendary courtesy and efficiency (if not always legendary patience), with an array of matters which would otherwise have proved most time-consuming. In addition, and a very big help, she took it upon herself to compile the List of Works Cited for me.\n\nI would also like once more to thank my agent, the remarkable Andrew Wylie, for his constant and invaluable help and advice, and the wonderful team at Penguin, both in London and in New York, who make publishing under this particular imprint something special. I am grateful to Cecilia Mackay for her work in locating the illustrations. And my editors, Simon Winder in London and, in New York, Scott Moyers, stand proxy for all those involved in the publication process, but deserve especial thanks for both their constant encouragement and for their sharp, vigilant criticism.\n\nFinally, as always, the last thanks go to my family. Without them, writing books on history would give me no satisfaction at all. So my deepest thanks\u2013as well as my love, of course\u2013go to Betty, to David, Katie, Joe and Ella, and to Stephen, Becky and Sophie for all that they have done and continue to do to help in my work but, above all, for giving me a constant reminder of a proper sense of priorities.\n\nIan Kershaw\n\nManchester\/Sheffield, November 2006\n\n## Dramatis Personae\n\nOnly the principal players of the major countries in the unfolding drama are listed here, with a brief indication of their position and standing during the crucial events of 1940\u201341.\n\nGREAT BRITAIN\n\nAttlee, Clement. Leader of the Labour Party from 1935; Lord Privy Seal in Churchill's War Cabinet.\n\nCadogan, Sir Alexander. Permanent Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office (head of the diplomatic staff).\n\nChamberlain, Neville. Prime Minister from 1937 until his resignation on 10 May 1940; thereafter Lord President of the Council and member of the War Cabinet until serious illness forced his resignation from government (and from the leadership of the Conservative Party) a few weeks before his death on 9 November 1940.\n\nChurchill, Winston. Appointed Prime Minister on 10 May 1940 after a decade in the political wilderness; also took on the responsibilities of Minister of Defence. Leader of the Conservative Party following Chamberlain's resignation.\n\nCripps, Sir Stafford. Ambassador to the USSR from May 1940.\n\nGreenwood, Arthur. Deputy Leader of the Labour Party since 1935; Minister without Portfolio, responsible for economic affairs, in Churchill's War Cabinet.\n\nGort, Field Marshal Lord. Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, who took the decision in May 1940 to withdraw to Dunkirk for evacuation.\n\nHalifax, Lord. Foreign Secretary from 1938 until his appointment as British ambassador to the United States in January 1941.\n\nLloyd George, David. Former Prime Minister (1916\u201322), seen by some (including himself) in 1940 as the likely head of government if peace terms with Germany could be attained.\n\nLothian, Lord. British ambassador to Washington; exposed Britain's financial plight to the Americans in November 1940, prompting the moves that led to lend-lease; died the following month.\n\nSinclair, Archibald. Chairman of the Parliamentary Liberal Party from 1935; Secretary of State for Air in the Churchill government; participated in the War Cabinet deliberations in late May 1940.\n\nGERMANY\n\nBrauchitsch, Field Marshal Werner von. Commander-in-Chief of the army from 1938 until December 1941.\n\nD\u00f6nitz, Rear Admiral Karl. Commander of the German U-boat fleet.\n\nEichmann, Adolf. Head of the Jewish Affairs Desk in the Reich Security Headquarters; responsible to Heydrich for organizing the deportation of the Jews; in effect, 'manager' of the 'final solution'.\n\nFrank, Hans. Governor General of occupied Poland.\n\nGoebbels, Joseph. Reich Minister for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda since March 1933.\n\nG\u00f6ring, Hermann. Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe; head of the Four-Year Plan (since 1936); Hitler's designated successor.\n\nGreiser, Arthur. Provincial head of government, and of the Nazi Party, in the annexed region of western Poland centring on Posen, known as the 'Warthegau'.\n\nHalder, Colonel-General Franz. Chief of the General Staff of the army, responsible for army strategic planning.\n\nHeydrich, Reinhard. Directly subordinate to Himmler; head of Reich Security Headquarters; in charge of the implementation of the 'final solution of the Jewish Question'.\n\nHimmler, Heinrich. Head of the SS since 1929; appointed chief of the German police in 1936; in addition, since October 1939, Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of German Nationality (giving him sweeping powers over the programme of population resettlement in eastern Europe).\n\nHitler, Adolf. Leader of the Nazi Party since 1921; Reich Chancellor (head of the German government) from January 1933; head of state from August 1934; in supreme and direct control of the newly created High Command of the Wehrmacht from February 1938; addressed officially only as 'F\u00fchrer' ('Leader') from 1939; at the height of his powers following the victory over France in 1940.\n\nJodl, General Alfred. As head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, responsible for overall strategic planning; Hitler's main adviser on military strategy and operations; strong Hitler loyalist.\n\nKeitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm. Head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht since February 1938, though completely subservient in that position to Hitler.\n\nM\u00fcller, Heinrich. Head of the Gestapo since 1937; directly responsible to Heydrich.\n\nOtt, General Eugen. Ambassador in Tokyo since 1938.\n\nRaeder, Grand Admiral Erich. Commander-in-Chief of the German navy.\n\nRibbentrop, Joachim von. Reich Foreign Minister since February 1938.\n\nRosenberg, Alfred. Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories from July 1941.\n\nSchulenburg, Count Friedrich Werner von der. Ambassador in Moscow since 1934.\n\nWarlimont, Major-General Walter. Head of the National Defence Department of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff since November 1938; directly subordinate to Jodl.\n\nWeizs\u00e4cker, Ernst von. State Secretary in the German Foreign Office since March 1938; head of the diplomatic staff; had a tense relationship with Ribbentrop.\n\nJAPAN\n\nHirohito. Emperor since succeeding his father, Yoshihito, in 1926; deified symbol of the 'Showa' era, meaning 'illustrious peace'.\n\nKido Koichi, Marquis. As Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal from 1 June 1940, the Emperor's closest counsellor.\n\nKonoe Fumimaro, Prince. Prime Minister in 1937, when the war against China began; resigned in January 1939, but reappointed as premier in July 1940; resigned again (nominally) along with the entire government in July 1941; immediately reappointed as Prime Minister for the third time; final resignation at the failure of his policies on 16 October 1941.\n\nKurusu Saburo. Former ambassador to Germany, sent to Washington as a special emissary in November 1941 to assist Nomura explore the possibilities of staving off war.\n\nMatsuoka Yosuke. Strongly pro-Axis and mercurial Foreign Minister from July 1940 to July 1941, when he was effectively forced out of office.\n\nNagano Osami, Admiral. Chief of the navy General Staff.\n\nNomura Kichisaburo. Ambassador to the United States from April 1941.\n\nOikawa Koshiro, Admiral. Navy Minister between September 1940 and October 1941.\n\nOshima Hiroshi. Pro-Axis ambassador to Germany, 1938\u20139, and took up the position again in February 1941.\n\nShimada Shigetaro. Succeeded Oikawa as Navy Minister in October 1941.\n\nSugiyama Gen, General. Army Minister in 1937; later chief of the army General Staff.\n\nTogo Shigenori. Former ambassador to Berlin and Moscow; appointed Foreign Minister in Tojo's government in succession to Toyoda in October 1941.\n\nTojo Hideki, General. Former chief of staff of the Kwantung Army; Army Minister in Konoe's second administration; appointed Prime Minister in October 1941.\n\nToyoda Teijiro. Navy Vice-Minister in 1940; successor to Matsuoka as Foreign Minister between July and October 1941.\n\nYamamoto Isoroku, Admiral. Former Navy Vice-Minister; mastermind behind the plan to attack Pearl Harbor; commander of the attack fleet.\n\nYonai Mitsumasa, Admiral. Konoe's predecessor as Prime Minister between January and July 1940.\n\nYoshida Zengo, Admiral. Navy Minister between July and September 1940 (when he resigned on grounds of ill-health).\n\nITALY\n\nAlfieri, Dino. Ambassador to Berlin from May 1940; more acceptable to the German leadership than Attolico.\n\nAttolico, Bernardo. Ambassador to Berlin from 1935 until his anti-interventionist stance prompted Hitler to request his recall in late April 1940.\n\nBadoglio, Marshal Pietro. Commanded the victorious Italian army in Abyssinia in 1935\u20136; chief of the Supreme Command of the armed forces since 1925; in this capacity, Mussolini's main military adviser; resigned in December 1940 in the wake of the debacle in Greece.\n\nCavagnari, Admiral Domenico. Chief of staff of the navy, and Navy Under-Secretary until his dismissal in December 1940.\n\nCiano, Count Galeazzo. Foreign Minister from 1936; married to Mussolini's daughter, Edda.\n\nGraziani, Marshal Rodolfo. Former viceroy of Abyssinia; army chief of staff, 1939\u201341; Italian commander in north Africa, 1940\u201341.\n\nJacomoni, Francesco. Governor of Albania from 1939.\n\nMussolini, Benito. Leader of the Fascist Party since 1919; head of government since 1922; in addition, in control of the armed forces as War, Navy and Air Minister since 1933; popularity and hold over the Italian state\u2013bolstered by the artificially manufactured Duce cult\u2013at their height after the victory over Abyssinia in 1936; in foreign affairs by 1940, however, increasingly under the shadow of Hitler.\n\nPricolo, General Francesco. Chief of staff of the air force, 1939\u201341.\n\nRoatta, General Mario. Deputy chief of the army staff from 1939 to 1941.\n\nSoddu, General Ubaldo. Under-Secretary for War since 1939 and deputy chief of the Supreme Command of the armed forces from June 1940; Mussolini's most trusted military adviser; replaced Visconti Prasca as commander in Albania in November 1940, but soon revealed his own inadequacies in the Greek campaign; resigned on health grounds in January 1941.\n\nVictor Emmanuel III, King of Italy. Sovereign since 1900; also Emperor of Abyssinia and King of Albania; head of state to whom, ultimately, Mussolini, too, was responsible (as the latter's removal from power and arrest in July 1943 were to show).\n\nVisconti Prasca, General Count Sebastiano. Incompetent military commander of Albania, sacked in November 1940 as one of the scapegoats for the failure of the offensive in Greece.\n\nTHE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA\n\nGrew, Joseph C. Long-standing, highly experienced and skilful ambassador to Japan; one of the strongest advocates of attempts to defuse the growing crisis in 1941.\n\nHopkins, Harry. Hugely energetic 'fixer' for Roosevelt, despite serious illness; close to the President, a member of his regular 'inner circle', and sometimes entrusted with especially important missions as a personal envoy.\n\nHornbeck, Stanley K. Chief adviser to Cordell Hull on the Far East, and an outright 'hawk' in his views on the threat from Japan.\n\nHull, Cordell. Secretary of State since 1933; a strong believer in the principles of self-determination and international cooperation laid down by President Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War, but increasingly drawn into a hard line in protracted negotiations with Japan in 1941.\n\nIckes, Harold L. Secretary of the Interior and a strong interventionist.\n\nKnox, Frank. Secretary of the Navy from June 1940; alongside Stimson, and a fellow Republican, he pushed for a more assertive defence policy than Roosevelt was prepared to pursue.\n\nMarshall, General George C. Army chief of staff since 1938; superb organizer, who pushed for and presided over a huge and rapid increase in the size of the army between the start of the European war and Pearl Harbor.\n\nMorgenthau, Henry. Secretary to the Treasury; strong proponent of economic assistance for Great Britain; given the task of organizing war production.\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin D. Inaugurated as President in January 1933; re-elected 1936; elected again for an unprecedented third term in November 1940; concerned in the main with domestic recovery from the Depression until the late 1930s, but then, increasingly anxious about the threat from Germany and Japan, commissioned the start of what would prove an immense armaments programme.\n\nStark, Admiral Harold. Chief of Naval Operations since 1939; a key advocate of according planning priority to the Atlantic over the Pacific.\n\nSteinhardt, Laurence. Ambassador to the Soviet Union since 1939.\n\nStimson, Henry L. Secretary of War from June 1940; a strong proponent of American interventionism in the war.\n\nWelles, Sumner. Under-Secretary of State and close to Roosevelt, which led to some antagonism in his relations with Hull.\n\nTHE SOVIET UNION\n\nBeria, Lavrenti. Chief of the NKVD (the secret police) from 1938; in charge of internal security.\n\nDekanozov, Vladimir. Soviet ambassador to Germany from December 1940.\n\nGolikov, General Filip. Head of Soviet military intelligence.\n\nMalenkov, Georgi. Stalin's right hand in the General Secretariat of the Communist Party, and manager of the party's bureaucracy; following the German invasion, put in charge of the evacuation of industrial production to the east, and of supplies for the Red Army.\n\nMaisky, Ivan. Ambassador to London since 1932.\n\nMerkulov, Vsevolod. Commissar for State Security (head of the network of foreign intelligence, which was separated in February 1941 from Beria's NKVD and remained distinct from the organization of military intelligence).\n\nMikoyan, Anastas. Member of Stalin's 'inner circle' in the Politburo; responsible for foreign trade.\n\nMolotov, Vyacheslav. Commissar for Foreign Affairs since May 1939 and, until 5 May 1941, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Prime Minister of the state government).\n\nOumansky, Konstantin. Ambassador to the United States since 1939.\n\nStalin, Joseph. General Secretary of the Communist Party; from 5 May 1941 chairman of the Council of People's Commissars; unchallenged supreme ruler of the Soviet Union, in control of all the main levers of power, political and military.\n\nTimoshenko, Marshal Semion. Defence Commissar from May 1940; held responsibility for the organization and training of the Red Army.\n\nVoroshilov, Marshal Kliment. Defence Commissar until May 1940; long-standing adviser to Stalin on military matters.\n\nZhukov, Marshal Georgi. Came to prominence as commander during the conflict with Japanese forces in Mongolia in 1939; chief of the Soviet General Staff from January 1941.\n\n## Fateful Choices\n## Forethoughts\n\nThe Second World War recast the twentieth century in ways that are still felt today. And that war\u2013the most awful in history\u2013took its shape largely from a number of fateful choices made by the leaders of the world's major powers within a mere nineteen months, between May 1940 and December 1941. These two thoughts underlie the chapters that follow.\n\nThe nearer the twentieth century came to its end, the more it became evident that its defining period had been that of the Second World War. Of course, the First World War was the 'original catastrophe'.1 It shattered political regimes (the Russian, Austrian and Ottoman empires all fell in its wake), destroyed economies and left a searing mark on mentalities. But the highly unstable, volatile societies and political structures that emerged proved to be of short duration. The immense social, economic and political cost of the seemingly pointless four-year-long carnage meant that a further great conflagration was always probable and gradually became inescapable. The Second World War was in obvious ways the unfinished business of the First. But this second great conflict was not only even more bloody\u2013costing upwards of fifty million lives, between four and five times the estimated death toll of the war of 1914\u201318\u2013and more truly global; it was also more profound in its lasting consequences and its reshaping of the world's power structures.2\n\nBoth in Europe and in the Far East, previous power pretensions\u2013those of Germany, Italy and Japan\u2013collapsed in the maelstrom of destruction. A combination of national bankruptcy and resurgent anti-colonial movements put paid to Great Britain's world empire. Mao's China was a prime legatee of the demise of Japan and the upheavals of the war-torn Far East. And, above all, the two new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, neither of them very super before 1939, now held each other at bay with nuclear arsenals in a Cold War that would last until the final decade of the century. The constellation of power left by the Second World War did not lead to a third cataclysmic conflict\u2013to the surprise and relief of many contemporaries of the early Cold War years\u2013but provided the framework for the phoenix-like recovery both of the European continent and of the Far East with, astonishingly, the defeated countries of Germany (at least its western half) and Japan as the economic driving forces.3 Only with the unpredictably peaceful (in the main) end of the Soviet bloc in 1989\u201391 did the world enter its post-postwar era. The impact of the Second World War had, then, been huge, lasting and defining.\n\nThe Second World War also left humanity with a new, horrible word which also relates to what has increasingly come to be seen as a defining characteristic of the century: genocide.4 And, though it was lamentably far from the only instance in that benighted century, what later came to be known as 'the Holocaust'\u2013the planned attempt by Nazi Germany to wipe out a targeted eleven million Jews, a genocidal project unprecedented in history\u2013left the most lasting and fundamental mark on future decades. In terms of power-politics, the legacy of the Holocaust ensured, and gave legitimacy to, the foundation of the state of Israel, supported by much of the world but ferociously attacked by the new country's neighbours who had lost land, and inevitably leading to unending, even increasing, turmoil in the Middle East, with huge implications for the rest of the world. And in terms of mentalities, the ever greater preoccupation with the Holocaust, the further it recedes into history, has profoundly affected views about race, ethnicity and the treatment of minorities. The context for the killing of the Jews had been the Second World War. But, more than just context, the murder of the Jews had been an intrinsic part of the German war effort. This inbuilt genocidal component of the Second World War has come to play an increasingly important part in shaping historical consciousness during subsequent decades.\n\nBefore May 1940 two separate wars, in separate continents, had broken out. The first was the bitter war raging in China, following the attack by the Japanese in 1937. The second was the European war which had commenced in 1939 with Germany's attack on Poland, followed two days later by the declarations of war on Germany by Great Britain and France. Terrible atrocities\u2013by the Japanese in China, and by the Germans in Poland\u2013had already become hallmarks of both wars. But at this stage, spring 1940, the genocidal onslaught which was soon to take place in eastern Europe was still in the future. And, although the war in the Far East was of vital concern to the European powers and to the United States, it remained down to this point distinct from the European war, which itself had not geographically extended (apart from Albania, under Italian rule since the invasion of April 1939) beyond parts of central and eastern Europe held down by German arms. The war in Europe was, conversely, alerting eager eyes in Japan to the possibilities opening up of rich pickings in east Asia at the expense, especially, of the biggest imperial power, Great Britain. But the expansion, as Japan's leaders well understood, presaged a possible showdown, not only with Britain, but, even more dangerously, with the United States. In Europe, too, the war was set to widen. In the autumn Mussolini set the Balkans aflame with his attack on Greece. And by the end of the year, Hitler's determination to invade the Soviet Union the following spring was translated into a firm military directive. Meanwhile, American aid for the beleaguered Britain was increasing. The entire world was being rapidly drawn into a single gigantic war.\n\nThe chapters that follow examine a number of interlinked political decisions with immense and dramatic military consequences, between May 1940 and December 1941, that transformed the two separate wars in different continents into one truly global conflagration, a colossal conflict with genocide and unprecedented barbarism at its centre. Of course, by December 1941 the war still had far to run. Many vagaries were still to occur over the course of the war. Obviously, other crucial decisions, though mainly strategic and tactical, were yet to be taken. And towards the war's end, with Allied supremacy now assured, the geopolitical framework of the postwar settlement\u2013the basis of the Cold War soon to emerge\u2013was laid down in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. But the remaining three and a half years of the war would, nevertheless, essentially play out the consequences of the decisions taken between May 1940 and December 1941.5 These were indeed fateful decisions\u2013decisions that changed the world.\n\nThe choices made by the leaders of Germany, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan and Italy\u2013countries with very different political systems and different decision-making processes (two Fascist, two democratic, one Communist, one bureaucratic authoritarian)\u2013fed from and were interwoven with each other. How were these decisions reached? Each chapter seeks primarily to answer this question. But related questions arise straight away. What influences were brought to bear on those responsible for the decisions? How far were decisions pre-formed by government bureaucracies, or shaped by competing power-groups within the ruling elites?6 How rational were the decisions\u2013and they were decisions that meant war\u2013in terms of each regime's aims and in the light of the intelligence it was receiving? What role was played by the individuals at the centre of the decision-making process, and how greatly did this differ within the varying political systems? What freedom did the war leaders have in reaching their decisions? How significant, in contrast, were external and impersonal forces in conditioning and limiting the decisions? To what extent did the room for manoeuvre in making decisions diminish over the months in question? How far, in other words, did the scope for alternatives narrow, or even disappear altogether, over the nineteen months in question? And what consequences, short and long term, did the decisions have? These are some of the considerations in mind in what follows.\n\nIn retrospect, what took place seems to have been inexorable. In looking at the history of wars, perhaps even more than at history generally, there is an almost inbuilt teleological impulse, which leads us to presume that the way things turned out is the only way they could have turned out. It is part of the purpose of this book to show that this was not the case. The war is viewed in each chapter as if from behind a separate leader's desk, with only indistinct notions of enemy plans available, the future open, options to be faced, decisions to be taken. A decision implies that there were choices to be made, alternatives available. To the actors concerned, even the most ideologically committed (or blinkered), vital considerations were at stake, crucial assessments to be made, big risks to be taken. There was no inexorable path to be followed. In each case, therefore, the book asks why a particular option rather than an alternative was chosen, posing in most instances explicitly the question of what might have followed had the alternative option been taken up.\n\nThis is not counter-factual or virtual history of the type which makes an intellectual guessing-game of looking into some distant future and projecting what might have happened had some event not taken place. There are always far too many variables in play to make this a fruitful line of enquiry, however fascinating the speculation. Nevertheless, it could fairly be claimed that historians implicitly operate with short-range counterfactuals in terms of alternatives to immediate important occurrences or developments. Otherwise, they are unable fully to ascertain the significance of what actually did take place. So the alternatives discussed here are not advanced as long-term projections or musings on 'what ifs', but as realistic short-term, but different, possible outcomes to what was in fact decided. Putting it another way, assessing the options behind a particular decision helps to clarify why, exactly, the actual decision was taken.\n\nTen decisions are explored. Three, with arguably the most far-reaching consequences of all, were those of Hitler's regime: to attack the Soviet Union, to declare war on the United States and to murder the Jews. The extensive consideration of these decisions reflects the predominant role of Germany as the chief driving force in the crucial course of events that we are following. As a dynamic power triggering events, Japan was second only to Germany, something which the two chapters devoted to Japanese decisions seek to emphasize. The essentially reactive decisions of Great Britain, the Soviet Union and, in a different way (with self-destructive consquences), Italy are taken up in single chapters, though the increasingly vital part played by the United States warrants two chapters. Other decisions than those under consideration here, for example those of Franco's Spain or of Vichy France to refuse to join the war on the Axis side\u2013were, compared with the momentous decisions examined below, of a distinctly lesser order of importance.\n\nIt could, of course, be claimed with some force that what shaped the postwar world most fundamentally was a decision taken almost at the end, rather than close to the beginning, of the Second World War: the decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even here, however, a prior decision\u2013to commission the atom bomb\u2013had been necessary, one which also dates back to the fateful months of 1940 and 1941. Following preliminary work and increased research funding after the fall of France in the summer of 1940, American scientists, aided by the findings of refugee physicists in Britain, established by autumn 1941 the fundamental framework for building a bomb. At huge cost, and necessitating the involvement of large numbers of the most talented American scientists, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to go ahead with its construction on the day before Japanese bombs rained down on the American warships anchored in Pearl Harbor. Without the decision then, the bomb would not have been available to President Harry S. Truman to use in the final days of the war, in August 1945.7 When the commission to research an atomic bomb was issued, however, its ultimate use was scarcely even a distant vision.\n\nEach decision in the following chapters had consequences which informed the next and subsequent decisions. So, as the story moves from one country to another, there is a logical sequence of 'knock-on' events and implications as well as an unfolding chronological pattern. The book opens with Great Britain's decision in May 1940 to stay in the war. Far from being the obvious, even inevitable, decision subsequent events (and some persuasive historical writing) have made it seem,8 the War Cabinet seriously deliberated the choices for three days, with a new Prime Minister still tentatively feeling his way, the British army seemingly lost at Dunkirk, no immediate prospect of help from the United States and a German invasion in the near future presumed to be very likely. The decision eventually taken, not to seek a negotiated settlement, had direct and far-reaching consequences not just for Britain, but also for Germany.\n\nThat single decision, in fact, placed in jeopardy Hitler's entire war strategy. With Britain refusing to see sense (as he saw it), with the war in the west not ended, and with the spectre of the United States in the background but looming ever more prominently, Hitler felt compelled already in July 1940 to begin preparations to risk a war on two fronts through an invasion of the Soviet Union the following year. But it was only six months later that the contingency plans were turned into a concrete war directive. In the interim, there was no straight path to the Russian war. Even Hitler seemed vacillating and uncertain. The intervening period saw a range of strategic possibilities explored, but eventually discarded. These options in the summer and autumn of 1940, viewed from behind Hitler's desk and evaluated in the eyes of his advisers, form the subject of Chapter 2.\n\nThe extraordinary German victory over France and the perceived likely collapse of Great Britain alerted the Japanese leadership to chances to be taken without delay through expansion in south-east Asia. In Chapter 3, the scene switches, therefore, to the Far East, and to the decision for the southern advance that would inevitably risk conflict with the United States and presaged, therefore, the road to Pearl Harbor directly embarked upon the following year.\n\nThe rapidity of France's fall also had immediate and far-reaching consequences in Europe. The next chapter considers the choices facing the Italian leadership as Mussolini exploited the destruction of France to take his country into the war, and then plunged the Balkans into turmoil with the disastrous decision to attack Greece. The crucial position of the United States is explored in Chapter 5; how Roosevelt walked a tightrope between isolationist opinion and interventionist pressure, deciding, out of American self-interest, not only to assist Great Britain with all possible means short of war, but to prepare with maximum speed for America's direct engagement in the war.\n\nThis is followed by a chapter dealing with one of the most puzzling episodes of the war, with near fatal consequences for the Soviet Union: Stalin's decision to defy all warnings and the explicit findings of his own secret intelligence of the imminent German invasion, leaving his country unprepared and in disarray when the strike came on 22 June 1941.\n\nFrom here, the route into global war was short, but not without further twists. Chapter 7 examines the decision of the American administration to wage in provocative fashion an 'undeclared war' in the Atlantic, taking advantage of Hitler's unwillingness to retaliate while embroiled in Russia. This is followed (Chapter 8) by an examination of Japan's extraordinary decision to attack the United States, despite full recognition of the immensity of the risk, aware that the long-term chances of final victory were low if an immediate and total knock-out blow were not attained. This had direct causal impact on Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States, taken in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor and long regarded as one of the strangest of the Second World War. With this decision, explored in Chapter 9, the world was aflame.\n\nBut one further decision\u2013or set of decisions\u2013of a different kind, though inextricably entwined with the war itself and intrinsic to it, remains to be examined: the decision, gradually but inexorably reached over the summer and autumn months of 1941, to kill the Jews. The complex process of the transition from partial and limited genocidal actions into total genocide, a process of interlocking impulses from the centre of the Nazi regime and its agencies 'on the ground' in the killing fields of eastern Europe, unfolding in the early months of 1942 into the full-scale 'final solution', is taken up in the last chapter.\n\nBy the end of 1941, nineteen months after the German offensive in western Europe was launched, the conflict had become global and genocidal. The war was at this juncture on a knife-edge. The German advance, it is true, had been stymied by the first major Soviet counter-offensive. But the Wehrmacht was withstanding the worst the Red Army and the ferocious Russian winter could inflict on it (for the time being) and was soon starting to regather its strength, poised to make further great inroads down to the autumn of 1942. In the Atlantic, German U-boats would meet with unprecedented success in the first half of 1942. The Allies looked for a time as if they were losing the war at sea. In Europe and in the Far East, the Axis powers still had vital economic resources in their grasp.9 And, much to Stalin's continued vexation, the Anglo-Americans were still nowhere near opening their promised second front. The full might of the United States' industrial power was still to be converted into weaponry on a scale to defeat both Germany and Japan. Japanese forces had meanwhile made brutal progress in the Far East, and would in February 1942 capture Singapore, long viewed as the bastion of British strength in south-east Asia. The way to the conquest of India, the heart of the British Empire, appeared to lie open. The Axis powers still seemed in the ascendancy. Only in retrospect can it be seen that their colossal gamble was already on the verge of failure, that they had overstretched their capacities, and that with the full engagement in the contest of the might of the United States, now allied with the extraordinary tenacity of the Soviet Union and the last major show of resilience of Great Britain and the British Empire, their eventual defeat would gradually be ensured.10\n\nTo reach the point, in 1945, when first Hitler's suicide was swiftly followed by a devastated Germany's surrender, then Imperial Japan was crushed into submission, there was a long, tortuous way to go. Millions of lives would be lost in the process; destruction wrought on a scale never known in history. The end was far away. But the path towards it had been laid out by the fateful choices made in 1940 and 1941.\n\n## 1\n\n## London, Spring 1940\n\nGreat Britain Decides to Fight On\n\nThe P[rime]M[inister] disliked any move towards Musso. It was incredible that Hitler would consent to any terms that we could accept, though if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies he would jump at it. But the only safe way was to convince Hitler that he couldn't beat us...Halifax argued that there could be no harm in trying Musso and seeing what the result was. If the terms were impossible we could still reject them.\n\nDiary of Neville Chamberlain, 26 May 1940\n\n'Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda. It was taken for granted and as a matter of course by these men of all parties in the State, and we were much too busy to waste time upon such unreal, academic issues.'1 This was Winston Churchill writing his memoirs of the Second World War. These were hugely influential in shaping the way the war came to be seen, and in fashioning the myth that Great Britain, alone, in great adversity, but with indomitable will, had never for a moment flinched in the determination to carry on the struggle against a mighty, triumphant and imminently threatening Germany. It is generally hard, knowing the end of a story, to avoid reading history backwards from the outcome. Given the power of Churchill's narrative and the unique role he played, it is particularly difficult to ignore what came later\u2013national defiance epitomized in the grandiose rhetoric of his speeches in summer 1940, victory in the 'Battle of Britain', the 'hands across the Atlantic' in ever increasing American aid. But Churchill knew full well that it had not been like that in the darkest days of May 1940. History viewed 'from the front' rather than 'the back' sometimes reveals surprises. At any rate, it is often less clear-cut, more 'messy' or confused than subsequently appears to have been the case. And so it was in the middle of May 1940.\n\nIt was a deeply anxious time. The British Expeditionary Force in northern France and Belgium was apparently lost, the once mighty French army was reeling under the German onslaught, no possibility existed of immediate help from the United States or, in a direct and practical sense, the overseas Empire, and defences at home were in a fragile state as the prospect of invasion became a distinctly real one. In these circumstances, it would have been extraordinary had the British government indeed regarded the question of whether the country could or should fight on as an 'unreal, academic' issue not warranting discussion. And in fact, though Churchill omitted any reference to it, there was the most grave and prolonged deliberation in the War Cabinet about precisely this question: should Britain fight on, or should she acknowledge that in her current plight the best avenue was to explore what terms could be attained to arrive at a settlement?2 This was the fateful choice that confronted Britain's leaders over a crucial three-day period in late May 1940. The outcome had profound consequences not only for Great Britain, but for the wider course of the war over the following years.\n\nI\n\nHow Britain found herself in such a predicament that the question arose of whether to seek terms from a position of great weakness\u2013which would, in effect, have come close to an acknowledgement of defeat\u2013has, of course, been extensively examined and analysed ever since. Already in 1940, a widely read and influential polemic, Guilty Men, laid the blame squarely on those in the British government who had chosen the dangerous, and ultimately self-defeating, road to appeasement of Hitler during the 1930s.3 Leading characters in the cast of the guilty were the austere, prim, but sharp and incisive Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister between May 1937 and May 1940, and the extremely tall, somewhat humourless Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax\u2013a former Viceroy of India and seasoned diplomat, known, for his combination of religious piety and enthusiasm for foxhunting, as the 'Holy Fox'\u2013who retained his post in Churchill's administration. History has never forgiven them. The shame of 'Munich' in 1938, when Britain, and her French ally, bowed to Hitler's bullying and handed him a substantial part of Czechoslovakia, has remained forever associated with Chamberlain. It is often conveniently forgotten that appeasement, down to Munich, had been widely popular in Britain, even among those who in the light of subsequent events came to be among its chief detractors and most severe critics. The British government, in seeking to appease Hitler, undoubtedly made grave errors of judgement. Even so, these have to be located within the framework of the barely surmountable problems besetting Britain as the looming danger posed by Hitler gradually came to be recognized.\n\nBritain's debilitating structural problems in the interwar period revolved around the interlinked triad of the economy, the Empire and rearmament. Between them, they ensured that when the dictators began to flex their muscles, an enfeebled Britain was in poor shape to contest their growing might.\n\nBritain emerged from the First World War still a great power\u2013though, mainly beneath the surface, a weakened one. Still a world creditor, with loans on paper outstanding to the Empire and her war allies of \u00a31.85 billion in 1920, her debts to America nevertheless totalled $4.7 billion. It was an indicator of a shift in the financial balance of power which would only over time reveal Britain's growing dependency upon her transatlantic cousin. Even the Royal Navy, still the world's largest, now had to reckon with a future rival in the rapidly growing navy of the United States. And difficulties in India, Egypt and, closer to home, Ireland were stretching limited military resources.4 With the Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa also showing signs of growing independence, the Empire was starting to crumble.\n\nThe magnitude of the problems was in good measure concealed during the 1920s, as recovery from the wartime trauma gradually took place despite numerous buffetings. Even so, beneath the surface all was not well.5 The key industries which had formed the basis of Britain's prewar prosperity\u2013coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, textiles\u2013were all struggling to combat long-term decline. Unemployment was relatively high throughout the decade. Britain was importing more and exporting less.6 Still, alongside the stagnation or decline there were signs of new industries taking root, and outside the run-down industrial towns and cities the later 1920s saw an all too brief upsurge of hope, confidence and relative prosperity.7\n\nThe onset of the world economic crisis in 1929 was rapidly to change all that. It brought economic growth in the industrial world to a juddering halt. Social misery and political turmoil followed. In Britain, the repercussions of the Wall Street stock-market crash of October 1929 ushered in political crisis and lasting economic depression. But indirectly the global consequences were to prove far more threatening. In the Far East, the swift emergence after 1931 of Japanese nationalism, militarism and imperialism, and in Europe the rise of Nazism between 1930 and 1933, were both, in no small measure, products of the economic crisis. Both posed for Britain, herself in an economically weakened state, immense new strategic dangers to add to the potential threat in the Mediterranean, not as yet materialized, emanating from Mussolini's Italy.\n\nThe new, thrusting authoritarian powers in Europe and the Far East\u2013Germany, Italy and Japan\u2013had a vested interest in challenging and 'revising' (or overthrowing) the international order established in the wake of the First World War. Each of them had the feeling, with all its attendant resentment, of a 'have-not nation', insistent and determined upon attaining its rightful 'place in the sun'. Each looked at Britain, France and other imperial powers and wanted its own share of empire, the political dominance that went with coveted great-power status and national pride; the economic area of self-sufficiency that, in a fundamental crisis of capitalism which highlighted the uncertainties and the inbuilt unfairness of an international trading economy, appeared to offer the only solution to sustained national prosperity. Other countries were unlikely to offer voluntarily the territorial acquisitions necessary for the formation of the new empires. So like the old, those of Britain and other major powers, they would have to be taken by force\u2013'by the sword', as Hitler repeatedly put it.\n\nBritain's interests were exactly the opposite. As a supreme 'have nation', her key concern was in upholding her world Empire. This meant adherence to the postwar order, which Britain had been a main party to creating. It meant, too, an emphasis upon international cooperation to maintain security, and the diplomatic negotiation of problems that arose. Above all, it meant a premium on peace. International safeguards and commitment to disarmament would prevent the world once more collapsing into the carnage of 1914\u201318. The recent and searingly painful memory of the dead millions of the war alone demanded no less.\n\nFrom the position of a victorious, and still prosperous, world power, demands for a new order based upon liberal freedoms, international agreements and external trade were not difficult to advance. From the vantage-point of the 'have-not nations', precisely this new order was both disadvantageous and, in political terms, humiliating. The memory of the war dead, in the eyes of growing numbers of their citizens, demanded not supine acceptance of the victors' terms, not compliance with economic rules stacked against them, not the weakness that came from disarmament, and not peace, but war\u2013for national glory, for territory to establish lasting future prosperity, and to rectify perceived past humiliation and current injustice.\n\nBritain, together with her most important Continental ally, the war-stricken France, and, across the Atlantic, the burgeoning new world power, the United States, saw the postwar settlement, therefore, through one set of lenses, Italy, Japan and Germany through quite a different set. Moreover, the postwar settlement, framed around the Versailles Treaty of 1919 (and the subsequent Treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon) in Europe and the Washington Nine Power Treaty of 1922 for the Far East, looked fragile. The refusal of the United States of America to underpin the settlement in Europe by joining the League of Nations, the body established to ensure international cooperation, did nothing to encourage optimism about its longevity. In both the Far East and Europe, however, the settlement nonetheless lasted during the 1920s. Japan, a member of the League of Nations, offered no threat to European and American interests in the Far East and 'appeared willing to play by western rules'.8 Churchill himself outrightly dismissed the prospect of war against Japan. 'I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime,' he wrote in December 1924. 'Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot menace our vital security in any way.'9 In Europe, too, the signs were improving. The postwar settlement was strengthened through the Treaty of Locarno of 1925, fixing by international agreement the western borders of the German Reich, and by Germany's accession to the League of Nations the following year. Both were inspired by the outstanding international statesman of the 1920s, the German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann.10 But appearances deceived. The Depression blew apart the optimism. Soon, both in the Far East and in Europe, the postwar settlement would be in shreds.\n\nIn the Far East, British weakness was soon demonstrated by the first manifestations of Japanese belligerence, in the occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and attacks on Shanghai the following year. The chiefs of staff of the British armed forces pointed out the danger to British possessions and dependencies, including India, Australia and New Zealand. Sir Robert Vansittart, the powerful Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, recorded in early 1932 that 'we are incapable of checking Japan in any way if she really means business', meaning that 'we must eventually be done for in the Far East unless the United States are eventually prepared to use force'.11 The United States were not\u2013resorting to largely counterproductive denunciations of Japanese actions, but little else. British policy, in fact, favoured Japan over China, though it tried to square the circle by placating the Chinese and the Americans while not alienating the Japanese and at the same time upholding the League of Nations.12 In early 1934, with Britain still in the throes of severe economic depression, imposing deep constraints on spending for the armed forces (which in any case faced the obstacle of opposition to rearmament in all the major political parties, and in public opinion), the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, stipulated that the friendship of Japan was more important to Britain than that of the United States or the goodwill of China and the friends of the League of Nations.13 The course for appeasement in the Far East was set. By this time, Japan was no longer a member of the League, and a new, closer and graver danger could not be ignored.\n\nIn the crucial early phase when the Nazi regime was establishing its complete control over Germany, Foreign Office officials could not make up their minds about Hitler. Was he the demon of Mein Kampf, whose rule meant not just diplomatic disturbance but, ultimately, war? Or would the firebrand eventually cool down into a 'normal' politician as far as foreign affairs were concerned? While they were still trying to decide, Hitler exploited insuperable differences between Britain and France about German rearmament to take his country out of the League of Nations. Like Japan in the Far East, Germany, the wildest card in the European pack, then no longer even paid lip-service to the League's doctrine of collective security. Disarmament, to which British policy and public mood had been wedded, was dead. It was obvious that Germany was rearming as rapidly as possible in secret, and it was recognized that the growing German strength posed a threat greater than that of either Japan or Fascist Italy. But in Britain complacency merged with financial exigency and the political difficulties of proposing rearmament in the face of hostile public opinion. It led to inaction, drift and a policy of 'hope for the best'.\n\nThe inertia was ended only with the German announcement in March 1935, in breach of the Versailles Treaty, of an air force and plans for a huge army; then the startling news brought back by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, and Lord Privy Seal, Anthony Eden, from their visit to Berlin later that month that Germany's air strength was already on a par with that of Britain. Hitler had exaggerated for effect. But the shock running through Whitehall, and in the public at large when the news came out, was palpable. Belatedly, the urgency of rearmament\u2013something that hitherto only Churchill and one or two lone and derided voices had been clamouring for\u2013was recognized, if still widely opposed in Labour and Liberal circles, as it would be until 1938. In air power, however, acknowledged as the new key to military strength and where the enemy threat was seen to be at its most lethal, it would be years before the lost ground could be made up, if at all. This was the weakness that underlay the entire attempt to appease Hitler.\n\nStretched by her global commitments, and struggling to overcome lasting economic depression, Britain, it was increasingly evident, could not match, let alone outstrip, German military might. It became equally evident that Britain faced the prospect within only a few years of a new war with Germany. But it was recognized that the British armed forces would be in no position to fight such a war until a lengthy armaments programme had been undertaken, perhaps not before 1942 or so.14 Even then, building up an air force and reinforcing the navy came at the expense of funding for the army (which would leave its mark in 1940) as attempts were made to keep rearmament costs in line with the demands of a balanced budget and economic recovery from the Depression.15\n\nAs Britain's military weakness was exposed, her diplomatic strength suffered a calamitous setback in late 1935 in the attempt, together with her ally France, to buy off the aggressor Mussolini at the cost of his victim, Abyssinia. The League of Nations never recovered from the debacle. Profiting from the diplomatic disarray, Hitler sent his troops over the demilitarized line into the Rhineland in March 1936. The German hand was now even mightier. One Conservative Member of Parliament, Robert Boothby, summed up much public opinion, as well as the government's stance, when he stated: 'Nobody feels that we can apply very strong or stringent measures against Germany because she has put troops into the Rhineland.'16 The British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, confining the response to diplomatic protest, reasserted the government's peaceful objective: 'It is the appeasement of Europe as a whole that we have constantly before us.'17 Three months later, in early July 1936, the Cabinet acknowledged that Britain could do nothing to help eastern Europe and that only force used against the Empire or parts of western Europe would be resisted.18\n\nWhen he replaced Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, Neville Chamberlain inherited a foreign policy shaped by confusion, uncertainty and inaction, increasingly compelled to come to terms with Britain's military weakness and her incapacity to do other than respond, often feebly, to events shaped by Europe's dictators. Chamberlain now sought starkly to face up to the cold reality and to devise a practical policy on the basis of recognition of this weakness. This meant active steps to accommodate\u2013or 'appease'\u2013Germany's interests. Realistic about Britain, Chamberlain deluded himself about German aims. Like most observers of the international scene, he presumed that these were purely nationalist in character. He imagined, as did so many, that Hitler was no more than an extreme proponent of territorial claims in central and eastern Europe which were not altogether devoid of legitimacy and could, with goodwill and peaceful objectives on both sides, be settled by negotiation. If German nationalist aims were met, he thought, war could be avoided. Buying Hitler off was the price of peace. It was, for Chamberlain, a price well worth paying.\n\nThe saga of 1938, as the Czech crisis culminated in Chamberlain's dramatic flights to Germany to attempt to reach a settlement with Hitler, ending in the Munich Agreement at the end of September, unfolded on this premise. Whether another way out of the crisis, short of war, could have been found is doubtful. But none was tried. Churchill, whose attacks on government defence and foreign policy had mounted with increasing forcefulness since the mid-1930s, was the chief advocate of a 'grand alliance' with France and the Soviet Union to deter Hitler and to resist by force, if need be, any aggression against Czechoslovakia (linked by treaty with both countries). The idea had much support on the Left, and in public opinion, but not in the government. For Chamberlain and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, detestation for Bolshevism was mixed with deep distrust of Stalin's motives and contempt for the Red Army. They ruled out any alliance.\n\nConceivably, nothing would have come of the 'grand alliance' even if it had been engineered. The Soviet dictator claimed that his troops were ready to march if Hitler invaded. It was bluff more than intention. No preparations for military action were made by a Red Army reeling from Stalin's purges, and its passage through Poland and Romania would almost certainly have been refused.19 In the west, in any case, France was looking to wriggle out of her treaty commitments to the Czechs, and Britain was anxious not to be tied to backing any French involvement. Chamberlain was warned that rearmament was insufficient to engage in a major war, and that nothing could be done militarily to save Czechoslovakia. War, he was certain, would endanger the Empire. British interests in the Far East were already threatened by Japan's war against China, expanding since it began the previous summer. (The following summer an initially minor incident in Tientsin, in north China, leading to a stand-off lasting weeks between Britain and Japan, forced a British acknowledgement that, as Lord Halifax put it, 'there seemed little we could do in the Far East unless the United States joined in with us'.20) In the Mediterranean, Fascist Italy and the growing likelihood of a Franco victory in the Spanish Civil War, raging since the summer of 1936, posed a mounting danger to British strength. Chamberlain later suggested that he was left with no choice. Britain was not ready for war; he had to gain time. 'Any way and whatever the outcome it is clear as daylight that if we had had to fight in 1938 the results would have been far worse,' he wrote to one of his sisters, months after war had eventually begun. 'It would be rash to prophesy the verdict of history, but if full access is obtained to all the records it will be seen that I realised from the beginning our military weakness and did my best to postpone if I could not avert the war.'21\n\nWhether Chamberlain genuinely believed he was gaining time through the surrender of part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, or whether he genuinely believed that he had taken a major step to securing 'peace for our time', is even now disputed.22 It is also impossible to be sure whether the squandered opportunity to combat Hitler in the summer of 1938 was better than that which occurred the following year, when war had to be undertaken anyway, and whether a defiant stance over Czechoslovakia might even have resulted in Hitler's fall through an internal coup. The most likely speculation is in both cases a negative one: that a better chance was not lost, and that Hitler would not have been toppled from within. In all probability, Czechoslovakia would have been rapidly overrun, as war games suggested would be the case, and Britain and France would either have come to terms in recognition of a fait accompli or would have been embroiled in war from a militarily weaker starting point than in 1939. In either case, an armed triumph of German might would have been a distinct possibility. And it must be doubted whether the embryonic German opposition would have been sufficiently well organized to act against Hitler before he could have disarmed resistance through victory over Czechoslovakia while keeping the western powers at bay. Whatever the surmises, the truth was, as Churchill vehemently expressed it in the House of Commons, that, through the Munich Agreement, 'we have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat'23\u2013though it was one born out of long-standing military weakness and the extremely overdue recognition of the need to rearm with all speed, for which successive British governments, not Chamberlain alone, had to carry the responsibility. At least now, at last, rearmament was sharply accelerated. By September 1939 Britain was still not strong, but she was militarily in a somewhat better position, relative to the strength of German arms, than at the time of Munich.\n\nOnce Hitler had shown his true colours in March 1939 by reneging on Munich and invading what remained of Czechoslovakia, the realization dawned on the British government that war was inevitable. The guarantee to Poland at the end of that month effectively ensured that war was unavoidable by leaving Britain's fate in Polish and German hands. The concatenation of events in the dramatic summer of 1939 followed inexorably. Chamberlain and Halifax only late in the day, and reluctantly, accepted the necessity of broaching the possibility of an alliance with Stalin. They were upstaged yet again by Hitler. The notorious Hitler\u2013Stalin Pact of 23 August 1939 meant that war was not only inevitable, but imminent. It began with the German invasion of Poland little over a week later, on 1 September 1939. The British and French declarations of war on Germany, turning the German\u2013Polish conflict into general European war, followed within two days. Chamberlain reckoned on a long conflict, but was confident that Britain would eventually prevail.\n\nIt was an assessment based in good measure upon the superior economic resources at Britain's disposal, which it was presumed would tell in a lengthy war, and upon a perceived critical instability in the German economy. Little dented such underlying optimism during the months of military inaction in western Europe that followed\u2013until spring 1940, when it was blown away within the course of a few days.\n\nII\n\nThe thunderclap finally burst on 10 May 1940. For the western Allies, Great Britain and France, the heavy, threatening atmosphere of the 'phoney war' that had lasted since the previous autumn now gave way to the predicted mighty storm. It had been brewing for a month, ever since early April when Hitler's troops had invaded Denmark and Norway. As dawn broke that May morning, German artillery on the Belgian border opened fire. The long-awaited western offensive had begun.\n\nAdvancing with breathtaking pace, ruthlessly violating Dutch and Belgian neutrality, the German advance reached the French coast by the night of 20 May, having covered 150 miles in ten days. The Allied forces, split in two by the speed and surprise of the 'sickle-cut' of the German army as it swept through southern Belgium and northern France, were retreating in disarray towards the coast. The last Allied hopes of a counter-offensive proved on 24 May to be illusory. Boulogne fell to the Germans. Calais came under siege. By 25 May the only port still open to the Allies was Dunkirk. Next day, practically the whole of the British Expeditionary Force and most of the French troops still fighting\u2013in all, close to 340,000 men\u2013had started to fall back on Dunkirk and its environs, where they found themselves pinned down between the sea and the German front line.\n\nAs the fates would have it, on 10 May, the very day that Hitler opened his western offensive, the man who was to prove one of his toughest adversaries, Winston Churchill, entered office as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Churchill had been out in the political cold throughout the 1930s. Despite his extensive ministerial experience, dating back to the First World War, he was regarded by the leaders of successive administrations of the 'National Government' (which had first come into office in 1931 during the economic crisis as a coalition of the major political parties, and was dominated by his own party, the Conservatives) as too unreliable and too independent-minded for high office. Remembered and disliked as a reactionary on the political Left, he was regarded as something of a maverick adventurer by much of his own side. His responsibility for the disaster at Gallipoli during the First World War had not been forgotten. Nor had his earlier political inconstancy, when he had deserted the Conservative Party and joined the Liberals before, years later, rejoining the fold. 'I've ratted twice,' he apparently said later, 'and on the second rat Baldwin', the Prime Minister, 'made me Chancellor.'24 As Chancellor of the Exchequer he was not a great success. His 'years at the treasury', it has been claimed, 'were indeed the weakest in his varied career. His erratic finance'\u2013he was seen as too impatient to master the close detail of financial management\u2013'discredited him in the eyes of more sober politicians and left the treasury weaker to face a period of real economic difficulty.'25 That he was 'unsound' seemed once again demonstrated by his outspoken opposition in the early 1930s to his party's policy of limited constitutional reform in India and his strong support for King Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis in December 1936.\n\nThe sense that Churchill, despite his manifold talents, was not to be trusted in political judgement ran through much of the Conservative Party. More than a few would have agreed with the private verdict of Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister: 'When Winston was born lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle gifts\u2013imagination, eloquence, industry, ability, and then came a fairy who said \"No person has a right to so many gifts'', picked him up and gave him such a shake and twist that with all these gifts he was denied judgement and wisdom.'26 Churchill's supposed untrustworthiness long swayed views within his own party. As late as July 1939, four-fifths of Conservative backbench Members of Parliament did not want Churchill in the Cabinet.27\n\nChurchill had indeed been of independent mind. He had freely used his many contacts, his rhetorical and journalistic skills, and his parliamentary standing to denounce, regularly and with increasing effect, British defence and rearmament policy. His warnings about the re-emerging danger from Germany had proved prophetic. His implacable enmity towards Nazism, consistent since Hitler's takeover of power, had made him a strong opponent of appeasement, one of the few in his party. His condemnation of the ignoble and humiliating Munich Agreement had contrasted strongly with Chamberlain's hapless concession to Hitler's demands. As Hitler's destruction of what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 finally opened British eyes to the fact that he was not seeking to incorporate ethnic Germans into a Greater German Reich, but was set upon imperial conquest, with war in Europe a certainty, Churchill had again vainly advocated, as he had done during the growing crisis the previous year, a 'grand alliance' uniting Britain with the Soviet Union as well as France as the last chance to head off a new great conflagration.28 When, despite all the appeasers had tried, war nonetheless came, Churchill had been proved right. His return to the Cabinet, to his old office as First Lord of the Admiralty, on 3 September 1939, the day of the British declaration of war on Germany, was, therefore, welcomed in many quarters, even among his own former political opponents. Churchill was back in the inner circles of political power. It seemed to offer some reassurance.\n\nIt would be well, however, not to exaggerate Churchill's power-base at this time. Chamberlain remained firmly in control and was still hugely popular within his own party during what he called the 'twilight war'. During these months, Britain's war aims, beyond getting rid of Hitler, were left undefined. There were exaggerated hopes that internal economic crisis or a power-struggle would bring Hitler down. The way would then be open, it was optimistically imagined, for a restoration of borders and an end to the conflict. Chamberlain was, even so, more realistic than many in reckoning with a long war: three years or so, he thought. He doubted that there would be outright victory. But he did not think Hitler could win in the long run, and hoped he would be toppled from within when the German people came to full realization of this. There were those who wanted to end the conflict before it began in earnest by negotiating with the Hitler government. In autumn 1939 Chamberlain received thousands of letters from individuals wishing to stop the war through a negotiated peace.29 Though there was no 'peace party' as such, disparate individuals\u2013mostly Conservative, and a number of peers of the realm with good contacts to persons in high places\u2013voiced hopes of a negotiated settlement.30 But the government showed no readiness to go down this route; the 'peace offer' made by Hitler on 6 October 1939, following his triumph in Poland, was turned down without hesitation.31\n\nSo the 'sinister trance' (as the restless Churchill later called it) of the shadowy war continued over the dark winter months.32 The strange optimism of the British government that Hitler would in the end fall from power or be defeated\u2013at any rate would not ultimately prevail\u2013continued. But there was also an underlying unease, a sense that the eerie calm would be followed by a great storm. Hitler's next move, it was felt, could not be long in coming. When it did, in April 1940, it was to pre-empt British plans, which Churchill had repeatedly pressed, to mine Scandinavian waters. On 4 April Chamberlain had tempted fate by announcing that in not invading France and Britain by this time Hitler had 'missed the bus'.33 The foolish boast immediately backfired. Five days later the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway. The disastrous British campaign in Norway followed. The main responsibility lay with Churchill, but it was Chamberlain who paid the political price. The knives were now sharpened for the Prime Minister who had tried to appease Hitler. Churchill, whose warnings from the wilderness now appeared so prophetic, had gained in stature. By early May much of Chamberlain's own party had lost confidence in him as the leader Britain needed in war. The opposition parties were adamant that they would not work with him in a war cabinet. On 10 May, after faring badly in a vote of confidence in the House of Commons, he resigned.\n\nThe two contenders to succeed him were Churchill and Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary and, since 1937, the leading figure in the Cabinet after the Prime Minister himself. Chamberlain favoured Halifax. So privately (since they had no constitutional opinion in the matter) did King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Parliament, too, would apparently have backed a Halifax premiership. To move from the House of Lords to the Commons, which would probably have been necessary, was awkward, though it would not have posed an insuperable problem. But Halifax declined. There has been speculation about his reasons.34 Most likely, the depth of animosity shown towards Chamberlain at the point of his resignation encouraged the recognition in Halifax that he, too, was not temperamentally equipped to be a war leader. Thus the path was clear for the more pugnacious, more dynamic, more determined and more strong-willed\u2013though more unpredictable\u2013Churchill. What the future would have held had Halifax accepted the premiership that was his for the taking is impossible to say. But without doubt his decision to stand back at this point was of enormous importance for the British prosecution of the war. By the evening of 10 May, Winston Churchill was Prime Minister. In his perhaps overdramatized reflections some years later, Churchill described his emotions: 'At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.'35\n\nThe magnitude of the trial would rapidly become clear as, within a fortnight, the fate of France hung in the balance while almost the entire British Expeditionary Force was in the deepest peril, on the verge of captivity or destruction. With his premiership scarcely begun, Churchill was faced with the most serious threat to his country in the whole of her long history. The impending danger now forced upon the War Cabinet one of the most momentous decisions the British government had ever taken: whether to open up channels leading to a negotiated peace with Hitler, or whether to fight on. There was no shortage of opinion, some of it in influential quarters, which looked, reluctantly, to a negotiated settlement based upon honourable peace terms as the only sensible course of action for Britain in such a grave situation.36 The outcome of the War Cabinet's deliberations was far from obvious in the days that the bulk of the British army was stranded on the Dunkirk beaches.\n\nIII\n\nIt is not easy to imagine, in the light of later events, how insecure Churchill's position was in the middle of May 1940. His hold on authority, soon to become unchallengeable, was still tenuous. No raptures on the Conservative benches greeted his first appearance in the House of Commons as Prime Minister on 13 May. The cheers that day, apart from those from the opposition side, were for Chamberlain, not Churchill.37 The latter's speech that day, later seen as epitomizing Churchillian rhetoric, promising 'blood, toil, sweat and tears', met with a cool reception among Conservatives. The distrust remained. Some thought it would be a short-lived premiership.38 Many Conservatives would have been happy to see Chamberlain back in office. Churchill himself recognized that, with only the conditional backing of his party, he could not afford to alienate his predecessor, still the Conservative Party leader.39\n\nChurchill brought a number of leading Labour figures into government, though, with some reshuffling of offices, most of the old faces remained. The War Cabinet was a more radical departure. It was reduced in size to only five members. Three were Conservatives. Churchill himself also took on responsibility for the Ministry of Defence. Neville Chamberlain was given the title of Lord President of the Council, effectively overseeing domestic policy. And Lord Halifax was still retained as Foreign Secretary. They were joined by two Labour representatives. Clement Attlee, leader of the party since 1935, in his late fifties, a small, dapper, undemonstrative man, unusual among socialists as a former officer in the war, was appointed Lord Privy Seal. His deputy, Arthur Greenwood, aged 60, an affable York-shireman with, like Churchill, something of a fondness for alcohol, whose brief experience in government just before the Depression had shown him to be a competent though undistinguished Minister of Health, became Minister without Portfolio. Churchill was soon to dominate the War Cabinet, his position greatly strengthened through his control of defence. But there was no such dominance in May 1940, as the crisis worsened. Churchill could not override or impose his will on the other members of the War Cabinet. He recognized his dependence, in particular, on Chamberlain and Halifax. As Chamberlain had written privately of his successor the day after he took office: 'I know that he relies on Halifax and me and as he put it in a letter \"My path depends largely on you.\"'40\n\nThe magnitude of the crisis facing Churchill's War Cabinet became more evident with every day that passed. The speed of the German advance was breathtaking. Every report indicated that a calamity of major proportions was unfolding. There was increasing concern for the fate of France. With that went the worry, often unspoken, that Britain might be unable to carry on the war if her ally were to fall. Though he later steadied, Chamberlain expressed precisely such an anxiety on the very day that the German offensive began.41 A few days later, Sir Samuel Hoare, a member of Chamberlain's War Cabinet but now on the point of departure to take office as British ambassador in Madrid, remarked that the former Prime Minister was 'completely knocked out. Everything finished. The USA no good. \"We could never get our army out, or if we did, it would be without any equipment.\"'42 The gloom did not stop with Chamberlain. Observers spoke of 'a mood of panic'43 and 'defeatism' among London's upper classes,44 while General Sir Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, feared the onslaught would mean 'the end of the British Empire'.45 Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, expressed the view on 16 May that if an adequate fighter force were kept within the country, and the navy remained in existence, Britain could continue the struggle. But if fighter squadrons were sent across the Channel, as the French wanted, then defeat for France would also mean the final defeat of Britain.46 Churchill, initially reluctant to accept the message relayed to him on 15 May by the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, that 'we are beaten', was left in no doubt of the scale of the disaster and of the desperation felt in Paris after he had flown there next day to meet French leaders.47 The British Prime Minister gave a bravura performance, impressing upon his hosts the intention of Britain to fight on until the United States came to her aid and Germany was defeated.48 At the same time, however, through a fog of cigar smoke and deep into the night, he conjured up 'an apocalyptic vision of the war', seeing himself 'in the heart of Canada, directing, over an England razed to the ground by high explosive bombs and over France whose ruins were already cold, the air war of the New World against the Old dominated by Germany'.49 'French evidently cracking, and situation awful', noted Sir Alex Cadogan, head of the Foreign Office, on hearing of Churchill's account of his visit. By 21 May Cadogan was confiding to his diary: 'A miracle may save us: otherwise we're done.'50\n\nThose who did not share the insights into high politics and have access to the depressing reports of military leaders\u2013the mass of the ordinary people\u2013were in no position to grasp the full gravity of the situation.51 There was general calm, at least on the surface. Many heads were simply buried in the sand. Chamberlain recounted his own impressions of the public mood in a letter to his sister Hilda on 17 May: 'The public don't in the least realise the gravity of the situation. Walking round the lake [in St James's Park] today it was heartbreaking to see the people enjoying the sunshine as they lolled in their chairs or watched the little ducklings darting about in the water. We shall try and bring them a little nearer to a sense of reality, though I daresay events will do more towards that end than anything we can think of.'52 Chamberlain's surmise was accurate. Bland reportage on the BBC or in newspapers could not disguise the threat posed by the German advance, or the weakness of the Allied forces to halt it. There was mounting and most justifiable anxiety about events across the Channel. Stiff upper lips did not altogether conceal the worry just below the superficial calm.53\n\nChurchill's faith in the ability of the French to hold out had been badly shaken by his visit to Paris on 16 May. A second visit, on 22 May, left him momentarily more optimistic at the prospects of a counter-offensive which he had urged upon the French.54 But alternative plans had to be made for the possibility, perhaps likelihood, of failure. In such an event Churchill, as he explained to the King on the morning of 23 May, would have only one course of action: to order the British Expeditionary Force to return home. All its arms would have to be left behind. Immense loss of life was to be expected.55 By nightfall on 23 May, a quarter of a million British troops were caught in the tightening German vice. Calais was unlikely to hold out for long, and meanwhile the forward spear of German tanks was heading closer to Dunkirk, the last accessible port in Allied hands.\n\nWhen Hitler visited the headquarters of his western commander, Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt, on the morning of 24 May, the panzers of the German spearhead were no more than fifteen miles to the south of Dunkirk. After reviewing the military situation with Rundstedt, Hitler gave the order that the advance should be halted at that point and not proceed towards Dunkirk itself. The decision soon came to be regarded as a crucially missed chance to finish off the defeated forces of the British army. Attempting to justify an evident major military error, Hitler later suggested that he had not wanted to destroy the British army, the backbone of the Empire.56 This was no more than a face-saving rationalization. In fact, he was merely following the military advice of his field commander, Rundstedt, who had wanted to preserve his motorized units for the final push to the south to conclude the campaign. Far from wanting to preserve the British army, Hitler was led to believe by G\u00f6ring, Commander-in-Chief of the German air force, that the Luftwaffe would finish it off.57\n\nBack in London, the War Cabinet was preoccupied with the fate of British troops in Calais, now under siege; and with the likely capitulation in the near future of the Belgians. Boulogne had by then already fallen, and the last remaining British troops there, about a thousand in all, had been taken off by sea. Churchill was adamant, however, that the troops encircled at Calais should continue to fight, to hold up the Germans as long as possible. Any gain in time would be valuable, either for the proposed counter-offensive (which, though Churchill did not know it at this point, was 'never more than a paper scheme',58 already given up by French military leaders prepared, even at this stage, to consider capitulation59), or for evacuation of as much as possible of the British Expeditionary Force. As yet, on 24 May, no British troops had been sent to Dunkirk, where the port was still functioning, though there was a sizeable garrison there of French troops.60\n\nThe counter-offensive never started. It had simply not been a feasible proposition. Instead, there was a withdrawal of British troops, followed by misunderstandings and recriminations between Paris and London about blame for the fiasco. Once the offensive was finally abandoned on the evening of the 25th, and with Belgian capitulation imminent, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, General Lord Gort, decided (on his own initiative, later approved in London) to withdraw to the coast, form a bridgehead around Dunkirk and seek to evacuate as many troops as possible. Dunkirk was a name little known to the British public at this stage. Very soon it would be upon everyone's lips.\n\nFor the War Cabinet, the increasingly probable fall of France, and with it the likelihood of the loss of the vast majority of British troops within the German encirclement, had to be reckoned with. General Ironside, admittedly given to pessimism, wrote gloomily on 23 May: 'I cannot see that we have much hope of getting any of the B[ritish] E[xpeditionary] F[orce] out.'61 Two days later he still thought it would be possible to evacuate only 'a minute proportion' of the army. And all the equipment, in such short supply, would have to be abandoned.62 The British commander, General Lord Gort, agreed that 'a great part of the B.E.F. and its equipment will inevitably be lost even in best circumstances'.63 On 26 May, the day that the evacuation from Dunkirk, 'Operation Dynamo', was ordered, there was talk of rescuing no more than about 45,000 men.64 The loss of almost the entire British Expeditionary Force would have been a fearful blow.65 There was no army to speak of at home ready to replace them. There would have been little to fend off a German invasion which, British intelligence was indicating, could be imminent.66 In such bleak circumstances, it was scarcely surprising that some thoughts were turning to the options facing Britain if the worst were to happen.\n\nIV\n\nItaly was seen by some, in London as well as in Paris, as the last hope. It was not worth placing too much on the bet, but the attempt had to be made, it was thought, at least to keep Italy\u2013still neutral at this stage\u2013out of the war. Beyond this, there was the related but separate notion that Mussolini might even at this point be persuaded to serve as a conduit to his friend Hitler to help to stave off a widening conflict and the ruination of Europe. Mussolini had, after all, intervened on the side of peace in 1938, even if the shameful Munich Conference had been the result. And Italy could not altogether rest easily at the prospect of a Europe completely dominated by a victorious Germany. Moreover, in any settlement he could broker, Mussolini was certain to gain significant territorial concessions for Italy around the Mediterranean. Enhanced power, new prestige and prosperity for his country in a peaceful Europe were the carrots dangled before him. There were few, if any, other inducements to offer the Italian dictator, certainly nothing to tempt him from the allure of militaristic grandeur, from the prospect of triumph in a war that he imagined was already largely won. Mussolini understood threats, particularly if backed by a big stick. But suggestions that he had 'put his money on the wrong horse', or that Italy was a 'light-weight' in a boxing match with the heavy weight western democracies, which would eventually win a long-drawn-out contest67\u2013points aired before Hitler's western offensive had brought France to her knees and left Britain in deep peril\u2013were unlikely to impress him. Mussolini's tone, in his dealings with both France and Britain, had remained belligerent. He had reminded both the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, and Churchill of his determination to remain both politically and militarily the ally of Germany.68\n\nAt the height of the crisis, however, an approach to Mussolini remained a possible last resort. \u00c9douard Daladier, the French Minister of Defence (and former Prime Minister), proposed trying to 'buy off' Mussolini. He suggested an approach to the Italian dictator through the American President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, informing him that the Allies would be ready to consider his claims if Italy were to remain out of the war. Italy was also to be promised a seat at the peace conference as if she had been a belligerent. The British Foreign Office signalled its agreement on 25 May.69 The suggestion that 'we should offer to discuss [the] Mediterranean with Italy' had been put the previous day to the former powerful head of the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, who had given it his blessing. So had his successor, Sir Alexander Cadogan, 'if it will stave off war with Italy for a few days'.70 The immediate aim of the French initiative, and of the British agreement to it, it is clear, was a limited one: to keep Mussolini out of the war in order to buy time. Mention of Italy's role in a prospective peace conference, however, indicates that the suggestion implicitly went further than this. No less than a negotiated end to the conflict was in mind. But this had to involve Germany. And in any peace conference, it was obvious, Hitler would have a great deal to say.\n\nNeville Chamberlain had noted in his diary as early as 16 May 'that if the French collapsed our only chance of escaping destruction would be if Roosevelt made an appeal for an armistice', though he thought it unlikely that the Germans would respond.71 Churchill also wanted the help of the Americans, but not for negotiating an armistice. In the first of what would turn into a voluminous correspondence with the American President, he struck a defiant tone: 'If necessary, we shall continue the war alone,' he wrote on 15 May, adding three days later: 'We are determined to persevere to the very end, whatever the result of the great battle raging in France may be.' However, he left Roosevelt under no illusions of Britain's perilous plight were France to fall. 'If this country was left by the United States to its fate,' he openly stated in his second letter, 'no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants.'72 It was an attempt, through laying bare Britain's danger, to push Roosevelt to an open avowal of support, with the hope of practical action to follow. But the later much vaunted 'special relationship' was not so special at this point. Churchill himself was to remark only a few days later, with a tinge of bitterness, that 'the United States had given us practically no help in the war, and now that they saw how great was the danger, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything which would help us for their own defence'.73\n\nRoosevelt was cordial, but non-committal. He had public opinion at home, much of it isolationist, to consider. And he had to ponder whether American backing for Britain at this juncture would not be supporting a lost cause. For, at the height of the crisis, he held out little hope of British survival. On 24 May he had so little confidence in Britain's ability to hold out that he thought Canada and the Dominions ought to urge Churchill to send the British fleet across the Atlantic before Hitler could include its surrender in his peace terms.74 But at least Roosevelt was prepared to offer what leverage he might have (it turned out, predictably, to be little) to intercede with Mussolini on behalf of the Allies.\n\nOn the day that Roosevelt was seeking to have Churchill send the British fleet out of harm's way, Lord Halifax was recommending to the Cabinet acceptance of the French proposal for the President's mediation to try to prevent Italy entering the war. He did not think much would come of it, but approved of the attempt to acquire, via Roosevelt, Italy's terms for staying out of the conflict. Halifax added that it might be useful to suggest at the same time that Roosevelt should convey to Mussolini the gist of the last part of a 'statement which the Prime Minister had proposed to make and had then cancelled'. This was 'that the Allies were ready to consider reasonable Italian claims at the end of the war, and would welcome Italy at a Peace Conference on equal terms with the belligerents'.75 This was effectively the French proposal that had emanated from Daladier. Churchill evidently had second thoughts about making such a statement himself at this juncture. He and the other members of the War Cabinet, however, were ready to endorse Halifax's suggestion of seeking Roosevelt's intercession not merely to keep the Italians out of the war, but to open the door to Mussolini's participation in a peace conference, presumably to follow an early armistice on the British as well as French side.\n\nAbout this time\u2013the precise date is not clear\u2013Halifax, who had voiced his view to the Cabinet some months earlier that Britain would not be able to continue alone if France were to make peace with Germany, drafted a telegram for Churchill to send to Roosevelt which, in the event, was not dispatched. It amounted to a plea to Roosevelt to intervene, should Hitler, following the fall of France, offer Britain unacceptable terms 'destructive of British independence', such as involving the surrender of the fleet or the air force. Roosevelt was to make plain, in such a dire eventuality, that this would 'encounter US resistance', and that the United States would give Britain full support.76 Probably the inherently weak, pessimistic tone did not endear itself to Churchill, who was keen to avoid intimations of desperation. In any case, it was a faint hope, though the unsent telegram shows the way at least one important member of the British government was thinking.\n\nFollowing the visit of Paul Reynaud to London on 26 May, an Anglo-French request to Roosevelt was finally made. It was thought preferable to approaching Mussolini directly, which might have suggested weakness.77 That same day, Roosevelt informed Mussolini of his willingness to act as an intermediary. He was prepared, he said, to pass on to the Allies 'Italian aspirations in the Mediterranean zone', and guaranteed Italy's participation on an equal footing with the belligerent powers in any peace negotiations at the end of the war. The price was Mussolini's agreement not to enter the war. The request was unceremoniously turned down the following day.78\n\nMeanwhile, however, the possibility of a more immediate and direct avenue to the Italians by the Allies themselves had opened up. It was around this possibility that, for three days, the issue of whether to seek terms or fight on centred.\n\nOn 20 May, in a conversation with Lord Phillimore, well known for his Fascist sympathies, the Italian ambassador in London, Count Giuseppe Bastianini, had appeared enthusiastic about the prospects of a British approach to Germany through the intermediacy of Italy. Phillimore duly passed on the message to the Foreign Office, that even now Hitler would listen to Mussolini. Soon after this, Sir Robert Vansittart was invited to meet the press attach\u00e9 at the Italian embassy, Gabriele Paresci, who implied that an approach to Italy would not be rejected.79 Halifax relayed this to the War Cabinet on 25 May, mentioning that, after consulting the Prime Minister, he 'had been authorised to pursue the matter further'. Vansittart had meanwhile been invited to a second meeting with Paresci. Halifax cautiously suggested the line to be taken: that 'we were now, as always, willing to enter into discussions with the Italian Government with a view to putting an end to the difficulties and misunderstandings which blocked the path of friendship between the two peoples'. Churchill had no objection, as long as the meeting was not made public.80\n\nIt was a Saturday, an unusual day for diplomatic meetings, but Halifax was anxious to lose no time in view of the critical military situation. The situation was becoming increasingly grave. The news filtering through was dire. Lingering hopes of a British counter-attack, in tandem with the French, to stave off the German advance were abandoned later that day. The desperate retreat to Dunkirk had begun. German forces were positioned no more than ten miles or so from the port. The prospects for the British army were bleak. 'Everything is complete confusion,' Cadogan, at the heart of the Foreign Office, recorded; 'no communications and no one knows what's going on, except that everything's as black as black. Boulogne taken, Calais heavily besieged. Dunkirk more or less open, and that's the only exit for our B.E.F., if they can ever be extricated. Meanwhile they have little food and practically no munitions...Every day that passes lessens our chances.'81\n\nLate that afternoon, Halifax met Bastianini. Though the usual diplomatic rules of a cautious fencing game were applied, the meeting soon went beyond the limited objective of keeping Italy out of the war. Bastianini widened the issue when he said that it had 'always been Signor Mussolini's view that the settlement of problems between Italy and any other country should be part of a general European settlement'. Halifax replied that in building a peaceful Europe, 'matters which caused anxiety to Italy'\u2013code for her extensive territorial ambitions in the Mediterranean and north Africa\u2013'must certainly be discussed as part of a general European settlement'. Bastianini enquired whether the British government contemplated discussion of 'general questions' involving 'other countries' as well as Italy and Great Britain. Halifax avoided an answer by saying that such wide discussion was difficult to envisage while war was continuing. But Bastianini countered by saying that once such a discussion had begun, 'war would be pointless'. Mussolini was concerned, the ambassador continued, 'to build a European settlement, that would not merely be an armistice, but would protect European peace for a century'. Halifax stated that 'the purpose of His Majesty's Government was the same, and they would never be unwilling to consider any proposal made with authority that gave promise of the establishment of a secure and peaceful Europe'. The Foreign Secretary agreed when Bastianini suggested informing Mussolini 'that His Majesty's Government did not exclude the possibility of some discussion of the wider problems of Europe in the event of the opportunity arising'.82\n\nHalifax was preparing to go to church next morning, Sunday, 26 May, when he received news that Churchill had called a meeting of the War Cabinet, the first of three that day, for 9.00 a.m., prior to the visit of the French Premier, Paul Reynaud. At the meeting, the Foreign Secretary reported on his discussion with the Italian ambassador. He prefaced his comments by stating: 'On the broader issue, we had to face the fact that it was not so much now a question of imposing a complete defeat upon Germany but of safeguarding the independence of our own Empire, and if possible that of France.' No one demurred at the suggestion, sounding most realistic in the desperate circumstances, that survival, not victory, was at stake. Implicit in what Halifax was saying was that at some point, perhaps earlier rather than later, with or\u2013increasingly likely\u2013without France, Britain would have to negotiate an end to the war. Bastianini 'had clearly made soundings as to the prospect of our agreeing to a conference', and had indicated that Mussolini's wish was to secure peace in Europe. Halifax had replied that peace and security were also Britain's objective, 'and we should naturally be prepared to consider any proposals which might lead to this, provided our liberty and independence were assured'. Churchill did not let this pass without comment. He retorted that peace and security might be achieved under German domination of Europe. But Britain's aim was to 'ensure our complete liberty and independence', and he opposed 'any negotiations which might lead to a derogation of our rights and power'.83 This was not, however, to rule out negotiations at all.\n\nBastianini had requested a further meeting at which he might have further proposals. There was no disagreement, however, with Attlee's suggestion that any further deliberations had to await the arrival that day of the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, and the report of the chiefs of staff on Britain's prospects of holding out if the French collapsed.\n\nThis report, 'British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality', dated 25 May (though not considered in detail by the War Cabinet until 27 May), looked dispassionately at Britain's situation following a projected French capitulation. Accepting the loss of most of the British Expeditionary Force and all its equipment, and Italian intervention in the war against Britain, but reckoning with American financial and economic support (and possibly eventual participation in the war), the report concluded that air superiority was the crux of Britain's hopes, without effective allies, of holding out against possible invasion over the next few months. The report offered grounds, therefore, for cautious optimism even in the face of such adversity.84\n\nReynaud lunched alone with Churchill on 26 May. In his report to the War Cabinet on their discussion, Churchill mentioned the neutralization of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, the demilitarization of Malta and the limitation of naval forces in the Mediterranean as probable Italian demands. Churchill had told Reynaud, he said, 'that we were not prepared to give in on any account. We would rather go down fighting than be enslaved to Germany. But in any case we were confident that we had a good chance of surviving the German onslaught.' The War Cabinet moved on to the question of whether any approach to Italy should be made. Halifax was in favour. He thought the last thing Mussolini wanted was a German-dominated Europe, and would be anxious 'to persuade Herr Hitler to take a more reasonable attitude'. Churchill 'doubted whether anything would come of an approach to Italy', but left the matter for subsequent consideration by the War Cabinet.85\n\nAfter the second meeting of the War Cabinet that day, at 2 o'clock, Halifax went back to continue the discussions with Reynaud. They were later joined by Churchill, Chamberlain and Attlee, in talks that lasted until Reynaud had to leave, about 4.30 p.m. Reynaud put to the British ministers his hope that 'some formula' might be found to 'satisfy Italian self-esteem in the event of an Allied victory, on condition that Italy did not enter the war'. He told them of the suggestion made a few days earlier by M. Andr\u00e9\n\nFran\u00e7ois-Poncet, the French ambassador in Rome, that to have any hope of success the Allies would have to be prepared to deal with the status of Gibraltar, Malta and Suez from the British side and Djibouti and Tunisia from the French. Reynaud thought Halifax was struck by his arguments. The British Foreign Secretary, he later recalled, 'expressed his willingness to suggest to Mussolini that, if Italy would agree to collaborate with France and Britain in establishing a peace which would safeguard the independence of these two countries, and was based on a just and durable settlement of all European problems, the Allies would be prepared to discuss with him the claims of Italy in the Mediterranean and, in particular, those which concerned the outlets of this sea'. But Reynaud recognized that Churchill 'was in principle hostile to any concessions to Mussolini', as were Chamberlain ('with some reservations') and Attlee.86\n\nThe mood, as the discussions with Reynaud took place, among those fully aware of the dramatic events across the Channel, was distinctly gloomy. Neville Chamberlain's diary entry speaks of 26 May as 'the blackest day of all'. Belgian forces, under heavy attack all day, were close to collapse. Leopold, King of the Belgians, was preparing to capitulate. The French, too, Cadogan learned, were 'in a very bad way' and, according to Churchill's military representative in Paris, Major-General Sir Edward Spear, 'talking about capitulating'. The French Commander-in-Chief, General Maxime Weygand, had stated that 'he had only 50 divisions against 150 German. He would fight to the end if ordered to do so but it would be useless. Paris would fall in a few days.' Chamberlain was not exaggerating in writing of 'a terrible position for France and ourselves, the most terrible in our history'.87\n\nOutside the inner circles of government, others were reading the runes. Fears of a German invasion were growing. One Member of Parliament told his wife that they should each try to obtain suicide tablets so that 'if the worst comes to the worst there are always those two little pills'.88\n\nAccording to Chamberlain's diary account of the meeting with Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, through buying off Italian entry into the war by an appeal to Mussolini, accompanied by territorial concessions, hoped to release ten divisions to throw into the defence against the Germans. The British ministers pointed out that this was unlikely to make any real difference to the military position. Reynaud suggested, however, that Mussolini's own self-interest in safeguarding Italian independence in the event of a French and British collapse might predispose him towards a proposal for a European settlement. Chamberlain suspected that Mussolini might indeed look to a four-power conference, though only once Paris had fallen. Churchill made plain his opposition to any appeal to the Italian dictator. 'The P[rime]M[inister] disliked any move towards Musso,' noted Chamberlain. 'It was incredible that Hitler would consent to any terms that we could accept, though if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies he would jump at it. But the only safe way was to convince Hitler that he couldn't beat us. We might do better without the French than with them if they tied us up to a conference which we should enter with our case lost beforehand.' Halifax disagreed, arguing 'that there could be no harm in trying Musso and seeing what the result was. If the terms were impossible we could still reject them.' Chamberlain supported Halifax, but had the impression that Attlee, though he said little, favoured the Prime Minister's position. There was evident division within the War Cabinet. Views were still not hard and fast. Chamberlain, despite voicing support for Halifax's proposal, inclined towards Churchill's view that 'it would be best for us to fight on in the hope of maintaining sufficient air strength to keep the German at bay till other forces can be mobilised[,] perhaps in U.S.A.' And Churchill, whatever his own preference, was ruling nothing out at this stage. He told Reynaud, as the French Prime Minister prepared to depart, that 'we would try to find some formula on which Musso would be approached but we must have time to think'.89\n\nAfter Reynaud's departure, what was described as a short 'informal Meeting of War Cabinet Ministers', without the presence of the Cabinet Secretary, took place. This was probably to brief the fifth member of the War Cabinet, Arthur Greenwood, who had not been present at the deliberation with Reynaud, on what had taken place.90 Then the War Cabinet formally reconvened. It was, noted Halifax, 'a discursive meeting'. The Prime Minister was 'rather jumpy, secretaries kept coming in with messages, and the general atmosphere was like Waterloo Station: very difficult to do business'.91 The discussion, if not always sharply focused, still centred around the question of whether or not to approach Mussolini. The differences, as they had been in Reynaud's presence, were most plainly articulated by Churchill and Halifax. Churchill emphasized that Britain still possessed powers to resist, which the French did not. He also pointed out that France was likely to be offered decent terms by Germany, whereas 'there was no limit to the terms which Germany would impose upon us if she had her way'. He was anxious to avoid being 'forced into a weak position in which we went to Signor Mussolini and invited him to go to Herr Hitler and ask him to treat us nicely'. Halifax attached, he said, 'more importance than the Prime Minister to the desirability of allowing France to try out the possibilities of European equilibrium'\u2013a somewhat optimistic concept in the circumstances. The Foreign Secretary emphasized that there should be no suggestion of any terms which might jeopardize British independence. But he repeated the suggestion that a Mussolini alarmed at the prospect of German hegemony in Europe might be prepared to look to the balance of power. 'At any rate,' he said, 'he could see no harm in trying this line of approach.' Greenwood saw no objection to the course proposed by Halifax, though he imagined Mussolini had little scope for action independent of Hitler, and thought demands affecting British security would soon enough be raised. Chamberlain, too, was ready to discuss Italian demands with Mussolini, but only if the Italian leader were 'prepared to collaborate with us in getting tolerable terms', pointing out, however, Reynaud's view that a specific offer, not generalities, would be demanded. Churchill wanted no decision until it was seen how much of the army could be brought home from France.92\n\nAt this point Halifax read out the communiqu\u00e9, agreed with the French, to the United States, seeking Roosevelt's intercession, and also his account of his interview the previous day with Bastianini. While the former was uncontentious, Churchill once more voiced his opposition to any direct British approach to Mussolini. What Halifax had suggested, he stated, 'implied that if we were prepared to give Germany back her colonies and to make certain concessions in the Mediterranean, it was possible for us to get out of our present difficulties'. This option was, in his view, not open, since 'the terms offered would certainly prevent us from completing our re-armament'. Halifax rejoined that, if so, the terms would be refused. Churchill repeated his earlier point that Hitler, apparently holding the whip-hand, had to be shown that he could not conquer Britain. At the same time, the minutes noted, 'he did not raise objection to some approach being made to Signor Mussolini'. Despite the opposition to such a move that he had voiced at every turn so far, Churchill was still not closing the door on the possibility of an overture to the Italian leader. At the very least, his comment implied that he did not at this juncture feel confident enough to override his colleagues, particularly Halifax, in pressing his own preference.\n\nGreenwood then made a telling point. He reckoned, like others, that Mussolini would demand Malta, Gibraltar and Suez. (Chamberlain thought he might also want Somaliland, Kenya or Uganda.) Greenwood added his certainty that negotiations would break down; 'but Herr Hitler would get to know of them, and it might have a bad effect on our prestige'. Halifax argued that this was a good reason not to mention particulars in the approach, but 'that if we got to the point of discussing the terms of a general settlement and found that we could obtain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them'. Greenwood pointed out that by the time discussions were undertaken Paris was likely to have fallen, and asked whether, therefore, there was any real chance that negotiations would serve a purpose. At this, the meeting ended inconclusively with adjournment to the following day. Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air and leader of the Liberal Party, who despite political differences had been a friend of Churchill since serving as his second-in-command during the First World War and had supported his condemnation of the Munich Agreement, was invited to attend. Halifax was asked to circulate for discussion the draft of a possible communication to Italy along with a record of his discussion with Bastianini the previous evening.93\n\nThe draft 'Suggested Approach to Signor Mussolini', prepared by Halifax and circulated on 26 May to the War Cabinet, summarized the proposal advanced by Reynaud earlier that day. It emphasized the difficulty for Mussolini, should the Germans establish European domination; that Great Britain and France would fight to the end to preserve their independence; that if Mussolini would cooperate 'in securing a settlement of all European questions which safeguard[s] the independence and security of the Allies', they would seek to accommodate his interests; and that if he secretly specified his precise wishes in 'the solution of certain Mediterranean questions', they would try to satisfy them.94 Though seemingly Reynaud's proposals, in practice they accorded closely both in the idea of Italian mediation and even in their wording with what Halifax had been saying, also to the Italian ambassador, before the visit of the French Prime Minister. In other words, the proposals, especially the third one opening up the prospect of a general European settlement, were at least in part Halifax's more than they were Reynaud's.95\n\nThe first of two War Cabinet meetings next day, 27 May, was predominantly concerned with the appalling military situation.96 The German air force had started pounding the beaches in Dunkirk. Around the coast of southern England, hastily improvised flotillas of small ships, trawlers, tug boats, tiny motor launches\u2013anything that was serviceable\u2013were being assembled and setting sail to try to do their bit in rescuing the stranded army.97 But the chances of a large-scale evacuation of troops from the port looked remote. Four British divisions, cut off near Lille, looked unlikely even to reach Dunkirk. Belgium, it was clear, was close to surrender. Later that day the news indeed came through that King Leopold had asked for a cessation of hostilities.98 The mood in Whitehall was very grim. 'See very little light anywhere,' Cadogan jotted down after the Cabinet meeting. 'Position of B.E.F. quite awful, and I see no hope for more than a tiny fraction of them.'99 Churchill's private secretary, John Colville, had gleaned something of the tense debates in Cabinet, perhaps from some indiscretion of the Prime Minister. Noting the serious fear now of French collapse, he added: 'The Cabinet are feverishly considering our ability to carry on the war alone in such circumstances, and there are signs that Halifax is being defeatist. He says that our aim can no longer be to crush Germany but rather to preserve our own integrity and independence.'100\n\nThe second meeting, late that afternoon, concentrated on the suggested approach to Mussolini. According to Halifax's diary entry, there was 'a long and rather confused discussion about, nominally, the approach to Italy, but also largely about general policy in the event of things going really badly in France'.101\n\nHalifax began by mentioning that the French ambassador in London, M. Charles Corbin, had been to see him that morning, on instructions from Reynaud, to press for the inclusion of 'geographical precision' in the approach. Halifax had pointed out the opposition of his colleagues to anything beyond a general approach. The Foreign Secretary mentioned the view of the British ambassador in Rome, Sir Percy Loraine, that 'nothing we could do would be of any value at this stage, so far as Signor Mussolini was concerned'. Chamberlain agreed 'that the proposed French approach to Signor Mussolini would serve no useful purpose', but was willing to go ahead with it to prevent France subsequently claiming that Britain had been unwilling even to allow the chance of negotiations with Italy. Churchill's caustic summary of this argument was 'that nothing would come of the approach, but that it was worth doing to sweeten relations with a failing ally'.\n\nSinclair also took the view that an approach to Italy would prove futile. Any sign of weakness would be an encouragement to the Germans and Italians, and would undermine morale at home and in the Dominions. 'The suggestion that we were prepared to barter away pieces of British territory', Sinclair declared, 'would have a deplorable effect and would make it difficult for us to continue the desperate struggle which faced us.' He thought it was better to await the outcome of Roosevelt's attempted mediation.\n\nAttlee and Greenwood also opposed any Anglo-French approach. Attlee declared that 'the approach suggested would inevitably lead to our asking Signor Mussolini to intercede to obtain peace-terms for us'. Following the French suggestion of geographical precision would simply prompt Mussolini to ask for more; and if Britain refused, it would appear she was letting down her allies. Greenwood thought the approach 'would put us in the wrong', and if word leaked 'that we had sued for terms at the cost of ceding British territory, the consequences would be terrible'. He concluded that 'it would be heading for disaster to go any further with those approaches'.\n\nChurchill's line was similar. He was 'increasingly oppressed', he said, 'with the futility of the suggested approach to Signor Mussolini, which the latter would certainly regard with contempt'. The integrity of Britain's fighting position would be ruined by such an approach. Even avoiding geographical precision would not help; it would be obvious which territories were meant. The best help to Reynaud, argued Churchill, was 'to let him feel that, whatever happened to France, we were going to fight it out to the end'.\n\nChurchill became more vehement in his forceful opposition to Halifax's proposal:\n\nAt the moment our prestige in Europe was very low. The only way we could get it back was by showing the world that Germany had not beaten us. If, after two or three months, we could show that we were still unbeaten, our prestige would return. Even if we were beaten, we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle. Let us therefore avoid being dragged down the slippery slope with France. The whole of this manoeuvre was intended to get us so deeply involved in negotiations that we should be unable to turn back. We had gone a long way already in our approach to Italy, but let us not allow M. Reynaud to get us involved in a confused situation.\n\nHe drew his conclusion: 'The approach proposed was not only futile, but involved us in a deadly danger.'\n\nChamberlain intervened in a conciliatory manner. Though he agreed that the proposed approach would not serve any useful purpose, he thought 'that we ought to go a little further with it, in order to keep the French in a good temper'. He favoured temporizing until the outcome of Roosevelt's approach was known. This met with some agreement. But Churchill looked no further than fighting it out as an example. 'If the worst came to the worst,' he stated, 'it would not be a bad thing for this country to go down fighting for the other countries which had been overcome by the Nazi tyranny.'\n\nHalifax had been quiet to this point. But he recognized the increasing signs of his isolation in the War Cabinet, and Churchill's strident tones now prompted his intervention. 'He was conscious', the Foreign Secretary said, 'of certain rather profound differences of points of view'. Halifax thought it would have been of value to have the French government declare that they would fight to the end for their independence. Moreover, he could see no resemblance between what he was proposing and the suggestion 'that we were suing for terms and following a line which would lead us to disaster'. He hinted, correctly, that Churchill had changed his mind since the previous day, when he had indicated that he would be thankful to get out of the current difficulties on terms, as long as they did not affect the independence of the country, even if it meant cession of some territory. Now, said Halifax, 'the Prime Minister seemed to suggest that under no conditions would we contemplate any course except fighting to a finish'. He agreed that acceptable terms were unlikely. But if it were to prove possible to attain a settlement which would not impair Britain's fundamental interests, he could not accept Churchill's view, and 'would think it right to accept an offer which would save the country from avoidable disaster'.\n\nChurchill was dismissive. The issue was most unlikely to arise. 'If Herr Hitler was prepared to make peace on the terms of the restoration of German colonies and the overlordship of Central Europe, that was one thing,' Churchill declared, in a mooted concession striking in itself. 'But it was quite unlikely', he went on, 'that he would make any such offer.' Halifax, undeterred, offered a hypothetical scenario. Would the Prime Minister be prepared to discuss terms which Hitler, 'being anxious to end the war through knowledge of his own internal weaknesses', might offer to France and England? The old, misplaced optimism in Hitler's presumed internal problems\u2013thought to be serious and imminent economic crisis102\u2013reared its head once more in the question. Churchill replied that he would not join France in asking for terms; but he would consider them if he were told what they were. Chamberlain once more defused the heated exchange between Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister. The dispute closed with agreement that Churchill's reply to Reynaud should be along the lines that Chamberlain had earlier suggested\u2013not complete refusal, but no commitment either, in awaiting the outcome of Roosevelt's approach.103\n\nThe discussion had been more heated than the official minutes suggested. Halifax noted in his diary that he 'thought Winston talked the most frightful rot, also Greenwood, and after bearing it for some time', he went on, 'I said exactly what I thought of them, adding that if that was really their view, and if it came to the point, our ways would separate'. From the invariably calm, unruffled Halifax, these words, implying that he threatened resignation, were strong indeed. He repeated his threat privately to Churchill after the meeting, but by then the Prime Minister had 'mellowed', as Halifax put it, and 'was full of apologies and affection'. It had been a clash of personalities, as well as a disagreement about substance. Churchill's emotional temperament was the antithesis of Halifax's instinctive cool rationality. According to Halifax, 'it does drive me to despair when he works himself up into a passion of emotion when he ought to make his brain think and reason'.104 Halifax agreed with Churchill, and the other members of the War Cabinet, that an approach to Mussolini was almost certain to prove fruitless. But he was still not prepared to dismiss the attempt. And what he had been unable to stomach was Churchill's apparent insistence that it would be better to go down fighting, even if Britain were to be devastated in the process, than to contemplate any possible negotiated settlement which might save the country from disaster.105\n\nAt ten o'clock that evening the War Cabinet was summoned for its third meeting that day. Churchill presented it with the dismal news that Belgium was on the verge of capitulation. The consequences, not just for the chances of prolonged French military resistance, but also for the prospects of evacuating the British Expeditionary Force, were grave in the extreme. 'Of course we did not expect that the Belgians would hold out indefinitely,' Chamberlain noted in his diary, 'but this sudden collapse opens our flank and makes it unlikely that any substantial number of the B.E.F. will get away. I confess I had not much hope of extricating them but there was a chance which has now almost vanished.'106\n\nMeanwhile, too, it had become clear that Roosevelt's attempt to intercede with Mussolini had been peremptorily rebuffed. In fact, Mussolini had declined even to receive the American ambassador in Rome, who sought to present the President's message verbally. Nor was any reply forthcoming. The contempt with which the approach was received could not have been more clearly expressed. Roosevelt's message was conveyed to Mussolini by the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, who told the ambassador straight away that it would be rejected.107 'Roosevelt is off the track,' Ciano said. 'It takes more than that to dissuade Mussolini. In fact, it is not that he wants to obtain this or that; what he wants is war, and, even if he were to obtain by peaceful means double what he claims, he would refuse.'108\n\nBy the time the War Cabinet resumed its deliberations on a possible approach to Mussolini on the afternoon of the following day, 28 May, therefore, the British ministers knew of the rejection of Roosevelt's intercession and were confronted with the sombre news of the Belgian capitulation, which had taken place in the early hours. This had left British troops retreating to Dunkirk dangerously exposed, as Chamberlain had recognized. It was now a desperate struggle to hold off the Germans so as to allow the retreat to continue. 'Prospects of the B.E.F. look blacker than ever,' Cadogan noted. 'Awful days!'109 All day, as Churchill later recalled, 'the escape of the British Army hung in the balance'. For many of the French troops also trying to reach Dunkirk it was too late. Cut off and encircled west of Lille, they were forced to surrender.110\n\nThe members of the War Cabinet now had to consider a request from Paris for a new Anglo-French approach to Mussolini. At Daladier's suggestion, the French Council of Ministers, reacting in a somewhat panicky late-night session to the news of Belgium's surrender, had agreed to make concrete, and unilateral, proposals to Rome in a desperate attempt to keep Italy out of the war. The French government then thought better of a unilateral proposal and postponed an approach until London had been consulted.111 This was the proposal now facing the British War Cabinet, prompting what Chamberlain described as a 'rather sharp discussion'.112\n\nThe alternatives sharply voiced by Churchill and Halifax the previous day remained in the foreground.113 Halifax had learned, he reported, that he had made no progress in his meeting with Bastianini three days earlier, 'and that the position was hopeless'. However, Sir Robert Vansittart, whose initiative had led to that meeting, had subsequently discovered that the Italian embassy had had in mind 'a clear indication that we should like to see mediation by Italy'. Churchill immediately retorted that 'the French were trying to get us on to the slippery slope' of having Mussolini act as an intermediary between Britain and Hitler, and 'he was determined not to get into this position'. The situation would be entirely different, he added, once Germany had made an unsuccessful attempt to invade Britain.\n\nChamberlain was veering closer to Churchill's position, though, unlike the Prime Minister, he viewed the continuation of the war not as the path to ultimate victory, but as the basis to attain a better compromise peace.114 Privately regarding the French proposal as 'derisory in itself and inopportune',115 he pointed out to his Cabinet colleagues that any concessions made to Italy, such as Malta and Gibraltar, could only form part of a general settlement with Germany. Concessions to Italy which left Germany in the war would have no value to Britain. Greenwood and Sinclair concurred in Chamberlain's scepticism about acceptable terms coming from any mediation by Mussolini. Halifax did not disagree, and indeed remarked in his diary on the futility of any further approach to the Italian dictator.116 But, even if the 'hypothesis was a most unlikely one', he repeated to the War Cabinet his suggestion of the previous day, that if Mussolini 'wished to play the part of mediator, and that he could produce terms which would not affect our independence, he thought that we ought to be prepared to consider such terms'. He went on to suggest that Britain 'might get better terms before France went out of the war and our aircraft factories were bombed, than we might get in three months' time'.\n\nAt this juncture, Churchill read out a draft reply to Reynaud, expressing his own views.117 It was clear to him that Reynaud wanted to use Mussolini's mediation 'to get us to the Conference-table with Herr Hitler'. But if Britain once began negotiations, 'we should then find that the terms offered us touched our independence and integrity. When, at this point, we got up to leave the Conference-table, we should find that all the forces of resolution which were now at our disposal would have vanished.' Chamberlain, increasingly in harmony with the Prime Minister, spoke in agreement with Churchill's draft, though he suggested some wording amendments to make it more acceptable to the French. The main thrust of his suggestion was, nevertheless, along the lines that Churchill had proposed: that Britain felt she could hold out, and, if so, would obtain better terms than if she became involved in negotiations with Mussolini from a position of weakness.\n\nWith the tide in the War Cabinet now flowing strongly in his favour, Churchill returned forcefully to the essence of his argument. 'Signor Mussolini,' he said, 'if he came in as mediator, would take his whack out of us. It was impossible to imagine that Herr Hitler would be so foolish as to let us continue our re-armament. In effect, his terms would put us completely at his mercy. We should get no worse terms if we went on fighting, even if we were beaten, than were open to us now.'\n\nIt was a powerful point. Halifax intervened, somewhat weakly, to say 'that he still did not see what there was in the French suggestion of trying out the possibilities of mediation which the Prime Minister felt was so wrong'. Chamberlain, for his part, did not see what there was to lose by openly stating that Britain would fight to the end to preserve her independence, but 'would be ready to consider decent terms if such were offered to us'. He pointed out, however, 'that the alternative to fighting on nevertheless involved a considerable gamble'. Churchill declared, with more feeling than reason, 'that the nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished', and said 'that the chances of decent terms being offered to us at the present time were a thousand to one against'. Chamberlain, again cautiously and somewhat ambivalently, agreed with Halifax's basic assertion on obtaining terms, but added that an offer of decent terms was so unlikely that Britain should not follow Reynaud's suggestion of an approach to Mussolini. He was keen, however, not to reject the French proposal outright, since he did not want France to give up the struggle, and thought there was a possibility of circumstances changing, even within a short time, that might alter the British stance. After more than two hours of discussion, the meeting adjourned at 6.15 p.m. for three-quarters of an hour.\n\nIt was an important interval. Churchill took the opportunity to address the ministers who were not members of the War Cabinet. He referred to the meeting in his memoirs. He had seen little of his colleagues outside the War Cabinet since the formation of his government, and now thought it proper to give them an account of the course of events and state of the conflict. Whether, beyond this, he had arranged the meeting to outflank the opposition in the War Cabinet and gain wider support for the uncompromising position he had adopted on the question of an approach to Mussolini is not clear. But that is, in the event, what he attained. After the difficult discussions in the War Cabinet he was now able to advance, unfettered and in full rhetorical flourish, his own convictions, and in front of an audience already at least in part predisposed to accept them.118\n\nTwenty-five or so ministers of varying political persuasion, by no means all fervent or long-standing supporters of the Prime Minister, crowded around the table in Churchill's room in the House of Commons. Even if they lacked detailed information, all were aware of the depth of the crisis unfolding across the Channel. They sensed what was at stake. The tension was palpable. Churchill lost no opportunity of exploiting the heightened atmosphere. One of those present, the Minister for Economic Warfare and senior Labour figure, Hugh Dalton, thought Churchill 'magnificent' at the meeting: 'the man, and the only man we have, for this hour.' It was a splendid, morale-boosting speech, even though Churchill still reckoned with bringing back only around 50,000 soldiers from Dunkirk and thought the rescue of 100,000 would be 'a magnificent performance'. Dalton recalled a key point made by Churchill, one he would make in the War Cabinet: 'It was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet\u2013that would be called \"disarmament''\u2013our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British government which would be Hitler's puppet would be set up\u2013\"under Mosley or some such person''.'119\n\nTowards the end of his address, Churchill declared: 'Of course, whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.' He knew how bleak the news still was from Dunkirk. By the end of that day, 28 May, a mere 17,000 troops had been rescued. (Only in the following days did the numbers swell to over 50,000 a day.) But his resilience appealed to his attentive audience. He was taken by surprise by the reaction of the experienced parliamentarians from different points on the political spectrum.\n\nQuite a number seemed to jump up from the table and come running to my chair, shouting and patting me on the back. There is no doubt that had I at this juncture faltered at all in the leading of the nation I should have been hurled out of office. I was sure that every Minister was ready to be killed quite soon, and have all his family and possessions destroyed, rather than give in. In this they represented the House of Commons and almost all the people.120\n\nWithin the hour, he was reporting back to the War Cabinet on the reaction. His colleagues, he said, had 'expressed the greatest satisfaction when he had told them that there was no chance of our giving up the struggle'. He did not recall, he said, 'having ever before heard a gathering of persons occupying high places in political life express themselves so emphatically'. While Halifax and Chamberlain had been preparing the new draft reply to Reynaud, Churchill had been garnering support for his stance. He had now won the day. There was no further opposition from Halifax. Churchill expressed himself content with the draft reply to Reynaud which Chamberlain read out. But when Halifax raised the question of an appeal to President Roosevelt, which Reynaud had also wanted the Allies to make, Churchill was firm. He thought an appeal to the United States at the present time would be 'altogether premature'. Once more, his political reasoning followed psychological instinct. 'A bold stand against Germany' would command the admiration and respect of the United States; 'but a grovelling appeal, if made now, would have the worst possible effect.'121\n\nLater that evening the reply went off to Reynaud. The wording had been redrafted by Chamberlain and Halifax, and agreed by all the War Cabinet.122 Its sentiments were, however, those of Churchill himself. As Chamberlain had advocated, the reply did not rule out the possibility of an approach to Mussolini 'at some time', though it explicitly did so in the current situation.123 It saw improvement coming only through continuing the struggle, which would 'at once strengthen our hands in negotiations and draw admiration and perhaps the material help of the U.S.A.' If Britain and France continued to hold out, it concluded, 'we may yet save ourselves from the fate of Denmark and Poland'.124\n\nIn fact, despite the British rejection of an approach to Mussolini, the French government decided to make their own, unilateral offer. It was treated with outright contempt in Rome.125 Mussolini was set on war, not peaceful negotiation. France was on the verge of defeat, at the hands of Germany. Mussolini wanted the easiest and cheapest route to his share of the glory and the spoils. He duly declared war on France on 10 June (a decision that will be explored fully in Chapter 4 below). The French ambassador in Rome, M. Fran\u00e7ois-Poncet, aptly described it, when being given the news by the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, as 'a dagger-blow at a man who has already fallen'.126 A week later, France capitulated.\n\nThe British government had reckoned since the middle of May with the prospect of having to continue the fight in the face of French defeat, in the hope of holding out until the United States might decide to help (of which there was no guarantee at all). But what it had not expected was 'the miracle of Dunkirk'. The loss of almost all the British Expeditionary Force had been taken into every calculation in late May. It was under this presumption that the crucial political decision, whose making we have followed, was taken. Only once that decision had been arrived at did it gradually become clear, over the following days, that the armada of small boats\u2013hundreds of them\u2013which had shuttled backwards and forwards across the English Channel had succeeded beyond anyone's hopes in what had seemed an impossible mission. Despite their exposure for days to relentless bombing, practically the whole of the British army (and many Allied soldiers) that had served in northern France had been rescued from the beaches and harbour of Dunkirk\u2013by 4 June 224,301 British and 111,172 French and Belgian troops.127 That day Churchill was able to tell the House of Commons of the 'miracle of deliverance' at Dunkirk in a stirring speech, reaching its rhetorical climax in his famous, ringing declaration: 'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender...'128 The warmth and enthusiasm with which his patriotic address was received, in the wake of a colossal military calamity that the 'deliverance of Dunkirk' had managed to turn into even a sort of triumph, was an important moment in the elevation of Churchill's public standing, and the regard for his qualities as an indomitable wartime leader.\n\nThe Churchill who emerged from the Dunkirk crisis now stood head and shoulders above his colleagues in the War Cabinet. On 6 June he could tell them with unchallengeable authority that 'in no circumstances whatsoever would the British Government participate in any negotiations for armistice or peace'.129 This had not been the case during the political crisis to determine Britain's war strategy during the very days when the fortunes of the army stranded at Dunkirk seemed at their darkest.\n\nV\n\nIn one sense, the outcome of the vital, intense and occasionally heated deliberations of those few days from 25 to 28 May was to alter nothing. Britain was already at war with Hitler's Germany, and now simply continued to stay in the fight. It was a choice, nonetheless: indeed, a most crucial choice to reject an alternative, that of a pathway to negotiations with Hitler which would have taken Britain out of the war with untold but profound consequences.\n\nTo be sure, not even Lord Halifax, the main spokesman for exploring the possibilities of Italian mediation towards a peace settlement, contemplated Britain's capitulation, or a settlement on terms which would have been harmful to the country's independence. Halifax was as adamant as Churchill, whatever their differences, that Britain's freedom must be preserved. This objective was shared by all members of the War Cabinet. How to attain that end was what divided the Prime Minister and his Foreign Secretary.\n\nNor was it a matter of patriotic defiance and Churchillian 'bulldog spirit' prevailing over weakness and defeatism. Halifax was no less a patriot. And he was prepared to fight on, if that was the only way. But his reasoned position was that fighting on, with the unquestionably high sacrifices that would entail, did not necessarily amount to the only course of action available to Britain. He was, therefore, impatient with Churchill's talk of going down fighting when alternatives had not been explored. For all that Churchill spoke with passion and emotion, however, and in ways that irritated the more coldly rational Halifax, his case was nevertheless underpinned by reason and logic. The other members of the War Cabinet, most notably Chamberlain, were ultimately brought behind the Prime Minister's position, rather than that of Halifax, because Churchill had the better arguments.130\n\nHalifax wanted to test the waters, to see whether Italian mediation might pave the way for a general settlement. He thought it unlikely; but he did not wish to see the possibility left untried. Any attempt would in reality have been significantly to overestimate Mussolini's influence on Hitler. This had waned greatly since his intervention had paved the way for the Munich Agreement in 1938. Churchill himself would apparently not have been opposed, as he indicated during the sessions of the War Cabinet, to an attempt to buy off Italy at the cost of some British possessions in the Mediterranean, or even, so he said at one point, to settle for German supremacy in central and eastern Europe if it would get Britain 'out of the mess'.131 But especially once Roosevelt's overture on behalf of the Allies had been so contemptuously rebuffed, he thought any approach to Mussolini was futile. Worse than that, it would leave Britain on 'a slippery slope'. Chamberlain, as the crisis wore on the key figure in the divide between the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary,132 accepted this, as did Attlee and Greenwood. Once an opening to negotiations\u2013meaning not just with Mussolini, but also with Hitler\u2013had been made, it had consequences, for Britain's international standing, and for morale at home. Hitler's position, given the mighty inroads his army had made in France, was extremely strong. He would make demands, almost certainly stretching beyond the return of former German colonies, which would leave Britain seriously weakened and her independence as a power threatened.\n\nHalifax's view was that, in such an eventuality, Britain could withdraw from negotiations. Churchill, backed increasingly by the other members of the War Cabinet, pointed to the irreparable damage that would already have been done, even by the readiness to contemplate the inevitable concessions which entry into negotiations meant. It would be as good as impossible to resuscitate fighting morale among the population when it had been realized that the government had been prepared to entertain terms. And the concessions, as Churchill pointed out, would not merely be confined to a few pieces of territory, though satisfying Mussolini's demands alone would have severely weakened Britain's position in the Mediterranean and Middle East. A puppet government would be set up within the country. Britain's effective disarmament would unquestionably also be a condition. The navy would probably have to be given up, or placed under German tutelage.133 There would be no possibility of rebuilding defences in the air or on land. Britain would consequently, even retaining nominal independence, be at Germany's mercy; subordinated without putting up a fight. Even if the navy were to be spirited away to Canada, and the royal family and government into exile, the likelihood of the United States rushing to Britain's aid would have been much diminished, and the focus of the Empire's resistance to Hitler removed. Churchill could persuasively argue, therefore, that no terms which Hitler was likely to offer Britain would be acceptable. They would not be worse if Britain had fought and lost than if she had not fought at all. Hence, he could reach the conclusion that to fight courageously and be defeated had few, if any, disadvantages, and the distinct advantage that it would provide moral encouragement to Britain's friends in the world, in the Empire and Dominions, and in the United States, to continue the fight.\n\nUltimately, these arguments were seen by the other members of the War Cabinet, apart from Halifax, to be convincing. And even Halifax concurred in the wording of the telegram sent on the evening of 28 May to Reynaud, which stated the position Churchill had set out, though the final wording was shaped largely by Chamberlain, with assistance from the Foreign Secretary himself.\n\nThree days, from Halifax's meeting in the late afternoon of the 25th to the agreement reached on the telegram to Reynaud on the evening of the 28th, were needed to arrive at the decision. It was a collective agreement, with Halifax finally bowing to the wishes of the other members of the War Cabinet and in so doing indicating his own binding commitment to the decision (a point of no small importance in demonstrating the government's unity to Parliament and to the country). It had been reached by reasoned discussion among five ministers (occasionally with a sixth, Sinclair, joining the deliberations). Of these, Churchill held primacy, though not outright dominance. He won his case by reason, not power and browbeating. The military case for reasoned hope, advanced by the chiefs of staff, had also contributed to the growing mood of resilience. Churchill had instinctive backing from Attlee and Greenwood. But the member of the War Cabinet whose support was most valuable was Chamberlain, who, as always, dissected all points of the argument with precision, before his initial ambivalence gave way to firm backing for the Prime Minister's stance. By this time, Halifax had little option (beyond a resignation which would have been as damaging as it was futile, and was never more than a fleeting thought) but to yield to the position adopted by all his colleagues.\n\nStriking about the way the decision was reached was how few individuals were involved in it, and how limited, in a parliamentary democracy, was the number of those who had any inkling of what was at stake. Only the small circle of the War Cabinet knew. Beyond those few ministers, as good as nothing filtered out. The members of the wider Cabinet remained largely in the dark. Only the highest level of officialdom within the Cabinet and Foreign Office was aware of what was happening. The general public had, of course, no notion of the momentous decision facing the War Cabinet, and, in fact, only gradually grasped the enormity of what was taking place so close to home, on the other side of the English Channel, a situation scarcely imaginable in today's society of global television and near-instant coverage of wars taking place thousands of miles away.\n\nHistory, too, cast a veil over what had taken place. Neither Churchill nor Halifax enlightened the readers of their postwar memoirs about the short-lived proposal to use Italian mediation to come to terms with Hitler. Churchill had, in fact, included in a draft of his war memoirs a reference to Halifax's willingness to placate a 'dangerous enemy', mentioning his meeting with Bastianini, but bowed to encouragement that he should use discretion, and omitted it from the published version.134 Only when the public records were released, thirty years after the events, did it become fully apparent how vital the deliberations of those May days of 1940 had been to Britain's future.135\n\nWhat would have happened had Halifax's alternative strategy been adopted naturally remains in the realm of speculation and conjecture. We have already seen something of what Churchill and the other members of the War Cabinet thought it would imply, however, and we know enough of German plans (to be explored in the next chapter) to have an idea what might have awaited Britain had she sued for peace.136\n\nA first German prerequisite of any negotiations would surely have been a change of government in London. Churchill, long seen as the arch-exponent of an anti-German, warmongering faction (which Nazi warped thinking associated with Jewish influence), and his supporters would have been forced out of office. Germany would have insisted upon a government more attuned to the interests of the Reich, and more prepared to make significant concessions in the interests of European peace than ever could have been expected under Churchill's leadership. Churchill himself imagined, as we have seen, that the Germans would have insisted upon a puppet government led by Oswald Mosley, the British Fascist leader.137 More probable would have been an attempt to install as the head of a new administration, dependent on the favour of Berlin, David Lloyd George, Britain's Prime Minister during the First World War, admired by Hitler and a great admirer, in turn, of the German dictator when he had met him at Berchtesgaden in 1936.\n\nChurchill had, in fact, wanted Lloyd George in his Cabinet and had asked him on 13 May to become Minister of Agriculture. Lloyd George declined, prompted by his unwillingness to serve with Chamberlain. He was by this time in his late seventies. He thought that Britain could not win the war, and would have to seek a negotiated settlement at some point.138 But he still had great stature, and remained influential, abroad as well as in Britain. With the situation looking so bleak towards the end of May, Churchill spoke to Chamberlain about including Lloyd George in the government. Chamberlain replied frankly. He did not trust Lloyd George, and could not work with him. Churchill, he said, would have to choose between them. The Prime Minister immediately backed down, adamant that he wanted Chamberlain to stay. They were serving together and 'would go down together', Churchill remarked, somewhat elliptically. He himself did not know Lloyd George's mind, he stated, or whether he would prove defeatist.139 This did not prevent him approaching Lloyd George on a number of further occasions, though all attempts to bring him into the Cabinet foundered on the mutually bitter enmity between him and Chamberlain.\n\nLloyd George was no outright defeatist. In the summer of 1940 he took the view that peace terms should not be undertaken immediately, but only once Britain had fended off the German onslaught and could therefore bargain from a better position. But Churchill and Chamberlain were right not to trust him. In autumn 1940 Lloyd George envisaged himself as a peace-making Prime Minister, once Britain's survival was assured but it had been acknowledged that total victory against Germany was impossible. He would 'wait until Winston is bust', he told his secretary in October 1940.140 Before then, in June and July, as stories of peace-feelers became practically a daily occurrence, rumours had reached Berlin that Lloyd George would soon replace Churchill as Prime Minister.141 He would most probably have been acceptable to Hitler as the British equivalent of Marshal Philippe P\u00e9tain at the head of a Vichy-style government, conceivably under a restored King Edward VIII.142\n\nOnce embarked upon the 'slippery slope' of negotiations, as Churchill had put it, such a government would have been compelled from its position of weakness to concede territory and armaments to Germany. Though Hitler later on numerous occasions stated that he had wanted to preserve the British Empire, it is unthinkable that this meant preserving it in a position of any independent power. As we shall see in the next chapter, there would certainly have been heavy pressure coming from some parts of his regime, especially from the German navy, to make serious territorial gains at the expense of Britain, as well as ending once and for all any military threat from the Royal Navy.\n\nOf course, an exiled British government would probably have continued the struggle from some part of the Dominions. It might also have been possible to get the fleet out and to the security of friendly harbours abroad. But it is hard to see how Britain could have emerged from any peace dealings to which it had committed itself in the late spring or summer of 1940 in anything other than a perilously enfeebled position.\n\nWith Britain supportive of Germany, or at least benevolently neutral towards the Reich, Roosevelt's leanings towards providing material and military backing would have been stopped in their tracks. As it was, the case for supporting Britain was not easy to articulate for a public opinion still extremely cautious about overseas interventionism even when it was not outrightly isolationist. And with western Europe secured and any threat from the United States a distant one, Hitler would have been able to turn his full attention to fighting the war for 'living space' against the Soviet Union, but now with British backing.\n\nThe decision taken in late May 1940 not to seek peace terms had, then, the most profound implications, and not just for Britain. A negotiated settlement to Germany's advantage with a severely weakened Britain, followed or accompanied by the crushing military defeat of France, would have left Hitler victorious in the whole of western Europe. The British decision to fight on meant that Hitler was unable to end the war in the west. This at once greatly magnified the enormous gamble he had taken. He would now have to contemplate attacking the Soviet Union, the ideological arch-enemy, in the war that he had always intended to fight for 'living space' and to destroy 'Jewish Bolshevism', with the war in the west unfinished. And behind Britain stood the might of the United States, with the likelihood that American aid for the British war effort would be increasingly forthcoming. As Hitler saw it, time was not on Germany's side. Germany had to remove Britain from the war before the Americans were ready and willing to enter it. If this were to take place before Germany had the complete mastery of Europe and all the Continent's material resources at its disposal, the chances of final victory would be seriously diminished and, in the long run, perhaps altogether undermined. The British decision to stay in the war, therefore, imposed a new sense of urgency on Hitler. If the British government would not come to terms, he saw only two options: impose military defeat on Britain; or force her to acknowledge German supremacy on the Continent through defeating the Soviet Union in a rapid campaign, with the ultimate effect of keeping the Americans out of the war.\n\nHitler was unaware of the crucial deliberations of the British War Cabinet in the last week of May. Only after the British government's swift rejection of his final, and lukewarm, 'peace-offer' in his Reichstag speech of 19 July, following his triumph over the French, was it plain that Britain was categorically set on rejecting all possibility of a negotiated end to the war. By then, with the British army safely brought back from Dunkirk, tentative steps were being taken in London and Washington to engineer the vital American aid. Hitler had to face his own critical decision. It was not long in coming.\n\n## 2\n\n## Berlin, Summer and Autumn 1940\n\nHitler Decides to Attack the Soviet Union\n\nThe F\u00fchrer is greatly puzzled by Britain's persisting unwillingness to make peace. He sees the answer (as we do) in Britain's hope on Russia, and therefore counts on having to compel her by main force to agree to peace.\n\nFranz Halder, chief of the army General Staff, \ndiary entry for 13 July 1940\n\n'With Russia smashed, Britain's last hope would be shattered. Germany then will be master of Europe and the Balkans. Decision: Russia's destruction must therefore be made a part of this struggle. Spring 1941...If we start in May 1941, we would have five months to finish the job.'1 With these astonishing sentences, Adolf Hitler announced to his generals, meeting on 31 July 1940 at his Alpine retreat, the Berghof, in the mountains high above Berchtesgaden, his most fateful choice of the Second World War. It ushered in the bloodiest conflict in history, a titanic struggle in eastern Europe that would cost the lives of over thirty million Soviet and German citizens and leave vast areas of unprecedented destruction, ending nearly four years later with the German dictator's suicide in the Berlin bunker and the Soviet Union dominant over half of the European continent for the following four and a half decades.\n\nThe magnitude of what Hitler was proposing appears, in the light of what happened, sheer madness. Napoleon had once tried it, and the campaign in 1812 had brought an ignominious end to the grande arm\u00e9e and to the Emperor's own imperial dreams. In Hitler's case, the gamble had even more catastrophic consequences. The decision looks like a death-wish for himself and his nation. Why, then, did he take it? Was it purely the delusory sense of infallibility in military judgement that the extraordinary triumph in the defeat of France had created, or perhaps just magnified? Was it the logical culmination of a wholly illogical ideology, an irrational lunacy aimed at the destruction of 'Jewish-Bolshevism'? If the decision was madness, why did the leaders of the armed forces go along with it? Was this simply an instance of the dictator imposing his own warped views on an unwilling following? Were other options available, only to be peremptorily rejected? Or, as his opening words suggested, did strategic imperatives lie behind the strange decision, imperatives that left Hitler less free in his choice than might at first appear to have been the case?\n\nHitler's road to war has been exhaustively explored. But before we try to find some answers to the questions just posed, we need briefly to remind ourselves of some salient points in the prehistory of the fateful decision to attack the Soviet Union.\n\nI\n\nJune 1941 was not the first time that German troops had invaded Russian soil or occupied huge tracts of eastern Europe. This had already happened during the First World War. In the latter half of 1915 the German army had overrun the parts of Poland ruled by Russia and occupied enormous swathes of territory along the Baltic coast. Two years later, in further advances, the Germans moved into Belorussia and the Ukraine.2 The harsh Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, forced on the new Bolshevik regime on 3 March 1918, conceded German influence over Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belorussia and the Ukraine.3 It was a treaty that Hitler praised for providing the 'land and soil' needed to sustain the German people.4 And when, many years later, he outlined to his military leaders his political objectives on invading the Soviet Union\u2013the establishment of buffer states in the Ukraine, the Baltic, Finland and White Russia (Belorussia)\u2013they bore a distinct resemblance to the terms of Brest-Litovsk.5\n\nThe images the Germans gleaned of the country they were occupying in 1918 had a lasting impact, helping to shape the mentalities that fed into the second, far more vicious occupation a generation later. 'Deepest Russia, without a glimmer of Central European Kultur', one officer noted. 'Asia, steppe, swamps, claustrophobic underworld, and a godforsaken wasteland of slime.'6 Led by such impressions, the occupiers intended to create a German military state in the Baltic region to impose order and introduce Kultur. The key figure in the utopian planning of the military state was General Erich Ludendorff, the most dynamic of the German army leaders in the second half of the war.7 In the early 1920s he was to come into close contact with Hitler, and to join him in the fiasco of the attempted beerhall putsch in November 1923.\n\nIn all probability, Ludendorff was among those who exercised some influence upon Hitler's changing views on Russia in the early 1920s. It was during this time that the early, conventional Pan-German focus of Hitler's ideas on foreign policy\u2013with a main emphasis on restoring Germany's 1914 borders, recovering the lost colonies and eventual revenge against the French and British victors of the war responsible for the hated Treaty of Versailles\u2013gradually gave way to a new concentration on eastward expansion to gain territory at the expense of Russia, with the corollary of a policy of friendship towards Britain. In his first known statement of this view, in December 1922, Hitler stated: 'the destruction of Russia with the help of England would have to be attempted. Russia would give Germany sufficient land for German settlers and a wide field of activity for German industry.'8 By 1924 the doctrine was fixed in Hitler's mind, and he came to state it unequivocally towards the end of the second volume of his treatise, Mein Kampf, published in 1926: 'We National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our prewar period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east...If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.'9 Once formed, this doctrine of 'living space' (Lebensraum) remained unchanged, and was crucial to Hitler's 'world-view' down to the Berlin bunker.\n\nIt was not an original idea. In fact, it had been a common strand of nationalist-imperialist thinking since the 1890s and had later been 'intellectualized' by influential geopolitical theorists, most notably Karl Haushofer, a Munich professor who had taught Hitler's private secretary, Rudolf Hess. The idea drew on crude economics: that only increased territory for settlement allowed for the population growth essential to the strength and vitality of a great power. Germany's borders were seen as too confined to allow for the necessary population expansion. Therefore, she needed to gain new territory. And whereas the British Empire, whose power Hitler admired and envied, had been built upon territory gained by overseas conquest and colonial exploitation, Germany's had to be found closer to home, in eastern Europe.\n\nSince no country, state or people would be prepared to give up its land, war for territorial gain was intrinsic to the Lebensraum idea. In this it was not just imperialist, but implicitly social Darwinist and racist, believing that the strong had the right to survive, while the weak deservedly went to the wall, and that the more vital, creative races should properly triumph over inferiors. Hitler himself, however, added a further vital racial component to it: antisemitism. Again, there was nothing original in Hitler's antisemitic views, however vicious. He shared them with countless others\u2013though the depth of his anti-Jewish paranoia was certainly unusual. But there was an originality in the way in which Hitler combined his pathological antisemitism with the notion of Lebensraum\u2013the twin components of his singular world-view.10 This was by regarding Bolshevism as Jewish rule, a view he had formed by 1920, probably under the influence of his publicist associate Alfred Rosenberg, who hailed from the Baltic, and the rabid antisemitic and anti-Bolshevik tirades of Russian exiles which fed into the German right-wing press.11 In the passage already quoted, Germany's need for land in the east was directly linked to the eradication of Jewish rule there. 'For centuries,' wrote Hitler, 'Russia drew nourishment from [the] Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally eliminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew...He himself is no element of organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.'12 'Living space' in Russia would, in other words, be synonymous with the destruction of the power of Jewry there.\n\nHitler returned to the theme of 'living space' in innumerable speeches in the later 1920s, and in an unpublished tract of 1928, where he expounded upon his ideas of foreign policy at greater length than in Mein Kampf. In this tract, he defined foreign policy as 'the art of securing for a people the necessary quantity and quality of Lebensraum'.13 For Germany, this meant a single goal, and 'in the one and only place possible: space in the East'.14 Such ideas were in 1928 still idiosyncratic. Few Germans entertained such notions, and even those who did must have thought them little more than pipe dreams. Hitler headed a fringe party in the political doldrums, with the backing of under 3 per cent of the population at the last Reichstag election, and with no obvious prospect of ever gaining political power. Mainstream politics looked very different from Hitler's vision. The German Foreign Office under Gustav Stresemann was wedded to Locarno and the collective security of the League of Nations. And, despite antipathy towards Bolshevism, relations with the Soviet Union had been, in fact, good since 1922, when the Treaty of Rapallo established a basis of mutually beneficial economic cooperation which helped the Reichswehr bypass the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty and undertake some clandestine steps towards rearmament.15\n\nDuring the Nazi movement's meteoric rise to power, as the Depression caught hold of Germany, Hitler had relatively little to say about 'living space'. A struggle, sometime in the dim and distant future, to acquire land for settlement and entailing war against the Soviet Union, was scarcely a vote-catcher. Most people had the failures of their own government and the everyday worries of trying to cope with the economic misery on their minds. These, and the prospect of a new start under National Socialism, offering unity and strength, were the themes that Hitler hammered home ceaselessly. But although he played down the 'living space' theme, he did not discard it. Meanwhile, his relentless exploitation of the travails of Weimar democracy gained him the dramatic increase in popularity that culminated in Reich President Paul von Hindenburg appointing him to the Reich Chancellorship on 30 January 1933. From now on, his views on foreign policy were no longer those of a fringe-party hothead, but carried the weight of the most important figure in the government, backed by a huge mass movement.\n\nIn the beginning, however, neither the attainment of 'living space' nor, indeed, any defined goal in foreign policy was laid down. What Hitler initially set out to do was to overcome Germany's weakness in the international arena. Crucial to this was to restore Germany's armed strength. He wasted no time in establishing the outright priority of rearmament. This was naturally music to the ears of his generals, whom he addressed only four days after taking office. Many of them had long been hoping, and secretly planning, for the day when the shackles would be removed from rearmament; and when, with democracy overthrown, Germany could once more regain strength and power to become, over time, the dominant force in central Europe, even on the European continent. So Hitler's expressed determination on 3 February 1933 to build up the armed forces was sure of a favourable response. He went on to hint at the direction of future foreign policy. Perhaps more exports could be won, he suggested. But the suggestion was raised only to pour doubt on it. 'Perhaps\u2013and probably better\u2013conquest of new living space in the east and its ruthless Germanization' was posed as the alternative.16 It was a cautious reassertion of his dogma of the 1920s. Most who heard it probably took it to mean no more than a vague allusion to expansionism at some future point to win back territories lost at Versailles and establish German supremacy in central and eastern Europe\u2013something that few disapproved of fundamentally\u2013but scarcely saw it as a concrete foreign-policy aim. Nor was it, at this stage. But it implied, nevertheless, a direction to Hitler's thinking on foreign policy, and one that was unchanged from the views he had developed a decade earlier. That is, Hitler's actions over the following years, as Germany came increasingly to force the developments that culminated in war, should not simply be seen as opportunism, as he adapted to the vagaries of international politics. Certainly, he exploited the chances that arose. But the opportunism was ideologically driven.\n\nHitler's dominance over the German government was already complete by summer 1933. He now controlled not only a huge party, but had the advanced apparatus of bureaucratic state administration at his disposal as well as, not least, the modern machinery of coercion and repression. A year later he had established total supremacy in the state. The brutal massacre of the stormtroopers' leaders in June 1934 removed the one remaining threat to his rule. And with the death of the aged Reich President Hindenburg shortly afterward, the only lingering source of potential alternative loyalty was gone. Hitler now became not just head of government, but head of state. The main beneficiary from the ruthless destruction of his own paramilitary organization had been the German army. This cemented its backing for Hitler, already grounded on his support for a massive rearmament programme. Meanwhile, business and industry, drawn by the scope they were given to maximize profit, had also largely fallen in behind the new regime.\n\nDecision-making in the Nazi regime, once the dust had settled on the upheavals of 1933\u20134, bore little resemblance to the way democratic states operated. Indeed, it was bizarre even in comparison with other forms of authoritarian rule. Hitler disliked the potential check to his authority posed by any collective body. Hence, the Cabinet, the highest organ of collective government, started to atrophy as soon as Hindenburg was dead. Its meetings became more infrequent as legislation was devised in the main through circulation of drafts among relevant government ministers. After February 1938 Cabinet meetings ceased altogether. Remarkably, therefore, there was now no collective body of government. Meanwhile, the dualism of party and state was left without clear demarcation lines, resulting in a good deal of governmental confusion. This was intensified by Hitler's readiness to create plenipotentiary bodies, backed by his personal support and often party\u2013state hybrids, to overcome blockages or obstacles in government, while at the same time leaving the original government ministry intact. The basic Nazi social Darwinist philosophy of support for the strong and powerful encouraged unbridled competition and use of 'elbow power'. So positions on paper often meant little or nothing in reality as power resided with those individuals who could fight their way to the top and had immediate access to Hitler. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, in control from 1936 onwards of the huge police and security apparatus, though nominally subordinate to the weakly placed Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, and Hermann G\u00f6ring, head of the Four-Year Plan after 1936, which largely supplanted the still existing Reich Ministry of Economics, were among the most important examples.\n\nIn these myriad competing agencies and this administrative anarchy, Hitler's position was supreme. He remained largely aloof from internal policy. To speak of his decision-making would for the most part be inaccurate. 'Decisions' could be no more than an informal utterance picked up by a minister or party functionary at Hitler's regular lunchtime gatherings and then going its way as an 'order of the F\u00fchrer'. As long as developments were taking shape along the lines he wanted, he seldom intervened in the prewar years (later it was different) unless he was called in to arbitrate, which he was in practice often reluctant to do. But at key junctures, where a crisis point or a fork in the road requiring a new direction was reached, his intervention was needed and was crucial. The crisis in provision of raw materials for rearmament in 1936, which prompted the introduction of the Four-Year Plan to intensify industrial production and make the German economy ready for war, led to perhaps the most crucial such intervention in the early period of the regime.\n\nIf he did little more before the war than lay down 'directions for action'17 in domestic affairs, there can be no doubt that the big decisions of foreign policy from 1933 onwards, down to and including the decision to risk European war by attacking Poland in 1939, were his.18 Here too, however, he shunned the collective decision-making of a Cabinet. As central government fragmented, he consulted, for the most part on an individual basis, those whose views he needed to sound out, before taking the decision himself. At a crucial meeting with his armed forces' leaders and his Foreign Minister in November 1937, at which he expounded upon the need for expansion and war, he began by stating that the matter under discussion was far too important to be brought before the Reich Cabinet.19 In part this reflected a characteristic preoccupation with secrecy, not in itself unreasonable in restricting knowledge of risky steps in foreign policy (or, later, vital military operations). In January 1940 he would have hung in the room of every military office his 'Basic Order' stipulating that: 'No one: no office, no officer may learn of something to be kept secret if they don't absolutely have to have knowledge of it for official reasons.' Even then, only limited necessary information, and no earlier than was needed, should be given.20 But it went beyond concern for secrecy. Hitler's understanding of his position as F\u00fchrer meant a sense of absolute power and responsibility that brooked no interference; he alone could take the crucial decisions; and, while he might choose to listen to the opinion of a military commander or relevant government minister, he had to be free and unconstrained by the views of others to decide as he chose. The decision was then simply announced to those who needed to know. Opposition was, accordingly, extremely difficult, if not impossible, to articulate publicly, while reservations privately expressed to Hitler had to contend with the possibility of a high-decibel tirade in response. Moreover, Hitler could always reckon on high levels of support within the ruling elites, most importantly in the leadership of the armed forces. When in the summer of 1938 General Ludwig Beck, the chief of the General Staff, fundamentally opposed Hitler's decision to attack Czechoslovakia that autumn (later postponed because of the western powers' intervention at the Munich Conference), he found himself completely isolated within the army leadership and his resignation from office in despair had no effect whatsoever on policy.\n\nAs had been the case before 1933 in dealing with his political opponents, Hitler had highly developed antennae when it came to recognizing weakness in others. His successes in foreign policy down to 1938 derived in the main from this bully's intuition, coupled with his instinctive gambler's willingness to take risks for high stakes. Hitler's first major step in determining Germany's new, assertive course in foreign policy, the withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations in October 1933, was fully in accordance with the wishes of the Foreign Ministry and army leadership. The timing was his, but the move was one which would probably have followed under any nationalist government at the time. Hitler took a more independent line in driving forward a deterioration in relations with the Soviet Union and pushing through a non-aggression treaty with Poland in January 1934, in both cases despite Foreign Ministry preferences. He gradually became more confident, and, with that, bolder. In March 1935 he correctly divined that the western democracies would do nothing if he faced them with a major breach of the Versailles Treaty and announced the existence of a German air force and the introduction of conscription to a mass army. He consulted neither military leaders nor ministers in arriving at his decision.21 In early 1936 he again correctly presumed that the weakness of the western democracies, laid bare by the Abyssinian crisis, offered an excellent opportunity to remilitarize the Rhineland\u2013another step that would have been on the agenda of any nationalist government. A surprisingly wide circle in the Foreign Ministry and the military leadership were aware of what was pending, as Hitler hesitated over a period of about a month, deliberating the issue with a number of advisers, some of whom opposed action as too risky. Hitler listened. But he took the decision alone, ignoring advice to the contrary. His triumph prompted the statement, made for propaganda effect though reflecting his now boundless self-confidence: 'I go with the certainty of a sleepwalker along the path laid out for me by Providence.'22\n\nThe path was, however, not a straight one. Since the mid-1920s he had wanted Great Britain as a friend and ally, not an enemy, in the war he envisaged, and desired, against 'Jewish-Bolshevism'. But hints of an alignment, such as the naval treaty between Britain and Germany concluded in 1935, offered only a false dawn. The alienation grew, and remained even when the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, bent over backwards to 'appease' Hitler in 1938. Long before then, Hitler had realized that he had to number Britain among Germany's foes. He knew, too, that Britain, with a world Empire behind her, was starting, if belatedly, to rearm with urgency. Beyond this, across the Atlantic, lay the vast potential of America, still untapped, to be sure, as the country lay locked in isolationism, but a likely future enemy to be viewed with the utmost seriousness, one whose intervention had sealed Germany's fate in the First World War. Time, in other words, was not on Germany's side. She had built up an advantage with her early and speedy rearmament programme. But the advantage would not last. This fed into Hitler's gambler temperament. The risk, he invariably argued, would be greater by waiting than by acting.\n\nThe imperative for early action was driven by another factor: economics. The entire rearmament drive, once past the initial stages, could only be undertaken at reckless cost to state finances and an ordered running of the economy. Germany simply lacked the resources to produce or import all she needed, for arms manufacture and to sustain a modest standard of living for her growing population.23 Money for arms meant less for food. Guns and butter were possible only for a limited time. By the later 1930s that time was starting to run out. Alarm bells were starting to be heard across the economy. War, when it came, was not the result of economic crisis. Rather, the looming economic crisis was a result of ideological imperatives to restructure the economy for war.24 But it did mean that, by the later 1930s, Hitler was under pressure to act, both because he felt Germany would before many more years be in a far inferior international position, and because an overstretched and overheated economy could not be indefinitely sustained.\n\nNot that Hitler acted only under the constraints of external pressures. Rather, these pushed him in the direction which he wanted to go anyway. Although anti-Bolshevism had played little overt role in shaping Hitler's foreign policy during the early years of the regime, this began to change from 1936 onwards. The beginning of the Spanish Civil War in the summer of that year put Bolshevism back in the spotlight from Hitler's vantage point. Hitler decided alone, and for ideological reasons (to combat the threat of Bolshevism taking over in Spain, then France), to offer German military aid to General Francisco Franco, leader of the nationalist rebellion against the Spanish Republic.25 Later that summer, his memorandum for the Four-Year Plan rested on the premiss that 'the showdown with Russia is inevitable'.26 By 1937, Hitler was expecting major war within Europe in the next five or six years, thought Stalin was 'sick in the brain', and spoke of Bolshevism as 'the danger that we will have to knock down sometime'.27 Hitler, therefore, never lost sight of the ideological aim he had developed in the 1920s, even if adjustments to the changing constellation of practical foreign policy in the years preceding the war meant that it faded for the time being into the background. In August 1939 Hitler made the ultimate adjustment when he overturned, in a move of breathtaking cynicism (shared by Stalin), the antagonism towards the Soviet Union embedded in Nazi ideology to conclude a non-aggression pact with the arch-enemy.28 Even then, days before this dramatic pact, he allegedly remarked to the Swiss Commissioner to the League of Nations, Carl Burckhardt: 'Everything that I undertake is directed against Russia. If those in the West are too stupid and too blind to understand this, then I shall be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians to beat the West, and then, after its defeat, turn with all my concerted force against the Soviet Union.'29\n\nBy this time, war in Europe was a certainty. Hitler, more than any other individual, had seen to that. As a combination of determinants\u2013ideological, military-strategic and economic\u2013accelerated the tempo and greatly reduced the timescale for war that he had previously entertained, imagining that it would be around 1943, so his room for manoeuvre in avoiding more imminent conflict with the western powers diminished. In 1938 Britain and France had been so anxious to avoid war that they had given in to Hitler's aggression at Munich, at the cost of Czechoslovakia. Hitler expected them to do the same in Poland, when the stakes, satisfying his claim on Danzig and the Corridor, seemed smaller. This was his miscalculation. His own action in occupying what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, ignoring the deal with the west which he had concluded only six months earlier, had destroyed the backing for appeasement. He thought until the end of August that Britain and France would still, at the last moment, yield, and that he could destroy Poland without their intervention. But two days after his troops had invaded Poland, he finally\u2013if not at the moment of his choosing\u2013had his war with the west. For the time being the war he really wanted, against the Soviet Union, would have to wait.\n\nA one-sided military campaign in Poland brought overwhelming victory in little more than three weeks. But Hitler had no expectation that the half-hearted offer of peace on his terms, made in a speech to the Reichstag on 6 October, would be taken up in London or Paris. He was already plotting his next move. The sense that time favoured his enemies, and that to strike early meant to seize the initiative, to retain the whip-hand\u2013as we have noted, a constant feature of Hitler's psychology\u2013left him impatient with the easy triumph in Poland. He was now anxious to attack the west without delay. With Poland defeated and the Soviet Union, his new-found ally, posing no danger for the time being, Germany was secure in the east. The western front lay open. The circumstances could never be better. The opportunity had to be taken while it lasted to impose a crushing defeat upon France and force Britain to acknowledge her weakness and come to terms. With the war in the west then effectively won, he could turn his attention to preparing for the war he had always wanted to fight: the showdown in the east with 'Jewish-Bolshevism', to destroy Stalin's Russia and to secure Germany's long-term future by acquiring 'living space' and unlimited material resources. This was Hitler's thinking in autumn 1939.\n\nHis generals recoiled at the dangers of such a risky early strike against the west, magnified by the imminent onset of bad weather. To brush aside the weak and antiquated Polish army in a brief campaign was one thing. To launch a major offensive against France, its huge army shielded by the elaborate defences of the Maginot Line, and joined in powerful alliance with Great Britain and the British Empire, was quite another. The generals knew that the armed forces were in no fit state for a full-scale, probably long-drawn-out, conflict against powerful enemies. Even the brief Polish campaign had left half the German tanks and motorized vehicles out of action. An immediate continuation of the war by an attack in the west was, in their eyes, unthinkable.\n\nHitler fumed at their hesitancy and caution. But perhaps he sensed that they were right. At any rate, he bowed to their worries about bad weather conditions and transport difficulties to accept delay after delay\u2013twenty-nine in all\u2013to the launch of the western offensive. Detailed operational planning was not worked out until February of 1940. Then the need to intervene in Scandinavia, where German troops had invaded Denmark and Norway in April, took precedence. The postponements proved invaluable in building up the armed forces. And they eventually resulted in the tactically bold and brilliant plan to attack where least expected, by scything through the wooded Ardennes region of southern Belgium and into lowland France towards the coast. The plan had initially been the tactical brainwave of Lieutenant-General Erich von Manstein but had been seized upon and turned into military directives by Hitler, impatient at the uninspired and conventional ideas of his army High Command. This was the plan behind the attack that eventually commenced on the early morning of 10 May.30\n\nThe offensive was a stunning success, greater than even Hitler had expected. The Dutch surrendered after five days. The Belgians, their neutrality violated by German troops for the second time in a generation, held out longer, until almost the end of the month. But though the small Belgian army fought gallantly, it was swiftly broken by German might. And, whatever their strength on paper, the French army, ineptly led, badly equipped and poor in morale, proved no match for the Wehrmacht. The fabled fortifications of the Maginot Line, built to fend off any possible third assault within a lifetime from across the Rhine, served little practical purpose in the event. They were incapable of halting the main German thrust, which simply bypassed them. Defiance crumbled. On 14 June, less than five weeks after the offensive had been launched, German troops entered Paris. Hitler was exultant as the news was brought to him three days later that the French had sued for peace. His revenge over the French was complete\u2013or would be once the armistice was signed in his presence on 21 June in the self-same railway carriage in which the Germans had been compelled to capitulate in 1918. The scale of the triumph took his incipient megalomania onto a new plane. And his self-glorification (embracing a sense of infallibility) was magnified by the plaudits of his generals, who had, sometimes reluctantly, to concede not only the magnitude of what had been possible under Hitler, but also his direct role in the extraordinarily successful strategic plan of attack. Only the British, Hitler thought, now stood between him and complete victory in the west. Surely they would see sense, and come to terms?\n\nII\n\nOn 6 July 1940 Hitler returned in triumph to Berlin to celebrate before a vast, adoring public the spectacular victory over France and the conclusion of the astonishing western campaign. It was his greatest ever homecoming. To the hundreds of thousands who had waited for hours along the flower-strewn streets of the Reich capital, it seemed as if the end of the war was close at hand. Only Great Britain now appeared to stand in the way of final victory. Few among the cheering crowds imagined that she would pose much of a lasting obstacle to the mighty Wehrmacht. Even in the full flush of the crushing defeat of the French, however, Hitler's military advisers and even the dictator himself were less than sure that Britain's resistance would be swiftly overcome. Behind Britain, too, lay the shadow, if still indistinct, of the United States. Though as yet the sentiment was seldom spoken out loud, the lingering fear was there nonetheless: should the United States mobilize her colossal might and wealth to enter the war, as in 1917, the chances of German total victory would rapidly recede. The twin problem: how to get Britain out, and how to keep America out of the war, loomed large, therefore, in the thoughts of Hitler and the German military leadership during the immediate weeks following the capitulation of France. The outright priority was to persuade (or, failing that, compel through military force) Britain to negotiate a settlement.31 Removing Britain from the war would both deter America from engagement in Europe and free Germany's rear to allow Hitler to engage upon the war he had wanted to fight since the 1920s: the war to destroy 'Jewish-Bolshevism' and gain an enormous eastern empire at the expense of the Soviet Union.\n\nBut within an hour of Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on 19 July, the first press reports were telling him of Britain's icy response to his 'appeal to reason' to come to terms with Germany and avoid the destruction of her Empire.32 On 22 July a broadcast speech by the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, made public what Hitler already knew, that Britain would not entertain the possibility of a negotiated settlement and was determined to fight on.33 Even before Halifax's speech, Hitler had acknowledged the categorical rejection of his 'appeal' and on 21 July raised with his commanders-in-chief the prospect of invading the Soviet Union that very autumn.\n\nHis underlying reasons were ideological, as they had been for almost two decades. Through an attack on the Soviet Union he would destroy the power of the Jews, embodied in his world-view by the Bolshevik regime, and at the same time gain 'living space' for German settlement. Victory would make Germany masters of Europe and provide the base for a racially purified empire which would be equipped eventually to challenge the United States for world domination. But it was now obvious that the war to destroy Bolshevism would not be fought as he had envisaged it, with Britain's support (or at least tolerance). Britain was refusing even at this stage to fit into the concept he had devised all those years ago. Somehow, she had to be compelled to do so, or at least removed from the equation as a hostile force. 'The F\u00fchrer is greatly puzzled by Britain's persisting unwillingness to make peace,' the army chief of staff, Franz Halder, had noted on 13 July. 'He sees the answer (as we do) in Britain's hope on Russia, and therefore counts on having to compel her by main force to agree to peace.'34 However strong the ideological motivation, therefore, the urgency implicit in the startling suggestion that the Soviet Union should be attacked that autumn was not ideological but military-strategic. And that was how Hitler presented it to his commanders-in-chief on 21 July.\n\n'No clear picture on what is happening in England', Hitler declared. 'Preparations for a decision by arms must be completed as quickly as possible.' He refused, he said, to let the military and political initiative slip. Germany had won the war, he brashly claimed. Britain's position was hopeless, but she continued because of the expectation of American help over time, and because she 'puts hope in Russia'. This could come from Russia stirring up the Balkans, with the effect of cutting off German fuel supplies, or by Britain inciting the Soviet Union to act against Germany. Stalin, he suggested, was 'flirting with Britain to keep her in the war and tie us down, with a view to gaining time and taking what he wants, knowing he could not get it once peace breaks out'. Hitler concluded that 'Britain must be reduced by the middle of September, at the time when we make the invasion'. But he was less certain than he sounded about this prospect. He thought the crossing of the Channel 'very hazardous', and stipulated that invasion was 'to be undertaken only if no other way is left to reach terms with Britain'. The way to force the issue, in his view, was to destroy the Soviet Union. 'Our attention must be turned to tackling the Russian problem and prepare planning,' he stated. The object was 'To crush [the] Russian army or at least take as much Russian territory as is necessary to bar enemy air raids on Berlin and Silesian industries'. It would take four to six weeks to assemble an invading army. 'If we attack Russia this autumn, pressure of the air war on Britain will be relieved.'35\n\nHe was ready, therefore, to plunge Germany for a short time (he thought) into war in the east with the war in the west still not conclusively won, raising the spectre of the war on two fronts, dreaded by military strategists and the general public alike. When General Alfred Jodl, head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff and Hitler's main adviser on military strategy, told his immediate subordinates on 29 July of the intention to launch an eastern campaign, the prospect of a war on two fronts prompted an hour of worried argument. Jodl, whether from conviction or not, countered objections with the case advanced by Hitler: the showdown with Bolshevism was inevitable, so it was better to have it now, while German military power was at its height; and by autumn 1941 the Luftwaffe, strengthened by victorious deployment in the east, would again be ready to be let loose on Britain.36 Hitler himself was dismissive of anxieties about a war on two fronts. Intoxicated by the grandeur of the victory in the west, he had told his chief military advisers at the time of the French capitulation that 'a campaign against Russia would be child's play'.37\n\nHitler justified the war as necessary to remove Britain's last possible major ally on the Continent. He claimed, too, that the Soviet Union was 'the Far Eastern sword of Britain and the United States, pointed at Japan'.38 The implication was that victory over the Soviet Union would free Japan to undertake her ambitious southern expansion without fear of Soviet power in the rear, with the combined effect of undermining British power in the Far East, tying down the United States in the Pacific and deterring her involvement in the Atlantic and in Europe. The projected short eastern campaign offered, therefore, the prospect not only of complete hegemony on the European continent, but even of overall final victory in the war. After that, at some indeterminate future date, would come the showdown with the United States. There was no contradiction between ideology and military-strategic considerations in Hitler's thoughts of invading the Soviet Union. They went hand in hand. The essential motivating force, as ever, was ideological. But in the actual decision-making, the strategic imperative dominated.39\n\nWhen the prospect of attacking the Soviet Union that autumn was rapidly ruled out as impractical, he postponed it until May 1941. This was the date he had fixed in his meeting with Jodl on 29 July, and which he announced to his military leaders two days later. It was a momentous decision, perhaps the most momentous of the entire war. And it was freely taken. That is, it was not taken under other than self-imposed constraints. It was not taken in order to head off an immediate threat of attack by the Soviet Union. There was no suggestion at this time\u2013the justificatory claim would come later\u2013of the need for a pre-emptive strike. Hitler himself had acknowledged ten days earlier that the Russians did not want war with Germany.40 Nor was the decision taken in response to pressure from the military, or from any other lobby within the power-echelons of the regime. In fact, even on 30 July, the day before Hitler's pronouncement, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, Field Marshal Werner von Brauchitsch, and the chief of the General Staff of the army, Colonel-General Halder, agreed that 'it would be better to be on terms of friendship with Russia'. They preferred to concentrate the military effort on the possibilities of attacking British positions in the Mediterranean (particularly Gibraltar) and the Middle East, saw no danger in Russian engagement in the Balkans and Persian Gulf, and envisaged helping the Italians create a Mediterranean empire and even cooperating with the Russians to consolidate the German Reich in northern and western Europe, from which basis a lengthy war against Britain could be contemplated with equanimity.41\n\nThe pressure upon Hitler was subjective: his sense that no time could be lost before striking at the Soviet Union if the overall initiative in the war, based on the balance of power and armed might, were not to drain away from Germany towards Britain and, ultimately, the United States.42 This subjective pressure was, however, reinforced by the economic logic of Germany's war. This in turn was rooted in the ideology of 'living space' and the closely related notion of Gro\u00dfraumwirtschaft: sphere of economic domination. When the euphoria following the victory over France started to die down, it was realized that Germany's expectations of economic dominance on the European continent had an Achilles heel: the Soviet Union. In fact, in the summer of 1940 Germany was profiting handsomely from Soviet deliveries of food and raw materials under the economic agreements that flowed from the Hitler\u2013Stalin Pact.43 Even so, Hitler was made aware by the Ministry of Economics that, to equip herself for a long war against Britain and, with growing certainty, the United States, Germany now needed vastly more than she was currently receiving from the Soviet Union. Even though, in the short term, Stalin would probably, to gain time, be prepared to bow to demands for increased supplies, there would inexorably be a growing dependence on the Soviet Union, too precarious a prospect for Hitler to tolerate. He agreed with his Economics Minister, Walther Funk, that the German 'economic sphere' (der 'gro\u00dfdeutsche Wirtschaftsraum') could not be 'dependent upon forces and powers over whom we have no influence'.44 This view was widely shared in leading sectors of the Wehrmacht, big business and the ministerial bureaucracy. It meant Hitler's decision for war against the Soviet Union was likely to find a good deal of support in all those vital groupings.45\n\nWhatever the misgivings of some generals about the venture, Hitler's decision was neither opposed nor contested in the military leadership. In fact, sensing what was coming, the army's General Staff had already begun to prepare feasibility studies weeks before Hitler announced his intention to strike at the Soviet Union.46 His military leaders were as aware as he was of the strategic position. They put forward no alternative strategy for attaining final victory, assuming that Britain could not be invaded or bombed into submission.47 Moreover, like Hitler, they grossly underestimated the Red Army (particularly since its poor showing in the 'Winter War' against Finland some months earlier), and they shared his detestation of Bolshevism, some of them even his identification of the Soviet regime with the power of the Jews. But it is doubtful in the extreme whether they would have of themselves come to recommend a decision, within a few weeks of the defeat of France, to prepare urgently for an invasion of the Soviet Union. That decision was Hitler's, and his alone.\n\nThe immensity of the catastrophe which he thereby invited would unfold ever more plainly from the autumn of 1941 onwards, once the German advance on Moscow stalled as the terrible Russian winter closed in. However, the question at issue here relates not to the attack itself, but to the decision to launch it, taken the previous year. Did Hitler, even as the logistics for what would come to be known as 'Operation Barbarossa' were being worked out, have options which might have given him a better chance of ending (or even curtailing) the threat to Germany posed by Britain's continuation of the war and America's presumed eventual entry? Germany's navy leadership thought so. And, for a while, so did the Foreign Ministry.\n\nThe decision, effectively taken on 31 July 1940, to attack the Soviet Union the following spring was not turned into a war directive until 18 December.48 Even that directive, of course, did not mean in itself that an invasion had to be launched. But in December the points were switched irreversibly onto the track that led to that invasion. In the four months that intervened between July and December 1940, by contrast, Hitler seemed, in matters determining German strategy, strangely vacillating, unsure which way to turn, hesitant, indecisive, weak even, at the height of his power in his external dealings with lesser dictators (Mussolini and Franco), and the leader of defeated France (Marshal P\u00e9tain). He appeared at times to entertain military and foreign-policy suggestions which stood in contradiction to the war in the east. But by the late autumn it was clear that he had returned to the chosen path from which he had never seriously wandered: attacking the Soviet Union at the earliest opportunity with the strategic aim of attaining final victory in the war by conquering London via Moscow. It was a fateful choice of immense magnitude.\n\nChoice presupposes options. What strategic possibilities lay open to the German leadership in the summer of 1940? That an alternative\u2013militarily far more promising\u2013strategy was available, but was squandered through Hitler's insistence on attacking the Soviet Union, was not infrequently claimed in the postwar years.49 It offered an exculpatory device for some military leaders, all too keen to look no farther than Hitler himself as the cause of 'the German catastrophe'.50 Later historical research has usually been far more sceptical, invariably concentrating upon Hitler's ideological imperative for the war in the east.51\n\nHitler decided strategy. On that there is no doubt. Moreover, his sensitivity to the prestige invested in his position as supreme Leader demanded that decisions be taken imperiously, without detailed soundings of advice, let alone prolonged debate and discussion. Critical assessment of policy options partly depends in no small measure upon the effectiveness of mechanisms within a governmental system to shape and present them to the leadership. Given the nature of government in the Third Reich, the potential for presenting Hitler with judiciously framed alternatives was not high. Whereas the British War Cabinet reached a collective decision, after three days of intensive debate, to stay in the war, Hitler simply announced to his generals on 31 July (without prior consultation other than with his immediate military advisers, who had had the first contingency plans drawn up) the decision to prepare for war with the Soviet Union the following spring. No one in the Reich's civil administration was informed of the decision.\n\nAs we have noted, the fragmentation of government below Hitler was greater even than in any other dictatorship at the time. Once the Reich Cabinet had met for the last time, at the beginning of 1938, even the remnants of collective government no longer existed. At that same point, in early 1938, Hitler had concentrated the leadership of the armed forces in his own hands. But the High Command of the Wehrmacht, set up as the vehicle of Hitler's own control, did not function as a collective advisory body on military strategy in the way that the meetings of the chiefs of staff did for the British War Cabinet. Consequently, there was little or no coherent planning devised collectively by the three branches of the armed forces\u2013army, air force and navy. These largely operated alongside each other, their commanders-in-chief dealing in the main bilaterally with Hitler.\n\nQuite different strategic priorities emerged, therefore. Among them were the German navy's own strategic preferences, which differed markedly from those of Hitler. Did they offer a workable option, ignored by Hitler, which offered a more promising prosecution of the war and could have avoided the debacle in the east?\n\nIII\n\nStrategic thinking among the leaders of the German navy\u2013competing in what was usually an uphill struggle with the army and air force for status, influence and resources\u2013had from the outset run along different lines to that of Hitler, though it was no less aggressive and no less global in its ambitions for territorial expansion and eventual world domination. Where Hitler had wanted to harness British friendship to destroy the Soviet Union, looking to build a huge land empire in eastern Europe and impregnable strength from which at some distant future date Germany could engage in a showdown with the United States, the navy saw the destruction of British world power as the central war aim. It demanded a big and powerful fleet, capable of taking on and defeating the Royal Navy in a classic naval war. Accompanied by the construction of an enormous German colonial empire, this would provide the basis to challenge and defeat the United States in the contest for world domination. Attacking Bolshevik Russia did not figure prominently in this thinking. Bolshevism was, of course, accepted as an evil to be confronted and destroyed at some point. But it was taken for granted that it could be contained, then smashed at a later date, once German pre-eminence had been established.\n\nNaval thinking in the Third Reich was, in essence, an updated and amended variant of that of Tirpitz's time.52 It drew on one of the two main strands of German imperialism, that of the overseas colonial empire. Hitler's ideas (and those of the Nazi Party) arose from the alternative strand of imperialism, also with deep roots in the Wilhelmine period, that looked to expansion and conquest in eastern Europe.53 For the army, though not the navy, this latter version, with its inbuilt demands for a large land force to ensure Continental mastery, had evident attractions. But the maritime and Continental alternatives could easily stand alongside each other in the prewar years. Though army, navy and air force competed for resources, there was no need to choose between the alternatives. With the decision in 1939 to construct a large surface fleet, envisaged in the Z-Plan, it even appeared for a time as if the navy was getting its way.54\n\nBut the navy's conception of preparing for a major struggle by the mid-1940s was completely upturned when the Polish crisis led to war between Germany and Great Britain in September 1939. In a remarkable memorandum of 3 September 1939, the very date that Britain and France declared war on Germany, the Commander-in-Chief of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, coming close to criticizing Hitler for taking Germany into war prematurely, admitted that the navy, which according to the Z-Plan was arming for a war 'on the ocean' at the turn of the year 1944\u20135, was still in autumn 1939 nowhere near sufficiently armed for the 'great struggle with England'.55\n\nBy the spring and early summer of 1940, however, this initial gloom had given way to unbounded optimism. In the wake of the part played by the navy in the Scandinavian conquests in April, then especially the stirring events during the western campaign in May and June, culminating in the dramatic victory over France, naval leaders had worked out their utopian vision of the future world power of Germany resting on the strength of the navy to protect its overseas possessions.56 Huge territorial annexation was envisaged. According to a memorandum of 3 June, composed by Rear Admiral Kurt Fricke, Denmark, Norway and northern France were to remain as German possessions, safeguarding the Reich's north-western seaboard. A contiguous swathe of territories, mainly to be taken from France and Belgium, added to some returned former German colonies, and others exchanged with Britain and Portugal, would establish a large colonial empire in central Africa. Islands off the African east coast, most notably Madagascar, would offer protective bases.57\n\nAdmiral Rolf Carls, head of naval command in the Baltic and for long seen as Raeder's likely successor, went even further. Parts of Belgium and France (including Normandy and Brittany) would become German protectorates, based on the Czech model. The French colonial empire would be broken up in favour of Germany, Italy and to some extent Spain. South Africa and Southern Rhodesia would be removed from the British Empire and become an independent state, while Northern Rhodesia would come into German possession as a bridge to link its east-and west-African territories. All British rights in the Persian Gulf, most notably the oilfields, would pass to Germany. Britain and France were to be excluded from any control over the Suez Canal. British mandates in the Middle East would be taken away. Germany would take over the Shetlands and the Channel Islands. Strategic bases were to be established on the Canary Islands (probably in an exchange of territory with Spain), in Dakar on the African west coast (at the expense of France) and on Madagascar, Mauritius and the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Carls admitted the vision might seem 'fantastic', though he advocated its realization in order to 'secure Germany's claims of its part of the globe once and for all'.58\n\nYet another memorandum, dated 11 July, imagined the great battle-fleet necessary to defend a large colonial empire and wage war against the United States when Britain had been totally defeated and its once-mighty Empire had broken up. Coastal defences would be massively extended. Bases on the Azores, the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands would offer security against attack from across the Atlantic. Taking possession of New Guinea as well as Madagascar would offer protection against attack in the Indian Ocean. Links between Germany and its colonies could be upheld without difficulty by dominance in the Indian Ocean, Red Sea and Mediterranean.59 It was a breathtakingly grandiose vision, and further testimony to a hubris in the German elite that was far from confined to Hitler.\n\nHowever, such memoranda fell well short of anything resembling coherent strategic thinking. They remained no more than megalomaniac pipe dreams composed in the intoxication of seemingly imminent final victory. In fact, without the defeat of Britain, which was their underlying premiss, even the first steps towards their realization were out of the question. And they did nothing to prepare the navy for the strategic choice which, by the summer of 1940, Hitler had effectively made: the invasion of the Soviet Union by spring the following year. The dictator's interest remained, as it had done throughout, focused on the prospects of empire in the east of Europe, not in central Africa. For him, in contrast to the navy, building a colonial empire in Africa would only come after, not before, the defeat of Bolshevism and formed part of the inevitable future confrontation with the American continent.60\n\nFor its own part, the naval leadership, when it descended from utopian dreams to practical planning, was preoccupied with the immediate task which had been thrust upon it only weeks earlier: preparing the operational plans for the invasion of Britain by the autumn, aimed at removing British involvement in the war and freeing Germany's rear for the attack on the Soviet Union.\n\nThough preliminary naval contingency planning for a possible invasion of Britain had been undertaken as early as November 1939,61 serious operational consideration did not begin until June 1940. On the very day that the French sued for peace, 17 June, Major-General Walter Warlimont, who as head of the National Defence Department of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff was close to the very centre of military thinking, told Raeder that Hitler had expressed no intention of attempting a landing in England 'since he fully saw the extraordinary difficulties of such an undertaking'. Accordingly, the High Command of the Wehrmacht had made no preparations for such a move. Warlimont also indicated the evident divergence in Hitler's thinking from the underlying strategic preferences of the naval leadership. He confirmed that Hitler did not want totally to destroy Britain's world Empire, since this would only be 'to the disadvantage of the white race'. He preferred to reach peace with Britain, following the defeat of France, 'on the condition of return of colonies and renunciation of English influence in Europe'.62\n\nNevertheless, within a fortnight General Jodl, as head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff Warlimont's immediate superior and Hitler's closest military adviser, had devised a strategy for forcing Britain to capitulate, if she could not be persuaded to agree to terms. This involved the prospect of a landing, but also 'war on the periphery', aimed at limited military support for those countries\u2013Italy, Spain, Russia and Japan\u2013which had an interest in benefiting from the undermining of the British Empire. An Italian attack on the Suez Canal and the capture of Gibraltar were specifically mentioned.63 The 'peripheral strategy' remained under consideration throughout the summer and autumn, and aspects of it coincided with the thinking of the navy leadership.\n\nThe idea of an invasion of Britain, on the other hand, had only a brief lifespan. Hitler evidently saw this as a last resort and was highly sceptical from the outset about its practicality.64 He had emphasized German mastery of the skies as the most important prerequisite for a landing. Raeder fully agreed. But the navy leadership was not only dubious that this could be attained, but also by mid-July expressing its extreme anxiety about transport difficulties and, not least, the worry that, even if German troops could be landed on British soil, the intervention of the Royal Navy could prevent further landings and cut them off, leading to the 'extraordinary endangering of the entire deployed army'.65 Moreover, the intended completion of preparations for the landing by mid-August rapidly proved illusory.66 The necessary rescheduling of completion to the middle of the following month67 meant that only the briefest of opportunities was left until the vagaries of the weather in the English Channel ruled out an attempt before the following spring. By the end of August it was plain to the navy leadership that preparations for transport could not be completed by the new date set, 15 September.68 Even before the end of July, the Naval Warfare Executive (Seekriegsleitung) had, in fact, been advising against trying to carry out the operation in 1940, and putting it off until May the following year at the earliest. On 31 July Raeder conveyed the arguments to Hitler, who acknowledged the difficulties, but deferred a final decision until the Luftwaffe had been given the opportunity to bomb England for eight consecutive days.69 The order for the indefinite postponement of 'Operation Sealion' was not actually given until 17 September.70 But in reality, Hitler had always had cold feet about the prospect of a landing in Britain, and possibly accepted as early as 29\u201331 July, long before the decisive phase of the 'Battle of Britain' was reached, that it would not be possible to go through with the invasion.71 The decision to attack Russia had swiftly taken the place of the decision to attack Britain. It was seen as less risky.\n\nGrand Admiral Raeder had already left the gathering of military leaders at the Berghof on 31 July 1940, when Hitler announced his decision to prepare for war against the Soviet Union the following spring.72 But nothing in the announcement could have been unexpected. Raeder had been present ten days earlier when Hitler had first spoken of a possible attack on the Soviet Union.73 And three days before the announcement, plainly aware of what was in the air, the chief of staff of the Naval Warfare Executive, Rear Admiral Fricke, composed a memorandum outlining his views on conflict with Russia, which Raeder read the following day, 29 July. Fricke accepted that Bolshevism was 'a chronic danger' which had to be 'eliminated one way or the other', and posed no objection to the envisaged German attack, other than acknowledging the sectional disadvantage that naval interests would take a back seat to those of the army and Luftwaffe.74 At the time of the crucial decision by Hitler on 31 July to prepare for the war against Russia, therefore, the navy raised no objection and had no clearly devised strategic alternative on offer.\n\nOver the following months, however, this was to change. The emergence of a Mediterranean strategy fitted in with the notion of 'war on the periphery' which Jodl had indicated in his memorandum of 30 June. Gradually, a military alternative emerged, though one which demanded a more active diplomacy targeted at Spain, Italy and Vichy France. Meanwhile, however, the operational planning for an attack on Russia was taking shape. This was the sword of Damocles hanging over the timing of any proposed alternative.\n\nDuring the late summer and the autumn months, the navy's ideas on strategy, as they developed, had much in common with the thinking in Hitler's headquarters. The rapidly fading prospects of an invasion of Britain prompted consideration of other ways to break British resistance. For Jodl, in charge of overall Wehrmacht operational planning, the 'peripheral strategy' he had devised was a crucial concern.75 But it did not stand in contradiction to an attack on Russia. Rather, it was aimed ideally at forcing Britain to agree to terms and freeing Germany's back for the war on Russia, or, failing that, tying Britain down until victory in the Soviet Union compelled her to yield. For the naval leadership, on the other hand, the 'peripheral' (or Mediterranean) strategy was no temporary solution to facilitate the war in the east. It offered an alternative to that war.\n\nBy mid-August, Hitler had agreed on plans (which he thought would meet with Franco's approval) for an operation to take Gibraltar by early 1941 and to support an Italian thrust to the Suez Canal around the same time.76 Shortly afterwards, the first serious consideration by the navy of a strategy focused on the Mediterranean was signalled by an analysis by Admiral Gerhard Wagner on 29 August of how war against Britain could best be waged, assuming that 'Operation Sealion' was not to take place.77 Bombing raids and the war in the Atlantic to cut off supplies would not, he took for granted, force a decision over the next months. And by the following spring, British defensive capacity would have improved, perhaps with American support. The best way to attack Britain, he concluded, would be to weaken its Empire through war in the Mediterranean, in tandem with the Italians.\n\nTaking up the thinking in the Wehrmacht High Command, Admiral Wagner pointed out that it would be possible to capture Gibraltar, with Spanish support, and to block the Suez Canal by an offensive thrusting from Libya through Egypt. The result would be to force Britain out of the Mediterranean, which would then be entirely in the hands of the Axis powers. In turn, this would safeguard shipping in the whole of the Mediterranean, ensuring unthreatened imports from north Africa. The position of the Axis powers in the Balkan region would in the process also be greatly strengthened. Turkey would no longer be able to remain neutral, and would fall within their orbit. The raw materials of the Arab countries, Egypt and the Sudan would be available to the Axis. There would be a good platform to weaken British positions in the Indian Ocean through attacks on colonies in east Africa and posing an obvious threat to India itself. The loss of Gibraltar would deprive Britain of one of her most important bases for the war in the Atlantic. Even were Britain to acquire a foothold in the Azores, Madeira or the Canaries, it would scarcely provide compensation. German mastery in the western Mediterranean would enable pressure to be exerted on French north-African colonies and prevent them going over to the Gaullists, and hence to the British side. At the same time, British bases on the west coast of Africa would be endangered.\n\nThe Italian navy would, as an additional advantage, be freed to support the German war effort outside the Mediterranean, in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, while the Italian army and air force could make further advances against the British, above all in east Africa. A final benefit would be the entry of Spain into the war (seen as implicit in the taking of Gibraltar), thereby widening significantly the basis for German naval warfare in the Atlantic. The memorandum concluded\n\nthat the mastery of the Mediterranean will be of decisive strategic significance for the continuation of the war. The operations envisaged for this purpose go well beyond 'interim actions', as they were previously described. Not only will an effective strengthening of the German-Italian war potential and a greatly improved basis for the last decisive struggle against the English Motherland and the sources of strength of the English Empire be attained. [But] since the most sensitive points of the English world empire will be attacked or threatened, there is even the possibility that England will feel compelled to give up further resistance.78\n\nThis would be all the more likely if American support had been negligible to that point. There was, therefore, no time to be lost. The strategy was in the interests of the navy, Wagner pointed out, ending with the expectation that Raeder would put the proposals to Hitler.\n\nFour days before Raeder could put the case, in his briefing on 6 September, the United States had agreed to provide Great Britain with fifty ageing destroyers. This decision (to which we will return more fully in Chapter 5) was of far greater symbolic than direct military importance, signalling to the German leadership the increased likelihood of a British-American coalition in the not too distant future.79 Following Raeder's highlighting of the danger to the Portuguese and Spanish islands in the Atlantic and to the French colonies in west Africa which would be posed by American involvement in the war, Hitler gave instructions to prepare for the occupation of the Azores, the Canaries and the Cape Verde Islands to prevent any possible landing by the British and Americans (though naval analysts working on the logistics over the following weeks were not persuaded of the value of such an operation).80 In the light of the growing 'Problem USA', and asking somewhat disingenuously what Hitler's political and military directives might be in the event of 'Sealion' not taking place, Raeder indeed pressed the argument for a Mediterranean strategy, along the lines of Wagner's memorandum, not as an 'interim' but as a 'main action against England'. He asked for preparations to begin immediately so that they could be implemented before the United States could intervene. Hitler gave orders to that effect. This did not mean, however, that he was signalling approval for a Mediterranean strategy instead of the intended strike at the Soviet Union. The proposed Russian campaign\u2013at this time code-named 'Problem S'\u2013came up later in the briefing. When it did, Raeder raised no objections, merely observing that the most suitable time for the navy would be as the ice melted. He added, a point immediately agreed by Hitler, that 'Sealion' should not be attempted at the same time.81\n\nBy the time of Raeder's briefing with Hitler on 26 September, the case for the Mediterranean strategy had taken on a new urgency in the light of the attack by British and Free French troops (supporters of General Charles de Gaulle) on Dakar a few days earlier. French Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia were endangered as the Vichy regime lost ground to the Gaullist movement in French Equatorial Africa. This concentrated German minds. Raeder had asked to speak alone with Hitler\u2013a quite exceptional occurrence\u2013and had begun by expressing his wish to go beyond his specific remit in commenting on the progress of the war. He pressed for a more conciliatory approach to the Vichy regime, wishing to upturn previous relations by incorporating the French as full allies in the war against Britain. Waging war together with the French would, argued Raeder, offer the possibility not only of securing the French possessions and their raw materials, but also of forcing Britain out of central Africa and depriving her of the port of Freetown on the western coast, thus causing significant problems for convoy traffic from the south Atlantic, from Latin America and South Africa. It would constitute a big step towards pushing the British out of the Mediterranean. Even before turning to north-west Africa, Raeder had urged Hitler to concentrate on 'waging the struggle against E[ngland] by all available means and without delay, before America can intervene'. The British, he stated, had always regarded the Mediterranean as the key to their world position. He concluded, therefore, that 'the Mediterranean question must therefore be cleared up over the winter'. Gibraltar had to be taken, and even before that the Canaries secured by the Luftwaffe. German support was necessary to help the Italians take the Suez Canal. From there, he saw an advance through Palestine and Syria\u2013which Hitler said would depend upon the French but ought to be possible\u2013as far as Turkey. 'When we reach that point, Turkey will be in our power. The Russian problem will then appear in a different light. Russia basically fears Germany. It is questionable whether an attack on Russia from the north will then be necessary.'82\n\nIt would have been difficult for Raeder to have been more explicit about the navy's preferred strategy.83 The Naval Warfare Executive was keen to establish the fact that Hitler had even indicated his basic agreement with the ideas expressed.84 Two problems nevertheless surfaced at the briefing, if only implicitly.\n\nThe first was the size of the fleet. Raeder pointed out (and Hitler concurred) that the fleet was currently too small for the tasks awaiting it if the Mediterranean strategy were to be implemented, particularly if the war were to acquire a global dimension through the entry of the United States. But shipbuilding capacity did not allow for any extension to existing commitments. Obviously, therefore, a maritime strategy was severely hampered from the outset if the fleet was too small to implement it and resources did not allow for any rapid expansion.\n\nThe second was the implication for foreign policy, which Hitler touched upon. He told Raeder that after concluding the Tripartite Pact with Japan (which was to be signed the very next day, 27 September), he would have talks with Mussolini and Franco, and would have to decide whether to go with France or Spain. He thought that France was the more likely choice since Spain demanded a great deal (French Morocco) but offered little in return. Britain and the United States had to be excluded from north-west Africa. That much was clear. But France would have to comply with certain territorial demands of Germany and Italy before agreement could be reached on the extent of her African colonial possessions. Though Hitler did not stress the point, this plainly weakened the attractiveness to France of any arrangement with Germany. Moreover, Hitler was cool about Raeder's hopes of engaging the French fleet on Germany's side. He was unprepared to move on this without the approval of his Axis partner Mussolini, who was unlikely to be enamoured of any strengthening of Italy's rival, France, in the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, if Spain were to join the war on the Axis side, the Canaries and perhaps also the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands would have to be secured by the Luftwaffe.85 In effect, therefore, while agreeing to the Mediterranean strategy in principle, Hitler was making its execution dependent upon the outcome of his negotiations with Mussolini, Franco and P\u00e9tain. He was well aware that pleasing all of them would be no easy matter. He recognized, cynically, that squaring the circle of the competing interests would only be possible through 'grandiose fraud'.86 This would prove beyond even Hitler.\n\nAt the time, in late September, the navy's ideas on directing Germany's war effort at the Mediterranean corresponded quite closely to the notion developed in the Foreign Ministry of a 'Continental bloc' of countries formed into a powerful alliance against Britain.87 The Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop himself, no less, had been keen to build up a powerful worldwide alliance, incorporating both the Soviet Union and Japan, which would be ranged against Britain, at the same time neutralizing the United States.88 Within this grand concept, a western 'Continental bloc' incorporating Vichy France and Spain, alongside Italy, formed a smaller, but vital, component.89 In military terms, the 'peripheral strategy' as it had developed by early autumn 1940 involved\u2013apart from trying to block British imports\u2013three strands: an Italian-German Middle East offensive; the taking of Gibraltar; and extension of German control over the African coast and the Atlantic islands.90 Clearly, as had emerged from the Raeder briefing on 26 September, the military potential of such a strategy rested upon important breakthroughs in diplomacy: quite specifically, upon Hitler's ability to come to satisfactory agreements with the leaders of Spain and Vichy France. And this was precisely where they would founder.\n\nIV\n\nAs summer turned into autumn, it was still not clear to those close to the hub of power in Germany\u2013including for a while, it seems, Hitler himself\u2013which variant of military strategy should be followed. The setting of different priorities was still possible. That is to say, options were still apparently open.\n\nHitler's own preference, both ideological and military, was obviously for an early strike on the Soviet Union. That had been plainly established at the end of July. Nothing in the interim indicates that he had changed his mind. But his interest in the 'peripheral strategy' was not simply a ruse. The Russian campaign, which he had initially hoped to launch that autumn, could not take place until spring at the earliest. Meanwhile, however, the worry had deepened that America might join in the war on the British side sooner rather than later.91 Clearly, Hitler was no less anxious than earlier in the summer to prevent this happening. The most obvious way was to force Britain out of the war. With 'Sealion' now shelved (and effectively, if not nominally, abandoned), a military and diplomatic focus on the Mediterranean offered the best opportunity. Variants of such a strategy were supported, as we have seen, by Jodl (and his deputy Warlimont) in the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, by Raeder and the Naval Warfare Executive and by Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister. Hitler was prepared for a while to give his backing to the search for a diplomatic opening on the 'periphery' and continued to promote the military planning which would depend upon the success of such a breakthrough. But whereas for Raeder, for Warlimont (if not for Jodl) and even for Ribbentrop the 'peripheral strategy' was viewed as an alternative to the invasion of Russia, for Hitler it was merely a prelude to secure Germany's rear before engaging on the showdown with the Soviet Union which was, in his eyes, both inevitable and alone capable of deciding the final outcome of the war. Hitler's heart was never in the 'peripheral strategy', therefore, as an end in itself. In part at least, this probably explains why his diplomatic effort in the October tour he made to engage in talks with Mussolini, Franco and P\u00e9tain proved so unfruitful. He went into them with few illusions.\n\nThe central purpose of Hitler's meeting with Mussolini on the Brenner on 4 October was (though he came only slowly to the point) to sound out the Duce about the possibility of bringing France and Spain to a 'common line' and in this way to create 'a Continental coalition against England'.92 Mussolini had no objections. But both dictators clearly saw that Spain's territorial demands as a price for entering the war\u2013the gain of Morocco and Oran from France as well as Gibraltar from Britain, only the last posing no problem\u2013would be impossible for the French to meet, and would pave the way to Gaullist success (in turn meaning the penetration of British interests) in the vital area of north Africa. Since Mussolini took the opportunity to remind Hitler of Italian demands for French territorial concessions, it was plain that the potential for finding a diplomatic solution which would satisfy the three Mediterranean powers, Italy, France and Spain, was extremely limited. Moreover, Hitler was clearly going to undertake nothing which might damage relations with his Axis partner. So, though friendly, the talks produced nothing tangible to assist the creation of the 'Continental coalition'.93\n\nThe meeting with Franco at Hendaye on 23 October lacked all promise from the outset.94 Hitler's bargaining position was weak. He wanted Spain in the war primarily to ease the planned attack on Gibraltar and to bolster the defence of the Atlantic islands off the Iberian coast. But he was not prepared to pay the exorbitant price which he was well aware that Spain would demand: huge supplies of armaments and foodstuffs, and satisfaction of her territorial claims not only on Gibraltar (which was easy to concede) but on Morocco and Oran as well. Hitler's view was probably much the same as the private verdict confided to his diary by Ernst von Weizs\u00e4cker, State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry: 'Gibraltar is not worth that much to us.'95 Germany could not contemplate meeting Franco's material demands. And the territorial concessions, as Hitler had made clear to Mussolini, were out of the question on account of the serious threat they would pose, through the weakening of Vichy France's position, to the hold of the Axis in north Africa. So Hitler had nothing to offer Franco, other than Gibraltar itself. Desirable though the acquisition of Gibraltar was to the Spaniards, it was available only at what, from their point of view, was the high risk of involvement in a war which Franco, despite Hitler's posturing, seriously doubted was as good as won by the Axis. Hitler came away empty-handed.\n\nHe fared little better the next day with P\u00e9tain, even if the talks were more cordial.96 Agreement on closer 'cooperation' between France and Germany fell well short of an outright French commitment to join the war against Britain. Discussion remained at the level of generalities. Once again, Hitler's hands were effectively tied, and he had nothing concrete to offer the French. Though Vichy France's entry into the war on Germany's side (and on her terms) made military and strategic sense from the German point of view, it was difficult to make this proposition attractive if mention were made of the mooted tampering with French colonial territory in north Africa in a peace-treaty between the two countries, let alone the expropriation of Briey and Calais on the coast of France itself, as well as Alsace-Lorraine, which the Germans had in mind.97 Moreover, and a key point for Hitler, closer relations with France would certainly cause Italian hackles to rise, something he wanted at all costs to avoid. In any case, it seems doubtful that Hitler really wanted the French as fully fledged allies.98 So the talks with P\u00e9tain amounted to no more than shadow-boxing.\n\nIn short, Hitler could not satisfy Spain without antagonizing France, and could not accommodate the French without upsetting his 'friend' Mussolini. Meanwhile, by the time the two dictators met again, in Florence on 28 October, his 'friend' had, to Hitler's fury, begun his ill-fated invasion of Greece, putting a further sizeable spanner in the works of any strategy revolving around German-Italian military cooperation in the Mediterranean.\n\nAlready on his way back from his meetings with Franco and P\u00e9tain,\n\nHitler had indicated to his pliant head of Wehrmacht High Command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Jodl that the war against Russia had to take place in the coming year.99 Soon afterwards, on 4 November, while offering his military leaders a tour d'horizon of all current strategic possibilities which concentrated on the Mediterranean and Middle East, Hitler nevertheless remarked that Russia remained the 'great problem of Europe' and that 'everything must be done to be ready for the great showdown'.100 Evidently, his failure to accomplish any breakthrough in engineering even a limited west-European 'Continental bloc' ranged against Great Britain had confirmed his own prior instinct that the only way to achieve final victory was through attacking and rapidly defeating the Soviet Union. The taking of Gibraltar (together with the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands) was still high on the agenda, and Hitler continued to cherish hopes of Franco joining in the war. If it came to occupying the Azores (in Portuguese possession), and Lisbon demurred, he was prepared if need be, he said, to threaten to send troops into Portugal. But Mussolini's Greek adventure meant that the Italian offensive in Libya had to be deferred, and in consequence also the deployment of German troops in north Africa and the drive to Suez. It was the first clear sign of Hitler's lack of trust in the military capability of his Italian partner.101\n\nAs Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs, made his way to Berlin for talks with Hitler on 12\u201313 November, German war strategy was still unclear and undetermined. On the very day that discussions with Molotov began,102 Hitler put out a military directive which ranged widely over potential fields of combat. The taking of Gibraltar to drive the British from the western Mediterranean and prevent them gaining a foothold on the Iberian peninsula or the Atlantic islands was the dominant item. Political efforts to bring Spain into the war were in train. France would for the time being provide cooperation short of full military engagement in the war against Britain. Deployment of German troops to support the planned Italian offensive against Egypt was put on hold. 'Operation Sealion', the invasion of Britain, was not formally abandoned, but no longer figured as anything remotely resembling a military priority. Thanks to Mussolini, preparations had to be undertaken for the occupation of Greece north of the Aegean. But perhaps the most crucial consideration came towards the end of the directive: 'Political discussions with the aim of clarifying Russia's position in the near future are in progress. Whatever the results of these discussions, all preparations already verbally ordered for the east are to be continued.'103 Though no military option had been closed off by this point, there is every indication that Hitler had become so sceptical about progress in the Mediterranean that he was returning, his ideas confirmed, to the strategy he had already favoured in the summer: the attack on the Soviet Union. The unease prompted in his mind by the Molotov visit was the final determinant.104\n\nRaeder's renewed plea, on 14 November, for priority to be given to the Mediterranean, and to a push on Suez, could only fall, therefore, on deaf ears. Hitler made it plain that he was still inclined to press forward with the showdown with Russia. Raeder's recommendation to postpone this until victory over Britain had been attained was by now whistling in the wind. And when Raeder advised caution to obviate a possible occupation of the Portuguese Atlantic islands by the British or Americans, Hitler's reply was characteristic. He was not thinking of the Azores primarily in a defensive, but in an offensive, capacity, to allow the stationing of bombers capable of reaching America and therefore compelling the United States to build up air defences rather than providing aid to Britain.105 It was an indication that the Iberian peninsula and the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic islands now figured in his thinking as a deterrent to Anglo-American intervention while he was engaged in the east, rather than\u2013as earlier in the summer\u2013as part of a strategy aimed primarily at getting Britain to the conference table.106\n\nOnly a brief time afterwards, Hitler dispatched his adjutants to find a field headquarters in East Prussia.107 On 5 December he told Brauchitsch and Halder to prepare the army for an attack on Russia at the end of the coming May.108 Three days later he heard that renewed attempts to win over Spain had failed. Franco had decided categorically to keep Spain out of the war. Hitler promptly called off preparations to take Gibraltar 'since the political conditions are no longer available'.109 The operation was abandoned on 9 January, even if Hitler dreamed for some while longer of its possible resurrection.110 Long before this, the eastward direction of German strategy had been fixed with Hitler's formal directive on 18 December for 'Operation Barbarossa', with the expressed aim, even before the war against Britain was won, 'to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign'.111 The decision reached in principle on 31 July was now enshrined in a military directive. There would be no turning back. The possibility of an alternative strategy which had briefly presented itself in the late summer and autumn could now definitively be ruled out.112\n\nV\n\nDid Hitler, in making his fateful choice in 1940, miss the opportunity of following an alternative course of action which could have led to victory or, at the very least, avoided the calamitous path to defeat that was to follow?\n\nIn the light of what we have seen, the question has perhaps to be approached in different ways. The first and most important consideration relates to Hitler's own thinking. He, after all, determined policy. Others might seek to influence him. But, ultimately, he decided. Hitler certainly did not think he had missed a chance. In his eyes, despite testing a number of possibilities in the late summer and autumn of 1940, none proved a practicable alternative to the course which he had already regarded by July as the most promising strategy\u2013an attack on the Soviet Union to attain rapid victory before the winter, laying the ground for the wider struggle against Britain and America. This of course fitted his long-established and unchanging ideological convictions. But strategic considerations were paramount in determining the timing.\n\nThe United States, he thought, would be ready to enter the war on Britain's side by 1942.113 He was convinced, therefore, that time was not on Germany's side. Continental dominance, the end of the European war and the impregnability that this would bring had to be attained during 1941 before any conflict with the United States ensued. There is no indication that he considered postponing, let alone cancelling, the invasion of Russia that he had envisaged for spring 1941. The preparations set in train at the end of July 1940 were never halted. By containing Great Britain and deterring the United States, the 'peripheral strategy' offered for him a device for paving the way for the attack on the Soviet Union, not a replacement for it. There is little doubt that he was serious in his support for both the military and diplomatic moves centring on the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula. But from his perspective there was nothing to be done during the war to reconcile or overcome the serious differences of interest which separated the main powers in the region, Italy, France and Spain. And since the necessary political framework could not be established, a military strategy for the Mediterranean was unlikely to pay a high dividend.\n\nWithout Spain's entry into the war, an assault on Gibraltar, the key to the western Mediterranean, became a different proposition. It could be achieved.114 But the cost, militarily and politically, would be high. It was no wonder, therefore, that it was called off, once Franco made it clear that Spain would remain neutral. The other main prong of the Mediterranean military strategy, the push to Suez, depended upon the Italians, who soon proved themselves to be the weakest link in the military chain. Once Mussolini had invaded Greece\u2013immediately and unsurprisingly branded by Hitler as an act of stupidity115\u2013the prospects of Italian success in north Africa vanished. But with the weakened and stretched Italians up against it in Libya, the push for Suez obviously could not take place. Finally, there was little to be done with France. Until the end of 1940, when Italy's Greek venture had created such difficulties that Mussolini would have welcomed a German-French agreement, the Italians had been reluctant to see any rebuilding of French strength in the Mediterranean and north Africa.116\n\nFor Hitler, therefore, an alternative to his chosen strategy never posed itself. And what he was aiming for\u2013a prop for his chosen strategy\u2013could not be accomplished. From his point of view, there was, therefore, no chance that was missed.117\n\nDid others, close to the heart of strategic planning, think a chance had been missed? The clearest alternative, as we have seen, was thought out by the navy, and it was put before Hitler by Grand Admiral Raeder on more than one occasion. We noted that Raeder did attempt, if not forcefully, to dissuade Hitler from pressing ahead with the attack on Russia. Hitler even agreed with Raeder's proposals for a Mediterranean strategy (though not in place of an eastern campaign). But he changed his tune again, and definitively, in the autumn, particularly following Molotov's visit. There was no question in his eyes about the threat to Germany posed by the Soviet Union. So Raeder, for the reasons already adduced, had no serious prospect of persuading Hitler to change his plans. Hitler never deviated from his conviction that destruction of the Soviet Union in a lightning campaign was the only route to overall victory. Moreover, Raeder, though he favoured another route, did not actually oppose the invasion of Russia, even if he was lukewarm about it. And by the time the navy's preferred Mediterranean strategy had taken shape\u2013leaving aside the grandiose utopian dreams of a vast colonial empire that had temporarily seemed so attractive in the wake of the defeat of France\u2013both the political and military framework for its accomplishment were crumbling, leaving the force of Hitler's argument for the Russian option difficult to counter.\n\nIn the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the most outspoken advocate of a Mediterranean strategy was Jodl's deputy in the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, and head of its strategic planning section, General Warlimont. But his advancement of proposals to focus Germany's military effort on the drive through north Africa became increasingly futile as the autumn progressed. Warlimont had little support from Jodl, his immediate superior and Hitler's closest adviser on strategic matters. Despite the fact that he himself had put forward the 'peripheral strategy' at the end of June, Jodl, as we have noted, viewed this as the basis for facilitating the strategic goal which Hitler had established: the attack on Russia.118 Though Jodl was little involved before December 1940 in the detailed preparations for the war in the east, which were the province of the army's High Command, not the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, he did not question Hitler's fundamental decision to attack the Soviet Union. Uncritical belief in Hitler as a military genius, greatly magnified since the triumph over France, ruled out any conceivable opposition from this quarter,119 and even more so if anything from the toadying Keitel. Whatever the initial doubts of Brauchitsch and Halder, the leaders of the army (which was evidently the key branch of the Wehrmacht in the forthcoming assault on Russia), they were quickly quelled. Both rapidly saw preparation for the war in the east as the outright priority. As Halder had noted on 13 July, they, like Hitler, saw Britain's hopes of Russia as the key to her refusal to come to terms.120 No serious consideration was given to any alternative, and certainly no alternative strategy could be expected from a Luftwaffe whose leadership was more pro-Nazi than that of the army, and whose Commander-in-Chief was G\u00f6ring, fearful of losing favour with Hitler and not least for that reason committed to support for an eastern campaign.121\n\nThe divided organizational structure of the German armed forces in itself hindered the promotion of any serious alternative to Hitler's own plans. As we have already noted, the chiefs of staff of the army, navy and air force, and the chief of the Operations Staff of the Wehrmacht High Command (responsible for overall strategic planning) did not meet in a body to devise strategy. Nor did the commanders-in-chief come together, except in Hitler's domineering presence when genuine discussion was as good as impossible.122 So the axis of common interest briefly forged between Warlimont's office and naval command both lacked support elsewhere within the armed forces and had no outlet to argue the case for an alternative which could have been put as a reasoned strategy in opposition to Hitler's. Structurally, therefore, it was impossible to construct a coherent alternative strategy. None was ever available to be put forward for consideration. But without that coherent alternative, it is difficult to argue that a chance was missed.123\n\nBut even if Hitler did not see any other chance, and the armed forces were not capable of presenting a compelling alternative, is it possible, finally, to posit a theoretical chance, an option which could have won Germany the war, or at least have prevented such a disastrous outcome, if only the leadership had not been blind to it? Here, of course, we leave historical terrain\u2013that which happened and the actual strategic considerations at the time\u2013and move to the realm of counter-factual speculation. Given the number of possible variables to take into consideration, this rapidly degenerates into little more than an academic guessing game. But, staying with the thought-experiment for a moment, it is possible to imagine that a full German commitment to war in the Mediterranean and north Africa\u2013demanding also a tougher policy towards the Italians, as well as the Spaniards, and full acceptance of the French as fighting allies\u2013at the expense of preparation for a war in the east could have paid dividends in at least the short to medium term, would have given the overall war a different complexion and another possible outcome, and might have avoided the total calamity that came to befall Germany.\n\nThe Mediterranean was, it must be admitted, not as vital to Britain's global Empire as Raeder had claimed. Nevertheless, loss of control of the Mediterranean, followed by deprivation of possessions and oil in the Middle East, would unquestionably have been a grave blow. Britain and her Empire would certainly have been seriously weakened, especially if national independence movements in the Middle East and India had, as most probably would have been the case, gained in strength and confidence as a result of British military setbacks. And it is far from certain that the United States, where even as it was Roosevelt had to struggle for months against strong isolationist tendencies, would have rushed to support a weakened Britain. The Japanese would doubtless have shown little hesitation in exploiting British discomfiture in the Far East, so that the Americans, instead of seeing the Atlantic as the main concern, might have found their attention diverted towards the Pacific at an earlier stage than was historically the case.\n\nWhether, given such a bleak scenario, Britain would have continued to hold out, or would have discarded the Churchill government and looked for peace terms with Germany is a moot point. With Britain subordinated, the European continent and north Africa under German control and the Americans preoccupied with Japan, the 'Russian question' would have been seen in a different light. There would have been less urgency, less immediate strategic necessity, to crush the Soviet Union in 1941. The detestation of Bolshevism would have remained. But Stalin's regime would have appeared less of a threat, more capable of containment, and, therefore, perhaps not worth a dangerous military gamble in a lightning war of aggression, thus weakening Hitler's own case for the eastern war in the eyes of his military leaders.\n\nBut a Mediterranean strategy, even if followed through, would probably still have led at some point to the war of the continents which Hitler envisaged. Most likely this would have come sooner rather than later, with Germany, holding down massive imperial conquests by little more than brute force and tyranny, still unable to contend in the long run with the immensity of American resources. Conceivably, if circumstances had become favourable, the Soviet Union would have taken the opportunity to join in on the Allied side. Germany would have then faced the feared war on two fronts after all. A race to build nuclear weapons would have taken place and, as indeed happened, would most probably have been won by American scientists (some of German descent). An imaginable outcome of such a contest would have been the dropping of American atom bombs on Berlin and Munich, rather than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.\n\nIn the real world of Hitler, rather than the counter-factual world of fantasy and imagination, it seems clear that no chance was missed in 1940. Given the leadership which Germany had, and the very reason she was facing a strategic dilemma in the summer and autumn of 1940 in the first place, the attack on the Soviet Union was indeed the only practicable way open. It was Hitler's decision, though the blame for it does not stop at his door, as some postwar apologetics would have had it. It goes beyond him and ranges widely. The regime's military elite, though with extensive backing both among other power-groupings and within the German population, had supported the policies of a leader who had taken Germany into a gamble for world power with the odds in the long run stacked heavily against her and without a 'get-out clause'. By 1940, unable to end the war, the only option for Hitler, and for the regime which had helped to put him in that position, was to gamble further, to take, as always, the bold, forward move, one that would sweep over the Russians 'like a hailstorm' and make the world 'hold its breath'.124 It was madness, but there was method in it.\n\n## 3\n\n## Tokyo, Summer and Autumn 1940\n\nJapan Decides to Seize the 'Golden Opportunity'\n\nSeize this golden opportunity! Don't let anything stand in the way!\n\nHata Shunroku, Army Minister, 25 June 1940\n\nNever in our history has there been a time like the present, when it is so urgent to plan for the development of our national power...We should grasp the favourable opportunity that now presents itself.\n\nStatement of the army's position, 4 July 1940\n\nIn the Far East another war altogether was raging. It had started in July 1937, more than two years before the European war, and had seen barbarities inflicted by Japanese troops on the Chinese civilian population that matched in their appalling inhumanity those suffered by Poles at the hands of the conquering Germans from autumn 1939. 'The China Incident', as the Japanese invariably called the war with China, was completely separate from the European war that began with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. However, the interests of the European 'great powers' and the United States in China inevitably meant that the bitter conflict had grave international implications from the outset. No end to this war was in sight by spring 1940, when the German western offensive overran the Low Countries and France and brought Great Britain almost to her knees. It was in the wake of Hitler's astonishing military triumphs in western Europe that Japan, seeking to exploit the weakness of those countries, took the fateful decisions to expand into south-eastern Asia (where Britain, France and the Netherlands held significant colonial possessions) and to forge a pact with the Axis powers, Germany and Italy. In so doing, over these crucial months Japan made choices which greatly increased the risk of her involvement in armed conflict not only with the European powers, but also with the United States. The road to Pearl Harbor was as yet far from being a one-way street. But summer 1940 was the time when the Japanese leadership took vital steps that would lead eventually to blending the two separate wars in Europe and in China into one huge global conflagration.\n\nI\n\nThe war with China, which embroiled Japan ever more from 1937 onwards, lay at the heart of the course of action that would culminate in her willingness to risk all by attacking the United States of America. The immediate prehistory of this war went back six years, to the Japanese attack on Chinese troops in Manchuria in September 1931\u2013the 'Mukden Incident', in Japanese parlance\u2013which not only marked a turning point in international relations in the Far East, but also signalled the changing basis of power within Japan.\n\nThere was, however, a longer prehistory. This was rooted in Japan's ambitions to become a great power in the Far East, with the trappings of a colonial empire and enhanced international status. Such ambitions dated back to the late nineteenth century, as Japan, under Emperor Meiji, was undergoing rapid modernization, accommodating western methods to Japanese culture. Wars, in each case started by Japanese aggression, against China in 1894\u20135 and Russia in 1904\u20135, had established Japan's position as the dominant power in east Asia. Within Asia, Japan's successes were frequently interpreted as blows against western domination of the region. In reality, Japan was laying the foundations for her own imperialist quest for mastery. Japan had gained possession of Korea, Taiwan, the southern part of the island of Sakhalin, and important leasehold rights together with control of a 700-mile stretch of railway in southern Manchuria. Japan had also, in 1901, been granted the right to keep troops in Peking and a number of other cities in China, ostensibly to protect diplomats and the Japanese minority population in such areas. China, its centralized government in an advanced state of disintegration, later extended the concessions to Japan in southern Manchuria. During the First World War, which she had entered on the Allied side with an eye to gaining German possessions in the Far East, Japan exploited China's weakness and political disorder to gain recognition of her position in southern Manchuria and the adjacent region of eastern Inner Mongolia, and to extend her leasehold and railway rights. Japan even went so far as to demand, in 1915, the establishment of joint Chinese-Japanese police forces in China and the acceptance of Japanese advisers in political, economic and military affairs. China would as a consequence have been effectively reduced to the status of a Japanese colony. Through allied support for China, it was fended off on this occasion. But it left smouldering resentment and animosity among the Chinese population, and it foreshadowed Japan's attempt to dominate China some twenty years later.\n\nIn 1917 Japan reached an agreement with the United States, accepting the principle of the 'Open Door' (established in 1899 to allow all nations equal access to trading ports in China) in return for American recognition of her 'special interests' in China. There was ambiguity in the agreement, but the Japanese took it to mean American acquiescence in Japan's position in southern Manchuria. By the time the war ended, Japan had extended her influence in the region\u2013one rich in mineral resources\u2013and emerged strengthened. Meanwhile, any semblance of centralized state control in an enfeebled China had collapsed. The country was wracked by political disorder.\n\nA combination of international pressure and internal opposition to Japanese rule in Korea and encroachments in China encouraged Japan, however, to adopt a more conciliatory approach in the 1920s. The framework for the interwar international order in the Pacific region was laid down in 1921\u20132, at the Washington Conference. A nine-power treaty\u2013signed, apart from Japan and China, by Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United States\u2013upheld China's independence and integrity.1 China, it was hoped, would evolve through international cooperation to a stability which would reduce tension in the region and be of economic advantage to the western powers. The 'Washington system', as it was dubbed, by and large worked during the 1920s. Japan retained her moderate course. In 1928 Chinese nationalists, under Chiang Kai-shek, were able to establish a central government in Nanking, and, through foreign (mainly American) capital, started to build transport and communications networks. China, despite her continuing travails, was on the way to incorporation in an international economic order based upon the 'Open Door' principle which the western powers, most of all the United States, had a vested interest in upholding.\n\nWithin Japan, however, the voices of those who saw the 'Washington system' as a threat to the country's future were becoming more voluble, and gaining greater public support. Mounting social unrest, as the world economic crisis prompted by the Wall Street Crash in October 1929 began to bite, provided the backdrop to anti-western feeling. Ideas of autarky\u2013maximizing economic self-sufficiency to reduce dependence on western capitalism\u2013were nourished.2 At the same time, boycotts of Japanese goods instigated by Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist regime in China, and infringements of the economic rights in Manchuria acquired by Japan since 1905, inflamed animosity towards the Chinese within Japan. Anger rebounded onto the Japanese government. Radical voices demanding stronger government and a more assertive foreign policy gained support. Within the military, too, dissatisfaction with what was seen as a compliant stance in international affairs, harmful to Japanese interests, had intensified. The discontent and restlessness were most evident among younger, middle-ranking officers, who were becoming increasingly difficult to control by the army General Staff in Tokyo.\n\nSome of the most radical adherents of change, aiming to break the constraints imposed on Japan's foreign policy by her dependence upon the western powers and their liberal-capitalist principles, were to be found among the officers of the Kwantung Army, which since its creation in 1906 had guarded Japan's Manchurian possessions. On 18 September 1931, with tension running high, some of these officers engineered an attack by Japanese troops on night manoeuvres on local Chinese forces at Mukden in southern Manchuria.3 Though the attack had not been ordered by the Japanese government, it rapidly gained retrospective sanction in Tokyo, an early indication not only of how little control the civilian government could now exert over the army, but also of its readiness to back arbitrary and dangerous initiatives, and thereby to accede in the dynamic set in train by autonomous actions on the part of the military.\n\nWhat initially seemed a minor incident proved a turning point. It ended the postwar cooperation in the Far East embedded in the 'Washington system', began Japanese international isolation, and inflamed still further both anti-Chinese and anti-western feeling within Japan. Chinese appeals for international help against Japan fell on deaf ears. In the throes of the Depression, western countries looked to their own interests. The League of Nations failed its first major test. No sanctions were imposed upon Japan. It was an early manifestation of the weakness that was soon to be fully exposed, both in east Asia and in Europe. The United States, not a member of the League, concurred in avoiding denunciation of Japan. Encouraged, the Kwantung Army extended their aggression, retrospectively backed, as earlier, by the Tokyo government and public opinion within Japan. The bombing of Chinchow in south-west Manchuria, on the border with China proper, on 8 October 1931 finally stung the Council of the League of Nations into action\u2013but only as far as setting up a commission, headed by Lord Lytton, a British peer, to examine the causes of the conflict and arrive at recommendations for a settlement. By the time the Lytton Commission reported in September 1932, condemning the Japanese action but also exhorting China to acknowledge Japan's interests in the region, a puppet government had been installed in Manchuria. The newly named Manchukuo was only nominally an independent state. In reality, it was totally under Japanese control.\n\nAmid widespread international condemnation and refusal to accept the status of Manchukuo, Japan left the League of Nations in March 1933. This sealed her isolation. At home, the aggression in Manchuria and establishment of Manchukuo had been greeted with much rejoicing, both among the general population and within the elites. Japan's international isolation fed resentment and defiance. Propaganda had no difficulty in persuading the general public of the justness of Japan's cause and the unfairness of western attitudes (though ironically the Japanese were modelling their own imperialist claims in no small measure on the British Empire they so resented). Politically, the country moved further to the right. Ideologies emphasizing 'national renovation', solidarity, devotion to the Emperor (portrayed as a 'living god') and traditional Japanese culture and mythology gained ground. Parliamentary government had been ended in May 1932, and a Cabinet of national unity formed, mostly comprising military leaders and bureaucrats. Increasingly, the military (though there were significant internal divisions within the army) were forcing the pace, while civilian representatives of government, their effective power reduced, for the most part reacted, usually in compliant fashion, to the pressure.\n\nThe Kwantung Army remained at the forefront of the radicalizing drive.4 Fighting with Chinese troops continued. By May 1933, the borders of Manchukuo had been extended to the Great Wall, little more than forty miles from Peking. Two years later, Chiang Kai-shek's national government felt compelled to withdraw its troops from the border areas south of the Great Wall, including from Peking itself. Puppet governments under Chinese warlords were installed to control the region. By this juncture, Japanese policy was focused upon consolidation of the gains in Manchukuo and stabilization of relations with Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government in its capital of Nanking. However, the potential for further conflict remained close to the surface.\n\nBy the middle of 1936 the Japanese government was ready to define the 'Fundamental Principles of National Policy', along revised lines.5 The definition lacked precision at this stage, and attempted to incorporate, without resolving their possible tensions and contradictions, the competing aspirations of the army and navy. The underlying consideration was the need to undermine the 'policy of aggression' by the great powers in east Asia. This was to be done by securing Japan's power on the east Asian continent, by fortifying defences and economic strength in Manchukuo to eliminate 'the menace of the Soviet Union', and by expansion into the South Seas. This was the first time that southern expansion had been expressed as a policy guideline. Though still no more than a vague expression of intent, this reflected the growing stridency within the navy, which had retained its high status since the war with Russia in the early years of the century and had successfully pressed in December 1934 for the abrogation of the naval arms limitation treaty signed with Great Britain and the United States in 1922 and renewed in 1930. The aims of foreign policy, as laid out in the summer of 1936, were to be attained peacefully. But army forces were to be built up in Manchukuo and Korea to the level where they could 'deliver the initial blow to Soviet forces in the Far East at the outbreak of hostilities'. Naval rearmament would enable 'command of the Western Pacific against the United States Navy' to be secured. The need for good relations with Great Britain was emphasized, as long as Britain recognized the Japanese vital interest in China and avoided joining the United States, the Soviet Union and China in applying pressure upon Japan. At the same time, particularly on account of her anti-Communist stance, good relations with Germany were to be built up.\n\nDespite the expressions of peaceful intentions, a possible collision course with Britain and the United States was implicit in Japanese policy. The army, meanwhile, stayed wedded to the need for preparation for a war against the Soviet Union, to remove the threat from the north. Japan had by now plainly turned her back on the limitations of the 'Washington system' of 1922. As if to advertise the fact, and clearly indicating the desire for good relations with Germany, the country which had torn up the postwar order in Europe, Japan joined the Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936, agreeing that neither she nor Germany would provide any assistance to the Soviet Union, should either country become involved in war with her.\n\nBy 1937 the need for a common front against Japan, reflecting heightened anti-Japanese feeling, temporarily superseded the bitter divisions between nationalists and Communists in China. Within Japan, the army backed away from the prospect of war with China, while the civilian government reverted, for a short period, to considerations of solving its economic problems not through further territorial expansion, but through a policy promoting industrialization, external trade and international cooperation. Such views could not prevail. They ran counter to the thinking, by now deeply embedded, and not just in the military, that Japan's future lay in economic autarky secured by force of arms. Interference by the army, or groups within it, in the running of government had mounted since the 'Mukden Incident'. An attempted coup of army militants, who murdered several government ministers, had failed in February 1936 and brought severe punishment of those involved.6 But the consequence was further government instability. The hand of the army in internal affairs had nonetheless emerged still further strengthened.7 Policy towards China was at the root of its increasing influence. In January 1937 military pressure forced the government to resign. Its replacement lasted only a few months before giving way to the formation in June of a new Cabinet, now headed by a Prime Minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who had good connections to the military and favoured a policy on the Asian continent requiring control of land and natural resources, seen as justified for a 'have-not' nation fighting for its survival.8 This was the climate in which a minor and unplanned incident\u2013in itself no more than a skirmish\u2013on the night of 7 July 1937, near the Marco Polo bridge south of Peking, when shots were fired by Chinese soldiers on Japanese troops, marked the opening of what would soon develop into full-scale war between Japan and China.9\n\nSome senior figures in the army General Staff tried to contain the incident. Their concern was that any escalation leading to prolonged Japanese involvement in China would hinder rearmament to counter the Soviet Union. Briefly, it looked as if the incident might indeed peter out without the danger expanding. But in the prevailing circumstances a truce locally agreed on 11 July had little chance of succeeding. Both in China and in Japan, the governments were under pressure to act from nationalist sentiment which they themselves had stirred up and manipulated. Chiang Kai-shek saw the Japanese aggression as an opportunity he could exploit to expand western support for his cause. For their part, weighty factions in the Japanese military portrayed the incident as a chance to defeat and subjugate China through swift and powerful action. The Army Minister, Sugiyama Gen, and chief of the Imperial Staff, Prince Kan'in Kotohito, told the Emperor that a war with China could be successfully concluded within two or three months.10 Such opinion prevailed.\n\nThe civilian government backed a decision to expand the conflict. Towards the end of July, major troop reinforcements were sent to China. Within two days Peking and Tientsin in the north of the country were occupied. A horrific atrocity in Tungchow, where Chinese troops slaughtered more than two hundred Japanese and Korean civilians, many of them women and children, on 29\u201330 July, then sparked predictable fury within Japan. The Emperor's brother, Prince Takamatsu, commenting on the army's mood, noted in his diary: 'we're really going to smash China so that it will be ten years before they can stand up straight again.'11\n\nBy the middle of August, the fighting had spread to Shanghai, where Japanese troops, planes and ships were bombed by Chinese aircraft. Heavy Japanese reinforcements were sent to the area. The Japanese Army Minister now spoke of 'total war'. The government started to refer to the conflict with China as 'holy war'.12 Konoe, the Prime Minister, spoke of the 'spiritual mobilisation' of the nation.13\n\nBy early November, as their demoralized troops started to withdraw from Shanghai in the direction of Nanking, the nationalist capital, almost a quarter of a million Chinese civilians (including many women and children) had been killed in the city.14 Japanese dead and wounded totalled around 40,000. Japanese troops pursued the fleeing Chinese army and civilian refugees to Nanking. When the city fell on 13 December, prompting great celebration in the streets of Tokyo, Japanese soldiers went on the rampage. At least 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were murdered in six weeks. Foreign observers put the number of rapes of women and girls of all ages at around a thousand per day.15\n\nReports of the orgy of killing and rape shocked the world. As the horror of Nanking was beginning, revulsion at Japanese behaviour had already been aroused by the shelling of Chinese refugees, then the bombing by trigger-happy Japanese pilots of an American gunboat, the Panay, anchored on the Yangtze river north of Nanking, with diplomats and journalists on board. Japanese soldiers had even fired on the last lifeboat making its way to shore from the burning ship. The government in Tokyo rapidly apologized for such a grave error and agreed to pay substantial reparations. But lasting damage was done. Public opinion in the west, quite especially in America, became intensely anti-Japanese. Sympathy with China, unsurprisingly, grew in response. There had always been an idealistic component of American commercial exploitation of Chinese markets through the 'Open Door' policy. Japanese atrocities now intensified the feeling in the United States that support for China was a moral cause.16\n\nNot that this translated at this stage into much more than symbolic gestures. Moral condemnation of Japan went hand in hand with political inaction.17 President Roosevelt associated the United States with the League of Nations' denunciation of Japanese aggression, but vetoed proposals of economic sanctions against Japan. He did, however, take the first steps towards coordinating the exchange of intelligence between the American and British navies in the Pacific, a sign that the Japanese threat was now regarded as serious.\n\nThe Japanese government had shown through its swift attempt to make amends for the Panay incident that it was anxious at this stage to avoid confrontation with the United States. But this did not go so far as tempering its policy in China. Extremely harsh terms, effectively imposing Japanese control over China, were offered to Chiang Kai-shek after the fall of Nanking.18 He could not possibly accept them. Japan's stance now hardened still further. Diplomatic relations with the Chinese nationalist government were severed in January 1938. The Japanese Prime Minister, Prince Konoe, chillingly announced the intention to 'eradicate' Chiang Kai-shek's regime.19\n\nDuring the following months, the Japanese army greatly extended its control in China\u2013and in highly brutal fashion. Huge swathes of the country were now under Japanese rule. But by the end of 1938, with 600,000 troops based in China, Japanese resources were stretched. Casualties were mounting. More than 62,000 Japanese soldiers had been killed since the start of the conflict.20 And Chiang, who had moved his capital to Chungking in the west of China, was bowed but far from defeated. The cruelty of the occupying army saw to it that nationalist resistance stiffened rather than diminished, helped by material aid from America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. For Japan, the high water mark of the war had been reached. It was now stalemate.\n\nIn November 1938 the Japanese government had reformulated its war aims. The basic objective was stipulated as the creation of 'a new order for ensuring permanent stability in East Asia'.21 The uncompromising stance adopted the previous January was partially modified. Cooperation with Chinese nationalists was now seen as possible. But the price was recognition of Manchukuo, cessation of anti-Japanese activities, collaboration in the defence against Communism (meaning, in effect, the acceptance of Japanese troops within China) and acknowledgement of Japanese economic exploitation of northern China and Inner Mongolia. It was an initiative directed at splitting the nationalist camp by winning over Chiang Kai-shek's rival, Wang Ching-wei, to the Japanese side. Wang, who broke with Chiang Kai-shek in December 1938, was ready to collaborate, advocating peace with Japan on the basis of a united and strong anti-Communist policy. He would eventually be installed, by March 1940, as head of a Japanese client government based in Nanking. But, unsurprisingly, Chiang remained implacable. Chinese nationalists continued overwhelmingly to support him. Unable to attain complete victory, and equally unable to extract itself from the conflict, Japan was bogged down in a political and military quagmire of her own making.\n\nRelations with the United States had meanwhile deteriorated still further. Responding in November 1938 to a protest at the infringement of American rights on the basis of the 'Open Door' in China, the government in Tokyo explicitly rejected the principles of the 'Washington system'.22 Soon afterwards, a loan\u2013the first of many to come\u2013of $25 million by the United States signalled the American determination to prop up the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek. On 26 July 1939, following numerous protests at Japanese actions in China, the United States announced the abrogation of a vital commercial treaty with Japan, dating back to 1911 and due to lapse in 1940. Since almost a third of Japan's imports came from the United States, this was a serious matter.23 It gave warning that economic sanctions could be the consequence of further aggression. Japan depended quite especially upon the import of scrap metal and oil from America. If these were to be cut off, Japan's war effort could hold out for no more than six months.24\n\nJapanese actions were also harming relations with the European powers. The occupation of strategic bases in the South China Sea\u2013Hainan Island, off the southern coast of China, in February 1939, then, a month later, the uninhabited Spratly Islands, a remote archipelago several hundred miles still further south\u2013gave an indication of Japan's intention to extend her influence southwards. The islands were nominally Chinese possessions, but the move was plainly of concern to Britain, France and the Netherlands, each possessing colonial interests in the region.25 The Dutch colonial regime in the East Indies responded by reducing imports from Japan. Britain and France were further alienated by a Japanese blockade of their concession in Tientsin in June. Soon afterwards, Japanese forces became involved in serious clashes with Soviet troops, arising from skirmishes near Nomonhan, in the north-west of Manchukuo, on the border with Outer Mongolia. The outcome was a notable military setback, and a warning to Japan not to underrate the Red Army. By the time the fighting ceased, with a truce in mid-September, the Kwantung Army had lost around 17,000 men.\n\nOne possible way out of the growing international isolation would have been to form an alliance with Germany. Influenced by Ribbentrop, Hitler's regime had in early 1938 reversed its earlier backing for China, and voiced its support for Japan.26 The presumption that Japan would win the war in China, and her fervent opposition to the Soviet Union, were important determinants of the change of policy. Recognition of Manchukuo in May followed as a tangible indicator of the new German position. But, wary of alienating the western democracies by casting in their lot with Nazi Germany, the Japanese government avoided overtures to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into a full alliance. Since in practice Japan did nothing to reduce the antagonism with the west, but avoided cementing closer ties with Germany, the diplomatic isolation continued. It worsened dramatically towards the end of August 1939 with the announcement of the sensational Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact. In an instant, Japan saw her only powerful would-be friend in Europe in alliance with her arch-enemy to the north. Marquis Kido Koichi, a leading courtier and soon to become the Emperor's closest counsellor as Lord Privy Seal, recorded in his diary that he was 'astonished at this extremely treacherous act'.27 In bewilderment at the 'inexplicable new conditions' in Europe, the Japanese government resigned en bloc.28 A few days later, Europe was at war.\n\nThe European war inevitably affected Japan, despite her neutrality. Some, both in the army and in the civilian government, favoured a reversal of previous policy by seeking a pragmatic arrangement with the Soviet Union, as Germany had done. They presumed the moment for a new world order, overthrowing the previous dominance by the European democracies and the United States, was dawning. The major powers in Europe were likely to be Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. It was in Japan's interests, they argued, to ally herself with both Germany and the Soviet Union. As regards the war in China, an alliance with the Soviet Union, it was suggested, could eliminate Soviet supplies to China.29\n\nAdvocates of a new policy towards the Soviet Union still remained, however, in a minority. Dominant opinion in the government preferred an attempt to improve relations with the United States, conscious that the European war might bind America and Britain more closely together. But since Japan was unwilling to make any serious concessions in her demands on China, this course promised little success. In fact, American policy towards Japan was hardening. Increased aid to China was seen as a way of weakening Japan and reducing the possible threat in the Pacific.\n\nChina remained, therefore, the linchpin. As long as the war with China continued, Japanese resources and manpower would be stretched to the maximum. And deteriorating relations with the United States posed a sharp threat to the oil and scrap metal necessary to continue the war. But as long as Japan remained wedded to her territorial conquests and domination, there could be no end to the war, therefore no improvement in relations with the United States, and no diminution of the continued threat to raw materials. With the United States fully backing Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese government supporting Wang Ching-wei's puppet regime, the impasse was set to continue. This was the position when Hitler's conquest of Denmark and Norway in April, then the overrunning of Holland and Belgium in May, culminating in the remarkable victory over France in June, transformed the scene in Europe. With only Britain, of the major belligerent powers, still withstanding Hitler\u2013and that, apparently, likely to be of short duration\u2013the Japanese government saw new opportunities to resolve her own problems.\n\nII\n\nJapan by 1940 was neither a democracy nor a dictatorship. Perhaps factionalized authoritarianism\u2013not the contradiction in terms that it might at first sight seem to be\u2013could serve as an abstract label. But it conveys little of the complexity and convoluted character of governance as it had developed since the beginning of constitutional rule in 1889 and as it had been transformed in the 1920s and 1930s under the impact of mass politics, domestic turbulence, diplomatic pressures and war. The popular image of a monolithic system of rule under the command of the Emperor greatly distorts reality.30\n\nThe system of government that had emerged in the late nineteenth century, as Japan was rapidly modernizing, retained strong oligarchic and bureaucratic traits. The constitution of 1889 looked to Europe (and particularly Germany) for its models. It established a parliament comprising an elected House of Representatives with three hundred seats and a House of Peers consisting of five hundred titled court, government and military officials. At the same time, the Emperor held\u2013at least in theory\u2013full personal power. As in Germany, government ministers were appointed by the Emperor and were responsible to him, not to parliament. Frequently, they were not drawn from the political parties. Of notable significance, the military General Staff were specifically granted an independent 'right to supreme command', and were responsible directly to the Emperor. Parliament, elected at first by only about 1 per cent of the population, was able to pass legislation and to approve or veto the state budget, but it could exercise only weak controls over the executive powers of the government and the military. The old oligarchic families, owning much of the country's land and wealth, retained great influence.31\n\nEven so, once instituted, mass politics and constitutional representation were unstoppable. As in Europe, they grew in importance, particularly after the First World War. Political parties, the more conservative Seiyukai and the more liberal Minseito, came to represent the vast majority of voters: all males over 25, following a franchise reform of 1925. But communist, socialist and fascist ideologies, imported from Europe into a Japanese setting, also found supporters as economic crisis, social unrest and political violence (which saw the assassinations of two prime ministers and other prominent figures in government and business alongside a number of leading intellectuals in the early 1930s) afflicted interwar Japan.32 Reflecting the domestic turbulence, governments were unstable and of short duration, with fifteen changes of Prime Minister between November 1921 and June 1937.33\n\nThe impact of the 'Manchurian Incident' after 1931 and the rapid recovery from the Depression, mainly through major state stimulation of steel, chemical and construction industries and a huge expansion in the military budget (taking up three-quarters of government expenditure by 193734), was to curtail the role of parliamentary parties and pluralist politics. Governments now usually had a majority of Cabinet members representing no political party.35 Above all, the influence of the military grew sharply. Once the war in China had begun, better coordination of the civilian and military input into decisions became necessary. In late 1937, two types of meeting, Liaison Conferences and Imperial Conferences, were instituted to try to achieve this.\n\nLiaison Conferences were held every few days and, in foreign affairs, effectively supplanted the Cabinet, which now mainly dealt with domestic matters. Key members of the Cabinet\u2013the Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, War Minister and Navy Minister, and occasionally other ministers whose expertise was specifically required\u2013joined the army and navy chiefs of staff and their deputies from the Supreme Command. The meetings took place in a small conference room. Participants sat in a circle of armchairs around the Prime Minister. No one, however, presided in any directive sense, and discussion tended often to be diffuse, a feature of a specifically Japanese way of using often oblique language in a lengthy process of edging towards a decision in which great emphasis was attached to unanimity.36 For a while, the Conferences were discontinued and replaced by Four-or Five-Minister Conferences involving merely leading government ministers. The problem of lack of coordination returned. The absence of the chiefs of staff proved an inevitable handicap, and the Liaison Conferences were re-established in 1940.\n\nImportant decisions reached by a Liaison Conference had to be ratified by an Imperial Conference. The same personnel attended, though were now joined by the President of the Privy Council, and the meeting took place in the presence of the Emperor. Documents registering the decisions of the Liaison Conference lay before the Imperial Conference. They had been prepared by General Staff officers, then circulated to the various ministries for revision and amendment prior to approval by the leading figures in the Liaison Conferences. Now, in front of the Emperor, the Prime Minister and each of the other ministers, then the chiefs of staff, read prepared statements. The Emperor did not usually speak a word, though questions on his behalf were raised by the President of the Privy Council. The Imperial Conference, if largely ceremonial in procedure, was of importance. Once the Emperor felt able to give his sanction to the course of action proposed, thereby legitimating it, the decision was seen as binding on all those present. This made it extremely difficult to alter.37\n\nDecisions, particularly those related to foreign policy and war, did not, then, bear the clear stamp of the individual's will, as was the case in the German, Italian and Soviet dictatorships. But nor could the central body of civilian government, the Cabinet, decide, as happened in parliamentary democracies. As we have noted, the Cabinet, itself appointed by the Emperor and not dependent upon parliament, could not take key decisions without accommodating (and, increasingly, acceding to) the wishes of the military staffs. And these, responsible only to the Emperor, had wide-ranging autonomy of action. The inclusion in the Cabinet of senior military officers serving as War and Navy Ministers did not diminish this independence. They themselves had the right of direct report to the Emperor if they wished to bypass the Prime Minister. In any case, their responsibilities were chiefly concerned with personnel and administrative aspects of the armed forces. The crucial areas, strategic and operational planning, were the prerogative of the Supreme Command\u2013army and navy chiefs of staff, whose authority derived from the Emperor alone.38\n\nIn practice, the military seldom spoke with one voice. Its wishes and demands mainly reflected the often different and competing interests of factions within the army and navy. Ultimately, therefore, decisions on weighty matters of foreign policy arose from 'group bargaining'\u2013the outcome of 'inducing coalitions in support of preferred options'. There was extensive discussion, debate and 'bargaining'\u2013with greater 'leverage' deployed by military spokesmen than others\u2013before a decision emerged, almost by a process of osmosis.39 But great emphasis was laid upon the eventual 'consensus' behind the decision, which, with the Emperor's approval, then became effectively sacrosanct.\n\nWhatever the factional differences, variants of weighting, political disagreements or alternative strategies, by 1940 a large degree of ideological consensus had come to prevail among Japan's power-elites. During the 1930s, arising from the domestic divisions and disunity of the previous decade, and to the backcloth of the 'Manchurian Incident' then the China War, a new nationalism had been forged that bears more than a passing resemblance, though in Japanese cultural guise, to contemporary European fascisms. Its 'spiritual' focus was the Emperor, as embodiment of the Japanese nation. Its vehicle was militarism.\n\nFrom the accession to the imperial throne of the 25-year-old Emperor Hirohito in 1926, and especially in the wake of the lavish and spectacular celebrations of his ritual enthronement and 'deification' two years later, the cult of the Emperor was elevated to the keystone of the new doctrine. Hirohito's reign was designated that of the 'Showa' Emperor, symbolizing, ironically in the light of what was to follow, the 'illustrious peace' of the new era. The reign of his father, Emperor Yoshihito, between 1912 and 1926 (during which Hirohito had acted as regent since 1920) had been associated with westernization and democratization. A sense of national decadence had gained ground as domestic crises beset Japan. Democracy and party politics, as in Weimar Germany, were seen by increasing numbers only to indicate a weak and divided nation. Commitment to the 'Washington system' of international politics, the chief beneficiaries of which were seen as the western imperialist powers, merely confirmed the weakness. At its centre, the feebleness was epitomized by the frail and ill figure of the Taisho Emperor (Yoshihito). Hirohito's reign was portrayed as the inauguration of an era which would revert to and build upon the heroic age of his grandfather, Emperor Meiji, who from 1867 to 1912 had presided over the creation of modern Japan, the great triumphs over China and Russia between 1895 and 1905 and the beginnings of overseas Japanese dominance in east Asia.\n\nThe essence of the new nationalist doctrine was the so-called 'imperial way' (kodo), which envisaged a Japan returning to the 'true values' of the nation's long (and legendary) history, overcoming the subjugation to western influence and realizing her destiny and mission, as a superior people and culture, to dominate east Asia.40 It offered the justification for naked imperialist conquest whose underlying aim, pared of its dogma, was the elevation of Japan to a great power with lasting domination based upon the securing of raw materials in Manchuria and north China, then throughout south-east Asia. The manipulation of public opinion through heavy propaganda, coupled with the ruthless suppression of open opposition, meant that elite doctrines became transmitted to the population. It was not difficult to whip up nationalist and imperialist fervour during the crises in Manchuria, then China. The manufactured chauvinism then applied its own pressure to the actions of the elites. Perhaps of greatest importance, the values of the new nationalism permeated down into the officer ranks, and from there to the rank and file, of the army and navy. For the most part at lower levels than that of the High Command itself, a leaven of overt, highly aggressive and risky militarism was being formed beneath the ideological umbrella of the 'imperial way'. By 1940, therefore, nationalist-imperialist ideas had developed into an ideology of supremacy and expansion which, at both elite and popular levels, in the civilian population and, quite notably, in the middle ranks of the military, had become hegemonic. That is to say, whatever operational or tactical differences existed, no other ideology offered serious competition.\n\nThere were, of course, those who opposed the new ideological and political trends. The Emperor's long-standing trusted adviser Saionji Kinmochi, a cultured, old-style liberal-conservative who had earlier in his life spent ten years living in Paris where he studied law at the Sorbonne, was one who strongly counselled preserving close ties with Great Britain and America, favoured coming to terms with Chiang Kai-shek and abhorred the growing proximity to Germany and Italy.41 But Saionji had been born in 1849. He was not only old (he would die before 1940 was out), but, as he realized, out of tune with the dominant currents of ideology. So were some in the army and navy\u2013military politicians such as General Abe Nobuyuki, who served briefly as Prime Minister in 1939\u201340, and his short-lived successor in office, Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa, or the Foreign Minister in the Abe Cabinet, Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo. Each of these favoured some form of accommodation with the United States and opposed closer relations with the Axis powers, though each also supported Japan's special rights in Manchuria and northern China and her search for a 'new order' in east Asia.42 That they were able to attain high office indicates that significant divisions of opinion on Japan's future course still existed. That they were so quickly ousted from office demonstrates that they could not withstand the dominant political and ideological forces, particularly represented in the middle echelons of the army and navy, which were now driving Japanese politics.\n\nThe leading statesman who had emerged\u2013if only as first among equals\u2013from the morass of Japanese politics by the time of the outbreak of the war against China was Prince Konoe Fumimaro, who became Prime Minister for the first time in June 1937, and was to play a central part in the fateful events of 1940\u201341. Born in 1891, Konoe became, on his father's death in 1904, the head of Japan's most prestigious noble family below the imperial house itself, with which it had intimate connections. From his early years, he was groomed for high office and regarded as a rising political star.\n\nEven in his late twenties, he was given a place on the Japanese delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, at the end of the First World War. Months earlier, as the war was ending, he had publicly expressed views which would remain essentially unchanged and fundamental to his thinking. He was critical of Japanese leaders at the time for accepting unreservedly the peace pronouncements of British and American politicians. He accused them of not perceiving 'the conscious and unconscious ways in which the democracy and humanitarianism put forward by Anglo-American spokesmen provide a mask for their own self-interest'. The peace proposed, he added, 'amounts to no more than maintaining a status quo' that suited the Anglo-American interests. Konoe was presenting a case which would become widespread among the up-and-coming sectors of the Japanese elite, and also among younger officers in the army and navy, that Japan was disadvantaged by being a 'have-not' nation. The First World War, argued Konoe, had been 'a struggle between those nations that benefit by maintaining the status quo and those nations which would benefit by its destruction. The former call for peace, and the latter cry for war. In this case pacifism does not necessarily coincide with justice and humanity. Similarly, militarism does not necessarily transgress justice and humanity.' Japan's position, he continued, was similar to that of Germany before the war. He castigated the 'height of servility' with which Japanese leaders were ready to accept the League of Nations 'as if it were a gift from heaven', when in fact it was a device which would 'let the powerful nations dominate the weak nations economically and condemn the late-coming nations to remain for ever subordinate to the advanced nations'. If the policies of the Anglo-American powers should prevail through a League of Nations upholding their own interests through maintenance of the status quo, he concluded, 'Japan, which is small, resource-poor, and unable to consume all her own industrial products, would have no resort but to destroy the status quo for the sake of preservation, just like Germany'.43\n\nKonoe repeated the sentiments, in part almost word for word, in a speech in November 1935, less than two years before he became Japan's Prime Minister. He saw two basic causes of war: the unfair distribution of territories, and the maldistribution of resources, among nations. Lasting peace could only come about by rectifying the imbalance among leading nations. But the postwar settlement had sought to eradicate war while doing nothing about the underlying injustice which brought it about. He rejected the principle of peace simply to uphold this situation. 'Our leaders', he declared, 'cannot seem to come out and declare the need for territorial expansion by acquisition, unlike German and Italian politicians. We have been so brainwashed by the virtually sacred Anglo-American idea of a peace structure based on the status quo that we defended our action in the Manchurian Incident like the accused standing before a judge. World peace can no longer be guaranteed by this peace structure. Japan and the other late-coming nations should have demanded a worldwide \"new deal\" long ago.'44 It was a political philosophy that would ultimately drive Japan, like Germany, down the road to perdition.\n\nIn June 1937 Konoe became Prime Minister, a position he would eventually hold three times. He enjoyed great popularity at the time. He cut an imposing figure\u2013tall, elegant, suave, urbane and at 45 years of age youthful for a Japanese Prime Minister (though he would later come to suffer so badly from piles that he sometimes had to sit on an inflated rubber tyre for comfort).45 Enormous hopes were invested in him. The army, too, welcomed his appointment, confident that his popularity would help to further its own interests.46 Within a month the war in China began. Konoe soon found himself presiding over the escalation of a conflict which Japan could not end. He proved in practice to be a weak and ineffectual individual, unable to offer a clear lead to the Cabinet, given to helpless hand-wringing, resigned apathy and lamentations at his inability to shape events.47 Towards the end of his life, just before his suicide in December 1945, Konoe would seek to portray himself as the helpless victim of an army out of control. But while he certainly did voice private misgivings about the imbroglio in China, he never distanced himself either from the policy aimed at Japanese domination or from the terrible cruelties perpetrated by the army, most notably in Nanking. And his own government, as we have seen, attempted to impose extremely harsh terms on China in December 1937, just prior to breaking off diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek's regime and the expansion of the war in 1938.48 By the end of that year Konoe had engineered the arrangement with the would-be puppet leader of China, Wang Ching-wei. But dejected, unable to conclude the war and increasingly feeling himself to be the victim of the military forces he had been instrumental in mobilizing, Konoe resigned in January 1939.\n\nIn a memorandum written the following year, Konoe revealed that, if the course of the war in China gave him great anxiety, he accepted its necessity. His views were no different from those he had expressed in 1918. The policies of the great powers, he claimed, were threatening Japan through economic blockade, depriving the country of overseas markets and raw materials. The 'Manchurian Incident' had broken this blockade, and the 'China Incident' was destined to lead ultimately to the 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'\u2013a term invented in 1940 to mean Japanese dominance in the entire east Asian region, seen as Japan's necessary Lebensraum.49\n\nThe inventor of the phrase was Matsuoka Yosuke, appointed Foreign Minister in the new Cabinet which Konoe, returning as Prime Minister, formed in July 1940, a time of high excitement in Japan following the dramatic events in Europe. Small, thickset, a flamboyant personality with a rate of verbal output that had him dubbed 'the Talking Machine',50 as head of the Japanese delegation Matsuoka had led Japan out of the League of Nations in March 1933. His dramatic defiance of the League turned him into a national hero within a jubilant Japan. It also established his reputation as a proponent of an assertive foreign policy. As a former President of the South Manchuria Railway, Matsuoka was well known for his advocacy of revisionism.51 He was a forceful individual, given to bursts of temper, self-promoting, arrogant, keen to occupy the limelight. One prominent figure thought Matsuoka had 'the good point of coming up with splendid ideas, but...the fault of recklessly advancing in the wrong direction'.52 His prima-donna tendencies made him a fractious colleague. But he was a skilled negotiator, combining shrewdness with single-mindedness. The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, thought he was 'as crooked as a basket of fishhooks'.53 On the other hand, Joseph Grew, who as American ambassador in Tokyo had frequent personal dealings with Matsuoka, thought, initially at least, that he was 'a loose talker but...a man who is patently straightforward and sincere according to his lights'.54 At this critical juncture, Matsuoka was the army's choice.55 The day before he took office, he gave a little-noticed interview to an American journalist in which he made no attempt to conceal his future expectations and political preferences: 'In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism the latter adversary will without question win and will control the world. The era of democracy is finished and the democratic system bankrupt.'56 He thought it a 'historical inevitability' that Japan and the United States, the two leading Pacific powers, would collide.57 Such certainties determined Matsuoka's actions and policy recommendations in 1940 and 1941.\n\nA third member of Konoe's second Cabinet, in July 1940, would also play a fateful role in events during those years, and during the war that followed (when, for most of the time, he served as Prime Minister). This was General Tojo Hideki, born in 1884, hard as nails, an experienced military administrator known as 'the razor', former commander of the military police then chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, a leading spokesman of the uncompromisingly expansionist faction in the army, a man of few words, but an outspoken advocate of Japan's imperialist ambitions, and now given a key role as Army Minister.58\n\nBeyond the offices held by Konoe, Matsuoka and Tojo, the most important Cabinet position in arriving at the key decisions in the summer of 1940 was that of the Navy Minister. In any southern advance, the role of the navy was self-evidently crucial. But the navy's accord with the broader strategy under contemplation was also vital. And when Admiral Yoshida Zengo, appointed Navy Minister in July 1940, found himself, despite his commitment to expansion, out of step with the dominant forces keen to forge a military alliance with Germany and Italy he soon had to make way for a more pliant successor, Admiral Oikawa Koshiro.59\n\nIII\n\nThe Konoe Cabinet, formed on 19 July 1940, lost no time in responding to the drastically changed situation in Europe. But in fact the ground had already been laid during the preceding administration, headed by Admiral Yonai Mitsumasa. Yonai's Cabinet had been more conciliatory towards the west. Yonai, and his Foreign Minister, Arita Hachiro, who had come into office on 16 January 1940, had opposed the closer ties with the Axis powers which the army favoured. Arita was keen to improve relations with Britain and the United States, a policy which drew the ire of the dominant groups in the army. An essential contradiction in Arita's approach was, in any case, the strong advocacy by the Yonai administration of the 'new order' in east Asia, which the Americans were determined to block.60 Arita also hinted more than once at Japan's readiness to exploit any change in the status of the Dutch East Indies. But while wanting to avoid damaging relations with the western powers, the Yonai government was starting to contemplate the 'southern advance' which would do precisely that.61 There was, therefore, no disagreement among the Japanese power-elites about the need to establish a 'new order', aimed at securing the raw materials of east Asia for the Japanese Empire and ending the dominance in the region of Britain, America, France and the Netherlands. The disagreement was about how to achieve these goals.\n\nEven before Konoe had formed his second Cabinet, therefore, the impact of the upheaval in Europe was reshaping Japanese thinking on expansion.62 The chance had opened up of attaining self-sufficiency through conquest in south-east Asia and destroying the hold of the European colonial powers there. It was seen as too good to miss. Excited by the events in Europe, the manipulated mass media pressed the case. The heavily censored press 'spewed out adjectives in defence of Japan's \"just cause'' and buried news under mountains of mystical philosophising in an attempt to beautify the underlying opportunism of Hirohito's national programme'.63 The corollary, however, was the need to adjust Japan's relations with her old enemy, the Soviet Union. A war on two fronts, while still tied down in China, was unthinkable. So for the first time, the prospect of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union started to gain favour among army leaders. Alongside this, the feeling rapidly gathered strength that a military alliance with the new force in Europe, Germany, was desirable.\n\nA decisive shift in policy began to take shape even as Hitler's army was advancing through the Low Countries and northern France. In late May the Yonai government had already exerted pressure upon the authorities in the Dutch East Indies to guarantee supplies of tin, rubber, petroleum, scrap iron and nine other vital raw materials.64 Then, following France's surrender on 17 June, the Japanese forced the beleaguered French and British governments to suspend the supply of vital aid to Chinese nationalists through Indochina, Burma and Hong Kong, a temporary, but humiliating, admission of weakness by the western powers.65 The French surrender also prompted heated debates in the army about exploiting the opportunity to expand to the south. On 25 June the Army Minister, Hata Shunroku, told his staff members: 'Seize this golden opportunity! Don't let anything stand in the way!' Some, riding the wave of an excitedly chauvinist public opinion, called for immediate preparations for a drive to the south. One senior spokesman, though a lone voice at this time, pressed for a surprise attack on Singapore. Wiser counsels prevailed. No agreement was reached.66\n\nBut Japan's military leaders ran war games and came up with draft contingency plans for establishing airbases in Indochina and Thailand and carrying out a lightning attack on the Dutch East Indies.67 The navy's war games led to the disconcerting conclusion that an attack on the Dutch East Indies would ultimately result in war against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands. It was also concluded that, without imports of oil from the United States, and unless the oil of the Dutch East Indies could be captured, safely transported and exploited, Japan would only be able to fight a war for four months. Even with the oil, 'should the war continue beyond a year, our chances of winning would be nil'.68 It was little wonder that the navy leadership was still hesitant about plunging into a high-risk expansionist drive to the south, even though planning for such an eventuality dated back to 1936 and even though strident voices had been advocating that the time was ripe for it since the beginning of the European war in September 1939.69 But section chiefs within the naval General Staff carried much weight in shaping policy, and by April 1940, even before the German offensive in western Europe, they were claiming that 'the time has come to occupy the Dutch East Indies'. Orders to prepare an increased state of readiness were issued to the fleet. The chief of staff, Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, told the Emperor that five to six months would be needed to prepare the navy for war.70 Events in Europe then greatly bolstered the optimism of those who thought that a military occupation of the Dutch East Indies might be possible without involving Japan in conflict with either a weakened Britain or an indecisive United States. The hawks were gaining ground.\n\nThis was the case in the army, too. By the last weeks of June, the army authorities\u2013the navy General Staff had earlier that month been informed of their thinking71\u2013were drafting a policy statement on an advance to the south. They worked fast, under the heady influence of the German victories in Europe. They were confident that Britain's defeat by Germany was imminent, and that Japan would be the beneficiary in south-east Asia. Driven by this confidence, they undertook no careful analysis of Japan's material capability of sustaining a major southern expansion.72 The presumption was that military conquest would itself provide the necessary resources. By 3 July the draft had reached the stage where it could be adopted by the Army Ministry and the General Staff under the rubric: 'Outline of the Main Principles for Coping with the Changing World Situation'. It was an important document, determining the thrust of army policy, and eventually that of the government, down to the beginning of the Pacific War in December 1941.73\n\nThe preamble indicated the priorities of settling the 'China Incident' as quickly as possible and seizing the most opportune time 'to solve the problem of the south'. It held out the possibility that southern expansion could take place even if the war in China had not been ended. Whether or not that was the case, 'preparations for war should be completed generally by the target date of the end of August'. In foreign policy, the emphasis was placed upon 'strengthening Japan's political solidarity with Germany and Italy' and 'improving rapidly its relations with Soviet Russia'. The imperative of closing off routes providing aid for Chiang Kai-shek was underlined. The resources of the Dutch East Indies were vital for Japan, and to be attained by force if diplomacy failed. The concluding section struck a belligerent note. Japan would use the right moment for military action in the south. 'It will attack Hong Kong and the Malay peninsula, restricting insofar as possible its operations to Britain alone.' War with the United States was to be avoided. However, the statement ended ominously, 'anticipating that in the end it will resort to the use of force against the United States if the situation requires, Japan will make the necessary military preparations'.74\n\nThe 'Outline' was presented to navy representatives the following day. The army spokesmen pressed the case for action to be taken without delay, before the European conflict ended, to free Japan from her dependence on Britain and the United States by establishing 'a self-sufficient economic sphere' with its core in Japan, Manchuria and China, but stretching from the Indian Ocean to the South Seas north of Australia and New Zealand. 'Never in our history has there been a time like the present,' the army's statement read, 'when it is so urgent to plan for the development of our national power...We should grasp the favourable opportunity that now presents itself.' There was no time to lose. Japan should not miss her golden opportunity.75\n\nThe navy came up with some amendments, and a second joint conference on 9 July arrived at fundamental agreement. Far from diluting the army's blueprint for aggression, the navy's intervention reinforced it. Though aware from its war games that southern expansion would lead to conflict with the United States, the navy now advocated a firmer approach to the possibility of war with America. In the section dealing with Hong Kong, for example, the navy, while agreeing that a military offensive should be avoided as far as possible, proposed that 'if the situation permits, an offensive will be carried out with a firm resolution for war against Britain (or even against the United States)'. And the army's concluding statement, stressing the avoidance, if possible, of war with the United States was hardened into the formulation: 'While operations should be structured so that no war against the United States results, sooner or later military action against the United States may become inevitable.' Moreover, the earlier pessimism about Japan's long-term chances should it come to war with America had now given way to increasing confidence among navy officers that, providing due preparations were made, Japan would prove victorious.76 The view marked the triumph of hope over reason.\n\nThe shift in the army's position from its traditional focus upon Russia in the north to expansion in the south had, therefore, coincided with the navy's long-standing interest in a southern strategy which obviously necessitated a major expansion of the fleet. From the navy's perspective, the principle of the new policy, 'northern defence and southern advance', could only be welcomed. The alternative scenario, avoiding war with the United States in order to target the Soviet Union, would have meant, inevitably, sacrifice of the naval budget to the needs of the army.77 In any case, that would have left the decisive issue of Japan's dependence upon the western powers for its raw materials still unresolved. On this issue rested not only Japan's potential for fighting a war against the Soviet Union, but also for a successful outcome to the war in China\u2013an unending drain on resources and on morale. The marriage of convenience, therefore, swiftly concluded to transcend the traditional rivalry between army and navy interests, was held together by a massive gamble that a Japanese offensive which would most likely involve war with America would prove victorious.\n\nA first step in the new accord between army and navy was to arrange a more suitable political environment for the high-risk expansionism. The Yonai government, with its continued hankering after improved relations with the western powers, did not fit the bill. So the army proposed replacing it. The navy concurred. A Prime Minister more in tune with the new thinking was required. 'Now when a political change may be unavoidable within the next four or five days, and the military have been perfecting preparations to meet the abrupt changes in the latest world situation, the character of the Yonai Cabinet is not at all suitable for making negotiations with Germany and Italy and it might even cause a fatal delay,' reported the Vice-War Minister Anami Korechika. 'The conclusion is that a Cabinet change is inevitable in order to face this grave situation. The army unanimously will support Prince Konoye's [= Konoe] candidacy.'78\n\nThe engineered resignation of Yonai took place on 16 July 1940. The next day, Kido, wholly in tune with the national 'renovationist' spirit that had established itself during the 1930s, and prominent in attuning the imperial court to the dominant thinking in the military, presided over a meeting of six former prime ministers (including Konoe) and the President of the Privy Council. Their task of nominating the next Prime Minister was accomplished in only half an hour\u2013record time. Predictably, the army's favourite, Prince Konoe, thought also to command public support 'at this time when the end of the China Incident is gradually approaching',79 was entrusted with the formation of a new Cabinet.80 He would soon, as had been the case in his first administration when he presided over the extension of the war in China, again prove himself the weak and vacillating, but compliant, tool of expansionist forces in the military.\n\nThese forces now had prominent representatives in the government. The army had indicated that it wanted Tojo Hideki as Army Minister and Matsuoka Yosuke as Foreign Minister.81 These duly occupied their places in the new Cabinet, which took office on 22 July. The following day, Konoe told the Japanese people in a radio address that the old world order was collapsing. Japan had to be ready to welcome the new world order.82 The same day, the German ambassador in Tokyo reported to his Foreign Ministry that the new Konoe Cabinet was certain to follow a policy of seeking closer alignment with the Axis.83 The way was now open to cement the shift in policy. It did not take long to make the fateful choice.\n\nIV\n\nEven before his new Cabinet was formed, Konoe arranged a meeting with the key figures\u2013Matsuoka, Tojo and Yoshida (who were to take over the Foreign, Army and Navy Ministries)\u2013at his villa in Ogikubo, a suburb of Tokyo. Matsuoka, the most forceful personality in what Konoe came to call the 'Four Pillars Conference', prepared a draft statement and played the dominant role. The participants reached an informal agreement on the shape of future foreign policy. They accepted that, to establish the 'new order' in east Asia, Japan would strengthen ties with the Axis powers and conclude a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union for the following five to ten years (building up her own military forces in the north to become impregnable to any subsequent possible Soviet attack once the pact had expired). At the same time, Japan would 'draw into' the 'New Order' the western colonial possessions in east Asia. And, though conflict was to be avoided if possible, Japan would 'resist armed intervention by the United States related to the establishment of the New Order in East Asia'.84 The meeting stopped short of endorsing a military alliance with Germany and Italy. The Navy Minister, Yoshida, was still opposed to such a step. The army, however, made plain that it now favoured converting cooperation with the Axis powers into a formal tripartite military pact. 'We should resolve to share our fate with Germany and Italy,' was how the vice-chief of the army General Staff, Sawada Shigeru, put it in mid-July.85 The recourse to 'fate' was redolent of Matsuoka's rhetorical flourish more than three years earlier, just after the conclusion in November 1936 of the Japanese-German Anti-Comintern Pact, when he had stated: 'It is characteristic of the Japanese race that, once we have promised to cooperate, we never look back or enter into an alliance with others. It is for us only to march side by side, resolved to go forward together, even if it means committing \"double suicide\".'86\n\nThe deliberations in the 'Four Pillars Conference' at Ogikubo were soon formalized as policy. Noting that the world was 'at a major turning point', the new Konoe Cabinet laid down the framework of its foreign policy on 26 July in its 'Outline of a Basic National Policy' (which had been drafted in the Army Ministry). It envisaged Japan building 'a new order in Great East Asia', resting upon the 'three solidly united' nations of Japan, Manchukuo and China (naturally, under Japanese leadership). At the same time, Japan was to be converted into a 'national defence state' ready for war.87\n\nKeen to coordinate the civilian and military arms of government in the interests of building a national consensus behind the shift in foreign policy, Konoe resurrected the Liaison Conference, which had fallen into abeyance two and a half years earlier. On 27 July the Liaison Conference adopted the 'Main Principles for Coping with the Changing World Situation', which in effect enshrined as government policy the strategy devised in the discussions between the army and navy leaders earlier in the month.88 This decision now confirmed, even if the wording remained vague, the two crucial shifts in policy: the southern advance and the strengthening of relations with the Axis powers.89\n\n'Political unity with Germany and Italy', the document ran, 'will be strengthened immediately in an attempt to effect readjustment of diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia.' Preparations for the southern advance were to be accelerated, though timing would depend upon exploiting the changing circumstances to best advantage. A deterioration in relations with the United States was accepted as inevitable, though friction was to be avoided where possible. Pressure was to be exerted on French Indochina to cease supplies to Chiang Kai-shek and to provide Japan with supplies, use of airfields and troop passage. Measures would be adopted 'to eliminate immediately the antagonistic attitude of Hong Kong', and Burma would be blockaded to prevent aid reaching the Chinese nationalists. Diplomatic efforts would be made to obtain important resources from the Dutch East Indies. Wherever diplomacy failed, it was made clear, armed strength would be deployed, if circumstances demanded it.\n\nThe resolution of the 'China Incident' through elimination of aid to Chiang Kai-shek and the 'immediate subjugation of the Chungking regime by every possible means' still underpinned the whole strategy. But, as the comments on the document by Imperial General Headquarters made clear, the previous emphasis on settlement of the 'China Incident' had now given way to the southern advance as first priority.90 So even if it proved impossible to end the war in China, armed strength was contemplated in the southern advance, 'depending upon the situation'. In such an event, efforts would be made to restrict Japan's adversaries to Great Britain alone. 'However,' it was acknowledged, 'thorough preparations for the commencement of hostilities against the United States will be made as it may prove impossible to avoid war with that country.' Indeed, even as the Liaison Conference was taking the decision for the southern advance, the United States government was contemplating moves to restrict Japanese access to the vital oil of the Dutch East Indies.91 Japan and the United States were now set on a collision course.\n\nIn July, in the deliberation over the 'Main Principles for Coping with the Changing World Situation', Japanese navy officials had sought to prevent the army going ahead with plans to invade the Dutch East Indies. A compromise formulation was reached, stipulating that armed force would be used only if favourable circumstances arose, and that 'for the present diplomatic means' would be used. But once the United States tightened the noose by threatening Japan's access to crucial resources, the navy's stance became more belligerent. On 1 August the Operations Section of the navy General Staff made plain its support for the stationing of troops in French Indochina. It saw this as a step towards control over Thailand, Burma and Malaya in the southern advance. It would secure necessary raw materials\u2013coal, rubber, iron ore and phosphorus\u2013for Japan's military effort, and it would be strategically advantageous in a war against the United States and Great Britain. The navy envisaged America responding to a Japanese occupation of French Indochina with an embargo on scrap iron and oil. But an American embargo, the General Staff's analysis pointed out, 'would be a matter of life or death to the empire. In that event the empire will be obliged to attack the Dutch East Indies to secure oil.' The navy concluded that military operations against French Indochina should proceed by November, if not earlier; and that 'Japan must be resolved to wage war against other powers'. All preparations were to be undertaken for the mobilization of the fleet. An attack on the Dutch East Indies was only foreseen if the United States imposed tougher economic sanctions. But in its decision for 'preparatory mobilization' of the fleet, which for naval planners meant a state of readiness close to full mobilization for war, the navy General Staff had not only shown that it was ready to contemplate war with America; it had taken the first step in that direction.92\n\nThe stance adopted by the navy General Staff was not universally accepted even within the navy. Cassandra voices were raised. The head of the Ship Procurement Headquarters stated categorically that if the United States cut off all oil and supplies of essential minerals, 'the navy could barely fight for one year'. The Navy Minister Yoshida, whose health was becoming seriously affected by the anxiety, concurred. 'I trust that the navy General Staff will seriously investigate the relationship between the extent of our naval armaments and our prospects in a protracted war,' he stated. He added that he did not favour military operations if they were to result in a total United States embargo against Japan. Admiral Nomura Kichisaburo, who in 1941 would be sent to Washington as Japanese ambassador, also warned that a war against the United States 'would, of necessity, be a long one, and this would be very disadvantageous to Japan'. Even the planners in the navy General Staff accepted this logic. 'We are not very confident of our capacity for endurance' in a protracted war with the United States, they acknowledged. Yet, basing all their hopes on a decisive blow in a short conflict, they continued to reckon with and plan for war, 'for the survival of the empire, whether we like it or not'.93\n\nThe fatalism built into the navy plans for the southern advance nevertheless served the interests of naval leaders. The shift from a northern, land policy, to a southern advance likely to lead to confrontation with the United States in the Pacific meant a sizeable shift in allocation of war resources from the army to the navy. The question of whether Japan could win a war against America became subordinated to the short-term benefits to the navy through a major expansion in its resources.94\n\nV\n\nWhile the navy was making its fateful choice for likely conflict with an adversary whom it was doubtful it could defeat, the politicians were embarking upon the steps that would lead to a full-blown military alliance with the Axis powers. On 30 July 1940 the Foreign Ministry prepared a statement bearing Matsuoka's hallmark, 'On Strengthening Cooperation between Japan, Germany and Italy'. The Konoe government adopted the statement as its guideline, hardening the position adopted at the Ogikubo Conference earlier in the month. It was now expressly stated that Japan was prepared to enter into military alliance with Germany and Italy against Britain, reserving Japan's right of independent decision on the use of force. The document envisaged a military alliance explicitly directed at Great Britain. However, cooperation was to extend to the event of Japan or Germany and Italy becoming involved in war with the United States, though the commitment in such a case only went as far as an agreement to 'confer on measures to be taken'.95\n\nThe new tone of Japanese policy was rapidly recognized. The American ambassador noted already on 1 August that the Konoe government 'gives every indication of going hell-bent towards the Axis and the establishment of the New Order in East Asia'. 'The German military machine and system and their brilliant successes have gone to the Japanese head like strong wine,' he added.96\n\nImmediately, Matsuoka began to put out feelers about Germany's attitude towards a prospective military alliance. The German response was initially cool. By mid-August, however, the Germans had changed their mind. The revised stance was most likely triggered by Churchill's announcement on 20 August that the Americans were supplying fifty American destroyers to help the British war effort. It was not much more than a symbolic contribution, but it was taken as a clear signal that the United States was not holding to strict neutrality, and was prepared to provide significant aid to the beleaguered Great Britain, which might even lead eventually to her entering the war against the Axis powers.97 Closer relations with Japan suddenly took on a new importance to the Germans. On 23 August the Japanese ambassador in Berlin was informed by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, that he would be sending an envoy, Heinrich Stahmer, to Tokyo as minister plenipotentiary. His brief was to discover Japanese intentions and, if there was willingness, to open negotiations towards an agreement.98\n\nMatsuoka's draft of 30 July had meanwhile been favourably received by the army. Indeed, the army began to press Matsuoka hard to conclude negotiations quickly.99 Within the navy, however, serious differences of opinion remained. The top navy leaders still feared that closer relations with the Axis powers would serve to provoke the United States. Yoshida, the Navy Minister, as noted earlier, was particularly opposed to a pact. But, as some navy leaders wavered\u2013under pressure, it seems, not only from the army but also from middle-echelon naval officers\u2013he became increasingly isolated. Inwardly tormented, he succumbed to a nervous collapse, was taken to hospital on 3 September and resigned next day.100\n\nMatsuoka helped influence the choice of Yoshida's replacement\u2013the reticent, softly spoken, more accommodating Oikawa Koshiro, who soon showed himself in agreement with the demands for closer relations with Germany and Italy. Oikawa, in any case, was pushed in that direction by his deputy, Vice-Minister Toyoda Teijiro, a more assertive, politically astute and opportunistic individual, who emerged as the dominant figure in the ministry.101 Even now, however, fear of war against the United States and Great Britain appears to have held Oikawa back from endorsing the move to a full military alliance with Germany and Italy. He was particularly concerned to avoid an obligation to go to war automatically should the Axis powers become involved in war with the United States. This seemed to be what Matsuoka now had in mind. By early September, the Foreign Minister had hardened the position he had taken in his draft of 30 July, aimed at Britain, by including new wording in a revised draft. It was now explicitly stated that 'in the event of a danger of either contracting party entering into a state of war with the United States, the other contracting party will assist that party by all possible means'. It amounted to a proposal for a military alliance directed now squarely against the United States as well as Britain. And, from a duty to 'confer on measures to be taken', as stated in the draft of 30 July, the obligation would now be to provide assistance 'by all possible means'. Probably, Matsuoka's more pronounced anti-American line was a response to the American government's moves towards the imposition of the much feared embargo on oil. He believed in diplomacy through strength. He most likely felt that Japanese firmness would serve as a deterrent. Instead, it increased the chances of Japan becoming involved in war with the United States.102\n\nReservations about the implications of such an alliance, particularly fears that Japan could be drawn through German actions into a war with America as well as Britain, persisted on the Japanese side and were specifically voiced by the new Navy Minister, Oikawa. Matsuoka was forced to bow to such views, and he accordingly toned down his draft, omitting the automatic obligation to provide assistance.103 But despite Oikawa's reluctance to embrace a military alliance which was now favoured by the government, the army and more radical factions within the navy itself, he had not opposed giving Matsuoka the authorization to negotiate closer ties with Germany and Italy. The Foreign Minister was left, therefore, with a fairly free hand to conduct discussions with Stahmer, once the German plenipotentiary (an amateur diplomat who had formerly headed the Far East section of Ribbentrop's Dienststelle, his agency for foreign affairs104) had arrived in Tokyo on 7 September 1940 after a fortnight's wearisome journey, first by air from Berlin to Moscow, then by the trans-Siberian railway to the Japanese capital.105\n\nThe Germans were keen to have an outright military alliance to deter the United States from entering the war. They were, therefore, less than enamoured by the weaker draft proposed by Matsuoka. But having paved the way, the Japanese Foreign Minister was himself most keen to press ahead with the alliance. 'I'll do it even if it costs me my job,' he remarked, 'and I'll finish it up in one or two weeks.'106 The breakthrough came when he showed himself willing to accept the stipulation that Japan would retain her independence in deciding whether to join in such a war. With this concession, the Navy Ministry's hesitancy gave way. At the Liaison Conference on 14 September, Oikawa resignedly accepted the need for the alliance. 'There is no other way,' he remarked.107 Looking back after the war, Oikawa indicated that he had been persuaded by Matsuoka's firm undertakings about retaining autonomy to avoid being dragged into a conflict, and on the German as well as Japanese intention to keep the Americans out of the war. He remarked, too, that the navy could not sustain its opposition when the alliance was so widely favoured. 'The navy no longer had any grounds for opposing the proposal,' he commented. 'Not only that, but it seemed to me that for the navy to insist stubbornly on its own views (regardless of public opinion, which at that time was turning in favour of the Axis) would lead to a violent internal confrontation. So I told the Cabinet that the navy had no alternative to tide us over the current critical situation.'108 That evening Tojo was able to report confidentially to the Lord Privy Seal, Kido, that the army and navy had reached agreement on the question of Japan's relations with Germany and Italy.109 The die was cast.\n\nOikawa must have been acutely aware that the Navy Ministry's hesitations had not been shared even within the navy itself. An insight into the thinking of the navy General Staff, on far bolder, and far riskier, lines than that of Oikawa himself, was provided by the comments of its vice-chief, Kondo Nobutake, at the Liaison Conference on 14 September, recorded in a memorandum of the Prime Minister, Prince Konoe:\n\nThe navy is not yet prepared for war against the United States, but preparations will be completed by April of next year [1941]. By that time we shall have equipped the vessels already in operation and shall have armed 2.5 million tons of merchant ships. After we have completed this, we will be able to defeat the United States, provided we carry on blitz warfare. If we do not carry on blitz warfare and the United States chooses a protracted war, we will be in great trouble. Furthermore, the United States is rapidly building more vessels, which means that the difference between the American fleet potential and ours will become greater, and Japan will never be able to catch up with it. From that point of view, now is the most advantageous time for Japan to start a war.110\n\nThe crucial intervention at the Liaison Conference was that of Matsuoka himself. The Foreign Minister saw Japan at a crossroads. She needed to decide which way to turn. Should she go with Britain and the United States, or with Germany and Italy? He posed the alternatives. He first envisaged Japan rejecting the German proposal for an alliance. Germany, he stated categorically, would conquer Britain. Germany might even establish a European federation, come to an agreement with the United States and 'not let Japan lay even one finger on the colonies of Britain, Holland, and other powers in the federation'. On the other hand, if concluding an alliance were to lead to war with the United States, then the Japanese economy would suffer severely. He then, however, posed the costs to Japan of an alliance with Britain and the United States. The conditions for this, he stated, would be 'that we should have to settle the China Incident as the United States tells us, give up our hope for a New Order in East Asia, and obey Anglo-American dictates for at least half a century to come'. Would this be acceptable to the people of Japan? he asked. 'Would the hundred thousand spirits of our dead soldiers be satisfied with this?' he added, in a rhetorical flourish. In any case, he argued, the material difficulties would only be avoided in the short term. He reminded his colleagues of the disadvantages that Japan had faced after the settlement following the First World War. 'Who knows what bitter pills we should have to swallow this time?' he asked. His conclusion was obvious: 'an alliance with the United States is unthinkable. The only way left is to ally with Germany and Italy.'111 He was, following the lobbying, pressing and cajoling of the previous weeks, speaking largely to the converted. Even so, this, effectively, was the moment that defined the new course of Japanese foreign policy.\n\nThe decision to proceed with the alliance was rubber-stamped at the Imperial Conference, in the presence of the Emperor, on 19 September.112 Even now, apprehension was voiced that a pact with Germany might incite the United States to intensify the economic pressure upon Japan and increase her aid to Chiang Kai-shek. However, the worries about Japan's oil supplies only reinforced the views, as voiced by Tojo, the Army Minister, that 'the question of oil can be equated with the question of the Dutch East Indies', and that the decision had already been taken to secure essential resources from that region, if possible by diplomacy, but if not by force.113 Southern expansion was, in other words, the premiss of Japanese action. This was accepted by all sections of the power-elite. Starting from that premiss, it was difficult, if not impossible, to argue convincingly against a treaty with Germany that, by deterring the United States, was seen as a vehicle to safeguard that expansion. After the conventional rituals of questioning Matsuoka on the pact, therefore, the Imperial Conference duly ended by giving the formal alliance with Germany the seal of the Emperor's approval.\n\nHirohito was himself full of foreboding. But he accepted the need for the pact. 'Under the present circumstances, this military agreement with Germany can't be helped,' he remarked privately to Konoe on 16 September. 'If there is no other way to handle America, then it can't be helped.' With some pathos, he then asked Konoe: 'What will happen if Japan should be defeated? Will you, Prime Minister, bear the burden with me?'114 Konoe, equally pathetic, was reduced to tears.115\n\nThere were still complex negotiations, with difficult moments, to be conducted.116 Japan's insistence upon retaining her freedom of action was a sticking point. The Germans wanted a firmer commitment to involvement in a potential German\u2013American war. But the pressures on Matsuoka to resist such a commitment were heavy. In the end, the Germans gave way, even if an element of ambiguity was retained in the final wording of the treaty. As late as 26 September, the very eve of the signing, Japanese leaders, meeting in the Privy Council, were still expressing their worries about the implications of the pact. There were deep concerns about deteriorating relations with America, and about supplies of oil and steel if the worst came to the worst and Japan and the United States went to war. Some reassurance was given about the stockpiling of essential resources. But there was more wishful thinking than hard calculation. Tojo remarked that military equipment was being obtained from Germany, passing through Siberia with Soviet consent. He pointed out, too, the necessity of improving relations with the Soviet Union so that Japan was not faced with conflict in the north as well as in the south. Konoe emphasized that the underlying thought behind the treaty was avoidance of conflict between Japan and the United States\u2013the idea of deterrence\u2013adding, however, that 'a humble attitude will only prompt the United States to become domineering', so 'a demonstration of strength is necessary'. This was the view of Matsuoka, the prime mover of the treaty. The Foreign Minister, pointing to the threat posed by the increasingly anti-Japanese stance of the United States, claimed there was 'no alternative but to take a resolute attitude'.117\n\nThe 'debate' had been largely formulaic. It was part of the elaborate process of confirming a decision that had already been taken at the Liaison Conference, then ratified at the Imperial Conference. It was nonetheless revealing. Japan's leaders sensed that their country was at a turning point. They faced a fateful choice. It seemed to them that they had to yield to long-term American domination, or take irrevocable and dangerous steps, with unforeseen and incalculable consequences, to resist it.118 They chose the latter course. At midnight the Privy Council, in the Emperor's presence, unanimously approved the treaty. The following day, 27 September, the Tripartite Pact was finally signed in Berlin. Its key clause pledged the signatories 'to assist one another with all political, economic, and military means when one of the three Contracting Parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or in the Sino-Japanese conflict'.119 It was plainly aimed at America. How would the United States react?\n\nVI\n\nIt was soon plain that Japan's calculation had backfired. The American response quickly revealed the folly of Matsuoka's claim\u2013a presumption, too, of the German Foreign Ministry, and accepted in varying degrees within Japan's power-elite\u2013that the Tripartite Pact would serve as a deterrent. Instead, it merely confirmed American views that Japan was a belligerent, bullying, imperialist force in the Far East, an Asian equivalent of Nazi Germany, and had to be stopped.120 Such views seemed confirmed by the entry of Japanese troops into French Indochina on 23 September. This followed intensified pressure on the French to allow right of transit by Japanese forces and use of Indochinese airfields, and took place even as negotiations were continuing. After two days of skirmishes between French and Japanese forces, the French surrendered. Northern Indochina was now occupied by Japan.121\n\nSome in the Roosevelt administration had for some time been pressing for a tough line against Japan. The most prominent 'hawks' were the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes. They favoured a total embargo on oil supplies to Japan. This hard line was resisted by the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and Under-Secretary Sumner Welles. Backed by Admiral Harold R. Stark, head of Naval Operations, and Admiral James O. Richardson, Commander-in-Chief of the United States fleet, they argued that all-out oil sanctions would simply incite a Japanese attack which the American navy would be powerless to prevent. The authorities of the Dutch East Indies had already made the State Department aware that they did not want American action that would expose them to the threat of Japanese invasion. For the time being, Roosevelt sided with the 'doves', at least in part. An oil embargo was not imposed. However, news that the Japanese and Germans were negotiating a pact was answered by the imposition on 19 September (to take effect from 16 October) of a complete embargo on the export of iron and scrap metal.122 Even though the dominant forces in the United States administration were still not ready to push Japan over the brink and into war, the scrap metal embargo was a plain signal that America was not going to bow to the pressure that Japan was seeking to exert through the Tripartite Alliance. Washington agreed to warn the Japanese of the continuing American commitment to the status quo in the Far East.123 This meant further, and increased, support for Chiang Kai-shek, an advantage which the Chinese nationalist leader rapidly recognized. For Japan, it meant that the disastrous imbroglio in China was set to continue indefinitely. Tokyo's recognition in November of the Nanking puppet administration of Wang Ching-wei, when Chiang had predictably refused the terms Japan dangled before him, was met by Roosevelt's announcement that he was considering a huge loan of $100 million to the Chinese nationalist government.124 By autumn 1940, therefore, relations between Japan and the United States had deteriorated still further. Since neither could back down, it was becoming increasingly evident that only a trial of strength would decide control over south-east Asia.125\n\nThe essential purpose of the Tripartite Pact, from the Japanese perspective, was to deter the United States from intervening to prevent the southern advance seen as necessary to ensure Japan's control of raw materials and, therefore, her future economic and political security. The gamble in the pact was self-evident. What if the United States did not regard the pact as a deterrent, but as a provocation? What if the effect was to reinforce the determination to prevent Japanese expansion by threatening the lifeline of oil supplies? But from a Japanese perspective at the time, the gamble had to be taken. To take it held great dangers, but also the potential of enormous rewards. Not to take it meant long-term servitude to the Anglo-American powers. It meant, too, that the China War had been in vain. The need for boldness, not caution, carried the day in such a mentality. Profound fears for the future had not been overcome. But they were met with fatalistic resignation. Characteristic in his expression of such an attitude, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, former Navy Vice-Minister and soon to become the planning mastermind behind Pearl Harbor, remarked in October 1940: 'It's out of the question! To fight the United States is like fighting the whole world. But it has been decided. So I will fight my best. Doubtless I will die on board the Nagato [his flagship].'126\n\nThose voicing deep apprehensions, however, were sidelined. In Matsuoka's summary of the issues at the Liaison Conference, the risk was less damaging for Japan's long-term future than not taking it. It was a recipe for disaster. But Matsuoka's penchant for high-flown rhetoric, his belief in diplomatic force and his underlying brinkmanship came into the political equation at a moment when the Japanese military and also the civilian government had become committed to southern expansion, and when American threats to Japan's economy were real, and growing.\n\nThe Tripartite Pact was less formidable in reality than in appearance.127 Its symbolic importance was, nevertheless, great. It confirmed that Japan saw her future shaped by the struggle against the Anglo-American supremacy in the Far East. Though the beginning of open hostilities would take place more than a year later, Japanese strategy and diplomacy were now framed by that imperative.128 The path to collision with the United States was opening up.\n\nThe collision was not inevitable. There had been no invisible hand of destiny guiding Japan on the course to a war against the might of the United States which even her own military were not confident of winning. That disastrous course was the consequence of the fateful choices made by Japan's leaders in the summer and autumn of 1940. Those choices were, however, in good measure shaped by mentalities forged over the previous twenty years or so, and by the way those mentalities interpreted economic realities.\n\nThe obvious economic reality was that Japan depended upon the vagaries of world trade for her future prosperity. As a group of islands off the east Asian mainland, Japan could be no more self-sufficient from her natural resources than could Great Britain. But Britain ruled a world Empire. This was seen to provide the classic model for a world power. The leading political philosophies of the time, as Japan was modernizing and beginning to flex her muscles, assumed that acquiring an empire provided the basis of prosperity and future national security. A modern version of mercantilism preached that control over raw materials, and the territory that provided them, offered the route to power and prosperity. Subordination of weaker forces, in order to establish the imperial dominance which was the hallmark of a great power, was inevitable, and justified. Japan came to see herself, much as did Italy and Germany in the European context, as a 'have-not' nation, with a right to expand to safeguard her own survival and security. The western great powers, America most of all, stood in the way of this through their control of resources in south-east Asia, most notably in China itself, and through American naval might in the Pacific. Japanese dependence upon America for essential supplies of oil and metal exposed her Achilles heel as a would-be great power. It highlighted the underlying weakness of her position.129 Hence, the liberal, democratic principles of the postwar settlement could increasingly come to be interpreted as self-serving for the west, but directly harmful for the 'have-not' nation of Japan.\n\nWith Japan in the throes of internal crisis during the 1920s, the bitter wrangles and deep divides in domestic politics seemed to mirror the country's external subservience to the western powers, sealed by the postwar Washington Conference. This provided the backcloth to the upsurge in nationalist-imperialist assertiveness during the 1930s, fired by the success in Manchuria and then the prospect of the much bigger prize in China. Economic imperatives drove the new ideology, resting upon the 'imperial way' embodied by the deified Emperor, eventually pulling politics into their slipstream. The new, shrill and aggressive nationalism rapidly caught hold among younger officers in the army and the navy, penetrating via military training to the more plebeian recruits to the rank and file. Older officers, and an older generation of civilian politicians, still held to less abrasive ideas of international cooperation. But they gradually but inexorably lost ground to the forces representing the new ideology. By the time the war in China began in 1937, politicians favouring the expansionism that the mentality of the 'imperial way' had spawned were in high offices of state. Konoe epitomized them. But by now politics were in any case being ever more determined by the demands of the army.\n\nChina held the key. The longer the war dragged on, the less Japan was capable of cutting her losses and reaching some sort of peace deal that was the basic premiss of improved relations with the United States. The more Japan became mired in an expanding war, at enormous human and material cost, the more hardliners in the army ruled out any retreat. Following the massacres in Shanghai and the 'rape of Nanking', Japan's international standing had fallen drastically. As the United States toughened her stance, the chances of any settlement of the 'China Incident' dwindled. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt had used American pressure to broker an end to the war between Japan and Russia. Thirty-five years later there was no prospect of his namesake, the second President Roosevelt, intervening to engineer a settlement of the war between Japan and China. With the lessons of appeasement in Europe fresh in the mind, there was no appetite in America for attempting to appease Japan. But without such a settlement, American-Japanese relations could only worsen. And with that, Japanese oil supplies would inexorably become more endangered. Unwilling to yield to such a threat, the response of Japan's leaders was the turn to a policy of imminent southern expansion. As night follows day, this increased the prospect of war with the United States, a war which even Japanese 'hawks' thought Japan could only win if she could land a swift knockout blow.\n\nBy the time the fateful decision for the southern advance was taken, in July 1940, therefore, it was impossible to put forward a convincing alternative strategy. Variants of emphasis certainly existed, often related to the differing levels of fear of war with America. But the fundamental imperative of southern expansion was by now generally accepted throughout Japan's power-elite. Simply to contemplate an alternative was to dismiss it. The very premiss could not be entertained. Better relations with the United States\u2013that is, the avoidance of risk of war\u2013meant effectively to capitulate over China. In the eyes of Japan's leaders, that would have entailed a colossal loss of prestige, with incalculable internal consequences. It would have been portrayed as an insult to the memories of those who had fought, suffered and died for Japan in the war in China, and it would have left Japan, her international strength undermined, even more dependent on America for the long-term future than she had been before embarking on the war in China.\n\nAfter the Pacific War had run its catastrophic course for Japan, the country was able to rebuild and establish unprecedented prosperity on the basis, precisely, of dependence on the United States and successful incorporation into world trade resting upon capitalist competition and market economies. But the mentalities of 1940 were light years away from those which, in conditions of total defeat, helped Japan rise from the ashes. These earlier mentalities saw no alternative to imperialist expansion to secure the raw materials that the United States, in progressively more belligerent tones, increasingly threatened.\n\nWith the very premiss of possible rapprochement with the United States ruled out (short of an utterly improbable American volte-face on China), the expansionist policy\u2013replete with dangers\u2013had to be adopted. The stunning victories of the German army in Europe in spring 1940 appeared to offer the chance Japan had been waiting for to obtain her 'place in the sun'. The opportunity could not be passed over. With the decision for expansion taken in July, the platform was set for Japan to break out of her self-inflicted international isolation and to redirect her foreign allegiances towards the victorious Axis powers. As we saw, those among the Japanese elites who opposed such a shift in policy swiftly lost all influence. Once the navy's opposition evaporated, in early September, the way to the Tripartite Pact signed later in the month was clear.\n\nJapan had made her fateful choices. They did not of necessity mean war in the Pacific. There was still far to go before the decision was taken to attack Pearl Harbor. But the fateful choices of 1941 had been prefigured by those of the previous summer and autumn, which had manoeuvred Japan into a cul-de-sac.130 Blocked by her refusal to contemplate any concessions over China, Japan's only way out ran the high risk of war in the Pacific. Now that Japan had opted to expand to the south, and to forge a military alliance with Germany and Italy, Pearl Harbor had moved much closer.\n\n## 4\n\n## Rome, Summer and Autumn 1940\n\nMussolini Decides to Grab His Share\n\nHitler always faces me with a fait accompli. This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be re-established.\n\nMussolini, 12 October 1940\n\nAt 6 o'clock in the early evening of 10 June, Mussolini spoke from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, his headquarters in the heart of Rome, to a large crowd of mainly Fascist enthusiasts, mobilized at short notice. With typical bombast he announced that destiny had determined Italy's entry into the war. Honour, self-interest and the future of the country demanded that Italy must fight. It was to be a fight 'against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West, which have repeatedly blocked the march and even threatened the existence of the Italian people'. Breaking the stranglehold of the western democracies which throttled Italy's scope for expansion and severely limited her power even within the narrow confines of the Mediterranean was vital for the country's freedom, he claimed. He portrayed Italy's war as 'the struggle of a poor people against those who wish to starve us with their retention of all the riches and gold of the earth'.1\n\nIt had seemed like a good idea at the time. It looked a safe bet that Italy would profit hugely and cheaply from the astonishing victories of the Wehrmacht in western Europe. In fact, as would rapidly become clear, it was an enormous gamble that would soon backfire in catastrophic fashion. Mussolini felt acutely that Fascist Italy had been dragged along at Germany's heels for several years. Italy had once been the senior partner in dealings with Hitler, but the roles had been decisively reversed in the second half of the 1930s in the wake of German foreign-policy successes and territorial expansion. Mussolini smarted under his relegation to the status of a second-rank dictator. And now, more plainly than ever before, Italy had to stand in the shadow of events determined by German military might. Asserting Italy's independent claim to power within the Axis was a key motive in joining the war. But within months any such claim lay in ruins. Far from being an autonomous power waging her own parallel war, Italy would soon become reduced to no more than an adjunct to Germany's quest for hegemony in Europe.\n\nThe key staging post en route to that degrading position was Mussolini's second fateful choice within five months: the decision, taken in October 1940, to invade Greece. At 6.00 a.m. on 28 October, Italian troops crossed the borders from occupied Albania into northern Greece. The Greek army was not seen to pose any serious obstacle. Victory would be swift. Mussolini saw himself standing in triumph in Athens after only a brief campaign, something akin to the German crushing of Poland in autumn 1939. The destruction of Greece would be a major step towards the empire in the Balkans and Mediterranean that he craved. Instead, the campaign rapidly proved a fiasco. The Greek forces fought valiantly, helped by good organization, knowledge of difficult terrain and the superior morale of troops repelling an invader of their country. Within a fortnight, it was obvious that the supposed easy triumph was already turning into a humiliation for Mussolini's regime.\n\nThe decision to invade Greece had been revealed as a calamitous folly. It was the first defeat for the seemingly invincible Axis forces. And, crucially, through neglecting north Africa for Greece, Mussolini had both exposed Italian troops to military disaster and gravely weakened the Axis position in the desert campaign, the most vital theatre of the war at the time. Had the weak British forces been driven out of Egypt and the Suez Canal region, the war would have taken a different course. Instead, sorely needed Italian troops were diverted to the mounting debacle in Greece. Italy would never recover from the double humiliation in Greece and north Africa. By the spring of 1941, Germany would be forced to intervene militarily to quell the turmoil in the Balkans that Mussolini's intervention had unleashed. The Italian dictator had fervently wanted to avoid German domination of the Balkans. Now his own actions had brought about just that. The repercussions of Mussolini's ill-fated Balkan adventure were massive, not just in their military outcome, but also in the undermining of the authority of the Fascist regime within Italy. It was the beginning of the end for the Italian dictator, as his support\u2013not just at the grass roots, but within the political elite\u2013waned rapidly.\n\nLooking for easy gains, Italy had joined a war which was to bring enormous hardship, heavy destruction and acute suffering to the country, leading to the overthrow of the Fascist regime in 1943, a switch of allegiance to the Allied side in the autumn of that year and bitter months of brutal German occupation in the northern regions before the total defeat of the Third Reich ended the misery. For Mussolini himself, the decisions to enter the war in June 1940 and, within only a few months, to invade Greece would eventually lead to his deposition from power, then his spectacular rescue from imprisonment and restoration as a German puppet-leader. He would finally pay the price in late April 1945 when he and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, were caught and executed by partisans on the banks of Lake Como. Their bodies were subsequently strung up on a girder in a Milan petrol station, the once glorified leader reviled in death by a jeering crowd.\n\nMussolini himself took the fateful decisions that saw Italy enter the war then embark upon the disastrous invasion of Greece. That much is clear. But how were the decisions arrived at? How far were they his decisions alone? To what extent did arbitrary dictatorial will override the wishes and interests of others within the power-elite of the Fascist state, notably the military? Or did Mussolini's 'decisionism' merely reflect the prevalent attitude within the regime as a whole? Were the decisions pragmatic or ideological in essence, the result of short-term opportunism or longer-term goals, a break with long-standing continuities in Italian expectations, or their presumed fulfilment? Not least, were Mussolini's decisions taken in such circumscribed conditions that, in effect, he had no choice but to take Italy into war and expansionism? Or did he and his regime, whatever their favoured choices, have real options in the summer and autumn of 1940, options they chose to reject in favour of the illusion of easy and rich pickings on the coat-tails of the German conquerors in western Europe?\n\nI\n\nWar and expansion had been implicit in Mussolini's ideas from the start of his 'career' as an arch-Fascist. In time, they became explicit. Rambling and discursive though these ideas were, a core element was plain enough. Even before his expulsion from the Socialist Party in November 1914 and his strident advocacy of Italy's intervention in the First World War the following year, Mussolini had welcomed the revolutionary, cleansing agency of war, and its necessity if Italy were to shake off her past and take her place among the great nations. In March 1919, at the foundation meeting in Milan of the Fasci di Combattimento, he announced that Italy needed and deserved more territory to accommodate her growing population. Soon afterwards, he held out the prospect of Italy joining Germany, should she not be given her due by the Allies, and eventually destroying Britain's naval strength in the Mediterranean. By the mid-1920s he was presenting his vision of a new warrior class, 'always ready to die', the creation of 'methodical selection', and the basis of the 'great elites that in turn establish empires'. War and revolution would mould the 'new man'. The goal was 'empire'.2\n\nThe goal remained without practical consequences of note during the years when Fascism was consolidating its hold on the Italian state, and on society. A diplomatic incident involving Greece led to a brief Italian military excursion and occupation of Corfu in summer 1923, before being settled by Greek compensation. A few months later Yugoslavia ceded the disputed city of Fiume to Italy, giving Mussolini a further (and easy) success in foreign policy. And by the end of 1926 Albania had effectively become an economic satellite of Italy, again no more than the most minor of triumphs. But Italy was extremely ill-prepared for foreign adventurism on any serious scale. The country was burdened with huge debts as a legacy of the war. Most regions, particularly in the south, were extremely poor. National income was less than a quarter of that of Great Britain. The industrial base was small, mainly confined to the northern triangle of Milan, Genoa and Turin. As late as 1938\u20139 Italy produced only a million tons of coal and 2.4 million tons of steel. Britain's output, in comparison, was 230 million tons of coal and 13.4 million tons of steel, Germany's 186 million tons of coal and 22.4 million tons of steel.3 Rearmament made little headway before the mid-1930s. And among the public, so soon after the terrible losses of the First World War, there was generally little appetite for risking new armed combat. Italy, as its leaders (Mussolini, too) recognized, was as yet by far the weakest of the 'great powers'; in reality, she was merely a would-be 'great power'.\n\nMussolini remained for the time being sensibly cautious. The position of Austria, on Italy's northern frontier, posed as yet no serious problem. Mussolini still had hopes in the later 1920s of gaining support in Hungary and Austria in order to create an Italian sphere of influence in the Danube region, and was anxious to prevent Austria falling under German influence and control. But the hopes of Anschluss with the German Reich that had initially been widespread in Austria after the war had meanwhile died down, and the revisionist Right within Germany which harboured aims of expansion was in the later 1920s still on the political fringes. The other potential difficulty in relations with Germany, the issue of the South Tyrol\u2013part of Italy, but with a majority German-speaking population\u2013had also not materialized into dangerous confrontation. The shrill voices on the radical Right in Germany clamouring for the return of the South Tyrol were only to be heard outside the political mainstream. The most vocal figure on the extreme Right, Adolf Hitler, already looking to good relations with Italy, had in fact risked splitting his still small Nazi Party by indicating a willingness to renounce claims to the South Tyrol.4 He had wider horizons in mind. And despite feeling much resentment towards the superiority of British and French power, especially in the Mediterranean, Mussolini risked nothing in his dealings with the western democracies (whom he had joined in the Locarno Pact of 1925, aimed at stabilizing Germany's west-European borders).\n\nMussolini was, then, forced for years to tread warily in foreign policy. But this altered nothing of his underlying interest in territorial aggrandizement, or his belief in war as an agent of national regeneration, the route to the prestige and status befitting a great power.\n\nThe disturbance to the international scene that followed Hitler's takeover of power in Germany in 1933 offered Mussolini new opportunities and opened up a more active role in European affairs for Fascist Italy. Mussolini's early concern was to shore up Austrian independence against Nazi pretensions. Relations between Italy and Germany were tense for a time after the assassination by Nazis of the Austrian Chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, in July 1934. And when, the following April, at Stresa, Mussolini aligned Fascist Italy with the western democracies against German expansionism, he had Austria primarily in mind. But by then his attention had begun to focus on Abyssinia (Ethiopia), a distant and impoverished country, but with its attractions for Fascist Italy. Mussolini wanted an external triumph, a show of Italian might, a demonstration to the world, and to Italy's own population, of Fascism's power and of national virility. The eastern Mediterranean and north Africa (where Libya had been a colony since 1912) had long been part of the dream of expansion by Italian imperialists. Mussolini's own interest in these regions as the core of a new Fascist empire was, therefore, in essence nothing new. Ideally, Mussolini wanted dominion closer to home, in the Mediterranean region, most notably in the Balkans. Italy's armed forces were, however, still weak in comparison with those of the major European powers. Any notion of expansion into the Balkans, however attractive the proposition sounded, had to be ruled out for the foreseeable future at least. It was still too risky, particularly given the strong French interests in south-eastern Europe.5 Abyssinia, seen as a primitive, tribal kingdom incapable of offering much resistance to Italian arms, served as a substitute.\n\nThe humiliating defeat at Adowa in 1896, after Italian troops had advanced into Abyssinia from their Eritrean colony, still rankled deeply among nationalists. The blooding of the nation in a short, one-sided war of revenge, and a triumph for Fascism, were tempting prospects for the Italian dictator. Success at no cost seemed assured. He had to overcome the hesitation and faint-heartedness of the King, army leaders and the more conservative elements in the power-elite, anxious at the risk he was taking. But the western democracies, he thought, would not intervene. This turned out to be a miscalculation\u2013though one which rapidly rebounded to Mussolini's great advantage. Condemnation of Italian aggression by the League of Nations and the imposition of economic sanctions fuelled hatred of Britain and France within Italy and massively bolstered the popularity of Mussolini and his regime. When Addis Ababa fell the following May, after an extremely brutal campaign which included the extensive use of chemical warfare, Mussolini could announce complete victory, the assumption by the King of Italy of the title of Emperor of Abyssinia, and the existence of a new Roman Empire.\n\nThe Duce cult now reached its height.6 The regime was greatly strengthened, Mussolini's position within it unassailable. The grandiosity of his own self-image knew no bounds. He eagerly anticipated confrontation with the 'decadent' western democracies, divided and weakened by their response to the Abyssinian war. The path to Italy's great future lay, it seemed evident (and not just to Mussolini), only in closer ties with Hitler's Germany\u2013already flexing her muscles, certain to become the dominant power in central Europe and posing a major challenge to France and Britain. Accordingly, Mussolini gave the green light to German remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, accepted that Austria should now fall into the German orbit as she did following an agreement signed in July, and in November that year formed the Axis with Germany as the symbolic seal on the close relationship\u2013one viewed with little relish by most Italians.\n\nIn fact, for all the propaganda razzmatazz, the relationship between Italy and Germany was in reality far from close, and became increasingly lopsided. Mussolini had at one time thought of himself as the master and Hitler as the pupil. But his sense of inferiority towards Hitler deepened as his co-dictator chalked up one diplomatic triumph after another. And he could not conceal his awe of German military might. Italian military muscle was, by contrast to that of the Wehrmacht, anything but daunting. A humiliating defeat at Guadalajara in March 1937, after Mussolini had defied the warnings of his army leaders to involve Italy in support for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, was a plain reminder of this. Mussolini's state visit to Germany in September that year merely rubbed in the massive gulf in military strength between the two dictatorships and left him still more awestruck at the power of the Third Reich.\n\nWhen Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, he profusely thanked Mussolini for his support. Whatever the position had been four years earlier, however, Mussolini now had little choice in the matter but to acquiesce. He had tied his country to the high-risk expansionism of Nazi Germany. Accordingly, he fully backed the belligerent German stance on the Sudetenland that summer. And he professed his readiness to fight on Germany's side, should\u2013as seemed likely\u2013general European war be the outcome. But this contained more than a small element of bluff. He was well aware of how unprepared Italy was for a major war. When Hitler momentarily wavered, Mussolini snatched at the chance, offered him by G\u00f6ring, to mediate the settlement at Munich, made possible by the readiness of the western democracies to carve up Czechoslovakia in the interests of the German bully. His euphoric reception on return to Italy as a saviour of Europe's peace did not please him in the slightest. Rather, it confirmed to him that the Italian people were too peace-loving, far from ready for war. Such a verdict was indeed presented by a whole array of reports by Fascist Party functionaries on the state of popular opinion, emphasizing hostility towards the German Axis partners and dread of being dragged into another war.7\n\nMussolini held these fears in contempt. He was aiming at war, not peace. In a far-reaching speech\u2013an updated version of a long-held vision\u2013to the Fascist Grand Council on 4 February 1939, he envisaged a war with the western powers to attain the Italian version of Lebensraum. Italy, he said, was effectively landlocked by British domination of the Mediterranean, blocking access to the oceans (and prosperity) through control of the Strait of Gibraltar in the west and the Suez Canal in the east. Encircled by hostile countries and deprived of scope for expansion, Italy was 'a prisoner of the Mediterranean'. The task of Italian policy was, therefore, to 'break the bars of the prison' and 'march to the Ocean'. But whether this 'march' was to the Indian or the Atlantic Ocean, 'we will find ourselves confronted with Anglo-French opposition'.8\n\nHe was soon enough given another reminder that he could only march to Germany's tune. The German occupation on 15 March of what was left of Czechoslovakia, as usual without prior notice to her Axis partner, showed where the power lay. The Munich settlement brokered by Mussolini had simply been ripped up by Hitler. When Hitler's emissary presented a verbal message of explanation and gratitude to Mussolini, a despondent Duce wanted to withhold the news from the press. 'The Italians would laugh at me,' he lamented. 'Every time Hitler occupies a country he sends me a message.'9 However, he saw nothing for it but to accept the German fait accompli with good grace. He even initially resisted the suggestion of Count Galeazzo Ciano, his Foreign Minister since 1936 and married to his daughter, Edda, to annex Albania to give the Italian people some 'compensation' for their humiliation. The annexation of this corrupt and backward little kingdom, already heavily under Italian influence, was, however, only deferred. It took place three weeks later, on 7 April 1939. Albania now became little more than Ciano's 'grand duchy', as the Foreign Minister\u2013young, dashing, but vain, corrupt and lightweight, preferring golf and womanizing to hard work at the diplomatic desk\u2013called it.10 Compared with Hitler's spectacular coups, it was small beer indeed. But Mussolini saw it merely as a staging post. Already by May he was contemplating using Albania for an attack on Greece to 'drive the British from the Mediterranean basin'.11 As Ciano told Hitler (who allegedly listened with enthusiasm and managed to keep a straight face), the Italian programme was to make 'Albania a stronghold which will inexorably dominate the Balkans'.12\n\nBut, immediately, the British guarantee for Greece and Romania that had followed the Italian takeover in Albania had the effect of driving Italy even closer to Germany through a military alliance, the 'Pact of Steel', signed on 22 May 1939.13 The two countries pledged mutual military assistance and support in the event of one or other power becoming involved in war. It was a case of 'Fascist diplomacy at its sloppiest':14 Italy had committed herself to unconditional backing of Germany even in a war entirely of German making.\n\nThe Italian understanding, as Mussolini soon reminded Hitler, was that war should not be unleashed before 1943 at the earliest, when Italian preparations would be complete.15 But the very day after the signing of the 'Pact of Steel', Hitler was telling his generals to prepare for war at the first opportunity against Poland.16 By mid-July, rumours about German intentions towards Poland had hardened into alarming reports from the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Bernardo Attolico, that Germany was preparing to strike at Danzig the following month.17 Ciano started to worry that Italy would be drawn into the war 'in the most unfavourable conditions', with gold reserves and metal stocks almost at zero-level and military preparations woefully incomplete. He was adamant that war must be avoided.18 Mussolini wavered between the idea of another 'Munich'\u2013an international peace conference with the aim of postponing war for another three years or so\u2013and the desire to fight alongside Germany, for honour, and to grab 'his part of the booty in Croatia and Dalmatia', as Hitler was tempting him to do. When Ciano met Hitler and Ribbentrop at the German dictator's Alpine residence, the Berghof, in the mountains above Berchtesgaden, on 11\u201313 August 1939, he was left in no doubt that Germany was set on military action. Italy had been kept in the dark once again about German intentions, and Hitler had 'decided to strike, and strike he will'. Ciano returned to Rome 'disgusted with the Germans', who had 'betrayed us and lied to us' and were now 'dragging us into an adventure which we do not want'. He felt Italy's hands were free, and fervently recommended keeping out of the war.19 Mussolini's nervousness continued. But his strong instincts were to fight alongside the Germans if it came to armed conflict. There was still a chance, he imagined, that the western democracies would not march. In that case, he wanted to profit from the cheap gains that would be on offer. But should it come to war, as seemed likely, he thought Italy would look cowardly in the eyes of the world if she backed away. Another point weighed with him, according to Ciano: his fear that Hitler, in rage at Italian non-compliance with the 'Pact of Steel', might 'abandon the Polish question in order to square accounts with Italy'.20\n\nThe stunning news late in the evening of 22 August of Germany's imminent Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union\u2013another surprise for Italy\u2013was a blow for the western democracies that gave Mussolini a fillip. His belligerent mood was encouraged by the sycophantic (and wholly misleading) report of Alberto Pariani, the Under-Secretary for War, of the good state of readiness of the army. This was utterly contradicted by the forthright opinion of King Victor Emmanuel III himself, when Ciano conferred with him on 24 August, that 'we are absolutely in no condition to wage war', and that 'the Army is in a \"pitiful\" state'. The officers were not qualified, the equipment was old and obsolete, and public opinion was hostile to the Germans. The King was adamant that Italy had to stay out of the war, at least for the time being, and await events. Most importantly, he insisted upon being involved in taking any 'supreme decisions'.21 It was tantamount to a veto on Mussolini taking Italy into the war.\n\nNext day, Ciano relayed the King's views to a 'furiously warlike' Mussolini, who felt duly deterred from taking the country to war and compelled to accept non-intervention. On receipt of a letter from Hitler asking for 'Italian understanding' for imminent action, Mussolini was forced to admit that 'it will be opportune for me not to take the initiative in military operations in view of the present state of Italian war preparations', adding that intervention was dependent upon immediate delivery of military supplies and raw materials to withstand an attack by Britain and France.22 A list, extraordinarily exorbitant in its demands, was eventually put together on 26 August. It was embellished still further by Attolico, acting on his own initiative in order to discourage any possible German compliance with the requests by asking for immediate delivery of all supplies requested before Italy could enter the war. That did the trick. The requests were totally impossible for Hitler to fulfil. He let Mussolini know he understood Italy's position and asked only for a continued friendly stance. He proposed, Ciano noted, 'to annihilate Poland and beat France and England without help'. It was a blow to Mussolini's prestige. Hitler had taken his country to war within six years of attaining power, while he, the Duce, was in no position to take Italy to war after almost seventeen years in power. That rankled. He told Hitler on 26 August: 'I leave it to you to imagine my state of mind in finding myself compelled by forces beyond my control not to afford you real solidarity at the moment of action.'23 His own wishes had been plain. But he had been forced to bow to pressure from within his own regime not to embroil the country in war. For now, he had to swallow the bitter pill and accept the novel status, unknown to international law, of 'non-belligerence'\u2013less demeaning, certainly, than 'neutrality', but falling far short of what Fascist martial values demanded.24\n\nIt would be ten months before the opportunity arose to make good the climbdown of late August 1939. This time the opportunity would be too good to miss.\n\nII\n\nThat in August 1939 Mussolini's wish to take Italy into the war had to yield to pressure to stay out of it, not least because of the King's hostility to intervention, demonstrates real limits to the dictator's power. Mussolini's German counterpart was in a much stronger position. After Hitler became head of state on the death of President Hindenburg at the beginning of August 1934, at which point the army swore an oath of allegiance to his person, his power was absolute in the sense that no individual and no body or institution could pose any constitutional challenge and there was no base of alternative loyalties. He tightened his hold over the armed forces in February 1938 in a reorganization of the central control structure under his own direct leadership. In Italy, by contrast, almost seventeen years after Mussolini had taken power following the 'March on Rome' in October 1922, that power, if not to be underestimated, remained far from total. Though the diminutive King cut an unimpressive figure and seemed a puny makeweight to Mussolini's domineering presence, he remained the head of state, and with more than merely titular powers. Ultimately, as the events of July 1943 would show, just as he had appointed Mussolini to head the government in 1922, he retained the prerogative of removing him from office. And he offered an alternative focus of loyalty. This was particularly important in the case of the armed forces. Most notably, the officer corps of the army and navy retained a strong sense of allegiance to the monarchy. Their prime loyalty, as they for the most part saw it, was to the King, the head of the armed forces. Whatever combination of bribery and browbeating Mussolini deployed in his dealings with the leaders of the armed forces, it was never sufficient to win their unreserved allegiance. This would prove a fatal weakness in the palace coup of July 1943.\n\nAlthough there were no overt signs during the uneasy period of non-belligerence in 1939\u201340 of the later rupture between Mussolini and his military leaders, the dictator could not simply ride roughshod over his senior generals and admirals.25 He would on more than one occasion bemoan the shortcomings he saw in the military and his inability to purge the officer corps, just as he expressed his intention to eliminate the monarchy as soon as he had the opportunity to do so.26 As it was, for the time being he had to put up with what he took to be the undue caution, pusillanimity, pessimistic outlook and lack of Fascist 'fighting spirit' of the King and of his military advisers.\n\nThe officer corps remained, to Mussolini's chagrin, irredeemably conservative in personnel and structure. Italy lacked the strong militaristic culture that had developed in Germany (especially in Prussia). There was, for the most part, no great enthusiasm for the military in Italian society. The army did not enjoy a high level of prestige, as it did not just in Germany but also in the western democracies, Great Britain and France. It was much the same with the navy, while the air force, as in other countries, was only just beginning to establish itself. What military tradition there was in Italy featured humiliating defeats, notably Adowa in 1896 and Caporetto in 1917, rather than glorious victories. A career in the armed services was, accordingly, not greatly sought after by most well-educated and technically skilled Italians, who in any case were not high in numbers in a poorly educated, industrially underdeveloped society. The outcome was the low calibre and shortage of talent in what amounted practically to a rigid military caste, especially in the army. Had Mussolini been powerful enough to purge the army leadership, he would have had difficulty in replacing those dismissed by men of much better qualities. In practice, he could make little dent in the closed ranks of the senior generals, who, despite their personal and inter-service rivalries, were backed by their close ties to the monarchy.\n\nFrom 1926 onwards Mussolini had been the minister at the head of each of the three branches of the armed services. But for years he remained diffident in his dealings with the top brass, keen to avoid provoking antagonism, and aware of his own technical deficiencies in military matters as well as the need to protect his own image by keeping out of issues he did not fully comprehend. Little was done to bring about a genuine coordination of the armed forces' leadership. This was to remain the case, seriously damaging strategic planning, throughout the war.27 The powers of Marshal Pietro Badoglio, chief of General Staff since 1925, to intervene in the internal direction of each of the branches of the armed services, and even to coordinate strategic thinking, were more nominal than real. He served largely as no more than Mussolini's liaison with the leaders of the army, navy and air force and as his chief adviser on military planning. Badoglio's role in masterminding the victory in Abyssinia had bolstered his position and meant that Mussolini could not easily override his advice. But, in its defensive tone, this was seldom what the dictator wanted to hear.\n\nNor did Mussolini like to face up to the obvious inadequacies of his armed forces and their lack of readiness for major combat.28 Victory in Abyssinia with the aid of heavy artillery, bombers and mustard gas against a hopelessly inferior enemy (which nonetheless provided surprisingly tenacious resistance for some months) offered little preparation for the engagement in the European war that Mussolini had in mind to gain Italy's place in the sun\u2013though it did give the dictator increased ambition to direct military affairs. Since he saw air and naval power as the key to future dominance in the Mediterranean following a struggle with Britain and France, the air force, above all, and the navy to some extent were given priority over the army in the allocation of resources. But despite substantial rearmament in the navy in the second half of the 1930s, the fleet at the end of the decade was still far from ready for full-scale combat, while its leadership was poor in its operational planning and strategic thinking, defensive-minded and largely rooted in the naval warfare of the past. The air force, too, had flattered to deceive in Abyssinia and then during the Spanish Civil War. Despite notable expansion in the later 1930s, it remained technically and organizationally weak in comparison with its British and German equivalents. The army was disadvantaged by the priority in resource-allocation accorded to the navy and air force, and suffered equally from Italy's small industrial base. Beyond this, it had a leadership locked into the military thinking of yesteryear, unwilling, as well as unable, to break the chains of the past. By the end of the 1930s, as a result, the army was woefully far from the levels of modernization required by new, more mobile forms of warfare. One experienced officer, General Ettore Bastico, warned against idolizing the tank and wanted to 'reserve our reverence for the infantryman and the mule', while as late as 1940 the deputy chief of the army staff, General Mario Roatta, let it be known that he opposed the abolition of horse cavalry.29\n\nAt the height of his power, then, Mussolini still faced a military caste\u2013particularly strong in the officer corps of the army\u2013that was far from his Fascist ideal, and in some respects obstructionist with regard to his far-reaching plans for war and expansion. And he presided over armed forces that were badly led, ill-coordinated, insufficiently modernized (especially, again, in the army) and inadequately prepared for seriously testing combat.\n\nThe leadership of the armed forces amounted to only one\u2013though arguably the most important\u2013of a number of partially autonomous bases of power in the Fascist regime that were far from simply vehicles of Mussolini's supposed 'total' control and domination. It could be claimed with some justice that Fascism in Italy, more than was the case with Hitler's regime in Germany, rested upon a 'power cartel'.30\n\nMussolini's 'seizure of power' in the 'March on Rome' in 1922 was a Fascist myth. In reality, he had been handed power in a deal with the national-conservative power-elites. What transpired 'was not a revolution but an authoritarian compromise' establishing 'a primarily political dictatorship that presided over a semipluralist institutional system'.31 Big business, the Church and the state bureaucracy retained some independence from Fascist control. In the economic sphere, Mussolini had to work with, rather than dominate over, the leaders of industry, business and finance. In a country where Catholicism was so influential\u2013and there was no plainer reminder of this than the residence of the papacy within Italy's capital city\u2013Mussolini had little choice but to reach a modus vivendi with the Church, as he did in the significant concessions granted through the Lateran Pacts of 1929 in return for the ending of papal hostility to the Italian state. And despite the rhetoric of Fascism's totalitarian ambitions, the party made few inroads into the domination of the apparatus of state government. On the contrary, it found itself shorn of much real power and turned largely into an agency of mass mobilization, propaganda, attempted political indoctrination and acclamation of the leader. Unlike in the Soviet Union, the state, not the party, remained pre-eminent. Mussolini recognized this by taking charge for a time in the latter half of the 1920s of no fewer than eight ministries of state. Although this, of course, significantly helped establish his unassailable leadership position, in reality, since he could not possibly oversee and direct everything in person, it also boosted the role of the state bureaucracy.32 Even within the Fascist Party itself, Mussolini's position had initially been effectively first among equals, the acknowledged party leader, certainly, but compelled to recognize the independent power-bases of the local chieftains, the ras (an Ethiopian term) upon whose control of the local party organization his own power ultimately drew.33 Nevertheless, by the later 1920s this initial mutual dependency had been transformed into the Duce's outright supremacy over the party.\n\nMussolini's initial struggle, once in power, had been to subordinate the Fascist Party itself to his complete control. One vehicle for attaining this was the institution of the Fascist Grand Council, which he initially set up in 1922, then, six years later, supposedly turned into 'the supreme organ that coordinates all activities of the regime'. In practice, it rarely met, had no legislative powers and indeed became little more than an agency of Mussolini's personal rule.34 When Mussolini made his big decisions in 1940, to enter the war, then to attack Greece, he did not even consult the Fascist Grand Council. Nevertheless, as the events of 1943 were to show, even this apparently tame animal could still kick, for it was the Fascist Grand Council which led the revolt against Mussolini that ended with his deposition. Institutionally, then, even the Fascist Grand Council, however emasculated in practice, posed a potential check on Mussolini's power. In Germany, by contrast, Hitler consistently rejected overtures to establish a senate of the Nazi Party, alert as ever to the existence of any collective body that might in certain circumstances be in a position to challenge his personal authority.35\n\nThough Mussolini's power was not absolute, it nonetheless expanded massively between 1925 and 1940, to the point where it approached that of an 'absolutist prince' whose decisions were subject to no effective control.36 Crucial to this development were the gradually increased centralization of control over the party, the growth and elaboration of the extravagant Duce cult, and the impact of the Abyssinian war on Mussolini's standing.\n\nFrom 1925 onwards, the residual independence of the provincial Fascist bosses, the ras, was undermined by the relentless bureaucratic centralization of the party's organization. By the early 1930s, even the most autonomous regional chieftains, such as Roberto Farinacci, the hardline boss of Cremona and party secretary for a brief time in the mid-1920s, had seen their wings clipped. Two general secretaries, ultra-loyal to Mussolini, Augusto Turati and Achille Starace, successfully purged the most unruly elements in the early Fascist movement then converted the party into a huge, enormously bloated organization largely devoted to the attempt to mobilize the masses behind the regime, and especially its leader, and to indoctrinate them in the aims and tenets of Fascism. In these years, the aesthetics of power were carefully honed and orchestrated. By the end of the 1930s the party was vast in size. On the eve of the European war, almost half of the population had formal membership of the party or one of its sub-organizations.37 But doctrinally, the impact of Fascism was shallow. Ideological commitment to the regime and the 'fighting spirit' of Fascism that Mussolini was anxious to inculcate into the population remained limited\u2013certainly far less profound than the impact of Nazism on the German population.38\n\nThe Fascist Party had been turned by the 1930s largely into an enormous vehicle of Duce adulation. The full-blown excrescence of the Duce cult accompanied this development. The pseudo-religious strains in the belief that the Duce 'was always right', as Fascist propaganda repeatedly told the population, need no emphasis. And such belief could easily coexist\u2013as did the quasi-deification of Hitler in Germany\u2013with limited allegiance either to the Fascist Party, or its doctrines.39 But, plainly, the manufacture of the Duce cult produced a level of popular acclamation that enormously strengthened Mussolini's position of power. By the early 1930s he felt strong enough to remove from major office almost all of the earlier prominent figures in the Fascist movement who might have posed some check to his mounting domination. Some bore grudges which would become apparent when Mussolini was later at his most vulnerable, at the Fascist Grand Council's fateful meeting in July 1943. But, for the foreseeable future, the former Fascist potentates, divided and without collective voice, saw their power reduced to personal dependence upon Mussolini.40 The Duce had bolstered his own position at the expense of his once mighty Fascist comrades. Their replacements were largely mediocrities, outright Mussolini acolytes.\n\nMussolini himself took back in hand some of the most important ministries, including, in 1933, foreign affairs (seen as too emollient in the hands of the former Foreign Minister and Fascist boss of Bologna, Dino Grandi) and the military ministries.41 It was a sign that foreign policy was soon to become more assertive. In relation to the other 'big battalions' in the regime\u2013such as big business, the state bureaucracy, the military leadership and, not least, the King himself\u2013Mussolini's popular standing now meant that he was less easy to challenge, that the scope of his domination had increased. The 'power cartel', in other words, though continuing to exist, saw the actual balance of power tip sharply in Mussolini's favour as the 1930s wore on. This meant that the aggressive expansionism to which Mussolini was wedded, especially once he had himself fallen victim to the Duce cult and swallowed the myth of his own infallibility, became a more prominent part of Fascist politics, and was less easy to block by those fearful of its consequences for the country.\n\nA major boost to the inflated domination of the Duce was provided by the Abyssinian war. This was in a real sense Mussolini's war. He had planned for it since 1932. He had pressed resolutely for it and engineered the way to it, despite the attempts by the League of Nations to find a diplomatic solution that would favour Italy. He pushed through the decision for war against alarmist warnings by Badoglio that it would result in war with Britain; against the caution of the conservative establishment that hated risk and also feared embroilment in a wider conflagration; and, not least, against the anxieties of the King, who, Mussolini later claimed, had to be forced to go to war.42 Once victory was attained the following spring, Mussolini's triumph, trumpeted ceaselessly in a huge outpouring of adulatory propaganda, was complete. His own position had received another massive boost. His 'heroic' image had been burnished still more brightly. The Duce cult reached its apogee. In matters of war and peace, especially, Mussolini towered above all other figures in the regime. His dominance of foreign affairs was not diminished when Ciano, before the war ultra-loyal to Mussolini, took over the Foreign Ministry in 1936. The Abyssinian war had another important consequence for the power-structure in Italy. The old elites, including the King, had not wanted to go to war. But they rejoiced in the glory it brought (even if Mussolini later complained that the King deserved none).43 More than that, they had favoured the expansionist goals, which had their roots in the pre-1914 imperialist dreams of the conservative establishment and the Liberal governments,44 even while fearing the repercussions of conflict with the western democracies. And they had become complicit in the savagery of the war in Abyssinia once it had started. The barbarous initiatives in the conduct of the war came as a rule from the military elite rather than from Mussolini himself, though the Duce certainly gave the orders for measures of gross inhumanity.45\n\nFollowing the war in Abyssinia, the commitment to Germany through the formation of the Axis, Italy's involvement in the Spanish Civil War, the part played by Mussolini in brokering the Munich Agreement and the annexation of Albania were all indicators that policy-making in foreign affairs had increasingly become the direct and personal province of the Duce, aided and abetted by Ciano. In matters of war and peace, decision-making was by now highly personalized. Discussion was, it was said, not a part of the 'Fascist style'. Sudden decisions reflected 'Napoleonic' qualities.46 By March 1938 Mussolini was claiming equal status with that of the King as supreme commander of the armed forces.47 The supposed representative bodies of the Fascist state, the Fascist Grand Council, the Senate (long since confined to Mussolini's appointees) and the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations (the eventual successor, in 1939, to the long moribund remnants of the Chamber of Deputies, the old parliament), had no input into decisions.48 No institutional gathering or corporate body existed where decisions were collectively reached. The Council of Ministers bore only the most superficial resemblance to the Cabinet of a democratic system of government. It met only when Mussolini summoned it, invariably merely to hear his pronouncements, and was wholly under his dominance; a receptacle for decisions already taken, rather than an agency for helping to shape policy. Mussolini himself decided. In this, the position was directly analogous to that of Hitler's Germany, with the qualification that in the latter case there was no ultimate source of possible constraint on action, whereas Mussolini still had to reckon with the approval of the King, as head of state and focus of army loyalty.\n\nThere were only two vehicles within the Fascist state with the potential to influence Mussolini's power of decision on the crucial issues of war and peace. One was the Foreign Ministry, where Ciano's line began in 1939 to veer sharply away from that of his father-in-law in an anxiety to avoid a war that he thought would prove disastrous. However, this was no more than tactical opposition, born out of fear of the consequences of Mussolini's gung-ho wish to embroil Italy in war. Ciano, who harboured private hopes of succeeding Mussolini one day, was equally wedded to notions of expansion, quite especially in the Balkans. And the dilettante exercise of his position as Foreign Minister meant that the advice he gave to Mussolini was often personalized, rather than emanating from the expertise of the ministry's professionals. Fascist appointees to higher civil service positions had to some extent radicalized the personnel of a ministry in any case traditionally predisposed to expansion.49 Beyond that, Ciano had instituted a top tier of the ministry, staffed by favourites and yes-men, which reduced the influence of the traditional apparatus.50\n\nThe other sphere of possible influence on Mussolini, as we have already noted, was that of his military advisers (and behind them, the King). They had somewhat reluctantly backed Mussolini in the decision to attack Abyssinia in 1935. But Mussolini had been proved right, which strengthened his own position. A practised servility gradually set in even among his senior military advisers. Generals and admirals, admitted to an audience with the Duce, would run twenty yards across his enormous room in the Palazzo Venezia before stopping to raise their arms in the Fascist salute.51 What the military leaders were nonetheless able to convey to Mussolini in 1939 was the lack of readiness of the armed forces for conflict with the western democracies. With extreme reluctance, Mussolini had at the last minute bowed to the pressure from Ciano and his military advisers, and finally conceded when the King had made known his opposition to war.\n\nMussolini took the decision not to march alongside Germany as a major blow to his (and Italy's) prestige. The next months would see him smarting under the tension between his instinct for war and his acceptance that his armed forces were in no fit state to fight one. He could do no more than hope for opportunities. They would soon present themselves.\n\nIII\n\nOn 4 September 1939, the day after Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany, Mussolini made plain to Ciano his full solidarity with Hitler's Reich. He was convinced that the French did not want to fight. (He said nothing of Britain, though Ciano's own view was that British involvement ensured that the war would be 'long, uncertain and relentless'.) The Duce went on to indicate, according to Ciano, that 'he is still dreaming of heroic undertakings against Yugoslavia which would bring him to the Romanian oil'. In more sober mood, Ciano implied, the Duce was reconciled to neutrality in order to build up the economic and military strength to intervene 'at the proper moment'. But then he would suddenly revert to the idea, still attractive to him, of joining Germany in the conflict. Ciano felt he had to continue to dissuade Mussolini from this course. 'Otherwise', he prophetically added, 'it will mean the ruin of the country, the ruin of Fascism, and the ruin of the Duce himself.'52\n\nGerman successes in Poland convinced Mussolini that he would soon be able to act as mediator in a new peace settlement. But, despite reminders of Italy's lamentable state of military preparedness\u2013owing in no small measure to the endemic, irremediable inefficiency within the bureaucracy of the armed forces; only ten of the country's sixty-seven divisions were fit for combat in mid-September and the shortage of basic supplies was extraordinary53\u2013and the strength of anti-German feeling among the Italian population, his regrets were plainly that he could not fight on Germany's side. A 'great nation', he thought, could not sustain a position of neutrality for long 'without losing face'. It must prepare to intervene.54 Yet preparing \u2013and waiting\u2013were all that the frustrated Mussolini could do. He also fluctuated in his confidence of ultimate German victory. He even intimated that a bloody stalemate between Germany and the western powers, leaving Italy to mop up the pieces, would suit him best.55 As late as spring 1940 he was envisaging any German attack on France as likely to prove both bloody and indecisive.56 Jealous of Hitler's successes, he would not have been unhappy to see the German dictator 'slowed down'.57\n\nBut what if the opposite were to happen? Hitler had made plain, when he met Ciano in Berlin on 1 October, that the fates of Germany and Italy were inextricably tied together. Defeat for Germany would mean the end of Italy's dreams of becoming masters of the Mediterranean. And, though showing understanding for the stance of non-belligerence, Hitler intimated that 'at a certain moment, Italy will have to profit from the favourable possibilities which will present themselves in order to join resolutely in the fray'.58 Mussolini was tormented that a German triumph would come too soon; that Italy would still not be in a position to profit from the opportunity. He knew that Italy could not be ready before 1942 at the earliest.59 And Italy, as he told Hitler, could not commit herself to a long war.60 But he 'would like to do something that would get us into the game', Ciano noted that autumn. 'He feels left out, and this pains him.'61\n\nSoon after the war had started, Mussolini had spoken of Italy's intervention any time after May 1940. But this optimism soon evaporated. Reports reaching him by the end of the year on the state of military preparations were depressing in the extreme. The army and navy would not be completely ready before 1943\u20134, the air force earlier, though not before mid-1941. Even such estimates drew on hope more than experience. Mussolini had to abandon hopes of fighting in 1940. He rescheduled the likely date for intervention to the second half of 1941.62\n\nIntervention, even if earlier than desirable in terms of military preparations, would still give Italy a unique chance, not to be missed, to attain the goals that Mussolini had held for many years: end British and French dominance in the Mediterranean, turning it into an 'Italian lake'; in so doing, open Italy's access to the oceans, the platform needed for any great power; and bring the Balkans under Italian sway. The concept was of a parallel war\u2013a war within a war. Already in autumn 1939, Mussolini, backed by Ciano, was eyeing up Yugoslavia as a likely target of Italian attack in the foreseeable future, with the aim of turning Croatia into a puppet state. Italy's military planners thought this project one within the capabilities even of the Italian armed forces, and sought to be ready for action in this sphere as early as the following spring. Greece, however, backed by the British guarantee, was another matter. 'Greece is not on our path,' Mussolini had declared.63 He meant: not for the time being. In the event, no move could be undertaken against Yugoslavia either. Any major disturbance in the Balkans was simply too risky at this stage. It would have to wait until Italy's intervention in a wider conflict offered more propitious circumstances to strike in the Balkans.\n\nBy spring 1940 Mussolini was presuming that a German offensive against France would not be long delayed. In mid-March 1940, just prior to meeting Hitler at the Brenner Pass, Mussolini was anticipating that his co-dictator would 'set off the powder keg' before long, and attack in the west. In this event, Italy would retain solidarity with Germany, but still not enter the war until the moment was ripe. He was not thinking of throwing Italian troops into the heat of a front-line battle alongside the Wehrmacht against the seasoned French army. Treading a fine line between non-belligerence and participation in the conflict, he told Ciano that Italian forces would 'tie up an equal number of enemy troops without fighting, but ready, none the less, to go into action at a convenient moment'.64\n\nSpeaking to Hitler at their Brenner meeting on 18 March, Mussolini declared Italy's entry into the war to be 'inevitable'. This was not on the grounds of military aid for the German war effort\u2013Germany, he said, could manage on her own\u2013but 'because the honour and the interest of Italy demand her intervention in the war'. However, Mussolini was compelled to add that the earliest Italy could intervene would be in around four months' time, when four new battleships would be ready and the air force also prepared. Nor would Italy's financial situation (the country, as he knew, was almost bankrupt, though he did not of course tell Hitler this) allow her to fight a long war. Hitler pointed out that, with France beaten, Britain would be forced to sue for peace and Italy would be master of the Mediterranean. In the attack on France, he envisaged Italian troops advancing alongside the Wehrmacht into the Rh\u00f3ne valley. The Italian air force, he added, if a decisive breakthrough should be dependent upon Italy's contribution, ought in coordination with the Luftwaffe to attack French aerodromes from the south. Mussolini did not respond directly to the points on military tactics. But Hitler had succeeded in his psychological pressure on Mussolini. He had prodded him in the direction that the Duce was in any case temperamentally inclined to go. Mussolini now effectively confirmed to his fellow dictator that Italy would enter the war on Germany's side. He went on to state that he would intervene 'as soon as Germany had advanced victoriously', and would lose no time, if the Allies had been so shattered by the German attack, in delivering the second knockout blow. Should the advance of the German troops be slow, he would wait, and time Italy's intervention to be of maximum use to Germany.65\n\nThe meeting can only have reinforced Mussolini's sense of inferiority towards Hitler. He hated having to play second fiddle, keeping quiet most of the time while Hitler did the talking. But at least his fears that Hitler was immediately going to fall on France were assuaged. He returned from the Brenner persuaded that, contrary to what he had assumed before the meeting, the German offensive was not imminent.66 But whenever it came, he had now committed Italy to intervention outright.\n\nThe Brenner meeting had left its mark on Mussolini. A few days later, Ciano noted that the Duce was 'in good humour these days' and 'is growing every day more definitively pro-German'. Mussolini was now speaking openly about entering the war on Germany's side, and he outlined for Ciano what he saw as Italy's course of action. He would not operate alongside the Wehrmacht on the southern French front, but instead maintain a defensive position in the Alpine regions. He would do the same in Libya, but take the offensive from Abyssinia against the important port of Djibouti (in the tiny French Somaliland that abutted it) and the British possession of Kenya, to the south. In the Mediterranean, the crucial theatre from an Italian point of view, he would engage in an air and naval offensive against the British and French. Ciano pointed out that Mussolini's bellicosity was starting to tell in bringing other Fascist leaders into line behind intervention. Some, however, remained opposed to what Ciano called 'the adventure'. This was Ciano's own position, though he himself was starting to weaken. As he noted, the mass of the Italian people still wanted nothing to do with war.67 For Mussolini, their views were irrelevant.\n\nOn 31 March Mussolini presented his thoughts in a written memorandum for the King, Ciano and his military leaders. Though Italy would have an important role in any compromise peace, he thought this outcome could be excluded. The war would continue. Germany, he thought, would not engage in a major land offensive in the west until victory was certain. In the meantime, she would continue the 'phoney war', but with intensified air and naval operations. He turned, in a crucial passage, to the choices facing Italy. The only option for Italy, he stated, was to intervene on Germany's side. It was absurd to imagine that she could keep out of the war. Neutrality, in other words, could not be entertained. Nor was a change of policy and shift to the side of the western Allies viable. This, said Mussolini, would bring immediate conflict with Germany, in which Italy would be left to fight alone. Italy's current position had been built upon the alliance with Germany. Her own objectives could only be attained by maintaining this alliance, by fighting a parallel war to gain supremacy in the Mediterranean. The main issue was, therefore, not whether, but when, to fight. He would delay entry as long as possible, aware as he was of the weakness of the armed forces. A long war could not be waged, on economic grounds. But intervention offered opportunities not to be spurned. He then sketched Italian strategy on intervention, much as he had described it privately to Ciano, though with some elaboration.68\n\nAddressing the Council of Ministers three days later, Mussolini kept up his rhetorical barrage in favour of war. He thought a German offensive could begin at any moment. Again, he rehearsed the options. Any change of course towards Britain and France would make Italy 'appear servile to the democracies' and bring her into conflict with Germany. By remaining neutral, Italy would 'lose prestige among the nations of the world for a century as a Great Power and for eternity as a Fascist regime'. So the only choice was to 'move with the Germans to advance our own ends'. He went on, in time-honoured fashion, to outline those ends: a Mediterranean empire and access to the ocean. Mussolini, noted Ciano, believed blindly in German victory, and in Hitler's word as to Italy's share of the booty. He himself doubted both.69\n\nThe military leaders also still needed convincing. The outcome of the meeting of the service chiefs with Badoglio on 9 April was anything but encouraging. They were pessimistic even about a limited offensive, insisted on avoiding close military cooperation with the Germans even in the event of a French collapse, agreed that no offensive from Libya was possible, were sceptical about the prospects of combined air and naval operations in the Mediterranean and expressed anxieties about Italy's position in Abyssinia. Summarizing for Mussolini, Badoglio adjudged that only in the event of the outright demolition of enemy forces by the Germans could Italian intervention be worthwhile.70 The division between Mussolini's thirst for action and the passivity of the military leadership of the country still ran deep. But it was at this point that the German invasion of Denmark and Norway began to cause a reconsideration of Italian perspectives, a process that would be completed by the Wehrmacht's astonishing successes in the western offensive in May and June.\n\nMussolini's immediate response to the news of the German occupation of Denmark and Norway was outright approval. 'This is the way to win wars,' he declared. Alone with Ciano, the talk was of Croatia. 'His hands fairly itch,' commented the Foreign Minister. The Duce was keen to quicken the tempo to take advantage of the current disorder in Europe. He was more warlike and more pro-German than ever, in Ciano's estimation, though he said he would not move before the end of August (and a few days later changed this date to spring 1941). He was irritated, however, by an audience with the King, who was still unenthusiastic about intervention. 'It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history,' Ciano recorded him saying. 'To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. This is what I shall do.' But as late as May not just the King, but the Italian military leadership remained for the most part opposed to Italy joining the war. And, though Hitler's successes in Scandinavia had made an impression on public opinion\u2013Mussolini contemptuously remarked that the Italian people were 'like a whore...always on the side of the winner'\u2013there was as yet no marked upswing in pro-German or pro-war feeling among the masses.71\n\nOn the eve of the German western offensive, which began on 10 May 1940, Italian intervention was still not a certainty. Mussolini, to be sure, had become sharply and unremittingly belligerent, as Ciano's diary entries record. Some Fascist leaders had followed his lead. Massive pro-war propaganda had left its mark and doubtless swayed some faint-hearts to support early intervention. The forces supporting war had, in other words, become stronger, particularly after the successful German operations in Scandinavia. But the forces opposed to war were not without weight. They included Count Ciano, even though his resolve was less firm than it had been, the military leadership and not least the King. The decision for war, despite Mussolini's powerful and insistent advocacy, was still in the balance, and by no means a formality. Had the German victory over France been less conclusive, it is even imaginable that intervention could have been postponed, perhaps even to a point where the impetus to join the war faded and non-belligerence or neutrality became seen as less than a temporary status. Caution might have prevailed. Without that comprehensive and calamitous defeat for the Allies, Mussolini would at any rate have been taking a risk to force into war a country whose military elite as well as the broad masses of the population were so lukewarm if not outrightly hostile to fighting a major war on Germany's side. Ciano had received a hint in March that 'the King feels that it may become necessary for him to intervene at any moment to give things a different direction; he is prepared to do this and to do it quickly'.72 It is not even beyond contemplation that such a move in circumstances seen as less than outrightly favourable might have prompted resistance within the power-elite, possibly even a military coup, backed if not directly initiated by the royal house.\n\nIn the event, however, the German victory in the west was swifter, the French collapse more dramatic, than anyone had foreseen. The balance of power in Europe was completely refashioned. Whatever the position before Hitler launched his attack on the Low Countries and France, the devastating advance of the Wehrmacht had now totally altered the picture. Just as the Japanese rulers, as we saw, rapidly reshaped their strategy in the wake of the astonishing German triumph, so did the power-elite in Italy. As in Japan, the feeling was that Germany was certain to be victorious. With France laid prostrate within a matter of weeks, and the defeat of Britain surely only a matter of time, few in the Italian leadership now doubted that Hitler would win the war. This radically changed attitudes towards Italy's intervention.\n\nIn the light of the altered circumstances following the collapse of France, any notion that Mussolini alone pushed an unwilling nation into war and subsequent disaster would be misplaced. The chance of profiting from the destruction of the western democracies was widely seen as too good to miss. During the second half of May, therefore, the arguments in favour of intervention markedly gained in force. Opposition to participation in the war, conversely, became increasingly difficult to articulate. Impressed by the German advances, Dino Grandi, the Fascist boss of Bologna and until now an opponent of intervention, told Ciano: 'We should admit that we were wrong in everything and prepare ourselves for the new times ahead.'73 Ultra-caution seemed completely misplaced, a recipe only for missing a unique opportunity to make cheap gains. Waverers and doubters now fell into line. For the first and only time, the Italian population became vociferously pro-war. Buoyed by his enthusiastic reception in some of the poorer districts of Rome, Mussolini had no doubt at the beginning of June that ordinary people had become 'accustomed to the idea that his war needs to happen'.74 The leadership of the armed forces\u2013and with it, the King himself\u2013was won over by the prospect of gain without pain, glory at little or no cost. Significant parts of the Italian ruling establishment had, as we noted, even before the First World War wanted expansion to establish and cement great-power status. Fear of the consequences, not lack of ambition, had held it back. But the traditional expansionist aspirations easily slotted into the far more aggressive and dynamic Fascist version.75 Now the opportunity that presented itself was as if godsent. When the moment of decision arrived, therefore, Mussolini found himself far from an isolated figure pressing for intervention against a reluctant people. He was by now surfing the tide, if on the foremost wave.\n\nFrom the first days of the German offensive, Mussolini was certain that the Allies had lost the war. There was no time to waste, he told Ciano on 13 May. 'Within a month I shall declare war. I shall attack France and Great Britain in the air and on the sea. I am no longer thinking of taking up arms against Yugoslavia because it would be a humiliating expedient.' The prospect of action in the Balkans had, therefore, faded temporarily. A bigger prize was at stake. After all, as Ciano reminded him later in the month, 'after the war is won we can obtain what we want anyway'. Ciano's own opposition was now giving way. He offered no response to Mussolini's belligerence. 'Today, for the first time, I did not answer,' he noted in his diary. 'Unfortunately, I can do nothing now to hold the Duce back. He has decided to act, and act he will. Only a new turn in military events can induce him to revise his decision, but for the time being things are going so badly for the Allies that there is no hope.'76 The next day Mussolini told the German ambassador in Rome, Hans Georg von Mackensen, that he would enter the struggle soon, no longer within months, but weeks or even days. Ciano was now resigned to intervention, though he hoped it would not be too soon, since Italy was still not ready for war. 'A mistake in timing would be fatal to us,' he added.77 A week or so later, Ciano was mainly concerned with what Italy would get out of intervention. 'If we really have to leap headlong into war,' he wrote, 'we must make a definite deal.' He envisaged meeting Ribbentrop early the following month with a statement of what Italy's share of the war booty should be.78\n\nThe King, however, was still distinctly anti-German. And he continued to drag his feet about Italian intervention. It did not endear him to the Duce. Mussolini's hatred of the royal house was palpable. He was ready 'to blow' the monarchy\u2013and the papacy with it\u2013'up to the skies' at the end of the war.79 Mussolini's ire was provoked not least by the King's refusal to grant him the sole command of the armed forces in the war. In a nebulous arrangement, Victor Emmanuel conceded the political and military conduct of the war while retaining the supreme command in his own hands, a distinction which would come to matter in July 1943.80 Nevertheless, the King, too, felt compelled to bow to the new circumstances of the German triumph in the west. By 1 June he was resigned to Italy entering the war. But, despite the propaganda barrage that had helped prompt the first demonstrations in favour of intervention in Rome's streets, he thought the country was going to war without enthusiasm. And he envisaged a long war, whose outcome would perhaps ultimately be determined by the entry of the United States into the arena.81\n\nThe Italian military leaders, who had imagined that much stiffer French resistance would have been offered to the German attack, were also bowing to the inevitable. By the end of May, according to Ciano, Badoglio 'now seems to accept a bad game with good grace, and prepares for war'. Badoglio was still cautious. The war had to be brief. Italy's supplies of vital raw materials were desperately low.82 The army's chief of staff, Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, advised in late May that the army was in no fit state for offensive action, even against Yugoslavia. The head of the navy, Admiral Domenico Cavagnari, also envisaged only defensive operations, other than a limited effort by submarines in the Mediterranean. And the air force's suggestion of bombing French bases in Corsica was ruled out by Badoglio, since Mussolini himself did not want an air offensive against France at that time.83 It was hardly a ringing endorsement of war. Such military effort as Italy would make was intended to be brief and in a minor key. The aim was to make the minimal contribution to attain maximum gains at the peace conference that would surely follow hard on the heels of German victory. But if the stance of the military was characterized by resigned acceptance rather than enthusiasm, there was nonetheless no opposition to the decision to go to war.\n\nThe same was true of big business. Here, too, the astounding German advances in May had dissipated an earlier preference for non-intervention. Business leaders naturally wanted what they saw as best for business. The fruits of intervention in a short and successful campaign appeared to provide it. And public opinion, so far as it is possible to judge it with accuracy, had now also largely fallen into line. Relentless state-orchestrated pro-war propaganda, greatly intensified over recent weeks, had not been without effect. Steps were taken to acclimatize the population to the onset of war. The glass in the windows of Milan cathedral was taken out and canvas covers put up. Schools closed at the end of May for the summer. Dance halls were shut. Foreign music was discouraged or Italianized: 'St Louis Blues' was to be sung as 'Tristezze di San Luigi'.84 As the German offensive swept through Belgium and into France student demonstrators in Rome burned French and British flags. Similar demonstrations took place in Milan, Naples and other big cities.85 One police report from Florence in early June recorded that 'the doubters have fallen silent, and the anti-Fascists are ultracautious...the expectation of a swift, easy and bloodless war against a France bled white and an England disorganized and with a decimated fleet, is rapidly maturing'.86 Mussolini had no need to fear popular opposition to his decision to intervene.\n\nDesperate appeals in May by Britain and the United States not to go to war were predictably rejected out of hand. Personal letters to Mussolini by Churchill and Roosevelt (who was offering, as we saw in Chapter 1, to act as a mediator between Italy and the Allies) met a peremptory rebuff. The time when appeasement stood any chance was long past. In the last days of May Mussolini took the decision. Badoglio, according to his postwar account, learned of it on 26 May. He had been in the ante-room, waiting along with Italo Balbo (one of the most prominent and dynamic early Fascist leaders, former air force chief, strongly anti-German and well aware of his country's unreadiness to enter the war, briefly home from his position as Governor of Libya) for an audience with Mussolini. As soon as he entered the Duce's enormous study, Badoglio realized that the meeting would not be routine. Mussolini was 'standing behind his writing-table, his hands on his hips, looking intensely serious, almost solemn'. When he spoke, it was to announce that he had sent a message to Hitler the previous day, stating that he was ready to declare war on Britain after 5 June. Badoglio's memory was playing tricks on him about the timing of Mussolini's letter to Hitler, and also the precise date. Ciano noted in his diary entry for 26 May that Mussolini was planning to write to Hitler announcing Italy's intervention for the latter part of June.87 The message was, in fact, only sent to the Italian ambassador, Dino Alfieri, on 30 May and delivered to Hitler in his western field headquarters that day.88 Mussolini had subsequently brought the date of entry forward to 5 June following the capitulation of Belgium.89 Badoglio went on to recall that he and Balbo were dumbfounded at the news, and Mussolini taken aback at the cold reception. Badoglio, so he said, pointed out in forceful terms that Italy was absolutely unprepared for war. 'It is suicide,' he claimed he remarked.90\n\nWhether Badoglio really expressed such vehement opposition might be doubted. His memoirs were self-serving, meant to highlight Mussolini's sole responsibility for an act of lunacy. Badoglio stated that he stayed at his post out of a sense of duty, aware that his resignation would have changed nothing and would have been unpopular among the population, and also out of a conviction that he would be able to prevent mistakes which Mussolini was certain to make out of his ignorance of military affairs.91 But the record of Mussolini's meeting with his military leaders on 29 May, when he formally announced that Italy would enter the war any time after 5 June, contains no reference to any protest from Badoglio or the others present. Even the King now reluctantly acquiesced.92 Mussolini told his military chiefs\u2013partially recouching what he had said at the end of March\u2013that war was impossible to avoid, and that Italy could only fight on the side of Germany, not of the Allies. He had advanced the date of entry in accordance with the rapidly changing circumstances. He was certain of German victory, and postponing entry would run greater risks than premature intervention. It was important to be in the war before the Germans had won so that Italy would have a bargaining position at the peace negotiations.93\n\nThe following day Ciano noted: 'The die is cast. Today Mussolini gave me the communication he has sent to Hitler about our entry into the war. The date chosen is June 5th, unless Hitler himself considers it convenient to postpone it for some days.'94 In fact, the date did not suit Hitler. It might, he thought, by prompting the removal of some aircraft to the south of France, interfere with German plans for an all-out assault on French airfields. Mussolini grumbled, but rescheduled Italy's big day to 11 June.95 The previous evening, 10 June, he addressed the crowd from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. An American journalist present painted the scene, as Mussolini 'bounced up like a jack-in-the-box on the balcony' to bellow his war declaration to the hundred thousand or so crammed into the square: 'He was greeted with probably the greatest applause he had ever received since he announced the end of the Abyssinian War...It looked as though Mussolini was making a \"smart move\" to realise his revindications upon France with a minimum spilling of blood. They thought France was already beaten and England left in a hopeless position. It was money for jam.'96 The speech was, of course, no more than an organized propaganda show. Giuseppe Bottai, the Minister of Education, recorded the difficulty organized Fascist cheer-leaders had in rousing the crowd from its 'almost stupefied discipline'.97 'It was a pitiable spectacle,' Badoglio later recalled. 'Herded like sheep between the officials and the riff-raff of the Fascist Party, the crowd had orders to applaud every word of the speech. But when it was over, the people dispersed of their own accord in complete silence.'98 Ciano's contemporary account was less expressive, though also pointed to a lukewarm reception by those other than Fascist diehards. 'The news of the war does not surprise anyone,' remarked Ciano, 'and does not arouse very much enthusiasm.'99\n\nObviously, from Mussolini's point of view Italy had no choice in the matter. The only question for him was not whether, but when, Italy would enter the war. Mussolini has often been portrayed as merely an opportunist, a dictator without driving ideological motivation and with simply an eye on the main chance, an exclusive focus on prestige, personal grandeur and power for its own sake. But this is to underestimate him. Entry into the war did not amount for Mussolini just to seizing the opportunity, important though the precise timing of intervention was. It was an inevitable step if his grandiose aims of an Italian imperium centred on the Mediterranean, erected on the ashes of the British and French Empires and the basis for making Italy a world power in deed and not just in presumption, were ever to be realized. It was the logical outcome of the pretensions he had harboured since coming to power almost two decades earlier. In that time, as we have seen, Mussolini's hold over Italy had strengthened inordinately. By 1940 the political system had been fragmented and eroded to the extent that no constitutional checks, apart from the King himself, could constrain Mussolini's internal freedom of action. And no corporate body, such as a Cabinet, helped to form decisions. Personal rule, when it came to questions of war and peace, had come to mean precisely that. When he took the decision for war at the end of May 1940, it was not after lengthy, indeed after any, consultation with a variety of advisers. No one, it is true, among Italy's political establishment was by then in the slightest doubt about the Duce's wishes. But equally, no one influenced the implementation of those wishes. The decision for war was his alone.\n\nUntil the heady days of May, alternatives did exist for other important sections of the Italian political elite, as well as for the mass of the population. Fascist prominenti like Ciano and Grandi, big-business magnates such as Giovanni Agnelli and Alberto Pirelli, military leaders including Badoglio and Cavagnari, and not least the King himself, had before May preferred to stay out of the conflict. Two possibilities beyond Mussolini's favoured interventionism were at least theoretically available.\n\nThe first of these was to switch allegiance from Germany to the Allies. This, of course, eventually happened in September 1943, but under very different circumstances. Despite the widespread dislike of Nazi Germany, stretching from most ordinary Italians to Count Ciano and the King himself, no one in spring 1940 seriously considered breaking the Axis alliance and swapping sides. That could only have taken place following a coup to topple Mussolini\u2013something scarcely feasible in 1940 (even if the King, as we have seen, appears momentarily and vaguely to have flirted with the notion in March). And it would have involved Italy in the war anyway, but against Germany. This would unquestionably have invited Hitler's wrath. Mussolini himself, as we noted, more than once voiced his fear that crossing Hitler would mean the might of the Wehrmacht being turned against Italy. Whether, in such circumstances, Hitler could have held down Italy as well as the Balkans in turmoil and still turned on the Soviet Union with Britain unconquered might be questioned. But the question remains purely in the realm of counter-factual speculation. In reality, the option to ditch Hitler in favour of the Allies never existed in 1940.\n\nThe second alternative was more plausible. This was simply to retain the status of non-belligerence, or neutrality. Those in Italy favouring non-intervention had, either explicitly or by default, this option in mind. Mussolini's rejection of it was, as we have seen, dictated by his ideological aims and his assumption that national 'virility' demanded that a would-be great power should fight and not remain neutral. Apart from Mussolini's psychological disposition and the aspirations to great-power status (which he shared with traditional imperialists in the national-conservative elite), could neutrality have been sustained? Franco managed it for Spain (even if neutrality had effectively been forced upon him when Hitler had proved unwilling to provide massive aid for a Spanish economy in ruins after three years of civil war). But Italy's geographical position, and her alliance with Germany, put her in a different position. One later assessment, though in a work sympathetic to Mussolini and arguing that Italy had no choice but to throw in her lot with Germany, stated that in the event of continued neutrality, she 'would sooner or later have been subjected to ever-increasing pressure by both sides'. In the end, her geographical situation would have brought an ultimatum from one side or the other to permit armed forces to be deployed in Italy. On refusal, Italy 'would have been invaded and devastated by the victors, whoever they were'.100 This was, however, no more than apologetics. At the time that Mussolini opted for war, his choice was not shaped by any sense that Italy would otherwise be at the mercy of Germany, let alone of Great Britain.\n\nA quite different, far more optimistic scenario was later painted by Churchill. 'It was certainly only common prudence for Mussolini to see how the war would go before committing himself and his country irrevocably,' Churchill wrote:\n\nThe process of waiting was by no means unprofitable. Italy was courted by both sides, and gained much consideration for her interests, many profitable contracts, and time to improve her armaments. Thus the twilight months had passed. It is an interesting speculation what the Italian fortunes would have been if this policy had been maintained...Peace, prosperity, and growing power would have been the prize of a persistent neutrality. Once Hitler was embroiled with Russia this happy state might have been almost indefinitely prolonged, with ever-growing benefits, and Mussolini might have stood forth in the peace or in the closing year of the war as the wisest statesman the sunny peninsula and its industrious and prolific people had known. This was a more agreeable situation than that which in fact awaited him.101\n\nNo one can, of course, know how a decision to defer entry to a date that could have become ever more distant would have played out in practice. But Ciano and others thought the prospect had a chance of success. That Italy would have come under pressure from both sides is obvious. This was already happening well before her entry into the war. As early as December 1939 Britain had tried to bribe Italy by an offer of most of the large supplies of coal that were so desperately needed. Italy would pay for the coal largely through the sale of arms. Ciano was well disposed towards the idea. But Mussolini would not sell arms to the British. He repeated his veto when a further attempt to buy Italian goodwill was tried some weeks later. That deal, too, foundered.102 Hitler lost little time in offering his own economic inducements. The vital coal, which the British blockade ensured could not reach Italy from Germany by sea, would be sent by rail across the Brenner.103 There is no doubt that such pressure and blandishments would have continued, and intensified, had Italy stayed out of the war. But, with clever diplomacy, Italy could have continued to play off each side against the other, retaining the advantages of neutrality, one-sided as it was, and avoiding being sucked into the maelstrom. By May 1940 Mussolini was being pressed for action from various sides in Germany.104 Even then he was not forced to enter the conflict; he did so willingly. Had Italy not entered the war, it is extremely unlikely that the Germans would have taken any punitive action. A benevolent neutrality in the summer and autumn of 1940 would probably have suited German purposes at least as well as Italian involvement\u2013in some senses better, as things turned out.105 And from an Italian point of view, there was\u2013apart from Mussolini's sense of urgency\u2013a lot to be said for playing for time. In the climate of May 1940, however, such arguments were lost. All factions of the ruling elite fell in behind Mussolini's dogmatic belligerency. The fateful decision to take Italy into a war against Britain and France for which she was so ill prepared was taken. A heavy price would be paid.\n\nIV\n\nItalian forces had barely stuttered into action by the time the new French premier, Marshal P\u00e9tain, sought an armistice from Hitler on 17 June. By then a few air raids, to little effect, on Corsica (in which Ciano took part as leader of a bomber squadron106), southern France and Malta and a minor, inconsequential Alpine offensive had constituted practically the sum total of the initial Italian war effort. The armistice plea had come too early, and the Italian engagement had been too puny, for Mussolini to be happy. 'The Duce is an extremist,' Ciano noted on 17 June. 'He would like to go so far as the total occupation of French territory and demands the surrender of the French fleet. But he is aware that his opinion has only a consultative value. The war has been won by Hitler without any active military participation on the part of Italy, and it is Hitler who will have the last word. This, naturally, disturbs and saddens him. His reflections on the Italian people and, above all, on our armed forces are extremely bitter this evening.'107\n\nMussolini's embarrassment at the minimal Italian contribution to France's humiliation did not prevent him, en route with Ciano to meet Hitler in Munich to discuss armistice terms, from concocting a formidable list of demands to be made of the French. These included occupation of France as far as the Rh\u00f4ne, together with French cession of Nice, Corsica, Tunisia and Djibouti. The French fleet and air force would also come into Italian possession. Hitler voiced no opposition to the occupation zone that Mussolini demanded. However, he wanted to treat the French leniently in order to prevent the French fleet going over to the British and the French government from transferring to north Africa, and also in the hope that it would persuade Britain to come to the negotiating table. And he was not prepared to include the Italians in the particular spectacle he had in mind for agreeing on an armistice. He insisted on Italy conducting a separate armistice, once the German terms had been settled. Mussolini was 'very much embarrassed', feeling 'that his role is secondary'.108\n\nWhen he saw the relatively moderate German armistice terms, Mussolini felt compelled to content himself with the more modest demand of a thirty-mile demilitarized strip within the French frontier and the hope of advancing his more extensive demands at the final peace settlement. His limited armistice demands had been influenced by further military humiliation. While the French were already prostrate and seeking an armistice of the Germans, Mussolini had decided to launch an Alpine offensive. Badoglio opposed it. Ciano thought it 'rather inglorious to fall upon a defeated army'. But Mussolini insisted. In dreadful weather conditions the Italian attack ground to an ignominious halt at the first show of French resistance. To add to the humiliation, Libyan colonial troops had been overrun by a British force in north Africa, and an Italian general had been captured.109 It was little wonder that, in contrast to the great symbolic significance that Hitler attached to the signing of the armistice at Compi\u00e9gne, in the very same railway coach that had been the scene of Germany's humiliating capitulation of 1918, Mussolini ordered no publicity for the Italian armistice negotiations, which were conducted 'almost secretly'. The separate Italian armistice with the French, concluded in Rome, was signed on 24 June.110 Mussolini was 'bitter because he had wanted to reach the armistice after a victory by our own armed forces'. Ciano was sure that the Italian people would be greatly disillusioned by the limited gains war had brought.111 Bottai indeed registered the popular criticism and sense of disappointment.112\n\nMussolini's thinking, and the war strategy that proceeded from such thoughts, in the weeks following the armistice with France was less than clear. On the one hand, he wanted a quick war together with the booty\u2013and glory\u2013that would follow on a triumphant peace settlement. The prospect of peace negotiations between Britain and Germany without Italy having seriously engaged in battle was not an attractive one for him. So when Britain made it clear that she was going to fight on, following Hitler's tepid encouragement to sue for peace in his Reichstag speech of 19 July 1940, Mussolini was, in a perverse way, not displeased. He had feared that the British would find even such a pallid invitation a pretext to open negotiations. 'That would be sad for Mussolini,' commented Ciano, 'because now more than ever he wants war.'113\n\nOn the other hand, Mussolini was well aware that Italy was in no fit state to fight a long war. So victory had to come quickly. With Britain determined to continue the war, despite unofficial peace-feelers through neutral channels that continued to give him cause for worry, Mussolini pinned his hopes on the German invasion that he had been told was imminent. He wanted Italian troops to take part alongside the Wehrmacht, but was politely though firmly rebuffed by Hitler. At this, while wanting the invasion to succeed, he hoped that the Germans would get a bloody nose in tough fighting and suffer perhaps a million casualties.114 With Britain and Germany both weakened, Italy would be in a prime position to maximize its booty. And this was to be considerable. Apart from the extensive gains from France, the territorial aims put together by Ciano included the acquisition of Malta and British Somaliland from Britain together with effective control over former British-controlled countries in the Middle East and north Africa (including Egypt), which would retain only nominal independence.115\n\nThe best way Italy could have inflicted her own serious damage upon Britain was, in fact, in north Africa, where the British military presence was still weak and the Italians were equal in armoury and superior in numbers. Badoglio still hoped that big gains could be made for little or no military effort. But Mussolini was anxious to accelerate the drive across 350 miles of desert from Libya to Alexandria, to force the British out of Egypt and take over Suez, before a peace settlement could be reached. With characteristic bravado, he told Hitler in July that he would be in Egypt before the end of the month.116 The enterprise was not helped when Marshal Balbo, who would have launched the attack from Libya, was shot down and killed when his own side opened fire on his plane near Tobruk at the end of June. His replacement, Graziani, then spent the rest of the summer finding excuses for not pressing home what turned out to be a short-lived advantage. In September, he advanced sixty miles into Egypt and took the fortified base at Sidi Barrani. But he showed no inclination to press on to Alexandria. Whatever Mussolini's urgings, Graziani would find a reason for inaction. Mussolini could do nothing about it. And, from a misplaced sense of pride and sensitivity to prestige, anxious to demonstrate that Italian troops could handle one front on their own, and at the same time equally anxious to keep the Germans out of his own sphere of activity, he declined Hitler's offer of troops to assist in the push for Egypt. Unwilling as on other occasions to affront his co-dictator, Hitler did not insist. The Axis war effort remained two uncoordinated strategies. Meanwhile, the British built up sizeable forces to face the Italians. The chance, possible with German aid, had been missed.117\n\nMussolini's other hope lay in the Balkans. He had temporarily seen prospective military action in this region as a mere sideshow while the main event was taking place in France. But now, egged on by Ciano, he again cast his eyes on what looked to be rich pickings across the Adriatic. And not just Yugoslavia, but now\u2013for the first time in earnest\u2013Greece entered the frame as a concrete object of Italian expansionism. By the autumn, the decision to attack Greece would become the most calamitous mistake Mussolini had made; calamitous for the Greeks, of course, but also calamitous for himself, for the Fascist regime and, in the futile loss of life it caused, for his country.\n\nEver since the Italian takeover in Albania in April 1939 the Greeks had looked towards Italy with a wary eye, and not without cause. Ciano had noted in his diary on 12 May that year that the new programme of public works in Albania had started well. 'The roads are all planned in such a way as to lead to the Greek border. This plan was ordered by the Duce, who is thinking more and more of attacking Greece at the first opportunity.'118 As the crisis mounted before the German invasion of Poland relations between Greece and Italy became tense. Italian troops were moved for a while to the border between Albania and Greece, while aircraft violated Greek airspace. On 16 August 1939 Badoglio had been given orders to prepare a plan to invade Greece. But nothing came of it. The tension subsided. On 11 September Mussolini told his representative in Athens, Emanuele Grazzi, that 'Greece does not lie on our path, and we want nothing from her'. Nine days later he was equally plain in speaking to General Alfredo Guzzoni, the military commander in Albania derided by Ciano for being 'small, with such a big belly, and dyed hair'. Mussolini informed him that 'war with Greece is off. Greece is a bare bone, and is not worth the loss of a single Sardinian grenadier.' Italian troops were pulled back to about twelve miles from the Greek border. The General Staff's invasion 'study' was consigned to the bottom drawer.119 All went quiet until Italy joined in the war in June 1940.\n\nWithin days of Italy's entry the temperature rose again amid rumours\u2013denied outright by Ioannis Metaxas, Greece's dull dictator, who looked more like a small-town mayor than a head of state, and who was ironically an admirer of Italy, where he had lived for some years\u2013that the British were abusing Greek neutrality and basing warships in Greece's waters. Ciano stirred the pot. He had outlined to Bottai some weeks earlier his vision of Italian dominance in the Balkans. It included the establishment of protectorates in Croatia and Greece (also taking in Crete), as well as a north African protectorate embracing Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and possession of Corsica.120 But Mussolini recognized that the realization of these grandiose plans would have to wait. The Germans, he knew, wanted no expansion of the war at this juncture.121 He had Grazzi tell Metaxas that Italian policy towards Greece was unchanged. Military contingency planning nevertheless continued to include action against Greece and Yugoslavia, as well as possible moves to secure the Ticino, the Italian-speaking enclave of Switzerland, if, as was rumoured, the Germans were soon to invade that country. It was little wonder that a frustrated Badoglio was heard to say: 'The enemy changes every day. I expect the order to attack Iraq!'122\n\nAs regards the Balkans, however, Yugoslavia rather than Greece remained the priority. Mussolini contemplated taking action in August. Hitler, when he met Ciano on 7 July, seemed to encourage Italy's aggressive intentions in that direction. But whatever Hitler had meant to imply, it was not an Italian invasion of Yugoslavia in the immediate future, which he judged likely to set the whole of the Balkans ablaze at a highly delicate moment, provoking Russian intervention. While Hitler conceded that the fate of Yugoslavia was Italy's to determine when the time was ripe, now was expressly not that time. But he repeated that 'everything concerning the Mediterranean, including the Adriatic, is a purely Italian matter, in which he does not intend to interfere' and also indicated his approval for Italian action to prevent the British gaining a foothold in the Greek islands.123\n\nItalian military plans for an assault on Yugoslavia continued throughout July despite Hitler's warning against precipitate action (which had not been passed on by Ciano to Mussolini in its full vigour).124 In early August Mussolini was still talking about an attack in the second half of September.125 A few days later, on 11 August, he ordered the foot-dragging Badoglio, who only a short time earlier had issued a directive stipulating that it was not the intention to take military action in the Balkans, to be ready to move by 20 September.126 That same day, Mussolini set his sights on Greece.\n\nCiano was the main instigator. He knew how angry Mussolini was about Graziani's tardiness in starting the offensive in north Africa. Graziani had just been in Rome and given Mussolini the impression that the attack on Egypt would start within a few days. He had told Ciano, however, that preparations were far from complete. Ciano's own impression was that the attack would not start for two or three months, if at all. He reported this to Mussolini, who was predictably livid.127 Adeptly spotting the moment, and shrewdly manipulating the Duce's psychology, Ciano seized the chance to press for an attack on Greece. Mussolini, as we have noted, already favoured moving against Yugoslavia. Ciano now persuaded him without difficulty that Greece, too, should be included in the plans for expansion in the Balkans. Deprived of the chance of glory in France, and now facing the prospect of delays in north Africa, Mussolini saw the attractions of an easy triumph over the Greeks, a nation he held in contempt.\n\nCiano, for his part, saw in the enterprise the potential to magnify his own power-base. Albania already served effectively as a personal fiefdom for him, run by his minion, Francesco Jacomoni. The prospect of enlargement of his domain, and of easy glory, beckoned. On 10 August Ciano stirred Mussolini's easily aroused antagonism towards Greece. Jacomoni had fed Ciano the story of the treacherous assassination by Greek agents of an Albanian freedom fighter, Daut Hodja, which was now relayed to Mussolini as an indication of Greek untrustworthiness. Hodja was in fact no more than a local bandit and cattle-thief, with a long history of extreme violence and criminality, who had been caught and beheaded by rival criminals\u2013Albanians, not Greeks\u2013two months earlier. But Mussolini needed no persuading. 'The Duce is considering an \"act of force, because since 1923 [the short-lived Corfu incident] he has some accounts to settle, and the Greeks deceive themselves if they think that he has forgotten\",' noted Ciano, following their meeting.128 Immediately, the Italian propaganda machine surged into action, eulogizing Hodja's patriotic virtues and castigating the treatment of Albanians by the Greek minority of the border area of Epirus, abutting Albania in northern Greece.129\n\nOn 11 August, the day after he had set Mussolini on the path to aggression against Greece, Ciano noted that the Duce wanted information on 'Ciamuria' (the contemporary Italian name for Epirus, derived from the Albanian word for the region). He had started agitation on the issue, and had called Jacomoni and General Count Sebastiano Visconti Prasca\u2013Guzzoni's incompetent successor as military commander of Albania, proud of his manly physique, though actually, with his monocle and dyed eyebrows, slightly eccentric in appearance130\u2013to Rome for discussions. Mussolini 'speaks of a surprise attack against Greece towards the end of September', Ciano recorded.131 Ciano was party to the discussions the next day. Mussolini laid down the guidelines for action against Greece. 'If Ciamuria and Corfu are yielded without striking a blow, we shall not ask for anything more. If, on the other hand, any resistance is attempted, we shall go to the limit,' the Duce declared. Jacomoni and Visconti Prasca thought the operation would be easy, and pressed for it to be undertaken immediately. Mussolini preferred to wait until the end of September.132\n\nThe German Foreign Ministry was, meanwhile, hearing from its representative in Athens, Prince Viktor zu Erbach-Sch\u00f6nberg, that Greece would resist all aggression and refuse to be humiliated by Italy, 'even if that involves the risk of being destroyed'. Popular feeling was running high against Italy.133 There would be strong support for resistance to Italian intervention. The conclusion was that 'if Italy believes that this is the right moment to realise its territorial claims in relation to Greece, it is mistaken'.134\n\nFor the Germans, keeping the lid on the simmering tensions in the Balkans was a high priority. Hitler had told Ciano on 20 July that he attached 'the greatest importance to the maintenance of peace in the Danube and Balkan regions'.135 Soviet interest in the Danube region had been pointedly indicated at the end of June with the annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina\u2013the former a region of Romania which had at one time been part of Tsarist Russia. Hungary, too, had acute border disputes with Romania. These were settled only in late August by German and Italian forced 'arbitration' which truncated large parts of Transylvania, awarding the lion's share to Hungary. The Germans were anxious to prevent disturbance in the region, both to retain their hold on oil from the Romanian oil wells in Ploesti, and to prevent further Soviet encroachment. Keeping the Russians (whose traditional sphere of defensive interests stretched as far as the Bosporus) and the British (guarantors of Greek independence since April 1939, seen as ready to exploit any upheaval in Greece and the Aegean) out of the Balkans was vital to the Germans. Impulsive Italian action against Yugoslavia could lead to Soviet intervention. Action against Greece could let in the British by the back door. By mid-August, therefore, the message was being diplomatically imparted from Berlin to Rome that Italian action in the Balkans was undesirable at this stage. 'Peace in the Balkans', as Hitler had told Ciano on 20 July in unmistakable terms, remained the outright priority. As he had made plain to the Italian Foreign Minister a few days earlier, the key Italian military aim had to remain Egypt and the Suez Canal.136\n\nRibbentrop repeated the need to keep the Balkans quiet when he met the Italian ambassador, Alfieri, on 16 August. It was crucial, the German Foreign Minister stated, to avoid action that would disturb the status quo there. The Russians should be given no pretext for intervention. The defeat of Britain was the absolute priority.137 Ciano noted the outcome of Ribbentrop's talks with Alfieri in his diary the following day. It was 'necessary to abandon any plan to attack Yugoslavia', and 'an eventual action against Greece is not at all welcome in Berlin'. He summed up: 'It is a complete order to halt all along the line.'138\n\nMussolini bowed to the pressure, though Ciano ensured that anti-Greek propaganda continued in the Italian press and three army divisions were put on stand-by for dispatch to Albania.139 Following a reassertion of German anxiety to avoid trouble in the region, stated in plain terms by Ribbentrop to Alfieri at a further meeting on 19 August, Mussolini gave orders three days later to slow down preparations for Yugoslavia and Greece. North Africa again had military priority\u2013though Mussolini continued to give out directives, quite incompatible with Italy's limited resources, for preparations in different possible theatres of war.140 Ciano recorded that 'the actions against Yugoslavia and Greece are indefinitely postponed'.141 In the case of Yugoslavia, this was accurate. The operation was effectively abandoned. Hopes had to rest on what Italy could gain in the eventual peace settlement, once Britain had been defeated. Greece, however, was a somewhat different matter. Ciano duly passed on to Jacomoni in Albania the orders from 'higher authorities' to 'slow down the pace of our moves against Greece'. He instructed him, nonetheless, to take the necessary steps to maintain 'in a state of potential efficiency all the dispositions made', avoiding crisis but 'keeping the question alive'.142 Military plans for an attack on Greece were also continued and refined.143\n\nBadoglio evidently thought, even so, that the planners were going through the motions. Word was passed from Supreme Command headquarters to the air force chief of staff, Francesco Pricolo, on 10 September that 'Greece is off'.144 Mussolini did not, however, see it like that. Though he had given up on Yugoslavia (which could only have been attacked with help from the north from Germany, if serious losses were to be avoided), he was not ready to discard the option to attack Greece as soon as it was feasible. This would be an Italian triumph without hanging on to German coat-tails. More than that: it would ensure that the Balkans did remain Italy's sphere of influence, heading off the possibility, starting to be rumoured, that despite all assurances the Germans intended to stamp their own imprint on the region.145 However, Mussolini's views changed with his moods. Consistency was not his strong point. On the last day of August, Quirino Armellini, Badoglio's deputy at Supreme Command headquarters, commented in his diary: 'Ciano wants war on Greece to enlarge the boundaries of his grand duchy; Badoglio sees how great a mistake it would be to set the Balkans alight (that is the German position) and wishes to avoid it; and the Duce agrees now with one and now with the other.'146 There, for an uneasy month of September, the matter rested.\n\nBy the time Ribbentrop visited Rome between 19 and 22 September, bringing a new 'surprise'147\u2013a military alliance with Japan which he wanted Italy to sign alongside Germany within the next few days\u2013the prospects of an imminent German invasion of England were fading.148 A long-drawn-out war seemed increasingly likely. Mussolini was not displeased. He still thought a rapid end would be 'catastrophic', as he told Badoglio on the day of Ribbentrop's departure.149 He was in a buoyant mood. He thought that, with the Germans bogged down in the conflict with Britain, Italy had a chance over the winter to advance through Egypt to Suez, without German aid, and destroy the basis of British strength in the Middle East. Badoglio was just as anxious to prevent the Germans from becoming involved in Italy's 'parallel war'. Ribbentrop had again indicated that Germany wanted no disturbance in the Balkans in the foreseeable future, though he once more acknowledged that Greece and Yugoslavia were a matter of exclusively Italian interest.150 Mussolini said he would not move against either for the time being, though he took the opportunity to remind Ribbentrop that in the Mediterranean Greece played much the same role in support for Britain as Norway had earlier done in the north.151\n\nCiano did his best to ensure that the question of Greece should not drop from sight. He was still impatient for action.152 He doctored the Italian version of the minutes of his meeting with Ribbentrop to ensure that they mentioned the necessity of proceeding to 'the liquidation of Greece'\u2013a phrase which did not appear in the German version.153 And he mentioned to the papal nuncio shortly afterwards that Italy soon, though not immediately, intended to occupy all of Greece because of the untrustworthiness of the Greeks.154 He seems to have had in mind a rapid military conquest at little cost to acquire Greece as a bargaining counter in a compromise peace settlement, the most likely outcome, he envisaged, of a deteriorating war situation.155\n\nMeanwhile, army contingency planning continued. But Badoglio reminded army staff in early October that there was no early likelihood of action.156 With priority given to north Africa, and more than half of the army in Italy demobilized to help with the harvest, the resources of manpower, limited in any case, were already stretched to the limit and would remain so over the winter.157 Plans for an attack on Greece were shelved.\n\nThey remained dormant during the first days of October. While Ciano had been in Berlin for the signing of the Tripartite Pact on 27 September, Hitler had suggested a meeting with Mussolini at the Brenner Pass. He wanted to review the overall situation in the war, and in particular the position in the Mediterranean, notably the question of Spanish intervention in the war and relations with France. The meeting took place on 4 October. Mussolini was in fine form. He had been in good humour for some days. He was anticipating 'that Italy could score in Egypt a success which affords her the glory she has sought in vain for three centuries' (though he was irritated with Badoglio, whom he blamed for holding back the offensive).158 The meeting went well. Mussolini received renewed German backing for Italy's territorial claims against France: Nice, Corsica, Tunis and Djibouti.159 He expressed his confidence in Italian success in Egypt. He had no need, he said, to avail himself of Hitler's offer of specialist forces for the attack.160 Mussolini returned to Rome in a sunny mood, irritated only by the sluggishness of Badoglio and Graziani over north Africa and voicing his detestation of the King, 'the only defeatist in the country'.161\n\nWithin days, however, an issue was to arise which would cast a dark shadow over Mussolini's sunny demeanour, and over relations between the Axis partners: the stationing of German troops in Romania. The Germans had engineered an 'invitation' from the new Romanian dictator, General Ion Antonescu, in early September to send a 'military mission' to his country. Crucial from the German point of view was the safeguarding of the Ploesti oilfields. By mid-September, before Ribbentrop visited Rome, the Italians had known of the plans to send German troops to the Ploesti area. Ribbentrop had expressly referred to them when he met Ciano on 19 September, but Ciano had evidently not passed on this important fact to Mussolini.162 The Ploesti oil was also vital to Italy. Moreover, Mussolini had always regarded the Danube as an area of specific Italian interests. So there was particular sensitivity on the issue; and also on the way Italy was handled by her Axis partner. The sensitivity exploded when Mussolini heard from press reports (which actually anticipated the event) that 15,000 German troops had arrived in Romania. For Mussolini this was a highly unwelcome reminder of the way Hitler had repeatedly informed him of significant German actions only after they had taken place.163 He was absolutely incensed. He immediately sought, in vain, to attain a similar 'invitation' to have Italian troops sent to the area. 'He is very angry,' Ciano remarked, 'because only German forces are present in the Romanian oil regions.'164 Ciano told Bottai that it was necessary 'for us to counterbalance their occupation of Romania by invading Greece'.165 Ribbentrop tried to placate Ciano by telephone on 10 October, and reminded him that he had spoken about the issue in Rome on 19 September. Ciano made no comment. The damage was done.166\n\nWithin two days Mussolini had taken the decision to attack Greece as soon as preparations could be made. On 12 October, on return to Rome from a few days in the north of the country inspecting Fascist organizations, he was angered by news of further delay before Graziani would begin the long-awaited offensive in north Africa. What he heard from Romania was guaranteed to make him even more irascible. German troops had begun arriving in Bucharest. Not only that: officials in Ribbentrop's ministry had high-handedly wanted to block any reportage of this in the Italian press; and Antonescu would probably only permit the stationing of Italian troops in Romania if the Germans agreed.167 Mussolini's fury boiled over. Incensed at the slight on his and his country's prestige, he was anxious to retaliate. 'Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli,' he fumed to Ciano. 'This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out from the papers that I have occupied Greece. In this way the equilibrium will be re-established.' Mussolini admitted that he had not yet reached agreement with Badoglio about military operations against Greece. 'But I shall send in my resignation as an Italian if anyone objects to our fighting the Greeks,' he added. 'The Duce seems determined to act now,' noted Ciano, delighted that what he had long advocated would at long last happen. The Foreign Minister thought the military operation would be 'useful and easy'.168\n\nIn this extreme fit of pique and wounded pride, the fateful decision to attack Greece was taken. Not just a sense of personal humiliation, but his standing among the Italian population propelled Mussolini to action. Up to now he had little more than the insignificant conquest in August of the barren outpost of British Somaliland to preen himself about to the Italian people as the spoils of war.169 He was concerned about the impact on public opinion in Italy of yet another German unilateral move. It would be seen as a further, and wounding, example of the inexorable subordination of Italy to the German juggernaut. A quick victory in Greece would restore the balance, boost his own prestige and bring, at last, a share of the spoils for Italy.170\n\nThe decision was taken, then, in an impulsive and arbitrary manner\u2013characteristic of Mussolini's personality and of his style of rule. But his fury over the stationing of German troops in Romania constituted the occasion, not the underlying reason, for invading Greece. It affected when, rather than whether, an assault would be launched. An attack on Greece had, as we have seen, long been part of Mussolini's longer-term plans for establishing Italian dominion in the Mediterranean and Balkan regions. Germany had repeatedly conceded that Greece was Italy's to determine. Equally, repeated warnings had been given that turmoil in the Balkans was to be avoided. The Italian military gleaned the impression that at the Brenner meeting Hitler had given Italy carte blanche in Greece.171 This was undoubtedly a misunderstanding. There is no reference to Greece in the official minutes, Italian or German, so if a hint to this effect was given, it must have been in private discussion between the dictators. Given the consistent German wish to maintain the uneasy status quo in the Balkans, it is inconceivable that Hitler was actually encouraging Mussolini to launch an attack on Greece. The cryptic reference can only denote some generalized concession, compatible with earlier similar statements, that Greece was seen on the German side as belonging to a future Italian dominium, not a target for immediate conquest.\n\nMussolini himself had until now not seen Greece as an urgent priority. North Africa had seemed the more important and strategically worthwhile theatre. In fact, for some days after reaching his decision to launch an attack on Greece without delay he had envisaged this taking place in tandem with the offensive in Egypt. Only on 16 October did he learn that the latter could not take place for another two months or so.172 Greece at this point, but only now, assumed outright priority.\n\nOn 13 October Mussolini informed Badoglio of the decision to attack Greece that he had unilaterally taken the previous day. He set the date for 26 October. Badoglio appears to have lodged no objection. The following day Mussolini told Badoglio and Roatta, the deputy chief of the army staff, that 'the operation against Greece will not limit itself to Ciamuria, but will take in the whole country, which in the long run may prove a nuisance'. He would give Hitler notice of the attack only at the last moment.173 The army's earlier contingency plans had only foreseen a limited conquest of Epirus, that is, of the northern parts of Greece. It was the first indication Roatta had been given that the earlier planning had been superseded.174 He pointed out that an offensive reaching to Salonika and Athens would require a far larger force than initially contemplated. Three months would be needed to have twenty divisions, the requisite number of troops, in place.175 The military chiefs were privately doubtful about the feasibility of the Greek operation before Graziani's advance into Egypt had been undertaken. But if Mussolini noted their doubts, he was not listening. Greece would not now wait.\n\nMussolini summoned a meeting of his military chiefs to take place next day, 15 October, at 11 o'clock in his study at the Palazzo Venezia 'to lay down\u2013in broad outline\u2013the course of action that I have decided to undertake against Greece'. Ciano, Badoglio, his deputy head of Supreme Command Ubaldo Soddu and Roatta, together with Jacomoni and Visconti Prasca, who had been ordered over from Albania, were present. Roatta arrived late. He had been informed of the meeting only a short while earlier by the Duce's private secretary. Remarkably, the chiefs of the naval and air staffs, Cavagnari and Pricolo, were not asked to attend.176 The meeting lasted only one and a half hours. It was one of the most superficial and dilettantish discussions of high-risk military strategy ever recorded.\n\nMussolini began by outlining the objectives of the operation: occupying the whole of the southern coast of Albania and the Ionian islands of Zante, Cephalonia and Corfu in a first phase, then the total occupation of Greece in a second phase to put her 'out of action'. This, he reckoned, would strengthen Italy's position in the Mediterranean in relation to Britain, and ensure that Greece remained 'within our politico-economic sphere'. He said he had decided the date, 26 October, which 'must not be postponed even by an hour'. This appears to have been the first time that Roatta heard the date.177 Yet only the previous day he had insisted that three months would be necessary to prepare for such a full-scale action.\n\nMussolini saw no complications arising from Yugoslavia or Turkey, and planned to make Bulgaria 'a pawn in our game' by offering her gains in Macedonia. He then turned to Jacomoni. The Governor of Albania asserted that the operation was impatiently awaited in his province. He pointed to possible supply difficulties if the port of Durazzo, the key unloading point, were to be bombed. The state of the roads, though much improved, could also cause problems. He relayed information that the Greeks would resist the action. The scale of resistance would depend upon the swiftness and decisiveness of Italian action. He raised the question of aid for Greece from Britain. A partial occupation might allow British air raids on southern Italy and Albania. Greek aircraft, however, posed no problems. Asked about the morale of the Greek population, he assessed their state of mind as 'profoundly depressed'.\n\nVisconti Prasca then commented on the military situation in Albania. He was highly optimistic. The first phase of the operation had been prepared 'down to the most minute details and is as perfect as is humanly possible'. He judged it would take only ten to fifteen days to occupy Epirus, well before the rainy season could set in to cause serious difficulties. The starting-date of the operation could be advanced, but not put back, the Duce interjected. Visconti Prasca was asked to comment on the morale of his troops. This was excellent, he stated. Around 70,000 men were ready, a superiority of two to one in the front line. As far as he was concerned, 'the Greek air force does not exist'. The only worry from the skies was from the possibility of aid from Britain. He did, however, allude to reservations about extending the advance to Salonika, given the time of year. This would take time. A couple of months would be required. The Duce insisted on the importance of preventing Salonika from becoming a British base. He asked Visconti Prasca about the morale of the Greek troops. 'They are not people who like fighting,' was the lapidary reply. He arranged to simulate an incident to serve as a provocation for the Greek attack. Mussolini advised him not to worry excessively about possible losses. Visconti Prasca replied that he had always ordered the battalions to attack, even against a division.\n\nAt this point, Badoglio took up the discussion. He thought the British would be preoccupied with Egypt and highly unlikely to attempt naval landings in Greece. The only possibility of British aid was from the air. Consequently, he favoured an operation against Greece to coincide with the advance on Mersa Matruh in Egypt, thus making it difficult for the British to spare aircraft to help the Greeks. Mussolini, still unaware that Graziani was about to postpone his advance, favoured the taking of Mersa Matruh even before the start of the Greek operation. Pushing on from there would make it even more difficult for the British to provide aid for Greece. And 'after the loss of the Egyptian key point, even if London were still able to carry on, the British Empire would be in a state of defeat', he added, with serene optimism. Badoglio approved of Visconti Prasca's operational plan for Epirus, but stopping there would not be enough. Crete and Morea would also need to be occupied, along with the whole of Greece. This, however, would require about twenty divisions (the figure Roatta had come up with the day before) and take three months.\n\nMussolini reckoned that the completion of the occupation of Epirus by 10\u201315 November would allow for a further month to bring in fresh forces needed for the remainder of the operation. He enquired how the march on Athens was envisaged, once Epirus was occupied. Visconti Prasca foresaw no great difficulties. Five or six divisions would suffice, he thought. Badoglio suggested the march on Athens should precede the taking of Salonika. Roatta agreed with Mussolini's suggestion that two divisions might be enough for that. Mussolini was satisfied that 'things are getting clearer'. Visconti Prasca enjoined that Greece would be cut in two from Athens, and Salonika could be attacked from the Greek capital. He did, however, in a response to a question from Mussolini, point out the difficulty of the terrain between Epirus and Athens: some 170 miles of poor roads over steep hills and a mountain chain where communications were reduced to passage over mule tracks. He thought three mountain divisions would be required. He imagined they could be dispatched to the port of Arta, a good distance down the Greek coast, in a single night.\n\nThe final part of the meeting was devoted to the question of using Albanian troops in the attack, and the deployment of anti-aircraft defence in Albania. By this stage, Mussolini adjudged that 'we have now examined all the aspects of the problem'. He summed up: 'Offensive in Epirus; observation and pressure on Salonika; and, as a second phase, the march on Athens.'178\n\nWhat passed for dictatorial decisiveness was in reality the merest veneer of half-baked assumptions, superficial observations, amateurish judgement and wholly uncritical assessment, all based upon the best-case scenario. After years of self-indoctrination, Mussolini was a firm believer in his own infallibility. Jacomoni and Visconti Prasca were prototypical creatures of the regime, capable only of pandering to Mussolini's assessments, wanting to profit from the opportunity of self-aggrandizement, anxious only to please by saying what the Duce wanted to hear. Ciano was largely silent. His preferences were plain. He was content to let his minions do the talking, assured that Mussolini was now pressing for what he himself had wanted all along. Soddu's silence amounted to his own backing for the operation. Badoglio and Roatta raised objections only in the most oblique fashion, pointing to the size and scale of the operation necessary to undertake the complete conquest of Greece, but otherwise providing no opposition even to the most speculative assumptions.179 Their own underestimation of the Greeks, as well as their lengthy attritional struggles over previous months with Mussolini's impulses in military matters whose complexity he did not remotely grasp, made them the more ready to bow to his imperative. So Mussolini got his way at the meeting without dissent. The decision that he alone had taken had now become an operational directive, with the full collaboration of his military chiefs.\n\nAs soon as the military leaders left the meeting, however, and started to give detailed consideration to the planning for an operation whose objectives had been rushed through so carelessly, serious doubts arose\u2013and rapidly multiplied. The landing at Arta, for example, was quite impossible, the naval chief, Cavagnari, asserted. The attack on Mersa Matruh that had been presumed to coincide with, or even precede, the Greek operation was now, they learned, to be postponed for at least two months. And the British, it was feared, would immediately establish bases in southern Greece, and be in a position to attack the Italian fleet at Taranto, on the heel of southern Italy. Badoglio raised these objections when he spoke to Ciano on 17 October. Badoglio's pessimism was evident. Equally gloomy were the views of the chiefs of staff who had 'unanimously pronounced themselves against' the operation.180 But\u2013deprived of his main logistical argument, the inaccessibility of the harbour at Arta, when it transpired that the Greeks had just dredged a deep-water channel enabling big ships to dock there\u2013Badoglio was pliant at his audience next day with an enraged Mussolini, who had learned of the reservations voiced. Mussolini had told Ciano he would be prepared to accept Badoglio's resignation. But Badoglio never offered it. He came away having achieved nothing, except a delay of two days for the start of the operation, rescheduled to begin on 28 October.181\n\nMilitary preparations now went ahead\u2013over-hastily and incoherently.182 Even the troop demobilization within Italy was not halted.183 The auguries for the campaign were not good. Transporting motorized troops to Albania could not be completed in time, it turned out, since the harbour at Durazzo was too cramped. The weather was also poor, and deteriorating, further hampering troop transports and turning Albania's roads into quagmires. King Boris of Bulgaria then, to Mussolini's disgust, refused to join in the attack. Finally, it had become clear that the balance of forces was much less favourable to Italy than Visconti Prasca had implied. Far from outnumbering the Greeks by two to one, the forces were fairly even, even before the Greek mobilization, with extensive reserves in hand, was complete. The commanders on the ground in Albania wanted discretion over the starting-date of the offensive, but Mussolini insisted that 28 October was immovable. Worry that Hitler, currently tied up in his talks with Franco and P\u00e9tain, might intervene to put a halt to the operation once he got wind of it was decisive in the timing.184\n\nWhatever their logistical concerns, neither the military leadership in Rome nor the commanders on the ground in Albania had any doubts that victory would be easy. The underestimation of the Greeks was general. Ciano talked of a 'walkover',185 Soddu later wrote of the commonplace expectation of a 'military parade'. The King himself thought the Greeks would crumble at the first assault.186 This type of presumption reinforced compliance with Mussolini's hurriedly devised imperative to destroy Greece. A rapid victory was vital. The Duce was anxious to avoid the British, perhaps the Turks too, becoming involved in any protracted struggle. He wanted, therefore, and expected, a devastating assault which would 'bring about a complete collapse within a few hours'.187 He was in excellent spirits as the attack began on 28 October.188\n\nHis co-dictator was, by contrast, less than delighted when he was given the news, en route back from his talks with Franco and P\u00e9tain, that Italy was about to attack Greece. Hitler was said to have been fuming, and greatly worried that the Italian action could set the whole of the Balkans alight and give the British the opportunity to install airbases in the region. He thought it was Mussolini's revenge for Norway and France.189 In fact, the Germans had received plenty of indirect warning from good sources in the previous days that action against Greece was imminent.190 Equally, they had been given outright denials by Italian military leaders that anything was afoot. They preferred to believe the denials. Hitler does not appear to have been alarmed before 25 October. Only on that day did a letter, composed six days earlier by Mussolini, reach him, cleverly couched but indicating that the Duce proposed to act on Greece very soon. Even then, the intelligence gleaned from Italy remained contradictory. A meeting with Mussolini, already instigated to discuss the dealings with the Spanish and French leaders just conducted by Hitler, was now brought forward. The dictators would meet in Florence on 28 October. When Hitler arrived for the meeting it was to be given the news, by a beaming Mussolini, that Italian troops had crossed the Greek border from Albania at dawn that morning.191\n\nSo Mussolini had achieved his own fait accompli. Later, reproaching Mussolini for his rashness when it was already plain that the Italian assault had misfired badly, Hitler said he had hoped in Florence to restrain the Duce from premature action in Greece, and certainly not from undertaking the operation without a prior occupation of Crete, for which he was prepared to provide military assistance.192 But when they had met in Florence, there were no reproaches. Hitler restrained himself. Whatever his private feelings, he could scarcely have anticipated the scale of the military disaster that Mussolini had invited. He offered German support for the operation and parachute divisions to occupy Crete (to head off British intervention).193 The rest of the meeting confined itself to a report on his meetings with P\u00e9tain, Laval and Franco. He was keen to assuage Mussolini about his dealings with Vichy France, which were not at all to the Italian dictator's liking.194 Greece was not again mentioned. But it soon would be.\n\nFar from being the expected military stroll in the park, the ill-planned and ill-coordinated attack on Greece rapidly proved an unmitigated military disaster. The advance took place in atrocious weather. Ceaseless, torrential rain and knee-deep mud bogged down the Italian tanks and heavy artillery. Streams were swollen by the autumn rains. Mountain tracks often proved impassable. Planes were grounded by thick mists. Heavy seas hampered naval operations. Shortages of equipment, fuel, ammunition and manpower soon became apparent. Poor training and leadership of the Italian troops also contributed significantly to the mounting debacle. But beyond this, the Greeks defended their country with bravery and tenacity, offering stiff resistance from the onset. Their knowledge of the local terrain was a great advantage, and they were better organized defensively than the Italians were in attack. Within little over a week the Italians were forced to halt their offensive in Epirus. By the time another week had passed they were being pushed back over the Albanian border by a Greek counter-attack. When the front stabilized, as any further advance ground to a halt in abysmal weather conditions, it was about thirty miles within Albania. Mussolini's casually brutal order that all Greek towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants be razed to the ground could not be implemented.195 Within six weeks, the would-be world power, Italy, had shown herself to be militarily weaker than the flyweight force of Greece. The Achilles heel of the Axis could not have been more plainly revealed.\n\nTo make matters worse, the Italian fleet, at anchor at Taranto in southern Italy, was severely damaged by a British torpedo attack in mid-November. Half of the Italian warships were put out of action. Fascist dreams of empire sank along with them. With this one stroke, the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean was decisively altered.196 And by early December Graziani, his offensive in Libya still stalled and told by Mussolini that Greece now had priority, suffered the first of a number of devastating assaults in the beginning of a British offensive in north Africa. Italian forces were driven out of Egypt by mid-December. In the new year the retreat turned into a full-scale rout. By the end of January 1941 the British had advanced over 200 miles of desert, capturing 113,000 Italian prisoners and over 700 pieces of artillery. Following this, as Churchill later wrote, 'the great Italian army which had invaded and hoped to conquer Egypt scarcely existed as a military force'.197 Here was a major consequence of the decision to invade Greece. What should have been the vital military effort, the push through Egypt to Suez against still weak British forces, had been completely undermined by the unnecessary Greek adventure, a blunder of the first order, with calamitous costs.\n\nIn December Badoglio, made the scapegoat for the debacle in Greece, had been sacked. The military leaders, not just Badoglio, were resentful of the blame passed to them by Mussolini for a catastrophe that he had personally instigated. Mussolini's own prestige was now affected, too, as his popularity fell with the sinking morale at home, worsening living standards and military setbacks. Ciano, well known to have been a leading promoter of the attack on Greece, became the target of much opprobrium, some, no doubt, really directed at his father-in-law. The first cracks\u2013though as yet they posed no direct danger to Mussolini\u2013were also beginning to show in the Fascist leadership, as old party potentates sought to distance themselves from the disasters and jockey for position.\n\nThe decision to invade Greece swiftly proved a massive self-inflicted wound. The military situation could, as events rapidly showed, only be remedied by German help, precisely what Mussolini had wanted to avoid. From Hitler's point of view, Greece was a sideshow. He had far bigger fish to fry. Molotov's visit to Berlin in mid-November had concentrated his mind on the need to go ahead with the attack on the Soviet Union the following spring. By mid-December, what came to be known as 'Operation Barbarossa' was enshrined as a military directive. Greece was an unwelcome diversion. Hitler had wanted the Balkans to remain quiet, but he could not ignore the threat now posed, thanks to Mussolini's inopportune adventure, of a threatening British military presence at a vulnerable point. Continued Italian gross incompetence and intensified British involvement compelled German military planners to pay close attention to operations in Greece.198 By the end of that November contingency plans had been worked out for the occupation of Greece, though Hitler had informed Ciano that Germany could not intervene before spring.199 When Hitler eventually decided, in March 1941, that a major operation would be necessary to evict the British from the whole of the Greek mainland, the German manpower involved was greater than initially imagined and could only be provided at the expense of the force intended to take care of the southern flank of 'Barbarossa'.200 The Germans had not envisaged such costly involvement in Greece. The Italians had not wanted them there in the first place. But this was what Mussolini's Balkan adventure had produced: a calamity for Italy, but wider consequences that had a bearing on the course of the war.\n\nV\n\nLooking back near the end of the war, as Germany's inevitable and impending defeat loomed ever closer, Hitler attributed great blame to Mussolini's Greek fiasco as the cause of his own subsequent catastrophe. 'But for the difficulties created for us by the Italians and their idiotic campaign in Greece,' he reportedly commented in mid-February 1945, 'I should have attacked Russia a few weeks earlier.' He believed that the delay in launching 'Barbarossa' had cost him victory in the Soviet Union. A few days later, along similar lines, he lamented that the 'pointless campaign in Greece', launched without warning to Germany of Italian intentions, 'compelled us, contrary to all our plans, to intervene in the Balkans, and that in its turn led to a catastrophic delay in the launching of our attack on Russia. We were compelled to expend some of our best divisions there. And as a net result we were then forced to occupy vast territories in which, but for this stupid show, the presence of any of our troops would have been quite unnecessary.' 'We have no luck with the Latin races,' he bemoaned shortly afterwards. The one friend among the Latins, Mussolini, took advantage of his preoccupation with Spain and France 'to set in motion his disastrous campaign against Greece'.201\n\nAs an explanation of Germany's calamitous defeat in the Soviet Union this had little to commend it.202 The five-week delay in launching 'Barbarossa' was not in itself decisive. Probably, given the unusually wet weather conditions, a launch before mid-June would not have been feasible anyway. The reasons for the failure of 'Barbarossa' lay in the hubristic nature of the German war plans\u2013as megalomaniac as they were barbaric\u2013and in the planning flaws and resource limitations that bedevilled the operation from the start. The German descent on Greece in spring 1941, necessitated by the Italian shambles, did cause heavy wear and tear on tanks and other vehicles needed for 'Barbarossa', and also, as we have noted, reduced the forces on the southern flank of the assault. But, although the diversion of German resources into Greece just prior to the attack on the Soviet Union scarcely helped the latter enterprise, Mussolini's foolishness did not undermine 'Barbarossa' before the operation started. It nevertheless had the most serious consequences for the Axis war effort in north Africa.\n\nIn the autumn of 1940 this should have been the pivotal theatre. Italy's position prior to launching a north African offensive would indeed have been far stronger had Tunis and above all Malta been taken after she had entered the war.203 The preparations for such steps had never been taken. Even so, the Italians still had numerical superiority over the British in the region, though this was rapidly to alter. Graziani deferred his advance repeatedly, aware that Italian strength was insufficient to mount the major offensive through Egypt that Mussolini was constantly urging and expecting. The Germans saw the importance of the sector and offered troops and equipment. The Italian military Supreme Command wanted to take advantage of the offer. It could have made the difference. But Mussolini refused.204 He was keen to keep the Germans at bay in what he saw as an Italian war theatre. Beyond that, from October onwards vital manpower and resources were directed, not at north Africa, but at Greece. Between October 1940 and May 1941, five times as many men, one and a third times as much mat\u00e9riel, three and a half times as many merchant ships and more than twice as many escort vessels were deployed on the Greek operation as in north Africa.205 The consequences of this diversion of resources, once the British offensive began in December, soon became all too evident.\n\nThe implications were, in fact, immediately recognized by German strategists. The naval staff's operational planners summed up the position already by 14 November 1940, little over a fortnight into the Greek debacle: 'Conditions for the Italian Libyan offensive against Egypt have deteriorated. The Naval Staff is of the opinion that Italy will never carry out the Egyptian offensive'\u2013even though this of course, far more obviously than an attack on Greece, had the potential to inflict serious damage on the British war effort, particularly if the Axis could have taken possession of the Suez area. The assessment continued:\n\nThe Italian offensive against Greece is decidedly a serious strategic blunder; in view of the anticipated British counteractions it may have an adverse effect on further developments in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the African area, and thus on all future warfare...The Naval Staff is convinced that the result of the offensive against the Alexandria\u2013Suez area and the development of the situation in the Mediterranean, with their effects on the African and Middle Eastern areas, is of decisive importance for the outcome of the war...The Italian armed forces have neither the leadership nor the military efficiency to carry the required operations in the Mediterranean area to a successful conclusion with the necessary speed and decision. A successful attack against Egypt by the Italians alone can also scarcely be expected now.206\n\nBy mid-December it was a case not of the long-awaited offensive against Egypt, but of repairing the fall-out from the disastrous Italian collapse. Despite Rommel's subsequent heroics in the desert campaign, with limited resources, the Italian failure and the alternative priorities for the deployment of German manpower and mat\u00e9riel meant that the crucial north African theatre was increasingly exposed to Allied might. To this unhappy state of affairs (from an Axis viewpoint), Mussolini's decision to invade Greece at the end of October 1940 had made a major contribution.\n\nThe most direct consequences of Mussolini's fateful move were felt by Greece and Italy. The immediate casualties of the conflict unleashed by the Fascist dictator on 28 October numbered around 150,000 on the Italian side and 90,000 Greeks.207 For the Greeks, however, this was only the beginning of the misery. Three and a half years of occupation followed the German invasion of April 1941. Beyond the repression of the conquerors, hyperinflation and malnutrition took a high toll. Around a hundred thousand people died of famine during the winter of 1941\u20132. Only a small fraction of Greece's Jews survived Nazi round-ups and deportation to the death camps. Even liberation, in October 1944, brought no end to Greece's suffering. The bitter aftermath of deep and intractable internal divisions that emerged during the occupation and surfaced fully after liberation was the country's fierce civil war, which flared up in 1946 and lasted until 1949.208\n\nFor Italy, the ill-fated invasion of Greece (with the attendant disasters of the sinking of the fleet at Taranto and the ignominious collapse in north Africa) signalled the end of great-power pretensions once and for all. The idea of a 'parallel war' to build Italy's own imperium had been revealed as a chimera. Mussolini had, of course, been the chief ideologue as well as the political leader driving along this cause, but he had been able to build upon, and exploit, long-standing continuities in Italian ambitions to become a genuine great power. For although they were often anxious about the consequences of expansion and armed conflict, and voiced well-founded strategic and tactical reservations, the Italian establishment right up to the King had no principled objections to war in pursuit of empire and national grandeur. If Mussolini could have delivered a successful war, he would have encountered little opposition.\n\nSince the mid-1930s Italy had increasingly been pulled along in Germany's wake. The impulsively devised attack on Greece, to pay Hitler back in his own coin for Romania and for earlier perceived insults when Italy had been condescendingly treated as a junior partner, was meant to wrest back the pride of independent action. Instead, it dragged Italy far deeper into humiliating subservience to Hitler's Germany. The fact that Hitler, as a sop to Mussolini's prestige, allowed the Italians to be a party to the Greek surrender, on 23 April 1941, that German arms had forced, could not hide the scale of Italy's degradation.209 The cracks in the edifice of Italian Fascism now rapidly started to widen. The disastrous invasion of Greece had 'put Mussolini at odds with his armed forces, shattered the fragile unity of the fascist hierarchy, disillusioned the Italian public and alienated the Italians from their German allies'.210 By 1943 the cracks were chasmic. The road to Mussolini's deposition in July that year, instigated by the Fascist Grand Council that he himself had set up, now ran straight. The last, bloody phase of the war, with a restored Mussolini as a German puppet heading the savagely repressive Sal\u00f3 Republic as the Wehrmacht fought ferociously to hold on to the occupied northern part of Italy and fend off the advancing Allied armies pushing up from the south, was a terrible finale to the drama. The overture had been in two parts: the decision to intervene in the war in June 1940; then the decision to attack Greece in October 1940.\n\nJust as intervention in the war had been a foregone conclusion for Mussolini, so was the attack on Greece. He had been long set on making Greece a part of Italy's expanding Mediterranean Roman Empire. If he had not attacked in late October 1940, he would probably have done so at the first opportunity that circumstances provided, possibly in spring 1941.211 Even so, the decision he took in autumn 1940 amounted to a fateful choice, where options were available. Supine and irresolute though they were, Mussolini's military advisers did express unease at the logistical implications of an invasion at such short notice and at that time of year. The timing was not propitious, even as seen by Italian military leaders. The Germans were, as we have noted, aghast at what Mussolini had done. The attack, even if still intended for a later date, could, therefore, have been postponed. Given what happened in north Africa by the end of the year, had it been postponed it might never have taken place at all. And with Greece still independent and neutral, the British, their hands full in north Africa, might have refrained from an intervention that could only be seen as a threat by the Germans, not least to the Romanian oilfields. Greece might then have escaped German subjugation and occupation. The war in the Mediterranean could, therefore, have taken a completely different turn, had not Mussolini invaded Greece when he did.\n\nMussolini obviously carries prime responsibility for the attack on Greece. He, after all, took the decision, alone, and without consultation, even of his own Fascist Grand Council. And he overrode the objections of Badoglio and the chiefs of staff. On 10 November, when the magnitude of the disaster was already beginning to unfold, Badoglio confronted Mussolini with his responsibility. He referred to the meeting on 15 October. 'As a result of the statements of Ciano and Visconti Prasca,' he declared, 'you decided to attack on 26 October, a date which was subsequently changed to 28 October. We tried to make all possible preparations during this time. I have reviewed these facts to show that neither the general staff nor the army staff had anything to do with the plans that were adopted, which were entirely contrary to our method of procedure. This method is based on the principle of thorough preparation before action is taken.'212 It was a bold\u2013but partly disingenuous\u2013statement from a man aware that he would soon be made the scapegoat for the Duce's impetuosity. For Badoglio had been less outspoken when the decision was taken. He had not repeated to Mussolini the stringent objections he had voiced to Ciano.213 The objections of the military chiefs had, in any case, been logistical rather than fundamental. These did not oppose an attack on Greece. They merely had worries about inadequate preparation. Ciano, and his inept henchmen in Albania, Jacomoni and Visconti Prasca, had not even shared these concerns. They had wholeheartedly backed the invasion. Ciano, as we have noted, had been the main proponent of an attack for months. And the underestimation of the Greeks had been as good as unanimous\u2013even stretching to the King.\n\nWhile the main responsibility for the Greek debacle fairly lies with Mussolini, therefore, the dictator cannot be seen to carry the sole blame. Churchill's pronouncement in December 1940 that 'one man and one man alone' had brought Italy 'to the horrid verge of ruin' was wartime rhetoric, not reasoned analysis.214 Other sectors of the power-elite in the Fascist regime were at the very least complicit in the decision. Fascist rule had, after all, over many years developed a system that not only elevated the leader to a cult-figure, but had placed decision-making entirely in his hands, abnegating all responsibility for decisions at any lower level.215 The politically corrupt system, as in the parallel instance of Nazi Germany, had at the same time rewarded subservience, servility, obsequiousness and sycophancy. Beyond that, all forms of political organization had been reduced to no more than a fa\u00e7ade: representative bodies solely in outward appearance, but in reality no more than vehicles of propaganda and acclamation of the leader. Organized opposition, in a system that ran on the basis of divide and rule, career advance and material gratification at the dictator's favour, was, therefore, as good as impossible to construct. The dictator had been told, repeatedly, that he was infallible; and he believed the blandishments. Others accepted, whether fawningly or cynically, the rules of the political game. When things worked out well, as they had done in 1936 with a cheap victory over a feeble enemy, they were happy to rejoice and take their share of the triumph. When things went badly, as they did in 1940 and thereafter, they sought to hide their share of the responsibility.\n\nThey could do so only to themselves. The imbecility of Mussolini's decision reflected the dictator's severe personal shortcomings. But it was also the imbecility of a political system.\n\n## 5\n\n## Washington, DC, Summer 1940\u2013Spring 1941\n\nRoosevelt Decides to Lend a Hand\n\nWe will say to England, we will give you the guns and the ships that you need, provided that when the war is over you will return to us in kind the guns and the ships that we have loaned to you...What do you think of it?\n\nPresident Roosevelt, 17 December 1940\n\nWithout a lead on his part it was useless to expect the people would voluntarily take the initiative in letting him know whether or not they would follow him if he did take the lead.\n\nHenry Stimson, Secretary of War, 22 April 1941\n\nSpeaking in Boston on 30 October 1940, during his campaign for election to an unprecedented third term in office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made a pledge to his audience. 'And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers,' the President stated, 'I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.'1 It was seen as the most explicit commitment to American neutrality; to keeping the United States out of the war that gripped Europe and threatened a German defeat of Great Britain.\n\nRoosevelt was telling those listening what they wanted to hear. At the end of September, 83 per cent of those asked in a public opinion survey had favoured staying out of the war against Germany and Italy.2 Helping the British, whose backs had certainly been to the wall since the catastrophic defeat of the Allies at the hands of the Wehrmacht in May and June, by taking measures that fell short of entering the war was another matter altogether. But only 34.2 per cent of Americans in August 1940 supported doing more to help Britain fight Germany.3\n\nThe British war effort, that desperate summer, had gained vital sustenance from the hope that America would soon join the war against Hitler's Germany. Winston Churchill was desperately impatient for the United States to leave neutrality behind and actively back Britain's cause. His entire strategic hopes rested upon the presumption of American entry into the war at some point. Some members of Roosevelt's own Cabinet, too, were pushing the President for a more interventionist approach. At this stage, in autumn 1940, no one was advocating sending an American expeditionary force to fight in Europe, but there were other steps, short of full engagement, that would entail active intervention. With British shipping already threatened by German U-boats, Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, told the President and the Cabinet in December 1940 that 'we ought to forcibly stop the German submarines by our intervention'. Nothing came of it. The President replied that 'he hadn't quite reached that yet'.4 Nor would he do so for some months.\n\nTo Churchill, across the Atlantic, and for the rest of the British government the President's hesitancy was a deep concern (though this was never expressed publicly). It was a worry, too, for those in his administration\u2013and Stimson was not alone in this\u2013who were coming to favour a more robustly interventionist approach. Roosevelt often sounded encouraging, but then his innate caution would prevail once again, leaving them frustrated. Yet to many within the United States, Roosevelt was going much too far. To these, he appeared to be a warmonger, intent upon dragging the country into a faraway conflict. The isolationist lobby, its chief geographical base of support located in the Midwest, and its political roots mainly but not entirely among Roosevelt's political opponents in the Republican Party, was by this time representing no more than a sizeable minority of opinion. But it was an extremely vocal minority, and usually able to make common cause with a far wider swathe of opinion that was not outrightly isolationist, but was at the same time intensely worried about embarking upon a slippery path that would end up in war.\n\nRoosevelt was acutely aware of the tightrope he was treading. On the one hand he was anxious to ensure that he retained the backing of public opinion, and more directly the support of the United States Congress. This demanded a strategy of caution. But he appeared to those around him too often ready to follow, rather than lead, opinion in the country. Where he did lead, it was usually to cajole more than to direct. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's closest adviser, reportedly thought in May 1941 that 'the President is loath to get into this war, and he would rather follow public opinion than lead it'.5 Stimson had put the same point in characteristically forthright terms to the President the previous month: 'without a lead on his part it was useless to expect the people would voluntarily take the initiative in letting him know whether or not they would follow him if he did take the lead.'6\n\nOn the other hand, in full recognition of the danger Germany posed to the United States, Roosevelt sought to pursue, with the self-interest of upholding America's national security as a legitimate priority, a policy that supported Britain in increasingly direct fashion. This, however, ran the obvious risk of embroiling an unwilling country in precisely the 'foreign war' he had vowed to keep out of. This was the intense dilemma that faced the President from summer 1940 onwards.\n\nAt the start of that summer, Great Britain stood alone in Europe against the Nazi menace, and greatly imperilled, with the danger of imminent invasion. Of course, she had the backing of her world Empire and Dominions. They could, however, have provided little practical help in the event of a German landing. To many Americans, Britain seemed as good as lost.\n\nOne option for Roosevelt would have been to side with the isolationist lobby, which contended that, with German dominance over the European continent (including Britain) as good as certain for the indefinite future, American interest lay in upholding the strictest neutrality, refraining from any involvement whatsoever in the conflict engulfing faraway nations, and exclusively looking after the concerns of the United States. Given the reluctance witnessed in opinion polls to see America involved in the war, isolationism, had Roosevelt thrown the formidable weight of his political skills and rhetoric behind it, still retained the potential to become far more popular than it was in reality.\n\nAnother option would have been to adopt the advice of some members of his administration to take steps which would have committed the United States to a much greater involvement in the European war, perhaps even to the point of joining it. This would, of course, have been to court serious difficulties with public opinion, and the problems in navigating the necessary legislation through the political rapids of the Congress would have been formidable indeed. In any case, the scale of American military preparedness for a major war in summer 1940 was so limited that any overt form of belligerency, even accepting the political risks, would have been highly restricted in practical terms. But, again, had Roosevelt, a profoundly experienced and skilful politician as well as a highly gifted rhetorician, chosen to do so, it is far from inconceivable that he would not have won over the country to a far more interventionist position. He was not prepared to put it to the test.\n\nFears were still widespread as late as May 1941 that Germany could soon mount the attack on Britain that had not materialized the previous year. These fears only vanished when Hitler turned eastwards, with the attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. By that point, Roosevelt was well embarked upon a course of action that precluded any lingering possibility of adopting the option of keeping the United States detached from the war in Europe. By the end of spring 1941, though the United States was still months away from direct participation in the war, the Roosevelt administration had taken important steps both in Europe and, increasingly, in the Far East too, that had made it impossible to extricate the country from the spreading conflict. The options had narrowed.\n\nRoosevelt's choice over the previous months had in fact proved to be an extremely cautious path between neutrality and belligerency, one of assistance to Britain through all 'methods short of war' (a phrase coined in January 1939 by the President himself).7 In summer 1939, Roosevelt had reportedly laid out his options. He thought there were four: 'A, we can go to war at once, sending an expeditionary force abroad, but that's out, of course. B, we can let ourselves be forced in later. C, we can go to war, now or later, but furnish only war supplies and naval and air aid to our allies. And D, we can stay out, following my policy of methods short of war to aid the democracies. And that'\u2013meaning the last of these\u2013'is what we shall do.'8 This policy, which the President stuck to, edged, rather than swept, the United States towards involvement in the war. Even so, the steps he did authorize were irreversible. And of these, the most singular, and most important, was the decision\u2013an initiative of the President himself\u2013to open up America's vast material resources to Britain's struggling war effort at no direct financial cost. With the passing of the Lend-Lease bill in March 1941, after three months of intensive debate, the isolationists had lost their last great fight.9 To be sure, the United States was not yet in the war, and little aid could flow straight away. But America was now bound up in a most tangible fashion with Great Britain, a belligerent already engaged in the fight against Hitler in Europe, and a main adversary in the intensified threat posed by Japan in the Far East. The decision to commit American resources to the British war effort was for the immediate future of largely symbolic importance, but it would become over time the key to Britain's continuing capacity to fight Hitler. Its significance was, therefore, immense.\n\nAnd yet, despite his unstinting public praise and gratitude for this 'most unsordid act in the history of any nation',10 Churchill remained frustrated, anxious and at times bleakly pessimistic at Roosevelt's hesitancy, caution and unwillingness to commit the United States to intervention in the war.11 When he met the President for the first time since the conflict had begun, in August 1941, the British Prime Minister told him: 'I would rather have an American declaration of war now and no supplies for six months than double the supplies and no declaration.'12 Some in Roosevelt's Cabinet felt almost equally frustrated. The period preceding the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 has been labelled 'a year of indecision'.13 It often indeed seemed in those months that Roosevelt's main decision was to avoid having to decide at all.\n\nI\n\nRoosevelt had taken office, on 4 March 1933, amid a full-blown banking crisis and with around a quarter of the workforce\u2013some thirteen or so million Americans\u2013unemployed. His first term was almost completely taken up with an array of often contentious legislative measures that comprised the 'New Deal', the programme of national recovery to rebuild the shattered economy and restore confidence.14 Much of his energy was consumed in the ensuing internal political struggles.15 The President's own popularity remained high. He was re-elected in 1936 in a landslide victory. His hold over Congress, however, weakened, especially after elections in November 1938 had bolstered the opposition.16 And this was at a time when events abroad had started to dominate his second term in office.\n\nThe isolationism that had taken hold in America since the end of the First World War\u2013building on long traditions\u2013had, in fact, become still further engrained during Roosevelt's first term. The impact of involvement in the European war in 1917\u201318 on American society had been profound. Fifty thousand American soldiers had lost their lives in a conflict which, to many United States citizens, had not been their country's concern at all. Most Americans felt this must on no account ever be allowed to happen again. Experiences of the horror of the trenches mingled with resentment at what was widely perceived as European ingratitude when America insisted upon repayment of war loans.17 There was also a widespread feeling, encouraged by anti-war literature and some histories of what Americans called 'the European War', then later backed by the report of a Senate committee investigating the munitions industry, that America had been inveigled into involvement by foreign financiers, bankers and arms manufacturers who stood to profit from an Allied victory.18\n\nThe United States had chosen to keep largely aloof from European affairs, rejecting membership of the League of Nations. Certainly, American initiative was crucial in providing plans in 1924, then again five years later, to try to resolve the gnawing problem of German reparations payments, an issue of the most bitter resentment in Germany. And in 1932, the United States joined the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, belatedly (and vainly) attempting to turn another of President Woodrow Wilson's principles for a peaceful postwar world into reality, though long after any genuine hope of doing so had evaporated. But there was little else. Behind a wall of protective tariffs, and an economic boom symbolized by the explosion of automobile production, most Americans were content to ignore the outer world and keep Europe from their minds.\n\nWhen, with Hitler in power, German assertiveness again started to manifest itself, and across the world Japanese imperialism sounded shrill, dissonant tones, a widespread American sentiment, whether from noble if illusory pacifistic leanings or from national unilateralist tendencies, was to retreat still further into isolationism. 'Let us turn our eyes inward,' advocated the Governor of Pennsylvania, George Earle, a liberal Democrat, in 1935. 'If the world is to become a wilderness of waste, hatred, and bitterness, let us all the more earnestly protect and preserve our own oasis of liberty.'19 A reflection of prevailing attitudes was the Johnson Act, named after the progressive Republican Hiram Johnson and passed in 1934 to forbid the granting of credits to countries that had defaulted on their war debts to the United States.20 Then in 1935, to the backcloth of open and large-scale German remilitarization and bullying Italian threats towards Abyssinia, Roosevelt opened the door to legislation that would ensure American neutrality in any future war. The key feature was an arms embargo on the provision of armaments to all belligerents in a war 'between, or among, two or more foreign states', irrespective of American sympathies. Roosevelt, the State Department even more so, would have preferred powers to impose a discretionary arms embargo, discriminating against aggressors. But the President professed himself satisfied with the Neutrality Act, which he signed on 31 August 1935.21\n\nThe neutrality legislation\u2013renewals and amendments meant that there were five neutrality laws between 1935 and 193722\u2013was designed to prevent any recurrence of the circumstances that had led to American intervention in the First World War. Together with the Johnson Act, the Neutrality Act would later pose obstacles to Roosevelt's attempts to help Britain while steering clear of involvement in a second European war. Meanwhile, of course, it did nothing to hinder aggression by the European powers. Oil, not among the list of embargoed 'implements of war', was still shipped to Mussolini (in fact, in increased quantities), when the Italian dictator unleashed his bombers against Ethiopian tribesmen in 1935.23 But then America could point to the Europeans themselves who, divided and inept in their response to the Abyssinian crisis, failed to impose an oil embargo on Italy.\n\nWhen in March 1936 Hitler took advantage of the disarray among the western democracies to remilitarize the Rhineland, Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, rejected the French plea for an American condemnation of the action on moral grounds.24 It was a perverse application of neutrality, an unnecessary endorsement by silence of Hitler's breach of the Versailles and Locarno treaties, the basis of the postwar settlement. But then, the British and the French had themselves simply stood by and let it happen.\n\nAnd when Italy and Germany provided military support for a rebel army, backed by Fascist sympathizers, aiming to overthrow Spain's struggling democracy, the arms embargo in the Neutrality Acts was extended to both sides of the conflict, though in a civil, not an international war. Again, in parallel to the supine non-interventionism of the European democracies, what this did was effectively to deny arms to the Republican defenders of democracy while allowing the assailants to be supported by Fascist arms from Italy and Germany. However, the Spanish Civil War was far away, without much resonance at home. True, a minority in the United States\u2013mainly Catholics and the Left\u2013were activated (along different lines in the conflict) by the crisis in Spain.25 But two-thirds of Americans, in January 1937, had no opinion about events in Spain that were sounding the death knell of a sister democracy.26\n\nUntil the later 1930s, Roosevelt had shown little inclination to demur from the prevalent isolationist and pacifist tendencies in the United States. He had witnessed the horrors of the western front at first hand during a visit in 1918, and the experience had left a lasting revulsion.27 'I hate war,' he had said in a celebrated phrase of an election address in 1936.28 It struck a popular chord. 'We are not isolationist,' he stated, 'except insofar as we attempt to isolate ourselves completely from war.' He told the American people that preserving peace would depend upon the day-to-day decisions of the President and the Secretary of State. 'We can keep out of war,' he declared, 'if those who watch and desire have a sufficiently detailed understanding of international affairs to make certain that the small decisions of today do not lead toward war and if at the same time they possess the courage to say no to those who selfishly or unwisely would lead us to war.'29 Campaign advisers told the President that his opposition to a possible war was the most effective issue in his return to the White House that year.30\n\nThe rhetoric was easy. Events in Europe seemed far away and of little direct relevance to most Americans, preoccupied with making ends meet and coping with the travails of daily life as the country struggled along the path of economic recovery. The Atlantic appeared to pose a large enough cushion to protect Americans from the dangers again threatening the incorrigibly warlike continent of Europe. But they wanted to take no chances. Seven out of ten Americans believed in autumn 1937 that Congress should have the approval of the population in a referendum before issuing a declaration of war. A constitutional amendment to that effect, tying the President down, not just to a decision of Congress, but to the result of a popular referendum, was only narrowly defeated in the House of Representatives.31\n\nWhile talking peace, Roosevelt, engrossed by domestic issues, did little to prepare America either psychologically or materially for the unpleasant prospect of engagement in troubles ahead, in Europe or in east Asia, which might in reality, whatever the good intentions, prove impossible to avoid. A minimal amount was done over the next years to rearm the American navy and as good as nothing to build up the army. In fact, one of Roosevelt's first measures to cut the budget after his inauguration in 1933 had been to reduce the size of the army, already minuscule at only 140,000 men.32 The President cherished ideals of peace, harmony, cooperation and free trade throughout the world. It was a noble dream, shared by millions less able than the President to do anything to bring it about. But for the first years of his presidency, apart from reducing US involvement in Latin America, in keeping with his 'good neighbour' policy, and offering future independence to the Philippines, Roosevelt was content to leave it as a distant aspiration.\n\nDown to 1938, he placed foreign policy largely in the hands of his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.33 Born in a Tennessee mountain cabin, tall, distinguished looking with silver hair and dark eyes, clever if somewhat unimaginative, highly experienced but often conservative to the point of being doggedly obstinate, moralistic and self-contained but 'plain and approachable as an old shoe',34 Hull was deeply committed to the principles that President Woodrow Wilson, chief architect of the postwar European settlement, had espoused. He firmly believed that world peace could be brought about on the basis of disarmament, self-determination, non-violent change and diminished commercial rivalry.35 Hull was watchful but not unduly concerned at this stage about Japan and saw no reason to press for a more interventionist approach to Europe's growing problems. Europe seemed indeed to pose the greater potential danger. But the inaction of the western democracies, France and Great Britain, that led to the policies of appeasement had its counterpart across the Atlantic in the detachment of the Roosevelt administration from the growing menace in Germany.\n\nIt was little different in east Asia. When Roosevelt, in response to Japan's attack on China, gave a major speech in Chicago, in the heartland of isolationism, on 5 October 1937, it seemed to herald a change in American policy. In reality, it merely offered a foretaste of the frustration that would afflict his friends and allies over the subsequent four years. Roosevelt used the analogy of the community cooperating in the quarantine of patients in an epidemic to imply that the same must happen in international relations in dealing with those now threatening world peace. But when Britain asked for clarification of what Roosevelt's words meant in terms of practical action, and went on shortly afterwards to suggest a joint naval show of force at Singapore to deter the Japanese, the United States backed away. 'There is such a thing as public opinion in the United States,' the message went out, and the President could not be seen to be tagging along behind the British.36 'It is always best and safest', commented the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, 'to count on nothing from the Americans but words.'37\n\nChamberlain did not change his view. When Roosevelt, in January 1938, proposed an initiative aimed at mobilizing countries in Europe and Latin America to agree to principles of international relations, in the hope that a revived sense of collective security, backed by the United States, would persuade the Axis powers to pull back from their course of aggression, the British Prime Minister was dismissive. Churchill later regarded the President's initiative as 'the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war'.38 In reality, the chances of such a move deflecting Hitler were nil. But Chamberlain's conclusion went beyond this particular initiative. He was adamant that, should she 'get into trouble', Britain could expect no help from the United States.39 He preferred to continue down the road to appeasement.\n\nThe United States viewed Hitler's expansionist moves in 1938 from afar, with disquiet, certainly, but merely from the sidelines. The takeover of Austria was registered with an air of resignation but no demur. Roosevelt appealed for peace as the Sudeten crisis unfolded during the summer of 1938. After the western democracies had carved up Czechoslovakia during the Munich Conference at the end of September, in a vain bid to satisfy Hitler's insatiable demands, Roosevelt likened their action to the betrayal by Judas Iscariot. But on hearing that Chamberlain would be attending the Conference, where the capitulation to Hitler was an inevitable outcome, Roosevelt had cabled to the British Prime Minister: 'Good man.'40 With some justification, the American President has been described at this point as 'a powerless spectator at Munich, a weak and resourceless leader of an unarmed, economically wounded, and diplomatically isolated country'.41\n\nMoral indignation in the United States at the German treatment of the Jews was certainly mounting during 1938. It boiled over following the notorious pogroms of 9\u201310 November, the 'Crystal Night' Nazi outrages against Germany's Jews. But Roosevelt was not prepared to waive the quota system on immigrants to accommodate the desperate Jewish refugees. And a large majority supported their President in this.42\n\nDespite his passivity throughout 1938, as Hitler's expansionist drive brought Europe to the brink of war, Munich had caused Roosevelt to recognize the illusion in believing that the United States could remain aloof and detached from what was happening across the Atlantic. His anxieties about Hitler, whom he saw as a 'wild man' and a 'nut', had sharpened.43 The President was by now much more actively involved in foreign policy, regularly reading the cables from abroad, and frequently discussing the issues that arose with Cordell Hull and others from the State Department. He would often receive Hull and the sharp-minded, urbane and polished, but pompous and formal Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles\u2013who had attended the same upper-class preparatory school as the President, had worn white gloves while playing in the country as a child and still had an 'air of suspecting lurking contamination in his surroundings', his demeanour at best 'on the chilly side'44\u2013while lying in bed at the White House, propped up against his pillows. They were clear that everything had to be done to prevent war and, should it nevertheless break out, to ensure victory for the western democracies. How to attain these goals was less clear.45\n\nBy the time of Munich American public opinion was shifting already to see war in Europe as likely. But there was as yet no readiness to welcome the repeal of the neutrality legislation, an issue the President raised in January 1939. And the following months would show how little American diplomacy was able to restrain Hitler. One tangible and new development did arise, however, from the changed emphasis in autumn 1938. This was the commitment to large-scale rearmament, especially in the air (though, of course, this could not be achieved overnight).46 Alongside this went Roosevelt's personal commitment to production of arms to be procured by the western democracies for their own defence\u2013though this was far from universally shared, and even met with the strong disapproval of his isolationist Secretary of War at the time, Harry H. Woodring.47 Despite the opposition, it marked the beginning of the policy of help for the European democracies short of war, a policy which Roosevelt would uphold until December 1941.\n\nBy the time Hitler had overrun what had remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, soon to be followed by Britain's guarantee for Poland, war in Europe within the near future seemed practically a certainty. Many more Americans were starting to see that helping Britain and France to arm against Hitler's Germany could also be regarded as self-help. The administration, with Cordell Hull in the vanguard, now began to exert pressure on Congress to repeal the arms embargo.48 It was to no avail. The House of Representatives in June, then the Senate the following month, voted to retain it. Six months of intense effort by the administration had met with resounding failure. By leaving Hull to lead the fight for repeal and staying in the background rather than risk his prestige, Roosevelt had badly miscalculated.49\n\nAs for diplomacy, a speech by Roosevelt in April 1939, offering Hitler and Mussolini talks to settle disarmament and trade if they would guarantee not to attack thirty specified countries during the subsequent ten years, met with a withering reply by the German dictator.50 America did not figure prominently in Hitler's thinking at this time. He had not reckoned with any serious intervention by the United States in planning his aggression. He felt no need to consider any concessions to the American President's diplomacy of desperation in the spring of 1939.\n\nNor did Roosevelt's attempt in mid-August 1939 to persuade the Soviet leadership that its best interests lay in reaching a 'satisfactory agreement against aggression' with Great Britain and France meet with any greater success. He asked the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Konstantin Oumansky, about to leave for Moscow, 'to tell Stalin that if his Government joined up with Hitler, it was as certain as that night followed day that as soon as Hitler had conquered France, he would turn on Russia and that it would be the Soviets' turn next'.51 If these prophetic words were actually delivered to him, Stalin ignored them. Within a fortnight, he had agreed the infamous Non-Aggression Pact with Ribbentrop. War in Europe was now both certain and imminent. As the last rites of peace were being read, Roosevelt appealed to Hitler, the President of Poland and the King of Italy.52 He knew it was a hopeless cause. He could now only wait for the inevitable.\n\nII\n\nThe beginning of the European war nevertheless did have obvious consequences for the United States. Americans could not bury their heads in the sand and pretend that they were unaffected by a conflict thousands of miles away, though many doubtless wished to do so. Roosevelt pointed this out to his fellow countrymen in a 'fireside chat' (as his radio addresses to the nation were known) on the evening of 3 September, the day of the British and French declarations of war. 'When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger,' he told them. 'Passionately though we may desire detachment,' he added, 'we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fought, does affect the American future.' But he hoped and believed, he said, that 'the United States will keep out of this war'. There should be no false talk 'of America sending its armies to European fields'. The United States would remain neutral, he emphasized. But he could not ask, he added, 'that every American remain neutral in thought as well...Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience.'53\n\nIt amounted to a public restatement of the already established doctrine of support for the European democracies through measures 'short of war'. Roosevelt could be confident of public backing for this approach. He was aware that opinion was almost entirely behind Britain and France in the conflict with Hitler's Germany. But he knew also that this attitude had its strict limits. Support for the democracies did not equate to participation in the war on their side. Objections to any direct involvement were as vehement as ever. The only fighting most Americans would contemplate was to defend the western hemisphere against unprovoked attack.\n\nThe President's own preferences actually accorded in good measure with public opinion. Before the conflict began, he had on a number of occasions made his own position clear to leading figures in his administration. 'While I am in the White House I never expect to see American troops sent abroad,' he had declared.54 And on the afternoon of 1 September (the day of the German invasion of Poland), speaking to his Cabinet, some of whom had hurriedly flown back from their holidays, in front of the portraits of past presidents and overlooking the garden of the White House, he repeated: 'We aren't going into this war.' He told his army planners that 'whatever happens, we won't send troops abroad'. The War Department's officials had put one plan in front of him envisaging sufficient reserves to equip a possible expeditionary force to Europe, but the President was adamant. 'We need only think of defending this hemisphere,' he declared.55 He recognized, however, that the attempt to preserve neutrality yet offer the support that Britain and France would need to withstand Hitler's Germany meant the tightrope he was walking would become frayed if the conflict dragged on.\n\nSome measures could now be taken which only a short time earlier would have been highly sensitive. Roosevelt authorized the War Department to build an army of 750,000 men\u2013more than four times its current size (though compared with the vast legions under arms in Europe, still tiny).56 He had Sumner Welles prepare the arrangements to introduce a security cordon around the shores of the American continent (except Canada) as protection for Allied shipping against naval warfare and the predicted German submarine campaign and personally widened the zone from the proposed 100 to 300 miles.57 Together with Hull, he thought that, in the altered circumstances, repeal of the embargo legislation, vital if help were to be provided for Britain and France, would now be a straightforward matter, and he resolved to call a special session of Congress to legislate for the change.58 In the interim, however, there was no avoiding the fact that the existing Neutrality Act had to be invoked, imposing an immediate embargo on the sale of arms and munitions to all belligerents\u2013something both depressing and worrying to the western allies, who were now legally prevented from buying any armaments at all from the United States.59\n\nIn fact, the repeal of the arms embargo was even now highly contentious, evoking huge hostility from the vocal isolationist lobby. Roosevelt made the repeal his own cause. Where in the spring he had still been reticent, he now personally took the issue to Congress. He said he regretted that Congress had passed the Neutrality Act, and that he had signed it.60 The repeal of the arms embargo, he argued, would mean true neutrality, an end to even-handed treatment of aggressors and victims, and thereby a better safeguard to peace than retention of the original Act. With the repeal, he declared, 'this Government clearly and definitely will insist that American citizens and American ships keep away from the immediate perils of the actual zones of conflict'.61 The necessary legislation eventually passed through both houses of Congress by wide majorities in early November, after six weeks of intense debate.62\n\nThere was, however, a price for the high level of consensus eventually attained. Isolationists succeeded in restoring the cash-and-carry provisions of the 1937 legislation that had expired in May 1939. The provisions had been introduced to enable the United States to continue to profit from foreign trade while remaining neutral. Goods, apart from weaponry and other forbidden items, could be sold to belligerents as long as they were paid for on receipt and transported in foreign ships.63 There was an absolute ban on credit to belligerents, whether from the US Treasury or from private bankers.64 The cash-and-carry provisions were advantageous to countries with large cash reserves and strong naval power. Britain and France, rather than Germany, would benefit in Europe. But in the Far East, the perverse effect would be to help Japan at the expense of China. Despite the repeal of the arms embargo, the questions were whether the western democracies could pay for the weapons they needed, and whether, even if the finance could be found, the Americans were willing to supply them in the quantities necessary. Both issues would remain unresolved for more than a year.\n\nAs the 'phoney war'\u2013the sarcastic term invented by the isolationist Republican Senator William E. Borah somehow stuck\u2013dragged on into 1940, Roosevelt sent Sumner Welles to Rome, Berlin, Paris and London unofficially to test the waters for a possible negotiated peace. Welles returned at the beginning of April suitably chastened about any chance of a diplomatic initiative to end the conflict. Mussolini had, indeed, said he thought a negotiated peace between Germany and the Allies possible, given settlement of all German and Italian territorial demands. But Welles had become aware that any influence Mussolini might once have possessed had vanished, and he was certain that the Duce would take Italy into the war, when the moment was opportune. Welles had been depressed by the belligerence in Berlin and the low morale of the French. Only in London, in the resilience shown by Winston Churchill, restored to the Cabinet as First Lord of the Treasury, had he encountered anything to impress him.65\n\nThere were no immediate consequences in Washington from Welles's bleak report. In fact, within days of the Under-Secretary returning, the 'phoney war' came to an abrupt end with the German attack on Denmark and Norway. A month later, the war spectacularly erupted into a new and highly dangerous phase as Hitler launched his devastating western offensive. The President's offer to Mussolini to act as an intermediary in any peace settlement, if Italy would agree to stay out of the war, was, as we saw, peremptorily rejected.66 For the central players in American foreign policy, as Sumner Welles later put it, May and June 1940 amounted to 'a nightmare of frustration. For the United States government had no means whatever, short of going to war, to which American public opinion was in any case overwhelmingly opposed, of diverting or checking the world cataclysm' and, with that, the threat to the United States itself.67 He might have added that even a declaration of war by the United States, however unthinkable at the time, would have presented not the slightest hindrance to Hitler nor caused him to hesitate. In spring 1940 the United States possessed neither the military nor the logistical capability to enter the war and block German military ambitions. Little had been done about rearmament. When the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, pleaded for aeroplanes to be sent from the United States, William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris, had to tell him that there were none to be had.68 Indeed, the United States itself only had 1,350 planes available at the time for its own defence.69 It was the same in response to Reynaud's desperate request for old warships. None could be spared.70 Roosevelt could only propose sending over 2,000 guns, French in fact, that had been standard issue in the First World War.71 The American regular army comprised 245,000 men at this time, twentieth in world rankings, one place behind the Dutch. It had only five fully equipped divisions (the Germans deployed 141 divisions in the western campaign alone), equipped with weapons often still of First World War vintage.72 Even transporting this puny army across the Atlantic could not have been achieved before Hitler had already overrun the Low Countries and France.\n\nAs spring drew to a close and the French sued for peace on 17 June then five days later signed a humiliating capitulation, there were few grounds for optimism in Washington about Britain's capacity to stay in the fight. The new British Prime Minister certainly symbolized the new determination in Britain that had impressed Sumner Welles a few weeks earlier. At the most despairing moment towards the end of May, with the British army stranded at Dunkirk, Churchill had indeed persuaded his colleagues in the War Cabinet that the only rational strategy open to Britain was to hold out, dismiss any prospect of negotiation and wait for American help. Whether, and if so when, such help of any meaningful kind would come was at this juncture an open question. Churchill could only hope, not reckon with it. But at least the government now showed defiance. And the British Expeditionary Force had been rescued from Dunkirk. On the last day of the evacuation from Dunkirk, 4 June, Churchill had produced an oratorical masterpiece in a speech to the House of Commons, expressing the new spirit. 'We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,' Churchill told his American listeners to the transatlantic broadcast. 'We shall never surrender.' Even were Britain to be subjugated, the Empire and the British Fleet would fight on from beyond the seas 'until in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old'.73\n\nIt was powerful rhetoric, without a doubt, and not without impact across the Atlantic. Yet it could not dispel the prevailing pessimism about Britain's fate. The American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, had long been a prophet of doom. He thought that in the wake of Dunkirk Hitler would make the British an offer they could not refuse.74 Others saw no grounds to disagree that Britain would be incapable of holding out. Roosevelt was told that Britain's chances of survival were one in three.75 The President had his own profound doubts, not least about the fate of the British fleet in the event of a surrender.76\n\nThe administration had reckoned before May 1940 on one of three scenarios: that the democracies would win the war without active American aid; that the war would turn into a protracted stalemate, in which the United States might eventually be in a position to broker a negotiated peace; or that the dictatorships would seriously threaten to defeat the democracies, though over the course of a long war. What had not been anticipated was a fourth scenario: an astonishingly rapid and sweeping German victory in the west, before any meaningful aid could be supplied by the United States.77 Yet this is precisely what happened. The gloomy prospects of British survival meant that the whole issue of material assistance to Britain now became acute. Aid to Britain was crucial if she was not to go under, yet if Britain were forced to surrender, such aid would be merely a gift to Hitler. As the magnitude of the defeat of France sank in across the Atlantic, the whole critical and contentious issue of aid for Britain was about to enter a new, decisive phase.\n\nIII\n\nAs he began to confront the momentous issues raised by the fall of France, Franklin D. Roosevelt, now 58 years old, was well into his eighth\u2013and by long-standing convention final\u2013year as President of the United States. Both wealth and high political office had moulded his background. Hailing from a patrician family, he was raised at Hyde Park, a large mansion in the state of New York; his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, had been President from 1901 to 1909. He had even married a Roosevelt\u2013Eleanor, a distant cousin and niece of Theodore. She was to be the mother of his six children (of whom one died in infancy). Unlike Theodore, Franklin had made his way in politics as a Democrat. He had been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson and ran as the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in the unsuccessful campaign of 1920. Personal tragedy struck the following year, when he contracted polio and was left paralysed in his legs. As elected Governor of New York from 1928, Roosevelt had proved a shrewd and capable politician. He had already made a mark in combating the worst of the Depression in New York when he gained the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932.\n\nHis personal charm, seemingly relaxed style, good humour and affable manner helped him persuade his friends and assuage his opponents on many occasions, as he wove his way through the political thickets. Some of his political enemies accused him of deviousness and duplicity. His supporters, on the other hand, admired his cleverness and skilful manoeuvring. He remained, for all his years in power, something of an enigma. 'His bewildering complexity', it has been said, 'had become his most visible trait. He could be bold or cautious, informal or dignified, cruel or kind, intolerant or long-suffering, urbane or almost rustic, impetuous or temporizing, Machiavellian or moralistic.'78 Whichever way he was viewed, it could scarcely be doubted that by the time he faced the daunting questions of war and peace in the critical months of 1940\u201341, Roosevelt was the supreme master of the political scene in the United States.\n\nThe White House in Roosevelt's time has been described as 'a home inside a mansion inside an executive office'.79 It was a power-centre, certainly, but an unostentatious one, even in its representative rooms. Roosevelt began the day by reading the newspapers over breakfast in bed, his blue cape with red F.D.R. monogram draped over his pyjamas. His personal aides would then come in to discuss the day's schedule with him. Thereafter he worked as a rule behind his big desk, littered with papers, in the Oval Study, full of books, prints and family photos, each day from 10 o'clock in the morning, looking out through the tall windows into the garden outside. He would usually have a number of visitors to see in the late morning and afternoon, where access to the inner sanctum was controlled by his amiable military aide, Major General Edwin W. Watson, known to all as 'Pa', a big, good-natured Virginian with a distinctive taste in aftershave that was the butt of many a repetitive presidential joke. Then he would dictate letters and memos to his secretaries, the longtime loyal devotee Marguerite 'Missy' LeHand and her assistant, Grace Tully. Congressional representatives would have their audiences with the President on Mondays or Tuesdays. Roosevelt met the press on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings. And on Friday afternoon he presided over the Cabinet meeting. In the evenings there was often formal entertainment in the state dining room. Otherwise, Roosevelt liked to spend the evening sorting out his stamp collection (when he was not distracted by phone calls and other business). But this seemingly ordered routine could be, and often was, interrupted by any kind of crisis that had blown up. Roosevelt's way of operating often gave the somewhat misleading impression of a lack of any systematic application. In fact, it spoke of a high personal level of involvement based upon accessibility. The 'air of small-town friendliness' that characterized the White House superficially belied the fact that Roosevelt kept the reins of power very tightly in his own hands.80\n\nThe US Constitution endows the President with wide powers, though it also imposes checks and balances on his executive authority. Most notably, the powers invested in the legislature and the judiciary were intended to limit presidential power and curb any abuse of it. The doctrine of the separation of powers foresaw the friction which was built into the relations between the President and the Congress.81\n\nThe duopoly between President and Congress, the complex balance between the powers of each, inevitably produced a need for compromise, often arrived at through wearisome, time-consuming processes and intense lobbying. The absence of swift, perhaps impulsive, decision-making and apparent lack of governmental efficiency were generally regarded as the necessary price of freedom from overweening power. On the other hand, at times of international crisis\u2013and the implications for the United States of the war in Europe and the increasing threat in the Far East certainly amounted to such\u2013the need to negotiate crucial measures through an obstructionist Congress could prove not simply laborious, but weakening when urgent action was called for. Yet precisely at such times it was imperative that the President have national, not partisan backing. Roosevelt's caution, his reluctance to embrace the bold moves that his advisers sometimes advocated, reflected his pronounced sensitivity to the need to carry the country with him. And he was all too aware that the nation was divided on the decisive issue of American involvement in the European war\u2013in favour of giving Britain more material support, certainly, but opposed by four to one to entry into the conflict.82 Roosevelt often showed consummate political skill in his dealings with Congress. He became, however, increasingly prepared to bypass Congress through use of his prerogative powers, sometimes ingeniously justified, in order to take action which might otherwise have been stymied or held up by protracted debate.83\n\nEach President brings his own inimitable style to the exercise of power. Roosevelt was a man of bold ideas, though without a coherent ideology. He was prepared to experiment, then pull back if his initiatives proved unworkable.84 He exuded confidence, and his genial affability helped to convey his sense of pushing at the limits of the possible to those around him. He focused on ends, not means. The detail of how to get something done he could leave to others.85 He was impatient with formal bureaucracies, often seeing them as a challenge that he had to circumnavigate. And his interests varied widely across the political spectrum. In many policy areas he did not become personally involved. While he could pore over matters relating to the navy, a passionate interest since his First World War days, he might pay only superficial attention to issues that did not capture his imagination.86 His discursive approach to problems could prove an irritation to those in his entourage who favoured more direct, forensic analysis. Stimson's impatience for action and Roosevelt's caution and ad hoc improvisations led the Secretary of War to note with a tone of frustration that 'it literally is government on the jump' and that conversation with the President was 'like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room'.87 Stimson, like others, did, however, come to appreciate Roosevelt's ingrained shrewdness in engineering, at times through patience, wariness and roundabout means, the passage of the measures he wanted to take. And no one mistook Roosevelt's caution for weakness. In the formulation of policy and in the taking of the key decisions, there was no doubt in anyone's mind of Roosevelt's outright primacy.\n\nThe Cabinet, the President's advisory council, played little role as a collective body in the making of decisions. Unlike the government in the British parliamentary system, where members of the Cabinet are elected to Parliament and share collective responsibility for policy, the United States system, drawing upon specific expertise of individuals drawn directly into government and with its clear divorce between the legislature and executive, encourages the President to deal bilaterally with individual departments of his administration. Roosevelt intensified this inbuilt tendency by competition and by often fluid and unclear lines of demarcation among his officials.88 The Cabinet served little function as an instrument for coordinating the defence programme and tackling critical issues of foreign policy. Decisions, when they could not be postponed, were reached between the President and individual members of the Cabinet or following discussion involving those most directly involved.89\n\nThe growing crisis from spring 1940 required more flexible and dynamic government. In the wake of the German triumph in western Europe in May and June 1940, there was an urgent need to convert the nation to a defence footing. A belated, massive effort had to be undertaken to mobilize the economy for defence, and to rearm with all haste. And, since national security was bound up with the fate of Britain and France, the attempt had to be made to prevent the destruction of the western democracies.90 Roosevelt now started to function more as commander-in-chief than as president of a civil administration, centralizing the orchestration of defence in his own hands. He was careful to bypass Congress, without alienating it, using statutes dating from the First World War to create new defence agencies and avoid legislation, strengthening his own position in the process. He began 'to improvise a new government within a government'.91\n\nIn May 1940 he established the Office for Emergency Management, intended to coordinate the work of all government agencies dealing with defence. Shortly afterwards, towards the end of the month, he revived the Council of National Defense, a body of six Cabinet officers that had lain dormant since the First World War, and created alongside it a seven-man National Defense Advisory Commission, comprised of business leaders and experienced administrators.92 But these organizations looked impressive only on paper. The Office for Emergency Management was merely an umbrella framework enabling Roosevelt to set up and control agencies for production without resort to Congress.93 The Council of National Defense, in theory the hub of the defence effort and consisting of Cabinet officers with defence functions, was no more than 'an administrative fiction' and never met at all.94 And the Advisory Commission was left without a chairman as an 'administrative anomaly', a group of experts without leadership or power, each responsible to the President alone. Defining its responsibilities, it has been said, 'represented a problem in metaphysics'. Confusion and jurisdictional friction between the Commission and the relevant government bureaucracies in the War, Navy and Treasury Departments was the inevitable consequence. Meanwhile, the President's power was enhanced.95 Temperament matched his sense of constitutional responsibility. He was unwilling to delegate authority to any organization that could have undermined his own direct and personal control; he thought it would have been constitutionally irresponsible to have done so.96\n\nIn June 1940 Roosevelt made two important personnel changes that affected the shaping of defence policy. He brought in Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy and Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War. They were shrewd political appointments in an election year. Both Knox and Stimson had been senior members of previous Republican administrations. Knox, indeed, had been the Republican candidate for Vice-President in 1936, while Stimson had long-standing prior experience under Republican presidents both as Secretary of War and, in the early 1930s, Secretary of State. But apart from widening the political representation of his administration and giving it a bipartisan image at a time of national crisis, Roosevelt also greatly strengthened his own hand in dealing with defence.97 The previous Secretary of the Navy, Charles Edison, had been ineffectual, while Harry H. Woodring, whom the President now removed from his office as Secretary of War, had been singularly ill suited to the position, his isolationist tendencies wholly out of tune with the urgency of the situation.98 In Knox and Stimson, Roosevelt now had in position two men who favoured a more forceful defence policy\u2013indeed were considerably more hawkish than the President himself and ready to push him in a direction he often seemed reluctant to take.\n\nKnox, whose affable demeanour went hand in hand with firm political views, had become the publisher of the Chicago Daily News in 1931 and provided a voice for moderate, internationalist Republicanism in a region dominated by the shrill isolationism of the Chicago Tribune.99 Stimson, by now into his seventies, a lawyer by profession though with many years spent in public service, soon became the strong man of the administration. He was a man of firm principles based upon moral rectitude and commitment to the law. He looked the part: silver-grey hair parted in the middle, a brisk moustache, an air of dogged respectability. His subordinates called him Colonel Stimson, his rank in the First World War. The President called him Harry. Stimson detested Nazism to the core, and had scant tolerance for the weak politicians of Britain and France who had failed to stand up to Hitler. He was a good, no-nonsense administrator, given to speaking his mind, with a tendency towards impatience, even brusqueness\u2013also towards the President himself\u2013when frustrated by anything he perceived as a lack of direction or drive.100 Stimson now brought a much needed dynamism and, despite his advancing years, great vitality to the urgent rearmament programme.\n\nIn Knox and Stimson, Roosevelt now had in place two men whose positions were crucial to the military aspects of foreign policy, prepared to back, privately and publicly, both American preparedness and aid to Britain.101 Stimson, especially, became the most ardent advocate of intervention in the European war. Roosevelt's keen interest in naval affairs led to his active involvement in the operational planning for the navy. He rarely saw Knox alone, and frequently dealt directly both with Admiral Harold 'Betty' Stark, chief of Naval Operations, invariably amenable to the President's proposals, and with the dour Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King. With the army, Roosevelt acted differently. He regularly saw Stimson alone, and not just on army matters. And, probably so as not to offend his Secretary of War's proprieties in the way he liked to run his Department, he seldom saw the head of the army, the chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, except in Stimson's presence.102 The exceptionally able and impressive, eminently austere Marshall, tall, with greying hair and intensely blue eyes, struck up an excellent working relationship with Stimson.103 Marshall had a reputation for speaking bluntly to his superiors. He had announced his presence in autumn 1938 by disagreeing outright with Roosevelt at an important meeting. Most thought at the time that his promising career was at an end. But Roosevelt made one of his most outstanding appointments several months later when he gave Marshall the position of chief of staff. Stiff formalities were, however, upheld. Marshall always called Roosevelt 'Mr President'. He determined to remain aloof from Roosevelt's charm and never to laugh at his jokes. And after his first rebuff, Roosevelt never again called Marshall 'George'.104\n\nIn May 1940, after Roosevelt had flatly rejected the army's proposal for a $657 million appropriation, Marshall approached the President and expounded all the arguments in favour of the funding, ending: 'If you don't do something...and do it right away, I don't know what is going to happen to this country.' Roosevelt reversed his decision. Marshall later spoke of this as the action that broke the logjam.105 Marshall continued, however, along with army planners, to oppose armed intervention until effective military strength was built up. Not before early autumn 1941 did the chief of staff come to favour war. In the summer of the previous year, the army's stance was plain. Entry into the war would result in attacks on the United States by Germany, Italy and possibly Japan. 'Our unreadiness to meet such aggression on its own scale is so great that, so long as the choice is left to us, we should avoid the contest until we can be adequately prepared.'106\n\nThis did not prevent Stimson and Knox from emerging as the most hawkish influences on Roosevelt, pressing upon him an unyielding stance towards both the Axis powers and Japan, while supporting every move to maximize rearmament. They found eager support from the long-standing Secretary to the Treasury and personal friend of the President, Henry Morgenthau, who believed, like Stimson, that Nazism could only be defeated if the United States were to muster its full material power at the earliest possible juncture. Morgenthau, burdened with the major task of organizing war production (which had traditionally fallen to the War Department), came to form a good working relationship with the Secretary of War, based upon mutual respect and close cooperation.107 Further backing for 'hawks' came from the abrasive and outspoken Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes, a former Republican who had been a member of the Cabinet since 1933 and shared Morgenthau's sense of impending crisis requiring decisive action.108\n\nThe State Department, on the other hand, formed something of a counterweight to the hawkish tendencies of those responsible for military and defence matters. It was not that Cordell Hull, Secretary of State since 1933, favoured a soft line towards the aggressors in Europe or in the Far East. A pillar of rectitude in foreign affairs, he detested fascism and took an equally strong line in his moral condemnation of the Japanese. But his ingrained caution made him uneasy about any action that could serve as an unnecessary provocation.109 The prospect of Japan taking advantage in the Pacific from any American involvement in Europe was indeed worrying, for the President, too. Roosevelt was content to let the wary and experienced Hull deal with the Far East with minimal interference and to keep a fragile peace in the Pacific by avoiding provocation to the Japanese while refraining from action that might condone their aggression in China. The Atlantic was another matter altogether, and here Roosevelt played a more direct and overt role. But even in the Far East, authority was divided. Hull did not preside over the spheres of military deterrence and trade restrictions.110 Moreover, Hull could find that important issues were delegated to his Under-Secretary, Sumner Welles, a friend and confidant of the President, and a rival he viewed with some animosity and bitter resentment.111\n\nThe range of views on offer among the President's closest advisers, from the wily caution of Hull to the forthright interventionism of Stimson, enabled Roosevelt to oscillate between options as he chose. Hull was one of the select few able to see the President more or less at will. Given his position, this was essential. But there was little personal empathy. Immediate access did not extend a great deal further. Only Stimson, Welles and, especially, Roosevelt's long-standing most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins\u2013his New Dealer 'Mr Fixit', who had been in his close entourage since the beginning, had his ear on most matters, even had an apartment in the White House, and was decried by opponents as a combination of Machiavelli, Svengali and Rasputin\u2013had near-automatic access to the President and were most directly exposed to his thinking. Hopkins, chain-smoking, gaunt and in frail health after a life-threatening illness, but with an undiminished liking for horse racing and nightclubs, indefatigable, straight-talking with a knack of cutting to the heart of any issue, and utterly loyal to Roosevelt with 'an extrasensory perception' of his moods, became an indispensable conduit for those in the inner circle who urgently sought to gain the President's ear.112\n\nThis group\u2013Stimson and Knox, their uniformed heads of the services, Stark and Marshall, Hull and Hopkins\u2013now started to be brought together increasingly at the White House. Stimson dubbed the group the 'War Council'. It was the closest approximation to the Defence Committee of the British War Cabinet, and the nearest Roosevelt came to an institutionalized framework for taking decisions in matters of national security. However, Roosevelt made sure the group did not ossify into a formal bureaucracy. He retained the flexibility to intervene or oversee wherever he wanted, depending on the issue. 'All the threads of policy', it has been said with justification, 'led ultimately to the White House.'113\n\nRoosevelt's difficulties were not in ensuring that his chosen line would be adopted by his advisers. Whether they were hardliners or more 'dovish', they acceded, if sometimes in frustration, to Roosevelt's often hesitant policy choices. The President's difficulties lay, as always, with the reception of his actions in Congress and, beyond Capitol Hill, among wider public opinion and its organized lobbies. And here, Roosevelt remained ultracautious. Congress still had Democratic majorities in both chambers. But the mid-term elections of 1938 had substantially strengthened the basis of opposition to Roosevelt. Alignment on key committees of conservative Democrats, mainly from the southern states, with Republicans could make life difficult for the President. In particular, the vocal isolationist minority, backed by important press outlets (most notably the influential daily, the Chicago Tribune) and lobbies, was able to tap far wider sentiment, sympathetic to the plight of the west European democracies, but opposed to American involvement in the war. Lobby groups, for and against intervention, exploited the mood and gained a good deal of backing\u2013and financial support.\n\nAs the presidential election campaign gathered momentum across the summer and autumn, an isolationist organization, America First, founded at the beginning of September, heavily weighted towards the Republicans and highly critical of Roosevelt's foreign policy, saw local groups spring up across the Midwest (where Chicago was the headquarters) and in the north-east. The main theme of their extensive propaganda, pumped home in huge mass meetings, was that Hitler did not endanger the United States and that aid to Britain could only end in American entry into the war in Europe.114 America First had been established as a counter-lobby to the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which was launched in May 1940 and was a presence in every state except North Dakota, advertising widely in the press and on national radio, raising a quarter of a million dollars by July and not stinting in its petitions to the President and Congress. The propaganda from both sides left its mark on opinion. There was a greater readiness to give Britain more material support, but the majority still held to neutrality and isolation.115 The German sweep through the Low Countries and the increasingly precarious position of France and Britain in May 1940 profoundly worried Americans. Polls showed that only about 30 per cent still believed in an Allied victory, while 78 per cent feared that a triumphant Germany would exert influence in South America and 63 per cent thought Hitler would even seize territory on the American continent.116 Worried for their own safety, people were greatly alarmed at the state of American preparedness, but divided on how much the United States should be doing to help the Allies, and massively opposed to any direct involvement in the European conflict.\n\nThis was the climate of opinion that Roosevelt had to face in the summer and autumn of 1940. It coincided with a key domestic issue: should Roosevelt stand for re-election for an unprecedented third term in office? And it formed the backcloth to the most critical and contentious issue of defence policy that had so far arisen: should the United States comply with Churchill's request and support Great Britain's desperate attempt to hold out against the prospect of German invasion in a tangible way by the sale of fifty destroyers? It was the first of two vital decisions that Roosevelt would make over the coming months. Together, these decisions would reshape the alliance between the United States and Great Britain and pave the way for ever closer cooperation in the struggle against Hitler's Germany.\n\nIV\n\nOn 15 May 1940 Winston Churchill sent his first letter as Prime Minister of what would prove to be a voluminous and vitally important correspondence with Roosevelt. The two had met briefly in 1918. The meeting left more of a mark on Roosevelt than on Churchill (who did not remember it): the future American President recalled the future British Prime Minister as being a 'stinker'.117 He continued into the Second World War to see Churchill as a social reactionary with old-fashioned 'Victorian' views. And he criticized his notorious capacity for alcohol. On hearing of Churchill's appointment as Prime Minister, he said he presumed he was the best man available, even if he was drunk half the time. Churchill, for his part, expressed concern about Roosevelt's own drinking habits, though in this case it was the President's taste for mixed dry and sweet vermouth that the British Prime Minister abhorred. More seriously, he had before the war been critical of the prolonged economic recession in the United States, which he attributed to Roosevelt's clashes with big business. He had been pleased to see the beginnings of American rearmament, limited though they were, but he still harboured doubts about Roosevelt's commitment to British interests during the spring and summer of 1940.118\n\nThe two had exchanged a series of personal letters since the beginning of the European war, when Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Roosevelt had initiated the correspondence on 11 September 1939, with the first of what would amount to almost two thousand letters and memoranda exchanged during the next five and a half years.119 Probably, Roosevelt viewed this early correspondence as a way of keeping a personal conduit, alongside official channels, open to the British government once war had begun in Europe.120 Churchill's interest was simple and unvarnished: 'it was a good thing to feed [Roosevelt] at intervals,' he told the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax.121 From unpropitious beginnings, the correspondence would help to build a personal rapport between Roosevelt and Churchill which would prove to be of inestimable value in forging the bonds between the United States and Great Britain in 1940\u201341, eventually turning into a fully fledged war alliance. But there was still a very long way to go when Churchill dispatched his letter to the American President on 15 May 1940.\n\nChurchill began by painting the dismal scene in western Europe where, in the wake of the German advance, 'the small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood'. He expected Mussolini to join in 'to share the loot of civilisation'. And he envisaged an attack on Britain in the near future. Britain, he said, would fight on alone, if necessary. 'But I trust you realise, Mr. President,' he continued, 'that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.' He then came to the point of his letter: his shopping list. 'All I ask now is that you should proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces. Immediate needs are, first of all, the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers to bridge the gap between what we have now and the large new construction we put in hand at the beginning of the war.' He added, for good measure, that Britain also wanted 'several hundred of the latest types of aircraft', along with anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition, steel and other materials. Britain would continue to pay in dollars as long as possible, he wrote, but 'I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same'.122\n\nThe letter lost nothing in forthrightness. It reflected the hope, rather than certainty, running through the leadership of the British government that the United States would not let Britain sink, and that 'when our dollars and gold run out there will be no difficulty about credits or gifts'.123 There were no illusions in Whitehall about the significance of such aid. On 25 May, outlining their contingency planning in the event of a collapse of France, the British chiefs of staff stated their assumption that the United States 'is willing to give us full economic and financial support, without which we do not think we could continue the war with any chance of success'.124 There were already hopes that America would go still further. By mid-June there was wide agreement that what Britain needed was an immediate declaration of war by the United States. A minority view, however, was that the supply of surplus materials by the United States, including destroyers, would probably make her entry into the war and the sending of an American Expeditionary Force to Europe unnecessary.125\n\nAid in order to keep America out of the European war, not draw her in, was increasingly the presumption of the Roosevelt administration. But even that stance ran ahead of public opinion at the time. In May 1940 only 35 per cent of those questioned in opinion polls favoured aid to Britain and France at the risk of American involvement.126 For Roosevelt, Churchill's request of 15 May was asking too much too soon. To comply with it was to take a gamble, first with public opinion and, secondly, with those in the administration who advocated waiting to see how the battle for France would turn out. Could American aid, even if it were to be given, be provided in time? Was there not the grave danger that it would simply be swallowed up in the defeat about to envelop not just France but, it seemed, most likely Britain as well? The American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, pessimistic to the point of being defeatist, advised caution. On 15 May he reported the impression he had gleaned from Churchill that Britain would be attacked within a month. He thought the United States was in danger of 'holding the bag for a war in which the Allies expect to be beaten', and advised 'that if we had to fight to protect our lives, we would do better fighting in our own back yard'.127 George Marshall, the chief of staff, argued that accommodating the British would severely weaken American hemispheric defence. Only limited armaments could in any case be made available.128 And Roosevelt himself had it on what he took to be good authority that Hitler was likely to make Britain an offer of settlement based upon the surrender of British colonies, and\u2013even more importantly\u2013the fleet.129\n\nThe President's immediate reply to Churchill's request, received in Whitehall on 18 May, was, accordingly, kind in tone but non-committal in content. While he would do what he could to facilitate the provision of equipment (and indeed he had hastily taken the decision to scrape together every available warplane to send to France, little though it amounted to130), the request for the loan or gift of the forty or fifty destroyers was turned down flat. There were legal as well as political obstacles. And the Navy Department opposed the release of any ships when national security was of such paramount importance.131 The President's reply was couched in these terms. The loan or gift of the destroyers, he wrote, would require the authorization of Congress. He indicated that this was unlikely to be forthcoming at the time. Moreover, the destroyers were needed to patrol American waters. In any case, they could not be transferred in time to make a difference in the battle for Europe. The plea for a declaration of non-belligerence was blithely ignored.132\n\nThere the matter of the destroyers rested for the time being. But not for long. Events in western Europe, unfolding at such a frightening pace, were concentrating American minds, in the White House as well as outside. Strong and widespread opposition to American intervention in the war was still the most profound feature of public opinion at the end of May 1940. According to an opinion poll published on 29 May, only 7.7 per cent of the population favoured entering the war immediately. The figure rose to 19 per cent in favour of intervention if the defeat of the Allies seemed inevitable. But 40 per cent opposed American participation under any circumstances.133 A despairing plea by the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, that the United States immediately declare war and act by sending its Atlantic fleet to European waters, could in this climate only fall upon deaf ears, even had the President been more temperamentally disposed towards direct American intervention than was the case.134 It would be many months before American opinion became attuned to the prospect of the country at war once again. Even so, opinion was soon shifting. With Americans glued to their radio sets, listening to the news of daily disaster from Europe, the fall of France and the imminent threat to Great Britain sharpened awareness of the menace to the United States from German domination of the Atlantic. Isolationist feeling was weakening, even in the Midwest heartlands. A sign of this was the rapidly increasing backing for the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the pressure group recently founded by William Allen White, a publisher and former supporter of the neutrality legislation, aimed at mobilizing opinion in favour of an interventionist stance.135 When, on 10 June 1940, the day that Italy joined the war, Roosevelt announced that the United States would 'extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation' as well as mobilizing American defence, he was doing no more than articulating the public mood.136 Four out of five Americans polled in June were in favour of giving more material support to Britain, and two-thirds, recognizing where this might lead, thought the United States would enter the war at some stage.137\n\nThere was also now massive support, reaching even into previously hardcore isolationist circles, for rapid and wholesale rearmament. Congress backed the President's requests that amounted to a fivefold increase in defence spending in 1940, granting a total of $10.5 billion, a figure unthinkable only a year earlier.138 But productive capacity was still low. The big dividends from rearmament would only show by 1942. And the question of how much and what to send to Britain, isolated and imperilled after the fall of France, was one that tended to divide, rather than unite, policy-makers. The question of the destroyers, of which the public was still ignorant, had been shelved. But it would not go away.\n\nChurchill had responded to Roosevelt, immediately on receipt of his letter, expressing his understanding of, though regret at, the decision not to provide the destroyers. The battle for France was still raging, and Churchill, in a previous note, had already stated that if American assistance was to play any part in the struggle, it had to come soon. Now he pointed out in bleak terms the 'nightmare' that would arise from the defeat of Britain. 'If members of the present Administration were finished,' he wrote, 'and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the Fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants.'139 Roosevelt sent no immediate reply. But the point struck home. Speaking shortly afterwards to business leaders, the President pointed out that if the British fleet and the French army were removed, 'there is nothing between the Americas and those new forces in Europe'.140 Soon, the French army was indeed removed from the equation. Under the terms of the armistice with Germany, the French navy was left intact and based in north Africa, to be 'demobilised and disarmed under German or Italian control'.141 The danger that the Germans would expropriate it was obvious. That left the British navy. Everything possible had to be done to prevent that falling into German hands. Thought was already being given to spiriting it across the Atlantic, to Canada, should Britain fall. But, more immediately, the navy was vital to Britain's chances of surviving a German invasion. In the confines of British coastal waters, the most crucial warship was the destroyer. And of a hundred or so destroyers available in home waters at the beginning of the war, almost half had been lost or damaged.142 If American destroyers could help keep Britain in the war, the value to the United States would be incalculable. If, however, they were loaned to Britain and then lost to the Germans, they would simply be an unnecessary gift to the enemy, increasing the menace to America.143 This was the dilemma of the Roosevelt administration when the issue of the loan of destroyers to Britain surfaced again in July 1940.\n\nBy then, Roosevelt had been heartened by the firm show of British resolve in the ruthless action taken on 3 July to destroy the French fleet, anchored at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria, with the loss of life of 1,297 sailors of Britain's former ally. The President had been notified in advance of the action by the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, and had signalled his approval.144 But he still showed no readiness to comply with the British destroyer request. When Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, argued with him that the defence of Britain might depend upon acceding to the request, Roosevelt was adamant. 'We could not send these destroyers unless the Navy could certify that they were useless to us for defense purposes,' the President countered. And 'it would be difficult to do this in view of the fact that we were reconditioning more than one hundred of them to use for our own defense purposes'.145 As he told Ickes a few days later, he also had to consider the fate of the destroyers should Britain be forced to capitulate to the Germans.146\n\nCritical though the situation was, the war in Europe tended for much of July to be superseded by domestic concerns as Roosevelt was preoccupied with the presidential nomination, to be decided at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in the middle of the month. The Republicans, a few weeks earlier, had chosen as their presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, a former Democrat, a striking personality, and, like Roosevelt, strongly in favour of giving all possible aid to Britain. Willkie posed a serious threat to the Democrats, especially since involvement in the European war was the central issue in 1940. The question of who should run against Willkie was, therefore, acute. One name that kept recurring in the list of hopefuls was that of Roosevelt himself. No one else was likely to defeat Willkie.147 The President had remained coy down to the Convention itself about whether he would be prepared to run for a third term, though his earlier assurances that he would not stand again had given way to equivocation. He diplomatically stayed away from the Convention. But the Roosevelt camp had stage-managed their hero's nomination.\n\nOn the second night, 16 July, a prepared statement was read to delegates, announcing that Roosevelt 'has never had and has not today any desire or purpose to continue in the office of the President'. All at once the loudspeakers in the hall started to boom out: 'Pennsylvania Wants Roosevelt! Virginia Wants Roosevelt!', and so on across the states. The delegates started to take up the cry. Standards from the states were brought in and paraded around the hall. It transpired that the disembodied voice that began the clamour had come from Chicago's Commissioner of Sewers, located beneath the hall. The organization of the 'Voice from the Sewers' had been provided by the Democratic Mayor of Chicago, Edward J. Kelly.148 And Kelly had discussed arrangements for the Convention with Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's right-hand man.149 It was a charade, and, in fact, little short of a scandal. But it served its purpose. Roosevelt was duly nominated next day with a massive majority over all other candidates.\n\nWith the Convention over, Lord Lothian advised Churchill that it might be a good time to return to the destroyer issue.150 Churchill had repeated his request on 11 June, the day after Italy had entered the conflict, and he raised this issue once more three days later.151 On seeing the letter, Morgenthau had asked Grace Tully, one of Roosevelt's personal secretaries, to inform the President of his belief 'that unless we help out the British with some destroyers it is hopeless to expect them to keep going'.152 But again, the request had fallen on stony ground. And for almost two months since the fall of France, correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill had lain dormant. The President had been taken up with his nomination for re-election. The Prime Minister and his colleagues might have felt it could be counterproductive to press Roosevelt too hard.153 But on 31 July Churchill took up the matter of the destroyers once again. German invasion could, it seemed, come at any time. Air raids and U-boat attacks on shipping could now be launched from the whole of the French coastline. A large construction programme of destroyers was under way in Britain, but the ships would not become available until 1941. Meanwhile, the rate of attrition was too high, and the next three or four months would be critical. Churchill felt, therefore, that he had to renew his request for 'fifty or sixty of your oldest destroyers', to be sent at once. 'Mr. President,' he declared, 'with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.'154\n\nThe issue had already been taken up earlier in the month by the Century Group, a sub-organization of the Committee to Defend America, comprising a number of influential citizens of New York, and meeting periodically at the Century Association in that city. Since mid-June the Century Group had been engaged in a campaign to send all possible disposable military resources, including naval, to the Allies, seeing their fight as synonymous with America's own, and advocating the abolition of neutrality and recognition of a state of war existing with Germany.155 On 11 July, at a meeting in New York, the Century Group proposed, as part of a strategy to meet the dangers threatening from Europe, supplying destroyers to Britain in exchange for a number of bases in British possessions close to American shores. This turned out to be a key proposal, and it came from a private initiative, not from within the administration.\n\nIt was not in essence a new idea. In fact, the isolationist Chicago Tribune had long urged that such bases should be offered by the Allies in return for the cancellation of war debts. But the linkage now to the provision of the needed destroyers was a shrewd move. It offered in embryo the possibility of a deal that would suit America. And it held some appeal even to isolationists. One of the leading figures in the Century Group, Joseph Alsop, a well-known newspaper columnist with good connections to figures in the administration, now persuaded one of the President's assistants, Benjamin Cohen, to compose a memorandum for Roosevelt, arguing that there was no obstacle to selling the destroyers. Cohen showed the memorandum to his boss, Harold Ickes, who brought it to the President's attention (and subsequently wrote in strong support of supplying the destroyers).156\n\nRoosevelt, however, remained unconvinced. The United States had 172 over-age warships, many of First World War vintage. Supplying Britain with fifty or so of them would not have crippled the navy. But on 28 June 1940, Congress, showing its distrust of the President, had passed an amendment to the Naval Appropriations bill stipulating that no item of military material could be turned over to a foreign government unless either the chief of staff (Marshall) or the chief of Naval Operations (Stark) had certified that it was useless for the defence of the United States. Precisely that was difficult for Stark to do since he had recently upheld the potential value of the warships before congressional committees.157 Roosevelt referred to the barrier of the new legislation when he sent Cohen's memorandum on to the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, on 22 July. 'I frankly doubt if Cohen's memorandum would stand up,' the President wrote. 'Also I fear Congress is in no mood at the present time to allow any form of sale.' All he could suggest was that sometime later Congress might be prevailed upon to allow the sale of the destroyers to Canada, but only on condition that their use be confined to defence of the American hemisphere.158\n\nThe Century Group, however, continued to press. Alsop talked to civilian and military officials in Washington and found an encouraging response. The British ambassador, Lord Lothian, was unsurprisingly supportive. On 25 July, in the light of Alsop's soundings, the Century Group compiled a further memorandum, ending in the proposal that the destroyers be offered immediately in return for naval and air concessions in British possessions in the western hemisphere. A further point of significance now added was to tie the deal to a guarantee that the British fleet would, in the event of a successful German invasion, be neither scuttled nor surrendered but removed to Canadian or American bases from where it would continue to operate. Since the issue was so urgent, members of the group would lobby Roosevelt and urge him to act jointly with Willkie, the Republican challenger, to expedite the matter. Meanwhile, a further publicity campaign would aim to sustain the pressure. Roosevelt met three delegates from the group on 1 August, listened to what they had to say, but remained non-committal. The delegates left disappointed, feeling that the President was apathetic about the issue.159\n\nThey were wrong in this. On 2 August Roosevelt raised the issue at an unusually important meeting of his Cabinet. Frank Knox, the Secretary of the Navy, had spoken at length to Lothian the previous evening, heard a desperate plea from the ambassador for immediate assistance in sending the destroyers and had met a positive response to the suggestion that Britain transfer land for naval bases on the Atlantic coast to the United States. Before the Cabinet met, Knox had talked over the proposition with Stimson, gained his backing, and that, too, of Harold Ickes.160 A powerful phalanx of support for the idea existed, therefore, when the Cabinet assembled.\n\nIt soon proved, in fact, that there was unanimous support for making the destroyers available to Britain. But the necessary legislation was a stumbling block. It was recognized that if Roosevelt were to seek it without thoroughly preparing the ground, Congress would reject the proposal or subject it to 'interminable delay'. A possible way round the problem was the transfer of British possessions. Discussion at Cabinet had indeed begun with Knox's report of his lengthy telephone conversation with Lothian. Hull, just back from the Pan-American Conference in Havana, thought the transfer of British possessions might fall foul of the agreement reached with the other American republics upholding the policy of retention of existing territorial status in the western hemisphere. Roosevelt himself, agreeing with Hull's objection, then suggested that leasing part of the territory (as was currently the case with a naval base in Trinidad) might provide a solution, an idea that met with general agreement. In addition, the Cabinet agreed to seek assurances from Britain that the fleet would not fall into German hands in the event of defeat. This, it was thought, would also help to assuage opposition within Congress. Hull pointed out that the transfer of the destroyers could only be accomplished through the repeal of the law prohibiting such sales. The best way of approaching this, he suggested, would be for the President and the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie (already known to be sympathetic), jointly to back the proposal, thereby defusing Republican opposition within Congress. The President was left to contact William Allen White, the leading figure in the Committee to Defend America, to ask his help in brokering agreement with Willkie.161\n\nBelatedly, it was a start. But there now followed a protracted period of consultation and legal wrangling about the details of the embryonic deal. Churchill was unwilling, for reasons of morale at home, to give a public assurance about the fleet in the event of a British defeat.162 The British 'shopping-list', when it was supplied on 8 August, had been substantially enhanced and now stretched to 96 destroyers, 20 motor torpedo-boats, flying-boats, dive-bombers and 250,000 rifles. Above all, it was still an open question whether, even with Willkie's support (and he proved cagy about giving explicit approval), the necessary legislation to permit the provision of the destroyers, accepting British willingness to transfer bases, could be pushed through Congress.163\n\nTwo developments gave impetus to a process that threatened to become becalmed in legal technicalities. The first was the enormous campaign of agitation unleashed by the Committee to Defend America. The Committee managed to enlist in its cause the support of the revered military leader of the First World War, General John J. Pershing, whose broadcast stirred widespread public backing for the supply of the destroyers, mixed with some incredulity that it was proving so difficult to organize. Once the quid pro quo\u2013the transfer of bases\u2013became public knowledge, the demands for prompt action grew even louder. But so, too, did the voices of the isolationist opposition, warning that 'the sale of the Navy's ships to a nation at war would be an act of war', and that 'if we want to get into the war, the destroyers offer as good a way as any of accomplishing the purpose'. The second factor in the breakthrough was a letter to the New York Times by four prominent lawyers, arguing persuasively that the supply of the destroyers could be accommodated within the existing legal framework and urging the President to act on his own authority without delay.164\n\nRoosevelt still awaited legal clarification from his Attorney General, Robert H. Jackson. But, finally, on 13 August, after consulting Stimson, Knox, Morgenthau and Welles (standing in for Hull, who was taking a brief and well-earned recuperative break), and with England already facing mounting air attacks, Roosevelt decided to push ahead with the negotiations. Probably at this point, before hearing from the Attorney General, he still contemplated putting the case before Congress rather than taking executive action. But in any case, a lengthy message to Churchill drafted that evening, offering at least fifty destroyers, the motor torpedo-boats and a small number of planes, made plain that the President would accept his private assurances about the fate of the fleet, and outlined the possessions, to be acquired through purchase or a ninety-nine-year lease, in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana where the Americans wanted to establish naval and air bases. Churchill replied straight away, accepting all the stipulations.165\n\nThe way seemed finally clear. Or was it? The President still fretted about the isolationist opposition. He feared that acting without the backing of Congress could lose him the forthcoming election. His worries probably lay behind the deliberately misleading impression he unnecessarily conveyed to a press conference on 16 August when he insisted that the acquisition of British possessions was not related to the transfer of destroyers to Britain.166 Given the feeling in the country, it reflected undue sensitivity.\n\nHis confidence grew on hearing the legal opinion of the Attorney General, who had concluded that the destroyers could be certified as not essential to national security\u2013patently a piece of sophistry. Roosevelt told the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, on 17 August that he did not need to submit the matter to Congress, and that Britain would have the destroyers within a week. That proved optimistic. Further fine-tuning of the draft agreement was only finalized at the end of the month. It was Churchill in these latter stages who delayed completion by insisting on redrafting the terms of the lease of the bases in order to obfuscate the reality of the deal to the British public: that the United States had come out of it inordinately well.167 Eventually, the minor but awkward difficulties were resolved. The President gave his approval on 30 August. On the evening of 2 September Cordell Hull for the United States and Lord Lothian for Great Britain signed the agreement. Admiral Stark certified next day that the destroyers were not essential to national security in the light of the acquired bases. The ships finally made their way to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and into British possession.168\n\nAfter the months of hesitation, delay, foot-dragging, legal wrangling and drafting complications, the destroyers proved of little practical value. Only nine were put into service by the Royal Navy before the end of the year, to meet the invasion that never came. And even these were less seaworthy than had been expected. As late as May 1941 no more than thirty were put to use. There were delays, too, in releasing the motor torpedo-boats and the rifles (which, amazingly, had been completely forgotten about in the final draft of the agreement).169 Nor, despite the flurry of activity in the summer crisis, did the bases pass rapidly into American possession. The precise arrangements for the base leases were not concluded until March 1941.170\n\nBut the symbolism of the destroyer deal far outweighed any tangible benefit for either side. The reaction in Rome, Berlin and Tokyo was sufficient to demonstrate this. Mussolini purported to be indifferent to the deal. But he interpreted it as bringing the likelihood of American intervention in the war closer.171 The German reaction was stronger. The delivery of the destroyers was seen as 'an openly hostile act against Germany', marking closer cooperation between Britain and the United States. America, it was now taken for granted, would do everything possible to support Britain and damage Germany. Part of the response was contemplation of a move to occupy the Azores and the Canaries. Hitler himself, however, shrugged off the deal. He thought American rearmament would peak only in 1945. Even so, from the summer of 1940 onwards America was a factor that had to be given the utmost consideration in German strategy.172 Such consideration, we might recall, played its part in the decision to attack and, it was presumed, rapidly destroy the Soviet Union the following spring. And the destroyer-bases deal helped to hasten the negotiations between Germany and Japan that culminated in the Tripartite Pact of mid-September, aimed at deterring the United States from participation in the war.173\n\nIn the United States, Roosevelt was above all able to emphasize the huge advantages to American defences from the acquisition of the Atlantic bases. The popular reception was very positive. Isolationists were outflanked by the President's move to tie in the bases with the supply of the destroyers. Traditional isolationism was now starting to run out of steam, even if fear of intervention was still strong. More importantly, as was widely recognized, the Americans had now effectively abandoned neutrality.174\n\nFor the British, this was the key point. The United States was no longer neutral in any conventional understanding of the term. The totemic aspect of the destroyer deal, privately as well as publicly emphasized by British leaders, was the outward display of American military support for Britain. During the niggly negotiations in late August, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, had remarked that 'the idea of the English-United States tie-up on anything is of more value than either bases or destroyers'.175 Churchill himself had implied the same at the climax of his speech in the House of Commons on 20 August. He spoke of the destroyer deal, at that point still not completed, as meaning 'that these two great organizations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage'. It was a process, he added, in a rhetorical flourish, that he could not stop even if he wanted to do so. 'No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.'176 Rhetoric apart, it was a decisive moment, as Churchill hinted, in demonstrating American solidarity with Britain's war effort. He later described it as 'a decidedly unneutral act by the United States', an event which 'brought the United States definitely nearer to us and to the war'.177 And so it was, and so it did.\n\nNot that this had been Roosevelt's intention. What seems in retrospect to have been part of an inexorable process did not look like that at the time. That it had taken fully three and a half months since Churchill's first overture to bring the deal to fruition was first and foremost a reflection of Roosevelt's uncertainty in handling public opinion at home and his reluctance to commit himself too far. In an election year, he was cautious of offering any propaganda hostages to fortune to his opponent. And his fear of upsetting Congress made him all the more ready to hide behind legalism when decisive action was called for. In the event, the Germans did not invade, and the destroyers were not needed. But an invasion certainly seemed imminent in summer 1940, and still Roosevelt hesitated over the destroyers. In the end, he did take action in authorizing something which he had probably inwardly favoured all along. But by then he was taking no risk with public opinion. Sensitive as ever to anything that might affect his popularity, he had even suggested that the destroyer deal might lose him the forthcoming election.178 In fact, he had been pushed by public opinion, stirred by the agitation of the lobbies favouring the deal. 'The destroyer deal', it has been aptly noted, 'was at least as much the achievement of private effort as of official action.'179 With the United States now effectively a non-neutral non-belligerent, it remained to be seen whether the President would take a more active role than he had done in the summer of 1940 in driving ahead the support for Great Britain.\n\nV\n\nThe underlying issue remained. The United States was committed, and with a great deal of popular backing, to providing support for Britain short of war. The idea that this was crucial to hemispheric defence\u2013in America's own direct interest, that is\u2013was widely accepted. But the practicalities of supplying aid to Britain raised contentious issues. The destroyer deal had been pushed through on the President's executive authority on what many regarded as legal sleight of hand by the Attorney General that allowed the bypassing of congressional legislation. However, if aid on a major scale were to be provided for Britain, the imprimatur of Congress as the seal of the nation's backing could not be indefinitely avoided.\n\nThere were at least two major obstacles to attaining congressional support for massively increased aid. One was the view, vociferously expressed by the isolationist lobby though not confined to them, that arms should not be shipped to Britain when they were directly and obviously needed to build up American military defences. A related concern was that increased arms would necessitate increased support for the ships carrying the mate\n\n\u00b4riel\u2013inexorably, therefore, drawing the United States closer to involvement in the war. The second obstacle, and certainly a daunting one, was legal and financial. Britain was fast reaching the point where she would be unable to pay for the arms she desperately needed. But under the Johnson Act of 1934, still valid, the United States could not give loans to nations in default on their debts from the First World War. And under the cash-and-carry provisions of the Neutrality Act, introduced in 1937 and renewed in 1939, goods could only be sold to belligerent countries if the money was provided upfront.180 On the other hand, a drop in British arms orders was out of the question, and not just for the pressing reason that, without the resources of the United States at her disposal, Britain's war effort would before long be exhausted. For domestic reasons, too, the Roosevelt administration wanted to increase, not curtail, supplies to Britain. By the time of his re-election\u2013with a comfortable, if reduced majority\u2013on 5 November 1940, Roosevelt had seen unemployment fall by 3.5 million since the recession of 1937\u20138. At the end of the year, unemployment stood at its lowest level for a decade. And this was thanks, in the main, to British weapons purchases, worth some $5 billion in orders by the end of 1940.181\n\nThe matter of aid to Britain was coming to a head by the end of 1940. The presidential election was past, but it had not brought the discernible shift in American policy that the British government had been hoping for. Vague illusions in Whitehall that the United States might even enter the war once Roosevelt was re-elected were rapidly dashed. In fact, there was some sense of anti-climax also in Washington. For some weeks, policy seemed becalmed. The exertions of the election campaign had probably left more of a mark on the President than was immediately visible. At any rate, as has been pointed out, Roosevelt 'again deemed it more advantageous to stay in step with public opinion' than to risk 'a gamble with his powers of leadership'.182\n\nIn London, Churchill said at the beginning of December that he had been 'rather chilled' by the American attitude since the election. But one keen observer of the Washington scene who was unsurprised at the lack of dynamic action of the Roosevelt administration was the British ambassador, Lord Lothian. On a brief return to England in November, Lothian pointed out to Churchill the belief, still widespread in the United States, that Britain was asking for more than she needed and was less hard-up than she claimed. He advised Churchill to lay out the case for the greatly increased aid, necessary if Britain were not to be forced into a compromise peace during 1941, in a personal letter to the President.183 On his return to the United States, landing at New York, Lothian had spoken in uncharacteristically blunt and non-diplomatic language to reporters at an impromptu press conference. 'Well boys, Britain's broke; it's your money we want,' the ambassador told the waiting reporters. He repeated the remark, showing it was no off-the-cuff slip of the tongue, for the newsreels shortly afterwards. It was quite unlike Lothian. He claimed to have spoken on his own authority. But the suspicion remains that Churchill himself had prompted a calculated indiscretion.184\n\nAt any rate, it had the effect desired: putting the matter of the parlous British dollar resources squarely in the public eye. But the immediate response in the Roosevelt administration was far from positive. Cordell Hull was sceptical about the claim that Britain could afford to buy no more. So was Morgenthau, in charge of the Treasury, who pointed out to Lothian that opponents of aid could make political capital out of allowing a bankrupt country to place more orders. Morgenthau was aware that Lothian's remark was not quite what it seemed. Britain was not bankrupt. But dollar resources were running low, if not, Morgenthau surmised, as low as Lothian was claiming. Morgenthau, even so, was struck by Lothian's pessimism about Britain's future, unless large supplies of aid were forthcoming. In fact, the Secretary to the Treasury had been mulling over throughout November ways to meet British needs not just for armaments, but for merchant ships\u2013victims already to U-boats at an alarming rate\u2013to carry the food on which Britain depended.185 Roosevelt himself, at a Cabinet meeting on 8 November, had hinted at a possible solution. He thought the British still had enough in credit and property in the United States\u2013about $2.5 billion\u2013that they could liquidate to pay for war supplies. But he recognized that the money would run out. 'The time would surely come', the President remarked, 'when Great Britain would need loans or credits.' According to Ickes, 'he suggested that one way to meet that situation would be for us to supply whatever we could under leasing arrangements with England. For instance, he thought that we could lease ships or any other property that was loanable, returnable, and insurable.'186 In fact, it was not the first time that something like it had occurred to the President. Two years earlier, in November 1938, following the disastrous Munich Agreement, Roosevelt had mused over the difference it might have made had he been able to sell or lend large numbers of warplanes to the embattled European democracies.187 Thus did the idea that blossomed into the lend-lease programme begin to germinate.\n\nThe idea gained its first airing in public by an indirect route on 26 November 1940, when William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies issued a strong statement urging greater assistance to Britain. The statement called upon Congress to revise statutes hampering this assistance, and advocated the building with all speed of the maximum number of merchant ships for rent or lease to Britain. Behind the scenes, the press release had probably been initiated by the President himself, as a trial balloon, a device sometimes used by the White House to test opinion. In this instance, the statement elicited neither an outburst of public support nor sizeable opposition. Opinion, as usual, generally favoured helping Britain short of war, but was still cautious about the risk of American involvement in hostilities. Whatever Roosevelt deduced from the trial balloon, if that is what it was, no action followed from the White House. All the public learned was that the President was about to take a holiday.188\n\nThe President was about to set sail on the USS Tuscaloosa for a ten-day cruise in the Caribbean. Officially, he was visiting the new base sites in the West Indies. He took plenty of state papers with him, and said he would work on a major speech to the nation about the international situation while he was away. But he took no experts on foreign affairs with him. Looking worn out, he needed the trip to recharge his batteries, and mainly spent the time fishing, playing poker, watching films and relaxing with Harry Hopkins, his sole guest, and his aides, his only other accompaniment.189\n\nThe day before he left Washington, Roosevelt had authorized a complex deal for orders from London worth $2 billion to equip ten British army divisions. The question was how the British were going to fund the deal. Though Roosevelt was still insisting that 'they aren't bust\u2013there's lots of money there', he recognized that most of it was tied up in foreign assets in the Empire and not readily available in dollars. All the available resources in dollars, and more besides, would be used up in the munitions deal and over the coming months. The idea of loaning cargo ships to Britain recurred during the discussion, though there was no suggestion at the time of loaning or leasing aircraft or armaments. Pressed by Morgenthau, Roosevelt agreed that the orders should be placed and the capital investment to build new plants and extend existing ones should come from American funds, with the British paying on delivery for the material produced, adding a surcharge to contribute to the capital costs. But the President told Stimson, 'we have just got to decide what we are going to do for England', adding, 'doing it this way is not doing anything'.190\n\nUnless new ways could be found, the end of the road for the current ways of fulfilling the aim of maximum aid for Britain short of war was clearly approaching. That much was recognized by Roosevelt's key advisers, meeting in the President's absence just after he had left for his Caribbean cruise. Frank Knox came to the point and posed the key question, a rhetorical one. 'We are going to pay for the war from now on, are we?' When Morgenthau raised the issue of whether the United States should allow Britain to place the orders, Knox was adamant: 'Got to. No question about it.' But how was this to be done? Discussion still circled around the issue of whether Britain would have to pay cash for the goods produced. There was no resolution to this issue. Those present were agreed that the proposal for any kind of gift or loan, such as Britain would soon request, would have to go to Congress, and was likely to be rejected unless it was obvious that there was no other option. Until British assets were liquidated, this was unlikely.191 Loans were, given the bad feeling stirred up by Britain's non-payment of her debts from the First World War, not seen as the solution. It was felt better for the United States to place the orders, then turn over the products to Britain, though not as an outright gift, since it was hoped that something might be had in return, or at least unused or undamaged material eventually returned.192 The idea of a loan in kind, first mooted by Roosevelt, was now tentatively being extended in his absence to cover not just freight ships, but potentially the whole gamut of British armaments demands.\n\nWithin days, Churchill's long letter, which Lothian had suggested he write, was on its way to Roosevelt and eventually reached the President in the middle of the Caribbean on 9 December, sent on by the State Department and delivered by a naval seaplane. It had been difficult to compose and went through numerous drafts over a period of longer than a fortnight before it was ready. Churchill later commented, with justification, that it was one of the most important he ever wrote.193\n\nMost of the letter presented a tour d'horizon of the state of the war, from a British perspective. Churchill stressed the losses of merchant shipping in the Atlantic, the urgent need for ships, planes and munitions, and the tough struggle looming in 1941. He laid strong emphasis on Britain's dependency on help from the United States. The prime need to reduce the loss of tonnage in the Atlantic could be achieved, he tactfully suggested, if the United States were to provide warship escorts to the merchant convoys, a move, he said, which 'would constitute a decisive act of constructive non-belligerency'. Churchill was aware of the magnitude of what he was asking. It would be months before the American public would be ready for such a move. He expressed another hope: 'the gift, loan, or supply of a large number of American vessels of war' to maintain the Atlantic route, and the extension of control by American forces in the western part of the ocean.\n\nOnly at the end of his lengthy missive did he reach the crucial issue of finance. He pointed out the drain on dollar credits. 'The moment approaches', he wrote, 'when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.' He combined moral pressure with economic logic: 'I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.'\n\nHe went on to outline the postwar economic problems this would cause for the United States. American exports to Britain would slump. Widespread unemployment would result. He offered no solution, but he ended by placing Britain's future in America's hands. 'Moreover,' he concluded,\n\nI do not believe that the Government and people of the United States would find it in accordance with the principles which guide them to confine the help which they have so generously promised only to such munitions of war and commodities as could be immediately paid for. You may be certain that we shall prove ourselves ready to suffer and sacrifice to the utmost for the Cause, and that we glory in being its champions. The rest we leave with confidence to you and to your people, being sure that ways and means will be found which future generations on both sides of the Atlantic will approve and admire.194\n\nIndirectly, with these closing remarks, Churchill was underlining the shift in power-relations between Great Britain and the United States which the first year of the war had laid bare. Morgenthau put it succinctly: 'It gets down to a question of Mr. Churchill putting himself in Mr. Roosevelt's hands with complete confidence. Then it is up to Mr. Roosevelt to say what he will do.'195 It sounded like the obsequies for the British Empire.\n\nWhile Morgenthau and other administration leaders continued in Washington to wrestle with the problem of Britain's payments for the material she needed,196 Roosevelt was sitting in his deckchair on board the Tuscaloosa in the balmy sunshine of the Caribbean, pondering Churchill's letter. He read it time and again and for two days seemed deep in thought, profoundly affected by its contents. Hopkins, the President's only confidant on board, left Roosevelt to his ruminations. 'Then one evening,' Hopkins later recounted, 'he suddenly came out with it\u2013the whole programme. He didn't seem to have any clear idea how it could be done legally. But there wasn't a doubt in his mind that he'd find a way to do it.'197 Perhaps Hopkins was being modest about his own role; perhaps he and Roosevelt had, in fact, examined the possibilities before the President resolved the matter in his own mind; perhaps the decision was less a bolt out of the blue than it was made to seem. However, this is of minor significance. For there is no question that the way round Britain's dollar crisis, the momentous decision that would open up unlimited resources for the British war effort, was found by Roosevelt himself.198\n\nCharacteristically, Roosevelt was in no hurry to tell the members of his Cabinet about his decision. He told them to avoid action until he returned and could discuss the matter in detail.199 Before then, the key figures in the administration responsible for foreign and defence policy had met in Hull's office in the State Department to review the situation in the light of Churchill's letter, and notably his call for 'a decisive act of constructive non-belligerency', to have a position worked out for the President on his return. Alongside the Secretary of State himself were Stimson, Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, Sumner Welles and a number of other leading officials. Stark was adamant that at the current rate of shipping losses Britain could not survive longer than six months. Stimson, to the point as ever, drew the conclusion that American defence production could not be raised to the levels necessary for the security of the United States and to prevent Britain's defeat 'until we got into war ourselves'. When he asked Stark what measures were necessary to relieve Britain's plight in the Atlantic, the Admiral replied that the Neutrality Act would have to be repealed to allow US merchant ships to carry supplies to British ports, and that such a move would undoubtedly lead to naval escorts of convoys and, ultimately, in all probability, to American entry into the war. It was a daunting prospect. Unsurprisingly, no clear path forward emerged from the meeting.200\n\nBy the time the President returned to Washington on the evening of 16 December, tanned, in good spirits, thoroughly 'refuelled' (as Hopkins put it) from his sojourn on board the Tuscaloosa, there was an air of some expectancy in the American capital.201 Next day he told Morgenthau that he had been 'thinking very hard on this trip about what we should do for England', and had come to the conclusion 'that the thing to do is to get away from the dollar sign'. He wanted neither sales nor money loans. Instead, he suggested that 'we will say to England, we will give you the guns and the ships that you need, provided that when the war is over you will return to us in kind the guns and the ships that we have loaned to you'. 'What do you think of it?' the President asked. Morgenthau was instantly enthusiastic.202 He put it down to one of Roosevelt's 'brilliant flashes'.203 As we have seen, however, the idea had been forming in the President's mind for some while. It certainly reached back to the time of the destroyer deal, when Roosevelt mused about leasing merchant ships to Britain. The original notion, it has been suggested, arose when the Treasury Department found that old statutes sanctioned the leasing of army property for up to five years if the goods were not necessary for public use.204 But if that was the case, the Treasury made nothing of the discovery. It took the President to recognize the full potential of the leasing idea. And on 17 December, he put it into the public domain in a way which was novel, clear and compelling.\n\nThat afternoon, Roosevelt held a press conference. He began disarmingly by saying there was no particular news. But he thought there might be one thing worth mentioning. He gradually moved into his theme. No major war had been lost for lack of money, he stated. Giving the impression that he was thinking on his feet, he went on to put the case for increased aid to Britain. It was, he said, 'important from a selfish point of view of American defense, that we should do everything to help the British Empire to defend itself'. He pointed out that British orders were 'a tremendous asset to American defense'. He ruled out the need for any repeal of the Johnson or Neutrality Acts. But he thought it necessary to think beyond traditional terms about war finances. He claimed, with some exaggeration, that the administration had been working on the problem for some weeks. Then he advanced what he suggested was only one of a number of possible methods. The United States could take over British orders and 'lease or sell' to Great Britain part of munitions production. What he was trying to do, Roosevelt continued, was to 'get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign'. He produced a folksy analogy to explain what he meant. A man would not say to a neighbour whose house was on fire: 'Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.' He would lend the neighbour his hose, and get it back later. This was how the munitions problem had to be handled. The details were still to be clarified, the President said, but what he was going to do was to substitute for the dollar sign a 'gentleman's obligation to repay in kind'. 'I think you all get it,' he added. When reporters present asked him whether his scheme would take the country closer to war, Roosevelt was dismissive. But he accepted that Congress would have to give its approval, and that proposals for legislation would be forthcoming in the New Year.205\n\nIt was a masterly performance; Roosevelt at his very best. The garden-hose parable was not, in fact, Roosevelt's brainwave, as it appeared on the day. It had first been used by Harold Ickes four months earlier, but had evidently stuck in the President's head and been stored away for future use.206 He had now deployed it, and to brilliant effect. 'It may accurately be said that with that neighbourly analogy Roosevelt won the fight for Lend Lease,' Robert Sherwood, one of the President's speech-writing team, believed.207 It was still far from a programme. Roosevelt had provided no details; those would, however, all come out one way or the other in the passage of legislation through Congress. He batted away questions about the increased production necessary to provide the material for the British. The implications of ensuring safe delivery of the goods produced to the British armed forces were equally unclear. And there was an obvious flaw in the analogy, not lost on some who heard it. The 'garden hose', in this case, was unlikely to be returned, certainly not intact. But what the President had done with his parable, above all, was to reduce a highly complex, and controversial, issue to utter simplicity\u2013to a story of good neighbourliness which anyone could understand and most would have sympathy with. The issue of aid to Britain was now fully in the public domain, open to rigorous scrutiny and debate on all sides.\n\nRoosevelt backed up his opening gambit with immediate and energetic executive action, approving as a matter of great urgency Stimson's initiative to shake up the reorganization of defence production. The leaderless and hopelessly ineffectual Advisory Commission, set up in the spring, was now replaced by a smaller and more dynamic Office of Production Management with only four members: Stimson, Knox, the director and experienced business leader William Knudsen (head of General Motors), and, as co-director, ensuring the involvement of organized labour, Sidney Hillmann (president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers). The operational weaknesses of this new organization, too, would be fairly quickly exposed. For now, however, its institution was a clear indication that Roosevelt was anxious to drive ahead with the armaments aid programme, though on the linked question of convoy escorts he remained evasive and non-committal.208\n\nTwelve days after his pivotal press conference, on 29 December, Roosevelt was wheeled into the diplomatic reception room at the White House to deliver his first 'fireside chat' to the nation since his re-election. Many at the time, and since, have reckoned it to be among his best and most effective. It may at least in part have been prompted by the hostile response to the lend-lease idea in German foreign propaganda\u2013a response aimed at shoring up the isolationists in the United States, but in fact having the opposite effect of prompting unexpected backing for the President's initiative.209 However, the main impulse was Roosevelt's wish to explain to the American people 'the plain truth about the gravity of the situation' in which the war had placed the United States,210 and to drive home the need to provide all-out aid to Britain\u2013an induction into lend-lease.\n\nRoosevelt pulled no punches in elaborating the danger to the security of America. Referring to the Tripartite Pact signed the previous September between Germany, Italy and Japan and directed against the United States, he painted a stark dualistic picture of free, democratic peoples in mortal combat against 'the evil forces' of totalitarian tyranny, set on dominating and enslaving the human race. In an age of air power, the oceans, he went on, were no longer a protection for the United States. It was vital that they did not fall to hostile powers. In this, upholding the fighting potential of Britain (the struggle of the Greeks and the Chinese was also mentioned) was vital. For, 'if Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and the high seas\u2013and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere'. There was, therefore, great danger ahead, which had to be faced. Indirectly rounding on his isolationist opponents, the President dismissed the illusion 'that we can save our own skins by shutting our eyes to the fate of other nations'. Appeasement, experience had shown, offered no solution. A 'negotiated peace' was 'nonsense'; it would be no peace at all.\n\nThe President turned to his second theme: the need to help Britain. The British were holding out against an 'unholy alliance'. America's future security depended upon the outcome of this struggle. Roosevelt stated categorically: 'there is far less chance of the United States getting into war if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat.' He openly accepted that there was risk involved in any course adopted. But the course he was advocating carried, he said, the least risk. There was no demand for an American Expeditionary Force to be sent abroad, and no intention of sending one. 'You can, therefore, nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.' But those engaged in the fighting were asking for 'the implements of war', and 'emphatically we must get these weapons to them'. He repeated that his policy was not directed at war, but at keeping war away from America. He appealed to workers and to leaders of industry to redouble their efforts. 'We must have more ships, more guns, more planes\u2013more of everything.' How much would be sent abroad would rest on the judgement of the government's defence experts. The United States had furnished the British with great material support, and would provide more in future. The President concluded his powerful speech with words that had a lasting echo: 'We must be the great arsenal of democracy.'211\n\nThere was an overwhelming response to the 'fireside chat'. Three-quarters of Americans had heard it, and of those over 60 per cent were in agreement. The White House was inundated with letters and telegrams on the speech\u2013100 to 1 in favour. Roosevelt was delighted. It was far beyond his expectations. The disapproval, as to be expected, came from the dwindling force of isolationists, but even they were in part disarmed by the speech. Some of the most perceptive published reactions welcomed the clear and firm leadership at last displayed by the President, applauding the end of the uncertainty that had hung like a cloud over American policy during the previous months, and that Roosevelt had finally 'clarified and crystallized America's choice, a choice really made long ago'. The regret was only that 'this approach was delayed at the expense of six months of vital preparation'.212\n\nDecember 1940 was the month in which the key decision\u2013one of the most important of the war\u2013was taken. It was a decision for a programme that amounted to 'nothing short of a declaration of economic warfare on the Axis'.213 For the first time since well before his re-election, Roosevelt had led, rather than followed, opinion in the country. And opinion was shifting in line with his lead. Now, as many as 70 per cent of those questioned were ready to help Britain win, even at the risk of American involvement in the war. But a huge majority still opposed entering the war there and then. The American people, as one commentator put it, continued to prefer 'their footing on the rim' to being pushed into war.214\n\nRoosevelt's 'fireside chat' was swiftly followed by his annual address to Congress on the State of the Union, delivered on 6 January 1941. In another forceful speech, the President outlined the 'four essential human freedoms' for which he was striving. They amounted to a declaration of American aims for a postwar world: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Soon afterwards, the President stipulated his budget demands for 1942: of the 17.5 billion dollars requested, 60 per cent was allocated to national defence.215 The 'arsenal of democracy' had been commissioned.\n\nEven before his speech to Congress, on 2 January, the President's new sense of urgency had led him to commission the Treasury to draft the Lend-Lease bill to take to Congress.216 From now on, the main responsibility lay with Morgenthau and his team. The bill was given the symbolic number of House Resolution 1776\u2013the date of the American Revolution. On 10 January it was brought to the House of Representatives. The debates that followed, over a period of two months, were intensive, and were widely reported. There was huge national interest. Almost all Americans knew of the bill, and most of them consistently supported it, even though more than a third of those questioned thought that, if passed, it would bring the United States closer to 'getting into the war'.217 For the isolationists, the campaign against the bill amounted to a last hurrah. The America First Committee launched a massive campaign of opposition. The young John F. Kennedy was one of those who contributed to its funds.218 Extensive publicity for the campaign was assured in the pages of the Chicago Tribune, published by the larger than life character, and outspoken isolationist, Colonel Robert R. McCormick.219\n\nThe complex legislative process took its course. In Congress, the opposition was not powerful enough to defeat the bill, but was able to force through a number of amendments. Eventually, the bill was passed by a majority of 260 to 165 in the House of Representatives, 60 to 31 in the Senate. In both chambers, those opposed were mainly Republicans. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease law on 11 March 1941. It now gave him the authority to order the production or procurement of 'any defense article for the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States'.220\n\nSpeaking at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association four days later, the President omitted all the recriminations about his opponents that he had originally thought of including.221 Instead, he focused on the national unity that the debate on lend-lease had brought to face the tasks ahead. 'Let not the dictators of Europe or Asia doubt our unanimity now,' he proclaimed. The entire country had engaged in a great debate. 'Yes, the decisions of our democracy may be slowly arrived at,' he conceded. 'But when that decision is made, it is proclaimed not with the voice of any one man but with the voice of one hundred and thirty millions. It is binding on us all. And the world is no longer left in doubt.' A sideswipe at his opponents followed: 'This decision is the end of any attempts at appeasement in our land; the end of urging us to get along with dictators; the end of compromise with tyranny and the forces of oppression. And the urgency is now.' He underlined the significance of the decision taken: 'We believe firmly that when our production output is in full swing, the democracies of the world will be able to prove that dictatorships cannot win.'222\n\nVI\n\nLend-lease was one of the most important political decisions of the war, and had some of the most far-reaching consequences. For Churchill, it was 'a wonderful decision', bringing new hope and conviction through the knowledge that 'the United States are very closely bound up with us now'.223 He spoke of it as a 'climacteric'\u2013an 'intense turning-point'\u2013in Britain's war effort.224 It meant an 'irrevocable commitment' to the alliance of the United States with Great Britain, a 'point of no return' in American policy against Nazi Germany, a 'major step towards war'.225 The German reaction also spoke volumes for the significance of what had happened. The Wehrmacht leadership interpreted it as 'a declaration of war'. Goebbels described it in the same way. And Hitler immediately decided to extend the combat zone in the north Atlantic as far west as the territorial waters of Greenland.226\n\nFor Roosevelt's critics, that was precisely what it was intended to do. When the arch-isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler declared that lend-lease would 'plough under every fourth American boy', Roosevelt reacted allergically. 'I regard it as the most untruthful, as the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has ever been said,' he retorted.227 And when, in the spring, Charles A. Lindbergh became the darling of the isolationists in the America First anti-Roosevelt campaign, the President privately expressed his conviction that the former aviation hero was a Nazi.228 Among ardent interventionists, within the administration and outside, lend-lease offered precisely what the isolationists were decrying: the expectation that a sense of urgency and dynamism would now drive American policy faster and closer towards the direct involvement in the war that they deemed necessary and inevitable. Over the months that followed the passing of the Lend-Lease Act, the President pleased neither of his sets of critics. For isolationists, he was going much too far. For interventionists, he was doing far too little. He was, in fact, not steering a middle way. His leanings were invariably towards those who wanted to do more, not less, to help the British in what was a dire phase of the war for them. But it was always to be 'short of war', and his political antennae invariably told him that the route of caution was the right one. The result was that over the spring months American policy seemed to recede into drift, uncertainty and hesitation.\n\nThe immediate benefits from lend-lease were not huge. Harry Hopkins was put in charge of the lend-lease programme with something approaching a plenipotentiary mandate to make it work.229 The administration immediately requested $7 billion in appropriations. Among the first supplies, and a neat reflection of Roosevelt's determining 'fireside chat', were 900,000 feet of fire hose. But only a tiny 1 per cent of the munitions actually used by Britain and the Empire during 1941 came from lend-lease. The immediate significance for the British war effort was largely symbolic. What would result from lend-lease over the course of the war, however, was anything but confined to symbolism. More than half of British deficits were covered by lend-lease, and it would come, too, to be vital to the Soviet war machine. The list of potential recipient countries had been deliberately left open when the legislation was drafted. Aware from intelligence reports of growing signs that Hitler might invade the Soviet Union before the year was out, the administration was anxious to prevent anti-Communists in Congress from limiting the countries that might at some point receive lend-lease. It proved a crucial piece of forethought. By the time the war ended, the scheme had provided over $50 billion worldwide.\n\nWithin the United States, lend-lease was the trigger to huge increases in armaments spending. Already in 1941, defence expenditure, as a proportion of gross national product, was almost ten times higher than it had been in 1939. Borrowing, not taxation, accounted for most of the increased spending\u2013a new and lasting trend in financing. The mass-production techniques used meant, too, that big business grew even bigger and its dominance of industrial output more swollen. In essence, the military-industrial complex of postwar America had its foundations in lend-lease.230\n\nThe decision taken in December and finalized through legislation in March had settled the issue of production. The American war economy was set in motion (though production and organizational blockages and shortcomings meant that it still did not function either smoothly or at full pace). How sufficient goods were going to get to Britain, given the mounting losses of merchant ships in the Atlantic, was, however, still far from resolved. Moreover, lend-lease had cast sharp light on the question which no one was yet ready to face. Could America, its neutrality now completely compromised, its non-belligerency a wholly one-sided affair, continue to remain out of a fighting war when she was so committed to one of the participants through the supply of weaponry? Stimson, as usual, had hit the nail on the head the previous December. 'We cannot permanently be in the position of toolmakers for other nations which fight,' he had concluded \u2013though he accepted that the country was not yet ready to contemplate intervention.231\n\nIn these same weeks, nevertheless, the fighting war came a step closer, even if only at the level of contingency planning. Already in November 1940, Admiral Stark had devised a global defence strategy, known as Plan D (or, in naval parlance, 'Plan Dog'). Its basic premiss was that, if and when the United States became involved in a war against Germany, Italy and Japan\u2013and Stark believed that it would ultimately prove necessary to send large land and air forces to Europe and Africa232\u2013a strong offensive in the Atlantic, allied to Britain, should take precedence over the Pacific, where a defensive posture would be adopted.233 Though he never formally adopted Plan Dog, it implicitly lay behind the conclusion Roosevelt reached at a meeting with his top defence advisers on 17 January that upholding the supply lines to Britain was the primary objective. He ordered the navy to prepare for the escort of convoys.234 It sounded promising. But, as so often, caution prevailed. Roosevelt was far from ready to take this step yet.\n\nStark had recommended to the President that he authorize secret joint staff talks with the British on possible future action in both oceans.235 In January 1941 these talks began. Within two months top American and British military planners had worked out a basic agreement on strategy\u2013a document named ABC-1\u2013if the United States should enter the war. Of course, there was still no commitment to do so. But in the event of war, the basic strategy\u2013following Plan Dog\u2013would be 'Germany First', with a containing attritional struggle against Japan in the Pacific until Germany had been defeated. Indeed, ABC-1 informed strategic thinking in both countries in the months that followed, and actual strategy after December 1941.236 As Robert Sherwood, who helped Roosevelt write his speeches, later put it, a 'common-law alliance' had developed between the United States and Great Britain six months before the United States would finally enter the war. It had been 'publicly entered into through lend-lease', then 'privately consummated through the Anglo-American staff conversations in Washington'.237\n\nRoosevelt had moved far during the winter. The hesitation that had accompanied the destroyer deal, when he had cautiously complied with the pressure from his advisers, had given way to boldness in December and January, when he instigated the lend-lease breakthrough. But the President was not yet prepared to accelerate. In the troubled spring of 1941, his boldness again deserted him. To the immense frustration of the more 'hawkish' elements in his Cabinet, caution once more took over.\n\nBritain was by now facing severe difficulties, and long before the promised American aid might start to make a difference. The advances made through lend-lease and the ABC-1 military agreement with the Americans threatened to be in vain. By May, British troops had been forced out of Greece and had lost Crete. The diversion to Greece, a vain attempt to prevent a German occupation, had weakened Britain's tenuous hold in north Africa, and, under the new and daring General Erwin Rommel, Axis forces were now threatening to break through, and would soon do so. Worst of all, shipping losses in the Atlantic had soared to almost double their level over the winter. And now the feared new German battleship, the Bismarck, was on the loose and set to wreak further havoc among British convoys. It was a bleak outlook. Britain seemed likely to lose the 'battle of the Atlantic'. Churchill, privately irritated and frustrated at Roosevelt's caution, remarked that 'quite unconsciously we are being left very much to our fate'.238\n\nThough Roosevelt's isolationist opponents had been strongly in retreat over the Lend-Lease bill, it has been claimed that the President still seemed at times to suffer 'less a fear that Hitler might suddenly attack than that isolationists in the Senate would best him'.239 Quite specifically, he could not bring himself to take a clear decision on the convoy question. In April he seemed at first in favour of the navy's plan to provide escorts, then against. Despite pressure from the Cabinet 'hawks'\u2013Stimson, Knox, Ickes and Morgenthau\u2013he continued to resist. His view, according to Morgenthau, was 'that public opinion was not yet ready for the United States to convoy ships'. He preferred to wait and was 'not ready to go ahead on \"all out aid for England\"'.240 The indications are that he could have carried public opinion on this issue if he had tried.241 He preferred not to put it to the test. For now, he agreed on 15 April only to a significant extension of the 'security zone' for navy patrols in the Atlantic, now widened to west of a line roughly halfway between Africa and Brazil, including Greenland and the Azores. In this broad tract of the Atlantic, they would report on the location of German submarines, but otherwise do nothing either to attack them (unless themselves threatened) or directly to defend convoys. Soon, this would lead to an American presence on Greenland and Iceland, astride the vital Atlantic route. Roosevelt also allowed around this time the transfer of a small number of warships\u2013smaller than the navy had wanted\u2013from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And plans were mooted (that came to nothing) to occupy the Azores.242 But Roosevelt was unwilling to go farther. Escorting was still rejected. He remained adamant that in the battle to control the seas, he was not willing to fire the first shot.243\n\nThroughout April and May, one of the most anxious phases of the war and among the most worrying of his presidency, Roosevelt seemed hesitant to his entourage\u2013cautious to the point almost of immobilization.244 When William Bullitt, former ambassador to France, saw him on 23 April, the President said 'that the problem which was troubling him most was that of public opinion. He had just had an argument with Stimson on the subject. Stimson thought that we ought to go to war now. He, the President, felt that we must await an incident and was confident that the Germans would give us an incident.'245\n\nAcross the Atlantic, Churchill, too, was privately depressed at the President's inactivity and procrastination. His letter to Roosevelt at the beginning of May, written in some irritation, had to be toned down by his advisers.246 He wanted bolder action. He suggested that what would make the decisive difference in tipping the balance in the war Britain's way 'would be if the United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent power'.247 The President ignored the plea.\n\nIn Washington, in a state of despondency, Stimson, Knox and the Attorney General, Robert Jackson, met Ickes in mid-May to consider sending 'some written representation to the President that we are experiencing a failure of leadership that bodes ill for the country'. They were unanimous that 'the country was tired of words and wanted deeds'. Even the words had not been forthcoming, since Roosevelt had postponed a major speech he intended to deliver on the state of the war. He had retired to his bed, ill\u2013though he seemed well enough to the few allowed to see him in those days. 'Missy' LeHand thought he was suffering from 'a case of sheer exasperation', torn constantly between the isolationists and the interventionists. In the event, there was little enthusiasm for the protest letter. But 'none of us could account for the President's failure of leadership and all of us felt disturbed by the fact that he is surrounded by a very small group and is, in effect, inaccessible to most people, including even members of the Cabinet'.248\n\nGiven the malaise which all those at the heart of defence policy felt to have descended over the administration, expectations of the President's forthcoming speech\u2013his first since the enactment of lend-lease\u2013were high. Morgenthau, musing on what he might say, 'felt the next move was to get us into the war'. He told Harry Hopkins that he had arrived at the conclusion during the previous ten days 'that if we were going to save England, we would have to get into this war, and that we needed England, if for no other reason, as a stepping stone to bomb Germany'.249\n\nRoosevelt finally gave his big speech on the evening of 27 May\u2013the day the news arrived of the sinking of the Bismarck. Several hands had been hard at work on the six drafts of the 'fireside chat', which the President wanted to end, dramatically, by proclaiming a state of emergency. He cabled Churchill, a few hours before his address, to inform the British Prime Minister that his text 'went further than I had thought possible even two weeks ago'.250\n\nThe speech was, however, not one of Roosevelt's best. For the invited audience in the unbearably hot East Room of the White House, it was a disappointing let-down, though the telegrams that afterwards poured in were overwhelmingly positive, a better response than the President claimed to have expected.251 Much of it went over similar ground to that of his 'fireside chat' the previous December. In his strongest passage, he promised to 'give every possible assistance to Britain and to all who, with Britain, are resisting Hitlerism or its equivalent with force of arms. Our patrols', he added, 'are helping now to ensure delivery of the needed supplies to Britain. All additional measures necessary to deliver the goods will be taken.' He brought the speech to a climax by declaring: 'I have tonight issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority.'252\n\nIt sounded dramatic. Perhaps, some of those in his entourage thought, the President was finally halting the drift of previous weeks. Perhaps the urgency that had shaped the decisions at the turn of the year would now return. But what exactly did the declaration of 'unlimited national emergency' mean in practice? When reporters at a press conference next morning asked Roosevelt for details, he promptly undid the good work of the previous evening. He had no plans to request Congress to repeal the neutrality legislation, he said. Nor was he going to order naval escort of shipping. He waved away as 'iffy' a question about the difficulty in reconciling the differences between labour and management in the big armaments drive. Finally, he admitted that his proclamation of unlimited national emergency needed executive orders based upon a revival of emergency laws stretching back over fifty years to become effective. And he had no plans to issue such orders.253\n\nThe President's inner group were baffled and irritated. Stimson, who along with Knox had been calling in May for immediate introduction of convoy protection, was appalled. Ickes thought that 'to declare a total emergency without acts to follow it up means little', though he added in fairness that it provided at least the framework for significant action. Hopkins was unable to account for the President's 'sudden reversal from a position of strength to one of apparent insouciant weakness'. The 'unaccountability' of his character was all that occurred to Sherwood as an explanation.254\n\nBut more profound reasons than Roosevelt's impenetrable personality dictated his caution. One was the continuing problem the President saw in trying to mould opinion while not outpacing it. The slight majority in opinion polls in favour of escorting convoys suggested that Roosevelt might be able to push the issue through Congress if he wanted to apply the pressure. But escorting convoys would inevitably lead to armed clashes with German vessels\u2013one step away from war. Would a bare majority in Congress offer the national unity needed in war? And was the country yet ready for war? Opinion polls in the run-up to his speech showed the usual contradictory traits. While 68 per cent thought it more important to help Britain than stay out of the war, a slightly higher percentage thought the President had gone either too far or far enough in his support for the British. And four-fifths of the population were still opposed outright to entry into the war.255 It was more than sufficient to persuade the President to hold back from bold initiatives. As one of those who saw him at the time in the White House later put it, he felt that as head of the nation he would be more effective if he did not cross the Rubicon.256\n\nAnother factor was probably crucial. Roosevelt had been aware since the beginning of the year of Hitler's directive to attack the Soviet Union in the spring. At the beginning of March, Sumner Welles had been instructed to pass on the information to the Kremlin.257 Now, the intelligence signals were pointing to an imminent invasion.258 Most likely for that reason, Roosevelt wanted to avoid any escalation of aggression in the Atlantic when news came through on 12 June that for the first time a German U-boat had sunk an American ship, the freighter Robin Moor. The American reaction was mild.259 For Roosevelt knew that an attack by Germany on the Soviet Union would put an entirely different complexion on the war in the Atlantic. Providing the Soviet Union could hold out, new prospects would open up in the west.\n\nOn 22 June 1941, the President was awakened with the news that a massive German attack on the Soviet Union had begun.\n\nVII\n\nRoosevelt and American policy had travelled an immense distance since the bleak months between May and September had threatened the total eclipse of democracy in Europe. By the time Hitler's forces invaded the Soviet Union, the United States was still nowhere near ready for war\u2013not ready militarily, psychologically or politically. But the decisions taken by Roosevelt, in particular over the destroyer deal, then especially over lend-lease, had been of the utmost importance to cementing transatlantic bonds, which within months would turn into a fully fledged military alliance against Hitler and would in time prove instrumental in his destruction. From now on, as the German dictator was only too well aware, time and resources were not on his side. He had to risk more to gain more. But the odds were\u2013though the fortunes of war did not show it at the time\u2013beginning to stack up against him. For Britain, it was the reverse. Militarily, she was still weak, and facing reverses in the Balkans, north Africa and, not least, the Atlantic. But for the first time there was more than a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Provided the Atlantic sea routes could be protected, the American 'arsenal of democracy' would soon be at her disposal. And the prospects of the United States actually joining the fighting war had increased sharply. Little wonder that Churchill ended his world broadcast on 27 April 1941 with a rhetorical flourish by citing a nineteenth-century poem to illustrate the new hope: 'In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright.'260\n\nWith the destroyer deal, lend-lease and the subsequent cautious steps, the President had been faced with difficult choices. He was not short of advice on all sides: go faster; go slower; don't go at all. He had wavered, he had hesitated, he had been pressed by his advisers and by the opinion polls. But, though he had felt his way forward tentatively, his boldness over lend-lease stands out and was vital. Without that decision, even though the immediate flow of aid from it was still small-scale compared with what was later to come, Britain's position would have rapidly and immeasurably deteriorated. As dollar reserves dwindled and losses in the Atlantic mounted, the plight would soon have begun to approach desperation. That Britain would have been forced, as some proponents of lend-lease had claimed at the time, to look for a negotiated peace with Hitler within six months is unlikely. The British government were as aware as the Roosevelt administration of German plans to fall upon the Soviet Union and of the great build-up of armed forces on the eastern front. The German\u2013Soviet war, provided it lasted, would have brought relief for beleaguered Great Britain even in the absence of lend-lease. But how long, without lend-lease, Britain's resources would have held out, even under the new conditions of war raging in the east, is still a moot point.\n\nMore important than this unanswerable question is that lend-lease began a commitment with consequences. Though the path to war for the United States was anything but decided, Roosevelt's advisers had correctly judged that, following lend-lease, it would ultimately become impossible to stay out of the conflict. Ensuring that the goods produced would not simply find their way to the bottom of the Atlantic implied that convoys would have to be escorted across the ocean. That would unquestionably lead to 'incidents'\u2013sinkings and shootings. As Roosevelt himself had pointed out, that sounded like war, and was certainly not far from it.261 This made him reluctant to order escorting, and he would only come to that point in the autumn. Some in his 'war cabinet', his inner circle on defence matters, were under no illusions about the need not simply to engage in defensive protection of convoys, but actively to participate in the battle of the Atlantic. Nor would it stop there. There were those who had thought that, should America have to become involved eventually, it would be at sea and in the air, but without the need to send ground troops, as in the First World War. But Roosevelt's military advisers did not deceive themselves. They were increasingly certain that the war would only be won through the dispatch of American troops to fight in Europe.\n\nWe have followed the reasons why the President acted as he did. Could and should he have acted differently?262 Had he followed the path the isolationists wanted him to tread, the chances that Britain would have been forced to a negotiated peace, leaving her and the Empire greatly weakened, would have been hugely magnified. But such a path was never at any juncture likely. Nor was it feasible. Since Munich at the latest, the administration, and not just its more 'hawkish' elements, had taken the view that Hitler posed a direct threat to the United States, and to the whole of the western hemisphere. The looming threat across the Pacific, from Japan, added markedly to the urgency of building up defence capacity. Once the war in Europe had begun, and especially once Hitler's troops had overrun Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, the American people rapidly began to grasp the enormity of the threat facing them. Few were ready to join in the war. But support for help to Britain (and, until her defeat, France) was strong. The purely isolationist line was supported by no more than around a third of the population, and fading. Apart from opinion polls, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Roosevelt's 'fireside chats' in December 1940 and then in May 1941 indicates that there was widespread backing for a policy of maximum aid to Britain short of war, in America's own interest. Any attempt, in this climate of opinion (admittedly influenced by the administration, not simply responded to), to press ahead with an isolationist policy would have been folly and doomed to failure.\n\nCould intervention, as Stimson, Knox, Stark, Morgenthau and others were urging by May 1941, have been a wiser option than the course Roosevelt steered? With an army smaller than that of Holland and no warplanes or ships available, intervention in the spring and summer of 1940 could have been only of symbolic value. The navy was less weak than the army. But it was needed in the Pacific, to deter the Japanese, as well as in the Atlantic, and this was stretching resources. Removal of the fleet, or most of it, to the Atlantic would have sent a clear signal to Tokyo. Earlier expansion in south-east Asia than actually occurred would have been likely, with serious consequences for British defence in the region. Meanwhile, American as well as British shipping would have been prey to U-boat attacks in the Atlantic. It would have done little to help the supply of material resources to Britain. And none of this would have made any difference to the situation in Europe. Nothing the United States could have done would have hindered in the slightest Hitler's conquest of western Europe.\n\nBy spring 1941 the situation had changed. American military strength was growing rapidly as the armaments drive gathered pace. The active help of American naval forces would have significantly reduced British losses in the Atlantic (though the chance capture of a German Enigma coding machine in May and the rapid breaking of U-boat ciphers itself produced a sharp drop in lost shipping over the next six months).263 A naval war with America in the Atlantic was something that at this juncture Hitler was keen to avoid. American belligerency would have sharply increased the apprehension in Berlin about the opening of a second front in the east. But the prospect of Hitler being sucked into what, with luck, would turn into a prolonged, bloody conflict in the east was precisely what the Americans\u2013and the British\u2013hoped would happen. In any case, nothing suggests that Hitler would have been deterred from his intention to destroy the Soviet Union in a swift and devastating surprise attack. In fact, since he reckoned with having two or three years before having to confront the full economic and military might of the United States, he would probably only have felt confirmed in his diagnosis that a quick knockout blow to the Soviet Union, forcing Britain to the negotiating table, was correct.\n\nIntervention, then, would have been of little practical gain in the months between the defeat of France and the opening of 'Operation Barbarossa' in altering the course or ferocity of German aggression. What might its consequences have been within the United States? Any attempt to take the country into war would have met with extensive and heated opposition. As opinion polls demonstrated, four-fifths of the population rejected intervention, even in May 1941. So had Roosevelt driven America into war, the result would have been intense disunity and disharmony, the opposite of what took place after December 1941.\n\nHowever, the question is otiose. At no point did Roosevelt consider taking America into war. Had he attempted it, he would have been reminded swiftly and in the most forceful terms (and not just by isolationists) of his explicit commitment in his Boston speech of October 1940, during his re-election campaign, that he would send no American troops to fight in a foreign war. In any case, quite apart from the state of opinion in the country, he knew full well that he had not the slightest chance of persuading Congress to issue a declaration of war.\n\nThe interventionists at home, even among Roosevelt's closest advisers, and of course many in Britain, were impatient and critical of the American reluctance to enter the war. But the President's caution, however maddening, was wise. He was successful, above all, in carrying the country with him in his careful steps across the tightrope. When war eventually came\u2013the result of aggression by hostile forces, not any direct action of the President\u2013that would prove vital.\n\n## 6\n\n## Moscow, Spring\u2013Summer 1941\n\nStalin Decides He Knows Best\n\nYou must understand that Germany will never on its own move to attack Russia...If you provoke the Germans on the border, if you move forces without our permission, then bear in mind that heads will roll.\n\nReported comment of Stalin to his military leaders, \nmid-May 1941\n\n'Lenin left us a great legacy, but we, his heirs, have f\u2014\u2014d it up.'1 Stalin uttered his angry expletive in a bleak moment as he and the small group of his closest associates were leaving a fraught visit to the Defence Commissariat, six days after the German invasion on 22 June had caught the Soviet Union astonishingly unawares. It was as close as Stalin came to accepting responsibility for a calamitous error of judgement that saw the German army advancing at breakneck speed over 300 miles into Soviet territory within days, capturing or killing huge numbers of Soviet soldiers, and destroying thousands of tanks and aircraft in the first wave of attack. Whether Stalin's chief henchmen accompanying him that day\u2013Vyacheslav Molotov (the dour, unbending Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who pedantically corrected comrades referring to him as 'Stone-Arse' by saying that Lenin had actually dubbed him 'Iron-Arse'2), Georgi Malenkov (manager of the Communist Party's labyrinthine bureaucracy), Lavrenti Beria (the ruthless head of State Security) and Anastas Mikoyan (the foreign trade expert)3\u2013were happy to be included in the collective blame for the disaster that Stalin's earthy outburst implied is unclear. Molotov, doggedly loyal, was certainly ready to accept collective responsibility, as he continued to do long after the dictator's death.4 If the others took a different stance, they were wise to keep quiet and not point out what all of them knew only too well: that the crucial decisions that had brought catastrophe to his country had been taken by Stalin and no one else.\n\nThough so many, and from different sides, were warning him in unmistakable terms of the imminence of German attack, even naming the date of the invasion, Stalin had insisted that he knew best. Only five days before the attack a Soviet agent's report was passed to Stalin by the Commissar for State Security, Vsevolod Merkulov. It warned that military action was imminent. Stalin's response was: 'Comrade Merkulov. You can tell your \"source\" from Ger[man] air force headquarters to go f\u2014\u2014his mother. This is not a \"source\"\u2013it's someone spreading disinformation. J.St.'5 It was a characteristically abrasive expression of Stalin's certainty that his own intuition and judgement were right, whatever anyone was telling him. His shock and astonishment on the early morning of 22 June were, then, all the greater, given his earlier self-assurance. But his spontaneous and unique admission six days later of grievous mistakes (if attributed collectively and couched in a crude vernacular) amounted to a tacit acceptance that other policy options had been available that could have avoided the disaster\u2013choices that were not taken.\n\nIn retrospect, Stalin's decision that he knew best\u2013a decision for inaction\u2013in the face of all the warnings of impending grave danger for his country seems one of the least comprehensible of the entire war. That this of all men, the most paranoidly suspicious of individuals, should have allowed himself to be deluded about Hitler's intentions appears particularly hard to understand. History would surely have taken a different course had Stalin made other choices. But what might those choices have been? On closer inspection, perhaps those choices were less obvious and more curtailed than they seem in hindsight. The story of Stalin's fateful choice is more complicated than an easy attribution to his arbitrary whim, scarcely credible blindness or stubborn stupidity would permit. This is the story that we now need to unravel. A starting point is how the Soviet Union was ruled, and how decisions were taken in the Stalinist system.\n\nI\n\nBy the time Hitler's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 unleashed what would turn into the Second World War, Joseph Stalin, soon to celebrate his sixtieth birthday,6 had been dictator of the Soviet Union for some ten years. In contrast to the precise dating of Hitler's dictatorship to his accession to power in the dramatic events of late January 1933, Stalin's autocracy is not attributable to a specific moment or event. It had emerged gradually, though relentlessly, from his membership of a group of leading Bolsheviks subordinate to Lenin to the point where his personal hold on power was unchallengeable, unconstrained and utterly decisive in the way the Soviet Union was ruled.\n\nUnlike Hitler's dictatorship in Germany, which rested on the premiss of obedience to the will of an untouchable and infallible 'great Leader', Stalin's essentially ran counter to the theory of collective government on which Soviet rule had been founded. Lenin, though his primacy had been uncontested, had nonetheless operated a form of collective leadership. Heated disputes over policy within the party leadership were not uncommon, and were accepted by Lenin, in the first years after the Bolshevik Revolution. After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin's own supremacy had arisen out of a bitter internal power-struggle, in which his own mastery of the party's secretariat and administrative apparatus had proved crucial. For some years, during the first Five-Year Plan to force the pace of collectivization of agriculture and industrial development, introduced in late 1928 and formally adopted in spring the following year, his own position remained one of first among equals in the Soviet leadership. And collective leadership was still upheld as the proper way to govern. Three leading members of the Politburo strongly criticized Stalin in early 1929 for appropriating powers to make decisions that by Bolshevik tradition should have been made collectively by the Central Committee of the party. 'We are against the replacement of control by a collective with control by a person,' they declared.7 They were too late. Stalin already controlled decisions, and how they were made. And he did not forget those who opposed him.\n\nFive years later, the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the popular Leningrad party boss, was a further, vital, staging post on the way to absolute power. That Stalin was behind the murder has never been proved. Probably, it seems, he was not involved.8 But he was certainly the main beneficiary from the elimination of a leading figure in the party seen by some as a potential rival. The Kirov murder appears to have fuelled still further Stalin's already pronounced paranoid distrust of all around him and morbid fear of attempts to remove him. The assassination marked the beginning of what would eventually develop into an all-out assault on those suspected of being his opponents. Perhaps it worked. For, remarkably, in contrast to a number of known attempts on Hitler's life, Stalin was never the victim of an assassination plot. Soon, the extraordinary waves of terror unleashed against Soviet citizens would come to know no bounds. Stalin's usually groundless but uncontrollable suspicions prompted massive and brutal purges that ravaged the ranks of party functionaries, not halting at some of the foremost Bolshevik leaders and former close comrades of Lenin, and decimating, with lasting and fateful consequences, the leadership of the Red Army. Stalin's own power was enormously strengthened in the process.\n\nThe purges\u2013'the Great Terror' as they have appropriately come to be known\u2013were unleashed from the top. During 1937\u20138 Stalin personally approved 383 lists, containing the names of 44,000 victims from the party, government, military, intelligence services and other agencies of the regime.9 This figure was only a fraction of those who were to suffer in the astounding onslaught on his own people. Prominent and long-standing Bolsheviks from the top echelons of the party were among the first victims as Stalin sought to wipe the slate clean of those whose experiences of the 'glory days' under Lenin might have stood in the way of his own claim to be his sole and legitimate heir.10 Stalin was reported as saying that it was time 'to finish with our enemies because they are in the army, in the staff, even in the Kremlin'.11 But the purges were also meant to produce a complete renewal of the party's cadres at all levels and throughout the Soviet Union. There was no shortage of willing helpers, as rank-and-file party members, whether from careerist opportunism or ideological conviction or both, rushed to denounce old comrades, and even friends and family, handing them over to the tender mercies of the secret police, the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs).\n\nThis body was a vital prop in Stalin's control of the Soviet regime, and was given special status. Its head was personally responsible to Stalin alone, and its functionaries were very well paid and encouraged in their loyalty by numerous material inducements, as well as threatened themselves with draconian punishment when the corruption and criminality endemic in the organization came to light.12 In July 1937 the NKVD laid before the Politburo its action plan, backed by a huge budget, for the purges. It presented target figures of 75,000 people to be shot and 225,000 to be sent to camps. The plan, approved by the Politburo, turned out to provide only the minimum framework of intended victims. Once unleashed, the purges took on their own momentum as grass-roots activists in the party relished the open licence to wipe out all supposed 'enemies' they could lay their hands on and NKVD agents rushed to fill their 'quotas'. Close to 700,000 people were shot in 1937\u20138, and more than a million and a half arrested.13\n\nThe party cadres were soon able to replenish themselves, and now with out-and-out Stalin loyalists. But for the Red Army, the catastrophe was more lastingly damaging. The purges of the army were driven by the same underlying aim of rooting out all real or imaginary opponents and turning the military, too, into an unquestioning, ultra-loyal vehicle of the political leadership. But whereas new party functionaries could easily be trained, lost military leadership skills and technical abilities could not be replaced overnight. And the losses in such areas were massive. In all, 34,301 officers were arrested or expelled from the armed forces in 1937\u20138. Some 30 per cent were reinstated by the beginning of 1940. But 22,705 were either shot or their fate remains unknown.14 Higher ranks suffered disproportionately in the 'decapitation' of the Red Army.15 Of the 101 members of the supreme military leadership, 91 were arrested, and of these 80 shot. Among them were three out of five of the Marshals of the Soviet Union (the highest military rank), three out of the four army commanders, all heads of military districts, nearly all divisional commanders, all commanders of the air force and two admirals of the fleet.16 Most were victims of absurd, trumped-up charges of anti-Soviet activity.\n\nThe most prominent victim, and the most classic demonstration of the bizarrely self-destructive nature of the military purges, was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the most brilliant military strategist in the Soviet Union and the chief advocate and planner of a modernized, well-trained, enlarged, technologically developed military organization. Stalin's elephantine memory doubtless recalled that, as Political Commissar to the southwestern front in 1920 after the Polish capture of Kiev, he had failed to supply cavalry troops demanded by Tukhachevsky, with disastrous consequences.17 The outspoken Tukhachevsky clashed further with Stalin during the 1930s about the level of political controls on a professionalized military machine. And his relationship with the incompetent Defence Commissar, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, a Stalin devotee and close associate, was fraught\u2013more than ever during his brief time as Deputy Commissar of Defence in 1936\u20137.18 In May 1937 Tukhachevsky was arrested, tortured into a confession of involvement in a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet state and executed. Stalin dubbed him a spy, who 'gave our operational plan...\u2013our holy of holies\u2013to the German Reichswehr'. His wife, daughter and other members of his family were killed on Stalin's orders, or sent to camps.19\n\nRecovery from such a consciously directed bloodletting of the leadership of the armed forces could not be speedy. Stalin was overheard asking Voroshilov, in charge of defence, in autumn 1938\u2013as Europe was anticipating another war in the near future\u2013whether there were any officers left capable of commanding a division.20 A plan for the reorganization of the armed forces drawn up the previous autumn calculated that they would not be ready for war before the end of 1942.21 The inadequacy of the army was indeed to be revealed in the humiliating campaign of the 'Winter War' with Finland in 1939\u201340. By the summer of 1941, as 'Barbarossa' was launched, 75 per cent of field officers and 70 per cent of political commissars had held their posts for less than a year.22 The lack of experience in vital areas of military command was a direct consequence of the purges.\n\nCountless numbers of Soviet citizens, inside and outside the party, supported the purges (and became complicit in them), believing they were a legitimate witchhunt to eradicate the 'enemy within'. Far from undermining Stalin's support, they enhanced it, though mainly out of awe and fear of their Leader rather than from warm adulation.23 For if mass acclamation was a key prop of Hitler's power in Germany, terror that potentially posed a threat to each individual, however elevated the status, and the universal fear that ran in its wake, was the basis of Stalin's. It now provided the platform for the full unfolding of the Stalinist dictatorship\u2013not the fabled 'dictatorship of the proletariat', but the dictatorship of one man.\n\nRemembering the contested route to his later supremacy, and conscious of the theories of collective leadership which his personal rule was negating, Stalin in fact continued in the 1930s to deny that he was a dictator, put his name to decrees alongside co-signatories (and not in first place) and insisted that 'decisions are made by the party and acted upon by its chosen organs, the Central Committee and the Politburo'.24 But by the time the Second World War began, this had long been the most blatant of fictions.\n\nThe Central Committee, the party's sovereign body, had for years been no more than a sham. Its membership had swollen since Lenin's day (when it had comprised forty-six voting and non-voting members), and the frequency of its meetings had declined. It had become, in fact, a vehicle entirely controlled by Stalin and serving merely to implement his will and legitimate his power. In the fevered atmosphere of 1937, the purge year, members were even prepared to denounce each other in full session of the Central Committee in order to curry favour with Stalin.25\n\nThe Politburo, technically a subcommittee of the Central Committee, and in theory the decision-making body of the party, had some fifteen members and in the 1920s had met weekly. This, though retaining a constant size, was meeting less frequently by the later 1930s. There were 153 meetings between 1930 and 1934, only 69 between 1934 and 1939, and a halving of the latter figure in the following three years.26 Some of its business was by then hived off to commissions or subcommittees.27 And even before the purges of 1937, Stalin was systematically diluting the power of significant figures in the Politburo, dispersing some of them to posts outside Moscow, and concentrating control still further in his own hands. The Politburo fragmented and atrophied in function. Stalin increasingly operated with small groups drawn ad hoc and at his whim from within the membership of the Politburo. Formal sessions of the Politburo declined sharply in the later 1930s. Only six took place in 1938, two in 1939 and two in 1940.28 By this time, informal meetings with varying personnel were often taking place at Stalin's dacha over dinner and copious amounts of vodka. By the beginning of the war, 'operational matters'\u2013meaning all crucial issues that Stalin wished to discuss with his closest associates\u2013and in particular the concerns, by now greatly magnified, of foreign policy, were dealt with by a quintet\u2013the 'Big Five'\u2013of Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria and Mikoyan.29 But within the 'Big Five', there was no doubt in anyone's mind whose opinion really counted.\n\nFar more than had been the case under Lenin during the early years following the Revolution, the state government was dominated in the immediate prewar years by the party's increasingly elaborate organizational apparatus. Lenin's most important power-base had derived from his position as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars\u2013effectively Prime Minister of the state government. Stalin, though from 1929 at the latest the pre-eminent Soviet leader, took this position only in 1941 (after which, in wartime conditions, the role of the state greatly expanded). Until then, from 1930 onwards, Molotov had been Prime Minister. That he was, and saw himself as, wholly subordinate to Stalin indicated where power really resided. Intertwined though they were at all levels, the party apparatus controlled the state. And Stalin, holding all threads of the highly centralized organization in his own hands, controlled the party.\n\nAs Stalin's power expanded, and as the position of his subordinates, even their survival, depended on his grace and favour, obsequiousness and fawning even at the highest level of the regime reflected the growth of a strong personality cult that would have its apogee during the wartime and postwar years. By the beginning of the war, the process of constructing the image of Stalin as superman was already well under way. The bloated army of bureaucrats and apparatchiks\u2013the 'little Stalins' and party drones in the provinces\u2013could be guaranteed, encouraged by fear of the consequences of denunciation if they did not do so, to implement what they took to be the wishes of 'our Leader, Teacher and Friend, Comrade Stalin'.30 It was no different at the top of the regime. Fear and dependence brought compliance and subservience. Stalin, shrewd and calculating, invariably testing the weakness and resilience of those around him as he did external enemies, was adept at playing individuals off against each other and exploiting vulnerable points of their personality or political misjudgements. The mass purges of 1937 ensured that Stalin would not be threatened, that his despotism would not be challenged, whatever his own paranoia told him. The purges also greatly weakened the position of the army's General Staff in its dealings with the political leadership, most especially with Stalin himself. Beyond that, a huge purge of the staff of the Foreign Ministry when Molotov replaced Maxim Litvinov at the head of the Foreign Commissariat at the beginning of May 193931 meant not only a loss of experience, but that in this crucial conduit of policy formation, and at such a vital time, subservience dominated over professional judgement. But fear and servility, the reverse of the coin to the cult of the Leader's infallibility, were scarcely recipes for good governance. Stalin\u2013cautious, distrustful and cold-bloodedly ruthless\u2013was increasingly told what his sycophantic and anxious subordinates thought he wanted to hear. This would play its part in the disaster of June 1941.\n\nIn the vital months prior to the launch of 'Barbarossa', therefore, decisions on all matters of importance within the Soviet Union were taken by Stalin personally. There was discussion, sometimes lengthy and usually informal, with fluctuating groups from within the 'inner circle'. But those who met Stalin on a regular basis saw each other as rivals, and were, consequently, divided among themselves. They were also acutely aware that their tenure was insecure. Their dependence on Stalin was total. So, therefore, was their loyalty to him. This did not make for an open exchange of views. Even Stalin's most long-standing and trusted associates, insofar as the dictator trusted anyone, were extremely cautious at expressing views which he might take to be critical. He himself often held back during meetings from voicing his opinion until others had spoken. This only enhanced the wariness of those asked to commit themselves. The reinforcement of Stalin's own views was, therefore, almost guaranteed. This would prove a major weakness, rather than a strength, as invasion loomed.\n\nDuring most of the 1930s the leadership of the Soviet Union had largely been preoccupied with the Stalinist revolution and its internal consequences. Foreign affairs, however, never sank far below the surface, particularly once Hitler had become Chancellor of the German Reich in January 1933. They exerted a continuing, if indirect, influence on domestic reconstruction. Preparing a socialist society for a war which Stalin and all his associates assumed to be coming in the foreseeable future was an underlying tenet of policy. And by 1938, just as Stalin was in the process of annihilating the leadership of his own army, that war suddenly began to appear very close. The Soviet Union, as Stalin more than anyone knew, was quite unready for it, the depleted armed forces especially unprepared. But foreign affairs now became a priority.\n\nII\n\nThat the Soviet Union should have been caught so unawares by the German assault in June 1941 is not only staggering when we take Stalin's intensely distrustful personality into account. It is also hard to explain in the light of the twin concerns\u2013conventional, despite their ideological colouring\u2013that had driven Soviet foreign policy since the 1920s: national self-interest and national security. Whatever cynical tactical manoeuvring or opportunistic twisting and turning had taken place found justification in those terms. That protection of Soviet security failed so catastrophically in 1941 seems, therefore, astonishing.\n\nThe initial notion of 'exporting' the Bolshevik revolution to bring about the imminent overthrow of world capitalism had been abandoned following the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921. Thereafter the revolutionary foreign policy advocated by Leon Trotsky (whose influence now began to decline) came to be replaced by more conventional diplomacy. Two central tenets shaped the approach to Soviet foreign relations by the mid-1920s. The first was that war was inevitable as the imperialist powers competed to control the world's material resources. War would be waged between rival imperialist countries (as in the First World War), and would benefit the Soviet Union and the cause of socialist revolution. But the Soviet Union would also find itself the target of imperialist ambitions, and directly threatened by war. So\u2013the second tenet\u2013socialism had to be constructed in the foreseeable future not through world revolution but within the Soviet Union itself (as the state became officially designated in 1924), which would thereby over time become strong and impregnable in the face of a great and mounting threat from hostile and rapacious imperialist forces.\n\nOf course, the idea of Communist revolution spreading to other countries was not given up. The work of the Comintern\u2013the Third Communist International, established in 1919\u2013was to exploit the crises seen as intrinsic to the capitalist system, and to prepare the ground for eventual revolution. But this would be an organic process over an indeterminate period of time (though it is true that as early as 1925 Stalin envisaged major and prolonged war in Europe at some juncture as an engine of general revolutionary change).32 Meanwhile, Comintern operations in other countries were always subordinated to the paramount aim of protecting the interests of the Soviet Union, the one country where socialist revolution had already created a new framework for society. And for the foreseeable future, it was obvious that the Soviet Union would remain militarily and economically weak, compared with the great imperialist powers. Recognition of this demanded policies of rapid and forced strengthening of Soviet economic and military resources while at the same time operating pragmatically in international relations. It was assumed that the Soviet Union and capitalist countries, whatever their fundamental ideological differences, would for a lengthy period of time have to cooperate on a basis of 'peaceful coexistence'. This would allow for the development and maximization of good trading and economic relations with capitalist countries even where conditions of mutual political antipathy prevailed.\n\nThe corollary, in external affairs, was that the Soviet Union sought to break down the international isolation that had followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In this, the Soviet state was highly successful. Diplomatic relations were established with thirteen countries during 1924\u20135 alone. With many other countries, including Russia's neighbours, a modus vivendi was found. By the end of the 1920s only the United States, among major powers, still refused recognition of the Soviet Union. Nowhere was there a sign of capitalist states forming an aggressive alliance against the Soviet Union. In the meantime, numerous commercial agreements had been reached with major European countries.33\n\nA special place in Soviet foreign relations in the postwar world fell to Germany. This was established by the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922, which repaired the breakdown that had followed the Revolution and created the basis of flourishing economic and, beneath the surface, military cooperation that lasted until Hitler's arrival in power eleven years later. The Bolshevik state emerging from a ferocious and barbaric civil war and the new German liberal democracy struggling through severe initial crisis were hardly natural bedfellows. But circumstances threw them together and underpinned a treaty of mutual self-interest. Russia wanted to emerge from her international isolation, Germany to show the victorious western powers, France and Great Britain, which were pressing hard on reparations, that she had the option of a new ally in the east. From the Soviet side, it was a hedge against western powers intervening militarily again in Russia as they had done in the Civil War, however unlikely this had become in practice. From the German perspective, it headed off any possible renewal of the alliance that they had fought against during the First World War, though such a revival was now even more improbable.34 Politically, Rapallo was of more symbolic than real importance. In economic and military terms, the treaty had greater significance. Both countries saw the advantages of closer trading arrangements. By the end of the 1920s, Germany had developed into the Soviet Union's most important commercial partner.35 And in the military arena, secret agreements following Rapallo offered both countries a way round the restrictions of the postwar order arising from Soviet isolation on the one hand and severe constraints imposed upon Germany by the Versailles Treaty on the other. Some parts of the agreements\u2013a Junkers contract to build an aircraft factory in the Soviet Union, and an agreement for joint production of poison gas\u2013never came to fruition. But cooperation of personnel on military exercises, experiments with chemical warfare and exchange of intelligence took place.36\n\nBy the end of the 1920s the political aspect of the Rapallo Treaty had lost its edge. Though Germany had signed a treaty of neutrality with the Soviet Union in Berlin in April 1926, her signing of the Treaty of Locarno five months earlier had signalled the improvement in relations with the western democracies, France and Great Britain. The end of Germany's international isolation, further and clearly marked by her entry into the League of Nations in 1926, had drained the significance that had been attached to the links with the Soviet Union, established four years earlier. But military cooperation continued. Economically, as the Soviet Union entered its big push for collectivization and Germany the terminal crisis of democracy that would let Hitler into power, the commercial links between the two countries even intensified. By 1932 almost half of Soviet imports came from Germany.37\n\nBy then, however, the storm winds were starting to gather force. On both sides of the Soviet Union new threats were emerging. In the Far East, following the 'Manchurian Incident' in 1931, the shrill tones of militaristic nationalism could increasingly be heard from the old enemy, Japan. In Germany, meanwhile, Hitler, the most extreme voice of militant anti-Bolshevism, was on the verge of power.\n\nThe Nazi takeover in Germany completely altered the framework of Soviet foreign relations. Fear of war now became a prevailing theme. By the end of 1933, the anti-Soviet thrust of the new regime was reflected in diplomatic coolness, directly promoted by Hitler. Rapallo was dead. Germany's non-aggression treaty with Poland, signed in January 1934, was the most overt demonstration of a significant shift in German foreign policy and a new course towards the Soviet Union. Many in Germany, from Conservatives to Communists, had dismissed Hitler as nothing more than a loudmouth who would either quickly pass from the scene or moderate his rantings. Official Comintern dogma continued to preach that the German leader represented the last, desperate fling of failing capitalism. But the Soviet leadership viewed the threat of Hitler with deadly seriousness. Already in March 1933, Izvestiya, the central government organ, commented that 'the National Socialists [had] developed a foreign policy programme against the existence of the USSR'.38 A month later, Sergei Alexandrovsky, a political counsellor in the Berlin embassy, reported that Hitler's future foreign policy meant 'military adventurism and, ultimately, war and intervention against the USSR'.39 Soviet leaders were aware of what Hitler had written in Mein Kampf in the mid-1920s and were far from ready to dismiss his outpourings as merely the radical rhetoric of a political hothead. At the 17th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 31 January 1934, Nikolai Bukharin, later to be one of Stalin's purge victims, spoke of the possibility of a 'counterrevolutionary invasion' of his country either from 'fascist Germany' or from Imperial Japan. He went on to cite extensively from the passages in Mein Kampf in which Hitler spoke of Germany's mission to acquire land in the east by force, at the cost of the Soviet Union. Bukharin concluded: 'Hitler therefore calls quite frankly for the destruction of our state. He says openly that the German people must reach for the sword to expropriate the properties of the Soviet Union that it allegedly needs.' Bukharin saw in this the enemy which 'will oppose us in all the mighty battles that History inflicts on us'.40\n\nA realignment of Soviet foreign policy was obviously necessary. The Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov (who would be replaced by Molotov in 1939), was the chief proponent of the need to work with the western democracies, France and Great Britain, to construct a system of collective security in Europe. In 1934 the Soviet Union\u2013by now also recognized, since November of the previous year, by the United States of America\u2013joined the League of Nations and became the most prominent advocate of an 'international peace front' to combat the threat of aggression posed by Germany, Italy and Japan.41 In May 1935 the Soviet Union signed a treaty of mutual assistance with France and followed it up with a similar treaty with Czechoslovakia (though coming into operation only if France, which already had a mutual defence alliance with the Czechs, acted first). The Soviet Union was the strongest supporter of sanctions against Mussolini later that year, in 1936 supplied arms to Republican forces in Spain at the outbreak of the civil war there, and in 1937, when Japan invaded China, provided aid for Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists.\n\nIn Soviet thinking, a new imperialist war could only be postponed, not prevented, by collective security. A major conflagration would obviously involve the Soviet Union, directly or indirectly. In fact, another war, it was thought, would be a world war, most likely involving an attack on the Soviet Union by a coalition of imperialist countries, threatening her from west and east.42 And never far from the surface was the suspicion that there were forces in the west anxious to appease Hitler by deflecting his attention to the Soviet Union, or even considering joining forces with Nazi Germany in an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Support for collective security aimed, therefore, at buying precious time. But the more the League of Nations and hopes of collective security fell apart amid the western powers' endeavours to come to an arrangement with Hitler, the more the suspicions grew. The Soviet Union's international isolation, never surmounted, was highlighted more plainly than ever as the west caved in to Hitler's expansionism in 1938. 'The League of Nations and collective security are dead,' Litvinov himself acknowledged in October that year. 'International relations are entering an era of the most violent upsurge of savagery and brute force and policy of the mailed fist.'43\n\nWith the weakness of the western democracies laid bare, Soviet fears of becoming dragged into an inevitable conflict\u2013and of being unprepared for it\u2013were hugely magnified. As the Sudeten crisis unfolded across the summer of 1938, the Soviet Union partially mobilized and proclaimed its readiness to fight to defend Czechoslovakia against aggression.44 The offer of assistance could be made in the near certainty that it would not have to be put into practice. Military involvement necessitated passage of troops through Poland (which would not permit it) and Romania (where limited permission was only belatedly given, and with severe restrictions). In any case, and far from the least consideration, the Red Army, its leadership drastically weakened by the purges of the previous year, was in 1938, as we have already noted, nowhere near ready for engagement in a major conflict. Its own planning foresaw full readiness for war as attainable only by the turn of the year 1942\u20133.45 Moreover, as Stalin knew only too well, Soviet armed intervention in Czechoslovakia was in any case only possible if the French moved first to fulfil their treaty obligations. And over the summer, with the French tied to the British and Chamberlain showing every endeavour to reach agreement with Hitler, it was never likely\u2013quite apart from continuing western distaste for the Soviet Union\u2013that Red Army troops would be called upon. As it was, the readiness of Britain and France to yield to Hitler's bullying and collude in the carve-up of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Conference of 29\u201330 September 1938 had obvious meaning in Soviet eyes: war was coming, and the Soviet Union could reckon on no help from the west.\n\nThe underlying thinking, on the Soviet side, behind the notorious Hitler\u2013Stalin Pact that so astonished the world in August 1939 rested on such considerations. In his speech to the 18th Party Congress on 10 March 1939, Stalin had outlined the growing danger from 'the new imperialist war' as the system of collective security had collapsed in the wake of British and French refusal to take a common and direct stand against Hitler. He ended by declaring that the Soviet Union would not 'be drawn into conflict by warmongers who are accustomed to have others pull their chestnuts out of the fire for them'.46 As Stalin's remarks indicated, loss of hope in the readiness of the western democracies to combat Hitler went hand in hand with deepened distrust of their motives. That the west would favour a German\u2013Soviet war, and might even lend support to Germany's fight, was a constant component of thinking in the Kremlin.\n\nFive days after Stalin's speech, Hitler occupied what was left of the Czech lands. This finally triggered the British and French to act. The guarantee for Poland resulted, followed by similar guarantees to Greece and Romania. But the Soviet Union refused Anglo-French proposals for a pact that offered the prospect of assistance to the USSR only after she had herself provided armed support on being dragged into a war against Germany launched solely on the initiative of Britain and France.47 Instead, the Soviet Union proposed a full-scale military alliance\u2013a triple pact between the USSR, France and Great Britain to provide mutual security against German aggression towards any one of them.48 But Britain and France were unenthusiastic. Anti-Soviet feeling, and underestimation of Soviet military potential, still prevailed.49 On the other side, the dilatory western response could be seen as confirmation of the 'unswerving line of policy\u2013of setting Germany on to the USSR'.50 So nothing materialized in the last hope of containing Hitler short of all-out war. Foot-dragging by the western democracies continued to the point at which the sensational Hitler\u2013Stalin Pact on 23 August 1939 abruptly turned international diplomacy on its head.\n\nBehind the scenes, the pact had, in fact, been brewing for some months.51 Economic contacts provided the opening. German-Soviet economic relations had, in fact, continued\u2013though trade declined\u2013after Hitler had come to power, despite the severe worsening of the diplomatic climate and the shrill anti-Soviet rhetoric of Nazi leaders. The Soviet Union had made overtures in 1935\u20136 to improve economic links with Germany, and to use these as a vehicle to promote some degree of political d\u00e9tente. But nothing came of them. Soviet attempts to obtain armaments through new credit arrangements were predictably rebuffed. And hopes that Hitler's vehement anti-Soviet policy might be diluted by those in the regime's elite presumed to be less hostile were soon dashed.52 By early 1937 relations between the Soviet Union and Germany had ebbed to a low point. That is how they remained until spring 1939, when economic contacts were once again the starting point for an attempt to produce a new basis for political relations, and this time with startling results.\n\nFor this time not just the Soviets but the Germans, especially, were interested in a rapprochement. And from tentative beginnings, Germany's interest became all the more urgent as the summer progressed and the likelihood grew that plans to attack Poland might result in war with the western democracies. A deal with the Soviet Union would at one and the same time head off any possibility of the mooted 'grand coalition' against Germany (a repeat of the constellation of 1914), deter Britain from intervention in the Polish conflict and leave Poland hopelessly exposed to the might of German arms. Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, for long made the running, with Hitler at first hesitant. From the Soviet point of view, improved political relations with Germany would at the very least ensure economic benefits, which were desperately needed for industrialization plans, and in particular for the build-up of the armed forces. Imports of industrial goods from Germany had fallen from 46 per cent of all Soviet imports in 1932 to a mere 4.7 per cent by 1938. Stalin himself took a direct and detailed interest in the advantages for Soviet armaments to be obtained from improved trade with Germany.53 But the Soviet interest in a rapprochement with Nazi Germany went much further than the economic advantages this would bring. The Soviet leadership (and not just Stalin) fully recognized that collective security was dead, was intensely suspicious of the intentions of the western powers, remained wary of the danger from Japan to the east and was desperate to buy time against a German threat presumed certain to be directed against the USSR at some point. For all these reasons, a political understanding with Nazi Germany was increasingly seen to make sense. Stalin, like Hitler for long cautious, finally committed himself only that August.\n\nBy then, the soundings which had been made during trade negotiations in the spring and had been accompanied by mutual suspicions had evolved into tentative steps towards a political agreement, and one involving the mutual territorial interests of both countries. The dilatoriness of the British and French during the spring and summer in agreeing to the trilateral pact of mutual assistance sought by the Soviet Union encouraged Molotov in his view that he was dealing with 'crooks and cheats'54 and merely pandered to Stalin's already capacious suspicions. That London and Paris had dispatched a low-level delegation, which appeared evasive and was in any case unable to give binding commitments, rather than a high-ranking minister, equipped with plenipotentiary powers, was also regarded as demeaning and lacking in seriousness.55 By mid-August, with the Polish crisis at fever-pitch and in the awareness of Hitler's imminent aim to attack Poland,56 it was obvious to the Soviet leadership that nothing could be expected from the west. The alternative had now to be taken.\n\nBy the time the talks with British representatives were formally broken off, Stalin had already let Hitler know that he was ready to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany as soon as possible.57 Within four days, on 23 August, Ribbentrop was in Moscow and the most infamous diplomatic move in history was rapidly concluded. It suited both sides. At his Alpine retreat near Berchtesgaden, Hitler slapped his thigh in delight at the news of his diplomatic coup.58 At his dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, Stalin was equally pleased. But he was under no illusions about the Germans. 'Of course it's all a game to see who can fool whom,' Nikita Khrushchev, at that time party boss in Kiev and a member of the Politburo, recalled Stalin saying. 'I know what Hitler's up to. He thinks he's outsmarted me, but actually it's I who have tricked him.' He told his dinner companions from the Politburo that night that 'because of this treaty the war would pass us by for a while longer. We would be able to stay neutral and save our strength.'59\n\nThe Soviet Union and Germany, ideological polar opposites whose governments (as Stalin elegantly put it) had spent years 'pouring buckets of shit over each other's heads',60 were now bound together through a non-aggression pact. A secret added protocol assigned the Baltic to the Soviet sphere of influence and drew a line halfway through Poland, with the western part earmarked for Germany. Soviet interests and security were, as they always had been, the only concerns at stake for the Kremlin. Cynical though the deal had been, these now seemed safeguarded for the foreseeable future. Stalin knew he had attained more secure borders in the Baltic. More than all else, he had staved off any imminent threat to the Soviet Union from Hitler's Germany, and had gained vital time. This had to be utilized to prepare the Red Army for war. Stalin had read parts of Mein Kampf as he was on the threshold of the devil's pact with Hitler. He had underlined the passages dealing with Germany's need to acquire new lands in the east at the expense of Russia.61 He knew what was coming. But he thought the Soviet Union would have three years to be ready for the onslaught. And by the end of 1942 the Red Army would be fit for the showdown. In the meantime, the Soviet Union could benefit materially, and territorially, from its new friendship with the former arch-enemy.\n\nIII\n\nSoviet leaders had grounds to feel satisfied with the fruits of the first months of their country's new relationship with Nazi Germany. Under agreements of 19 August 1939 (just before the pact), widened in February 1940 and renegotiated to lay down new delivery schedules in January 1941, trade between the Soviet Union and Germany rapidly recovered from the nadir of the later 1930s to reach a level roughly in line with that when Hitler took power. Germany was the recipient of millions of tons of grain, timber and petroleum products as well as tens of thousands of tons of precious manganese and chromium. The Soviet Union received in return machinery, construction equipment, chemical products and other manufactured goods. The Germans came out better from the economic arrangements. The Soviet Union delivered its raw materials more or less on schedule whereas there were often delays in reciprocal deliveries of manufactured goods. And Germany still provided as good as nothing in response to Soviet demands for armaments.62 But from the Soviet perspective, the trading arrangements were secondary to the main aim of the pact: security. And in this respect, the balance sheet from the first period of German-Soviet cooperation was encouraging. 'As regards safeguarding the security of our country, we have achieved no mean success,' was Molotov's verdict before the Supreme Soviet at the end of March 1940.63\n\nApart from keeping the Soviet Union out of the European war, the pact (and in particular its secret protocol) had opened the door to territorial aggrandizement, whose chief objective\u2013in contrast to that of Nazi Germany, even if the effect of occupation was almost as dire for the subjected peoples\u2013was to bolster security. The eastern part of Poland had been occupied in mid-September 1939\u2013a cynical piece of realpolitik that marked the first step in constructing a cordon sanitaire around Soviet western borders. Before the end of the month, Ribbentrop was back in Moscow to sign the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, agreeing to transfer Lithuania into the Soviet sphere of influence in return for extended parts of central Poland, which passed to Germany. Alongside Lithuania, the other Baltic republics of Latvia and Estonia were also forced during the following weeks into subservience to the USSR, and compelled to allow Soviet troops to be based on their territory. Finland proved, however, a step too far. Pressure on the Finns in the autumn to make territorial concessions aimed at strengthening Soviet northern defences produced not compliance but defiance and, by the end of November, full-scale war. The bitter conflict through the depths of the winter saved Finland's independence. By the time the Finns sued for peace the following March, 200,000 Soviet soldiers lay dead. The Red Army, which had sent over a million troops to fight in Finland, had been humiliated by the tiny Finnish forces. The Germans were not alone in the gross underestimation of Soviet fighting potential that was a legacy of the 'Winter War'.\n\nStalin's hopes in this first phase of the European war were that the western democracies and Nazi Germany would wear each other down and fight to a standstill. His worry was that they would at some point come to a deal\u2013and together turn on the Soviet Union.64 The hopes were dashed by the speed of the German victory in the west in May and June 1940. The worry, on the other hand, was magnified.\n\nThe rapidity of France's collapse took the Soviet leadership completely by surprise. All calculations now had to be revised. With western Europe prostrate at Hitler's feet, apart from Great Britain (and how long would she hold out before being conquered, or, more likely, capitulating and joining Germany's side, as long predicted?), the Soviet Union was more exposed than ever. Stalin immediately recognized this. Khrushchev was with Stalin as the news came through of France's defeat. He later recalled Stalin's reaction. 'He'd obviously lost all confidence in the ability of our army to put up a fight. It was as though he'd thrown up his hands in despair and given up after Hitler crushed the French army and occupied Paris...He let fly with some choice Russian curses and said that now Hitler was sure to beat our brains in.'65\n\nThe Red Army, as Finland had exposed only too cruelly, was far from ready to counter the threat. In the wake of the disastrous showing in the Winter War, steps were taken to adjust as far as possible to the new situation. The pace of rearmament was sharply stepped up. Workers were subjected to even more draconian labour discipline than had previously existed in order to increase arms production. The armed forces were reorganized as some purged officers returned and the next generation of commanders (some to gain fame during the coming years) took up key posts.66 Without delay, too, the fragile remaining independence of the Baltic republics was ended. In June, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were annexed under the flimsy pretext of alleged anti-Soviet activity and fully incorporated into the USSR in order to shore up the Soviet defensive position in the north. There were even contingency plans, laid down in September 1940 but never put into operation, for a new war against Finland.67\n\nIn southern Europe, as well, there was a new urgency to Soviet diplomatic moves. Here, the Balkans held the key. After France's defeat, the Soviet leadership reckoned that Britain would before long be forced to the conference table. The Soviet Union needed to be strong enough to defend its interests in the face of German dominance in western and central Europe. Soviet influence over the Balkans, the Black Sea and the Turkish Straits, areas where Russia had traditionally sought to exert her power way back in Tsarist times, was seen as crucial to fending off likely German designs also on this vital region and protecting against any threat of invasion from the south. There was also the question of British strategic interests in this region, and the danger this would pose to the Soviet Union should Britain and Germany come to some 'arrangement' in a peace settlement. The perceived need to extend Soviet control of the Danube basin and the Balkans lay behind the annexation in July of Bessarabia, transferred to Romania in 1919 but prior to that falling within the Russian Empire, and northern Bukovina, historically a Romanian territory which had never previously belonged to Russia. For a time, in the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union even hoped to use the Italians to broker a deal to divide the Balkans into separate spheres of influence between the USSR and the Axis powers. This, predictably, held no attractions for Germany, keen to keep the Soviets out of such a strategically important region and especially anxious to gain a dominant hold over Romania, where the Ploesti oil wells were indispensable to the German armed forces.\n\nGerman and Italian arbitration at the end of August\u2013with the Soviet Union excluded\u2013of the disputed Romanian-Hungarian borders then drew Romania directly into Germany's orbit. The Soviets claimed that the arbitration\u2013from their perspective a direct anti-Soviet move\u2013violated the requirement to consult on matters of common interest laid down in the pact of the previous year. The Germans, naturally, ignored the complaint, and Soviet hopes of a sphere of influence in the Danube basin and Balkans were, with this, effectively ended. When, in September, German military 'missions', on 'invitation', entered Romania\u2013and a little later in the month, Finland\u2013the threat to Soviet interests was obvious.68\n\nThese territorial issues, where Soviet and German interests conflicted, unavoidably prompted a rise in tension between the two countries during the summer and autumn. The Tripartite Pact on 27 September, linking Germany (and Italy) with Japan, the USSR's dangerous eastern enemy, did little to improve matters, even though its thrust was anti-American, not anti-Soviet. Then, at the end of October, Mussolini's disastrous invasion of Greece lit the touchpaper to the Balkan powder keg, prompting British intervention and opening up the certain prospect of German military involvement in the region\u2013something scarcely guaranteed to reverse the serious deterioration in relations between the Soviet Union and Germany that had set in during recent weeks. This was the climate in which Molotov, on Ribbentrop's invitation, arrived in Berlin on 12 November for talks with the Reich Foreign Minister and with Hitler.\n\nThe talks went badly.69 Ribbentrop was mainly concerned with persuading the Soviet Union to join the Tripartite Pact and become part of what he saw as a Euro-Asiatic bloc which would divide the world into German, Italian, Japanese and Soviet spheres of influence. He encouraged Molotov to look to the Soviet Union expanding in the direction of the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and India. Hitler wanted above all to discover more about Soviet intentions. But Molotov's dogged persistence on matters of detail reminded him of a pedantic schoolmaster. He became increasingly irritated. The talks simply confirmed his negative views on the Soviet Union\u2013probably what he had implicitly been looking for, anyway.\n\nMolotov's agenda, laid out in careful consultation with Stalin, was more specific and mainly directed at the issues which had led to the deterioration in relations between the Soviet Union and Germany in recent months.70 Finland, Romania and the Balkans were particularly sensitive areas, where the Soviet Union felt cause for grievance. But no headway was made. Mutual suspicion and underlying antagonism pervaded the talks, which led nowhere. Hitler felt wholly vindicated in his view that the conflicting interests of Germany and the Soviet Union could never be peacefully reconciled. A clash was inevitable. Hitler saw Molotov's visit as confirmation that the attack envisaged since July could not be delayed. By mid-December, as we saw, a military directive had been devised, scheduling the invasion for the coming spring.\n\nFrom the Soviet perspective, the talks, inconclusive as they were, altered nothing. They had no dramatic consequences. Certainly, Molotov returned to Moscow with a sense of having achieved little. And the Soviet leadership remained particularly sour at what they saw as grave breaches of the pact in German action in Romania and Finland.71 They had been largely outmanoeuvred in the Balkans, and in Romania especially. And from July onwards, even before Hitler had announced to his generals the intention to invade the Soviet Union the following year, reports had been filtering through from the well-informed intelligence network of German preparations for war against the USSR and of the transfer and concentration of troops in East Prussia, close to the Russian border.72 But, whatever their suspicions about German intentions in the long run, Stalin and Molotov, the two key figures in shaping Soviet foreign affairs, expected no military conflict in the near future. Now as before anxious above all to gain time, maintaining the pact of 1939 remained their priority. In this, they had few options. The straitjacket of choice was in part a consequence of the speed with which Germany had established mastery over much of Europe since the spring. But it was also partly self-inflicted. Soviet options were mainly circumscribed by the poor state of the Red Army, which would not be fully prepared for war for another two years. And for this, Stalin himself, through the lethal purges he had launched against his experienced and talented military leaders three years earlier, bore the main responsibility.\n\nIV\n\nOn 1 January 1938 the Soviet armed forces comprised 1,605,520 men, just under three-quarters of them in the army. This was not far removed from the planned size when Stalin expected to be ready for war, at the end of 1942.73 The plan was, however, rapidly overtaken by events once the European war began. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, and especially the war against Finland, saw the mobilization of large numbers of reservists, increasing the army size by little short of two million soldiers. Remarkably, however, almost 700,000 reservists were then demobilized following the end of the Finnish war as the Politburo ordered a return to peacetime status for many units. It took the shock of the German victory in France to reverse this trend and instigate the all-out drive for drastic and rapid expansion.74\n\nHowever, serious weaknesses in leadership and experience in the military command left by the purges could not be rapidly repaired. Around 4,000 officers arrested during the purges were released to take up command posts. But the thousand or so newly promoted senior officers had little time to gain the requisite experience before the German onslaught began.75 There were also organizational flaws (which the campaign in Finland had revealed). And the armed forces were seriously under-equipped in modern weaponry. Despite the intensification of war production that had followed the jolt caused by Hitler's victory in the west that summer, industry was unable to meet the urgent need for armaments. Grave shortages still existed when Hitler struck. Part of the problem lay with Stalin's leadership and the nature of the regime.\n\nLike Hitler, Stalin had a sharp mind (however warped), and his excellent memory gave him a good grasp on detail. His understanding of military affairs was, nevertheless, in essence that of an informed amateur. He lacked the training and expertise of the professional. This led to seemingly contradictory tendencies, both harmful. On the one hand, he was inclined to interfere in matters of detail, such as on specific artillery types, often on a whim.76 On the other hand, he was forced to rely heavily upon the judgement of those whom he trusted\u2013and they were few in number\u2013in the top echelons of military command. Once the big drive for expansion and reconstruction of the Red Army had begun in summer 1940, he had frequent briefings, usually late at night in his dacha, from his military leaders. They also sent in regular written reports on the state of the army.77 And Stalin checked up on the army leadership through reports from Beria, head of the secret police, and others.78 But since he seldom left the Kremlin or his nearby dacha to inspect the genuine condition of the armed forces, he was all the more dependent upon what he was told.\n\nUntil he was sacked as Defence Commissar, in May 1940, following the poor performance of the Red Army in the Finnish war, Marshal Voroshilov had had Stalin's ear on important military matters. But Stalin's confidence had been misplaced. Voroshilov had been negligent, idle and incompetent when it came to addressing the urgent need of building up the armed forces. Matters improved greatly once Marshal S. K. Timoshenko replaced Voroshilov. But even now, Stalin was prepared to take military advice from such individuals as the odious L. Z. Mekhlis, former editor of the Party newspaper, Pravda, and by 1940 head of the Political Directorate of the Red Army. Khrushchev considered Mekhlis 'a nitwit' and was appalled that he enjoyed such influence over Stalin on military matters.79\n\nIf Stalin had harboured any illusions about the quality of the Red Army following the debacle in Finland, they could only have been dashed by the devastating top-secret report presented in December 1940 by Timoshenko, outlining the grave deficiencies of the nation's armed forces. The lengthy report, compiled on the basis of thorough assessments after Timoshenko had taken over from Voroshilov the previous May, cannot have made pleasurable reading for Stalin. The whole organizational support structure for administration and provisioning was inadequate, the report ran, and, in many aspects, out of date. So lacking had the central administration been, that not even exact figures for the strength of the Red Army at the point of Timoshenko's takeover existed. Equally extraordinary was the fact that, under the heading 'Operative Planning', the first item stated: 'At the time of the hand-over and takeover of the People's Commissariat for Defence, no operational war plan is available; an operational total plan or partial plans do not exist.' Nor had any training programmes for senior commanders and their staffs been conducted either by Voroshilov or by the General Staff, and no checks on operational training in military districts were in place. There were not enough airfields in key districts. There was even a shortage of maps. In addition, there were serious weaknesses in transport and communications. There was no updated mobilization plan, and no training programme for the three million ill-prepared reservists.\n\nTimoshenko also criticized the inability of the officer academies to produce an adequate military leadership, a shortage especially marked in the infantry. There were serious deficiencies in the training of the troops for battlefield action. And the weaponry was old-fashioned, not up to the needs of modern warfare. Aircraft lagged notably behind those of other states, and for the air force, too, the drastic shortage of trained personnel was highlighted. Similar weaknesses in modern weaponry were noted for motorized units and in artillery. One of the greatest deficiencies emphasized was the absence of organized and systematic intelligence on the state of the armies of other countries. Air-defences could not provide protection from attack from the skies. And ground defence preparations behind the front lines were poor.80 All in all, the picture was scarcely that of an army close to readiness for a major war, or capable of defending the Soviet Union from invasion, let alone itself launching any offensive operations.\n\nTimoshenko may well have exaggerated the shortcomings to save himself from future criticism by attaching blame to his predecessor for the magnitude of the task he was facing. Even so, it was a shocking indictment of the state of the armed forces. The failings could not be put right immediately. It would take a considerable time to make the Red Army ready for major combat. This in itself imposed the most decisive limitation on Stalin's operative choices over the coming months. The only option, Stalin and Molotov agreed, was to do everything possible and with the utmost speed to prepare the armed forces for the inevitable showdown. But in the meantime, it was crucial to avoid any provocation that might give Hitler a pretext for attack.\n\nThese twin considerations effectively framed Soviet policy in the months before the launch of 'Barbarossa'. And, indeed, a huge amount was achieved in rearmament. Production of armaments was a third higher in 1940 than in the previous year. And the armed forces grew massively in size to 5.4 million soldiers in 1941, compared with 1.6 million at the beginning of 1938.81 They were mostly deployed on the Soviet Union's western borders, and became vastly better equipped. But morale and discipline were often poor.82 Relatively few of the tanks and planes were the latest models, and there were numerous obstacles to a smooth flow of production.83 Too much ground had been lost, gravely abetted by the purges, to make good the backwardness in technology and organizational deficits.84 More time was needed. Stalin thought he would gain it. He was convinced that Hitler would not attack in the east before the war in the west was conclusively won. The likelihood was in Stalin's mind\u2013and his judgement was shared by Molotov and the rest of the Soviet political and military leadership\u2013that the invasion would come only when the Red Army was ready to meet it. Until then, ultimate caution and, where necessary, appeasement of Nazi Germany were the requirement. Winning time was of the essence: the overriding imperative.\n\nUnder this extreme pressure, Soviet military strategy had to be reassessed. Soviet strategic theory had rested upon the ideas developed by Tukhachevsky in the 1920s and 1930s. These envisaged a modernized, technologically developed army capable of transforming defence into attack by absorbing the first enemy assault then swiftly transferring the war onto the enemy's territory in what were dubbed 'deep operations'. A lengthy defensive war was not envisaged. The emphasis was on the ability, having weathered the initial storm, to provide an immediate, decisive blow in an all-out strike of airborne and ground forces, supported by massed armoured and mechanized units.85 The theory was predicated upon a notion of how war would begin: with an ultimatum, a formal declaration, then full-scale mobilization lasting days, or even weeks (as in 1914), and with frontier battles allowing the 'deep operations' to come into play.86 The surprise attack, tactical brilliance and devastating speed of the German blitzkrieg in the west then cast serious doubt on such premisses. Nevertheless, the planning of the Soviet General Staff in 1940 and 1941 amounted to a modification, rather than radical revision, of Tukhachevsky's 'deep operations' theories. Even when the later war hero General Georgi Zhukov took over as chief of the General Staff at the end of January 1941, the expectation remained that the Red Army would be able to contain the enemy during the initial attack, then turn defence into attack in a devastating counter-blow.87 The strategic plans of the General Staff proceeded on the basis of such thinking.\n\nTimoshenko, as we have noted, had been scathing in his criticism of the absence of an operational war plan when he took over from Voroshilov in May 1940. Indeed, the previous plan, designed in 1938 by Marshal V. M. Shaposhnikov, at that time chief of the General Staff, had been rendered mainly redundant by the changed circumstances that the European war had brought about. Despite Timoshenko's dismissive remarks, however, there were strong elements of continuity with Shaposhnikov's concept in subsequent plans.\n\nShaposhnikov had seen a threat to the Soviet Union from Japan in the east, and a greater one from Germany and Poland, together with Italy and the Baltic countries, in the west. Working on the theory of strategic defence in depth to contain the enemy before conversion into an offensive, Shaposhnikov posited two variants for an attack against the Soviet western front. Soviet defences had to be ready for an attack, either to the north of the Pripet marshes in Poland towards Vilnius in Lithuania and on to Minsk, or to the south of the marshes, through southern Poland in the direction of Kiev. Shaposhnikov still held to notions of mobilization soon to be exposed as wholly obsolete. He thought the northern variant somewhat more likely since the enemy attack could take place on the twentieth day of mobilization, whereas 28\u201330 days would be needed for the southern variant. And he envisaged a Soviet decision on whether to place the weight of defence on the northern or southern variant being taken only around the tenth day of mobilization, when it was plain which direction the enemy offensive was taking.88\n\nBy August 1940, when he was replaced as chief of staff by General K. A. Meretskov, Shaposhnikov's plan was in need of stringent revision. Poland no longer existed, the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were now part of the Soviet Union, Finland had fallen within the German orbit and Germany had extended her grip on the Danube basin so that Romania and Hungary could be regarded as her allies in any future conflict. Moreover, Italy had entered the war, and Axis influence in the Mediterranean and Balkans was substantially strengthened. Timoshenko and Meretskov now reversed Shaposhnikov's precedence attached to the northern variant. In their reassessment, presented to Stalin on 5 October, they envisaged the main strike coming from the south. Stalin agreed. 'I think the most important thing for the Germans is the grain in the Ukraine and the coal of the Donbas,' he remarked.89 By the middle of the month, the revised plan, predicated on the main German attack coming south of the Pripet marshes, was adopted. The Balkans, in this scenario, played a central role in Soviet strategic thinking. Under the revised plan, the Red Army would engage 'to the south of Brest-Litovsk in order, by means of powerful blows in the directions of Lublin and Cracow and further to Breslau, to cut Germany off from the Balkan countries in the very first stage of the war, to deprive her of its most important economic bases, and decisively to influence the Balkan countries on the question of their participation in the war'. This reassessment remained essentially intact as the basis of Soviet operational war planning until the eve of 'Barbarossa'.90\n\nAt the end of December 1940, bringing to a close a conference of top military leaders convened by Stalin following the depressing report on the state of the armed forces presented earlier in the month, Timoshenko summed up the proceedings by saying that 'although the war with Germany might be difficult and long, the country had all it needed for a struggle to full victory'. Probably the optimistic assessment was what Timoshenko thought Stalin wanted to hear. Instead, it gave the Soviet dictator a sleepless night.91 His unease could not have been quelled by the results of two war games conducted in early January.\n\nThey were concerned purely with defence strategy. Both games assumed aggression from the west: an invasion of the Soviet Union. And both, remarkably, omitted the vital initial stage of defence, starting their assessment only at the phase, presumed to be several weeks after the war had begun, when the 'enemy' had already penetrated into Soviet territory. The first of the games posited an attack in the north, with Zhukov leading the 'enemy' forces and General D. G. Pavlov commanding the Soviet army. Pavlov failed to repel the 'enemy', which ended well inside Soviet territory. In the second game, Zhukov and Pavlov swapped sides. Here, the southern variant was tested. Zhukov worked on 'deep operations' theory, contained the attack in the south, then destroyed twenty enemy divisions and was able to advance on one flank about a hundred miles into Poland. Even then, the German offensive could not be wholly contained. The results were not viewed as satisfactory. At a meeting soon afterwards in the Kremlin, with the Politburo present, Stalin severely berated the chief of staff, Meretskov, then sacked him on the spot. Zhukov, who had proved such an effective commander in the war games, was promoted to the new chief of the General Staff.92\n\nBy March, influenced by the war games and by a recently completed blueprint for mobilization (which, again, in attempting to please Stalin had provided wildly optimistic and unrealistic figures on manpower and armaments), a revised operational plan was ready. It reaffirmed the decision taken the previous autumn and seemingly justified in the war games, that the main weight of Soviet defence would be directed towards the expected southern, not northern, variant of German attack. The assumption was that the key German thrust would be towards the Ukraine.93 It would prove a serious miscalculation.\n\nThe frenetic months of planning revision and feverish expansion since the previous summer\u2013and the tempo was to accelerate even more sharply\u2013had produced ambivalent results. On the one hand, a massive amount had unquestionably been accomplished in a remarkably short time. On the other hand, there was still far to go before defences would be ready for the predicted onslaught. The outcome of the war games had highlighted major deficiencies remaining in defence strategy. And projected estimates of manpower and armaments tended to inflate current strength and put the most positive gloss on future capability. The mobilization plan of February had outlined a staggering wartime strength of 8,700,000 soldiers in over 300 fully equipped divisions, 60 of them tank and a further 30 motorized divisions, and an air-strength of some 14,000 aircraft. The aims of the plan were meant to be fulfilled by the end of 1941. But the figures concealed much of the truth. Not enough vehicles could be produced to equip fully the tank and motorized divisions even by 1943. Even with optimal production, there would be a 75 per cent shortfall on the vital medium-sized tanks (mainly the later renowned T-34s) as late as 1 January 1942. The figures for aircraft were also wholly unrealistic in the short term. And when the war actually began in June 1941, a quarter of the divisions stipulated in the plan existed only on paper.94\n\nStalin and his 'inner circle', who were fully briefed on the plans and their practical limitations, knew that any German attack during 1941 would pose extreme danger for the Soviet Union. The Red Army would still be ill-equipped to counter the threat. The country's defences would be at the very least severely stretched. In so many vital spheres\u2013tank and aircraft production, border fortifications, manpower\u2013completion targets were scheduled for no earlier than the beginning of 1942.95 The problems had been compounded by Stalin's decision, overriding opposition from his military advisers, to abandon the system of fortifications, known as the 'Stalin Line', begun in the 1920s and stretching across the Soviet Union's former frontier, in favour of new fortifications to be constructed in forward positions on the new frontier. This would prove a serious error in June 1941. On the eve of the German attack, crucial defence areas were still unprovided with minefields, camouflage or effective fields of fire, and most of the strongpoints belatedly set up on Zhukov's orders had no artillery. Meanwhile, when Stalin at last agreed that the old line of fortifications should at least be partly manned, the troops found them 'overgrown with grass and tall weeds', concrete shells with empty gun emplacements.96\n\nStalin drew one conclusion from all this. There was no option: conflict with Germany must at all costs be delayed until 1942 at the earliest. 'We all, Stalin included, knew that conflict was inevitable,' Mikoyan recalled, 'but we were also aware of our lack of preparations for it.'97 Stalin later told Churchill that he knew the war was coming, but thought he might gain another six months or so.98 This meant a policy of mollifying Germany and avoiding confrontation, offering not the slightest provocation for German aggression. None of Stalin's closest associates differed from this analysis. They held to it even as the indications mounted that Hitler was preparing to attack in 1941. Stalin viewed such signs with equanimity. He thought he could read Hitler's mind. Hitler was not stupid, he thought. He would not risk a war on two fronts. He would first want to cover his rear in the west. The British were proving tenacious, and German victory on the western front did not seem imminent. If the Germans did not attack in the summer of 1941, the ferocious Russian winter would see to it that they could not do so before the following spring. So Stalin was confident he could fend off Hitler until 1942. By then, the Red Army would be ready for him.\n\nV\n\nMeanwhile, with military options foreclosed, everything possible had to be done on the diplomatic front. Here, the first months of 1941 brought only partial success. On the gains side was a joint declaration of neutrality signed with Turkey in March. This headed off the danger of Turkey joining the Tripartite Pact and reduced the threat to the Soviet Union on her southern flank, where the Turkish Straits had traditionally proved a vulnerable point of Russian defences.99 More important still was the neutrality pact signed with Japan in April which left Stalin euphoric at this major improvement to the security of the Soviet eastern front, eliminating\u2013or at least greatly reducing\u2013the prospect of the USSR being attacked from the east as well as the west. On the debit side, hopes of keeping Bulgaria\u2013traditionally well disposed towards Russia and of strategic importance to Soviet security in the Balkans\u2013out of the clutches of the Germans had failed by the end of February, when Sofia agreed to join the Tripartite Pact and allow German troops to be stationed on Bulgarian soil. By early April, rapid moves to forge a treaty of alliance with Yugoslavia, where a popular coup had overthrown the government which had decided to join the Axis, had been immediately vitiated by the German invasion and subsequent rapid conquest of the country. The capitulation of Greece, too, to Hitler's forces meant that by the end of April, aside from Turkish neutrality, the Balkans were now squarely in the German domain and the southern frontier of the Soviet Union exposed to Germany and her allies. At every point in the diplomatic game of chess, Stalin had found himself outmanoeuvred by Hitler. Military weakness was compounded by diplomatic isolation.\n\nStalin remained greatly worried, too, that Britain would seek a deal with Hitler, ending the bogey of the two-front war and allowing Germany to turn eastwards unthreatened from the west. Britain's military weakness, exposed by the withdrawal of 100,000 men from Greece when the Germans invaded, and in north Africa through Rommel's startling successes, made the prospect seem a real one. None other than the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, now alerted Stalin and Molotov to precisely such a scenario. 'It was not outside the bounds of possibility, if the war were protracted for a long period,' stated Cripps on 18 April, 'that there might be a temptation for Great Britain (and especially for certain circles in Great Britain) to come to some arrangement to end the war on the sort of basis which has recently been suggested in certain German quarters.'100 The British government was at the time trying to induce the Soviet Union to throw her military might behind the defence of Yugoslavia and Greece to form a 'Balkan front' against Hitler. Stressing the mounting threat posed by Germany to the USSR itself was part of this diplomatic offensive. Instead, however, what Cripps succeeded in doing was to alarm the Soviet leadership about the likelihood of an 'arrangement' between Germany and Great Britain. When Winston Churchill then sent a message via Cripps to Stalin, delivered in the Kremlin on 21 April, warning the Soviet leader of the danger of a German attack, the impact was wholly counterproductive. All the message did was to set the alarm bells ringing even more loudly and intensify Stalin's paranoia. He presumed that Churchill was trying to entice him into a war with Germany in a move aimed at serving only British interests. 'Look at that,' he told Zhukov, 'we are being threatened with the Germans, and the Germans with the Soviet Union, and they are playing us off against one another. It is a subtle political game.'101\n\nChurchill later described Stalin and his associates in the Kremlin as 'simpletons' and 'the most completely outwitted bunglers of the Second World War', and thought that, through direct contact with the Soviet chief, he might have prevented the disaster that befell his country on 22 June 1941.102 Even belatedly, Churchill did not see how his well-intended message would inevitably be construed in Moscow. In the context, Stalin's reaction was not wholly irrational. In any case, by the time Churchill sent his warning Stalin was inundated with intelligence reports informing him of the growing threat from Germany.\n\nWith so many Communist sympathizers abroad, Stalin's regime had no shortage of informers willing, often at considerable risk to their own safety, to provide the state security organs with a flow of intelligence\u2013varied in quality, often contradictory, but sometimes significant.103 Digests of reports were forwarded at frequent intervals by Vsevolod Merkulov, head of the NKGB (responsible for external affairs, and hived off in early February 1941 from Beria's NKVD, left in charge of internal security).104 Despite approving Merkulov's appointment, Stalin had no high opinion of him, regarding him as weak and over-anxious to please. The flaw was, of course, built into the system. But perhaps the fact that Merkulov wrote plays and fiction in his spare time did not help.105 At any rate, Stalin distrusted his reports. Nor did he think he could rely upon the military intelligence reports, again sometimes summarizing important information, sent to him by the head of the GRU (the Soviet military intelligence), General Filip Golikov. Still further intelligence reports reached Stalin via the Foreign Ministry's sources.106 Once more, they were treated with scepticism. Vital intelligence, for which agents had often risked their lives, was consequently dismissed as a matter of course by Stalin as 'disinformation'. In fact, there was a good deal of disinformation deliberately put in circulation. Much of it was successfully placed by the Germans themselves (such as the story that the build-up of troops in the east was a deception aimed at British intelligence, a cover for the planned invasion of Britain).107 So there was certainly room for distrust and scepticism of uncorroborated intelligence. But Stalin's own profound cynicism went much further than healthy scepticism. It led him to disbelieve all information, however compelling and however well placed the source, which contradicted his own analysis of German intentions. And this, perversely, came to rest upon the successful German deception that any attack would be preceded by an ultimatum, which would give him time to concede, mobilize or even pre-empt.108 The complete mistrust of all intelligence coupled with the certainty that his own analysis was right amounted ultimately to the reason why Stalin was caught so totally by surprise on 22 June 1941.\n\nAs early as 5 December 1940, the newly appointed Soviet ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Dekanozov, a former senior officer in the NKVD, received an anonymous letter warning that Hitler would attack the Soviet Union the following spring.109 This was indeed at precisely the point that Hitler was confirming to his military leaders the decision to prepare to invade the USSR in May 1941, embodied in the directive for what was now called 'Operation Barbarossa' on 18 December. Within eleven days, Soviet military intelligence in Berlin was forwarding to Moscow the information it had received from 'most well-informed high military circles that Hitler has given the order to prepare for war with the USSR. War will be declared in March 1941.' Verification of the information was sent to Stalin personally in early January 1941.110\n\nTwo of the best-placed agents, supplying a flow of excellent information, were the German Communist sympathizers Harro Schulze-Boysen (whose codename was 'Starshina', or 'the Elder') and Arvid Harnack (known as 'Korsicanets', or the 'Corsican'). Through family connections (his father was a nephew of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the former head of the German navy, and his mother was related to Hermann G\u00f6ring), Schulze-Boysen was able to join Luftwaffe headquarters in 1941 as an officer. There he gained access to top-secret material. Harnack, a lawyer who had studied for some time in the United States, was a nephew of Adolf von Harnack, an eminent theologian, and since 1935 had worked in the Economics Ministry in Berlin. Like Schulze-Boysen (with whom he came into contact after the outbreak of war), he had access to privileged information. Both were won over in 1940 to work secretly for Soviet intelligence. They were eventually uncovered and executed in 1942. But in 1941, as German preparations to attack the USSR were under way, they were able to tap sources close to the heart of Nazi military and economic planning.\n\nAt the beginning of March 1941, 'Corsican' reported serious discussions within the German leadership about attacking the USSR. His report was passed to Stalin, Molotov, Timoshenko and Beria. Contingency plans for occupation of the western parts of the Soviet Union were being drawn up, he indicated. And he relayed reports that General Franz Halder, chief of the German army's General Staff, thought the occupation of the Ukraine and the Caucasus would be easy, and pay rich dividends, information which fitted the Soviet presumption that any strike would have its main thrust in the south.111 A further report, sent on to the Soviet leadership two days later, pointed out that the build-up of troops on the Soviet border was now so large that it was quite evidently an invasion force. However, this report suggested that the USSR would be attacked only following an assault on Turkey; moreover, that Ribbentrop and even Hitler thought Germany would gain more economically by retaining trade links with the Soviet Union than by invasion and occupation. Notions in the Soviet leadership that there might be a split in the upper echelons of the Nazi regime, and even that Hitler might not belong to the most aggressive faction in the matter of designs on the Soviet Union, were thereby given some support.112\n\nA few days later, yet another report from 'Corsican' found its way to Stalin's desk. This mentioned German spy planes photographing Soviet territory, particularly around the naval base of Kronstadt, near Leningrad. It also relayed second-hand information from two German generals that an attack on the USSR was planned for the spring. German High Command, it was said, thought Soviet forces would be defeated after little more than a week. The occupation of the Ukraine\u2013again the focus on the Soviet 'granary'\u2013would deprive the USSR of its main source of food. The Wehrmacht would rapidly advance eastwards, and within twenty-five days would be beyond the Urals.113 Towards the end of March, 'Corsican' passed on information from the German Ministry of Air, detailing planning for the bombing of communications in the USSR, aerial reconnaissance of Soviet towns and the expectation among Luftwaffe officers that operations would begin in late April or early May. An important consideration, it was said, was the German aim of taking the crops before retreating Soviet forces had time to destroy them.114\n\nIn April the volume of reports intensified. Precise details were given of the build-up of German forces along the border, troop movements and construction of fortifications and aerodromes.115 'The Elder' ('Starshina') reported remarks of an officer who had contact with G\u00f6ring that Hitler considered it necessary to launch a preventive war against the USSR. A point followed which was lodged in the minds of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. Before war was declared, Germany would issue an ultimatum that the Soviet Union join the Tripartite Pact and submit to German demands\u2013predominantly ruthless economic exploitation and political subordination, it was presumed. The attack would follow if the USSR refused to comply with the ultimatum.116 A few days later, 'Starshina' was relaying information that most German officers were opposed to Hitler and did not support the idea of attacking the USSR. He thought the opportunity for a decisive blow by the Wehrmacht was fading.117\n\nBy the end of the month, 'Corsican', following a secret meeting of leading German officials in the Economics Ministry, again laid the emphasis on the demands for supplies of raw materials from the Soviet Union, to be achieved either by peace or by war.118 And on 6 May a communication from another extremely well-informed source, Richard Sorge (known as 'Ramzai'), a Soviet spy located in the German embassy in Tokyo, noted that, according to the German ambassador, General Eugen Ott, Hitler was determined to defeat the USSR and gain the economic resources of the western parts of the Soviet Union. Once the grain had been sown, Germany could attack at any time to reap the harvest. German generals, in Ott's view, believed that an eastern campaign would prove no hindrance to the war against Britain. The Soviet forces, they thought, were unprepared, defences weak, and the Red Army could be routed within a matter of weeks.119 These, and countless other agents' reports, were routinely summarized by Merkulov, head of external security, and the digests sent on to the Soviet leadership.120\n\nIn retrospect, ignoring such information seems sheer folly. Leaving aside the hearsay nature of much of it, that it was not always consistent and that it did not match the actual pattern of the invasion, it did point unequivocally to a German attack on the Soviet Union\u2013and in the near future. From Stalin's perspective, however, it was less obvious. The reports just cited were only part of an increasing flow of information, starting to turn into a torrent. But a good deal of it actually came through British, American or other foreign channels.121 This was instinctively distrusted by Stalin, as we have seen, and his distrust was encouraged by his own intelligence chiefs. On 20 March 1941 General Golikov, head of military intelligence, presented a report to the Defence and Foreign Commissariats and the Central Committee which outlined a long list of various views from an array of sources on German intentions towards the USSR. He preceded this by stating that much of the agent information about a spring attack on the Soviet Union came from Anglo-American sources, whose main aim was to worsen the relationship between Germany and the USSR. His own view was that the Germans would attack the Soviet Union only once they had defeated Britain. Persistent rumours that the attack would occur in the spring of 1941, he suggested, ought to be viewed as disinformation spread by the British, and also the German, intelligence services.122 This was no more than pandering to Stalin's preformed judgement.\n\nStalin and his associates were not alone, however, in misreading the signals. Foreign intelligence services were also for the most part misled.123 German deception strategy\u2013that the build-up of troops in the east was a front for 'Operation Sealion' (the invasion of England), or was to culminate in an ultimatum to Stalin to demand territory and raw materials from the Soviet Union\u2013played a notable part in this.124 British intelligence, sometimes swallowing the false messages deliberately put into circulation by the Germans, was late in coming to the realization that an invasion was indeed being planned. Early reports on Hitler's intended aggression were dismissed as unreliable rumour, wishful thinking or defensive moves against possible Soviet attack. Then it was seen as a 'war of nerves' by the Germans to prevent intervention in the Balkans or to extricate more material resources from the Soviet Union.125\n\nReading the intelligence runes was, therefore, anything but straightforward. Molotov was still unrepentant many years later on the allegation that Stalin's cardinal error was to ignore the intelligence he was receiving. 'We are blamed because we ignored our intelligence,' said Molotov. 'Yes, they warned us. But if we had heeded them, had given Hitler the slightest excuse, he would have attacked us earlier.' (When that might have been, Molotov did not indicate. Since, as was obvious, the Germans had been in no position to attack during the summer months of 1940, and the Russian winter ruled out any such move during subsequent months, the earliest date of any invasion had to be spring 1941\u2013when, indeed, Hitler initially intended to launch it.) 'We knew the war was coming soon, that we were weaker than Germany, that we would have to retreat,' Molotov continued. 'We did everything to postpone the war...Stalin reckoned before the war that only in 1943 would we be able to meet the Germans as equals.' His interrogator brought Molotov back to the stream of intelligence reports. 'We could not have relied on our intelligence,' Molotov replied. 'You have to listen to them, but you also have to verify their information. Intelligence agents could push you into such a dangerous position that you would never get out of it. Provocateurs everywhere are innumerable...You couldn't trust such reports.'126 Molotov's views were an echo of Stalin's own.\n\nBy the beginning of May, nevertheless, the flood of worrying information could no longer be simply ignored. Even Stalin saw that some action was necessary. It was primarily aimed at sending a message to Germany, providing public reassurance and bolstering troop morale. At the same time Timoshenko and Zhukov were viewing the warnings with more anxious eyes than Stalin's. They were by now favouring a different sort of action. They were at work on a drastically revised military plan\u2013one which placed the emphasis on a Soviet offensive.\n\nVI\n\nOn 5 May Stalin replaced Molotov as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars\u2013the equivalent of Prime Minister. He was now for the first time officially head of the state government, as well as the party (as its General Secretary). In reality, the move, made public the next day, was in many ways cosmetic. Though Molotov had previously headed the state government, Stalin's supremacy had never been in doubt. But by officially taking over, Stalin was now offering reassurance to the Soviet public. He was in total control. The well-being of the country was in the best hands. He knew what to do.\n\nBut the move went beyond morale-boosting. Converting Politburo decisions into government decrees, a process necessary to ensure party dominance, had entailed cumbersome formalities. At such a critical time, these were now greatly streamlined.127 At least as important was the impression to be conveyed abroad, most crucially to Germany. At the formal level of diplomacy, Stalin's lack of responsibility for state government had been something of a complication. Formal negotiations had to pass through Molotov, even though it was obvious that Stalin was really in charge. This complication was now bypassed. It was meant to show the Germans that in negotiations to stabilize relations they could deal with Stalin himself. The German ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, who secretly opposed the looming invasion, correspondingly reported to Berlin his conviction 'that Stalin will use his new position in order to take part personally in the maintenance and development of good relations between the Soviets and Germany'.128 The Germans soon had reason to be satisfied with Stalin the Prime Minister. He denied rumours of military concentrations on the frontier, resumed diplomatic relations with the pro-German government of Iraq and closed the Norwegian, Belgian and Yugoslav embassies in Moscow\u2013all to appease Hitler.129\n\nOn the day that he became the Soviet premier, Stalin gave a major speech in Moscow before hundreds of graduates of the Military Academy, along with the elite of the Red Army, representatives of the Defence Commissariat and General Staff, and important government figures. Unlike Hitler, Stalin seldom gave speeches, even behind closed doors. His previous major speech had been in March 1939, at the 18th Party Congress.130 And, again unlike Hitler, Stalin's style of speech was calm and measured (even to the point of dullness), the content structured and ordered. But the rarity of his speeches and the gravity of the situation increased the interest, at home and also in Berlin, in what Stalin had said. Little could be known for certain. The newspapers next day carried only a lapidary note of his address.131\n\nIn all, an audience of around 1,500 heard Stalin speak for around forty minutes about the great advances achieved in modernizing and building up the Red Army to its current position of strength. He provided an array of impressive figures on the huge improvements in the size and fighting capability of the armed forces and their modern weaponry. Turning to the German army, he attributed the great victories in the west to the ability to learn from earlier failures and the weakness of the French. He was insistent that the German army was not invincible, and, drawing an analogy with Napoleon, that its aim of conquest (which had replaced the earlier one of freedom from the Versailles Treaty) would not be achieved. In the reception that followed, Stalin gave three short toasts. In the third, he corrected an officer who wanted to toast his peace policy. The peace policy had served the country's defences well, Stalin said. It had been pursued until the army had been rebuilt and given modern weaponry. But now, he declared, the Soviet Union had to move from defensive to offensive operations. 'The Red Army is a modern army,' he ended, 'but a modern army is an attacking army.'132 Some interpreters have seen in these words the aim of launching a preventive attack on Germany, precisely what Nazi propaganda claimed to justify the invasion of the USSR.133 But the brief remarks offered no more than a terse restatement of the long-standing military strategy of converting defence into devastating attack, though it is certainly true that they presented, and were seen to present, a new emphasis upon offence. And they were, as was the main speech preceding the toasts, explicitly aimed at effect. The outright purpose was to instil belief in the Red Army's fighting capacity, to bolster morale through the confidence exuded at the very top of the Soviet Union. That the speech set the tone for the new propaganda directives for the army and civilian population which were prepared in its aftermath also suggests that the building of morale was its key purpose.134\n\nThe speech has been seen as aimed primarily at spreading disinformation abroad. Had that been the case, Soviet intelligence would have been adept at leaking its content. As it was, even the Germans, whose interest in what Stalin had to say was obvious, had to be content with a completely bowdlerized version passed on only a month later by the ambassador in Moscow. Schulenburg, who, at the time it was delivered, had been unable to discover the content of the speech, now provided a wholly misleading version, suggesting that Stalin had emphasized that the Red Army was still weak compared to the Wehrmacht, and had wanted to prepare his audience for a 'new compromise' with Germany.135 No accurate version of the speech, it seems, found its way to Berlin, or anywhere else.136 And a deliberate leak stressing the feeble state of the Red Army was scarcely in the Soviet interest. So, for all the speculation, the objective of the speech is best viewed as domestic, rather than external\u2013to shore up the morale and self-belief of the leaders of the Red Army.\n\nIt had, however, immediate consequences for the military leadership's operational planning, which was also most likely affected by the latest comprehensive assessment by military intelligence of the number of German divisions massing on the western borders of the Soviet Union.137 The earlier plans, from September 1940 and March 1941, were now rapidly revised. By 15 May Timoshenko and Zhukov were ready to present the new plan to Stalin.138 Though building directly on the earlier plans, it differed in one striking respect. It now envisaged a major pre-emptive strike, as Zhukov later acknowledged, to forestall the enemy by attacking the German army before it was ready to launch its own offensive. As before, the main directional thrust was towards southern Poland, where the enemy would be destroyed by a 'sudden blow' on land and from the air. The advance included the conquest of Warsaw, and subsequently the destruction of German forces in northern Poland and the overrunning of East Prussia.139\n\nThe plan has given succour to those anxious to assert that Hitler, as he claimed, launched 'Barbarossa' to head off a Soviet pre-emptive strike which was under preparation. But nothing supports such a far-fetched interpretation. The Nazi leadership knew, of course, that they were not invading the Soviet Union to head off a pre-emptive strike. 'Barbarossa' had been instigated months earlier, and for aggressive, not defensive, reasons. And the Soviet plan of 15 May provides no 'smoking gun'.\n\nCertainly, it proposed a pre-emptive strike. In this, it converted the traditional emphasis on the rapid transition from 'deep defence' to offence into a stress on attack as a form of defence. Unlike the German fiction of a Soviet threat, the menace from Hitler's forces was evident to the Soviet military leadership as daily reports of the build-up of troops and violations of the borders for aerial reconnaissance poured in. The idea of the pre-emptive strike contained in the 15 May plan arose directly from the need to protect the Soviet Union, and was inspired by Stalin's speech ten days earlier. That is, it was an offensive plan born out of defensive necessity.140\n\nWorried as they were by the incessant flow of intelligence reports on troop movements together with indications (if not always consistent) of hostile German intent towards the Soviet Union, Timoshenko and Zhukov nevertheless most probably thought, like Stalin, that the German attack was not imminent. Red Army estimates indicated that the German build-up in the east had not been great in recent weeks, and that a far larger concentration of strength would have to occur before any attack took place.141 And, as the Soviet military leaders were only too well aware, the forces available to the Red Army nowhere approached those required under the 15 May plan, and major deficiencies were still obvious in transport and supplies. The plan also encompassed the construction of huge defensive fortifications, which were nowhere near completion. As a blueprint for action in the near future, therefore, the plan was utterly unrealistic.142 Most probably, Timoshenko and Zhukov had in mind an offensive at some stage in the more distant future, probably at the earliest during the summer of 1942.\n\nIn any case, speculation on the possible timing of any pre-emptive strike is fruitless. When Timoshenko and Zhukov presented the plan\u2013still in draft form\u2013to Stalin, he rejected it outright. 'He immediately exploded when he heard about the pre-emptive blow against the German forces,' Zhukov reputedly commented at a later date. ' \"Have you gone mad? Do you want to provoke the Germans?\", he barked out irritably.' Timoshenko and Zhukov reminded Stalin of what he had said on 5 May. ' \"I said that in order to encourage the people there, so that they would think about victory and not about the invincibility of the German army, which is what the world's press is blaring on about\", growled Stalin. And thus was buried our idea for a pre-emptive blow,' Zhukov concluded.143\n\nAn account of the postwar testimony of Timoshenko was equally explicit about Stalin's reaction. Stalin, in this version, accused both Zhukov and Timoshenko of being warmongers. When Timoshenko referred to his speech of 5 May, Stalin retorted: 'Look everyone...Timoshenko is healthy and has a large head, but his brain is evidently tiny...What I said [on 5 May] was for the people. Their vigilance had to be raised. And you must understand that Germany will never on its own move to attack Russia...If you provoke the Germans on the border, if you move forces without our permission, then bear in mind that heads will roll.' Stalin then stormed out, slamming the door.144\n\nStalin stuck to his policy of non-provocation and playing for time. So keen was he to avoid provoking the Germans that deliveries of raw materials to Germany in line with earlier trade agreements were still being met in full only six days before the Wehrmacht attacked. Even down to the morning of the invasion itself, Soviet goods were being unloaded at stations on the Polish borders.145 About the same time, Lieutenant-General Kirponos, the Red Army commander in Kiev, who had written to Stalin informing him that a German offensive in the near future was more than likely and had moved some units into more favourable defensive positions on the frontier, had his orders countermanded.146 Stalin remained unshaken in his conviction that the Germans would not invade until they had attained victory or a compromise settlement in the west. 'Hitler and his generals are not so stupid as to fight at the same time on two fronts,' Zhukov remembered Stalin saying during his angry riposte to the plan. 'That broke the neck of the Germans in the First World War.' Again Stalin insisted that Hitler was not strong enough to fight on two fronts and\u2013here wholly misjudging his foe\u2013'he won't go in for adventures'.147\n\nDid Stalin miss an opportunity in turning his back on the military plan of 15 May offered to him by Timoshenko and Zhukov? That was not what Zhukov himself later thought. Recalling his own inexperience at the time as chief of the General Staff (a position he had not wanted, aware that his real strength was as a field commander), he admitted that he had been wrong, and that Stalin's judgement on the plan was correct. Had a pre-emptive strike been attempted, Zhukov adjudged, the consequences for the Soviet Union would have been even more catastrophic. In all probability, he concluded, the Soviet Union would have been quickly defeated, Moscow and Leningrad would have fallen in 1941, and Hitler's forces would have been in a position to conclude the war successfully.148\n\nWhile Timoshenko and Zhukov were unsuccessfully trying to persuade Stalin to adopt their modified operational plan, and while frenzied work to build up the Red Army was under way, urgent diplomatic efforts to avoid or at least postpone war continued. Most of these revolved around the German ambassador in Moscow, Schulenburg, who would be executed by the Nazi regime just over three years later for his association with the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Schulenburg still believed in May 1941 that war could be prevented if the Soviet Union complied with German material and territorial demands. He reported to Berlin his conviction that Stalin had taken over the office of Prime Minister because he had set himself the goal of 'preserving the Soviet Union from a conflict with Germany'.149 And he backed up the conviction by transmitting the Soviet offer of five million tons of grain to be delivered to Germany the following year.150 Naturally, such reports, if ever they reached him, cut no ice with Hitler. But Schulenburg in turn was deliberately fed misleading information from Berlin. He was directed, for instance, to quell rumours, deliberately spread, it was claimed, by the British to stir up conflict between the Soviet Union and Germany. He was told that the rumours of German troop concentrations and impending war were 'very detrimental to the further peaceful development of German-Russian relations'.151 And during an audience with Hitler himself in Berlin at the end of April, the German dictator had explicitly told him: 'I do not intend a war against Russia.'152 Schulenburg was sure that Hitler had lied to him. Even so, in the weeks that followed, he conveyed his own belief to Stalin and Molotov that war was not inevitable, reinforcing in their minds the notion that a diplomatic solution might still be possible, and sowing still further distrust of British intentions.153\n\nThe distrust was significantly hardened in the wake of Rudolf Hess's flight into British captivity on 10 May. The British government, itself led by intelligence into believing until early June that German troop movements were designed to force the Soviet leadership into negotiations,154 tried to use Hess's mysterious arrival to stiffen resistance by instilling fear in Stalin at 'being left alone to face the music' and encouraging him to forge an alliance between the USSR and Britain.155 The attempt misfired totally. Instead, it simply shored up Stalin's paranoia. His immediate reaction on hearing the news of Hess's flight and capture was, according to Khrushchev, to presume that he was on a secret mission, at Hitler's behest, to negotiate with the British about ending the war to free Germany for the push to the east.156 But he soon became less certain. Other possibilities implanted themselves in his mind. Soviet intelligence reported rumours offering different interpretations. Ivan Maisky, the long-standing and perceptive Soviet ambassador in London, added to the uncertainty through his reports, since he himself had difficulty in reaching a clear conclusion on the purpose of Hess's mission. All this contributed to Stalin's own unease. Unsure whether Churchill's government was trying to inveigle him into a war against Germany, whether the British and the Germans were about to do a deal to join forces against Bolshevism (as he had always anticipated), or whether Hess represented a faction opposed to a Hitler thought to prefer negotiations with the Soviet Union, Stalin was confirmed only in his belief in the utter untrustworthiness of the British and took all warnings emanating from London to be outright disinformation.157\n\nThe rumour and counter-rumour feeding the innumerable intelligence reports were open to different interpretations, some of them playing directly to Stalin's prejudices. Dekanozov, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, for instance, reported as follows to Moscow in early June: 'Parallel to the rumours circulating about the imminent war between Germany and the Soviet Union, rumours were spread in Germany of a rapprochement between Germany and the Soviet Union, either on the basis of far-reaching \"concessions\" on the part of the Soviet Union'\u2013a long-term lease of the Ukraine was frequently mentioned\u2013'or on the basis of \"division of spheres of influence\" and undertakings on the part of the Soviet Union not to interfere in European affairs.'158 The Soviet ambassador was, in fact, unwittingly relaying a piece of deliberate German misinformation.\n\nMaking sense of the mountain of conflicting intelligence reports and countervailing rumours was far from straightforward. Timoshenko and Zhukov, certainly, became increasingly anxious as quite specific reports of German troop concentrations poured in. But when, on the night of 11\u201312 June, they advocated putting the troops on a war footing and moving forces to forward positions to strengthen defensive capacity, Stalin was dismissive: 'I am certain that Hitler will not risk creating a second front by attacking the Soviet Union,' he declared. 'Hitler is not such an idiot and understands that the Soviet Union is not Poland, not France, and not even England.' His anger mounted. He rejected the mobilization and movement of troops to the western borders, fuming: 'That means war.' Concealed reinforcements of the western borders were, in fact, now carried out, though within constraints ordered by Stalin to ensure that there could be no sign of provocation.159 The last-minute, improvised mobilization was, in fact, both limited in scope and flawed in execution.160 On 13 June Timoshenko and Zhukov gave orders to the Kiev military district to transfer command headquarters and a number of divisions at night and in total secrecy closer to the Soviet border. This was to be carried out by the beginning of July. In mid-June, according to information given to Stalin by the General Staff, a total of 186 divisions were deployed on the western front, more than half of them to the south-west. Most had been secretly moved there from the interior of the country in preceding weeks.161 But only on 19 June were orders given to start to camouflage aerodromes and other vital installations, and to disperse the aircraft around the airfields. Even now, Stalin was keen to retain secrecy, to avoid any provocation.162\n\nIt is hard to imagine that Stalin himself did not by now harbour hidden doubts about his own convictions. He must, in solitary moments, have wondered whether he had not for months been outbluffed by Hitler. During the last weeks before the invasion, he seemed restless and worried, took to drinking more heavily, seeking out company as a diversion, replacing working stints at the Kremlin by lengthy dinners at his dacha.163 However sure he was of his own judgement\u2013and he betrayed no uncertainty to those who saw him regularly at this time\u2013it would have been extraordinary if he had not found cause to worry in the information now showering in from all sides.\n\nOn 2 June Beria provided him with a digest of intelligence stipulating the exact location of German troops and their headquarters, although, characteristically, he diluted the impact of his report by concluding that if Germany were to begin a war against the Soviet Union, it would not be before an agreement had been reached between Germany and Great Britain.164 Other reports were less ambivalent and were now, by any measure, becoming distinctly disconcerting.\n\nThe day before Beria delivered his digest, Richard Sorge ('Ramzai') had dispatched two reports from Tokyo based upon information emanating from Berlin. Ambassador Ott had learned that the German attack on the USSR would begin in the second half of June, Sorge indicated, and was 95 per cent certain that war would begin.165 In a second report, also on 1 June, 'Ramzai' passed on information he had received from an acquaintance, Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Scholl, who was passing through Tokyo en route to a new posting at the German embassy in Bangkok. Scholl told him that war would begin on 15 June. Scholl also mentioned that the limited Soviet defensive lines (concentrated, as we have seen, in the south) were a weakness, since the main German attack would be launched on its left flank (that is, in the north).166 When Sorge's telegram was decoded and translated into Russian, his superiors added the disparaging comment: 'Suspicious. To be listed with telegrams intended as provocations.'167 Stalin had long been disparaging about Sorge, dismissing the man risking his life for Soviet intelligence as 'a little shit'.168 The Stalinist system was at all levels preprogrammed to supply the Soviet dictator with confirmation of his own prejudice.\n\nOn 12 June Stalin, Molotov and Beria received information provided by 'Starshina' (Schulze-Boysen) of talk within the upper echelons of the Luftwaffe and Air Ministry indicating that a decision had been made to attack the USSR. Whether demands would be made of the Soviet Union beforehand or whether there would be a surprise attack was unknown.169 The same day, a report reached the Foreign Ministry and Central Committee noting a total of 2,080 violations of the Soviet border by German aeroplanes between 1 January and 10 June, some penetrating as far as sixty miles or so into districts with defence fortifications and large troop concentrations. Ninety-one planes had violated the borders during the first ten days of June. One military plane, which had flown a hundred and twenty miles into Soviet territory and been forced to land, had on board maps and aerial photographs of a region in the Ukraine.170 On 17 June, another report from 'Starshina', based within Luftwaffe headquarters, told Stalin, Molotov and Beria that all German military measures for an attack on the USSR were complete, and that the blow could come at any time. The report gave a list of immediate bombing targets and the designated German heads of the future occupied territories.171 Two days later a Soviet agent in Rome passed on information, said to be derived from the Italian ambassador in Berlin, Augusto Rosso, that Germany would attack the USSR sometime between 20 and 25 June.172 In mid-June information came in from 'Lucy' (an \u00e9migr\u00e9 German anti-Fascist publisher, named Rudolf R\u00f6ssler), a Soviet agent based in Lucerne, in Switzerland, stipulating the date of the attack (22 June) and providing details of the German operational plan.173 'Ramzai' (Sorge) in Tokyo reported on 20 June the view of Ambassador Ott that war was inevitable, and that the German military believed Soviet defences to be weaker than those of Poland.174 On the same day the Soviet agent in Sofia informed Moscow that the attack would come on either 21 or 22 June.175 Nor were the danger signs to be derived only from intelligence reports. By now, most of the German embassy staff, in a state of great nervousness, had left Moscow. Italian, Romanian and Hungarian embassy staff swiftly followed.176\n\nHowever, Soviet distrust of reports from agents and from foreign intelligence services continued unabated. The distrust was, as before, especially pronounced towards Britain\u2013perhaps in part a veiled reflection of Stalin's belief that the British would act with equal duplicity to his own double-dealing in 1939. On 14 June the official Soviet news organ, Tass, published a communiqu\u00e9 denouncing British press rumours of imminent war between Germany and the USSR. Molotov later claimed the Tass communiqu\u00e9 had been 'a last resort. If we had managed to delay the war for the summer, it would have been very difficult to start it in the fall.'177 Reports of the rumours had been passed to Moscow by the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, who continued to believe that German troop movements on the Soviet border were just a part of Hitler's 'war of nerves'.178 Stalin hoped, by publishing the communiqu\u00e9, to elicit an equivalent denunciation from the German side of the rumours. None was forthcoming.179\n\nIn fact, British intelligence, long convinced that German troop movements were to exert pressure on the Soviet Union, had by now changed its tune and become\u2013belatedly\u2013convinced that an invasion of the USSR was imminent.180 The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, barely able to believe that Hitler might invade the Soviet Union in preference to exploiting his conquests in the Balkans to attack the British in north Africa and the Middle East, nevertheless summoned Maisky to his office on 16 June and passed on precise and detailed evidence of the imminent threat. Maisky, himself greatly disturbed by the reports, relayed the information to Moscow, though with the usual caveats to meet the expectations of his leaders.181\n\nThe information, like other British warnings, was taken with a large pinch of salt in Moscow. But one of the last warnings received before the German onslaught was from a recognized friend, the Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. On 21 June, Georgi Dimitrov, the General Secretary of the Comintern Executive Committee, noted in his diary that he had received a telegram from Mao. It stated that Germany would attack that very day. Dimitrov noted that rumours of such an attack were mounting on all sides. He telephoned Molotov to ask about the position to be adopted by Communist parties. Molotov's reply was that 'it was all a game'.182 He said he would speak with Comrade Stalin about it.183\n\nHe knew what response to expect. Stalin remained in complete denial. His position throughout had been: he knew best. Given the structure of leadership and decision-making in the Soviet Union, together with the fear of recrimination that underpinned any perceived opposition, it was difficult even to put a countervailing argument, let alone to persuade Stalin that he was wrong. So the other Soviet leaders, from conviction or convenience, were compliant. Even on the day before the German invasion, Beria wrote to Stalin criticizing the increasingly urgent warnings from one of his own acolytes, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, Dekanozov. He told Stalin of his view that Dekanozov should be dismissed and punished 'because he is bombarding me incessantly with disinformation. Hitler is allegedly preparing an invasion of the USSR. Now, he [Dekanozov] has told me that this invasion is to begin tomorrow.'184 Stalin's own obscenity about what he took to be disinformation was cited near the beginning of this chapter. The vehemence of his outburst was, nevertheless, in all probability a sign of his own inner doubts that he had been right all along. The problem was that his stance had dictated policy at every stage. And now Stalin, paralysed by his own analysis into inaction, had no alternative to offer. When a German deserter, a former Communist, appeared at a border post in the Ukraine at 8 p.m. on the evening of 21 June, saying that Hitler's forces would invade next morning, Stalin was at least anxious enough to agree to Zhukov's directive to warn all military districts of a possible surprise attack at dawn and ordered all units to be made ready for combat. But it was far too little, and far too late. And even now Stalin still thought that 'perhaps the question can be settled peacefully'.185\n\nWhatever his inner doubts, his unwavering conviction for so long that he was right, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, had left Stalin with no choice but to believe\u2013or perhaps just to hope\u2013that he was not wrong.\n\nHe was. His illusions were shattered by a telephone call from Zhukov at 3.40 a.m. on the morning of 22 June. A massive German attack had started on all parts of the western front. The war had begun.\n\nVII\n\nStalin was speechless when he heard the news. All Zhukov could hear was his heavy breathing on the telephone. Stalin gave no immediate orders for countermeasures. He told Zhukov and Timoshenko to go straight away to the Kremlin. Members of the Politburo were also summoned. The meeting, under the direst circumstances imaginable, finally began at 5.45 a.m., Moscow time, just over an hour after the attack had started. Astonishingly, Stalin thought the attack might have been unleashed as a provocation by German officers acting on their own initiative. 'Hitler simply does not know about it,' he stated. He poured out his bile on Ribbentrop instead. For some time, Stalin did not rule out the possibility that the attack was to intimidate the Soviet Union into political submission. He would not order action by the Red Army until he had heard from Berlin.\n\nSchulenburg was contacted and told to come immediately. He had, in fact, been trying to arrange a meeting with Molotov. When he arrived, Schulenburg read out a telegram that had arrived at 3 a.m., Berlin time, stating that Germany had been forced to take 'countermeasures' against the concentration of Soviet forces. Schulenburg spoke of his own 'despondency, caused by the inexcusable and unexpected action of his own government'. Shocked and angry, Molotov retorted that it was 'a breach of confidence unprecedented in history'. He returned to Stalin's office to announce that Germany had declared war on the Soviet Union.186\n\nStalin received the news in silence. He seemed shocked, tired and depressed. But he soon pulled himself together. 'The enemy will be beaten all along the line,' he declared.187 At this stage, he was unaware of the full scale of the disaster that was unfolding. He still thought the Red Army could swiftly turn the tables on the enemy and inflict a crushing defeat on the German invaders. The directive that Timoshenko composed (though it bore Stalin's imprint) and dispatched to all military districts at 7.15 a.m. ordered Red Army units to 'use all their strength and means to come down on the enemy's forces and destroy them where they have violated the Soviet border'. But a Soviet offensive was still held back. 'Until further orders, ground troops are not to cross the border,' ran the directive. Meanwhile, the enemy's aircraft would be destroyed on the ground and bombing raids carried out up to a hundred miles into German territory.188 In fact, by now much of the Soviet air force had already been put out of action. The unreality of the directive was compounded by another, fourteen hours later, that still spoke of taking the area of Lublin\u2013fifty-five miles inside German-occupied Poland.189\n\nNevertheless, during the course of the day consciousness of the scale of the calamity began to become clear. At midday, Molotov\u2013not Stalin (subdued, and unable to announce the beginning of the war)190\u2013spoke to the Soviet people. With a slight nervous stammer, he told them of 'an unparalleled act of perfidy in the history of civilised nations'. He referred to losses of two hundred.191 The address, heard by fearful and incredulous citizens, listening in border areas as bombs rained down from the skies, ended with words drafted by Stalin: 'Our cause is just, the enemy will be smashed, victory will be ours.'192 Stalin himself was meanwhile immersed in non-stop meetings, issuing decrees and directives and trying to ascertain the seriousness of the invasion. Only that afternoon, when the Politburo met at 4.00 p.m., did the full gravity of what had happened become apparent. Timoshenko reported that the severity of the German attack had exceeded all expectations. The Soviet air force and border forces had experienced heavy losses. Some 1,200 planes had been lost, 800 of them destroyed on the ground. German forces were advancing rapidly into the heart of the country. Almost unbelievably, Minsk, the capital of Belorussia, was under threat. Stalin thought that 'inconceivable', branded the invasion a 'monstrous crime' and angrily declared that heads would roll.193 Among the first was to be that of General Pavlov, the Commander-in-Chief of the western front, who would be executed within a month along with three other front commanders. Even Stalin thought the charges of 'anti-Soviet military conspiracy' were absurd. But he confirmed the sentences, and wanted the fronts to be informed 'so they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy'. Eight generals in all were shot\u2013scapegoats for the debacle.194\n\nThe news from the front worsened by the day. By 28 June that which Stalin had described as 'inconceivable'\u2013the fall of Minsk, laying open the way to Smolensk and Moscow itself\u2013had happened. As many as 400,000 Soviet troops had been trapped in the German encirclement. In no more than a week the Wehrmacht had advanced some 300 miles into Soviet territory. The psychological shock of what had happened now hit Stalin. For two days he did not appear in the Kremlin. He could not be contacted. In self-confinement at his dacha, he appears to have been briefly in a state of near nervous collapse. Finally, the members of his inner circle plucked up courage to drive out to his dacha. They found him looking haggard and depressed, seemingly nervous at the arrival of his leading henchmen. If, as was later claimed (probably with some exaggeration), he thought they might have come to hold him to account for his failings, and to depose him, he had nothing to fear. They persuaded him to return to the Kremlin, now as chairman of a newly formed State Defence Committee, an all-powerful small War Cabinet, with wide-ranging powers. Next day, 1 July, he was back in the Kremlin, and in full control. Two days later, he gave a powerful address to the nation, combining patriotic rhetoric with threats of merciless reprisals 'against cowards, panic-mongers and deserters'.195 The low point of Stalin's personal adjustment to the disaster that had befallen the Soviet Union had passed.\n\nAt this very time, even so, Stalin, together with Molotov and Beria, seems to have been secretly contemplating putting out feelers to Hitler to see what his conditions would be for halting the attack. The idea was to win more time for the USSR to regather military strength. The cession to Germany of substantial territory, including the Baltic republics, the Ukraine and Bessarabia, was mooted. Molotov apparently spoke of a second Brest-Litovsk treaty, referring to the amputation of Russian territory that ended Russian participation in the First World War. If Lenin could do it, such was the implication, it could be done again\u2013a lesser evil, to cut losses, and prepare militarily for a time when the lost lands could be recovered. According to the postwar testimony of General Pavel Sudoplatov, then deputy head of the NKVD's intelligence section, he was assigned to put the proposals, under conditions of the highest secrecy, to a trusted intermediary, the Bulgarian ambassador to Moscow, Ivan Stamenov, in a Moscow restaurant. The meeting took place. But Stamenov appears to have thought his interlocutor was eliciting his own impressions of whether it was worthwhile passing the information to Berlin. His view, perhaps tailored to what he thought his dinner companion wanted to hear, was that Soviet superiority would ultimately prevail. Germany would be defeated in the war. Whether or not he had misinterpreted what was expected of him, Stamenov passed on no message. Sudoplatov himself reported back to Beria and the issue was quietly dropped.196\n\nAccording to Zhukov, Stalin considered putting out peace-feelers on a second occasion.197 This was in October 1941, soon after the advancing German army had smashed the Soviet front line in the great encirclements at Brjansk and Viaz'ma, where as many as 673,000 Red Army soldiers were captured. If there were such thoughts, they could only have arisen out of desperation. But the second story of possible peace overtures sounds implausible. The chances of Hitler stopping with Moscow apparently at his mercy would have been remote. In any case, no overtures were made.\n\nMoscow was, however, indeed by now within the sights of the Wehrmacht. The deepest crisis in that crisis-ridden year was mounting for the the increasingly panic-stricken population of the Soviet capital. When the Germans broke through the capital's main strategic defence on the night of 14\u201315 October, the survival not only of Moscow, but of the Soviet state itself, was in question. The State Defence Committee ordered the evacuation of most of the government to Kuibyshev, on the Volga 400 miles to the south-east. Factories and industrial installations were made ready for detonation. So was the Moscow underground. The moves reflected a belief among the top Soviet leadership that Moscow could soon fall to the Germans.198 Among ordinary Muscovites, what came to be known as 'the big skedaddle' began, as hundreds of thousands voted with their feet and rushed to leave the city.199 Possibly a fifth of the city's population took flight as the panic spread.200 Lenin's embalmed body was removed from its Kremlin mausoleum and shipped east, to be secretly housed in a former Tsarist school.201 Preparations were made for Stalin, too, to leave Moscow. His dacha near the city was mined. Offices and a bomb shelter had been made ready for him at Kuibyshev. A plane waited to transport him out of Moscow. So did a special train.202 Beria was encouraging the complete relocation of the government to Kuibyshev. Stalin faced another vital decision. According to testimony, if at a much later date, from Nikolai Vasilievich Ponomariov, in 1941 a military liaison communications officer in Stalin's entourage, he was told on the evening of 16 October to prepare for immediate evacuation and driven to the railway station. Stalin's bodyguards were on the platform. The train was ready for departure, but Stalin never appeared. Zhukov, it seems, had persuaded him that Moscow could be held.203 Stalin stayed. When asked at a later date what would have resulted from a different decision by Stalin, to leave the city and move to Kuibyshev, Molotov replied: 'Moscow would have burned.' He went on to say that the Germans would have taken the city, the Soviet Union would have collapsed and this would have led to the break-up of the coalition against Hitler.204 This was, perhaps, an over-dramatic surmise. But Stalin's decision to stay was unquestionably an important boost to morale for the city of Moscow, and for the Soviet Union generally. Word rapidly circulated. The strong Leader was still at the helm, and would stay with his people in the capital. The immediate crisis subsided. The panic dissipated as quickly as it had arisen. But the danger was still not at an end.\n\nThe tide of the German onslaught would only be stemmed in the first successful counter-offensive of the Red Army, in December 1941, with the spearhead of the Wehrmacht on the outskirts of Moscow. It was a turning point. Never again would the threat be so grave. For the hitherto all-conquering Wehrmacht, the winter crisis before Moscow was a key moment. In retrospect, it is not too fanciful to see in it the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. For the Soviet Union, there were still many dark days ahead before victory was achieved. By that date, 8 May 1945, huge tracts of the country were in ruins and some twenty-five million Soviet citizens lay dead. The cost of Stalin's decision that he knew best had been colossal.\n\nVIII\n\nThe scale of the catastrophe was unprecedented in history. And it followed what still stands out as one of the most extraordinary miscalculations of all time. Stalin had, as we have detailed, repeatedly drawn the wrong conclusion about German intentions, even down to the eve of the invasion. Attempts to satisfy German economic demands continued to the last. Warnings from all sides were ignored. Those who tried to press arguments to the contrary were treated with contempt. Stalin was insistent: he understood how Hitler thought. The German dictator would attack; but not yet. Hitler's first priority, he was sure, was the economic exploitation of the USSR. The insistence upon economic appeasement rested upon this disastrous misconception.205 With unfinished business in the west, Hitler's early priority had to be Soviet submission, not all-out war. This would win Germany benefits for an economy in trouble, and it would put further pressure on the west. Meanwhile, furious Soviet rearmament would continue. If peace negotiations should take place, the Soviet Union needed to be involved, and from a position of strength. Even as the danger signs mounted, Stalin was confident that he could defer conflict with Germany throughout the spring and summer of 1941. By then it would be too late to invade that year. And by 1942, the Soviet Union would be ready for Hitler. Stalin's thinking ran roughly along such lines. His conviction that he was right, and that all warnings to the contrary were disinformation or were hopelessly wrong misreadings of the situation, became ever more entrenched. The combination of fear, subservience and admiration that underpinned the Soviet dictator's autocracy meant that serious alternatives could scarcely be proposed, let alone adopted. But what might the alternatives have been? What options existed to avoid the calamity?\n\nMolotov, at Stalin's right hand the entire time, persistently took the view that whatever mistakes were made were unavoidable.206 Khrushchev, by contrast, castigated Stalin's miscalculations and errors of leadership in his denunciation of the dead dictator, in 1956, blaming them on the arbitrary actions of one man who had accumulated total power.207 This heavy personalization of responsibility conveniently exonerated those, not excluding Khrushchev himself, who had applauded Stalin and supported his policies. It also largely whitewashed the military leadership\u2013though their own shortcomings cannot be entirely laid at Stalin's door. More recent research has qualified this assessment. Even so, Khrushchev's withering verdict still has wide currency. The realistic choices confronting Stalin are seldom posed. And yet, one leading authority, who has subjected the evidence to meticulous scrutiny, concluded that 'Stalin's failure to prepare for the German onslaught primarily reflected the unappealing political choices which the Soviet Union faced before the outbreak of the Second World War', adding that 'even with hindsight, it is hard to devise alternatives which Stalin could have safely pursued'.208\n\nWhat does seem obvious is that whatever options Stalin might have had narrowed sharply over time. Earlier decisions, and the thinking that lay behind them, had necessarily meant that by the eve of the German invasion his room for manoeuvre had become greatly constrained. But some years before this, his hands had been less tied. It was then that he made a catastrophic error that limited his later options.\n\nWith no external pressure, he instigated in 1937, as we noted earlier, the decimation of his army leadership, with immeasurably harmful consequences for the rebuilding of a professionalized military force capable of countering the rapidly growing danger from Hitler's Germany. Apart from the phantoms in the minds of Stalin and his acolytes, the purges lacked all rationale. They were wholly unnecessary. Stalin was not compelled to have the purges carried out; he chose this option. But not only did they do incalculable damage to the future construction of Soviet military strength; they also instilled in Hitler and his advisers an indelible notion of the weakness of the Red Army. To Hitler, this very weakness was an invitation to strike before a powerful military machine could be constructed. In Hitler's eyes, then, Stalin's purges gave him the chance. He thought Stalin must be mad. As early as 1937 he had remarked: 'Russia knows nothing other than Bolshevism. That is the danger which we will have to knock down sometime.'209 In choosing to destroy his army leadership, Stalin removed his most important backbone of strength at a later date, when the crisis unfolded. An immense effort was put into a crash programme of rearmament and militarization in 1940 and 1941. But too much ground had been lost. It could not be completed before the German threat became overwhelming. That Stalin had left himself with too little military room for manoeuvre in 1940\u201341 is in good measure attributable, therefore, to the choice he made in 1937\u20138 to undermine his own military capacity. And this was just as Europe was being thrown into upheaval by the German incorporation of Austria and much of Czechoslovakia, with the complicity of the hapless western democracies.\n\nBy 1939, with war looming in Europe, Stalin now faced a second, highly unenviable choice. Should he ally himself with the western democracies, whom he intensely distrusted, or with Nazi Germany, the ideological arch-enemy? This, indeed, turned into a fateful choice. We have noted the plausible reasoning that made Stalin, in August 1939, opt for a pact with Hitler. Britain and France had shown little appetite for an alliance with the Soviet Union. Stalin, along with other Soviet leaders, thought western motives were scarcely less cynical than Hitler's. At least a pact with Germany would provide some breathing space. And it held out the prospect of Germany and the western powers fighting each other to a standstill, to the ultimate benefit of the Soviet Union.\n\nWhat the consequences might have been in the unlikely event of Stalin joining forces with the west can only be a matter of counter-factual speculation. Hitler's attack on Poland would have been riskier in such an eventuality. And those in high places within Germany, fearful of the consequences of involvement in a general European war against powerful enemies, would have had their hand strengthened. Hitler postponed the mobilization against Poland once, at the last minute, and might have been further deterred had he faced a triple alliance of the USSR and the western powers, a reconstitution of the anti-German coalition of 1914. But he might have gone ahead and invaded Poland anyway.210 The western democracies would probably still have done nothing militarily to help Poland.211 In such circumstances, the Soviet Union would also have most likely refrained from direct conflict, but would have found Germany after victory in Poland not as an ally but, instead, as an enemy on her doorstep. Perhaps, then, a German attack on the Soviet Union would have come earlier than it did. On the other hand, Hitler's big western offensive in spring 1940 (which greatly upset Stalin's calculations) would have been far more hazardous with a hostile Soviet Union poised in the east. Who knows how it might have turned out? The guessing-game is pointless. The variables in the equation are simply too many to make speculation fruitful.\n\nWhat does seem apparent, however, is that Stalin was too blinkered by his ideological preconceptions to allow the Soviet Union to play other than a passive role in dealings with the west in the summer of 1939.212 It was certainly the case that Britain and France did little during those months to expedite the 'grand alliance' that might have been the last hope of blocking Hitler. They had scant interest in joining forces with the detested and distrusted Soviet Union. The negotiations as European war grew close were predictably sluggish. But the Soviet Union was also locked into passivity. More urgent and determined diplomacy on Stalin's part could conceivably have paved the way, despite British and French hesitations, for a new triple alliance with the west. It would at the very least have given Hitler and the German ruling elites pause for thought. However, Stalin was content to let the negotiations with the western democracies drift on while the war clouds gathered ominously. The result was that inaction from the Soviet, not just the western, side eventually pushed the choice towards that which made most sense in terms of the USSR's security at the time, the pact with Hitler's Germany.\n\nStalin saw the pact as a great Soviet diplomatic coup. But in practice it worked more in favour of Germany than of the Soviet Union. Certainly, the USSR was able to extend its defensive frontiers westwards through territorial aggrandizement. And the removal of the imminent threat from Germany allowed time to rebuild the Red Army and prepare defences. Obviously, however, the time was insufficient. The rebuilding was flawed and inadequate. And the Germans, too, were given time to make themselves ready, not just militarily, but also in the spread of diplomatic sway. During 1940, after the German victory over France had completely upturned the balance of power in Europe, Hitler was able to exert increasing influence over the countries of the Danube basin. German dominance in Romania, especially, and the vain attempts by Stalin and Molotov to prevent the Balkans and, in the north, Finland falling within the German orbit led to the growing tension that was so manifest in the visit of Molotov to Berlin in November 1940. Mussolini's Balkan adventure had meanwhile destabilized the region even further. And by the following spring, German intervention in Yugoslavia and Greece squeezed out any last hope of Soviet influence in south-eastern Europe (as well as contributing to the concealment of 'Barbarossa', since Stalin could see little sense in Hitler striking to the east that year immediately following his conquests in the Balkans).213 The Soviet Union was now fully isolated. Turkey, the gateway to the Black Sea, remained neutral, though relatively well disposed towards Great Britain. Otherwise, the USSR was more or less ringed in the west by countries under German influence. The pact had brought short-term advantage to the Soviet Union, but over its duration the danger from Germany had become greatly magnified. Whether Stalin made the right choice in 1939 might, therefore, be justifiably questioned.\n\nBetween August 1939 and June 1941, Stalin's policy, as we have seen, was consistently to rearm with all speed, but to mollify Germany as far as possible. He was not naive enough to believe that conflict with Germany could be avoided. He had read and digested the parts of Mein Kampf that advocated the winning of 'living space' in the east. But he thought he could head off trouble until 1942, and he believed he could 'read' Hitler's intentions: to force the Soviet Union into political submission before reaching a settlement with Britain and only then to turn his aggression eastwards. Stalin thought Hitler would act with the same cold, brutal rationality that he himself would have deployed. Sure that Hitler would pose an ultimatum before any attack (a German deception that Stalin swallowed), he felt confident that he could win time. Meanwhile, the least provocation had to be avoided. This was doubly important, from Stalin's point of view, since the Soviet Union continued to face the additional, if lesser, threat from the east, from Japan. But it made him excessively cautious.214 Was there an alternative to this policy?\n\nStalin's policy of avoiding war at all costs was strongly criticized, many years later, by Marshal Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky, deputy head of the operational administration of the General Staff in 1941 and from 1942 to 1945 chief of the General Staff and Deputy Commissar for Defence.215 Vasilevsky claimed that\n\nStalin did not grasp the limit beyond which such a line became not only unnecessary, but dangerous. Such a limit should have been correctly determined, the armed forces brought to full combat readiness at the maximum possible speed, accelerated mobilisation carried out, and the country converted into a single armed camp. While trying to put off armed conflict, whatever hidden work was possible should have been carried out and completed earlier. There was more than enough evidence that Germany planned a military attack on our country...We had come, due to circumstances beyond our control, to the Rubicon of war, and it was necessary determinedly to take a step forward.216\n\nRearmament and militarization were, in fact, as we noted, under way at a frantic pace during 1940 and 1941. But Vasilevsky was emphatic that much more should have been done: early and full mobilization of the armed forces for combat readiness. The implication is that the policy of non-provocation had reached a point where it had become highly dangerous. Full mobilization should have been undertaken at this point. The risk of an earlier German attack would have had to be borne. But it would have been a risk worth taking. As Stalin's military advisers knew, the earliest the Germans could have invaded was, in fact, when they did attack, in spring 1941. The worst that 'provocation' could have achieved, in other words, was what took place anyway (though Stalin had wanted to avoid what he probably for long envisaged as limited German action, not necessarily all-out war, to seize border territory and compel greater economic dependence).217\n\nThey also knew that in summer 1940 the Japanese leadership had opted for the advance to the south. A prior attack by Japan from the east could, therefore, be as good as ruled out.218 A show of deterrence, rather than allowing the German build-up to take place unchallenged over so many months, might, then, have proved successful in staving off the attack for the few precious months of the summer of 1941. Moreover, advertising Soviet strength would have countered the overriding image of the Red Army's weakness that prevailed within the German leadership. Instead, Stalin, petrified about offering any provocation, allowed repeated German reconnaissance flights to take photographs recording precise details of Soviet military installations and troop placements, evidence which confirmed the impression that the Wehrmacht would sweep through the Red Army's ranks.219 Stalin was unquestionably in an unenviable position. But the preference for non-provocation over deterrence was another fateful choice.\n\nBy June 1941 the options had drastically diminished. As we noted, Zhukov later acknowledged that Stalin's rejection of the pre-emptive strike plan of 15 May 1941 had been correct. To pursue the plan would have courted even greater disaster. As it was, the frontier defences were hopelessly stretched, divisions badly deployed, fortifications incomplete.220 To compound the problem, Soviet military planning in 1940 and 1941 had anticipated the main German thrust in any attack coming through southern Poland, south of the Pripet marshes. And this is where the bulk of the Soviet forces were arrayed in June 1941. But, completely unanticipated by the Red Army command, the crushing German advance, when it came, was through the central area of the front, north of the Pripet marshes, in the direction of Minsk, Smolensk and Moscow.221 Collectively, then endorsed by Stalin, the Soviet military leadership had disastrously chosen the wrong option.\n\nUltimately, the failings were those of a system of highly personalized rule. 'Stalin was the greatest authority for all of us, and it never occurred to anybody to question his opinion and assessment of the situation,' Zhukov later commented.222 In a climate of fear and sycophancy, where one individual's paranoid phobias, sense of his own infallible judgement, limitations in military strategy and ruthless unpredictability had become decisive structural components of the Soviet system, there could be no correctives to Stalin's preferred options. Toadying, at all levels, was endemic. The Politburo kowtowed. The military were generally no different and, when voicing reservations, were browbeaten into submission. The refusal of the Soviet dictator to accede to requests from his commanders, only a week or so before the invasion, to have troops at battle readiness in better defensive positions was symptomatic of a system where reason had lost its way.\n\nStalin's despairing obscenity, days after the invasion, with which this chapter began, is easy to understand. It reflected his own sense that the Soviet leadership collectively, and he personally, had made a calamitous miscalculation. In the end, for all the self-deception and delusions, his options could be narrowed down to a straightforward choice: was he to do everything imaginable to prepare the Soviet Union for war with Germany in 1941 (which could not objectively be ruled out), or persist in his belief (with attendant risks) that conflict could be postponed until 1942? Did he, putting it another way, prefer to work on the basis of a best-case or worst-case scenario? The answer is obvious. It was indeed a fateful choice. And yet, the path to that choice had been anything but a straight one. Even at this distance, it is impossible to be certain about what would have been the most advantageous turning at the crucial junctions. What can be plainly seen is that the choices Stalin made courted disaster. The astonishing recovery from that disaster is another story.\n\n## 7\n\n## Washington, DC, Summer\u2013Autumn 1941\n\nRoosevelt Decides to Wage Undeclared War\n\nIf he were to put the issue of peace and war to Congress, they would debate it for three months. The President had said he would wage war, but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative...He would look for an 'incident' which would justify him in opening hostilities.\n\nChurchill's report of President Roosevelt's remarks, \n19 August 1941\n\nThe German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 took the emerging global conflict onto a new plane. Fresh hope for the western allies, Great Britain and the United States, but also fresh uncertainties, entered the picture. The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt needed to reconsider the strategic options.\n\nGermany was now involved in a war on two fronts. When Britain and the United States were most fearing a major thrust to north Africa and the Middle East following the German dominance of the Balkans in spring 1941, Hitler had chosen to attack the Soviet Union. The defeat of Great Britain by armed invasion, which had seemed such a danger\u2013to the defence of the United States, too\u2013in the summer of 1940, and had appeared to remain a distinct possibility as late as spring 1941, had now receded (though not completely vanished). And a new, potentially powerful, if for the western partners uncomfortable, ally had been forced to enter the arena in the defence against Hitler's Germany. All this posed grounds for optimism at a point when the fortunes of war had seemed bleak.\n\nBut there were also great uncertainties. First and foremost, would the Soviet Union hold out against Hitler's onslaught? The United States War Department advised President Roosevelt that Hitler's forces would conquer the Soviet Union within a period of one to three months. British military authorities took a similar view. They thought Hitler's eastern campaign would be over in six to eight weeks. After that, Hitler would transfer his forces to the west. The invasion of the United Kingdom could only be seen as temporarily postponed.1 With Germany, after defeating the Soviet Union, master of effectively the entire European continent, an invasion might not even be necessary to force Britain to the negotiating table. At any rate, the question of how the United States should react in the changed circumstances allowed more than one answer.\n\nIn Britain, Churchill, exultant at the new development, did not hesitate for an instant and immediately committed Britain to aid for the Soviet Union, a step on the way to full-scale military alliance. Ideological differences were completely subordinated to practical necessity (even if Churchill, behind the public gestures, had in mind only limited measures of support, aimed at keeping the Soviet Union in the war).2 Britain had nothing to lose and everything to gain from such an alliance in the fight against Hitler. For the United States it was less straightforward. Hostility to Communism was both widespread and deep-seated. Many, not just among isolationists, thought it to be no bad thing if the Nazis and Bolsheviks fought themselves to a standstill, imposing maximum destruction on each other and avoiding in the process any American commitment to the conflict. Since neither posed an imminent threat, nothing like the same urgency as in Britain was felt about the need to jump into bed with Stalin. In any case, if victory in the east were to go Hitler's way, and within a matter of weeks, there was little to be said for dispatching arms and equipment much needed for American defences to the Soviet Union. They would not arrive in time to make any difference in the conflict, and at the expected Soviet defeat would merely fall into the hands of the Nazis. A more sensible strategy would surely be to bolster Britain's chances in the subsequent struggle when Hitler once more turned westwards, as part of the United States' own defence.3 One option was, therefore, simply to wait and see how the war in the Soviet Union would turn out before taking any action.\n\nAnother uncertainty was how Japan would react to the dramatic new turn of events. Thanks to the ability (through the appropriately codenamed MAGIC intelligence intercepts) to read dispatches from Tokyo to the embassy in Washington, the Roosevelt administration knew what was in the minds of Japan's leaders, an inestimable advantage.4 The President's advisers were aware of the sharp division of opinion in Tokyo about moving swiftly to take advantage of the German invasion by attacking the Soviet Union from the east (a policy fervently advocated by the Foreign Minister, Matsuoka Yosuke), or adhering to the previously agreed strategy of the southern advance. Fending off an attack from the east as well as trying to cope with the inroads Hitler's troops were making in the west would plainly have weakened the Soviet Union's chances of holding out. That in turn would have enhanced a policy of extreme caution in offering aid to Stalin. By early July, however, policy-makers in Washington had learned, through MAGIC, that Japan's leaders had confirmed the southern advance and would make no strike against the Soviet Union, at least until they were sure that Hitler was conclusively winning. This was clearly a boost to Stalin's chances of survival.\n\nOn the other hand, the imminent expansionist course in south-east Asia pushed Japan inexorably towards a clash with the United States. Though President Roosevelt still hoped to keep Japan quiet in order to deal with what was still regarded as the greater threat of Hitler across the Atlantic, the question of what to do in the Pacific had become an urgent one. On 1 July, still unsure what course the Japanese would adopt, Roosevelt told Harold Ickes, his Secretary of the Interior, that it was 'terribly important for the control of the Atlantic for us to help to keep peace in the Pacific'. He added: 'I simply have not got enough Navy to go round\u2013and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.'5\n\nA day later the Japanese decision not to reverse policy in favour of the northern option and to go south after all was made. Aware through MAGIC of Tokyo's plans, the President now came under increasing pressure from the hawks in his administration to curb Japanese belligerency. On 10 July he let the British know that he 'would immediately impose various embargoes, both economic and financial', in the event of Japan taking 'any overt step' in south-east Asia.6 The Japanese invasion of southern Indochina which began on 24 July soon emerged as that 'overt step'. Before the end of the month all Japanese assets in the United States were frozen and supplies of oil to Japan, essential for the construction of the 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere', were embargoed. With those steps, the showdown in the Pacific loomed.\n\nFor now, however, we turn away from Japan to examine the ways in which the Roosevelt administration faced the greater threat, as it saw it, of the war in Europe in the changed circumstances following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. And here, though the circumstances had altered, Roosevelt's basic dilemma had not. The issue that still faced him was how to provide maximum aid for Britain (and now, he thought an imperative, to the Soviet Union too), a policy supported by the majority of the population, without involving the United States directly in the war, which the American people overwhelmingly opposed.\n\nAn immediate issue, already mentioned, was the question of providing material aid to the Soviet Union through extending lend-lease. Though no immediate decision was taken to do so, early measures were taken to meet Soviet orders for goods, and by November the Soviet Union had indeed become eligible for lend-lease.7 A second, and far more hazardous, question was how to approach, from the standpoint of neutrality, the battle raging in the Atlantic. Here, Roosevelt's dilemma posed itself in increasingly sharp contours. It made little sense to provide goods for Britain if they were merely to find their way to the bottom of the Atlantic. But helping to protect the transit of the vital material against the raids of U-boats ran the obvious and increasing risk of dragging the United States into the war. Given the continuing voluble isolationist lobby, the high-decibel publicity campaign against intervention by the America First organization, and the strength of opposition (from a variety of motives) certain to be encountered in Congress to moves seen as likely to lead towards involvement in the European war, Roosevelt felt justified in continuing his difficult balancing-act of placating public opinion while running ever greater risks of armed confrontation in an 'undeclared war'.\n\nOn more than one occasion, the President would imply that he was seeking an incident to remove his dilemma. Yet when incidents did arise in the autumn months, he fought shy of exploiting them fully to take the United States directly into the war. Despite the convictions of many of his detractors, at the time and since, that the President was actively seeking to take his country to war, his actions suggest that he did want to avoid it as long as possible while simultaneously recognizing that America's involvement at some point had become inevitable. He knew in any case that his chances, even as tensions rose across the autumn, of obtaining a declaration of war from Congress were as good as nil. But although only Congress could declare war, the Constitution of the United States, as Roosevelt was well aware, accords the President wide powers as Commander-in-Chief to make war, even without a formal declaration. Former Presidents had availed themselves of such powers. Later ones would also do so. Roosevelt sought legal confirmation of his constitutional powers to deploy the navy 'in any manner that to him seems proper' in the national interest\u2013that is, in pursuing the 'undeclared war' with Hitler's U-boats in the Atlantic.8\n\nAs the war had widened over the previous twelve months or so, Roosevelt's own options had, in fact, narrowed. In the aftermath of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the President faced the inexorable logic of the decisions he had taken earlier to assist Great Britain. True, he could have resisted the extension of lend-lease to the Soviet Union. He was under no pressure from public opinion to assist Stalin. And, certainly in the first weeks after the German invasion, there were differing views among his advisers on the merits of providing aid. Here, the President himself took the lead. He pushed for aid to Russia. It proved not only a logical step, but a vitally important one, which over time would make a significant contribution to securing victory for the Allies. On the issue of aid to Britain, the President, even had he wanted to do so (which he did not), could not easily have extricated himself from the consequences of the lend-lease decision taken at the start of the year. Only had Britain been overrun by Hitler's troops and forced into capitulation following a rapid German victory in the east could Roosevelt have terminated lend-lease and pulled back from the commitment to the British war effort. But since more optimistic signs of protracted Soviet defence soon became evident, there was everything to gain from increased aid to Britain (as well as the start of supplies to the Soviet Union).\n\nThe inevitable consequence of this was, as already noted, the increase of tension between the United States and Germany in the Atlantic, and the acute problem at home for the President of deciding what to do about the issue of armed escorts for convoys. Since, whatever steps he took, Roosevelt was determined to avoid asking Congress for a declaration of war and running the risk of near-certain political defeat that would completely divide the population and destroy any hope of national unity, this left him only with the option of continuing the policy he had begun the previous year: taking all measures in the fight against Hitler 'short of war'. But 'short of war' had now come to mean 'undeclared war', even to the extent of armed clashes in the Atlantic which, despite the state of non-belligerency that technically prevailed in American-German relations, threatened to explode into all-out conflict. Roosevelt's choice in the summer and autumn of 1941 had narrowed, therefore, to one effectively forced upon him by the decisions he had made earlier, and by the strategic constellation that had emerged. This was to push ever closer to the brink, without going over the edge.\n\nI\n\nIn his powerful speech on the evening of 22 June 1941\u2013heard by millions of Americans as they tuned in to their radios that afternoon across the Atlantic\u2013Winston Churchill had specifically linked the fates of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States in the fight against Hitler's Germany. Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, he had stated, 'is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles'. Doubtless Hitler hoped, he added, 'that all this may be accomplished before the fleet and air power of the United States may intervene'. Should this invasion of Britain take place, he warned, the scene would be set for the final act, 'the subjugation of the Western Hemisphere to his will and to his system'. The conclusion was evident: 'The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.'9\n\nPresident Roosevelt was of similar mind, though less decisive in action. A careful (though non-committal) statement put out on 23 June by Sumner Welles (Acting Secretary of State in the temporary absence through illness of Cordell Hull), which the President had approved, indicated that 'any rallying of the forces opposing Hitlerism, from whatever source', would benefit the United States' own defence and security, and ended by reasserting the administration's long-held view that 'Hitler's armies are today the chief dangers of the Americas'.10 But the statement offered nothing concrete. Next day, commenting on Welles's statement in a press conference, Roosevelt was more forthright. 'Of course we are going to give all the aid we possibly can to Russia,' he stated.11 He now released Soviet funds in the United States\u2013amounting to around $40 million\u2013that had previously been frozen, and indicated his readiness to provide aid, noting, however, his ignorance of what was needed. Most significantly, the White House announced on 26 June that the President would not invoke the Neutrality Law against the Soviet Union. This meant that the port of Vladivostok, on the far-eastern rim of the Soviet Union, would, crucially, remain a lifeline for American ships to deliver supplies.12\n\nIt all pointed in the right direction. But it was no more than a modest start. The President's military advisers favoured a bolder course. Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, had sent Roosevelt a memorandum on 23 June, only a day after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, outlining the thoughts of the leading military strategists in the War Department, including those of the chief of staff, George Marshall. Stimson described Germany's attack as 'an almost providential occurrence', allowing the United States a brief respite in which 'to push with the utmost vigour our movements in the Atlantic theatre of operations' as the best way 'to help Britain, to discourage Germany, and to strengthen our own position of defence against our most imminent danger'. The respite, argued Stimson, would last from one to three months. That time allowed for no hesitation in seizing the initiative.13 Frank Knox, Secretary of the Navy, agreed. Writing to the President the same day, he saw an opportunity, not to be missed, to 'strike effectively at Germany'\u2013'the sooner the better'. The President, he asserted, should lose no time in seizing the psychological opportunity to start the escorting of ships. Admiral Harold Stark, chief of Naval Operations, joined in the chorus. With Knox's approval, he proposed that escorting of convoys in the Atlantic should begin immediately, aware that this 'would almost certainly involve us in war', and considering 'every day of delay in our getting into the war as dangerous'.14\n\nBut the President continued in his policy of 'making haste slowly'.15 Stimson, frustrated as so often by what he saw as Roosevelt's unwillingness to grasp the nettle, thought that, while Hitler's forces were making spectacular gains in their eastern assault, America had lost her way. He was uncharacteristically pessimistic in his diary entry of 2 July: 'Altogether, tonight I feel more up against it than ever before. It is a problem whether this country has it in itself to meet such an emergency. Whether we are really powerful enough and sincere enough and devoted enough to meet the Germans is getting to be more and more of a real problem.'16\n\nEqually hawkish, as usual, was Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior. In a letter to the President on 23 June, he wrote: 'It may be difficult to get into this war the right way, but if we do not do it now, we will be, when our turn comes, without an ally anywhere in the world.'17 Ickes suggested that an embargo on oil to Japan, certain to be popular, would make it possible 'to get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus indirectly be brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of communistic Russia.'18 But the likely opposition in the United States even to providing aid for 'communistic Russia' made Roosevelt cautious. Before committing himself, he wanted to test opinion.\n\nIt turned out to be predictably split. Isolationists momentarily had a field day. One isolationist Senator expressed the views of many when he said: 'It's a case of dog eat dog. Stalin is as bloody-handed as Hitler. I don't think we should help either one. We should tend to our own business, as we should have been doing all along. The whole business shows the absolute instability of European alliances and points to the necessity of our staying out of all of them.'19 Vehement anti-Communist Catholics also railed against any support for Stalin's atheistic regime. According to opinion polls, even so, very few Americans favoured a Nazi victory in the bitter struggle raging in eastern Europe. And important news organs recognized that, despite the dislike of Communism, practical realities necessitated as much support as possible for the Soviet Union.20\n\nRoosevelt also needed to know what the Soviet Union wanted, whether it could be delivered and that it was not going to be squandered in a rapid defeat by Hitler's forces.21 On the last consideration, the President had been from the outset among the optimists\u2013far more so than his military advisers\u2013about the prospects of the Red Army holding out. One of those encouraging such optimism, which in the face of the devastating German inroads initially seemed to rest upon little more than unfounded hope, was the former American ambassador in Moscow, Joseph E. Davies, now based at the State Department as Cordell Hull's Special Assistant for War Emergency Problems and Policies. Davies had from the start been a forceful advocate of aid to the Soviet Union. 'This Hitler attack', he had written in his diary on 7 July, 'was a God-given break in the situation for nonaggressor nations and Soviet resistance should be stimulated in every way possible.'22 In a memorandum compiled a few days later, Davies argued, on the basis of his extensive experience of the Soviet Union, that even should Hitler occupy White Russia and the Ukraine, the likelihood was that Stalin could retreat behind the Urals and continue to fight 'for a considerable time'. It made sense, therefore, also in heading off any possibility of Stalin feeling forced to accept a negotiated settlement with Hitler, to let him know 'that our attitude is \"all out\" to beat Hitler and that our historic policy of friendliness to Russia still exists'.23\n\nOn the question of Soviet needs, initial soundings were taken in Moscow within a week of the German invasion. In Washington, a special committee was then immediately set up to deal with Soviet orders. Lend-lease was not contemplated at this stage. It was presumed that supplies would be purchased, not donated, though consideration was given to extending credit over five years or exchanging American equipment for Soviet raw materials. In fact, when the Soviet 'shopping-list' was put before the Cabinet on 18 July it turned out to be enormous. Included were requests for 6,000 planes, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns and industrial plant and equipment to the value of around $50 million. Not only was it a formidable list; the administrative machinery to dispatch any of it was nothing like so streamlined as the establishment of the committee to handle Soviet orders had implied. Foot-dragging and lack of coordination in the half-dozen agencies involved meant irritating inefficiency. The President himself intervened in peremptory fashion at the beginning of August, pointing out that in nearly six weeks little had been done to satisfy Soviet requests so that 'the Russians feel that they have been given the run-around in the United States'.24 According to Ickes, Roosevelt's intervention\u2013mainly targeting the State Department and War Department\u2013amounted to 'one of the most complete dressings down that I have witnessed'. The President was only too well aware that if any attempt was to be made to help the Red Army to hold out until the onset of autumn rain and snow from October onwards could start to provide a much needed respite from the German onslaught, the hold-ups had to be bypassed and supplies hastened. 'This was a time to take some risks,' he felt.25\n\nOn the day after the presidential outburst, 2 August, the State Department put on record 'that the Government of the United States has decided to give all economic assistance practicable for the purpose of strengthening the Soviet Union in its struggle against armed aggression'.26 In fact, however, early supplies were on a very modest scale. Exports worth only $6.5 million were dispatched to the Soviet Union in July. Estimates to the beginning of October totalled no more than $29 million. The immediate reality was that the Soviet fight for survival against the German invader down to autumn 1941 had to be sustained with little more than marginal assistance from the United States.27\n\nNew life was breathed into the question of aid for the Soviet Union through the visit to Moscow at the end of July 1941 by Roosevelt's lend-lease administrator, close confidant and personal emissary, Harry Hopkins, later described as 'one of the most extraordinarily important and valuable missions of the whole war'.28 The mission arose from a personal initiative of Hopkins himself, swiftly backed by Roosevelt (and receiving the approval of Sumner Welles, at the State Department). Hopkins had, in fact, suggested such a mission only three days after 'Barbarossa', and the President had signalled his assent within twenty-four hours. Sending aid to Russia seemed infinitely preferable to Roosevelt to having to dispatch American troops to fight in Europe. Nothing had materialized at that point.29 Just over a month later, however, the idea was resuscitated. The outcome was crucial not simply for the necessary spur it gave to material provision for the Soviet Union, but also for establishing a direct, personal link, bypassing formal diplomatic channels, between Roosevelt and Stalin. Hopkins's mission helped to lay the foundations of the eventual 'grand alliance' of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States.\n\nThe idea of Hopkins going to Moscow arose out of his visit in July to London to discuss the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt planned to take place at sea, near Newfoundland, the following month, as well as matters relating to lend-lease and questions of overall war strategy. The American military had been critical of the British diversion of ships and equipment to the campaign in the Middle East, and urged concentration on the Atlantic and defence of the British Isles. At his meeting with Hopkins and both British and American military representatives, Churchill resolutely upheld the need to reinforce the Middle East and warned of the mounting danger in the Far East. Hopkins realized that information on an essential piece of the strategic jigsaw puzzle\u2013how long the Soviet Union could hold out\u2013was missing. Churchill and Roosevelt, at their planned meeting the following month, would be operating in a vacuum if better information than currently available were not gathered before then. Hopkins suggested he should fly straight away to Moscow to try to find some answers directly from Stalin himself. Roosevelt cabled his immediate approval and sent Stalin a personal letter of introduction to Hopkins. Churchill supplied the transport, and Hopkins\u2013tired, frail and wracked with pain from his long battle with cancer\u2013was within twenty-four hours on his long, hazardous and highly uncomfortable flight across the Arctic route to Archangel, and then on to Moscow.30\n\nHopkins arrived in the Soviet capital on the morning of 30 July 1941. Wearing a homburg lent to him by Churchill (bearing the initials W.S.C. inside the rim)\u2013he had lost his own hat in London\u2013he was by early evening on his way to the Kremlin for a meeting with Stalin himself.31 They were soon discussing Soviet aid\u2013what was immediately needed, and what would be required for a long war. Stalin stressed the immediate need for anti-aircraft and large-scale machine guns to defend Russian cities. He also urgently wanted a million rifles. In the longer term he required high-octane aviation gasoline and aluminium for aircraft construction, beyond the items on the extensive list already presented in Washington. 'Give us anti-aircraft guns and the aluminium and we can fight for three or four years,' he stated.32 It was one of a number of comments from Stalin which greatly encouraged Hopkins. Contrary to the initial views of the American military experts, it seemed that there were distinct prospects of the Soviet Union holding out in the face of the German onslaught and sustaining the struggle in a long war.\n\nHopkins's second lengthy interview with Stalin the following evening was even more instructive. The Soviet leader acknowledged that the Red Army had been caught off guard in a surprise attack, and that he had believed Hitler would not strike.33 But, without underestimating the German army\u2013capable, he thought, of engaging in a winter campaign in Russia\u2013he was confident that Soviet troops would hold out. (In fact, his predictions of where the German advance would be halted turned out to be highly optimistic. The territorial losses soon became far more severe than he had anticipated.) And once the autumn rains began, he was sure the Germans would have to go on the defensive. He provided Hopkins with details of Soviet armaments and production rates in a display of frankness that Laurence Steinhardt, the American ambassador in Moscow, found astonishing. Asked about the location of munitions plants, Stalin told Hopkins that many of the larger factories had already been dispersed eastwards. He jotted down on a piece of paper a repeated urgent request for guns\u2013anti-aircraft, machine and rifles\u2013and aluminium. And he immediately welcomed Hopkins's suggestion of a tripartite conference of the emerging allies\u2013the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States\u2013in Moscow once the front had stabilized, which he presumed would be by October, to explore the relative strategic interests of the three countries and how best to satisfy Soviet requirements.34\n\nFinally, after surveying the military situation, Stalin asked Hopkins to pass a personal message to Roosevelt, urging the United States to enter the war against Hitler. He thought Britain and the Soviet Union, without the help of the United States, would find it difficult to crush the German military machine. It was inevitable, in his view, that the United States and Germany would eventually fight each other. Remarkably, he was even prepared\u2013no doubt a sign of his desperation\u2013to welcome American troops on any part of the Russian front and entirely under American control. He ended by stating his confidence that the Red Army could hold out, but added that 'the problem of supply by next spring would be a serious one and that he needed our help'. This part of Hopkins's report was marked 'For the President Only', and kept in a single copy.35\n\nHopkins left Moscow on 1 August, greatly impressed by Stalin and what he had heard of the Soviet determination to withstand the German attack. In the haste of his departure from the Soviet capital, he managed to leave behind his bag of essential medicines, and was ill, exhausted and in great discomfort on what seemed an endless, turbulent return flight in strong headwinds from Archangel to Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. Looking at the end of his tether, more dead than alive, Hopkins was given two days to recover before joining Churchill on board the Prince of Wales for the battleship's journey across the Atlantic for the meeting with President Roosevelt off Newfoundland.36\n\nHopkins's Moscow trip was a crucial juncture on the road to providing aid\u2013in time to prove indispensable\u2013for the Soviet war effort. A more positive image of Stalin and the Soviet Union began to circulate in influential American newspapers. Opinion polls showed that most Americans were in favour of aid to the Soviet Union. One reason was the belief that if the Russians were helped, Hitler could be defeated in Europe without American intervention.37 The positive public opinion helped Roosevelt ignore the opposition of isolationists to Soviet aid, which was now being planned on a larger basis. Most importantly, Hopkins's optimism about the Soviet capacity to withstand the invasion seemed ever more realistic as the weeks passed. Certainly, the Germans had made massive advances, greater than Stalin had predicted in his talks with Hopkins. But the presumption among military experts in both America and Britain of a rapid German triumph had proved false. And as the calendar dragged slowly towards the time when the severe Russian weather would set in, it began to appear possible, even likely, that Hitler had bitten off more than he could chew.\n\nBy September, despite further major Soviet setbacks, including the devastating loss of Kiev during that month, there was no doubt that the German advance had slowed. Roosevelt and Churchill felt able to embark on the planning of long-term substantial and coordinated aid.38 The meeting of British, American and Soviet representatives, initiated by Hopkins's visit, took place in Moscow at the end of the month, and the United States and Britain (with her Empire) agreed to meet as many as possible of Stalin's requests, offering aircraft (1,800 over the next nine months), tanks, aluminium, 90,000 jeeps and lorries and much else besides.39 The first agreement for deliveries was signed on 1 October.40\n\nTransport and payment were still problems. Roosevelt, conscious of public opinion which, though mainly (other than loud opposition from the isolationist lobby) keen to supply aid, was equally keen that the Soviets should pay for it, and without extended credit, was still seeking to extract payment from Russian gold reserves. When the unpalatable Soviet ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky, proved stubborn, unaccommodating and unwilling to acknowledge that gold reserves could be used to cover payments, an angry and frustrated Roosevelt described him in a Cabinet meeting as 'a dirty little liar'.41 But the President was already preparing to provide aid by extending lend-lease to Stalin. Spurred by the positive public response, despite the vociferous isolationists, to reports brought back from the recent Moscow conference of tough Soviet resistance, he was now ready to test the issue in Congress. To ensure that his proposal would not be blocked, he included it in a bill for large-scale appropriations for the armed forces, something hard for patriotic congressmen to reject.42\n\nOn 10 October an amendment by isolationists to prevent the Soviet Union from benefiting from lend-lease was defeated in the House of Representatives then, almost a fortnight later, in the Senate. With that, the President knew he was home and dry. Near the end of the month, he let Stalin know that the Soviet Union would receive up to $1 billion of lend-lease aid, to be repaid without interest over a ten-year period, beginning five years after the end of the war. By 1 November Roosevelt had congressional sanction. The American offer was made public five days later and on 7 November the Soviet Union was deemed eligible for aid under lend-lease. By then, the Germans were no more than thirty miles from Moscow. But American opinion was now overwhelmingly behind the Soviet Union, urging on the Red Army, keen to support its heroic fight, and feeling that, even in this dark hour, and even if Moscow itself were to fall, Soviet resilience might ultimately prevail.43\n\nMeanwhile, the longer the Red Army held out, the more chance there was that the mighty arsenal of the United States would start to have an effect. Equipment to the value of only $65 million had reached the Soviet Union by the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Soviet repulse of the German incursion in December almost at the gates of Moscow owed as good as nothing to western aid. That the Americans would eventually provide more than $10 billion through lend-lease was foreseen by no one at this juncture.44 But, over time, this aid would make an indispensable contribution to the Soviet war effort.\n\nIn the immediate term, the extension of aid to the Soviet Union, a move in which Roosevelt's personal hand had been both visible and decisive, drew the United States yet one step closer towards direct involvement in the European war. Roosevelt had faced a choice. His military advisers had been dubious about the wisdom of committing aid in what they thought was likely to be a lost cause. Isolationists and Catholics had formed a voluble body of oppositional opinion at home. Others in his entourage, however, had pressed for a commitment. Though initially cautious, as usual, Roosevelt had been more optimistic from the start than most of his advisers about the Soviet capacity to hold out. And he had immediately grasped that Hitler's opening of an eastern front held a potential key to the entire war. In a letter to his ambassador in Vichy France on 26 June, he had written: 'Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that, it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination.'45 It followed that the United States should provide as much support as possible for the Soviet defence. He had given, therefore, prompt backing to Hopkins's mission, and had then been ready to take the extension of lend-lease to Congress, despite known continuing opposition.\n\nRetreating from a commitment to aid for the Soviet Union in the teeth of such opposition was never likely. It would have been to back minority opinion against the majority that favoured aid. And it would have reversed the course of action 'short of war' that Roosevelt had, whatever the tactical hesitancy at times, consistently followed. Moreover, unlike the isolationists, Roosevelt had never viewed Hitler's Russian war through the narrow lens of letting two bloodthirsty dictators slug it out in the hope of preventing the United States from having to fight. He was well aware that it was only a matter of time before America would have to enter the war. And this would mean, despite his election promise the previous year, eventually having to send large numbers of American troops to fight in Europe if the objective of defeating Nazism were to be attained.\n\nIn the personal message he had sent via Hopkins, Stalin had openly stated that Hitler's army would finally be crushed only once the United States had entered the fray. This was no more than what Roosevelt's own military advisers were telling him. In July the army's War Plans Division started work on preparing an extensive Victory Program (which would eventually be delivered to the President in September) surveying projected needs on all likely military fronts. It came up with the conclusion that the complete military defeat of Germany could only be accomplished through the United States entering the war and sending a large force\u2013probably some five million men\u2013to fight in Europe. It envisaged an army totalling almost nine million men to be equipped, trained and mobilized for operations by 1 July 1943, a requirement demanding a doubling of production plans.46\n\nRoosevelt had always seen Hitler, not Stalin, as the threat to American security. 'I do not think we need worry about any possibility of Russian domination,' he had written just after the German invasion had begun.47 Domination by a victorious Germany, on the other hand, could not be ruled out. Support for Stalin was, then, the logical and necessary policy. Still, it fell short of the actual participation for which neither the President nor his people were ready. And the bitter fighting in the Soviet Union was far away. If anything was going to prompt the United States to enter the shooting match, it would have to arise much closer to home. It seemed highly likely to be the intensified conflict in the Atlantic.\n\nII\n\nIn a letter to Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, on 1 July, Roosevelt had expressed his view 'that if the Russians should fail to hold out through the summer, there may be an intensified effort against Britain itself, and especially for control of the Atlantic. We may be able to help a good deal more than seems apparent today,' he added.48 It was a cryptic allusion to the issue of providing escorts for convoys. To Stimson, Knox and others, the diversion of Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union had provided the ideal moment to take the initiative in the Atlantic. They wanted Roosevelt to seize the opportunity while it lasted to introduce the escorting of convoys by American warships. The President seemed for a while to accept the arguments and agreed to the compiling of plans for escorting ships of any nationality in the western Atlantic, to take effect from 11 July 1941. It looked as if he had taken a crucial step, involving the protection of British convoys by American armed vessels. It was a step his military advisers had long advocated. But within days, most probably concerned about public anxieties about escorting and how this might play into the hands of his congressional opponents, he changed his mind. The uncertainties about Japan meant that he would not permit Knox to transfer more warships from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And Knox had his work cut out to persuade the President to approve plans to escort even American ships as far as Iceland.49 Once more, he appeared to the 'hawks' in his Cabinet to be backtracking when boldness was called for.50\n\nIn early July, nevertheless, Roosevelt did take another step towards the brink\u2013and in this case unquestionably a bold one. On 7 July a brigade of 4,400 American marines landed to begin the occupation of Iceland. This was Roosevelt indeed taking advantage of Hitler's 'diversion' to the east to enhance the security of the western hemisphere.51\n\nThe move had a prehistory stretching back to May 1940, when Churchill, anxious to avoid a sudden German occupation of such a vital strategic location astride the Atlantic shipping lanes, had sent a British infantry brigade to the island. Reinforcements of British and Canadian troops had followed in June and July. But Churchill had been anxious to redeploy the troops elsewhere, and also keen to involve the United States more directly in the war. He wanted American troops to replace the British force at the earliest opportunity. The British and American military had then agreed, early in 1941, that defence of the island in the event of war would fall to the United States. By mid-June, Admiral Stark had designed instructions to put in the American troops, at this point envisaged as being under British command. 'I realize that this is practically an act of war,' he jotted on his cover note to Harry Hopkins who, Stark hoped, would smooth the passage of his operational instructions with the President.52 He gained Roosevelt's approval. But the President would not act without a formal invitation from the government of Iceland, which was not forthcoming until 1 July.53 Six days later Roosevelt announced the move into Iceland, 'to supplement and perhaps eventually replace the British force', as he put it, though the relief of an equivalent number of British troops began straight away.54 The dispatch of marines rather than soldiers from the army enabled the President to bypass the restrictions\u2013highly sensitive to public opinion\u2013under the Selective Service Act, which prevented draftees from serving outside the western hemisphere. The marines were volunteers, professional fighting men, as they saw themselves, and not the 'boys' whom Roosevelt had promised only months earlier would not be sent to fight in foreign wars.55\n\nIt was a distinctly unneutral act. An elated Churchill told the House of Commons it was 'an event of first-rate political and strategic importance; in fact, it is one of the most important things that has happened since the war began'.56 Privately, he took the view (shared by the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax) that its significance was in accelerating American intervention in the war alongside Britain.57 Indeed, it did take the United States closer to hostilities in the Atlantic. Perhaps, as has been claimed, 'if ever there was a point when Roosevelt knowingly crossed some threshold between aiding Britain in order to stay out of war and aiding Britain by joining in the war, July 1941 was probably the time'.58\n\nEight days after the American troops had landed, the western hemisphere was designated as including Iceland, even though 'everyone concedes [it] is in the eastern hemisphere and therefore logically attached to the continent of Europe'.59 At Iceland, the American defence zone and the German combat zone intersected. The prospects of 'incidents' involving German submarines and the US navy, now engaged in the defence of Iceland as well as escort duties for American convoys as far as the island, were now far greater than they had been. But the occupation of Iceland was approved by 61 per cent of Americans questioned in an opinion survey, with only 20 per cent opposed.60 Despite his fears of a 'vitriolic outburst' against the move,61 the President was carrying the population step by step with him to the brink. But still he remained cautious of pushing opinion too far, too quickly. Though the opportunity appeared to present itself to introduce the escort of non-American convoys, Roosevelt did not seize it.\n\nThe President's sensitivity towards public opinion was shown to be justified in the heated debates that flared up in July and August over the issue of amending the Selective Service Act of 1940. At stake was nothing less than what General Marshall described as the 'disintegration of the army'.62 Had the administration failed to carry through Congress the amendments it was proposing, the large army envisaged under the Victory Program (still being prepared) for future engagement in Europe would have been impossible. The strength of public feeling in the country, alongside the intense battle in Congress, was a sharp reminder to Roosevelt that, whatever the level of readiness to support Britain, and now the Soviet Union too, the opposition to any notion of American soldiers being sent to fight abroad was as vehement as ever.\n\nThe Selective Service Act of August 1940 had allowed the army to draft up to 900,000 men, but only for a period of one year, unless Congress (not the President) should declare that national security was imperilled. A second stipulation had been that men drafted could not serve outside the western hemisphere (a condition which Roosevelt circumvented in the occupation of Iceland by using marines). The President's declaration in May of a state of unlimited national emergency had no bearing on the Act; Congress leaders told Roosevelt that they could not muster the votes to amend it; and the expiry date was looming for the first men conscripted the previous autumn. Moreover, around the country families wanted their 'boys' back home, while in the army itself morale among the draftees was so poor that it seemed many were on the point of deserting if they were not to gain their promised release. It was by any assessment an awkward, indeed critical, situation for the President. His first inclination, as so often, was towards caution. He wanted to avoid the struggle in Congress. Stimson, Knox and especially Marshall worked for days to persuade Roosevelt to confront Congress. The issue plainly could not be ducked for long. Eventually, he agreed to brave the inevitable and extensive opposition.\n\nThree resolutions of amendment to the original Act were introduced on 10 July: to retain draftees in service as long as the national emergency lasted; to allow them to be sent beyond the western hemisphere; and to remove the upper limit of 900,000 men on the size of the army. The opposition was bitter and mostly along party-political lines. The most heated attacks, predictably, came from Republicans. But many Democrats who had backed earlier measures were also deeply concerned at the implications of giving the President powers to send troops abroad. The usual isolationist core of opposition could on this occasion, therefore, reckon with a wider base of anxious support\u2013with Congressmen anxious not least at the reaction of their constituents if they voted to keep 'their boys' in military service. Eventually, the bill passed through the Senate on 7 August by the reasonably comfortable margin of 45 to 30. The main drama, however, was reserved for the debate in the House of Representatives. When that ended, on 12 August, the bill secured its passage by a single vote: 203 to 202.63\n\nIt was later described, with pardonable hyperbole, as 'one of the decisive battles of the war'.64 Doubtless, if the vote had gone the other way the administration would have been compelled to bring in new measures to ensure its military planning was not vitiated. But valuable time would have been lost. The attack on Pearl Harbor, four months later, would have struck a country with its army in a process of dissolution.65 Most significantly, as the prospect of global conflict loomed ever larger, the vote carried the warning to Roosevelt, as expressed by the high priest of isolationism, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, 'that the Administration could not get a resolution through the Congress for a declaration of war'.66\n\nWhile the torrid debates were preoccupying Congress and much of the country, Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting for the first time since either of them had taken office. The meeting gave tangible expression to Churchill's words a year earlier, that Britain, with its Empire, and the United States were becoming 'somewhat mixed up together'.67 For Churchill, a personal meeting with Roosevelt was of immense importance. 'Nothing must stand in the way of his friendship for the President on which so much depended,' one of the Prime Minister's aides had noted. That Roosevelt had sought the meeting was significant, Churchill thought. He would not have done so 'unless he contemplated some further step'.68 But nothing significant was on Roosevelt's agenda. He wanted as far as possible to coordinate policy on a number of vital issues, to iron out any differences and to get to know Churchill. But he did not have in mind what Churchill was hoping for: a decision to take America into the war.69\n\nPlans for a meeting had been laid as early as the spring. Eventually, the crucial talks took place in secret between 9 and 12 August aboard the American heavy cruiser Augusta and the British battleship Prince of Wales, which had borne Harry Hopkins alongside Churchill across the Atlantic to Placentia Bay, just off the disused Newfoundland silver-mining settlement of Argentia. Roosevelt and Churchill were accompanied by military top brass and important diplomatic officials in the discussions on the two warships, anchored alongside each other.70\n\nThe talks ranged widely, embracing aid to the Soviet Union, convoys in the Atlantic, the Japanese menace in south-east Asia and the postwar order. Oddly, perhaps, the Atlantic Conference was devoted less to the Atlantic than the Pacific. With Hitler preoccupied by the Wehrmacht's progress in Russia, the danger in the west had at least temporarily subsided. The American occupation of Iceland had gone smoothly. A sort of uneasy stalemate had settled over the Atlantic. In the Far East, by contrast, the tension had mounted sharply since the Japanese invasion of southern Indochina and the American imposition of an oil embargo. The more immediate menace seemed to come from that direction. Little by way of concrete action emerged from the talks. Churchill urged a strong American line on any further Japanese expansion, amounting effectively to an ultimatum. Roosevelt agreed to use 'hard language' when warning the Japanese ambassador in Washington on his return, though in the event, on the intervention of the State Department, he toned this down. Despite the oil embargo, deterrence, not provocation, remained the policy. The aim was to keep the Pacific quiet as long as possible.71\n\nAs regards the Atlantic, though it figured less prominently in the talks, there was encouragement for the British. Roosevelt, disappointing Churchill's hopes, had swiftly ruled out expectations of immediate American involvement in the war. But two steps were agreed that seemed to have the potential to bring the moment of intervention closer.\n\nRoosevelt was seriously worried about Nazi agents penetrating the bulge of Africa and opening the way for Hitler to make a quick strike through the Iberian peninsula into north Africa.72 The relatively short distance across the southern Atlantic from the bulge of Africa to Brazil had long been a concern of American strategic planners, envisaging this as the simplest way for German troops to establish a footing on the American continent. To head off any danger, Roosevelt was willing to promise Churchill (who had outlined the danger of a German thrust to take Gibraltar, the gateway to the south Atlantic routes as well as controlling entry to the Mediterranean) that he would send occupying forces to the Azores once Britain could arrange for an invitation from Portugal (analogous to that from Iceland).73 Nothing came of it. In the event, there was no German takeover in Gibraltar, no need (at least, not at this stage) for an invitation from Portugal and no occupation by American troops of the Azores.\n\nA second point of agreement gave Churchill some satisfaction. Roosevelt finally consented to provide armed escorts for all shipping, not just American or Icelandic, across the western Atlantic as far as Iceland. British ships could at last reckon with American protection. It was what the 'hawks' in his Cabinet had been exhorting the President to do for months. Admiral Stark sent out instructions from Placentia Bay, to take effect from 16 September.74 The President had taken an important (and in British eyes long overdue) step, amounting to 'the beginning of undeclared hostilities with Germany'.75 At least, that was Churchill's understanding. In fact, only the contingency plans for escorting had actually been decided, while the implementation still rested on the President's order. When he returned to Washington, he did nothing at first to expedite the implementation.76 Technical and logistical problems\u2013organizing the communications links with British naval intelligence, and making sure the ships were in the right place at the right time, for instance\u2013posed their own obstacle to any immediate start.77 But the President's real difficulty was political. How he was going to tell the American public, and broach the matter to Congress, he still did not know.78 According to Churchill's report on the talks to the British Cabinet, the President had told him 'he was skating on pretty thin ice in his relations with Congress'. Asking Congress for a declaration of war, Roosevelt went on, would produce a three-month debate. (His real belief, in fact, was that a request to Congress for a declaration of war would be defeated by two or three to one.79) Instead, he said, 'he would wage war, but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative...He would look for an \"incident\" which would justify him in opening hostilities'.80\n\nIn practical terms, the Conference ended by achieving little. It was of importance, nevertheless. Out of it came the Atlantic Charter, a statement of principles, largely an American inspiration, for a postwar world envisaged by the United States and Great Britain. Though not all of the eight points of the Charter, amounting in effect to a declaration of democratic war aims, had an easy birth, final agreement on the wording was reached by 12 August and the text was made public two days later. The Charter proclaimed that the United States and United Kingdom sought no territorial or other aggrandizement, wished no territorial changes beyond the wishes of the peoples concerned, respected the right of all peoples to choose their form of government, would endeavour to promote equal access to trade and raw materials, would work for economic advancement and social security for all and would strive for world peace and disarmament.81\n\nThe Charter, whose initial purpose had been mainly as propaganda, came to have historic significance as a list of democratic rights and principles that would later become enshrined in the aims of the United Nations. But the real value of the Atlantic Conference at the time lay less in its statement of abstract war aims\u2013noble though they were, they were widely viewed on both sides of the ocean as no substitute for firm joint policy declarations\u2013than in the personal relations that were cemented between Roosevelt and Churchill.82 An understanding of profound importance was established, and on a direct, personal basis, between the two leaders. The sense of trust created at the Conference would last throughout the vagaries of the war.\n\nThe meeting left its mark on both. For Churchill, it evoked the common purpose of the two countries, symbolized movingly for him in the joint church service on the Sunday morning of 10 August, on the quarterdeck of the Prince of Wales, as British and American sailors together sang hymns he had chosen beneath the ship's big guns while the flags of the two nations draped the pulpit side by side. He later described 'the fact alone of the United States, still technically neutral, joining with a belligerent power' in drawing up the Atlantic Charter as 'astonishing'.83 For Roosevelt, too, the meeting had been significant, and not simply for the joint declaration of war aims embodied in the Charter. Like Churchill, he had been greatly moved by the symbolism of the joint church service on the Prince of Wales, the 'keynote' of the entire Conference, as he recorded. 'If nothing else had happened while we were here, that would have cemented us,' his son Elliott, present on board, reported him saying.84 He had established a personal rapport with Churchill. But he was also pleased at the tone of the Conference, which implicitly acknowledged American leadership in the informal alliance with Britain and her Empire.85 And though he had formally agreed little of substance during the Conference, he had gained sharper insight into British strategic thinking and how, with American help, the war against Hitler could be won.86 He was starting more clearly to see the eastern front as the key to the outcome of the war, and his determination to provide aid to the Soviet Union found expression in the warmly couched message to Stalin that he and Churchill sent on 12 August, the last day of the Conference, proposing a meeting in Moscow (as Hopkins had suggested during his visit) to work out arrangements for long-term aid.87 He was also now prepared to move away from neutrality to adopt a more actively belligerent role in the 'battle of the Atlantic' amounting to a limited, undeclared war against Germany, one which ran an increased risk of the United States being fully drawn into hostilities.88\n\nThe crucial question of when the United States would enter the war had, however, come no closer to finding an answer. Certainly, Roosevelt's comment about provoking an incident seemed to suggest that it was merely a matter of time. But when might that be? From a British perspective, the issue could not be stretched out indefinitely. Yet there was little expectation that American entry was imminent. News of the alarmingly close vote on the renewal of the Selective Service Act, which had reached Placentia Bay on the last day of the Conference, offered scant encouragement.89 And Churchill's initial high spirits on his return from the meeting had been dissipated by the reaction at home.90 Not only was the public response to the meeting muted (as it had been in the United States); the Cabinet seemed far from encouraged by the talks to believe that the United States would soon be in the war alongside Britain. Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill's Minister of Supply, had travelled on to Washington from Placentia Bay and had reported back that there was no chance of the United States entering the war until a direct attack on its own territory forced it to do so. This was thought to be highly unlikely until both Britain and Russia had been defeated.91 Roosevelt's rejoinder to criticism by alarmed isolationists that the Atlantic Conference had taken the United States no closer to war gave further sustenance to the deflated mood in Britain.92\n\nTowards the end of August, a depressed Churchill sent Harry Hopkins 'one of the gloomiest messages that ever came to the White House from the normally confident, ebullient Prime Minister'. Churchill pointed out the heavy British shipping losses to U-boats in the Atlantic\u201350,000 tons in the previous two days. 'I don't know what will happen if England is fighting alone when 1942 comes,' he added. He noted that Hitler's submarines were keeping clear of the zone defined as belonging to the western hemisphere, so that 'there was little prospect of an \"incident\" serious enough to bring the United States into the war'.93\n\nLess than a week after Churchill's dispirited message to Hopkins, however, an incident did take place which gave Roosevelt the opportunity to make public his escort policy, and edged the United States closer to the brink.\n\nIII\n\nIn the early morning of 4 September, a German submarine, the U-652, was spotted by a British bomber patrolling about 165 miles south of Iceland, at a point within the overlap between the German combat area and the American security zone. The submarine dived to avoid the immediate danger. But her location was signalled to an American destroyer in the immediate vicinity, the USS Greer, carrying mail and a few military passengers to Iceland. Since she was not escorting American shipping, the Greer had no authority to attack, and was officially bound only to report the submarine's position. Nevertheless, the Greer closed in and trailed the submerged U-boat for over an hour, taking sonar readings of her position and flashing these to the British bomber, which dropped four depth charges. These easily missed their target, and the bomber returned to base. But the pursuit continued, and an hour and a half later, following the Greer's radio signal, another British plane arrived to search for the U-boat. The pursuit had gone on for around four hours when the U-boat's commander, presumably fearing that the batteries would fail and force him to the surface, decided to turn the tables. He fired two torpedoes at the Greer, though each of them passed harmlessly by. The Greer now retaliated by dropping eight depth charges, but inflicted only minor damage on the U-652. A British destroyer arrived on the scene an hour or so later and also dropped a depth charge, to no effect. The Greer made a last attempt to destroy the U-boat in mid-afternoon, dropping eleven more depth charges, though now missing by a long distance. Only in the early evening, about ten hours after taking up the chase, did the Greer give up and sail on to Iceland.94\n\nA radio report of the incident was swiftly transmitted to Washington and made available to the President. Without delay, the Navy Department put out a press release about a submarine attack on the Greer.95 At his press conference next day, 5 September, Roosevelt emphasized the deliberate nature of the U-boat's attack, in daylight, on a ship with an identification number, flying the American flag and within the US security zone. He also stated that he had given orders to 'eliminate' the submarine if it could be found.96\n\nAt this point, the President may not have been in full cognizance of the facts. No mention, of course, was made of the harassing role of the Greer. In the circumstances, the U-652 could be said to have fired its torpedoes in self-defence. Nor was it certain that she had recognized the destroyer as American. She had been under attack by British warplanes, within the German combat zone, and had merely chanced to gain a periscope glimpse of a four-funnel destroyer similar to those transferred to Britain the previous autumn.97 But no such considerations were likely to deter Roosevelt, now given an opportunity of the kind he had awaited.\n\nAt lunch that day, 5 September, the President sketched for Harry Hopkins and Cordell Hull the outlines of a speech to the nation, long planned, which, in the light of the Greer incident, he now intended to deliver the following week. He intended to pull no punches. Hull, apparently no less outraged by what had happened, also spoke assertively. But when the Secretary of State summarized his views on paper to send them to the White House, doubts set in and he made no recommendation for action. In the absence of the President (who had travelled to Hyde Park to attend his mother's funeral), Hopkins and Judge Samuel Rosenman, Roosevelt's other main speech-writer, worked on the address with no input from the State Department. They incorporated some passages composed by the President himself (they were in touch with him by telephone during the drafting) and by the time he travelled back to Washington, the speech was as good as ready. He tried it out that evening, 10 September, on Stimson, Knox and Hull, who gave their warm approval. A few minor adjustments were made to the wording. Then, the following morning, Roosevelt read it out to a group of congressional leaders. Only one, a Republican isolationist, did not like it. The Secretary of State, however, despite his expression of agreement the previous evening, was again having second thoughts. He told Hopkins that 'the speech was too strong', and wanted 'all reference to shooting first, or shooting of any kind', to be removed. He spoke to Roosevelt along the same lines. But there was to be no weakening of the tenor of the speech.98 It was among the most hard-hitting the President had ever made.\n\nRoosevelt began in similar vein to that of his press conference six days earlier. The attack on the Greer had been in the American self-defence zone, in broad daylight, and with the ship's identity unmistakable. 'I tell you the blunt fact,' he declared, 'that the German submarine fired first upon this American destroyer without warning, and with deliberate design to sink her.' He described it as 'piracy legally and morally', and referred to several incidents\u2013including that of the sinking of the merchant ship, the Robin Moor, in July, which had prompted no retaliatory action\u2013to show that the Greer was no isolated case, but 'part of a general plan'. The Nazi design, he continued, was to acquire absolute control of the seas as a prelude to domination of the western hemisphere by force of arms. A sideswipe at isolationists followed. Americans could not continue deluding themselves, the President stated, by the 'romantic notion' that they could 'go on living happily and peacefully in a Nazi-dominated world'. No appeasement was possible. A line had to be drawn. Supply routes to the enemies of Hitler had to be kept open, and the freedom of the seas upheld. He used a telling metaphor (adapting a remark by a luncheon guest a little while earlier99) to drive home the need for preventive attack in the Atlantic. 'When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi submarines and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.' It was a powerful image. He came to its policy implications, and the crucial\u2013much belated in some eyes\u2013introduction of escorting of convoys. 'Upon our naval and air patrol\u2013now operating in large number over a vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean\u2013falls the duty of maintaining the American policy of freedom of the seas\u2013now. That means, very simply, very clearly, that our patrolling vessels and planes will protect all merchant ships\u2013not only American ships but ships of any flag\u2013engaged in commerce in our defensive waters.' The aim, he emphasized, was solely defensive. But then came the explicit warning to the Axis: 'From now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defence, they do so at their own peril.'100\n\nAs the President finished speaking, the playing of the national anthem brought the audience\u2013family, friends, advisers and a large press contingent\u2013assembled in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House to hear the address (carried worldwide by radio) to their feet in an emotional finale.101 The President had outmanoeuvred his opponents. The isolationists were isolated. The escorting of convoys had been introduced. The official orders went out two days later. The escorting began on 16 September.102 'Thus was the long-standing issue of American naval escort resolved by the declaration of the shooting war' is an apposite description of what had occurred.103\n\nThough he had not used the phrase, what he had unmistakably initiated was a policy of 'shoot on sight'. The banner headline of the New York Times next day ran: 'Roosevelt Orders Navy to Shoot First'.104 Isolationists predictably and vigorously protested.105 But public opinion favoured 'shoot on sight', 62 per cent approving with only 28 per cent against. This showed the impact of the Greer incident, and the President's exploitation of it. Two days before it happened, only a bare majority of 52 per cent had favoured the US navy 'convoying' war materials to Britain.106 The American people had been brought behind a policy practically guaranteed to draw the United States into future armed clashes with German vessels in the Atlantic. Open warfare was round the corner. As Admiral Stark, chief of Naval Operations, put it on 22 September: 'So far as the Atlantic is concerned, we are all but, if not actually in it.'107\n\nRoosevelt's detractors, at the time and since, accused him of deceiving the American people 'in a gigantic conspiracy to drive them into war' (as alleged in the rabidly isolationist Chicago Tribune).108 His Greer speech had certainly been economical with the truth about the incident. He had made no mention of the circumstances of lengthy pursuit and harassment of the U-652 before she had fired her torpedo salvo. Though it was true that the submarine had fired first, it had not been without provocation. The American people learned nothing of this. Roosevelt's claim that the Greer was part of a systematic Nazi attack on American shipping was also a distortion. It was, in a sense, surprising that there had been so few, not so many, incidents. The President and his military advisers were, however, aware that Hitler was not likely to be seeking outright conflict in the Atlantic before he had crushed the Soviet Union. (In fact, although Roosevelt could not know it, Hitler had given express orders forbidding provocation in the Atlantic while he had his hands full in the east.109) Apologists for the President claimed he was not fully informed of the facts of the incident. But if, in his press conference on 5 September, the President was still not in full knowledge of what had taken place, this is unlikely to have been the case six days later. (Hull's reticence about the statement may, indeed, have been precisely because, legally, right in the incident was by no means unequivocally on the American side.) There is little doubt, therefore, that Roosevelt used some sleight of hand in his speech. Was this justified?\n\nHe himself justified his action in terms of national defence interest and saw it as his clear, inescapable obligation as President.110 It is not easy to claim that he was wrong in this, given the long-term threat posed by Hitler's regime.111 Did he have a choice? His options were, in fact, by now severely constrained. If he had used a degree of hyperbole to make the introduction of escorting more palatable to the American people, the policy itself was quite in accord with the cautious but consistent steps taken over previous months. Stimson was only one of those pointing out from the outset the logic of lend-lease\u2013approved by Congress\u2013necessitating the protection of the mate\n\n\u00b4riel to be shipped across the Atlantic. So the only effective choice Roosevelt faced in September 1941 was whether to take the executive action he did, whether to risk further protracted, bitter debate and possible defeat in Congress, or whether to ignore the Greer incident and delay the introduction of escorting yet further.\n\nEither alternative course would have pandered to minority isolationist feeling. But this offered no real option. The strategic problem in contending with the German threat (exacerbated by the growing tension in the Pacific) would not as a consequence have disappeared or lessened. And to pass up the chance of introducing escorting would have been to fly in the face of the advice he was receiving from his military experts. It would also have meant reneging on the promise he gave Churchill at Placentia Bay, and would therefore have been potentially damaging to the Atlantic alliance on which Hitler's ultimate defeat was seen to rest. This in turn would have been to take a huge risk with Britain's future capacity to continue fighting. As Roosevelt's military experts put it on the very day of his speech, 11 September, 'the immediate and strong reinforcement of British forces in the Atlantic by United States naval and air contingents, supplemented by a large additional shipping tonnage, will be required if the United Kingdom is to remain in the war'.112 And, as Roosevelt had seen all along, the defence interests of the United States would be irreparably damaged if Britain were to be forced to capitulate or to negotiate an unfavourable settlement, leaving Hitler in charge of the European continent and dominating the Atlantic. Isolationist notions that America could bury her head in the sand and Hitler would leave her alone were, as Roosevelt had incessantly pointed out, dangerous illusions. By 1941, the United States could, in her own interest, not afford to stand on the sidelines in the 'battle of the Atlantic'.\n\nRoosevelt followed the only course of action possible. His exploitation of the Greer incident was clever politics, not an abuse of power. It had brought the majority of the public behind the escorting policy in a way which would probably not earlier have been possible. Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, described to Churchill the President's dilemma, as he himself saw it: to steer a course between '(1) the wish of 70% of Americans to keep out of war; [and] (2) the wish of 70% of Americans to do everything to break Hitler, even it if means war.'113 Again, the President's way of 'making haste slowly' had proved both successful and justified. But there was no mistake about it: he had indeed now taken the United States to the brink of all-out conflict with Nazi Germany. Could sporadic skirmishing continue indefinitely? Or might little now be needed to transform the 'undeclared war' into the all-out conflagration which would demand American boys being sent to fight\u2013something the President had ruled out during his electoral campaign less than a year earlier?\n\nThe latter seemed the more likely eventuality as the inevitable further incidents in the Atlantic occurred in the autumn. Pushing in the same direction was the news emerging soon after Roosevelt's 'fireside chat' of 11 September that the President had discussed measures to bring about the repeal of the 1939 Neutrality Act with congressional leaders.114 But as autumn dragged on, and the clashes in the Atlantic led to no great flare-up, the first possibility, that of indefinite undeclared war, began to seem a possibility. By now, in any case, the danger of war in the Pacific was at least as great as all-out conflict with Germany. And that was something the President had to bear carefully in mind when deciding how to react to incidents in the Atlantic.\n\nIV\n\nThese incidents did not take long to materialize. When on 19 September the Pink Star, a Danish freighter registered in Panama but requisitioned by the US Maritime Commission, was torpedoed, questions arose about the necessity of arming merchant ships, something not permissible under the 1939 Neutrality Act.115 The sinking of a number of other freight ships flying the Panamanian flag though American-owned\u2013a ruse to avoid falling foul of the neutrality legislation\u2013raised the same issue.116\n\nIt was a torpedo attack on another American destroyer, the USS Kearny, south of Iceland on 17 October, that gave Roosevelt his best opportunity to highlight the deficiencies of the Neutrality Act in the changed circumstances. The Kearny was one of four American destroyers responding to a call for assistance from a Canadian-escorted convoy under assault from a U-boat 'wolfpack'. Several ships went down in a night-long battle with the marauders. The destroyers launched a hail of depth charges, but in the m\u00e9l\u00e9e the Kearny was hit by a torpedo. She was damaged, though not sunk, and was able to limp on to Iceland. But eleven of her crew had died, and twenty-four were injured.117 It was a poignant moment for a nation not officially at war. Roosevelt did not let the chance slip. The 'Navy and Total Defense Day' on 27 October provided the occasion for a notably fiery address by the President, his most outspoken before Pearl Harbor.\n\n'We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot,' he began. 'America has been attacked.' Continuing in this vein, he claimed: 'Hitler's torpedo was directed at every American.' It was an attempt 'to frighten the American people off the high seas\u2013to force us to make a trembling retreat'. He referred to secret maps in his possession of German plans to dominate South America, and a Nazi design for the eradication of religion\u2013British forgeries swallowed by a gullible President118\u2013using 'these grim truths' to discredit isolationists (though he did not directly refer to them) who were presenting a gift to the Nazis through exposing apparent American disunity. He posited, as in earlier speeches, the absolute choice in a future world between American freedom and Nazi tyranny, and pledged once more the complete destruction of Hitlerism. The United States, he continued, was producing ever more arms for those involved in the actual fighting, 'and it is the Nation's will that these vital arms and supplies of all kinds shall neither be locked up in American harbors nor sent to the bottom of the sea'. It was in defiance of that will that American ships had been sunk and sailors killed. 'I say that we do not propose to take this lying down,' he declared. 'That determination of ours not to take it lying down has been expressed in the orders to the American Navy to shoot on sight. Those orders stand.' He came to the relevance of this to the neutrality legislation: 'Our American merchant ships must be armed to defend themselves against the rattlesnakes of the sea. Our American merchant ships must be free to carry our American goods into the harbors of our friends. Our American merchant ships must be protected by our American Navy.' It meant 'total national defense'. He concluded his peroration on an emotive note: 'Today in the face of this newest and greatest challenge of them all, we Americans have cleared our decks and taken our battle stations. We stand ready in the defense of our Nation and in the faith of our fathers to do what God has given us the power to see as our full duty.'119 It sounded like the preface to a declaration of war. But no request to Congress was forthcoming.\n\nAccording to a later comment by Roosevelt's speech-writer, Samuel Rosenman, the President had believed when the European war started in September 1939 that the United States could stay out, and that remained his view during 1940. But, though there had been no definitive incident that had changed his mind, during 1941 he had gradually come to the conclusion that American involvement was as good as inevitable.120 This conviction collided, however, with political realities at home. Speaking to Lord Halifax after the Greer affair, Roosevelt had reportedly said that 'if he asked for a declaration of war he wouldn't get it, and opinion would swing against him'.121 That remained his position. It meant a policy of waiting for things to happen.\n\nAs autumn deepened, Roosevelt felt his hands were tied by three considerations. At home, isolationist clamour had been stirred again by the neutrality legislation revisions which had been proposed to Congress, and by the escalation of conflict in the Atlantic. In terms of production and rearmament, the United States was still not ready for war. And, with the pot starting to boil in the Far East, it was a question of how long Roosevelt could keep the lid on. As he had said earlier in the year, he did not have 'enough Navy to go round', and war in the Pacific would mean diversions from the Atlantic.122 Perhaps a combination of these considerations led Roosevelt to take a surprisingly soft line, compared with his response to the Greer and Kearny incidents, when another American destroyer, the USS Reuben James, was attacked by a U-boat 600 miles west of Ireland on 31 October. In this incident, the worst of the three clashes involving American warships, a torpedo struck the ammunition magazine of the destroyer, which sank within five minutes, with the loss of a hundred and fifteen men. Given the inflammatory way Roosevelt had spoken following earlier attacks, where there had been less damage caused and fewer casualties, his restraint on this occasion was striking. It signalled that, despite his previous belligerent statements, he was still far from ready to use a clash in the 'undeclared war' of the Atlantic to take the United States into full-scale hostilities.\n\nIf he had been contemplating seeking a declaration of war\u2013and there is not the slightest evidence that this was in his mind during these months\u2013the question of revisions to the Neutrality Act would have dissuaded him.\n\nThe logic of repealing at least some sections of the 1939 legislation followed from the enactment of lend-lease. If weapons and merchandise were to be transported across the Atlantic, it made sense if the merchant ships were armed, and if American vessels could carry their cargoes all the way to Britain. The question of asking Congress to repeal the relevant sections of the Act was aired in spring 1941. But Cordell Hull had advised against it, on the grounds of the strength of isolationist opposition.123 He seems to have changed his mind by the end of June, when he urged the President to discuss amending the Act with congressional leaders as a matter of urgency. Roosevelt carried out the discussions, but did not feel confident enough to go ahead until the Greer incident in early September gave him his opportunity.124 In the last week of the month Hull proposed modifications rather than the outright repeal of the entire Act (certain parts of which, such as the collection of funds for belligerents, the administration had an interest in continuing to control).125\n\nThe President received a great deal of conflicting advice from leading members of his administration on running the risk of an unfavourable verdict from Congress.126 Opinion in the country, influenced by some leading newspapers, supported the amendments. A Gallup poll on 5 October indicated that 70 per cent of those asked thought the defeat of Hitler was more important than keeping the country out of the war.127 But opinion in Congress was another matter altogether. Isolationist feeling was once more whipped up. The passing of the amendments in Congress could not be taken for granted.\n\nInformal soundings in the Senate in early October suggested that the President was wise to progress cautiously. Roosevelt decided to test the waters, with the repeal initially only of the section of the Act prohibiting the arming of merchant ships (Section VI), on which the highest degree of consensus could be expected. He put the proposal to Congress on 9 October. It was the beginning of a further bitter debate. As it was approaching its conclusion, news of the attack on the Kearny came through. This probably had an impact. The repeal of Section VI was approved by the House of Representatives on 17 October, with a sizeable majority (259 to 138). Even so, 113 Republicans had rejected even this measure.128\n\nA good deal more rancour followed when the resolution to repeal Sections II and III (excluding American shipping from designated combat zones) came before the Senate. Roosevelt's belligerent speech following the attack on the Kearny, then the sinking of the Reuben James, inflamed isolationist opposition.129 One arch-isolationist publicly proposed that Roosevelt should seek a vote from Congress on whether or not the United States should enter the war. There was no danger of the President falling into such an obvious trap. The very suggestion was enough to show Roosevelt that his caution was justified; were he to follow such a course, 'he would meet with certain and disastrous defeat'.130 Eventually, on 7 November the resolution was passed by the Senate, but only by the uncomfortable margin of 50 to 37 votes. Again, most Republicans were in opposition. It was the smallest majority on any foreign-policy issue in the Senate since war had started in Europe.131 In the House of Representatives it was even worse. The amendments were approved there by a slim majority of only 18 votes, 212 in favour, 194 against.132 Roosevelt had got what he wanted. But the struggle on such logical consequences of what had already been agreed months earlier when the Lend-Lease bill was enacted showed once more in clear terms that any attempt to seek a declaration of war from Congress would have resulted in resounding failure.\n\nV\n\nThe narrow passage of the amendments to the neutrality legislation showed that clashes in the Atlantic such as those involving the Greer, the Kearny and the Reuben James were far from sufficient to persuade Congress that the United States should formally enter the war.133 But without the likelihood of obtaining a declaration of war, Roosevelt was left with no option. His only choice was to continue the 'undeclared war'.\n\nThis was, in any case, Roosevelt's preference. 'We don't want a declared war with Germany,' he told a press conference in early November, 'because we are acting in defense\u2013self-defense\u2013every action.'134 His entire policy for more than a year had been directed at providing maximum help to Britain (and, more recently, the Soviet Union) as part of American defence, in the\u2013diminishing\u2013hope that the United States would be able to keep out of the direct fighting. Despite the accusations of his detractors, that he was working by devious means to take the country into war, the evidence suggests that the President had been genuine in his earlier expressions of his abhorrence of war, but that he had gradually and reluctantly come to the conclusion that American involvement was both inevitable and necessary if Hitler were to be defeated.135\n\nThere were, however, good reasons to defer the moment of entry as long as possible.136 The longer America could remain out of the formal combat, the more advanced her military build-up and the mobilization of an arms economy would be. Moreover, a declaration of war would doubtless have resulted in domestic clamour to utilize the arms and equipment now being sent to Great Britain and the Soviet Union for the United States' armed forces, leading to a weakening, not strengthening, of the resistance to Hitler on the European fighting front in the short term\u2013perhaps with disastrous consequences. American shipping losses to preying U-boats in the Atlantic would, as an immediate consequence, probably have mounted sharply. There was also the real concern that a declaration of war against Germany would immediately bring Japan\u2013Hitler's ally under the Tripartite Pact\u2013into the war. Having to fight in the Pacific would certainly complicate dealing with Hitler, which was consistently seen as the main event.137 By the autumn the signs were mounting strongly that Japan's entry was simply a matter of time. But American policy was nevertheless to delay that moment as long as possible.\n\nBeyond these considerations, there was, as always, the question of public opinion\u2013not just congressional opposition\u2013to ponder. Public opinion was, to go from the results of surveys, more favourably disposed towards Roosevelt and his policy on the war than Congress, where hardbitten isolationists could always reckon with the additional backing of those with their own varied reasons for wanting to give the President a bloody nose. But the large percentage of the public consistently opposed to entry into the war could not be ignored. Perhaps some of that opinion could be won over. However, Roosevelt's powerful speeches had not dented it to any great extent. The fact had to be faced: unless the United States were to be attacked, a declaration of war\u2013even in the unlikely event that it could be pushed through Congress\u2013would undoubtedly produce a bitterly divided country.\n\nIt seems as if Roosevelt had settled in autumn 1941 for as long a period as possible of partial, undeclared hostilities with Germany. Perhaps as justification for avoiding what Churchill had long been pressing for, the President told Lord Halifax that, in any case, 'declarations of war were going out of fashion'.138 The limited and unprovocative way that he introduced convoying all the way across the Atlantic directly to Britain (and also to Russia) in late November and early December does not suggest he was in any haste to move beyond the current stalemate in relations with Germany. In Roosevelt's ideal scenario, this would have continued for some months.139 This strategy nevertheless had a limited time-span. The Victory Program, eventually laid before the President in September (and giving rise to an enormous furore when a damaging leak enabled the leading isolationist organ, the Chicago Tribune, to publish its details in the first week of December140), had after all concluded that Hitler could only be defeated by sending millions of men to fight in Europe by 1943.141 The prognosis in the plan had envisaged the defeat of the Soviet Union before that date. But even with the Red Army providing far stiffer resistance than American military strategists had forecast, destroying Hitler meant American soldiers fighting a land war in Europe. The document was explicit: 'if our European enemies are to be defeated, it will be necessary for the United States to enter the war.'142 That day, Roosevelt was hoping, could be delayed. But it could not be postponed indefinitely if Nazism were to be crushed.143\n\nThe Victory Program recommended 'holding Japan in check pending future developments'.144 By late November 1941 future developments were certainly pending. Intercepts of Japanese diplomatic intelligence were telling the White House that aggression by Japan was imminent. Roosevelt had hoped to take the United States to the brink but not beyond in the Atlantic, and to keep Japan at bay. But those hopes exploded with the bombs that fell on American ships at anchor far away in the south Pacific on that clear sunny morning of 7 December 1941.\n\nThe events of that morning were dire indeed from an American perspective. But Roosevelt, who had striven to hold off direct participation in the growing global conflagration while preparing for it, finally had an incident capable of bringing a united people into the war.\n\n## 8\n\n## Tokyo, Autumn 1941\n\nJapan Decides to Go to War\n\nIf we miss the present opportunity to go to war, we will have to submit to American dictation. Therefore, I recognize that it is inevitable that we must decide to start a war against the United States.\n\nHara Yoshimichi, President of the Privy Council, \n5 November 1941\n\nTwo years from now we will have no petroleum for military use. Ships will stop moving. When I think about the strengthening of American defences in the south-west Pacific, the expansion of the American fleet, the unfinished China Incident, and so on, I see no end to difficulties. We can talk about austerity and suffering, but can our people endure such a life for a long time?\n\nTojo Hideki, Japanese Prime Minister, 5 November 1941\n\nIn the summer of 1941, Japan's leaders suddenly faced new options. These were framed, as they had been the previous year, by the immediate global consequences of events far away. As earlier, Hitler had made the decisive move. The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, like the victory over France almost exactly a year earlier, caught Japan's power-elite unawares, in spite of the clear warnings they had been given. Hitler's attack destroyed at one stroke Japanese hopes of building a coalition of forces together with Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union aimed at deterring the western powers from hostilities in the Far East against Japan while she was establishing her dominance of a 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'. The driving force behind such a strategy had been the Foreign Minister, Matsuoka Yosuke, who in April, following visits to Berlin and Rome, had engineered a spectacular diplomatic success with the signing of the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact in Moscow. That strategy was now in ruins. Instead, the prospect loomed of the Soviet Union compelled, despite ideological differences, to turn towards Britain and America for support in the clash with Nazi Germany. Japan was set to become more diplomatically isolated than ever. And she still had found no exit route from the China quagmire.\n\nJapan's leaders differed sharply in how they judged the opportunities and the dangers that had emerged. But overnight, it was clear, the question of an alternative strategy had arisen. Should Japan postpone, at least temporarily, the policy of expansion to the south, determined the previous summer, in favour of a northern advance to strike at the Soviet Union from the east while the Stalinist regime was reeling from the devastating German assault from the west? Much seemed to speak in favour of grasping the chance that had presented itself. There were powerful advocates of such a drastic reordering of priorities, the most outspoken of them Matsuoka himself. In typically ebullient fashion, he simply cast off the strategy that he had been urging for months. 'Great men will change their minds,' he declared. 'Previously I advocated going south, but now I favour the north.'1\n\nSome in the army leadership, too, relished the prospect of landing a fatal blow on the traditional enemy to the north. Army leaders were, however, more cautious than Matsuoka. Japan had, after all, lost around 17,000 men killed or injured in bitter clashes with Soviet troops in the summer of 1939\u2013the 'Nomonhan Incident'\u2013over a stretch of disputed territory on the Manchurian-Mongolian border. They were less sure than Matsuoka that Germany would prove victorious in the Soviet Union. And, as they were well aware, Soviet forces greatly outnumbered Japan's troop contingent in the north. A military build-up necessary for a northern offensive could not be accomplished overnight. They preferred, therefore, to see how the German-Soviet war developed before committing themselves to an attack in the north, which at this juncture would be a hazardous enterprise. The navy, of course, remained in any case wedded to the southern advance.2\n\nMatsuoka became, therefore, an increasingly isolated figure. He soon encountered the combined opposition of the army and navy representatives. In a series of meetings at the end of June, his plans suffered a complete rebuff. The northern option was ruled out\u2013or at least postponed until Germany had proved utterly victorious in the war against the Soviet Union. Defeated and lacking all support in high quarters, Matsuoka was forced to resign as Foreign Minister in mid-July, to be replaced by the more emollient Admiral Toyoda Teijiro.\n\nShortly afterwards Japan took a crucial step in the planned southern advance. Following pressure on Vichy France, 40,000 Japanese troops (later swelling to 185,000) moved into French Indochina on 28 July.3 Japan was now in a position to close off the supplies to Chiang Kai-shek passing through the Burma Road. And the way to the oil of the Dutch East Indies now lay open. Aware in advance of the move through intelligence intercepts, the American administration had already started to take retaliatory steps. On 23 July the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, informed the Japanese ambassador in Washington, Nomura Kichisaburo, that he was terminating diplomatic deliberations that had been proceeding, for the most part unofficially, for months in the hope of improving the worsening relations between Japan and the United States. Three days later, all Japanese assets in the United States were frozen (followed over the next days by identical measures in Britain, Canada, the Philippines, New Zealand and the Netherlands).4 Japan would no longer be able to buy oil from America. Keen to avoid provoking a Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies, President Roosevelt fought shy of imposing a total oil embargo. Small quantities of low-grade oil, not fit for usage in aircraft, could still be exported. The President appears to have had in mind at this stage temporary restrictions to serve as a deterrent, rather than a total and complete stoppage. But he was in effect bypassed by the administration's hawks in the Treasury and on the newly formed Economic Defense Board, which would not permit the release of funds even to obtain inferior grades of oil. Roosevelt did not discover until early September that Japan had received no oil after 25 July.5 Effectively, therefore, a total embargo on oil to Japan had been imposed.6 The Japanese military had seriously miscalculated. They had continued to believe that America would not impose a total oil embargo.7 Konoe's government was thrown into near panic.8 Without oil, Japan's quest for power and prosperity was doomed. But Japan had less than two years of oil reserves left, and was rapidly consuming remaining supplies.9 The clock was ticking.10\n\nThe southern advance could not wait. The oil of the Dutch East Indies had to be secured for Japan. But that meant, with certainty, a clash not only with the Dutch authorities, but also with Great Britain, and, most threatening to Japan, with the United States. Not only were America, Britain and the Dutch in effective alliance. Their interests were also bound up in the fate of China, where Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists had been engaged (with western support) in the most bitter and brutal of conflicts with the Japanese for over four years\u2013a conflict with no end in sight, and one that had already cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Japan was preparing, therefore, for a possible gigantic showdown with what had come to be labelled the ABCD (American, British, Chinese and Dutch) powers. America's own position (with Britain egging her on) had hardened sharply over the summer. This had pushed Japan still further into the corner where her own policies had driven her. By August 1941, therefore, the outlook was bleak. Intransigence had set in on both sides. War was beginning to appear inevitable. The only question seemed to be: when? The die was cast. Or was it?\n\nIn retrospect, the path to the Pacific War appears undeviating. But at the time, even in autumn, Japan's leaders still thought there were possibilities of avoiding the conflict; that options, if narrowed, remained open. Indeed, that was the case. In autumn 1941 there were still significant figures\u2013including the Prime Minister, Konoe, the Foreign Minister, Toyoda, and Emperor Hirohito himself\u2013opposed to war. Even within the army and navy leadership there was hesitation; and much anxiety about the consequences of war. Opinion in the elites was split. Some, especially in the military (backed by the chauvinism of a general public whose belligerence had been whipped up for years by manipulated mass media), were gung-ho. Others were fearful. A protracted war (which was likely), they were sure, could not be won. Its consequences for Japan would be incalculably calamitous. Many more entertained a samurai-like fatalism. War would come. It might mean even Japan's destruction. But that would have to be endured. There could be no retreat. Destruction with honour was better than survival with shame.\n\nThese, broadly sketched, were the mentalities that helped shape the way Japan's options were viewed in autumn 1941. By the end of November, the fateful choice had been made. It was to be war. The fleet had already set out for Pearl Harbor. How was this momentous decision arrived at?\n\nI\n\nIn August 1941, following the American imposition of the oil embargo, the storm clouds over the Pacific started to gather rapidly. Some among Japan's leaders, previous advocates of the assertiveness that had led to the current predicament, were now gripped by anxiety and foreboding.\n\nThe new Foreign Minister, Toyoda Teijiro, tried to bridge the increasingly yawning gulf between American and Japanese interests with proposals drawn up on 5 August and put to Washington the following day. He stipulated that Japan had no intention of stationing troops in the south-west Pacific beyond French Indochina. And she was prepared to guarantee the neutrality of the Philippines (an American possession). These minimal concessions were all the Japanese had to offer. In return, the United States would have to cease military measures against Japan in the south-west Pacific, urging Britain and the Netherlands to do the same. The United States would also cooperate in Japan's acquisition of natural resources in the Dutch East Indies, restore normal commercial relations, act as a mediator to end the war in China, and accept Japan's special position in French Indochina even once troops were withdrawn.11 It was scarcely an endearing package from an American perspective. It remained a dead letter.\n\nAnother initiative came from an even higher level. Though he had fully supported Japan's expansionist programme and backed the continuing war in China, the Prime Minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, was now so disturbed by developments that he contemplated a last, desperate attempt to head off what seemed increasingly like an inexorable collision course with America. He proposed a personal meeting with President Roosevelt, at Honolulu or at sea in the mid-Pacific.12 Such a proposal had no precedent in Japanese history. And it carried dangers, physical as well as political, for the Prime Minister. Speaking to military leaders, he justified the initiative, not through a wish to bridge the differences with the United States at whatever cost, but by showing the world that Japan had done everything possible to avoid war. 'If it comes to war after we have done all that can be done, that can't be helped,' he declared. 'In that case we will have come to a resolution and the people will also be fully prepared. Moreover, it will be clearly understood by the world in general that we have shown good faith in going to such lengths.'13 Privately, he appears to have been ready to offer a number of limited concessions, such as the withdrawal of troops from Indochina. According to later testimony of those close to him, Konoe would, if necessary, have sought the Emperor's approval by telegram and agreed to the concessions in order to outflank the army and to save the peace.14 Given Konoe's usual weakness and indeterminacy, whether he would have taken such a bold step might justifiably be doubted. And had he made any concessions likely to have swayed the Americans, these would almost certainly have been opposed by the military\u2013and by violently anti-American public opinion\u2013back home. At least two plots by fanaticized radical nationalists to murder Konoe were uncovered.15 Change of government by assassination had only a few years earlier been effected more than once. Konoe, as friendly voices had warned him, would probably not have lived to tell the tale. If he was serious in thinking that he could outmanoeuvre the army by his ploy, he was greatly underestimating the hold which by now the military leadership in both army and navy had gained over the levers of power in Japan.\n\nThe Emperor endorsed the idea of a summit with President Roosevelt at an audience with Konoe on 4 August and urged him to proceed without delay.16 The Foreign Minister, Toyoda, also backed the scheme as a last hope of avoiding disaster. Oikawa Koshiro, the Navy Minister\u2013often hesitant, ambivalent and wavering in his views\u2013was prepared to go along with the suggestion. Possibly he thought its chances of success were slight. He certainly knew that the navy's preparations were well advanced, and that its expeditionary force would be virtually ready for action by the beginning of September.17 The more forthright Army Minister, Tojo Hideki, gave only conditional approval on behalf of the army. He would not oppose the move; but only as long as Konoe was prepared to uphold the basic, non-negotiable principles of Japanese policy and ready to commit Japan to war against the United States should Roosevelt prove unyielding.18\n\nBelow ministerial level, others in the military were even less well disposed towards Konoe's initiative. The chief of the navy General Staff, Nagano Osami, remained dogmatically of the view that diplomatic negotiations with the United States should be broken off, and that Japan should go to war. Among naval planners, the view was that the planned summit meeting was 'an odd artifice'. There was scarcely greater endearment in the army. The chief of the army General Staff, Sugiyama Gen, and the Operations Division chief, the hawkish Tanaka Shin'ichi, were willing to acknowledge Konoe's move as 'one last effort', since 'if Roosevelt misinterprets our Empire's true intentions and persists in pursuing the same old policies, no objections can possibly be raised to prevent our confronting this with resolute determination to join battle with the United States'. Likely failure, in other words, would legitimate war. And there was another advantage: 'We can't say that Konoe can't go to the United States. We figure it's 80 percent certain that his trip will end up a failure, but even if he does fail we'll have pinned the Prime Minister down about not resigning.' The manoeuvre was likely to bring about, then, the change in political leadership in Japan that many in the military were already thinking was long overdue. Sugiyama and Tanaka nevertheless struck a note of caution. Pinning the slippery Konoe down 'might be like trying to nail jelly to a wall'.19\n\nThe Japanese ambassador in Washington, Nomura Kichisaburo\u2013a tall, good-natured, one-eyed, retired admiral with limited command of English, much given to bowing, and relatively pro-American in his views\u2013was instructed on 7 August to seek the summit between Konoe and Roosevelt.20 The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, however, fed by MAGIC digests of Japanese intelligence intercepts, reacted coolly. The move into southern Indochina had confirmed his assumptions. 'Nothing will stop them except force,' he had said on 2 August.21 He told Nomura bluntly six days later: 'We can begin consultations only when Japan stops using force.' He showed scant interest in the idea of a summit meeting, remarking that he had little confidence in putting it to Roosevelt without evidence of a change in Japanese policy.22\n\nMeanwhile, Roosevelt was preoccupied with another summit meeting\u2013one that was taking place. Between 9 and 12 August 1941 he was engaged in his high-level talks with Winston Churchill, at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. To the western powers, the reaffirmation of the commitment to freedom, peace, economic liberalism and rejection of force in international affairs enunciated in the Atlantic Charter signed at the end of their historic conference was a powerful declaration of noble principles. But from a Japanese perspective, the joint statement of Roosevelt and Churchill looked quite different. Its very principles seemed threatening. As Tokyo's leading newspaper, Asahi, reported, they seemed simply to restate the determination of the western powers to maintain 'a system of world domination on the basis of Anglo-American world views'.23 Only submission by Japan to this aim, the conclusion was drawn, would avoid war. The augurs, both in Tokyo and in Washington, for the sort of concessions capable of heading off war that might be made in a Konoe\u2013Roosevelt summit were not promising.\n\nOn the American cruiser Augusta, during their talks in Placentia Bay, Churchill had urged Roosevelt to take a tough line with the Japanese. Roosevelt was, however, keener to play for time. He had no illusions about Japanese intentions, since the Americans had been reading their intelligence signals for months. But deferring the outbreak of hostilities even for a few weeks would help American military preparations, and would assist the British, so he argued, to build up defences around Singapore. 'I think I can baby them along for three months,' he told Churchill.24\n\nWhen he met Nomura on 17 August, on his return from Placentia Bay, Roosevelt handed him a warning (drawn up during his meeting with Churchill, and based on the latter's draft) that further Japanese advances in the south-west Pacific would prompt American countermeasures, perhaps leading to war. But, retreating from the hard line he appeared to have offered Churchill, the President then gave the Japanese ambassador a second, more conciliatory note. If Japan were to suspend her expansionism and 'embark upon a peaceful program for the Pacific', he would be ready to reopen conversations with Japan. He suggested a meeting in mid-October in Juneau, Alaska. Nomura was sure that Roosevelt was in earnest. 'A reply should be made before this opportunity is lost,' he cabled Tokyo. His government should 'decide on this matter urgently'.25\n\nThe American ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph C. Grew, highly experienced in Japanese affairs and attuned to their ways of thinking, still firmly believed that skilful diplomacy could find a way out of the impasse. When told of the proposed summit between Roosevelt and Konoe by the Japanese Foreign Minister, Toyoda, on 18 August, he immediately sent a message to Washington, urging 'with all the force at his command, for the sake of avoiding the obviously growing possibility of an utterly futile war between Japan and the United States, that this Japanese proposal not be turned aside without very prayerful consideration'. He was sure, he added in subsequent dispatches, that the Japanese government was ready to make far-reaching concessions. He advised not an immediate attempt to produce a general plan for the reconstruction of the Far East, but a step-by-step relaxation of American sanctions to match actions on Japan's side to implement its proposed commitments.26\n\nThe Japanese response to Roosevelt's warning and accompanying note\u2013a cordial message from Konoe and formal reply\u2013was agreed by the Liaison Conference on 26 August.27 Nomura handed them both to the American President two days later.28 In a personal message, couched in terms of goodwill and regret for past misunderstandings, Konoe urged a meeting as soon as possible, preferably in Hawaii, to 'explore whether it is possible to save the situation'. Discussion of the problems in the Pacific should be broadly framed. Detail could be worked out later by officials. The formal note stressed that Japanese actions had been necessary for national self-defence and underlined the threat posed by American countermeasures. But it was also conciliatory in tone. Japan was prepared, it went on, to remove her troops from Indochina as soon as a just peace could be established in east Asia. There was no intention to advance into neighbouring countries, nor to attack the Soviet Union. 'In a word,' it declared, 'the Japanese Government has no intention of using, without provocation, military force against any neighbouring nation.'29\n\nRoosevelt was suitably cordial, even affable, when he received Nomura. He looked forward, he said, to three or four days with Prince Konoe. He was pleased to learn that the Prime Minister spoke good English. He again suggested Juneau as the venue. But he proposed no date. In truth, he was still 'babying' Japan along. Secretary of State Hull in any case poured cold water on hopes of a summit when he met Nomura later that evening. Influenced less by Ambassador Grew than by the head of the State Department's Division of Far Eastern Affairs, the hawkish Stanley K. Hornbeck, and even more so by MAGIC intercepts, Hull was duly mistrustful of a summit without a precise, preformed agenda. 'It seemed to us that Japan was striving to push us into a conference from which general statements would issue,' he wrote later, 'and Japan could then interpret and apply these statements to suit her own purposes,' even citing the President's endorsement. 'It was difficult to believe that the Konoye [Konoe] Government would dare to agree to proposals we could accept,' he added. 'A substantial opposition existed in Japan to any efforts to improve relations with the United States.'30\n\nThis opposition had meanwhile been active in preparing its own ground. It comprised, in the main, differing factions, each with its own agenda, in both the army and navy, especially among middle-echelon officers. Since the opposition, whatever its factional differences, could always fall back upon the immutability of Japanese expansionist aims and the need to ensure that the sacrifices in the 'China Incident' had not been in vain, it always had good chances of blocking any initiative that posited meaningful concessions. In the first week of September, the counter-position to Konoe's proposals for a summit with Roosevelt was finalized, then confirmed as national policy in the presence of the Emperor. It amounted to a decision that Japan would go to war if agreement could not be reached with the United States within an extremely tight time frame\u2013less than six weeks.\n\nII\n\nAlready by 16 August, the day before Roosevelt and Nomura spoke in Washington of a possible summit between the President and Prince Konoe, the bureau and division chiefs of the army's and navy's planning staff were meeting in Tokyo to discuss a proposed 'Plan for Carrying out the Empire's Policies'. The essence of the 'Plan', put forward by the navy, was that Japan should both prepare for war and at the same time conduct diplomacy. This amounted to a compromise. The navy believed a decision for war could follow mobilization; the army wanted it the other way round. But in the compromise, diplomacy was only given the briefest of chances. The countdown to hostilities was already stipulated. The navy had told the army the previous day that it would like an agreement between the two services on operations to be reached by 20 September, and war preparations to be concluded by 15 October. Mid-October was the envisaged diplomacy deadline. If agreement could not be reached by then, Japan would exercise force. Drafts of the 'Plan' were fine-tuned in almost daily meetings between army and navy staff over the next two weeks. Lengthy deliberations over minor wording amendments reflected the nuances of different factions and interests. But nothing of substance was altered. The fundamentals were not in dispute. By 30 August, the document was finalized and agreed as 'Essentials for Carrying out the Empire's Policies'.31 The critical stipulation was: 'In the event that by early October there is still no prospect of obtaining our demands through diplomatic negotiations, we shall immediately resolve to go to war with the United States (Britain, Holland).'32\n\nThe demands offered little prospect of diplomatic success. The United States and Great Britain should cease giving military and economic aid to Chiang Kai-shek; they should not extend their military presence in the Far East; and they should provide Japan with necessary economic resources. In return, Japan would agree not to advance from Indochina into neighbouring areas, apart from China, would withdraw from Indochina once a just peace in the Far East had been established, and was prepared to guarantee the neutrality of the Philippines.33 In fact, on the day before the Liaison Conference on 3 September, called to discuss the 'Essentials', Sugiyama, the army's chief of staff, sent Konoe a warning shot across the bow, in case he showed any sign of weakening. There could be no wavering, Sugiyama emphasized, on the three fundamental principles: the alliance with the Axis powers, the attainment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and the stationing of troops in China.34 These formed the basis of army\u2013navy understanding. Without support from the military, no civilian government could survive. But with such inflexible fundamentals of policy upheld by the military (and with much broader acceptance both among the elites and in public opinion), no diplomatic move stood much chance of success. Konoe was now in a bind partly of his own making. He could not back down from a commitment to the basic principles which he himself had been instrumental in establishing since the beginning of the war in China. But without a weakening of those principles, he had little or nothing to offer Roosevelt in the summit that he was still intent on promoting.\n\nKonoe's heavily compromised position was probably the main reason\u2013alongside his ingrained weakness and supine nature\u2013why he raised no objections at the seven-hour-long Liaison Conference on 3 September, when the 'Essentials for Carrying Out the Empire's Policies' were deliberated, then adopted. The other main proponent of a diplomatic settlement present at the meeting, the Foreign Minister, Toyoda, was equally compliant. The tone of the meeting was set by the bellicose chiefs of staff, Nagano and Sugiyama. It was plain that, while both were prepared to tolerate a short period of diplomatic soundings, their main concern was urgent preparation for the war that was judged to be highly likely. Neither was prepared to contemplate any loss of time in mobilization. War, if it were to come\u2013and both thought it well-nigh inevitable\u2013had to come soon. 'Although I am confident that at the present time we have a chance to win a war,' stated Nagano, 'I fear this opportunity will disappear with the passage of time.' His prognosis was one that should have given rise to the gravest doubts about the wisdom of his proposed course of action. He hoped for a quick showdown in a decisive battle with the enemy in Japanese waters. That would not in itself end the war. But it might give Japan the resources to fight a long war. 'If, on the contrary,' Nagano frankly pointed out, 'we get into a long war without a decisive battle, we will be in difficulty, especially since our supply of resources will become depleted. If we cannot obtain these resources, it will not be possible to carry on a long war.' His conclusion was that the armed forces had no alternative 'but to push forward'. Sugiyama concurred. The target date for war preparations could be no later than the last ten days of October. Diplomatic objectives must be attained within the first ten days of the month. 'Failing this,' he said, 'we must push forward. We cannot let things be dragged out.' The main reason he gave for this was the ability to be able to act in the north the following spring\u2013an army, though not a navy, priority.\n\nThe remainder of the Conference was largely spent in discussion of wording amendments to the proposed 'Essentials'. Strikingly, however, there was no rooted objection. Though long, the meeting was smooth. The crucial document, setting a timetable for a decision on war, was accepted without serious demur. Even more remarkable was that Nagano's prognosis\u2013imprecise, highly speculative and not altogether encouraging as it was\u2013did not encounter serious questioning, let alone criticism. Even the navy's own planners thought the odds would run strongly against Japan if the war were protracted, which was likely to be the case. Nagano was aware of this thinking. But his own inability to offer more than a determination to go to war resting upon lack of a perceived alternative and reliance on good luck drew no resistance from Konoe, Toyoda or the rest of the Liaison Conference.35\n\nThe vital document, advocating a policy committing Japan to war, was rubber-stamped by the Cabinet late the next day. The last, and most formal, stage of adoption was to present it to the Imperial Conference, sitting in the Emperor's presence, on 6 September. Once that had taken place, it would be enshrined as national policy and, sealed with the Emperor's imprimatur, as good as impossible to change.\n\nThe evening before, Konoe went to the palace to brief the Emperor formally on the 'Essentials for Carrying out the Empire's Policies' (though Hirohito was, as usual, well abreast of developments and recognized that he would probably soon be called upon to make 'a truly grave decision').36 The Emperor was alarmed at what the document endorsed by the Liaison Conference implied. He thought it gave precedence to war over diplomacy, and wanted Konoe to alter the highly dangerous October deadline imposed on negotiations. The Prime Minister could offer only the consolation that he would do his utmost to succeed in the negotiations, but said it was difficult to amend a decision taken by the Liaison Conference. He suggested the Emperor question the chiefs of staff.37\n\nA little later, Nagano and Sugiyama appeared at the palace, with Konoe in attendance. Hirohito asked about the probability of victory in the event of war with the United States. When Sugiyama replied that victory was probable within three months, the Emperor became angry\u2013a most rare occurrence. 'At the time of the China Incident, the army told me that we could achieve peace immediately after dealing them one blow with three divisions,' Hirohito objected, adding: 'Sugiyama, you were Army Minister at that time.' Sugiyama answered lamely that China was a vast area, and Japan had encountered unexpected difficulties. 'Isn't the Pacific Ocean even more vast?' the Emperor retorted. He reminded his chief of staff of his warnings at the time, then asked directly: 'Sugiyama, are you lying to me?' Nagano intervened to save his colleague's embarrassment. He agreed that victory could not be totally guaranteed. This was the case in all conflicts. He then presented a medical analogy. If a doctor says there is a 70 per cent chance of saving a sick patient by an operation, but that not operating would mean certain death, then surgery would surely be chosen. 'And if, after the surgery, the patient dies, one must say that was meant to be. This indeed', he claimed, with dubious logic, 'is the situation we face today...If we waste time, let the days pass, and are forced to fight after it is too late to fight, then we won't be able to do a thing about it.' It was a strange argument. But it seemed to calm the Emperor. Konoe asked whether he should change the agenda for the next day's Imperial Conference. The Emperor replied: 'There is no need to change anything.'38\n\nCould the Emperor at this crucial juncture have done other than resignedly accept that which he had just fundamentally questioned? Did he have a choice? Could he have opted to give his complete backing to diplomacy and rejected the countdown to a decision for war? One counsellor at least thought other options were available to him. He was advised by Shigemitsu Mamoru, former ambassador to Great Britain, that Japan could best retain her status as a great power and influence postwar politics by staying out of the European conflict and re-examining her own current policies.39 In plain terms, this implied backing away from an alliance with the Axis powers and making concessions on China and south-east Asia sufficient to impress the Americans in negotiations. But substantial concessions were opposed by most of the power-elite, while without them the oil-clock would continue running down. In any case, the Emperor's power was more limited in practice than it was in theory. Constitutionally, the Emperor still held executive power. In theory, the armed forces acted in accordance with his will. And it was certainly true that the leaders of government as well as the armed forces felt a bond of honour through obedience to the Emperor. But, quite apart from Hirohito's less than forceful personality, to try to exercise executive power by overriding a decision reached in a Liaison Conference by the army and navy High Command in combination with the leadership of the civil government would have been to take a great risk with the standing of the imperial throne. In practice, it was unthinkable. Hirohito certainly preferred peace to the dangers of war with America. But he had inwardly as well as externally favoured the steps in the quest for Japan's power and glory that had placed the country in its present plight. He could not order an unwilling military to retreat from a stance which had become associated in the eyes of most of the general public, as well as major sections of the elites, with Japan's national honour. To have attempted conflict with the military leadership in those circumstances would conceivably have been to put the position of the monarchy itself in jeopardy.\n\nTwenty minutes before the beginning of the Imperial Conference, scheduled for 10 o'clock on the morning of 6 September, Hirohito sent for his chief counsellor, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Kido Koichi, and told him that he wanted to raise some questions at the meeting. This was quite contrary to convention. The Emperor's traditional role was to sit silently, while his Privy Council President, Hara Yoshimichi, posed questions on his behalf to ministers and armed forces' leaders. Kido advised him that the tradition should be upheld on this occasion, too, but that it would be fitting for the Emperor to give a warning at the end of the meeting to encourage active cooperation in the pursuit of success in the forthcoming negotiations.40\n\nA momentous Imperial Conference began with a statement by the Prime Minister, Prince Konoe, on the increasingly strained international situation.41 A united front of the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands stood opposed to the Empire. The Soviet Union might well join them. If this situation continued, over time Japan would be unable to sustain her national power. Konoe laid the stress on diplomatic measures to prevent the disaster of war. But should they fail within a specified time, he said, 'I believe we cannot help but take the ultimate step in order to defend ourselves'. It was scarcely a ringing endorsement of the overriding need (which Konoe had privately expressed) to make significant sacrifices for the greater good of peace.\n\nNagano, the navy's chief of staff, followed. He rehearsed the same arguments he had advanced at the Liaison Conference three days earlier. The key factor was time. Delay would reduce Japan 'to a crippled condition'. He pointed out that oil supplies 'are dwindling day by day. This will cause a gradual weakening of our national defence, and lead to a situation in which, if we maintain the status quo, the capacity of our Empire to act will be reduced in the days to come,' while American and British military preparedness was being strengthened. As at the Liaison Conference, his prognosis in the event of war was based upon a best-case scenario. If Japan could swiftly defeat American and British naval forces 'in the areas of the ocean we have in mind' (meaning in the Far East), and if, in a likely prolonged war, strategic areas and raw materials could be obtained to make Japan's position impregnable, then there was a good chance of victory. Even then the outcome would depend upon overall national power and unforeseeable developments in the world situation. But\u2013this was the gist of his statement\u2013Japan's best opportunity lay in the immediate future. She could not afford to wait. Diplomacy must be given its chance. However, stringent time limits had to be set. And results must be obtained which would mean that Japan was not to be compelled to fight at a later date\u2013and in more disadvantageous circumstances. It was a worrying assessment, an irrational one for a nation likely to embark upon a major war against a country with overwhelming advantages in strength and resources. The line of argument contained obvious flaws, weaknesses and untested assumptions. But no serious scrutiny followed.\n\nNor was there any rigorous interrogation of Sugiyama, the army chief of staff, who began by expressing his complete agreement with Nagano's statement. Sugiyama outlined the pressure of time which had determined late October as the completion date of war preparations. He accepted, of course, the need to exhaust all diplomatic measures, but it was obvious that they were for him of secondary importance. The main concern was to be ready for war in the near future. He added\u2013his own optimistic prognosis\u2013that 'if we could take advantage of the winter season and quickly finish our military operations in the South, I believe we would be in a position to deal with any changes in the Northern situation that might take place next spring or thereafter'. (This rested on the army's highly optimistic estimation, prepared for the Imperial Conference: 'It is virtually certain that Germany will sweep through the greater part of Soviet Europe within the year and that the Stalin regime will flee east of the Urals...It is clear that the Stalin regime, having lost Soviet Europe, will weaken with the passage of time and lose its capacity to prosecute the war.'42)\n\nAfter Toyoda had provided a lengthy description of diplomatic dealings with the United States since the spring, the director of the Planning Board, General Suzuki Teiichi, addressed the issue of material resources. As a result of the economic embargo by the western powers, 'our Empire's national power is declining day by day', he reported. 'Our liquid fuel stockpile, which is the most important, will reach bottom by June or July of next year, even if we impose strict wartime controls on the civilian demand.' His conclusion was obvious: 'it is vitally important for the survival of our Empire that we make up our minds to establish and stabilise a firm economic base.' That meant military action.\n\nThe President of the Privy Council, Hara, now took the opportunity to pose questions on behalf of the Emperor. In contrast to the military leaders, he placed the emphasis squarely upon diplomacy. Conventional efforts would not suffice. Every possible means had to be tried. He supported Konoe's initiative to meet President Roosevelt. He accepted that military preparations had to be made for the eventuality that diplomacy ultimately failed. But he was troubled by the draft of the 'Essentials for Carrying out the Empire's Policies' presented to the Conference. It implied a primacy given to war, not diplomacy. The Navy Minister, Oikawa, tried to assuage him. There was no priority for war. This would be a last resort only when and if the most serious diplomatic effort had failed. Hara seemed contented. A decision for war, should Konoe's efforts fail, would, he took it, be subject to careful deliberation. As long as diplomatic negotiations were carried out and taken as far as possible, he was satisfied. But before the proposal facing the Conference received the Imperial Assent, Hara asked for full support to be placed behind Konoe's forthcoming visit to the United States and in avoiding 'the worst possible situation between Japan and the United States'. At this point, there was an embarrassing silence. Then something extraordinary occurred. The Emperor himself, in his squeaky high-pitched voice, asked: 'Why don't you answer?' After a moment or two, Oikawa took it upon himself to utter that, although war preparations would be started, every effort to negotiate would be undertaken. There was a further awkward silence. Neither Nagano nor Sugiyama commented. Then the Emperor spoke again. 'Why doesn't the High Command answer?' At this point Hirohito took out of his pocket a piece of paper and read out a short\u2013and delphic\u2013reflection composed by his grandfather, Emperor Meiji, at the beginning of the war with Russia in 1904:\n\nAcross the four seas\n\nAll are brothers.\n\nIn such a world,\n\nWhy do the waves rage,\n\nThe winds roar?\n\nHe said he frequently read the composition to remind him of Emperor Meiji's 'peace-loving spirit'.43 Nagano and Sugiyama, taken aback, rose apologetically in turn to underline their agreement with Hara's emphasis on the vital importance of peace negotiations as a priority. With that, the unusual and tense Imperial Conference drew to a close.\n\nThe Emperor's extraordinary intervention, and the evident disagreements over the relative weighting of diplomatic negotiations and military preparations, could not conceal the enormous significance of what had just received the Imperial Assent and, therefore, become national policy: that Japan was now virtually committed to war. If, within a matter of a mere few weeks, diplomatic negotiations\u2013not yet even scheduled, and foreseen as having only scant chances of success\u2013turned out to be predictably unfavourable, a decision for war would be confirmed. For all its drama, at the Imperial Conference, as at the Liaison Conference that had preceded it, the lack of fundamental opposition to this most probable, and highly fateful, development was striking. The compromise reached between those favouring early military action, mainly the armed services leaders, and those stressing the urgency of diplomacy was in essence a hollow one. While the military leaders forcefully advanced their case, paying little more than lip-service to diplomacy, the supporters of negotiations were weak, defensive and willing to accept the ultimate rationale of war before the winter against the United States. Moreover, no voice was raised to challenge the military logic, the limitations of Japanese mate\n\n\u00b4riel and manpower in a long war, or the very inflexibility of the negotiating position as regards China or the southern advance to build the 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'. Though unease at the worrying prospect of war was manifest, and though there were plainly disagreements within Japan's ruling elites, there was no division between 'doves' and 'hawks'. The dividing line fell rather between those with cold feet and the fatalists.\n\nThe latter, prominent among the military, took the view that war, whatever its outcome, was inevitable. The thinking was reflected in an answer prepared by the army General Staff for possible use at the Imperial Conference. To the question whether war with Britain and the United States was unavoidable, the prepared answer stated:\n\nThe construction of a New Order in East Asia, centring on the Empire's disposition of the China Incident, is unshakeable national policy. However, United States policy towards Japan rests on a status quo world view that would obstruct the Empire's rise and expansion in East Asia in order to dominate the world and defend democracy. The policy of Japan is in fundamental contradiction to this. Collisions between the two will finally develop into war after periods of tension and relaxation. This may be said to have the nature of historical inevitability. So long as the United States does not alter its policies towards Japan, the realities of the situation will reduce the Empire to the point of no return where it cannot help but resort to war as the final means of self-preservation and self-defence. If for the sake of a temporary peace we were now to yield one step to the United States by a partial retreat from state policy, the strengthening of America's military position will lead to its demanding further retreats of ten steps then a hundred. Ultimately, the Empire will wind up having to do whatever the United States wants it to do.44\n\nThis, rather than the lukewarm underwriting of Konoe's peace manoeuvres, represented the true face of thinking, not just of the army, but of the navy as well. It amounted to a fatalistic acceptance that Japan could only break free of dependence upon America by a military gamble that might well end in disaster. Given the dominance of such thinking in the Japanese elite, the chances of avoiding war were now slim indeed.\n\nIII\n\nLosing no time once the Imperial Conference was over, Konoe left for an unofficial\u2013and highly secret\u2013meeting with the American ambassador, Joseph Grew, at the residence of Count Bunkichi Ito, head of one of Japan's great noble families. The only other persons present were the Prime Minister's private secretary, Ushiba Tomohiko, the United States embassy counsellor, Eugene H. Dooman (who had been born in Japan and had a deep knowledge of the country he had lived in for twenty-three years), and Konoe's mistress. Konoe had managed to reach her by telephone while she was at the hairdressers and told her to be ready. A car would soon pick her up to take her to the secret rendezvous. With the servants dismissed for the evening to maintain absolute secrecy, her job was to look after the catering arrangements. She was introduced as the 'daughter of the house'. With Ushiba and Dooman translating, Konoe and Grew talked frankly for three hours. Konoe stressed how anxious he was to have the meeting with Roosevelt, and that time was of the essence. He thought that, in direct talks with the President, he could resolve the immediate problems and prevent war. This was the absolute priority. A detailed agreement could be worked out later by officials. He acknowledged his own responsibility for the 'China Incident', the Tripartite Pact and the deterioration of relations with the United States. He was even prepared, he suggested, to accept in principle the 'Four Principles', of the inviolability of territorial sovereignty, noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries, equality of commercial opportunity and preservation of the status quo in the pacific, laid down in April by Cordell Hull as the non-negotiable basis of American policy. Konoe thought he could carry the Japanese people with him. He was aware of the risk to his life\u2013an assassination attempt by four armed nationalist fanatics only a few days later was foiled by security guards45\u2013but regarded this as unimportant in the greater purpose of saving the peace. Grew and Dooman returned convinced of Konoe's sincerity. Grew, in what he told Konoe would be 'the most important cable' of his career, exhorted Washington to approve the meeting with the President. But Cordell Hull remained deeply suspicious. And Stanley Hornbeck, his chief adviser, was as hostile as ever.46\n\nRoosevelt himself had already indicated a changed, hardened tone to Nomura on receiving the Japanese ambassador again, in Hull's presence, on 3 September, on the same date that the important Liaison Conference was taking place in Tokyo. The President this time gave Nomura no encouragement. He, like Prince Konoe, had public opinion to take into account, he said. And opinion was vehement in its demands 'that there be no changes in our policy in order to accommodate Japan'. He professed still to want a meeting with Konoe. But a summit, he pointed out, could not be undertaken without preliminary talks. There were still major differences which would have to be cleared up beforehand. Hull's 'Four Principles' were once more emphasized. Essentially, Roosevelt was stating once more that agreement was only possible if Japan bowed in advance to American demands on China and the Tripartite Pact, renouncing her claim to dominance of the 'new order' in the Far East and ending discrimination in international trade. The limited concessions, intended to pave the way for the summit, offered by Toyoda in a dispatch transmitted on 4 September before hearing the report of Nomura's meeting with Roosevelt, were scarcely sufficient to alter this basic American position.47\n\nEven so, Nomura cabled his view to Tokyo on 11 September that a significant Japanese move on China would pave the way for Konoe to meet Roosevelt. His cable smacked of increasing desperation. He proposed, by now more in hope than belief, to let the Americans know that Japan would agree to withdraw all its troops from China within two years of an end of hostilities. He thought this might provide at least the basis for discussions at a summit. Negotiations for a ceasefire and a subsequent peace conference would then take longer, he somewhat cynically calculated, so that any actual withdrawal would still be some years down the line, by which time much might have happened to alter circumstances. He asked for a firm decision on troop withdrawal.48\n\nThis was provided by the Liaison Conference on 13 September, and adopted as policy a week later. But the terms were unlikely to prove endearing to the Americans as a basis for peace negotiations. The army, angered at even the moderate watering down of Japanese demands by Toyoda on 4 September, now stiffened them again. The 'Basic Terms of Peace between Japan and China', presented to the Liaison Conference, insisted on the continued stationing of Japanese forces in northern China and Inner Mongolia for defence against Communism. Other troops would be withdrawn as soon as the 'China Incident' was settled. But this was to be brought about by merging the Chungking government of Chiang Kai-shek with the Japanese puppet regime under Wang Ching-wei in Nanking\u2013something which it was obvious the Chinese nationalists would never freely accept. China and Japan would cooperate economically. Manchukuo was, of course, to be recognized.49 The army's position was that, should these terms be rejected, Japan must be ready to go to war.50\n\nToyoda, the Foreign Minister, was reluctant to present this tougher set of demands to the Americans, certain that it would meet outright rejection. Ambassador Nomura confirmed this on 27 September when he eventually received the new 'Draft Understanding'. By this point, the armed forces were rapidly losing confidence in Toyoda, and in Konoe. The fragile compromise that had temporarily held together those factions in the elite pressing for war without delay and those hoping to stave off war through negotiations was now breaking apart. On 25 September Sugiyama and Nagano, the chiefs of staff of the army and navy, had successfully pressed for a deadline of 15 October to be set for the successful completion of negotiations with the United States. By that date, the decision for war or peace had to be taken. Konoe was shocked. He threatened to resign. But Kido reminded him that he himself had been present at the Imperial Conference on 6 September when 'early October' was accepted as the last date a decision could be taken.51 Konoe backed down. Unable to abdicate responsibility for, or change the course of, unfolding events which he thought disastrous, the Prime Minister left Tokyo and retired, wearied and depressed, to his home in the seaside resort of Kamakura.52\n\nThe predictable American reply to the Japanese terms was not long in coming. Behind the language of diplomacy, when Hull met Nomura on 2 October, stood the blunt rejection of the Japanese proposals and an unyielding restatement of American demands, which in turn were by now inflexible and completely unacceptable to Japan. Hull also indicated his doubts about the value of a meeting between Konoe and Roosevelt until Japan was prepared to alter its stance.53 China, as had been the case throughout, was the crux. War, it now seemed plain, could only be avoided if Konoe could persuade his army leadership to commit itself to troop withdrawals from China. Of that, there was not the slightest chance. Toyoda was overruled by the military representatives in the Liaison Conference on 4 October when he wanted to reply to Hull's uncompromising note. The army and navy chiefs of staff had lost patience with American delaying tactics. They wanted an end to further attempts at negotiation.54\n\nEven so, the navy was not altogether united in its stance. The Navy Minister, Oikawa\u2013a born waverer, in contrast to the Army Minister, Tojo\u2013visited Konoe at Kamakura and told him that 'we must be prepared to do nothing less than swallow whole the United States proposal', promising the navy's support and presuming that the army would also comply.55 It was wishful thinking. The hopes of Konoe and Oikawa, aligned to those of Toyoda, of overthrowing the Imperial Conference's decision of 6 September were doomed to failure. Oikawa could not even rely upon the united backing of the navy, let alone of the army. The chief of staff, Nagano, was the most forthright of those who insisted on an early decision, and a commitment to the policy that war would follow if negotiations had not been brought to a successful conclusion\u2013meaning acceptance of Japanese demands\u2013by mid-October. Between Oikawa and Nagano, other voices could be heard from navy leaders, worrying about the consequences of a war with the United States, advising caution, implying that the army would have to soften its stance if the navy opted for continued negotiation, but ultimately ambiguous and refusing to speak forcefully and plainly for peace rather than war. The head of the navy's Operations Division, Fukudome Shigeru, summed up the concerns of those whose feet were turning cold when he said on 6 October, at a meeting of army and navy planning chiefs: 'I have no confidence in South Seas operations. As far as losses of ships are concerned, 1.4 million tons will be sunk in the first year of the war. The results of the new war games conducted by the Combined Fleet are that there will be no ships for civilian requirements in the third year of the war. I have no confidence.'56 But such serious doubts stemming from the centre of naval planning operations remained without practical consequences. The divisions remained. And it was Oikawa rather than Nagano who found himself increasingly isolated within the navy leadership.\n\nThe army, meanwhile, was far more united. Its stance was more unequivocal than that of the navy. Negotiations, it was adjudged, stood no chance of success (though they could be continued until 15 October). Most pointedly, it was stated that no changes, even minor ones in wording, were to be made on the issue of the stationing of troops in China. Nevertheless, Fukudome's statement had worried army leaders. If it were true, they agreed that the Army and Navy Ministers and chiefs of staff would have to resign for having misled the Imperial Conference into sanctioning a war which Japan had no chance of winning. The claim would have to be clarified. But when Tojo and Oikawa met on the morning of 7 October, incisiveness clashed with ambiguity. Tojo was emphatic that to accept Hull's 'Four Principles' was to return to the position of the 1920s, under the Nine Power Treaty, and to Japan's state of powerlessness before the 'Manchurian Incident'. This would upturn the whole of Japanese policy since 1931, and totally undermine the aim of the 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'. His other point of no compromise was the stationing of troops. This was the 'absolute minimum demand'. To withdraw troops from northern China and Mongolia would threaten the existence of Manchukuo. Once again, it would mean a return to the country's weakness and exposure to American dominance. All Oikawa could offer as a parry to such a clear and unbending position was that negotiations should continue, but that he did not want to alter the Imperial Conference decision, nor to object to a resolution for war.57\n\nWith the clock ticking towards the deadline of 15 October, and with unity and clarity on the question of peace or war still missing, Konoe summoned a meeting of the crucial five government ministers (the Foreign, Army and Navy Ministers, and General Suzuki of the Cabinet Planning Board, besides himself) to take place at his Ogikubo residence on the outskirts of Tokyo on Sunday, 12 October. The meeting gave Konoe few grounds for celebrations on his fiftieth birthday. Tojo declared at the outset in his usual blunt manner that negotiations held out no promise. Oikawa could have taken the opportunity to declare the navy's unwillingness to risk a war that, as Fukudome had stated some days earlier, some of its leading planners feared could not be won. A clear stance from the navy might, even at this juncture, have shifted the odds in favour of peace, not war. Instead, Oikawa simply restated the dilemma of negotiations or military action. He added, however, that if the route of negotiations were chosen, this would mean a decision 'not to resort to war for perhaps several years', a line that ran counter to the policy adopted at the Imperial Conference on 6 September. Oikawa then baulked at advancing any recommendation, leaving the decision to the Prime Minister. Konoe asked how the Foreign Minister, Toyoda, estimated the prospects of negotiations. Put on the spot, Toyoda equivocated. He could not say with confidence that they would prove successful. It would depend upon what the other side had to say. Tojo pounced on the truthful, but in the context utterly feeble, answer. 'Such a wobbly position will put me in a bind. I won't be able to persuade the High Command to go along,' the Army Minister exclaimed. 'There must be much greater grounds for confidence.' Oikawa agreed that Japan might find herself 'strung along', then ultimately sucked into war anyway. Konoe said that, of the two options, he chose diplomatic negotiations. But Tojo countered that this was simply a subjective view. He could not convince the High Command on that basis alone. The meeting ended inconclusively. But the army's stance was now dominant. It had not been supported outright at the meeting. But nor had any of the other four present directly rejected Tojo's position.58 The crisis of Konoe's government was deepening.\n\nIt plunged to the point of no return on 14 October. Konoe had arranged to meet Tojo for a private discussion just prior to the Cabinet meeting that day. All this meeting did was to reveal how wide the gulf between the two men had become. Konoe said he was sure that to open negotiations with a chance of rescuing peace hinged upon the issue of Japanese troops in China. He suggested to Tojo that Japan 'ought to give in for a time', accede to 'the formality of withdrawing troops and save ourselves from the crisis of a Japanese-American war'. It was necessary, he stated, 'to end the China Incident'. The Army Minister was appalled at what he saw as a breach of trust by Konoe, now retreating from a formal agreement at the Imperial Conference. He rejected the suggestion out of hand. 'If at this time we yield to the United States,' Konoe recalled Tojo saying, 'she will take steps that are more and more high-handed, and will probably find no place to stop. The problem of withdrawing troops is one, you say, of forgetting the honour and of seizing the fruits, but, to this, I find it difficult to agree from the point of view of maintaining the fighting spirit of the Army.' Konoe replied that American superiority in material resources meant Japan had to proceed with great caution. Tojo's disdain for Konoe now meant reason momentarily deserted him. 'There are times when we must have the courage to do extraordinary things\u2013like jumping, with eyes closed, off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple' (a Buddhist shrine in Kyoto, on the edge of a cliff), he snapped. The difference between the Prime Minister and him, Tojo stated, ending his extraordinary outburst, could be put down to personality. The implication was clear. Bolder leadership than that which Konoe could provide was necessary at this critical juncture.59\n\nTojo also spoke with great passion at the Cabinet meeting that followed. 'To submit to the contentions of the United States in their entirety', he thundered, 'will annihilate the gains from the China Incident and by extension threaten the existence of Manchukuo, even affecting Japanese rule over Korea and Taiwan.' The obvious intimation was that Japan would be cast back to powerlessness such as she had not experienced since before the time of the great Emperor Meiji. Tojo pointed to the millions of Japanese troops who had fought against hardship, the hundreds of thousands of war casualties, the billions spent on the struggle for the future of the nation. 'Of course, if we want to go back to the little Japan of pre-Manchurian Incident days, there's nothing else to be said, is there?' he asked, rhetorically. There was nothing for it. Japan simply had to insist upon the stationing of troops in China, the heart of her demands. To concede now to the United States would be to endanger that future. It would mean a foreign policy amounting merely to submission.60 The Cabinet listened in silence, cowed by the Army Minister's fervour, as he reminded them that they remained committed to the policy agreed by the Imperial Conference of 6 September: if no diplomatic settlement had been agreed by early October, then it would be war. Military preparations had been proceeding in accordance with that decision. They could now only be stopped by agreement with the United States on the issue of troops in China.61 The logic was plain. Only a new Cabinet, not bound by the decision of 6 September, could reverse the momentum for war.\n\nKonoe understood the logic. He arrived for dinner with two colleagues that evening dressed in a traditional Japanese gown to say that he was there only to enjoy their hospitality. Their planned discussion was no longer necessary. His Cabinet was about to fall.62 In the early evening of 16 October, Konoe went to the palace and presented his resignation.\n\nIn his letter to the Emperor, Konoe expressed his continued belief that 'given time, the possibility of reaching an agreement with the United States is not hopeless'. The crux remained the withdrawal of troops from China. As he had done in speaking to Tojo, Konoe now advised the Emperor that the issue could 'be settled if we are willing to sacrifice our honour to some extent and agree to the formula suggested by America'. He could at any rate not agree to plunging into a great war with the China Incident still unsettled, especially since he felt his grave responsibility for the unfolding of events since 1937. 'Now is the time', he wrote, 'for us to sacrifice the present for the future.' He admitted, however, that he had failed to persuade Tojo of this, and that the War Minister was adamantly of the view that Japan should 'grasp the present opportunity and get ready for war at once'. He realized, therefore, Konoe concluded, that his ideas could not prevail, and that he could not carry out his governmental responsibilities.63\n\nDespite his unyielding stance over the previous days, Tojo himself had belatedly, and somewhat surprisingly, come to see, even before Konoe had resigned, that, in the face of the navy's hesitation and uncertainty, the decision by the Imperial Conference of 6 September needed to be reexamined. Only a new government, unbound by that decision, could undertake the task. When sounded out on a possible replacement for Konoe, Tojo suggested Prince Higashikuni, an army officer and close relative of the Emperor, as the only person capable of holding together the army and navy and sustaining national unity while abandoning the time limit set for a war decision and conducting a thorough policy review. Konoe agreed, following a sleepless night, that Higashikuni would be the best choice. But, under the express advice of Kido, anxious not to risk the prestige of the imperial house in an attempt to master the crisis, Hirohito rejected the proposal. Decisive was Kido's point that a Cabinet led by a royal prince might eventually 'cause the Imperial House to become an object of public hatred'. An astonished Tojo found himself summoned to the palace and asked by the Emperor to serve as Prime Minister. Tojo's belated doubts about the course set for war, his unquestioning loyalty to the Emperor, his lack of political ambition and his ability to hold the army in check had persuaded Kido to favour him over the only other individual considered at this point, the irresolute Navy Minister, Oikawa.64 But this could not disguise the fact: the most fundamental opponent of troop withdrawals from China, the man who had taken the hardest line on negotiations and, more than any other, had shaped the current crisis on the decision for war or peace, General Tojo Hideki, was now running the Japanese government.\n\nIV\n\nTojo was a military man through and through, a career officer who had worked his way up through army officialdom. It had been his second nature to look no further than army interests. His refusal to budge on the issue of the stationing of troops in China, the potential lifeline to peace negotiations that had brought down Konoe's administration, was testimony to the rigidity of his stance in upholding the priority of army concerns. He was a man of limited vision, with an unquestioning sense of obedience and service to the Emperor. 'We're still only human, but the Emperor is divine,' he remarked. 'I shall always bow my head to His Excellency's divinity and greatness.'65 Now, called to take an office he had never in his wildest dreams imagined occupying, he was at once, and for the first time in his career, compelled to look beyond the army, to the wider interests of the nation at a time of great crisis.\n\nIronically, his appointment as Prime Minister offered a last glimmer of hope that war might be avoided. In pressing the appointment, Kido had overcome opposition in the gathering of senior statesmen\u2013the seven former heads of government, on whose judgement Hirohito relied in selecting a new Prime Minister\u2013by arguing that Tojo would not start a war if the Emperor spoke to him, and would be capable of handling negotiations with the United States.66 Tojo had left the audience with the Emperor asking for time to reflect upon the burden of responsibility now thrust upon him. The Emperor had asked him to bring about closer cooperation between the army and the navy\u2013meaning, if cryptically expressed, that the armed services should be persuaded to unite behind the push for a negotiated settlement\u2013and summoned Oikawa to tell him the same. Tojo and Oikawa were, shortly afterwards, joined by Kido, who explained the Emperor's wishes in more explicit terms. The new Cabinet, Kido indicated, should on the Emperor's orders re-examine state policy 'without being obsessed with the Imperial Conference decision of 6 September'. This was a remarkable step. Never before had the Emperor been known to order the bypassing of a decision taken in his own presence at an Imperial Conference. Tojo was being asked to 'go back to blank paper'\u2013to start, that is, with a clean sheet.67\n\nTojo assembled his Cabinet with great speed. In this, he quickly showed that he knew his own mind; he would not brook interference. He rejected Oikawa's suggestion that he be replaced as Navy Minister by Toyoda Soemu. Tojo thought this would cause trouble with the army, well aware of Toyoda's antipathy towards their leadership. Oikawa gave way, and agreed to Shimada Shigetaro, Commander-in-Chief of the Yokosuka naval station, as his replacement. Tojo also brusquely dismissed attempts by the army to influence his selection of ministers.68 Of particular importance was the position of Foreign Minister. Here, Tojo's rejection of suggestions that he bring back the stridently anti-American and pro-Axis Matsuoka was a sign of his readiness to follow the Emperor's instructions to find a way to prevent war, even at this late hour. Instead, he made Togo Shigenori, former ambassador in Berlin and Moscow, a highly experienced diplomat, his Foreign Minister. Togo accepted the nomination as long as there was a serious intention to work for successful negotiations with America. He was assured that this would be the case, and that the army would have to agree to concessions to make that possible. Tojo himself retained the Army Ministry as a lever to attempt to bend the army to his policy. He also took over home affairs, with a view to quelling possible internal unrest if a deal should be struck with the United States.69\n\nIn fact, the prospects on the American side for such a deal, at least some sort of pieced-together arrangement to prevent the headlong rush to war and buy time for some months, were not wholly extinguished. Tojo's appointment had sounded alarm bells in London and in Chungking. The British Foreign Office and Chinese nationalists alike feared an immediate move by Japan to cut off supplies to China, bringing Chiang Kai-shek's struggle to its knees. They pressed the Americans for support.70 Washington, too, viewed Tojo's appointment with foreboding. War seemed all at once much closer. At the State Department, Cordell Hull adjudged Tojo to be a 'typical Japanese officer, with a small-bore, straight-laced, one-track mind' and 'rather stupid'. He feared the worst.71 President Roosevelt was, however, also listening to advice from the Joint Army-Navy Board, reminding him that the United States navy was still not ready to take on Japan in the Pacific without seriously, perhaps fatally, undermining the support it was giving to Britain in the Atlantic, still seen as the priority.72 So all chances of staving off war were not yet fully foreclosed on either the American or the Japanese side.\n\nHowever, Tojo had been ultra-hawkish in policy direction for too long to change course convincingly at the eleventh hour. And though, in contrast to the weak and vacillating Konoe, he had the appearance of being Japan's strong man, he was no match for the military forces that he himself had helped to unleash. Despite his military background, and the retention of the position of Army Minister, he had no direct control over the operational staff of the army, let alone of the navy. Here, the personnel was unchanged. And both branches of the armed forces had gone too far down the line, wedded themselves too deeply to war preparations, to be prepared to back off now. The pressure they had exerted on Konoe, which had brought about the deadline of mid-October for the decision for war and, eventually, the fall of the Cabinet, had been predicated upon the assertion that Japan could not wait, militarily, without becoming weaker and losing advantage in the Pacific. Even though the Emperor had instructed Tojo to ignore the decision confirmed at the Imperial Conference of 6 September that had set that deadline, the premiss on which it rested could not be simply swept aside. Moreover, the Emperor's instruction had not been formally conveyed to the High Command. The chiefs of the army and navy General Staffs, Sugiyama and Nagano, and their subordinates, therefore felt no compulsion to comply with it.73 Tojo was, in other words, still in the bind that had broken Konoe. His room for manoeuvre was limited in the extreme. Either he had to bring off at breakneck speed successful negotiations to prevent war, at least temporarily, or go to war.\n\nBut negotiations meant substantial concessions. These had not been forthcoming under Konoe, and it was hard to see how they could become attainable under Tojo. Indeed, the first declaration of his Cabinet was to avow adherence to 'the unshakable national policy of the Empire'. This, the declaration went on, was 'to bring the China Incident to a successful conclusion, firmly establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and contribute to world peace'.74 But, as previous months had shown, precisely this policy had brought Japan to the brink of war. It did not offer a promising recipe for the major concessions on which peace depended.\n\nThe alternative was to follow the military logic. This meant war before the year was out. The decision, having been put back from mid-October, could not be put off indefinitely. In fact, it would have to be taken within the following couple of weeks. This was the setting for the feverish activity that took place in the first fortnight of Tojo's premiership.\n\nTojo's difficulties in dealing with the High Command began immediately. His first Cabinet meeting, on 18 October, the day of his government's formation, had before it a number of hypothetical questions about the further course of the war and the prospects of Japan attaining in the immediate future even its minimum demands through negotiations with the United States. The questions were meant to serve as the basis for a re-examination of the decision of 6 September.75 The response of the High Command when it received a copy of the questions, however, was that 'there really is no room for re-examination'. Nagano, the navy's chief of staff, put it bluntly: 'The decision of the Imperial Conference is not open to change.'76 His subordinates argued forcefully that a diplomatic solution at this stage could only come about through a complete volte-face, amounting 'to throwing in our lot with the Anglo-American camp' and incurring 'the contempt of the Chinese and a great loss of national prestige'.77 The army's General Staff also adopted a truculent stance. There was outright refusal to contemplate withdrawal of troops from China, in full recognition that this undermined any hope of successful negotiations. Resistance to the notion of re-examination of state policy even led to talk of overthrowing the new Cabinet no sooner than it had been formed. The unchanged stance of the High Command caused Tojo insuperable difficulties from the outset. He was unsure how to act. He told his new Navy Minister, Shimada, that he was 'truly in the dark about what to do'.78\n\nThe Liaison Conference, meeting every day (apart from 26 October) for over a week between 23 October and 1 November in almost permanent crisis session, faced the same quandary. The hypothetical questions on the likely course of the war and prospects for negotiations provided the framework for discussions which, despite pressure from Nagano and Sugiyama for a quick decision, were protracted and often contorted. A central issue was Japan's ability to wage war if hostilities should drag on. This revolved largely around availability of raw materials, especially oil and steel, and her shipping capacity and shipbuilding capability. Strikingly, even at this stage the head of the Planning Board, General Suzuki Teiichi, and the newly appointed Finance Minister, Kaya Okinori, had only limited information at their disposal. Kaya complained at the inability to arrive at a 'precise judgement, rather than a statement of generalities'.79 The new Foreign Minister, Togo, later recounted his astonishment at the lack of precise statistical data necessary for informed estimates, since the High Command was unwilling to divulge operational details or troop numbers.80 Even so, such information as was available left no room for doubt: Japan presided over insufficient raw materials, shipping and shipbuilding capacity to fight for more than two years, before the overwhelmingly superior resources of the United States would inexorably begin to tell. 'We can manage somehow in 1942 and 1943,' Tojo himself remarked in relation to army allocations. 'We do not know what will happen after 1944.'81 Oil\u2013even taking into account that which could be extracted from the Dutch East Indies\u2013would only last for two and a half years. Synthetic oil production would not be in a position for three years to make good the shortfall, and even that would depend upon the availability of a million tons of steel and other large amounts of precious resources to construct the manufacturing plant. As it was, because of shortage of steel, shipbuilding capacity would fall drastically, rather than rise, by the third year of the war. The demands on state finances, meanwhile, were colossal.82 It was by any stretch of the imagination a gloomy prognosis. The military chiefs could counter the undeniable deficiencies in the long run only by pointing to the uncertainties of war, the need for clever strategy and good luck, and the necessity to maximize early advantages to prepare the ground for a longer struggle. It was planning for the best-case scenario, not preparing for the worst.\n\nThe deliberations, given the pressure of time, were painstakingly slow, much to the irritation of the chiefs of staff. At one point, it was noted that 'the Prime Minister took about thirty minutes to explain why every minute counted'.83 The question of the prospects in negotiations with the Americans was only reached on 30 October. It was recognized that there was no hope of immediate success. When possible Japanese concessions were broached, no changes of substance to what had been stipulated in early September proved acceptable, other than agreeing, with regard to commerce in China, that 'the principle of equal opportunity throughout the world' could be granted\u2013something which Nagano said would show Japan's generosity.84 A heated debate arose over the question of stationing troops in China. It had been decided that 'as a diplomatic gesture' this could be for about twenty-five years. Even that met with vehement army objections. Togo, the Foreign Minister, on the other hand, 'forgetting reality' (as the Conference notes had it), favoured withdrawing troops straight away. Eventually, Tojo\u2013who as Army Minister under Konoe had been the most adamant opponent of any concession on the stationing of troops\u2013proposed 'that a certain number of years \"close to being forever\" be mentioned'. The feeling was, however, that whatever the number of years indicated, the proposal would be rejected by the United States. When it came to assessing the impact of the American conditions, were they to be accepted, all except Togo ('who gave everyone a strange feeling' by suggesting that everything could turn out for the better) were agreed that Japan 'would become a third-rate country'.\n\nThe Prime Minister drew proceedings to a close by declaring that a decision had to be reached on 1 November, even if the meeting should continue all night. He offered three possibilities for consideration. The first was that Japan should avoid war and undergo great hardships. The second was an immediate decision for war. The third was to decide on war but carry on military preparations and diplomacy side by side.85 Though there was still some hope, expressed at the Conference, that in the last case some compromise agreement could be stitched together even at this stage, this was neither the wish nor the expectation of the military representatives.\n\nThe Liaison Conference that took place in the imperial palace on 1 November 1941\u2013the sixty-sixth since such meetings had been established in 1937\u2013was a historic one.86 It lasted for seventeen hours, amid great tension and some heated exchanges. By its conclusion, war was as good as certain.\n\nV\n\nTojo's efforts prior to the meeting to establish a consensus behind the proposal\u2013the third of the options he had put forward on 30 October\u2013to continue negotiations while completing preparations for military operations had not been successful. While the Army Ministry backed the proposal, the General Staff (directly responsible to the Emperor for matters relating to strategic planning) did not. Sugiyama was insistent: negotiations were at an end; the morale of the troops was at stake; there could be no pulling back; the only solution was war. His position was, therefore, clear\u2013and different to that of the Prime Minister. In his view, the Liaison Conference had to adopt the second of the three propositions: to determine to go to war immediately. In a late-night meeting the previous day, Tojo had managed to persuade Kaya, the Finance Minister, and Suzuki, the director of the Planning Board, to support his third option. But the Foreign Minister, Togo, stood out alone for the first proposal: avoidance of war even at the cost of lasting privation. Shimada, the new Navy Minister and also present at the late-night discussion, had his own agenda. On the eve of a momentous decision, he made his approval of war dependent upon a major increase in allocation of steel for the navy, at the expense of the army and civilian use. This issue, in fact, was to take up the first half of the Liaison Conference, lasting several hours before being resolved in favour of Shimada's demand. With that, the navy was, like the army, committed to war.87\n\nWith the steel allocation issue decided, the Conference turned to discuss the three options proposed by Tojo. The divisions left unresolved in the prior discussions now resurfaced. Deliberations first focused upon the first proposition: not to engage in war. Kaya tried several times to press the navy on the long-term chances of success. 'If we go along, as at present, without war, and three years hence the American fleet comes to attack us, will the Navy have a chance of winning or won't it?' he asked. 'Nobody knows,' was Nagano's reply. Kaya asked again whether Japan could win a war on the seas. Nagano simply reasserted his view that 'it would be easier to engage in a war now', when the foundations had been laid, than in three years' time. Kaya was not satisfied. 'If there were chances of victory in the third year of the war, it would be all right to go to war,' he stated. 'But according to Nagano's explanation, this is not certain. Moreover, I would judge that the chances of the United States making war on us are slight, so my conclusion must be that it would not be a good idea to declare war now.' Togo backed the Finance Minister. Nagano pointed to the uncertainty of the future. America would be stronger in three years' time. 'Well, then, when can we go to war and win?' retorted Kaya. It was the question Nagano had been waiting for. 'Now!' he declared, with vehemence. '[A better] time for war will not come later!' He was backed in this judgement by Suzuki. Kaya remained unconvinced, but no longer pursued the first option. With that, the proposal to pull back from war at all costs was dead. Since this proposal had been tied to the assumption that its acceptance would condemn Japan to many years of hardship and privation it was hardly an attractive recommendation. Its dismissal out of hand was more or less a formality. Kaya's stance had been largely rhetorical, since he had already committed himself at the meeting with Tojo the previous evening to the third proposition.\n\nThe Conference then turned to the second proposition, to go to war immediately. Sugiyama produced a statement of the army's position: abandonment of hope in successful negotiations; determination to begin war against the United States, Britain and the Netherlands at the beginning of December; negotiations with the United States to continue until then but only as a pretext to give Japan an early advantage in war; and, finally, strengthening of ties with Germany and Italy. Kaya and Togo objected straight away. It was a great turning point in Japan's long history. The fate of the nation was at stake. 'It's outrageous to ask us to resort to diplomatic trickery,' they said. 'We can't do it.' They pressed for a last attempt at negotiations. The blunt and forthright Tsukada Osamu, the army vice-chief of staff, a man not given to nuance and intellectual refinement, could hold back no longer. He was impatient with the calls for further negotiations. He wanted a decision on going to war immediately, which he specified as 1 December, and only then to consider the question of diplomacy. Nagano's deputy, the navy vice-chief of staff Ito Seiichi, suddenly threw a new date into the discussion. 'As far as the Navy is concerned,' he interjected, 'you can negotiate until 20 November.' Tsukada immediately rejoined: 'As for the Army, negotiations will be all right until 13 November, but no later.' The military leaders were, therefore, now introducing dates not previously discussed, and imposing an even tighter deadline on negotiations than had been envisaged up to now. Togo was appalled. 'I cannot accept deadlines or conditions if they make it unlikely that diplomacy will succeed,' he objected. 'You must obviously give up the idea of going to war.'\n\nIt was by now impossible to separate discussion of the second proposal (an immediate decision for war) from the third (simultaneous negotiations and war preparations). Tojo and his Foreign Minister both sought guarantees from the army that 'if diplomacy is successful we will give up going to war'. 'That's impossible,' Tsukada shot back. The chiefs of staff agreed that this would throw military preparations into confusion. When, in an aside to his deputy, Shimada suggested negotiations could be continued until two days before the outbreak of war, Tsukada brusquely told him: 'Please keep quiet. What you've just said won't do.' Tempers were fraying. Tojo suggested a twenty-minute break. During that time, the army and navy chiefs of operational planning, Tanaka and Fukudome, were called in. It was eventually agreed that negotiations could continue until five days prior to the outbreak of war. This was stipulated as 30 November. Under further pressure, Tsukada accepted that this meant midnight on that date. The final time for decision was now fixed. If diplomacy were successful by that date, war would be called off. But if diplomacy failed by this tight deadline, Japan would go to war.\n\nBy now it was 10 o'clock in the evening and the Conference had been in session for eleven hours. There was still the question of the negotiating terms to discuss. Before the Conference was the plan already agreed in essentials two days earlier. The plan posited a comprehensive settlement of the issues separating Japan and the United States. The only concession on the stationing of troops in China was that this was foreseen as lasting for twenty-five years. On troops in Indochina, it was agreed to evacuate them once the 'China Incident' was solved and a 'just peace' concluded in the Far East. The principle of non-discrimination in trade was accepted, if applied throughout the world (something quite unachievable in practice). On the Tripartite Pact, Japan's own discretion in deciding whether to take action was reiterated. Finally, Japan continued to reject the inclusion of the American 'Four Principles' in any formal agreement.88 The plan offered only a marginal adjustment to the position effectively already rejected by the United States. It stood, therefore, scant chance of success now. But Togo now surprised the Conference by referring to this as Plan A and introducing a Plan B which had not been the subject of any prior consultation with the military leaders. Sugiyama had, before the Conference began, sought and obtained from Tojo assurances that there would be no reduction in the terms proposed under what was now Plan A. But precisely that was now on the table as Plan B.\n\nWhat Togo had in mind\u2013and he had run the document past both the American and British ambassadors in Tokyo\u2013was simply a device to prevent war in the short term, an indication of the absolutely minimum conditions acceptable to Japan. Togo thought there was no hope for Plan A, and that to try to negotiate on that basis would put him in an impossible position. Plan B, a brief document, left China out of consideration and concentrated on the south. It aimed not at a final or comprehensive agreement\u2013impossible in the time-span\u2013but to avoid further deterioration in relations with the United States. It agreed to withdraw Japanese troops immediately to northern French Indochina and, following settlement of the 'China Incident', eventually from Indochina altogether. Meanwhile, Japan and the United States would promise not to make military advances in south-east Asia, other than in Indochina. They would cooperate in guaranteeing necessary resources from the Dutch East Indies and the United States would supply Japan with the oil she needed in the restoration of trading relations to what they had been before the freezing of assets. Finally, the United States would not hinder efforts towards peace between Japan and China.89\n\nThe military representatives were appalled at the extent of the concessions. Sugiyama and Tsukada rejected outright the withdrawal of troops from Indochina. Both were adamant: Togo should proceed only with Plan A. Nagano agreed. Tsukada, summarizing the positions adopted on the respective merits of war and negotiations by those who had expressed their views, then established his own stance, lest anyone still be in doubt of it, and in inimitable style: 'In general, the prospects if we go to war are not bright,' he began. 'We all wonder if there isn't some way to proceed peacefully.' However, he went on, 'it is not possible to maintain the status quo'. With doubtful logic he then added: 'Hence, one unavoidably reaches the conclusion that we must go to war.' At this point, Tsukada was only just slipping into gear. Having begun by accepting that Japan's chances in a war against the United States were not good, he resorted to national fatalism. 'I, Tsukada,' he declared, 'believe that war cannot be avoided. Now is the time. Even if we don't go to war now, we must do so next year, or the year after that. Now is the time. The moral spirit of Japan, the Land of the Gods, will shine on this occasion.' He moved from fatalism to best-case-scenario military optimism. 'The probability of Japan's push southward enabling Germany and Italy to defeat Britain is high, and the probability of forcing China to capitulate is even higher than it is now. Then we could even force Russia to capitulate. If we take the South, we will be able to strike a strong blow against American resources of national defence. That is, we will build an iron wall, and within it we will destroy, one by one, the enemy states in Asia; and in addition, we will defeat America and Britain.' This was the thinking of one of the highest representatives of the military elite. It was pure lunacy.\n\nTogo held his ground in the face of such irrationality. Again the debate became heated. Togo's resignation seemed possible. But this would have brought down the government. A new Cabinet might have opposed the war. This was the consideration put to the army chiefs in another brief recess. It concentrated their minds. They made minor wording amendments, particularly on restoration of trade relations, supplies of oil and noninterference in the settlement of the war with China. All were designed to toughen up the terms as far as possible without triggering a change of government. With these limited changes, they had to accept Togo's proposal, whatever their distaste. When the Conference adjourned at 1.30 a.m. on 2 November, it had determined 'in order to resolve the present critical situation, to assure [Japan's] self-preservation and self-defence, and to establish a New Order in Greater East Asia...to go to war against the United States, Britain, and Holland', with a deadline for initiating military action in early December. Only if negotiations proved successful by 'zero hour on 1 December' would military action be suspended.90\n\nTogo and Kaya had asked for a few hours to think over the implications before giving their consent. By early next afternoon they had complied. The decision of the Liaison Conference was now unanimous. The Emperor, when Tojo reported to him on the outcome of the Conference, exhorted the Prime Minister 'to do everything you possibly can to seek a negotiated settlement'. The deferential Tojo was indeed anxious to fulfil the Emperor's wishes. He put the chances of successful negotiations at fifty-fifty. His Foreign Minister, Togo, put them, more realistically, at no better than one in ten.91\n\nOn 5 November at 10.30 a.m. Japan's leaders assembled at the palace in the presence of the Emperor for the Imperial Conference\u2013which on this occasion went unreported in the press92\u2013to ratify the decision taken three days earlier. Unlike the heated atmosphere of the Liaison Conference on that occasion, this time there was no dissension. But there was a dejected and anxious mood among the participants, shared also by the Emperor.93\n\nTojo began by reminding those present of the background to the revision of the 'Essentials for Carrying out the Empire's Policies' that had been agreed on 6 September. As a result of the intervening deliberations, he said, 'we have come to the conclusion that we must now decide to go to war, set the time for military action at the beginning of December, concentrate all of our efforts on completing preparations for war, and at the same time try to break the impasse by means of diplomacy'. Togo pointed out that there was little room left for diplomatic manoeuvring. Suzuki and Kaya gave lengthy summaries of the raw materials and financial situation. Suzuki's argument was that, as regards material resources, war was preferable to 'just sitting tight and waiting for the enemy to put pressure on us'. Kaya noted that 'it will not be possible for some time for us to give much consideration to the living conditions of the people' of the occupied territories, 'and for a while we will have to pursue a so-called policy of exploitation'. The chiefs of staff then commented on war preparations. Sugiyama emphasized once more that time would work against Japan if war should be delayed.\n\nHara, the President of the Privy Council, posed questions at this point, as convention demanded, on behalf of the Emperor. Tojo responded on the issue of stationing troops in China. He again emphasized Japan's sacrifices since the war there had begun. Withdrawal of troops would leave Japan worse off than she had been prior to the war. China would be more powerful than before and 'would even attempt to rule Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa [Taiwan]', he added. 'We can expect an expansion of our country only by stationing troops. This the United States does not welcome.' Hara turned to the detail of Togo's Plans A and B. Togo admitted that he could expect no settlement from Plan A. Even Plan B would meet serious obstacles. There were only two weeks left for negotiations. 'To my regret,' Togo said, 'there is little hope for success.' Hara, too, greatly regretted this, stressing again the importance of a negotiated settlement, though he concluded that 'it is impossible, from the standpoint of our domestic political situation and of our self-preservation, to accept all of the American demands. We must hold fast to our position.' He correctly viewed the war in China as the root of the problem. But he saw no immediate way out of it. Japan could not let the current situation continue. 'If we miss the present opportunity to go to war, we will have to submit to American dictation. Therefore, I recognize that it is inevitable that we must decide to start a war against the United States.' The Emperor on this occasion remained silent. There can be no doubt that Hara was echoing Hirohito's sentiments.\n\nTojo brought the Conference to a close. He acknowledged the grave difficulties the war would bring. Again, he painted a picture of an even less attractive alternative. 'Two years from now we will have no petroleum for military use. Ships will stop moving. When I think about the strengthening of American defences in the south-west Pacific, the expansion of the American fleet, the unfinished China Incident, and so on, I see no end to difficulties. We can talk about austerity and suffering, but can our people endure such a life for a long time?' He feared Japan would become 'a third-class nation after two or three years if we just sat tight'.94\n\nThis was the ultimate reasoning for war. Peace but austerity in a world dominated by America, or war with probable defeat but upholding national honour were the alternatives.95 War was seen as preferable. As the American ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, put it, Japan would risk 'national hara-kiri' rather than 'yield to foreign pressure', adding cryptically that 'Japanese sanity cannot be measured by American standards of logic'.96 The fateful Imperial Conference ended. The decision was that, short of a diplomatic miracle, Japan would go to war. No objections were raised. The Emperor's seal of approval was given.\n\nVI\n\nEverything now hung by a frayed thread of diplomacy. As a last-ditch effort, and to help the struggling Nomura, Togo sent a highly experienced diplomat, Kurusu Saburo, to Washington as his special emissary with the mission of brokering a holding peace if at all possible. Kurusu, a tiny, dapper man, had served as ambassador to Germany and indeed signed the Tripartite Pact, but was also well acquainted with the United States through his American wife of British descent.97 The auguries were not good; Hull 'felt from the start that he was deceitful'.98 In Tokyo, Tojo now put the chances of success at 30 per cent\u2013down from 50 per cent a few days earlier. He asked Kurusu to do his best.99\n\nPreparations for war were meanwhile well advanced. An attack on Pearl Harbor had been proposed by Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku (who would eventually lead the assault) in May 1941, tested in war games in September, and adopted by Nagano on 20 October.100 This would be one prong of the overall offensive. In tandem with this daring move would proceed a widespread assault on Malaya and the Philippines, leading to an attack on the Dutch East Indies. Within four to eight months, Japan would have attained the dominance in south-east Asia and the western Pacific needed to combat the United States over a lengthier period or to force a negotiated peace to her advantage. This was the strategic aim. At the same time, it was presumed, the severance of aid to China as a consequence of the expansion would cut off the lifeblood of Chiang Kai-shek's struggle. Finally, though this was outside Japan's direct control, it was hoped that German military successes against Britain and the Soviet Union would be accompanied by the Axis powers declaring war on the United States, which would then become enfeebled through prolonged embroilment in the European conflict.101 By the beginning of November, the Japanese strategic plan had then taken something approaching its final shape. On 3 November, Yamamoto, as Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, approved the secret operations order, which began by stating that 'The Japanese Empire is expecting war to break out with the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands'.102\n\nThe Emperor, briefed daily by his chiefs of staff, was fully apprised of developments and showed an acute awareness of tactical detail. On 4 November, he attended\u2013exceptionally\u2013a lengthy meeting of the Supreme War Council at which the chiefs of staff and the Prime Minister were questioned.103 Hirohito was still wracked with doubts and worries. He feared the consequences of war. And he had concerns about important details of the military operations. These were justified. For whatever the precise military planning for the offensive, the overall strategy was flawed. Too much was left to factors which Japan could not determine. And too much was predicated upon the best-case scenario. But, whatever his inner anxieties, the Emperor confirmed the strategic war plan in the middle of the month.104\n\nThe task facing Nomura and Kurusu was daunting in the extreme. It was not helped by the fact that the secret instructions from Togo to Nomura accompanying the transmitted text of Plans A and B\u2013like all other secret traffic from Tokyo, immediately intercepted by American intelligence and decoded before being sent on to Hull\u2013were distorted through inaccurate translation in a way that enhanced suspicions of Japanese duplicity.105 Distortions or not, there was no mistaking the implication of the intercepted traffic: Japan was preparing for war in the very near future.106 In the State Department, Stanley Hornbeck was advising Hull to ignore the appeals by Ambassador Grew in Tokyo to take seriously the Japanese desire to avoid war. Knowing from the intelligence intercepts that Japan was talking peace but preparing for war did nothing to win over the hard-nosed Hornbeck, who thought Grew too ready to trust Japanese intentions. And Hornbeck, rather than Grew, had the ear of the American Secretary of State.107\n\nEven so, at first it seemed that the faint hope of those still working for a compromise settlement might be justified. By 15 November Plan A was predictably rejected.108 But the American government was still playing for time. And the administration was not speaking with one clear voice. While Hull and the State Department dampened prospects of an accommodation, the President himself appeared still open to the possibility of one. Urged by his military advisers to practise caution towards Japan and concentrate on defeating Germany, Roosevelt told Hull and a distinctly unimpressed Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, that he was contemplating proposing a six-month truce during which there would be no troop movements. The President, receiving the Japanese ambassador on 10 November, hinted at the possibility of what he called a 'modus vivendi'. When they met again a week later, this time with Kurusu (who had arrived on 10 November) in attendance, Roosevelt seemed to open up the prospect of a breakthrough in the critical issue of China. He indicated that the United States did not want to intervene or mediate in the Sino-Japanese dispute. According to Nomura's dispatch, the President coined the word 'introducer' to describe what he saw as America's role in prompting a settlement. Kurusu reported back to Tokyo that Roosevelt had 'considerable enthusiasm for a Japanese-American accord'. Nomura was so encouraged that, on his own initiative, he suggested that the United States rescind the freeze on Japanese assets in return for Japan's withdrawal of troops. This was going much too far for Tokyo. Nomura was called to order by Togo, and told to resubmit Plan B (which, Kurusu had already told Tokyo, would in its entirety probably be unacceptable).109 Nomura duly presented Plan B to Hull on 20 November. It triggered the last episode in the diplomatic drama.\n\nHull's cold reception dismayed Nomura and Kurusu. He declared that the American public saw Japan and Nazi Germany in partnership to divide up the world. The Tripartite Pact, he stated, had strengthened such feeling. Privately, Hull was utterly negative about the current proposal. He viewed it as an ultimatum, later saying its stipulations were 'of so preposterous a character that no American official could ever have dreamed of accepting them'.110\n\nWhatever his private views, Hull did not, however, dismiss Plan B outright. In fact, the American reply, in its final draft of 25 November, was surprisingly conciliatory.111 It had taken account of a pencilled note sent over a week earlier by Roosevelt to Hull, proposing a 'modus vivendi'\u2013the term he had used at the beginning of November when talking to Nomura\u2013for a six-month period. In the President's brief formulation, Japan would stop troop movements and agree not to invoke the Tripartite Pact even if America became involved in the war in Europe. The United States, for her part, would resume economic relations with Japan and broker the beginning of talks between Japan and China.112 The idea had the backing of military top brass, keen to win time to bolster defences in the Philippines. At this point it seemed as if perhaps some common ground could even now be found between the Japanese Plan B and the State Department's incorporation of the President's idea of a temporary modus vivendi.113 But by late that evening, Hull had abandoned the possibility. The Chinese had been predictably vehemently hostile to any concessions to Japan. The British, Dutch and Australian governments were only lukewarm.114 In any case, the Secretary of State's reluctance to reach an accommodation with the Japanese on anything but unyielding American terms had never been significantly diluted. It had, in fact, been reinforced by the intercept of a message from Tokyo to Nomura on 22 November, extending the deadline for negotiations from 25 to 29 November, but emphasizing that this 'deadline absolutely cannot be changed. After that things are automatically going to happen.' Any residual hope in the State Department of finding a modus vivendi was largely dispelled by the anger at this message.115\n\nWhat had specifically changed Hull's mind, however, had been the abrasive reaction to the 'modus vivendi' proposal by Chiang Kai-shek, fearful that American appeasement was about to take place at the expense of China.116 A message from Churchill to Roosevelt, backing Chiang and expressing British anxiety about a collapse of China, confirmed Hull's rejection of the 'modus vivendi'.117 'The slight prospect of Japan's agreeing to the modus vivendi', the Secretary of State concluded, 'did not warrant assuming the risks involved in proceeding with it, especially the risk of collapse of Chinese morale and resistance, and even of disintegration in China.'118 Roosevelt, on the other hand, seemed even early next morning, 26 November, to imply that the 'modus vivendi' could be rescued, saying he could assuage the Chinese. The President's mood darkened measurably only a little later, however, when he was given reports of a Japanese convoy carrying about 50,000 troops, sighted south of Taiwan. Roosevelt was incandescent at what he saw as evidence of bad faith on the part of the Japanese. He said it 'changed the whole situation'. Soon afterwards, Hull arrived at the White House, proposing that the 'modus vivendi' be abandoned. Instead, he suggested offering the Japanese a new and 'comprehensive basic proposal for a general peaceful settlement'. Roosevelt agreed.119\n\nHull's proposal, compiled without consulting either military chiefs or the representatives of Britain or other unofficial allies, was presented to Kurusu and Nomura late that same afternoon. Its ten points were an uncompromising restatement of American basic principles on which all previous attempts at negotiation had foundered. They made new demands, and were much sharper in tone than any previous American proposals.120 They summarily required Japan to withdraw her troops from China as well as Indochina, to renounce her extraterritorial rights and concessions dating back to the turn of the century, following the Boxer Rebellion, to recognize no other Chinese government but that of Chiang Kai-shek, and effectively to abrogate the Tripartite Pact. The United States in return would unfreeze Japanese assets and work towards a new trade agreement as a basis for restabilizing economic relations. Hull suggested the proposal might open the path to long-term discussions towards peace in the Pacific. This was simply disingenuous. Hull was clear in his own mind that negotiations had run into the buffers.121 'It's as far as we can go,' he told the dismayed Japanese envoys, who, recognizing the certain peremptory rejection of the proposal in Tokyo, wanted to discuss it informally with a view to tempering its demands before sending it on.122 Hull later acknowledged that 'we had no serious thought that Japan would accept our proposal'.123\n\nPredictably, the 'Ten Points' were seen, when the cable arrived in Tokyo on 27 November, as an ultimatum\u2013practically an insult.124 There was anger as well as consternation among Japan's leaders. More than all else, the demand to withdraw from the whole of China infuriated them. They took this to apply to Manchuria, too, which would indeed have meant a return to the situation before 1931, and a serious undermining of Japan's economy. Hull had, in fact, not intended this specific reading. Manchuria, for him, was not an immediate concern.125 The misunderstanding had arisen from poor, overhasty drafting. It was a significant irritant. But it probably made no appreciable difference to Japan's response.\n\nThose who had pressed for continued negotiations in the hope of avoiding war now felt the rug pulled from beneath them. For those, mainly in the army and navy General Staffs, who had urged war, the 'Hull Note' (as it later came to be called) was a heaven-sent opportunity. The army, in particular, had feared all along that Plan B might pave the way for an accommodation. They had wanted tough new conditions on oil supplies inserted into Japanese demands, which would effectively have sabotaged any possibility of the plan being accepted.126 Now the General Staff reacted with relief, even elation: 'This must be divine grace; this makes it easy for the Empire to cross the Rubicon and determine on going to war. That's great, just great!' was one response.127\n\nAmong the last pleas, based on dread at the consequences of military conflict, to continue negotiations and avoid war, even if it meant prolonged poverty and hardship for Japan, were those of a number of the 'senior statesmen', the former Prime Ministers who met Tojo and four members of his Cabinet on the morning of 29 November. But by this point even Togo conceded that negotiations had reached the end of the road. Tojo himself now spoke forcefully in favour of military action. Whatever their doubts, none of those present voiced fundamental opposition.128 Tojo recalled after the war the tenor of opinion expressed at the meeting, that 'if this war was for self-existence, then we must be prepared to wage war, even if we foresaw eventual defeat'.129\n\nThe Emperor still had his own anxieties. His brother, Prince Takamatsu, tried on 30 November to persuade him not to take the empire to war. But when Hirohito summoned his navy leaders later that day to ascertain the readiness for war, the Navy Minister, Shimada, expressed confidence in victory. Nagano told him that the navy's large task force, including six aircraft carriers, was already at sea and steaming towards Pearl Harbor. Under sealed orders, it had set sail from Hitokappu Bay in the remote southern Kurile islands at 6.00 a.m. on 26 November, and was by now part-way across the Pacific, some 1,800 nautical miles from Hawaii.130 Nagano had already revealed, with some reluctance and in a low voice, to the Liaison Conference the previous evening that 'zero hour is 8 December'. Even the Prime Minister learned this now for the first time. Surprise was of the essence. Negotiations would have to continue, but only as a cloak to conceal the impending strike.131\n\nOnly the Emperor's sanction for war remained still to be granted. Kido had told Hirohito that 'the decision this time will be enormously important. Once you grant the imperial sanction, there can be no going back. If you have even the slightest doubt, make absolutely sure until you are convinced.'132\n\nThe Imperial Conference met in the afternoon of 1 December. Nineteen leaders of the government and the military assembled before the Emperor, seated as usual on a dais in front of a gold screen at the end of the room.133 First Tojo, then\u2013at great length\u2013the Foreign Minister, Togo, rehearsed the tale of the breakdown of diplomatic negotiations with the United States. Other ministers described the readiness for war in their respective spheres. The most important statement was that of Nagano, speaking for both the navy and the army General Staffs. Preparations for military operations were complete, he said. 'We are now in a position to begin these operations, according to predetermined plans, as soon as we receive the Imperial Command to resort to force.'134 Hara began his usual questioning by remarking that, although they were dealing with a very grave subject, 'every step that could be taken has been taken', so that he had 'nothing in particular to add'.135 He ended\u2013speaking, as always, on behalf of the Emperor\u2013by stating that Japan could not tolerate the 'utterly conceited, obstinate, and disrespectful' attitude of the United States:\n\nIf we were to give in, we would give up in one stroke not only our gains in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, but also the benefits of the Manchurian Incident. This we cannot do. We are loath to compel our people to suffer even greater hardships, on top of what they have endured during the four years since the China Incident. But it is clear that the existence of our country is being threatened, that the great achievements of the Emperor Meiji would all come to nought, and that there is nothing else we can do. Therefore, [he concluded] I believe that if negotiations with the United States are hopeless, then the commencement of war, in accordance with the decision of the previous Imperial Conference, is inevitable.\n\nHis final comment was to exhort the government to look for an early settlement of what promised to be a long war, and to do everything to prevent internal unrest.136 Tojo assured him that this would be done and adjourned the meeting with expressions of loyalty to the Emperor. Sugiyama noted that 'His Majesty nodded in agreement with the statements being made, and displayed no signs of uneasiness. He seemed to be in an excellent mood, and we were filled with awe.'137 All those present bowed as the Emperor, expressionless, withdrew. The proposal for war, signed by all those present, was delivered shortly afterwards to Hirohito. After briefly reflecting on the gravity of his decision, and remarking that to accept Hull's demands would have been humiliating, the Emperor put his seal to the documents. With that, he gave his approval to war.138\n\nVII\n\nThe next day, he was fully initiated into the military plans by Sugiyama and Nagano. They explained the details of the attack on Pearl Harbor on 8 December (Japanese time, 7 December in Hawaii). Nagano explained that the day, a Sunday, was ideal since the American warships would be at anchor. He asked for the Emperor's approval. It was swiftly given. Yamamoto, in command of the Combined Fleet, was immediately informed. He telegraphed the task force at 5.30 p.m. that day: 'Commencement of hostilities set for 8 December. Carry out attack as planned.'139\n\nThe pretence of maintaining diplomatic negotiations until the very last moment, to maintain the element of military surprise, required delicate timing. A lengthy document, comprising fourteen points, was drawn up. It ended by stating that hope of cooperation with the United States had finally been lost, and that no accord could be reached even if negotiations were to continue.140 It was meant to be presented to the American government at 1.00 p.m. in Washington (7.30 a.m. in Hawaii) half an hour before the attack on Pearl Harbor began.141 This was cutting it fine\u2013in fact, too fine. Incompetence by the Japanese embassy in Washington meant the decoding of the vital message was inexcusably delayed. And the fourteenth and last point was deliberately held back as long as possible in Tokyo. This part of the text was eventually decoded only by 12.30 p.m., and a clean copy of the entire text was not ready until 1.50 p.m.142\n\nThe American administration had itself, however, been able to intercept the Japanese cable. Roosevelt received the first thirteen parts at 9.30 p.m. on 6 December, remarking: 'This means war.'143 (The President had sent a personal message to Hirohito earlier that evening, seeking the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Indochina to preserve peace in the region. But he was aware how futile the attempt was. It was duly dismissed out of hand by Tojo, without bothering to put it before the Emperor, who was said to have been annoyed by it.144) Hull, Stimson and Knox had sight of the decoded text an hour earlier. They arranged to meet next morning. They had not thought it necessary to meet earlier, or to issue special warnings to military bases to add to the earlier warnings already dispatched to American commanders across the Pacific, including Hawaii and the Philippines, that war with Japan was imminent.145 A Japanese attack was by now expected any day\u2013though no one imagined this would be on Pearl Harbor.146 The sighting on 5 December (Washington time) of three Japanese convoys off the southern tip of Indochina and heading into the Gulf of Siam suggested that the attack was likely, and in the very near future, against Malaya or Siam\u2013at any rate somewhere in south-east Asia and the south Pacific. A direct attack on American possessions was thought less likely (though when the first news of Pearl Harbor came through, one immediate response was that it was a mistake, and that the Philippines had been attacked).147\n\nBut incompetence was not confined to the Japanese embassy. The office of Admiral Stark, chief of US Naval Operations, had possession of the last part of the decoded text no later than 11.30 a.m. (Washington time; 6.00 a.m. in Hawaii) on 7 December. George Marshall, the army chief of staff, also had the decoded message by that time. He and Stark spoke twice on the telephone. They eventually decided to send out a warning. It reached the commanders in San Francisco, the Panama Canal and the Philippines by noon, Washington time. But atmospheric conditions blocked communication with Hawaii. Neither the direct scramble telephone nor naval radio communications were used. Remarkably, the message was sent instead by Western Union's commercial telegram service, which had no direct line to Honolulu. It still had not arrived in Hawaii when the Japanese attack began.148\n\nOut of a clear blue sky, the first wave of Japanese dive-bombers began their attack on the American fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor at 7.50 a.m., Hawaiian time (1.20 p.m. in Washington).149 When the attack subsided at 9.45 a.m. and the pall of smoke over the big naval base finally cleared, the mighty battleships Arizona, Oklahoma and California had been sunk, the West Virginia was going down in flames, the Nevada was aground and a further three battleships were damaged. In all, eighteen ships were sunk or damaged; 188 planes had been destroyed and a further 159 damaged. The death toll of American servicemen reached 2,403; another 1,178 were wounded.150 But, crucially, the aircraft carriers were at sea. The submarine pens also escaped the bombing. And, in fact, most of the damaged ships turned out to be repairable and later returned to action. So it was a mighty\u2013though not a knockout\u2013blow to the American war machine.\n\nNor was there any follow-up to Pearl Harbor, an indication of the barren strategic armoury of the Japanese in their attempt to inflict a decisive defeat upon the United States. Yamamoto had, in fact, foreseen this crippling limitation in a private letter written the previous January. 'Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States,' he had written, 'it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. We should have to march into Washington and sign the treaty (i.e. dictate the terms of peace) in the White House'.151\n\nEven so, Pearl Harbor had been a massive shock.152 The wider Japanese offensive had also begun. By an error in timing, the assault on the Malay peninsula had started even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Landings were soon under way as well in the Philippines. In the early hours, Singapore was bombed. Hong Kong was attacked some hours later. As news of the Japanese military successes was broadcast early in the morning of 8 December in Tokyo, bystanders in the streets applauded.153 Japan was still not officially at war. At 11 o'clock that morning, seven and a half hours since the news of the successful onslaught on Pearl Harbor had reached the imperial palace, Emperor Hirohito put his seal on the declaration of war. He was said to have been 'in a splendid mood' that day.154\n\nIn Washington, Cordell Hull received the news of Pearl Harbor from the President just after two o'clock. He was about to receive Nomura and Kurusu. A quarter of an hour later, the Japanese envoys entered the room. The Secretary of State refused to shake hands, and left them standing. He looked at the final Japanese note. 'In all my fifty years of public service,' he then witheringly declared, 'I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions\u2013infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.' He nodded curtly towards the door. Nomura and Kurusu were peremptorily dismissed.155\n\nAt one o'clock the next day, President Roosevelt addressed Congress. He told the packed chamber of the House of Representatives: 'Yesterday, December 7, 1941\u2013a date which will live in infamy\u2013the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.' Applause repeatedly broke into his speech, which ended by asking Congress to declare 'that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire'. A roar of approval greeted the words. When the formal vote was taken, a single Representative, Jeannette Rankin of Montana, was opposed to war, as she had been in 1917. All other 388 members of the House of Representatives, and all members of the Senate, were in favour.156 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had ensured that the United States had never been more united. Without the Japanese attack, it is doubtful that Roosevelt could have attained a declaration of war in the Pacific from Congress. Pearl Harbor had removed the need to put that to the test. The President signed the declaration of war at 4.10 p.m. Great Britain and the governments of the British Commonwealth followed immediately with their own declarations. The Pacific War had begun.157\n\nVIII\n\nLess than four years later, Japan lay prostrate, two of her cities obliterated by the only nuclear bombs so far to be dropped in war, her population defeated and demoralized, her economy wasted, the country under enemy occupation. These were the dire consequences of the fateful choices made by Japan's leaders. How open and unconstrained had those choices been? And when, if at all, did they narrow down to the point where options had in effect disappeared, where no real choice remained? What by then, if not earlier, were the genuine limitations on Japan's freedom of choice? And is it possible to distinguish between objective constraints on decisions, and psychological, subjective determinants?\n\nThe questions are easier to pose than to answer. But it seems possible to highlight a number of crucial steps taken by Japan's civilian and military leadership, backed by a manipulated public opinion, which had the effect of significantly and consistently narrowing the range of choice available, until options all but disappeared in the autumn of 1941.\n\nThe first narrowing of options had begun way back in 1931, with the 'Mukden Incident' that led to the effective annexation of Manchuria. Increasing unrest within Japan had accompanied mounting animosity towards western industrial competitors, especially the United States and Great Britain, in part because of high tariffs on imported Japanese goods. Hostility towards the perceived disadvantages of the postwar 'Washington system' shaped a climate which fostered nationalism and militaristic tendencies. Neo-mercantilist tendencies, looking to the benefits of autarky to be derived from a colonial system, or at least territories dependent upon Japan, gained ground.158 This was the backcloth to the support given by the Japanese government to the independent action taken by the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Japan had had a stake in Manchuria since the war with China in 1894\u20135. Control of the region would strengthen Japan economically. And it would bolster Japanese defences against the Soviet Union, seen as a growing threat. So the reasons\u2013economic, military and in terms of domestic politics\u2013for supporting the independently initiated aggression by the Kwantung Army are evident. But they did not compel that support. The Japanese government had a choice. In deciding to back aggression, it gave a substantial boost to the military in Japan, which was now in the process of regaining much of the influence in domestic politics that it had lost in the 1920s, and was beginning to flex its muscles. And it also promoted the populist nationalist rhetoric which was starting to sound ever more shrill. In years to come Manchuria became almost totemic: a return to the 'Washington system' that had existed before 1931, with its implied exploitation of Japan by the western powers, was invariably put forward as a prospect that could not be contemplated. Manchuria in this way helped to shape later decisions.\n\nThe Japanese takeover in Manchuria was a watershed. There was no intrinsic connection with the 'China Incident' six years later. But the forces it helped unleash had become strengthened in the interim. And Japan had become internationally more isolated. Populist clamour and militarist expansionism in the army combined in 1937 to turn the 'China Incident' into an unending war which sucked in manpower and resources for diminishing returns, and at the same time became the single most important stumbling block to any accommodation with the United States. But the idea of a 'holy war' against China stretched beyond military factions of the Japanese government. There was practically no voice among leading civilian politicians which opposed the war. Prince Konoe, Prime Minister for the first time and four years later a desperate advocate of a last-minute deal to avoid a Pacific War, was only one of its ardent advocates. Again, the government in Tokyo had a choice. It could have decided not to expand the initial minor incident into a major conflict. It chose, instead, to try to destroy China. This, with the attendant atrocities that shocked the west, backed Japan much further into a corner from which it became ever more difficult to extricate herself.\n\nWe have followed the making of crucial decisions in 1940 and 1941 in close detail. Though the factional nature of Japanese government meant that nuances of policy were frequently proposed, and decision-making was a complex and often laborious business, by 1940 no significant individual or faction, the military least of all, stood against the imperative of expansion in the near future into south-east Asia to create a Japanese economic imperium. Expansionism had by now become a universally accepted ideology among the ruling elites. It was most fervently held among the strongest sections of those elites: among the leadership and middle-ranking echelons of the army and the navy. In the summer of 1940, again the following summer and, finally, in autumn 1941, policy options were available. But they were narrowing.\n\nOnce the decision was taken in summer 1940 (exploiting the disarray of Great Britain following Hitler's western offensive) to advance to the south, this became a further non-negotiable element in the pursuit of any diplomatic settlement. Japan tied herself even further into an anti-American, as well as anti-British, stance with the consequential decision, later that summer, to form a military alliance with the Axis powers. By now, the collision course with the United States was becoming ever clearer. The Japanese government had been aware that it was taking this course, and of the dangers that entailed. It nevertheless chose to embark upon it. The option, still available, of backing down from expansion, with the growing prospect of military conflict with a mighty enemy, in favour of re-entry into international trade, with its inbuilt competition (seen to disfavour Japan), was rejected outright.\n\nIn the summer of 1941, the gods had appeared to favour Japan once more. Germany's sudden attack on the Soviet Union and rapid inroads into the country, accompanied by devastating blows against the Red Army, offered the potential to attack the beleaguered traditional enemy from the east. For six weeks or so this was actively deliberated. But the choice was made to continue the preparations for the southern advance. By now Japan was completely locked in to her own economic and ideological imperatives. These, intertwined, became even more apparent once the Americans turned off the oil-tap following the Japanese dispatch of troops into French Indochina in July. From now on, war was inevitable unless a conscious decision were made to avoid it.\n\nImportant voices from within the Japanese leadership were indeed raised in the autumn of 1941 in favour of a decision for war. But by now, there was great apprehension blending into outright fear at the consequences for Japan of a war with America. The Emperor himself wanted to avoid war. So did Prince Konoe, now serving his third term of office as Prime Minister and desperately seeking a personal meeting with President Roosevelt to head off conflict\u2013a course of action which eventually brought down his government. When Konoe's Cabinet fell, even Tojo, the new Prime Minister and previously an ultra-hawk, became an earnest advocate of a negotiated accommodation with the United States. His Foreign Minister, Togo, was chosen with a view to engineering such an arrangement. The dispatch of Kurusu as special envoy to assist the beleaguered ambassador in Washington, Nomura, was a further sign of the seriousness of Japan's attempt, at the eleventh hour, to find a way out of the impasse. As late as 29 November 1941, the day before the Imperial Conference confirmed the decision to go to war, most of the jushin\u2013the group of senior statesmen, former Prime Ministers\u2013still wanted to prevent the conflagration they feared so much.\n\nIf such weighty figures were speaking out in favour of peace, why was the ultimate decision one for war? Part of the answer lies, of course, in the hardening position of the United States, which pushed Japan ever further into a tight cul-de-sac. There has been much subsequent speculation about the likely or possible course of events had the American administration, above all the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, been less intransigent, more open to negotiation, especially in autumn 1941. Could it not have been in America's own interests, at least short-term, to weaken her commitment to China in favour of a settlement with Japan instead of rigid insistence on Japanese withdrawal from a country in which the United States had no prime stake?159 Might not peace in the Pacific have been saved had Roosevelt indeed consented to meet Konoe?160 Could not even a last-minute prevention of war have been attained if the United States, instead of bringing down the shutters at the end of November through Hull's peremptory Ten Points, had been prepared to continue with the President's suggested 'modus vivendi'? Some who had participated in the tortured process in Tokyo that ended in the decision for war later claimed that had Roosevelt's 'modus vivendi' been received by the Japanese government, or even had Hull's 'Note' excluded Manchukuo from the demand for troop withdrawals from China instead of mistakenly allowing the presumption that it was included, then new proposals and new compromises would have been forthcoming. Possibly, so the counter-factual argument ran, Tojo's government might have fallen and been replaced by a pro-peace Cabinet. Possibly, the further debate in the Liaison Conference, prompted by the 'modus vivendi', would in any case have necessitated a postponement of the mobilization for war.161 And once the war machine had been halted, even if only temporarily, it could not have been restarted until the spring. A respite would have been gained, perhaps leading to a permanent new basis of power-relations in the Far East.\n\nIt seems wishful thinking. Certainly, the Roosevelt administration had become more intransigent. But the American stance had hardened precisely in response to Japan's refusal at any point since 1937 to halt her relentless pursuit of expansion and dominance in the Far East. And, as war approached, intelligence intercepts provided confirmation that expansion with a view to establishing a 'new order' in the region was non-negotiable. The issue of withdrawal from the Chinese mainland was equally intractable. China had become such a breaking point in all attempts at negotiation not just for idealistic reasons, although China had indeed become a moral cause in America, and the anti-Japanese backlash in the United States stirred by accounts of atrocities by Japan's army against Chinese civilians had certainly made American public opinion a factor which the Roosevelt administration could not ignore in its treatment of the Far East.162 Nor were economic concerns the prime determinant in the American adherence to the cause of the Chinese nationalists. The Pacific, rather than the Asian continent, was central to American interests in the region. The chief consideration, becoming more rather than less important, was the need to hold together what had come to be known as the ABCD coalition\u2013the loose alliance of America, Britain, China and the Dutch East Indies authorities. To have abandoned China would have had the most serious consequences for Britain's position in the Far East. This would have put relations between the United States and Britain under intense strain at a crucial juncture in the Atlantic War, and in the wider struggle against Nazi Germany\u2013still seen in America, too, as the priority\u2013particularly since Japan was in formal alliance with the Axis powers. For this reason above all, China remained the pivot. The United States could not contemplate undermining Chiang Kai-shek for short-term gain in preventing an immediate war in the Pacific, not least since it was all but certain that Japanese designs on power in the region would most likely have meant that war was simply being postponed, not avoided.163\n\nThe main reasons for the narrowing of Japan's options to the point where she was left with war as the only remaining course of action are to be found not in Washington, but in Tokyo. Certainly, the wish to avoid war was voiced in prominent quarters in the autumn of 1941. But the same individuals who now wanted peace had at every stage up to then supported the steps which had led to the point where Japan was peering into the abyss of war. Konoe is a prime, but far from isolated, example of those who had avidly backed aggressive expansionism until it had left no exit route from impending disaster. But fear of war did not equate with opposition to the policy decisions that had taken Japan to the brink. At no point was there a concerted and forthright rejection of policy choices that were seen to bristle with danger. For no faction of the elites could there be a retreat from the goals of a victorious settlement in China and successful expansion to establish the 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'\u2013or, in other words, Japanese domination of the Far East. These aims had not just become an economic imperative. They reflected honour and national pride, the prestige and standing of a great power. The alternatives were seen as not just poverty, but defeat, humiliation, ignominy and an end to great-power status in permanent subordination to the United States.\n\nSuch thinking had become all-embracing in Japan over the previous decade, as the Depression had destabilized politics and society, discrediting belief in the virtues of an Anglo-American-dominated international economy. It permeated both the power-elite and the mass of the population, whose shrill chauvinism had been deliberately encouraged, where not directly manufactured, by government-inspired mass media ever since the 'Manchurian Incident'. Most important of all, it allowed the influence of the most powerful faction, the military, to become completely decisive. Although the army and the navy had differing interests and agendas, the combination of the quest for dominance in China (along with bolstering defences in the north against the Soviet Union) and the prospect of expansion to the south was more than enough to hold them together. Moreover, the military always held the trump cards in the political debate: withdrawal from China would mean accepting that the huge sacrifices since 1937 had been in vain; abandoning the southern advance would mean that prosperity and security would be surrendered in favour of poverty and deprivation; pulling back from the Axis would mean lasting submission to the United States; and refusal to go to war in the autumn of 1941 would mean postponing inevitable conflict to a time when the balance of power would be less favourable to Japan. At every stage, as the political options narrowed, the chiefs of the General Staffs of both armed services, urged on by gung-ho middle-echelon officers in their planning and operational sections, were the most forceful and outspoken advocates of war. By the late summer of 1941, they had pushed through, against no serious opposition, a commitment to military action before the end of the year. The last serious political choice made by the Japanese leadership was to agree to a military timetable which meant that diplomacy, however faint its prospect of success, was forced to compete against the clock. The weakness of the other factions of Japan's elite had allowed the army and navy General Staffs increasingly to dictate policy options, down to the point where those options gave way to the military imperative: war.\n\nIronically, when that terrible war was finally over, Japan found herself more dependent economically upon the United States than had been foreseeable before the conflict, deprived of any great-power status, shorn of all military capability, but, over time, enjoying a prosperity unimaginable to the citizens of the country in the troubled and turbulent interwar era.\n\n## 9\n\n## Berlin, Autumn 1941\n\nHitler Decides to Declare War on the United States\n\nHe emphasizes the extraordinary significance of the Japanese entry into the war, above all with regard to our U-boat war...The F\u00fchrer is convinced that even if Japan had not joined the war, he would have had to declare war on the Americans sooner or later. Now the east Asian conflict drops like a present into our lap.\n\nReported comments of Hitler to his party leaders, \n12 December 1941\n\nIt has been described as the 'most puzzling' of Hitler's decisions during the Second World War.1 At the climax of his long speech in the Reichstag on the afternoon of 11 December 1941, Hitler announced that the attempt by Germany and Italy to prevent the war widening, and to maintain relations with the United States of America, despite years of 'intolerable provocation by President Roosevelt', had failed. Consequently, in accordance with the terms of the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940, Germany and Italy saw themselves compelled, alongside Japan, 'together to carry out the struggle for defence, and thereby for the upholding of freedom and independence of their peoples and empires against the United States of America and England'.2 The formal declaration of war had been starchily read out earlier that afternoon to the American charg\u00e9 d'affaires in Berlin by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich Foreign Minister, whose curt bow at the end of the audience had terminated relations between Germany and the United States.3\n\nFour days later, the regular digest of opinion soundings among the German people, compiled by the Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD), which had begun life as the Nazi Party's own surveillance organ and had later become part of the regime's huge and expanding SS-police network, claimed that 'the declaration of war on the United States did not come at all as a surprise and was widely interpreted as official confirmation of what already existed in reality'. How accurate this lapidary description of opinion was can only be surmised. Even the same report went on to record 'very occasional remarks of surprise and a certain concern about the addition of a new enemy' to be heard in the countryside. And there was evidently, so the report indicated, speculation about what this implied, with expectations of a long-drawn-out war at sea lasting for years.4 Even before the declaration of war on America, pessimistic voices could be heard out of earshot of police informers prophesying that the war would last five years, that American aid had saved Britain, that perhaps Germany would not win and that in the end a compromise settlement would be reached.5 One ordinary soldier, confident that Germany would eventually prove victorious, nevertheless confided to his diary on the day of Hitler's Reichstag speech, that it meant 'war for our lifetime'. 'Poor parents,' he added.6\n\nThose worried and horrified at the war now stretching out way into the future, and extending to a mighty new belligerent with access to unimaginable resources, were well advised not to broadcast their views. But privately such anxieties were widespread. Memories of the First World War were still painfully strong. According to reports filtering out of underground socialist sources, many Germans had 'not forgotten that it was America's participation in the last world war which decided its outcome and sealed the fate of Germany'.7 A German officer based in Warsaw, in a letter to his wife on the day after the declaration of war, wrote that the news had struck him 'with horror'. 'What probably every German feared', he added, 'has become true.'8 Such fears came on top of immense worries about loved ones in an army bogged down in Russia's icy wastes and facing Germany's first serious military crisis since the war had begun over two years earlier.\n\nEven Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister and one of his closest and most trusted associates, obliquely hinted at his apprehension about bringing a powerful new enemy directly into the conflict. Jotting down the gist of a telephone conversation with Hitler, soon after the news broke in Berlin of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Goebbels noted that Germany 'on the basis of the Tripartite Pact' would 'probably not avoid a declaration of war on the United States'. Then came a telling phrase in his diary. 'But that's now not so bad', since, he presumed, American supplies to Britain would have to be diverted to the war in the Pacific.9 It was the merest unwitting intimation that Goebbels, too, saw war against the United States as a worrying development. And the subconscious doubt rapidly disappeared, of course, beneath the usual effusions of confidence.\n\nThe military leadership, already only too well aware of the magnitude of the crisis on the eastern front, were less sanguine, at least if we can rely upon their postwar recollections. Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, just back from a month's leave, was told that Pearl Harbor provided a signal for Germany to declare war on America. He was shocked, he later wrote, at Hitler's 'cluelessness' about the American 'potential', the economic and military power which had been decisive once before, in the First World War. He saw it as an expression of Hitler's 'dilettante' approach and his limited knowledge of foreign countries.10\n\nRear Admiral (as he then was) Karl D\u00f6nitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German U-boat fleet and a firm Hitler loyalist in the ranks of the higher officer corps, was equally taken aback by the news that Germany was at war with America. He had told Hitler in September that, should the United States be drawn into the war, he wished to be given due warning so that his U-boats would be properly placed to take full advantage of the element of surprise to strike a major blow while anti-submarine defences were still weak. 'In the event,' he later wrote, 'things turned out differently. German High Command was itself taken by surprise by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; and at that time there was not a single German U-boat in American waters.'11\n\nGeneral Walter Warlimont, second in charge to General Alfred Jodl, Hitler's chief adviser on operational planning, underlined the charge of amateurish, ill-conceived strategy imposed through spontaneous decisions taken without consultation or reflection. He himself had just heard the news of the declaration of war in Hitler's field headquarters in East Prussia, where he was just discussing the implications with some staff officers, when Jodl telephoned him from Berlin on the afternoon of 11 December. 'You have heard that the F\u00fchrer has just declared war on America?' Jodl asked. 'Yes and we couldn't be more surprised,' Warlimont replied. Jodl pointed out that it was urgently necessary now to consider where the United States might deploy her forces. Warlimont agreed, adding that 'so far we have never even considered a war against the United States and so have no data on which to base this examination'.12\n\nThe decision to declare war on the United States, Warlimont recalled, 'was another entirely independent decision on which no advice from the Wehrmacht had either been asked or given; as a result we were now faced with a war on two fronts in the most serious conceivable form. Hitler's war plan had hitherto aimed at the rapid elimination of Russia as \"a factor of military importance\" in order subsequently to use the concentrated power of the Wehrmacht to bring the war in the west to an end. Now the best that could be hoped for was to escape being crushed between two enemies in east and west whose combined war potential was vastly superior to our own.'13 Warlimont took the view that Hitler was 'literally mesmerized by his own concept of the political situation and did not take the military implications adequately into account'.14\n\nHitler, then, had declared war on such a powerful nation as the United States abruptly, without consultation with his military strategists (except, presumably, the ultra-loyalist Jodl and the head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the toadying Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel), without anything approaching proper preparation for such a conflict, and, as D\u00f6nitz recalled, without taking cognizance of immediate logistical considerations. Nor had a declaration of war been formally necessary or in any way binding on Germany. Hitler had stated in his Reichstag speech that the declaration had been in accordance with the terms of the Tripartite Pact. But this was not the case. Ribbentrop (according to his later, self-serving account) had reminded Hitler that Germany was bound under the pact only to aid Japan if she were to be attacked by a third party.15 Since Japan had attacked America, not the other way round, Germany was not committed to intervene. The leading official in the German Foreign Ministry, State Secretary Ernst von Weizs\u00e4cker, later pointed out the great surprise at Hitler's claim in his speech that Germany had been obliged under the Tripartite Pact to declare war on the United States. He saw this as 'legally an error and politically a mistake'.16\n\nThe surprise and foreboding, not just among ordinary Germans but among those in Hitler's entourage and in the highest circles of government and the military, at the declaration of war on the United States provide a clear indication that the opening of hostilities with America was seen as neither a foregone conclusion nor an outright necessity. Even in the eyes of Germany's military and diplomatic leaders there had been a choice. Hitler had faced options, and chosen war with the United States. As he himself viewed it, of course, a state of war had already existed in practice in the Atlantic, and in the fact of direct American support for Britain, then also for the Soviet Union. But we have seen reason to suppose that the 'undeclared war' in the Atlantic could, from Roosevelt's perspective, have continued into the indefinite future, even after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Hitler was well aware of Roosevelt's difficulties with American public opinion, and even more so of his problems with Congress. He knew that the American President had only by the narrowest of margins attained support for an extension of the Selective Service Act in August 1941, and how he had not dared risk asking Congress for a declaration of war until the blatant Japanese act of aggression in the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December. Even after the declaration of war on Japan, there was absolutely no guarantee that Roosevelt would have secured a congressional mandate for war against Germany. Hitler took that difficult, even unenviable, question away from Roosevelt on 11 December.\n\nYet Hitler had the Pacific diversion he wanted even without a declaration of war on America. And he knew no way at this point of defeating the United States. His U-boats could certainly attack American shipping in the Atlantic. But he had no means of attacking the American mainland, bombing cities in the United States or disrupting the build-up of her military might. Now, with the declaration of war, the pressure of time\u2013the urgency of attaining complete victory in Europe and acquiring economic strength and military muscle to be able to defeat, or at least fend off, the United States\u2013had become even more acute. Time was less than ever on Germany's side. As Hitler knew, within two years or so the Americans expected to have a huge land army ready to fight on the European continent. It took in reality somewhat longer than expected for this 'second front', so eagerly awaited by Stalin, to materialize (though the landing in north Africa, then the push up through southern Italy, did commence in 1943), and the invasion of Nazi-occupied western Europe, which Britain could never have carried out without American help, began only in June 1944. But with his decision on 11 December 1941 Hitler had gone a long way towards sealing Germany's eventual fate. It seems exactly the move which he should have avoided at all costs. It looks like madness, even from a distant vantage point in time. Why, independently of advice, and at a critical juncture of the bitter contest for supremacy on the eastern front, did he opt for war against a new and extremely powerful enemy in the west, and one he did not know how to defeat? Just how puzzling was this decision?\n\nI\n\nIn terms of the politics of international power, the United States had figured only on the fringes of Hitler's thoughts before the late 1930s. He was concentrated squarely upon Europe. America, in another hemisphere and determined, it seemed, to follow the political path of isolationism, was largely irrelevant to Hitler's conception of future German foreign policy.\n\nThe economic potential and racial composition of the United States nevertheless had implications for his ideological construct\u2013how he saw Germany's current problems and future hopes. Characteristically, his central ideas of 'living space' and race held the key to his image of America. In America's vast country, with a dominant white 'Nordic' racial core, to which he attributed her economic success and high standard of living, he saw a model for his vision of German 'living space' in Europe.17 America's economic advancement had been made possible in his view not simply (as was generally presumed) by technological innovation and modern rationalization of management and production, but by territorial expansion to fit the growing population: by colonizing the west 'after the white man had shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand'.18 This matched his view of how German prosperity and dominance of Europe could only be attained by expansion\u2013and this, 'by the sword'. By the beginning of the 1930s Hitler regarded America in economic terms as 'the toughest rival possible'.19 He did not spell out the wider implications of this in public, though by now he had contemplated them in private. At some dim and distant future date, a German-dominated Europe would have to face a contest for supremacy with the United States. This implication was reinforced\u2013though the reinforcement was unspoken\u2013by another unwavering strand of his image of America: that it was a country, though with a good racial stock in its white population, dominated by Jewish capital, and by Jewish control of politics and culture.20\n\nDuring the 1920s Hitler's image of America (apart from its peculiarly vehement antisemitic content and additional heavy focus on Freemasonry) had largely matched widespread stereotypes in right-wing circles in Germany. Unsurprisingly, in the early years of his political 'career', America's role in the First World War\u2013which he saw as dictated by the interests of Jewish finance capital and Freemasonry\u2013was the point of reference. Alongside this went expressions of hatred for President Woodrow Wilson, widely condemned on the German Right for what was seen as his part in bringing about the 'November Revolution' in 1918, then the national humiliation of the Versailles Treaty the following June.21 In one of his very earliest speeches, in December 1919, Hitler ranked America alongside Britain as Germany's 'absolute enemies', a conventional view such a short time after the First World War. For America, he reckoned, money, even drenched with blood, was all that mattered. His association of America with the power of the Jews followed promptly: 'For the Jew, the money-purse is the most sacred object.' America, he concluded, was bound to have joined in the war, and left it with the lion's share of the spoils.22 Similar sentiments recurred in a number of his speeches in the years before the putsch at the end of 1923, without ever becoming a dominant theme.\n\nNor did America occupy any place of prominence in Hitler's assessment of future German foreign policy in the second part of his tract, Mein Kampf, which he began in 1924 while interned following the failed putsch and completed in the summer of 1926, more than a year after his release. Only a brief passage towards the end touched on America's position in world affairs, as a country controlled by Jews, the coming rival and eventual inheritor of the doomed British Empire. 'It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union,' Hitler wrote. 'Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions.' The looming threat was to Great Britain. 'No ties of kinship can prevent a certain feeling of envious concern in England towards the growth of the American Union in all fields of international, economic and power politics,' he averred. 'The former colonial country, child of the great mother, seems to be growing into a new master of the world.'23 The threat to Germany, in Hitler's warped world-view, of an emerging great power run by Jews, was implicit, but far off in the distant future. He did not embroider upon it.\n\nBy 1928, when he composed his 'Second Book'\u2013mainly a tract related to the question of the South Tyrol, a sensitive issue at the time and probably the reason why this treatise remained unpublished until its discovery long after the war\u2013the prospect of a showdown with the United States at some point in the long-term future had adopted at least shadowy form in Hitler's mind. Notions of a threat to Europe from the growing economic might of America were as commonplace in Germany at the end of the 1920s as general anti-American prejudice.24 Even so, Hitler's racist world-view, linked to his assumptions about geopolitics, gave them a different twist.\n\nIn the second half of the 1920s, he had become far more preoccupied with geopolitical issues, with the 'space question' as he usually called it, than in the years before the putsch. Mainly, this meant providing justification for his view that Germany had to expand to survive, and that the expansion had to come at the cost of the Soviet Union. It meant, too, elaborating upon his view, already expressed in Mein Kampf, that Germany should turn her back on earlier alignments in foreign policy and seek an alliance with Great Britain and Italy. In this thinking, the position of far-off, isolationist America played no part. However, the image we have already cursorily summarized of an emerging economic colossus with the potential to become a great power in the world\u2013and one with a 'healthy racial core', but controlled by Jews and Freemasons\u2013now did have a bearing. He came to incorporate that image in his vision of the future status of Germany as a world power, and to envisage its consequences.\n\nHe saw these, typically, in racial terms. Impressed (as many were at the time25) by American racially restrictive immigration legislation and propagated ideas on public health and eugenics, Hitler portrayed a young, racially virile white population, representing a selection of the 'best' migrants from Europe, in competition with a decadent and declining racial stock of the old continent. 'The danger arises', he wrote, 'that the significance of racially inferior Europe will gradually lead to a new determination of the fate of the world by the people of the North American continent.' The only way to block this threat was through a racial renaissance in Europe.26 'In the future,' therefore, 'the only state that will be able to stand up to North America will be the state that has understood how\u2013through the character of its internal life as well as through the substance of its external policy\u2013to raise the racial value of its people and bring it into the most practical national form for this purpose.' This was the duty laid down for the Nazi movement. The implication was clear. 'It is thoughtless to believe that the conflict between Europe'\u2013dominated, of course, by a racially purified Germany\u2013'and America would always be of a peaceful economic nature.' Eventually, America would turn outwards. The clash with Europe to determine ultimate hegemony could not be avoided.27\n\nHitler had less to say about the United States during the early 1930s.28 In line with many contemporaries and with the approach taken in the Nazi press, he regarded America as being significantly weakened by the economic crisis set in motion by the Wall Street Crash at the end of October 1929. According to his associate Ernst Hanfstaengl, himself of part-American descent, Hitler remarked that a country beset with its own domestic problems could not hope to play a part in foreign affairs.29 The crisis presumably also shored up his view that free markets and liberal capitalism could not offer the security that national long-term survival required. But, in fact, he said little in public about the Depression in the United States, reserving his rhetorical fire-power for assaults on the failing democratic system at home. And temporary weakness through economic crisis was still compatible with Hitler's long-term vision of an eventual clash between the United States and Europe, a view he continued to hold into the 1940s.30\n\nNo straight line, however, leads from these vague musings about the distant future to later policy decisions about America. Consonant with the scant attention Hitler had paid to the United States during his rise to power, America was little more than a sideshow for him and his government once he had taken office as Reich Chancellor. He displayed no overt interest in the United States during his first years in power, and America scarcely figured in the formulation of foreign policy. Nevertheless, with Hitler's tacit approval, there was an inexorable decline in relations between Germany and the United States down to the beginning of the European war. Certainly, he did nothing to try to stem this deterioration. Nor could he have done so without reversing the racism and militarism upon which his regime was founded.\n\nGermany's relations with the United States had been good, and improving, before 1933. This soon changed under the new Nazi regime. Disputes about trade tariffs and Germany's readiness to renege on repayment of credits owing to the United States formed part of the rapid downturn in goodwill between the two countries. But other issues were more important still. The persecution of the Jews, the first serious outrages already all too evident in the spring of 1933, brought revulsion in the United States and spurred the growth of anti-German feeling. So did the attacks on the Christian Churches, the burning of the books of racially or politically 'undesirable' authors and the brutal police terror against political opponents. Beyond the mounting disgust at Nazi barbarism, the strident militarism of Hitler's regime and the obvious signs, soon apparent, that Germany was starting to rearm (with all the implications that held for the future peace of Europe) were viewed across the Atlantic with increasing foreboding.31\n\nUnsurprisingly, the deterioration in relations also found its echo in German images of the United States. Concerns about foreign trade with the United States, then the staging of the Olympic Games in 1936, meant that German propaganda in the early years of the Nazi regime remained relatively muted in its anti-Americanism, certainly in contrast with its shrill tone in the late 1930s. Even so, criticism of the alleged role of the Jews in the United States was frequent, and gathered in intensity. So, from the mid-1930s onwards, did negative comment about the 'New Deal', about American cultural and racial decline and about President Roosevelt himself.32\n\nThe growth of antagonism across the Atlantic towards Germany caused Hitler no sleepless nights. If the antipathy was inevitable from a German viewpoint, given the ideological priorities of the Nazi regime, which could not accommodate American liberal sentiment, then it gave few grounds for worry. The United States, after all, was still in the throes of prolonged economic depression; she remained in the grip of isolationism; and her military capability was very low. Hitler could feel confident, therefore, that the United States' own interests would keep her aloof from European affairs for the foreseeable future. This interpretation was underscored at the very outset of his rule by his Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath. Though Washington could not be expected to support German demands and wishes, suggested Neurath, 'the lack of interest of the United States in European affairs would probably not alter under President Roosevelt'.33 The reshaping of Europe, Hitler must have been convinced, would remain a matter of little direct American concern. From the perspective of Hitler and the Nazi leadership, the United States, it seemed, could be more or less ignored as a factor in German foreign policy.\n\nLittle suggests that Hitler changed his mind in the last years before the war. When, on 5 November 1937, Hitler expounded to his military leaders his ideas about expansion into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and posited a number of differing scenarios about Germany's involvement in war for 'living space' by 1943\u20135 at the latest, he did not even mention the United States.34 America remained an irrelevance to Hitler the following year as German ambitions became reality, with Austria then the Sudetenland swallowed up by the Reich.\n\nEven so, there was by now more than the occasional straw in the wind to indicate that things were changing. Roosevelt's 'quarantine speech' of 5 October 1937, in which the American President advocated the international isolation of those countries threatening world peace\u2013plainly, Germany, Italy and Japan\u2013was interpreted by the German ambassador in Washington, Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, as an indication that the United States might be moving out of isolationism. Dieckhoff reported in early December that, although for the time being the United States was likely to continue a passive foreign policy, this would cease, despite internal opposition, if her own interests were at stake or she was intolerably provoked, and 'in a conflict in which the existence of Great Britain is at stake America will put her weight into the scales on the side of the British'.35 The mutual antagonism of the United States and Germany now became ever more apparent. The volume of anti-American propaganda in Germany was turned up sharply, while across the Atlantic mounting detestation for Nazism mingled with growing alarm as Hitler's aggression took Europe to the verge of war. Revulsion at Nazi barbarism reached a peak in reactions to the horrific nationwide pogroms against the Jews on 9\u201310 November 1938, the so-called Reichskristallnacht (Reich Crystal Night).36 A tidal wave of outrage swept across America. The American ambassador to Berlin was recalled 'for report and consultation' (though, in fact, never to return). Shortly afterwards, in retaliation, the German ambassador in Washington was summoned back to Berlin.37 There was no move to a full breach of diplomatic relations, but the German Foreign Ministry was concerned about the possibility of economic sanctions.38 The concern was justified. The American Treasury backed off at the last minute, on the intervention of Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, from imposing punitive tariffs on German imports.39\n\nSpeaking to representatives of the German press the day following Reichskristallnacht (though not mentioning the pogrom by a single word), Hitler, in contrast to his views a decade earlier, was contemptuous of the inferior racial quality that he saw in the mixed ethnic population of the United States.40 But he and other Nazi leaders were now beginning to take seriously the prospect of America as a potential future enemy. Hitler spoke in January 1939 of the United States as 'agitating' against Germany. Plainly, she ranked by now among 'the enemies of the Reich'.41 His anger at the reactions to Reichskristallnacht in the United States and paranoia about the power of the Jews in America combined in ever shriller attacks on Roosevelt and the Jewish warmongers allegedly calling the tune.\n\nThis formed part of the background to the important speech that Hitler delivered to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his 'seizure of power'. At its centre lay the presumed power of the Jews, which Hitler had consistently seen as the dominant force in American government and economic might. The tenor of the speech was an attack on the threat which he saw posed by Jewish finance in Britain and the United States to Germany's economy and national security. He depicted the Jews as warmongers forcing Germany into a conflict she did not want. Germany was, however, ready to meet the challenge and was prepared for a struggle to the death. And should it come to war\u2013here Hitler offered his own terrible threat\u2013then those who had caused it, the Jews, would perish. The result would be 'the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe'.42\n\nWhen, the day after Hitler's baleful speech, Roosevelt implied that the threat of Hitler meant America's frontiers now lay on the Rhine (a figure of speech he had used to justify the delivery of planes to France), it produced a veritable barrage of assaults in the German press.43 This was a prelude to Hitler's frontal attack on Roosevelt in his Reichstag speech at the end of April.\n\nRoosevelt, though, as we have seen, handicapped in his scope for action by domestic opinion and isolationist clamour against any move that hinted at dragging America into Europe's travails, had since Munich the previous autumn become ever more concerned about the likelihood of war and about the damaging failure of British and French appeasement policy. The horrors of Reichskristallnacht had then revealed the full barbarity of the Nazi regime. And in mid-March had come the occupation by Hitler's Wehrmacht of what remained of Czechoslovakia, followed, in early April, by the invasion of Albania by the troops of the other 'mad dog', Mussolini. In the days that followed, Roosevelt contemplated a public message that amounted in effect to a personal appeal to Hitler and Mussolini to back away from the path of aggression and war and to demonstrate their sincere commitment to peaceful development in Europe. The message, after numerous redraftings, was published on 15 April 1939. The centrepoint was Roosevelt's proposal that the Axis dictators should give an assurance that for a period of at least ten years they would attack none of a list of thirty named independent nations, mainly European but also including some in the Middle East. For his part, Roosevelt committed the United States to participation in discussions aimed at reducing armaments and opening up international trade on equal terms to all countries.44\n\nHitler was infuriated and insulted by what he saw as Roosevelt's arrogance in a message published before it had even been officially received in Berlin.45 He at first deemed it beneath his dignity to reply to 'so contemptible a creature', but, probably because Roosevelt's speech had evidently made a generally favourable impression upon international opinion, eventually felt that he had to respond.46 When he did so, in a speech to the Reichstag on 28 April, his riposte was withering.47 He had enquired of the thirty named countries, he claimed, and none felt threatened by Germany. Some countries (he mentioned Syria as one), however, had been unable to give a reply because their own freedom of action had been curtailed by the democratic states. And was not Palestine occupied by British, not German troops? The Republic of Ireland, too, feared aggression from Britain, not from Germany. Roosevelt's appeal to disarmament equally played into Hitler's hands, since the German dictator had no difficulty in making great capital of the way in which the victorious powers had denuded Germany of armed defences after the First World War while finding no shortage of reasons to avoid disarming themselves.\n\nHitler's sarcastic sallies had the assembled tame Nazi Reichstag deputies in fits of laughter. It was one of his most effective speeches. Goebbels was ecstatic. 'A terrible flogging of Roosevelt. That really smacks him around the ears. The house is bent double with laughing. It's a pleasure to hear it. The success among the public is immense. Anybody publicly attacking the F\u00fchrer certainly gets his comeuppance...He's a genius of political tactics and strategy. Nobody can do it like him. What a pygmy a man like Roosevelt is in comparison.'48 Not only Nazis recognized the effectiveness of Hitler's rhetoric. William Shirer, an American journalist in Berlin at the time who heard the speech, thought Hitler's answer to Roosevelt 'rather shrewd' in playing upon the sympathies of appeasers and isolationists in America and Europe.49\n\nBeyond such circles, even so, Hitler's 'reckoning' with Roosevelt had little currency. Rather, as it appeared to many, Roosevelt was claiming the moral high ground with an appeal to reason and peace in the face of proven aggressive intent. The impact of the speech, and of Roosevelt's intervention that had provoked it, was in any case of passing importance. What was significant was that the divide between the United States and Germany had been exposed in the most visible fashion. It was clear where the United States stood in the conflict between the democracies and the Axis powers.\n\nFrom the German perspective, whatever the appearances of neutrality, the United States had to be regarded as essentially a hostile power. This meant that, after years of near irrelevance in German policy formation, the United States had now to be viewed strategically, not just ideologically. The key issue in the event\u2013ever more probable\u2013of European war in the foreseeable future was to ensure that America did not enter the conflict. In German thinking, however, this was not likely; there was no undue cause for concern. A presidential election was due in autumn 1940. No risks would be taken with public opinion before then. In any case, the force of isolationism ruled out intervention. And, beyond that, American military weakness was only too evident, with rearmament and industrial war production merely in their beginnings. German planning was indeed reckoning with a long war, or series of wars. But the early stages, it was presumed, would rapidly prove victorious before the United States was in any position to intervene. Hitler was confident that war with Poland, when it came, would be swiftly decided by German force of arms. He expected the western democracies to stay out of any military action against Poland. But, should they intervene, he again had no doubt that Germany would prevail. The western democracies, Britain as well as France, would be defeated, or would concede in a negotiated settlement in the face of overwhelming German military supremacy. The Americans would stay aloof. The future showdown with 'Jewish-Bolshevism' would follow at some stage with the backing, or at least the quiescence, of the west European powers. And this, too, would be over quickly. Conflict with the United States at some point in the future\u2013not before the mid-1940s at the earliest\u2013would be on the basis of a Germany dominating the whole of the European continent, and by this time with a mighty battle-fleet ready to contest control over the oceans.\n\nThis remained mere nebulous musing. But the central assumption, as war loomed ever closer in the summer of 1939, was broadly\u2013and the thinking was still inchoate rather than concisely worked out\u2013that Germany would have established her ascendancy in Europe before the United States became a factor of major strategic significance.\n\nII\n\nEven so, nothing could be taken for granted. As war began in Europe in September 1939, Hitler was acutely aware that he had only a limited period of time to achieve supremacy in Europe before American military and industrial potential would start to make itself felt in the conflict. Increasingly, America now had to be reckoned with. Speed was more than ever of the essence. Germany had to be victorious before American intervention could tip the balance.\n\nThough Hitler was convinced that there was little prospect of an early entry of the United States into the war, he wanted to take no chances. Nothing was to be done to offer undue provocation. Attacks on President Roosevelt in the German press, commonplace and venomous in the months preceding the war, now ceased on orders from Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda. The press was instructed to apply absolute discretion in reporting on American affairs.50 Hitler also reined in the gung-ho naval leadership, anxious to unleash their U-boats even at the risk of sinking neutral American ships. More than once in the autumn, Hitler insisted to the Commander-in-Chief of the navy, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, that everything should be done to avoid naval incidents with the United States. On 23 February 1940 he categorically refused permission to Raeder for two submarines to patrol waters off the Canadian coast, near Halifax, Nova Scotia, a crucial port for British convoys, because of 'the psychological effect that any such step might have in the United States'. In early March, the navy received explicit orders banning the stopping, capturing or sinking of any American ships, wherever they might be.51\n\nGerman military prognoses in autumn 1939 reckoned that there might be a period of grace lasting no longer than a year and a half before the industrial and military potential of America would begin to make itself felt. An analysis by the High Command of the Wehrmacht concluded that, for the time being, the United States could just about manage to meet the demands of her own armed forces and would need about a year to start producing large numbers of planes, tanks and other military vehicles. But after around one to one and a half years, there would be 'a level of productivity in all spheres of armaments which far outstretches all other countries'.52 This assessment accorded with that of reports from the German military attach\u00e9 in Washington that the state of military preparation in the United States ruled out any intervention before the late summer of 1940, but that thereafter a full American participation in the war was possible.53 The German embassy in Washington took the view that Roosevelt's administration was reckoning with a long war, did not expect a rapid defeat of Britain and France and would intervene in the event of the democracies either facing disaster or, alternatively, approaching victory. The necessary popular support for intervention would be created, it was presumed.54\n\nHitler's sense of urgency to complete the military defeat of France and force the British to a negotiated settlement from a position of weakness becomes all the more understandable in the light of such reports. At the beginning of the war, he had expressed his confidence that he would have 'solved all problems in Europe' long before the Americans could intervene. But privately he had added: 'woe betide us if we're not finished by then.'55 As Poland lay prostrate, only a few weeks later, he urged an immediate attack on France on the grounds that time was running against Germany, militarily and economically.56 And just before the start of the western offensive in May 1940 he justified his move to his friend Mussolini by pointing to 'the recurring undertone of threats in Mr. Roosevelt's telegrams, notes, and inquiries' as providing 'ample reason for seeing to it that the war is brought to an end as soon as possible'.57\n\nOn the very day that Italy declared war, 10 June 1940, President Roosevelt had publicly avowed to 'extend to the opponents of force' the material resources of the United States.58 Just over a month later, an analysis Hitler received of a speech by Roosevelt, delivered (in accepting the Democratic nomination for the forthcoming presidential election) on 19 July, made plain that the American President stood resolutely opposed to Germany and ready to back Britain in a continued struggle.59 The implications for Germany's war were evident: it had to be won quickly and conclusively before American resources\u2013and possibly direct intervention\u2013could tell. Hitler drew his conclusion. The signals from across the Atlantic influenced the decision which he announced at the end of the month to his generals: to prepare to attack and defeat the Soviet Union in a 'lightning war' of a mere few months. The war he had always been ideologically determined to fight now had a vital strategic purpose: ending British hopes of any Continental ally, thereby forcing Britain to accept the inevitable and come to terms; and, by so doing, removing the threat of American intervention. London and Washington had, as it were, to be defeated via Moscow.\n\nHitler's strategy had become global in its dimensions. It now reached out to the role of Japan in the Far East. Defeat of the Soviet Union by the Wehrmacht would free Japan from any threat from her old enemy to the north. It would open up the way which Japan was already deliberating: a move to the south, implying an attack on British possessions in the Far East, with the further desired effect of keeping the Americans occupied in the Pacific. Within weeks, the new interest in Japan had led to the moves to that eventually culminated in the Tripartite Pact of 27 September 1940 and underpinned Ribbentrop's short-lived hopes of constructing a new world order aimed at undermining British world power and the international strength of the United States.60\n\nMeanwhile, the destroyer deal concluded between Churchill and Roosevelt in early September had given Hitler the most tangible indication of America's increasing support for the undefeated Britain. The hawkish Admiral Raeder now imagined American entry into the war to be a certainty.61 But the emerging Atlantic alliance which the destroyer deal symbolized, and the visibly anti-German tenor of the American administration, had to be swallowed. Still Hitler wanted no provocation. Firm restrictions were placed upon the press reportage in Germany.62\n\nThe lifting of the restraint on anti-American propaganda followed in the wake of Roosevelt's press conference on 17 December (where he used the metaphor of lending a neighbour a garden hose to put out a fire to introduce what would soon materialize as the policy of lend-lease), then his 'arsenal of democracy' speech near the end of the month.63 Taking the gloves off in the propaganda war was a reflection of how seriously the move to introduce lend-lease was viewed by the Nazi regime. Admiral Raeder, keen as ever to exploit the latest development to push for greater naval aggression in the Atlantic, emphasized the implications of lend-lease to Hitler on 27 December. His conclusion, that 'very strong support will be forthcoming [for Britain] only by the end of 1941 or the beginning of 1942',64 underlined what Hitler himself had told Jodl ten days earlier: that Germany had to establish her Continental dominance by the end of 1941, before America could intervene. A memorandum composed on 9 January by Hans Dieckhoff, the former ambassador to the United States, who had come to be regarded as an expert on America in the German Foreign Ministry, outlined the seriousness of the implications. He pointed out that it would be a mistake to believe that the United States' entry into the war would not change the situation. In such an event, industrial production would increase sharply, allowing greater supplies of arms, munitions and planes to be made available to Britain. Without American intervention, a British collapse offered the prospect of a peace settlement and an end to the war. 'If, however, the United States is also in the war,' Dieckhoff added, 'then, even if England collapses, the war against the United States will continue, and it will be difficult to arrive at a peace.'65 It was about as far as a senior diplomat could go in implying that American involvement in the war\u2013seen as increasingly likely, now all the more so in the light of lend-lease\u2013would mean a German victory could not be won. The implication was reinforced a month later by a report from the German military attach\u00e9 in the Washington embassy, General Friedrich von B\u00f6tticher, estimating that American production of warplanes would triple in the course of 1941. By that time the rate of production would have overtaken Germany's own.66\n\nPublicly, Hitler resorted to threats, a device he frequently used, though now, for the first time perhaps, deployed from a position, at least as far as the United States was concerned, approaching weakness. Speaking in the Reichstag on 30 January 1941, the eighth anniversary of his 'seizure of power', he declared: 'No one should be under any illusion. Anyone who believes he can help England must know one thing above all: every ship, with or without escort, that comes within range of our torpedoes will be torpedoed!'67 It was a threat he did not dare implement for fear of provoking exactly what he was still wanting at all costs to avoid. More important than this still empty threat was the strategic conclusion that Hitler privately drew from the moves towards lend-lease.\n\nFirst, it confirmed him in his thinking that Germany's chance of total victory\u2013that is, keeping the Americans out of the war\u2013rested upon the rapid destruction of the Soviet Union. And, secondly, it drew him still further in the direction of an active policy towards Japan, something which had made no progress since the conclusion of the Tripartite Pact the previous September. 'The smashing of Russia would also allow Japan to turn with all her might against the United States,' he told his military leaders on 9 January. And this would prevent the United States from entering the war.68 The navy's report on the meeting explicitly drew out the strategic thinking, and consequences, in Hitler's expos\u00e9. 'If the USA and Russia should enter the war against Germany,' the report of Hitler's comments ran, 'the situation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very beginning. If the Russian threat were non-existent, we should wage war on Britain indefinitely. If Russia collapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved; this in turn would mean increased danger to the USA.' Hitler then added a further reflection, indicating the way he was starting to invest hopes in Japan: 'Regarding Japanese interest in Singapore, the F\u00fchrer feels that the Japanese should be given a free hand even if this may entail the risk that the USA is thus forced to take drastic steps.'69 Japanese expansion in the Far East, in other words, was now starting to form an intrinsic part of Germany's strategy for final victory in Europe. Rapid defeat of the Soviet Union was the key to both.\n\nWith the passing of the Lend-Lease Act on 11 March 1941, the German leadership concluded, as an article in the V\u00f6lkischer Beobachter (the main Nazi daily newspaper) stated, that the United States was now irredeemably committed to support for Germany's enemies. 'We now know what and against whom we are fighting,' the article declared. 'The final struggle has begun.'70 According to a report on reactions in the High Command of the Wehrmacht to Roosevelt's speech announcing the implementation of the Lend-Lease Act, the general view was that it 'may be regarded as a declaration of war on Germany'.71 Hitler himself, amid the abuse he showered on President Roosevelt, agreed that the Americans had given him a reason for war. He was not yet ready for it, but 'it will come to war with the United States one way or the other', he remarked. Roosevelt, and the Jewish financiers behind him, worried about their losses if Germany should win the war, would see to that. His only regret, Hitler went on, was that he still had no aircraft capable of bombing American cities. He would happily hand out such a lesson to the American Jews. The Lend-Lease Act had brought additional problems, but these could be mastered 'by a merciless sea war'. It was important to increase the tonnage sunk by U-boats. But the Americans were themselves for the time being still constrained by the limitations of their armaments capacity.72\n\nIt was 'as a countermeasure to the expected effects of the aid to England law of the United States' that, on 25 March 1941, Hitler extended the German combat zone to the waters around Iceland and the fringes of the American neutrality zone. This followed rumours reaching Berlin that the American administration was contemplating providing naval escorts for convoys as far as Iceland.73 As we have seen, it would be some months before Roosevelt finally agreed to the escorting of convoys which the more hawkish members of his administration were already urging. But from the German perspective, escorting was one of a number of issues in the spring of 1941 which gave the impression that Roosevelt was deliberately escalating the conflict in the Atlantic, seeking a provocation that would enable him to take America into the war.\n\nThe permission in late March granted to the British to have their warships repaired in American docks, then the seizure of Axis vessels in American ports at the end of the month and the agreement with Greenland to establish a military base there were all seen as self-evidently hostile acts towards Germany. They were accompanied by rumours of American plans to occupy the Azores (which the Germans had for a while considered possessing to pre-empt the Americans\u2013a move Hitler still favoured in order to provide a base for long-range bombers to attack the United States).74 And, though Roosevelt's administration introduced patrolling (to warn British convoys of lurking German submarines) rather than fully fledged escorting, this, too, augured future trouble.\n\nThe first apparent clash of an American destroyer, the USS Niblack, with what was\u2013wrongly, as it turned out\u2013taken to be a German U-boat in April seemed a sign of things to come, which could only hasten the descent into full-scale conflict. The sinking of the Robin Moor on 21 May provided an even more dangerous flashpoint, and was followed, six days later, by Roosevelt's big speech declaring his administration's intention to do everything to prevent German dominance of the Atlantic, and introducing a state of 'unlimited emergency'.75 The unexpected American soft-pedalling of the Robin Moor sinking came as a notable relief to Berlin, as did the fact that no significant action followed the fanfare preceding Roosevelt's major speech. A period of mounting tension over the spring had subsided into an uneasy stalemate. The last thing Hitler had wanted, preoccupied as he was by military action in the Balkans and, especially, the build-up to 'Operation Barbarossa', was the entry of America into the war as a result of some incident in the Atlantic.\n\nHe had, in fact, repeatedly given instructions to the trigger-happy Admiral Raeder, heading a bellicose German naval leadership anxious to engage fully with the increasing American threat in the Atlantic, to avoid all incidents that could be seen as a provocation. The Robin Moor sinking had been carried out in disregard for Hitler's explicit orders, but remained, until the autumn, a stray incident. The strict prohibition on German submarines taking any action against American shipping was repeated as 'Barbarossa' approached. At the beginning of June, Hitler informed Raeder that 'the question of searching American merchant ships is to be postponed until units of the fleet are sent to operate in the Atlantic', clearly a temporary ban until the war at sea could finally be fought with no holds barred.76\n\nOn 21 June, the day before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the question of German naval action against American ships in the Atlantic was again raised by Admiral Raeder. He brought up a near-incident the previous day, when a U-boat had encountered an ageing American battleship, the Texas, with a destroyer escort, ten miles within the proclaimed German combat area. The submarine had given chase, but the Texas had eventually steamed away unscathed and unaware of the danger.77 Raeder welcomed the incident, as he did that of the Robin Moor, and gave Hitler his opinion that 'where the United States is concerned firm measures are always more effective than apparent yielding'. But Hitler was adamant. 'For the present,' the report of his meeting with Raeder ran, 'the F\u00fchrer wishes to avoid incidents with American warships and merchant ships outside the closed area under all circumstances. For the closed area, clearly defined orders will be necessary which will not involve submarines in confused and dangerous conditions, and which can be carried out.'\n\nRaeder himself, getting the message, proposed a fifty-or hundred-mile strip inside the boundary of the combat zone, within which attacks on American warships should be avoided. Hitler wanted no misunderstandings. 'The F\u00fchrer declares in detail', the report continued, 'that until operation \"Barbarossa\" is well under way he wishes to avoid any incident with the United States. After a few weeks the situation will become clearer, and can be expected to have a favourable effect on the United States and Japan; America will have less inclination to enter the war, due to the threat from Japan which will then increase.'78 With that statement, not only was the temporary nature of the ban on attacking American shipping made plain, but the globally strategic aims of the attack on the Soviet Union were evident. In these aims, the position of Japan was crucial.\n\nUneasy and uncertain about Japanese intentions since the signing of the Tripartite Pact, the Nazi leadership had actively sought to persuade Japan to attack Singapore. Hitler's war directive of 5 March 1941, on 'Co-operation with Japan', began: 'The aim of the cooperation based on the Tripartite Pact has to be to bring Japan to active operations in the Far East as soon as possible. Strong English forces will be tied up as a result, and the main interest of the United States of America will be diverted to the Pacific.'79 Some days earlier, Ribbentrop had actively tried to persuade Oshima Hiroshi, the newly re-appointed and overtly pro-Axis Japanese ambassador in Berlin, to strike against Singapore.80 This, it was recognized, ran the risk of bringing American involvement in the war, something German policy was otherwise striving at all costs to avoid. The apparent contradiction was, however, merely superficial. American involvement in the Pacific, it was thought, would hinder rather than encourage participation in Europe. But, beyond that consideration, it was felt that a rapid strike against Singapore, bastion of British possessions in the Far East, while avoiding aggression towards the American base in the Philippines, could be undertaken without any declaration of war by the United States, and yet still preoccupy the Americans with defence in the Pacific at the expense of the Atlantic. A further worry lay behind the intensified German attempts to persuade the Japanese to act against Singapore. If and when Germany found herself at war with the United States, she desperately wanted Japan to be alongside her in the conflict. And, still apprehensive about Japanese intentions, there was the lingering fear that some rapprochement might be found with the United States, leaving Germany facing the eventual deployment of American might alone.81\n\nThis worry continued throughout the spring of 1941, enhanced by German awareness of the Japanese moves to defuse the mounting tension between Japan and the United States, a development which seemed to conflict with the impression given by Oshima, supportive of German policy, and the messages filtering to Berlin via the German embassy in Tokyo about the anti-American, pro-Axis stance of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Matsuoka. When Matsuoka paid a visit to Berlin at the end of March 1941 every effort was made both by Ribbentrop and by Hitler himself to press him to commit to an early strike against Singapore. 'The capture of Singapore', said Ribbentrop, 'would perhaps be most likely to keep America out of the war because the United States could scarcely risk sending its fleet into Japanese waters. If today, in a war against England, Japan were to succeed with one decisive stroke, such as the attack on Singapore, Roosevelt would be in a very difficult position. It would be difficult for him to take any effective action against Japan.'82 Hitler, in his own audience with the Japanese Foreign Minister, pulled out all the rhetorical stops. Germany had, he said, taken account of the possibility of American aid to Britain. But this could have no worthwhile effect before 1942. And Japan need have no fear of the Soviet Union in the event of a move against Singapore, given the German divisions on the eastern border ready to be deployed if need be (though Hitler divulged nothing of the actual plans to invade). He urged 'joint action' now by the Tripartite Pact powers. No time could be more favourable for the Japanese to act. But, to Hitler's disappointment, Matsuoka stonewalled. An attack on Singapore, he commented, was a matter of time, and in his own opinion the earlier it came the better. But other views, he said, prevailed in Tokyo. He could offer no commitment.83\n\nIn their further meeting after the Japanese Foreign Minister's brief courtesy call on Mussolini, Hitler again exuded a confidence that belied his underlying anxiety. In the event that America should enter the war, Germany would prove victorious, he claimed. She would wage war with her U-boats and Luftwaffe, and had taken precautions to ensure that there could be no American landing in Europe. In any case, American troops were no match for German soldiers. He went on to make an unprovoked promise of significance. If Japan should come into conflict with the United States, Germany would immediately 'draw the consequences'. America would seek to pick off her enemies one by one. 'Therefore Germany would', declared Hitler, 'promptly take part in the case of a conflict between Japan and America, for the strength of the allies in the Tripartite Pact lay in their acting in common. Their weakness would be in allowing themselves to be defeated separately.'84 These unprompted remarks give a clue to Hitler's reasons for declaring war on the United States eight months later. But for now he had to accept that Japanese intentions were unclear, and that nothing he could do was able to push Japan into the aggression in the Far East that he desired.\n\nAs the date neared for Hitler to launch his all-out offensive against the Soviet Union, Japanese plans remained nebulous. The Germans tried to encourage a more distinctly anti-American stance.85 But nothing materialized. On 6 June, the German ambassador in Tokyo, General Eugen Ott, reported that Japan was trying to improve relations with the United States to prevent American entry into the war. As a consequence a Japanese attack on Singapore had been shelved for the time being, since it was assumed that this 'would bring America to enter the war at once'. Ott was sure that the Japanese would honour their pledge to fight if the United States took the initiative in entering the war. But if America entered the war as a result of a conflict between Germany and Russia, Japan would feel no obligation to fight under the Tripartite Pact.86\n\nWhen German troops fell on the Soviet Union on 22 June, therefore, the stakes from Hitler's point of view could scarcely have been higher. A speedy triumph in the Soviet Union was absolutely imperative. German total victory depended upon a quick knockout blow against Stalin's forces, aided if at all possible by a Japanese strike in the Far East aimed at Britain and America. Japan's actions, which Hitler could not control, were now a crucial component of German strategy. For behind the whole strategy lay the spectre of American intervention. Once America joined the war, as seemed inevitable if the struggle were to become prolonged, Germany's chances would rapidly diminish. It came back to what Hitler had told Jodl on 17 December 1940: 'We must solve all continental European problems in 1941 since from 1942 onwards the United States would be in a position to intervene.'87\n\nIII\n\nAmerica was understandably far from the forefront of Hitler's thoughts over the weeks following the onslaught against the Soviet Union. But if the problem of the United States was at the back of Hitler's mind, it was not out of it. It was crucial above all, over this phase, until victory could be achieved, that no incidents involving American shipping should disturb the Atlantic front and serve as a conceivable pretext that Roosevelt might exploit to take America into the war. With Admiral Raeder and his colleagues still champing at the bit, Hitler could do no other than adamantly persist in the policy, already adopted before 'Barbarossa', of holding his U-boats in check, despite Roosevelt's intensified 'undeclared war' in the Atlantic. 'Germany's attitude to America', it was reported by the navy's leadership on 8 July, was 'to remain as before: not to let herself be provoked'.88\n\nThe previous day American troops had set foot in Iceland. This further departure from the neutrality of the United States unquestionably made the war in the Atlantic more difficult for Germany, with its obvious consequence of easing the passage of British convoys using the same route as American vessels supplying the troops in Iceland. But Hitler was not prepared to countenance any retaliatory measures. U-boat commanders in the north Atlantic had, in fact, promptly requested permission to take action in Icelandic waters. But policy remained the same: avoid any provocation.\n\nRaeder was unhappy. On 9 July, at the 'Wolf's Lair', the 'F\u00fchrer Headquarters' that had been set up in East Prussia, he sought a decision from Hitler on whether 'the occupation of Iceland by the USA is to be considered as an entry into the war, or as an act of provocation which should be ignored'. The response offers an insight into Hitler's thinking. 'The F\u00fchrer',\n\nRaeder's notes of the meeting ran, 'explains in detail that he is most anxious to postpone the United States' entry into the war for another one or two months. On the one hand the Eastern Campaign must be carried on with the entire Air Force, which is ready for this task and which he does not wish to divert even in part; on the other hand, a victorious campaign on the Eastern Front will have a tremendous effect on the whole situation and probably also on the attitude of the USA. Therefore for the time being he does not wish the existing instructions changed, but rather wants to be sure that incidents will be avoided.'89\n\nWhether the postponement of conflict with the United States for some two months was envisaged as leading, after a triumphant end to the eastern campaign, to Germany opening hostilities or to a presumed move by Roosevelt to enter the war was not made clear. But the sense of Hitler's comments implies that in such an eventuality the move would have been made by Germany. This is reinforced by his remarks to Raeder just over a fortnight later, on 25 July. Hitler repeated that he wanted to avoid having the United States declare war while the eastern campaign was still in progress. But 'after the eastern campaign he reserves the right to take severe action against the USA as well'.90 In the high summer of 1941, then, with the Wehrmacht rampaging eastwards, Hitler was contemplating war with the United States in the near future\u2013but only once the Soviet Union had been crushed.\n\nVictory in the east seemed at this time almost achieved. The chief of the army General Staff, General Franz Halder, had as early as 3 July concluded that it was not going too far to claim that the eastern campaign had been won within the space of two weeks.91 The arrogant presumption would soon rebound drastically. But it was in this euphoric atmosphere that Hitler ruminated on war against the United States once his hands were free in the east.\n\nIn the middle of July he opened up to Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, the giddy prospect of a combined effort by Germany and Japan to demolish the threat first of the Soviet Union, then of the United States. 'We won't get round the showdown with America,' Hitler told him. It should not be presumed, because he was not doing anything at present, that he accepted the American occupation of Iceland. He had no fear of America. The European armaments industry was far greater than the American. And he had experienced American soldiers in the First World War: the Germans were far superior. As soon as the eastern campaign was over, he would transfer his efforts from land to building up the navy and air force. (A war directive to this effect had, in fact, been issued the previous day. The extended emphasis upon U-boats, not surface ships, clearly had Britain and America in its sights.92 And we might recall that Hitler, already in May, was envisaging bases on the Azores for long-range bombers to attack the United States.93) He lavished praise upon the Wehrmacht, then told Oshima that the destruction of Russia was in the supreme interest both of Germany and of Japan. Russia would always be the ally of their enemies. Germany was menaced in the east by the Soviet Union and in the west by the United States, he declared. For Japan, it was the other way round. He was therefore of the opinion, he went on, 'that we should jointly destroy them'.\n\nThe current conditions for Japanese intervention, he implied to Oshima, were optimal. 'The Russian war was won', he roundly declared. Soviet resistance would soon be broken. He would be finished in the east by September. He did not need any help. He could continue the struggle alone. But, he stated, the smashing of the Soviet Union also brought the moment of fate for Japan. He and Ribbentrop (also present) had already encouraged Japan to push into Siberia. An attack on Vladivostok had temporarily become the substitute for Singapore.94 Hitler's strategic aim now became apparent. 'What would America then do? How would she then conduct the war?' he asked. 'The destruction of Russia must become the political life's work of Germany and Japan. And we could make it easy for ourselves if we acted at the same time, if we cut off Russia's life-support at the same time.' It offered the chance\u2013and the hope. 'If we were able to keep the United States out of the war at all,' he concluded, 'it would only be through the destruction of Russia and only then, if Japan and Germany act in clinical fashion [eiskalt] and definitively.'95\n\nAgain, Hitler had veered between the idea of the destruction of the Soviet Union to keep America out of the war, and as a platform for aggression against the United States. Either way, the talk with Oshima, with the war in the east presumed won, indicated that the United States figured centrally in Hitler's thoughts on attaining final victory. Mastery in Europe (reverting to his ideas of 1928 in the 'Second Book') had to be viewed in its global implications. It was the premiss for the showdown with the United States that Hitler again here saw as inevitable. And, though he was obviously speaking for effect, hoping to impress the Japanese to act as he wanted, Japan's position in Hitler's strategic vision at this point was plainly pivotal. But he could do nothing except hope that the leaders of Japan would see matters as he did. In reality, he was, and remained, quite in the dark about Japanese intentions. He was still convinced a month later that Japan would attack the Soviet Union.96 Unknown to him, on 2 July, almost two weeks before Hitler's talk with Oshima, the Japanese leadership had already decided against the 'northern option' of attacking the Soviet Union. The leaders of Japan were less sure than Hitler was that the German war in the east was already won.\n\nWithin a month of the rosy vista Hitler was painting for Oshima's benefit, the mood in his East Prussian headquarters had turned distinctly gloomier. Despite continuing German advances, it was now obvious that the quick knockout had not succeeded. Logistical difficulties were mounting alongside the growing numbers of casualties. Above all, Soviet defences were proving more resilient than had been forecast. On 11 August, General Halder acknowledged that 'we have underestimated the Russian colossus'.97 The war, it was ever more clear, would drag on through the winter. Hitler, suffering from dysentery and high nervous tension, was embroiled by mid-August in the first of many damaging conflicts with his leading military advisers. Should the primary objective be Moscow, as his generals were suggesting, or still, as the 'Barbarossa' plan had laid down and Hitler insisted, the push to secure the key industrial and oil-rich regions of the southern Soviet Union and the dominance of the Baltic through the conquest of Leningrad in the north?98 As the decision\u2013which only weeks later resolved itself into the desperate big autumn push for Moscow before the winter snows set in\u2013hung in the air and Hitler's generals recoiled beneath his thunderous outbursts, news of the Atlantic Charter, the outcome of Churchill's meeting with Roosevelt in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, filtered through.\n\nGoebbels immediately, cynically and with some accuracy summed up the Atlantic Charter as 'a typical propaganda product'\u2013something about which he knew a great deal. 'Evidently Churchill had set out to draw America into the war,' he commented. 'In that he did not succeed. Roosevelt can't at the moment bring about the entry of the United States into the war because of American popular opinion. So obviously they've agreed on this gigantic propaganda bluff.' Goebbels instructed the German press to pour out all its vitriol on the eight points of the Charter. He acknowledged that, through the Charter, Roosevelt had allied himself unequivocally with the aims of the British belligerents. But on no account could it be claimed 'that through this Declaration a transformation in the general war situation had taken place'.99 The line that the Atlantic Charter was 'a great big bluff' was taken up by Ribbentrop in a memorandum he drew up for Hitler on 17 August.100\n\nThe following day, Goebbels visited a sick and irritable Hitler in his field headquarters. Unsurprisingly, the German dictator was dismissive about the significance of the Atlantic Charter, much as Goebbels himself had predicted. Here, as repeatedly, Hitler's views on the United States were shaped, at least in part, by the dispatches relayed to him from the German military attach\u00e9 in Washington, B\u00f6tticher, who had cabled the message that the Atlantic Conference was of no importance. B\u00f6tticher had consistently (and erroneously) believed that the United States was so preoccupied with Japan that the Pacific was her priority. Correspondingly, he minimized the threat to Germany. And he further pandered to Hitler's prejudices through his frequently reported belief that the Jews were running America.101 B\u00f6tticher had now signalled that the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt would do nothing to alter the course of events or the balance of forces. America could not enter the war as yet, whatever the declarations, since military preparations were incomplete and she feared war on two fronts. He saw the internal differences in the United States as a reflection of 'the conflict between the Jewish conception of the world and true Americanism', the latter opposed to intervention.102\n\nGiven such background information, it was a foregone conclusion that Hitler would be unimpressed by the Atlantic Charter. Grossly overestimating some recent parliamentary criticism of Churchill, he thought the British Prime Minister's domestic difficulties lay behind his attempt to persuade Roosevelt to enter the war.103 The American President was unable to oblige, as he actually wanted to do, because he had to be cautious of the domestic situation in the United States. (Hitler was well apprised of the bitter debates in Congress over the extension of the Selective Service Act.) Roosevelt and Churchill had settled on the Declaration of the Atlantic Charter, in his view, because they were in no position to decide on anything of practical value. The Charter, Hitler concluded, 'can do us no harm at all'.104\n\nJapanese intentions were still a matter merely of guesswork. 'The F\u00fchrer is convinced that Japan will carry out the attack on Vladivostok as soon as forces have been assembled,' Raeder noted from his meeting with Hitler on 22 August. 'The present aloofness can be explained by the fact that the assembling of forces is to be accomplished undisturbed, and the attack is to come as a surprise move.'105 Hitler's optimism was unfounded and misplaced. The German Foreign Ministry, in fact, was far less sanguine than Hitler about Japan's intentions. The replacement of the pro-Axis Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka in mid-July by Admiral Toyoda, known to be more conciliatory towards America, was not seen as a positive sign. It stirred worries that Japan, faced with the freezing of Japanese assets in the United States on 26 July as a reaction to the occupation of southern Indochina, might be anxious to reach a rapprochement with the Americans. The unease was heightened by information gleaned at the end of August that an important message from the Japanese premier, Prince Konoe, had been passed to President Roosevelt. This was interpreted as a move to avoid conflict, precisely the opposite of what Germany wanted. The Germans were left guessing. But they could not avoid the suspicion that the Japanese were anything but anxious to rush into action that would invite a clash with the United States.106\n\nIt was at this stage that the Greer incident gave a new twist to events in the Atlantic. Goebbels was initially inclined to play it down. He even thought at first that it had probably been an English submarine deliberately attempting to create a provocation to bring the Americans into the war. He still took the view that Roosevelt's position was not strong enough to risk war. He was surprised at the way the American press was exploiting the affair. For his part, he was prepared to let the German press attack Roosevelt personally, but not to link these attacks to the incident in the Atlantic and offer any provocation. 'Our position is for the time being extraordinarily difficult,' he noted. 'We have to operate with great sensitivity and the utmost tact.'107 But when Roosevelt delivered his 'shoot-on-sight' speech on 11 September, Goebbels told the press to fire a full-scale broadside at the President. He interpreted the speech as Roosevelt's commencement of an unofficial war. Only American opinion, he presumed, was holding back an officially declared war. And it need not be doubted, he thought, that if there should be a series of armed clashes Roosevelt could whip up opinion without difficulty to back an official declaration. That this would be unwelcome to Germany at this stage, Goebbels made plain. 'The entry of the United States into the war would be not so much materially but psychologically extremely unpleasant,' he commented. 'But that, too, would have to be borne.'108 A day later, he summed up his own (and without doubt Hitler's) feelings. 'The longer a formal declaration of war can be delayed, the better it is for us. If, what we are all hoping and urgently yearning for, we have brought the eastern campaign to a victorious conclusion, then it can't harm us much more.'109\n\nThe caution that Goebbels voiced was not shared by Raeder and the naval leadership. As before, they were keen to engage fully in the battle of the Atlantic and did not want to accept the American escalation in the Greer affair lying down. On 17 September, Raeder and U-boat chief Admiral D\u00f6nitz put a number of proposals to Hitler to amend the combat instructions to submarines in the Atlantic. Apart from their interest in maximizing the sectoral interests of the navy, both felt that Germany's best chance of victory lay in cutting off British supplies from the United States. To do this meant expanding the war at sea to American ships assisting British convoys. Hesitation in such an undertaking, they thought, was a grave mistake. They wanted the freedom to attack convoy escorts without regard to the blockade area, and to attack American vessels if they were helping the enemy or engaged in an assault or a pursuit. They also sought the recognition of only a twenty-mile neutrality zone off the American coast. The proposals amounted to little less than unrestricted licence for U-boats in the Atlantic. But they went much too far for Hitler at this crucial juncture in the eastern campaign. 'On the basis of a detailed discussion of the situation as a whole,' recorded Raeder, 'in which it appears that the end of September will bring the great decision in the Russian campaign, the F\u00fchrer requests that care should be taken to avoid any incidents in the war on merchant shipping before about the middle of October.'110 But, of course, the end of September did not bring victory in the Soviet Union. And the middle of October came and went without any change in Hitler's orders to the U-boats in the Atlantic.\n\nHitler's attention, and that of his leading generals, was meanwhile focused intently upon the unfolding drama on the eastern front. Though the advance on Moscow had commenced at the start of October, the chances of taking the city before the winter were dwindling. The timetable was by now awry. The grand strategic scheme behind 'Barbarossa' lay already on the verge of ruination. But the threat from the United States, rearming fast, had not diminished. To the German leadership, Roosevelt\u2013pushed by Jewish warmongers\u2013was determined to take America into the war.\n\nAction by Japan in the Far East was increasingly imperative from Berlin's perspective. But a subtle difference had taken place in German expectations of Japan. When Hitler had talked to Oshima in July, he had hoped, even presumed, that the Japanese would cooperate in the demolition of the Soviet Union, and then deal with America. Now, the hopes were starting to rise that the simmering tension between Japan and the United States would not cool into some uneasy rapprochement, but would boil over into full-scale war in the Pacific. By this time, Hitler wanted to avoid imposing pressure on Japan. He did not want it to appear that Germany needed the Japanese.111 Despite this, on 13 September Ribbentrop, warning that Roosevelt's aggression was certain to lead to war between the Axis powers and the United States, sought assurances from Tokyo that Japan would honour her commitments under the Tripartite Pact. He wanted a warning to Washington along those lines.112\n\nNew hope arose from the change of government in Tokyo on 18 October. The end of Konoe's government and the new Cabinet formed under General Tojo, known to be a militant, were correctly interpreted as a sign that the basis for negotiations with Washington had failed. Hitler remained sceptical. He saw a mismatch between strong words and action from the new Japanese Cabinet. He distrusted Tojo, thought the construction of the new Cabinet was a tactical bluff to force concessions from America, and had as great a difficulty as ever in reading Japanese intentions, which remained completely opaque. Even Oshima was kept ignorant of his government's aims.113 But Goebbels presumed 'that now at least gradually the Japanese intervention will start to get going'.114 That, in turn, would preoccupy the Americans, distract them from the Atlantic and the European war, and allow the Germans time to finish off the Soviets. As long as the eastern campaign was unresolved, however, the prohibition of incidents that might be dangerous flashpoints in relations with the United States had to be upheld.\n\nSo although such incidents did indeed multiply, they received only passing attention in the German press, and their significance was seen as domestically contrived by Roosevelt. The torpedoing of the Kearny on 17 October was thus portrayed as an invention by the American President to help the passage through Congress of the controversial bill to repeal important sections of the Neutrality Act.115 And when the Reuben James went down on 31 October, the German press contented itself with a vehement denunciation of the claims by Roosevelt about the secret documents he alleged to have in his possession illustrating Nazi intentions for South America. On the consequences of the sinking itself, Goebbels summed up, perceptively enough: 'Roosevelt probably has no use for war at present. He has first to see how things go with Japan, and then public opinion in the United States stands in his way. Anyway, I don't think there is need for anxiety at the moment.'116 In a speech to the Nazi Party 'old guard' on 8 November 1941, the anniversary of the ill-fated putsch of 1923, Hitler underlined his own moderation in the Atlantic, in contrast to the trigger-happy actions of the Americans and the provocations of Roosevelt, and again poured scorn on the President's alleged evidence of Nazi plans in South America.117 Speaking to Raeder five days later, Hitler confirmed that the orders to the navy would remain unchanged even if Congress repealed the Neutrality Law. He agreed that it remained naval policy 'to lessen the possibilities of incidents with American forces'.118 Nevertheless, as Hitler must have seen, this policy (which naval leaders had, as we have noted, long been straining to have changed) could not continue indefinitely once the American Neutrality Laws had been amended without conceding the battle of the Atlantic, and, with that, the strengthening of the vital supply-line to Britain that enabled the British war effort to continue.119 The German toleration policy necessarily, therefore, had time limits\u2013undefined, but real.\n\nDuring the autumn, Hitler had talked more than once in his usual sweeping, though vague, fashion about the great showdown with the United States as an obligation of the next generation. It was a return to (or a repeat of) what he had envisaged in the 1920s. But how far he believed what he was saying is difficult to judge. As always, it was the effect on those listening that counted for him.120 For by this time Hitler knew better than most that the showdown would come earlier than that. The truth was that war with America could now not be avoided, or even long delayed.\n\nWith neither the Germans nor the Americans prepared, however, to push over the brink and into the cauldron of war in the Atlantic, it would be events in the Pacific, uncontrollable by Hitler's Reich, that would eventually bring the fateful decision that took Germany into outright hostilities against the United States.\n\nIV\n\nRibbentrop's request of 13 September, seeking assurances from Japan under the terms of the Tripartite Act in the event of war between Germany and the United States, remained unanswered throughout October. The change of Japanese government in the middle of the month, when the hardline General Tojo had replaced Konoe as Prime Minister, had, to external appearances, brought no substantial alteration in policy. Hitler, it was reported in the Foreign Office, expected little of the new Cabinet. He had, it seems, changed his mind since the summer about Japan entering the war against the Soviet Union and now had some anxiety that this might be in Tojo's mind. It was not now what he wanted. Conflict between Japan and the United States in the Pacific was far more desirable from his point of view. He still harboured by now dwindling hopes that he could force Britain to the conference table by defeating the Soviet Union. 'If Russia collapses now and England wants to make peace with us,' he reportedly said, 'Japan could be an obstacle for us.'121 What impact Tojo's takeover of power had on relations between Tokyo and Washington was unclear to the German leadership. The impression gleaned from the German ambassador in Tokyo, General Ott, was that relations between Japan and the United States had deteriorated. But there was little sign of any obvious action. Towards the end of the month, Goebbels noted a rise in tension, but at no more than the propaganda level. 'It is very questionable', he remarked, 'whether Tojo will proceed to decisive action. Perhaps the F\u00fchrer is right to be sceptical. At any rate, we should not harbour false hopes.'122 At the end of the month, Ott reported that the Japanese had still not come to a decision on the warning to the United States which Germany had sought six weeks earlier, on 13 September.123 It was highly discouraging.\n\nGoebbels, influenced by Hitler, was now an outright sceptic about the Japanese. Tojo 'talks tough, but he doesn't shoot', was the Propaganda Minister's verdict on 6 November. 'The Japanese are evidently not yet inclined to intervene actively in the conflict,' he added. 'Thank goodness that we didn't reckon with the active military support of Japan, so that our calculations are not substantially affected by this fact.'124 But Goebbels was not fully in the picture.\n\nThings had by this point just started to move. And the overtures had come from Tokyo, not Berlin. The first straw in the wind was a message from Ott on 5 November about a tentative approach from the Japanese navy 'concerning a German assurance not to conclude a separate peace or armistice in case of a Japanese-American war'.125 More promising still\u2013and the opening to a flurry of exchanges\u2013was a feeler transmitted by General Okamoto Kio Puku, the head of the foreign armies section of the Japanese General Staff, on 18 November. Okamoto reported that a peaceful solution to the problems between Japan and the United States was unlikely, in the view of the Japanese General Staff. Should relations break down, the Japanese would resort to 'self-help', which would be followed by the entry of the United States into the war. What Okamoto wanted, on behalf of the General Staff, was both states, Germany and Japan, to 'obligate themselves not to conclude any armistice or peace separately but only jointly'.126 Ribbentrop provided a quick response. He had Ott pass on the message on 21 November: it was taken for granted in Berlin that any armistice or peace, in the event of war between Japan or Germany and the United States, could only be concluded jointly, and that this could be made a formal agreement.127\n\nThe Japanese wasted no time. Within two days, on 23 November, Ott was transmitting Okamoto's reply, which made it evident that Tojo himself had been consulted. The diplomatic ratchet was now turned one notch further. Okamoto had wanted to hear from Ott, the ambassador reported, whether in his view 'Germany would also consider herself at war with the United States if Japan should open hostilities'.128 The Tripartite Pact, we might recall, had stipulated as its condition for any joint action aggression by a third force. But what if Japan fired the first shot? On that eventuality, nothing had been agreed. Oddly, Hitler's verbal expression of readiness at his meeting the previous April with Matsuoka to offer Germany's immediate support in the event of Japan becoming embroiled in conflict with America, without any qualification about the aggressor, had in the meantime been forgotten or ignored.129 Whether it had been inaccurately reported at the time in Tokyo, not treated as a serious and binding commitment by Hitler, or simply overlooked, is unclear. In any case, it had been less than a formal agreement. So what Okamoto was now seeking was formal assurance that Germany would offer military support in a war Japan herself had started\u2013something not covered by the pact. Giving such a guarantee would commit the German Reich to war with America\u2013an eventuality which up to this juncture everything had been done to avoid. The initiative for deciding on Germany's war with the United States would have been passed to Japan. In return for such a guarantee, Okamoto was offering precisely nothing. And, though Hitler and Ribbentrop were unaware of this, the Japanese government, as they sought an agreement with Germany to rule out a separate peace with America, were prepared to meet a German request to engage in the war against the Soviet Union with a firm refusal. Should this become a German condition of support for the Japanese war against America, no agreement would be entered into.130 But that would not halt the Japanese preparations, now entering their final stages.\n\nOf these the Germans knew nothing. Ernst von Weizs\u00e4cker, State Secretary in the German Foreign Office, had noted in his diary on 23 November that it would be difficult to close the gap between Japanese and American demands, but that Tokyo provided little information on the progress of the negotiations with Washington.131 Goebbels continued to bemoan Tojo's perceived lack of aggression. 'There can at present be no talk of Japanese intentions to intervene in the war,' he concluded in mid-November.132 In fact, the Japanese leaders had already fixed 25 November as their deadline for reaching agreement with the Americans. If none were achieved by that date, there would be war. None was received; and the next day the naval task force set out in secret for Pearl Harbor.\n\nOkamoto's key question, posed on 23 November, received no answer for five days.133 But once Ribbentrop learned, on 27 November, that the Americans had presented Japan with an ultimatum almost certain to result in an end to negotiations and a breakdown of relations, he moved swiftly, doubtless after consultation with Hitler.134 Next day he told Oshima, the Japanese ambassador, that in his view Japan could not now avoid a showdown with the United States. The situation, he thought, could never be more favourable than the present. He vehemently urged Japan to declare war straight away, on the United States as well as on Britain. According to Oshima's dispatch to Tokyo, the German Foreign Minister then stated: 'Should Japan become engaged in a war with the United States, Germany of course would join the war immediately. There is absolutely no possibility of Germany's entering into a separate peace with the United States under such circumstances. The F\u00fchrer is determined on that point.'135\n\nOn 30 November in Tokyo, Ott assured the Japanese Foreign Minister, Togo, that Germany would stand by Japan.136 An urgent reply was cabled to Oshima. He was to inform Hitler and Ribbentrop secretly that 'there is extreme danger that war may suddenly break out between the Anglo-Saxon nations and Japan through some clash of arms'. He was to add that 'war may come quicker than anyone dreams'.137 He was to ensure that Ribbentrop's spoken promise was turned into a written agreement. Late on the evening of 1 December, or in the early hours of 2 December, Oshima signalled Tokyo's agreement to Ribbentrop. But before a formal agreement could be drawn up, Ribbentrop needed Hitler's final approval.138\n\nEven in the early 1940s heads of state were rarely out of telephone or radio contact. But for the next three days it indeed appears that Hitler was incommunicado, stranded after a flying visit to the eastern front and unable to return to his East Prussian headquarters until 4 December. Only then could Ribbentrop reach him for a final decision, which led to the rushed drafting of a new agreement effectively superseding the Tripartite Pact of the previous year and presented to Oshima that night.139 With Hitler's approval, the die was now effectively cast that would take Germany into war against America.\n\nRome was immediately contacted by an impatient Ribbentrop and fell into line straight away. Mussolini was pleased at the Japanese initiative. 'Thus we arrive at the war between continents, which I have foreseen since September 1939,' he declared.140 Under the vital first two articles, all the partners committed themselves to involvement if war should break out between any one of them and the United States, and to conclude no armistice or peace with the United States or Britain other than by complete mutual consent.141 All that remained was for it to be signed. Weizs\u00e4cker expected matters to be finalized by 6 December.142 But that did not happen. Details still had to be ironed out. It took time.\n\nGerman leaders had for some days sensed that the crisis in relations between Japan and the United States was coming to the boil. With German troops bogged down in the Russian wastes and a major military crisis brewing on the approaches to Moscow, this was extremely welcome news. So was the prospect dangled by Oshima of a Japanese move on Singapore in the near future.143 The urgency to accommodate Japanese requests for a revised tripartite agreement reflected this feeling that a key turning point in the conflict, to Germany's advantage, was approaching.\n\nNot everyone shared Hitler's (and Ribbentrop's) optimism about the Japanese. In the Foreign Office, Weizs\u00e4cker commented that the Japanese had for some days regarded a clash with the United States as inevitable. The military effect of Japan's entry into the war from a German point of view seemed to him fairly evenly balanced. But overall, rational and pessimistic about Germany's long-term chances, he did not welcome Japanese participation.144 News was by now filtering through from the Foreign Office to army General Staff headquarters that the storm was likely to break soon. General Halder heard on 6 December that conflict between Japan and the United States was 'possibly imminent'.145 Goebbels, outside the information loop about the diplomatic toings and froings between Tokyo and Berlin, repeatedly registered the mounting tension. On 6 December he noted: 'The row between Washington and Tokyo is still at a critical peak. I no longer have the impression that things can be mended. Sometime the bomb will go off in this conflict.'146\n\nHe had no idea how close he was to the truth. Early next morning, Hawaii time, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It was evening in central Europe on 7 December when the stunning news reached Hitler's headquarters.\n\nV\n\nThe German leadership had no prior inkling of a Japanese attack. They seem, in fact, to have been hoping that the first strike would come from the Americans.147 In the first week of December 'we did not believe there would be a direct attack by Japan on America', Weizs\u00e4cker later recalled. When news of Pearl Harbor broke, the Foreign Office at first thought it was a hoax.148 That was Ribbentrop's first, angry reaction. He thought it was probably a propaganda trick by Germany's enemies, and that his press department had fallen for it. He asked for further enquiries to be made and a report given to him next morning.149 Confirmation came through faster than that. In Rome, Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, received a telephone call that night from an excited Ribbentrop. 'He is joyful over the Japanese attack on the United States,' Ciano noted. He offered Ribbentrop his congratulations, but was doubtful about the advantages the new development would bring. 'One thing is now certain,' he thought. 'America will enter the conflict, and the conflict itself will be long enough to permit her to put all her potential strength into action.'150 Weizs\u00e4cker was privately also unsure about the benefits for Germany. Japan, he reflected, had now ranked herself with the 'aggressors'. 'The military effect would have to be a very big one to justify this procedure. Now our relations with the United States will also be legally clarified very quickly,' he adjudged.151\n\nGoebbels, though attentively following the growing tension in relations between Japan and the United States, was equally surprised at the news of Pearl Harbor. 'Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, the news breaks that Japan has attacked the United States,' he wrote in his diary. 'The war has arrived.' It was what he had been hoping for but doubting would happen over the past weeks. He was still unsure where the attack had taken place; 'somewhere in the Pacific' was all he knew. During the night came further news. Roosevelt had summoned Congress and war had been declared on Japan from 6 a.m. that morning. Soon afterwards Hitler was on the line. He was 'extraordinarily happy' about the turn of events. He wanted the Reichstag to be summoned for Wednesday (10 December)\u2013it was now in the early hours of Monday\u2013to clarify the German position. As always, Hitler immediately thought of the propaganda effect. He was wasting no time. Goebbels now reckoned (we noted his comment near the beginning of the chapter), presumably on the basis of his conversation with Hitler, on a German declaration of war against the United States in accordance with the Tripartite Pact. But he saw a notable advantage in the sharp reduction of weaponry provided by the United States for aid to Britain, and also that Germany was now in some ways 'shielded on the flanks', since America would be distracted by events in the Pacific. 'For the F\u00fchrer and for the whole headquarters there is the purest joy about the development. At least now we have a serious threat removed from round our neck for the time being,' he recorded, his views unquestionably echoing if not directly quoting Hitler's own. 'Roosevelt will not be able to be as bold over the coming as in the previous weeks and months,' he added. 'This war has become a world war in the truest meaning of the word. From small beginnings, its waves have now enveloped the entire globe.' Now was Germany's great chance, once the present crisis was surmounted. 'If we win this contest, then nothing stands in the way of fulfilling the dream of German world power,' he summed up.152\n\nFor Hitler, immersed in the deepening crisis on the eastern front, where the Soviet counter-offensive against the frozen and exhausted German troops not far from Moscow had begun two days before Pearl Harbor, the elation at events in the distant Pacific was unalloyed. 'We can't lose the war at all,' was his relieved reassessment of the situation. 'We now have an ally which has never been conquered in 3,000 years.'153 For him it was no less than 'a deliverance'.154 When he had burst in, clutching the telegram with the news of war between Japan and America, the astonished Keitel had the feeling that Hitler had been freed from a nightmare.155 As the word rapidly spread, the entire headquarters was 'caught up in an ecstasy of rejoicing'.156 Had Hitler realized that, when the dust settled over Pearl Harbor, the damage inflicted by the Japanese raid would prove to be substantially less than the knockout blow needed in Tokyo, his mood might have been less ecstatic. As it was, he was sure that his long-held presumption would turn out to be correct: America would now be tied down by the war in the Pacific; and Britain's position would be undermined both by the dwindling supplies coming across the Atlantic and by Japanese attacks on her possessions in the Far East. The prognosis for Germany's chances had improved at a stroke. Little wonder that Hitler was still beaming with optimism when he arrived in Berlin on 9 December.157\n\nThere was never the slightest doubt, given these views, that Hitler would use the occasion to take Germany into war with the United States. This was, we have seen, no mere spontaneous, emotional reaction to Pearl Harbor itself. For weeks beforehand, the dealings with the Japanese had been predicated on Germany entering a war against the United States which might be caused by events outside German control. On hearing the news of Pearl Harbor, Hitler did not hesitate for a moment. That Germany would now declare war on the United States was taken for granted by Goebbels from his telephone conversation with Hitler. When Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, returned to F\u00fchrer Headquarters on the morning of 9 December after a period of leave, he immediately gleaned the impression that Pearl Harbor was seen as a signal to declare war on America.158 And Wolfgang Brocke, then a young officer attached to Hitler's headquarters, recalled, if long after the events, that Hitler's immediate reaction on hearing the news of Pearl Harbor had been that he could now declare war on the United States.159\n\nUnquestionably, the battle of the Atlantic was the imperative behind Hitler's vital decision. Keitel connected Hitler's elation on hearing the news of Pearl Harbor with the feeling that it brought a relief from the consequences of America's 'undeclared war', which had worked to Germany's disadvantage.160 And without waiting for the declaration of war, on 8\u20139 December Hitler removed the shackles from his U-boats. From now on, they had free licence to attack American shipping.161 That was a notable relief for submarine commanders, noted Goebbels. It was impossible to fight a 'torpedo war' when the commander had to study half a dozen instruction manuals to work out whether he had permission to fire. Much of the failure of the war at sea could be attributed to the way the U-boats had been hamstrung. 'That's now over. No more free zones will be acknowledged, and the American flag will no longer be respected. Anyone caught on the way to England must reckon with being torpedoed by our U-boats.'162 This reflected Hitler's thinking.\n\nWhen Ribbentrop saw him on the morning of 9 December\u2013before the declaration of war, but after his 'licence to kill' orders had been sent out to the U-boats\u2013Hitler stated that the main reason for Germany now entering the war was 'that the United States is already shooting against our ships. They have been a forceful factor in this war, and they have, through their actions, already created a situation, which is practically, let's say, of war.'163 For months he had held his naval leaders back while they had chafed at the bit because of the constraints under which they had to operate in the Atlantic. And all the time, the Americans had been gradually intensifying their 'undeclared war'. The provocations had mounted, and still Hitler had felt forced to hold back. But let no one say he bore his grudges lightly. He could not wait for the moment when he was at last free to retaliate. The vehemence with which, in his Reichstag speech on 11 December, he poured out his hitherto unresolved grievances against what he portrayed as an almost endless catalogue of American transgressions in the Atlantic over many months was not purely for propaganda effect.164 It reflected his inner burning desire to get even with President Roosevelt. Even more importantly, the U-boats were his only method of attacking America. And without forcing the United States onto the retreat, or at least to a readiness for concessions, the war could not now be ended.\n\nThe clearest possible indication of Hitler's thinking can be seen in his confidential remarks to his party leaders the following afternoon. They make plain that, in his crucial decision, the war in the Atlantic was uppermost in his mind.\n\nGoebbels recapitulated what Hitler had to say:\n\nHe emphasizes the extraordinary significance of the Japanese entry into the war, above all with regard to our U-boat war. Our U-boat commanders had reached the point where they didn't know any longer whether or not they should fire their torpedoes. A U-boat war can't be won in the long run if the U-boats are not free to fire. The F\u00fchrer is convinced that even if Japan had not joined the war, he would have had to declare war on the Americans sooner or later. Now the east Asian conflict drops like a present into our lap. All German agencies have indeed worked to bring it about, but even so it came so quickly as to be partly unexpected. Psychologically, too, that's of inestimable value to us. A declaration of war by us on the Americans without the counterpart of the east Asian conflict would have been hard to take for the German people. Now everyone accepts this development almost as a matter of course. The F\u00fchrer has gone through an extraordinarily tough inner struggle in the past weeks and months about this question. He knew that either the U-boat war would be condemned altogether to ineffectiveness or that he would have to take the decisive step to wage war against America. This heavy burden has been taken from him. He views the struggle in the Atlantic now far more positively than previously. He thinks the number of sinkings will rise rapidly. He regards the tonnage problem as altogether decisive in the war effort. The one who solves this problem will probably win the war.165\n\nFor Hitler, his remarks make clear, the one-sided state of 'undeclared war' was the main reason for his decision. He now had the justification he needed for opening up all-out submarine warfare in the Atlantic and preventing the U-boats being as 'worthless' as they had proved in 1915\u201316.166 In the declaration of war on the United States, too, the reverberations of the First World War that had left such an indelible mark on Hitler could still be felt.\n\nPearl Harbor provided the occasion. Without the Japanese attack on the United States he evidently would not have felt confident about taking such a giant step. The hasty diplomacy since the first Japanese overtures in early November about firmer military commitments than those stipulated in the Tripartite Pact had presumably been undertaken with an eye on the increasing likelihood of Germany, as well as Japan, becoming involved in hostilities with the United States in the near future. Negotiations had reached the stage where Germany was ready to sign a formal agreement binding her to join the war even if Japan, not the United States, launched the attack. More by good luck than good judgement this agreement had still not been signed when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Hitler was not obliged, therefore, by the Tripartite Pact or any other treaty to do anything at all. He had what he wanted: Japan's engagement in war against the United States in the Pacific. He could have been content with the presumption that, through the godsend of Pearl Harbor, America would have her energies diverted into the Pacific. He could simply have maintained the existing fraught relations with the United States. Or he could have altered the orders to his U-boats (which Raeder had been clamouring for over the past months) without declaring war\u2013which, in fact, he did do for the two days before his Reichstag speech. But he chose neither to remain passive, nor just to escalate confrontation in the Atlantic (which would have had the likely effect of putting increased pressure on Roosevelt to risk either a declaration of war or a loss of face). Instead, he decided (unnecessarily, therefore, from the point of view of his existing international commitments) on a full declaration of hostilities against the United States. And this was a decision that he evidently took very swiftly, and without consultation.\n\nEven so, there was a delay, despite pressure from Tokyo, before he made the declaration. Hitler knew his speech was a vital one. It would be heard around the world, not least in Japan and America, and it had to have a big impact at home. He had been promising Goebbels for weeks that he would speak to the German people. But things had hardly gone according to plan in the eastern campaign. Now, at last, he had some substance for a speech, something he could turn to good propaganda effect. Ribbentrop told Oshima on 9 December that Hitler was assessing the best way, from the psychological point of view, of declaring war on the United States.167 By 10 December, however, the date initially envisaged for the meeting of the Reichstag had to be put back. Hitler had been held up by an endless array of meetings and had not even begun work on his speech.168 He wanted to prepare it especially carefully. So he postponed the Reichstag meeting by a day.169 There were banal reasons, therefore, for the delay in reaching the declaration of war. But there was another, less banal reason. This was the draft agreement, still unsigned, with Japan.\n\nWhen he met Hitler on the morning of 9 December, Ribbentrop passed on Oshima's request for an immediate declaration of war on the United States. Whether he was suffering from a belated bout of cold feet, or was simply reminding Hitler of Germany's strict obligations in such a crucial decision, the Foreign Minister pointed out that there was no commitment to declare war under the Tripartite Pact. That had bound Germany to military aid for Japan only in the event of an attack on her ally. But Japan, not America, had unleashed the conflict. Hitler's response, however, was that 'if we don't stand on the side of Japan, the pact is politically dead'.170\n\nRibbentrop later claimed that he had tried to dissuade Hitler from a declaration of war. 'I never wanted the USA to be drawn into the war,' he claimed, 'but then, as later, the Japanese had their own ideas.'171 His demeanour at the time lends little credence to this subsequent apologia. He had not demurred from the more binding arrangement with Japan, mooted for over two weeks; he had enthused to Ciano after Pearl Harbor; and, speaking to the Italian ambassador, Dino Alfieri, on 9 December, he had referred to Japan's involvement on the side of the Axis as 'the most important event to develop since the beginning of the war'.172 On 8 December, the day before meeting Hitler, Ribbentrop had given Oshima a draft of the proposed new agreement with Japan, and sent it that evening to Ott. He asked for it to be accepted without delay because it 'may be announced here in a special form', an evident reference to Hitler's forthcoming Reichstag speech.173\n\nThere were, it turned out, still some small points on which the Japanese wanted clarification. Final authorization only came through on Wednesday, the 10th, and the important agreement was finally signed by Ribbentrop, Alfieri and Oshima on the Thursday, just before the declaration of war. In his speech that afternoon, 11 December, Hitler read out the whole of the agreement.174 It was an indication of the value he attached to it. The key clause was the second: the agreement not to conclude an armistice or peace treaty with the United States or England without complete mutual consent.\n\nThis now seemed to Hitler watertight. He had a formal agreement with an ally who had historically proved invincible. The agreement prevented Japan from concluding an early peace with America, as she had done with Russia in 1905. In the First World War, American entry had tipped the balance. With Japan and America now locked in conflict in the Pacific, and with no Japanese 'get-out clause' unless Germany agreed, the chances of a repeat seemed, if not altogether eradicated, then at least massively reduced.175 Without such an agreement, there was always the possibility in Hitler's mind that Japan and the United States could reach some sort of compromise peace that would leave Germany facing the might of America on her own.176 So with the war in the east likely to drag on into the indefinite future, what became dubbed the 'no-separate-peace treaty'177 seemed a good basis for the declaration of war on the United States to which Hitler was in any case temperamentally inclined. This would ensure that America would be tied down in the Pacific. More than that, she would be unable to concentrate wholly on that theatre, but would be faced with a two-front war. In this way, the weight of American arms, which Hitler anticipated coming online during 1942, could be fully directed neither at Japan, possibly forcing her to sue for peace, nor at Germany before the war in the east was won and Europe lay at her feet.178\n\nOne other factor, always important to Hitler, also played a part: prestige. 'A great power doesn't let itself have war declared on it, it declares war itself,' Ribbentrop, doubtless echoing his master's voice, told Weizs\u00e4cker.179 It seemed better to Weizs\u00e4cker that the declaration should come from America rather than Germany. He did not see the importance of the gesture towards Japan. But such an argument was pointless.180 For Hitler, America had ranked herself squarely among Germany's enemies, especially over the past eighteen months, and above all with her pointed escalation of aggression during the autumn. Despite the conflict that had now opened up in the Pacific, there was no doubt in his mind that it was only a matter of time\u2013and he presumed it would happen sooner rather than later\u2013before the United States declared war on Germany. Only three days before Pearl Harbor the sensational publication in the isolationist Chicago Tribune of the Victory Program envisaging a mighty army to fight in Europe\u2013a claim not denied by the Roosevelt administration\u2013had come as a revelation of American war aims to Nazi leaders in Berlin.181 It seemed likely that an American declaration of war on Japan would soon be followed by a similar declaration against her partners in the Tripartite Pact. That would have been harder to 'sell' at home, Hitler must have calculated, than a declaration, on grounds which he could justify, by Germany herself on the United States.\n\nAs Goebbels admitted, a stroke of luck had brought Japan into the conflict.182 That had overnight given a major boost to Germany's prospects, especially in the critical battle of the Atlantic. As usual, Hitler sought immediately to grasp the opportunity and to recover the initiative in the war which he had seemed in danger of losing. Hitler's extraordinarily inflated hopes in his Japanese ally led him on 11 December to his fateful choice: all-out war against an enemy whom, as he conceded to Oshima at the beginning of January 1942, he had no idea how to defeat.183\n\nVI\n\nWas Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States on 11 December 1941, then, a puzzle, a grandiose moment of megalomaniac madness? It has often been seen as such. But, in fact, there is no puzzle. From Hitler's perspective it was only anticipating the inevitable. Far from appearing inexplicable or baffling, Hitler's decision was consistent with the views he had held on America since the 1920s, and, especially, with his strategic thinking in 1940\u201341 about the United States, Japan and the future course of the war. It also accorded with his implicit fear that time was not on Germany's side, that America had to be defeated, or at least held in check, before her economic might could sway the conflict, as it had done in the First World War. Given his underlying premisses, his decision was quite rational.\n\nThat does not mean it was sensible. But the lunacy of Hitler's project was the gigantic gamble of the bid for world power, not just this precise part of it. Certainly, he felt a rush of blood after Pearl Harbor. Neither he nor anyone else in the Nazi leadership had anticipated an attack of such boldness. The very audacity of the Japanese strike appealed to him. It was his sort of move. And, grossly overestimating Japan's war potential, he thought its effect was far greater than it turned out to be. In those days, reeling from setbacks on the eastern front (the first, devastating Soviet counter-offensive of the war had just begun), he could not have wished for better news than a Japanese assault on the American fleet at anchor. Japan and America at war was exactly what he wanted. The decisions that followed were taken in this mood of exhilaration. But they were not driven by spontaneous, irrational emotion. Letting his U-boats loose on American shipping came first. He had no doubt been itching to do this all autumn. Now he need hold back no longer. This in itself, he imagined, would turn the battle of the Atlantic Germany's way (and, indeed, a small number of U-boats at work off the north American coast were able to wreak havoc on Allied shipping in early 1942).184 It preceded the bigger decision, to declare war on the United States. Prestige and propaganda considerations dictated that this should come from Germany and that he should not passively await a declaration by America. But Hitler's own decision\u2013and, as we have seen, it was his, taken without consultation apart from with the subservient Ribbentrop, and presumably also Keitel and Jodl\u2013had been preceded by moves, rational from his point of view, and dating back several weeks, to prevent Japan, once in the war, from leaving it at a time that did not suit Germany. Only when what effectively amounted to a new tripartite pact had been concluded did Hitler declare war.\n\nWere Hitler's options in December 1941, therefore, as wide open as appears to be the case from the suggestion that his decision was puzzling? We need to return for a moment to the place of the United States in his developing war strategy in 1940\u201341. He was receiving mainly reliable information from General B\u00f6tticher, his well-informed military attach\u00e9 in Washington, about the pace of American rearmament. But B\u00f6tticher misled Hitler in two ways. First, he overrated the importance of the Pacific in American overall strategy, downplaying the commitment to the war in Europe. And secondly, though he left no doubt about the rapid progress being made in the United States' rearmament, if from a very low initial base, he was adamant that America would not be ready for war before Germany had won it. This was the message he passed to Berlin.185 The miscalculation in intelligence matched Hitler's own prognosis. Aware of the impending danger from across the Atlantic, to which he had no early answer in terms of weaponry, Hitler's aim, lasting from his victory over France until the weakening of the Wehrmacht's advance in the Soviet Union, had been to keep the United States out of the war until German hegemony in Europe was finally established. This had been the strategic idea behind 'Operation Barbarossa'. With Britain forced to the negotiating table after Germany had crushed the Soviet Union, America would be forced back on her own hemisphere. Sometime, there would be a final showdown between a German-dominated Europe and the United States\u2013the scenario he had depicted in the 1920s\u2013but that would not happen in his lifetime.\n\nIn the whirlwind of early German successes in the Soviet Union in June and July 1941, he had temporarily deviated from this distant grand vista. A joint enterprise with the Japanese to destroy the Soviet Union and then turn together on the United States in the near future seemed for a while an attractive proposition. But the Japanese, their thinking in any case impenetrable to Hitler, did not move against Siberia, just as they had earlier not followed the German invitation to make an early strike at Singapore. Meanwhile, the German advance had started to run into trouble in the Soviet Union. The eastern campaign, against all prognoses, was not going to be won easily\u2013and not that year. It was going to be a long haul. And it seemed to Hitler that, exploiting the circumstances, Roosevelt was now openly provoking him through intensified aggression in the Atlantic, about which in the current circumstances he could do nothing.\n\nJapan's intentions were still not clear. She made aggressive noises, but at the same time, it appeared, was prepared to negotiate with Washington. By autumn, however, the situation had finally become clarified. Relations between Japan and the United States had irredeemably broken down. War was now highly likely. In changed circumstances in the east, Hitler had to consider the role of Japan in a new light with regard to America's place in his own strategy. America, it was by now obvious, could not be kept out of the war indefinitely. The question was only when she would join it. He had said more than once that he expected her to be ready for war by 1942. The United States, it was increasingly certain, would have to be faced before, not after, the war against the Soviet Union\u2013Hitler's 'real' war\u2013was over. The role of Japan in his thinking was now, therefore, to tie the Americans down as long and as completely as possible in the Pacific, and thoroughly weaken the British in the Far East, taking their possessions, undermining their bastions and eventually destroying the heart of their Empire, India.186 Germany's role, in supporting Japan by entering a war against America which, to Hitler, was inevitable anyway, was to prevent the Americans defeating the Japanese or forcing them to agree terms, before turning on Germany. The United States, through the German intervention, would be forced into a war across two oceans.187\n\nThis, Hitler calculated, would give him time to finish off the unexpectedly resilient Soviets or at least reach a satisfactory point where he could conclude the eastern campaign, perhaps by some sort of deal with Stalin, but on his own terms. Japan's entry into the war in December 1941 gave him that chance, as he saw it; hence, his elation at the news of Pearl Harbor. From his perspective, therefore, the declaration of war against the United States at this juncture was no great gamble, let alone a puzzling decision. He felt he had no option. The decision seemed to him to open up the path to victory which was beginning by autumn 1941 to recede. For him, therefore, it was the only decision he could make.\n\nDespite his own construction of possibilities, did he objectively have the option of refraining from a declaration of war, a decision which might have given Germany new chances in the conflict? Objectively, of course, he was not compelled to take Germany into a war with the United States. A German declaration of war did not have to follow the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even Ribbentrop, as we noted, pointed out to him that there was no treaty obligation to do so. But what might have ensued had he chosen not to declare war on the United States? Is it likely, had Hitler not been so rash in declaring war, that the United States would have retreated from the Atlantic theatre, pulled back aid to Britain and the Soviet Union, left Europe alone and concentrated on the Pacific, allowing the Nazi leader to get on with his war against Bolshevism? Might Roosevelt have refrained from pressing for his own declaration of war out of fear of a defeat in Congress? Would the war, in other words, have taken an entirely different turn had Hitler been less ready to rush into Japan's arms when he had no need to do so? In a guessing-game, there are many possibilities. But there are fewer likelihoods. And the actions as well as the reflections of those close to the decisions at the time provide few hints that a completely different scenario might have emerged.\n\nOf course, cooler heads might have chosen other options. Weizs\u00e4cker, in the Foreign Office, for one thought it would be better to wait for an American declaration of war. That would surely have been a more sensible ploy. Roosevelt would have been left with the predicament of whether to try to persuade both Congress and the American public, overnight preoccupied with the new war in the Pacific and the desire to take revenge on Japan, that Germany was still the main enemy, and that a declaration of war on the European Axis powers was necessary. Had such a declaration been forthcoming, clever German propaganda could have turned it to advantage: a war that Germany had not wanted and done everything to avoid being forced upon the country by American plutocracy, and now requiring a backs-to-the-wall fight. That type of propaganda was lost because of Hitler's insistence upon the prestige of a German declaration.\n\nBut it is worth noting that Weizs\u00e4cker was not imagining that Germany's plight would have been drastically altered had Hitler not been so foolhardy in his seizure of the moment to plunge into an unnecessary declaration. Weizs\u00e4cker does not appear to have doubted that the war with the United States would now ensue. His difference from Hitler was on preferring to be the object of the declaration, rather than making it, as he thought, as an unnecessary gesture to Japan. But it was not a presumption that, by refraining from declaring war on the United States, Germany would be able to avoid that war. Weizs\u00e4cker, every bit as much as Hitler, now expected Germany to be embroiled in conflict with America.\n\nThe thinking on the other side of the Atlantic was similar. In fact, on the very evening after the dramatic events at Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt dined with members of his Cabinet and top military advisers to discuss the action now needed. A declaration of war next morning against Japan had already been decided on, and in the meantime the Japanese had, belatedly and formally, declared war on the United States. Roosevelt and his advisers considered whether they should now declare war on other members of the Axis. 'We assumed, however, that it was inevitable that Germany would declare war on us,' Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, recalled. 'The intercepted Japanese messages passing back and forth between Berlin and Tokyo'\u2013read by the Americans through their MAGIC codebreaker\u2013'had given us to understand that there was a definite undertaking on this point between the two Governments. We therefore decided to wait and let Hitler and Mussolini issue their declarations first. Meantime we would take no chances and would act, for example in the Atlantic, on the assumption that we were at war with the European section of the Axis as well.'188\n\nIn the absence of the rash German move, could the United States have sustained the status quo in the Atlantic, and avoided a declaration of her own? If he had gone to Congress to seek a declaration of war on Germany when Japan had been the aggressor against America, Roosevelt would doubtless have encountered some serious opposition.189 That in itself was a deterrent to making the attempt. He was duly cautious, and had already resisted pressure from Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, to include Germany and Italy alongside Japan in the request to Congress immediately after Pearl Harbor.190 Hitler conveniently eliminated that problem for him.\n\nBut even had he not done so, American moves towards full involvement in the war in the near future would have been likely. The Roosevelt administration had consistently linked Germany and Italy together with Japan as a joint threat to the free world. And the Atlantic had always been the first priority. When he returned from delivering his message to Congress inviting the declaration of war on Japan, Roosevelt immediately reminded his advisers that the main target remained Germany.191 It followed that the war could not be restricted to the Pacific, despite the navy's preference for a concentration on that theatre. Though it can only be speculation, from the tenor of Hull's remarks it even seems at least conceivable that Roosevelt, had he not been aware of what was happening in Berlin, might have exploited the post-Pearl Harbor climate to take America into full-scale war also against Germany and Italy. Again, the logic of the Victory Program, which had been leaked in December, meant that the United States would, before too long, be sending a major land force to fight in Europe. Roosevelt's military advisers had always insisted that this was the only way to be rid of Hitler.\n\nRoosevelt had for his part always been adamant that only the removal of Hitler guaranteed the future safety and freedom of the United States. Backing out of the battle for the Atlantic, retreating from lend-lease supplies to Britain and leaving Hitler a free hand on the European continent in order to concentrate on the Pacific would have contradicted not only Roosevelt's professed aims and ideals in foreign policy, as he had enunciated them since the mid-1930s, but would also have flown in the face of the consistent advice he had received from his military leaders for months, and the concrete, extensive planning that had followed from it. Roosevelt might, it is true, still not have wanted to risk proposing a formal declaration to Congress in December 1941, though the circumstances, after Pearl Harbor, were probably as propitious as could be imagined. However, it is hard to see that the shadow-fighting in the Atlantic could have continued indefinitely at the level of autumn 1941, even if Germany had not declared war.\n\nHitler's decision, prior to the declaration of war and not dependent upon it, to reverse previous policy and unleash his U-boats on American shipping in itself altered the uneasy stalemate that had existed in the Atlantic. In the months that followed, the German intensification of the U-boat war took hostilities deep into American coastal waters and faced Allied shipping with serious and mounting problems.192 These were compounded because of the demands of the Pacific\u2013immediately after Pearl Harbor Roosevelt had been forced to transfer some warships from the Atlantic to counter the Japanese threat193\u2013and plainly had to be contested with all power and urgency. The American war against Germany, in other words, even if it had stayed 'undeclared', could not have remained at the level of autumn 1941. An American move to full-scale, all-out conflict at some point in the coming months, if not straight away, would have been well-nigh unavoidable.194 Before much longer, it might be reasonably surmised, Roosevelt would have engaged the United States in all-out hostilities with Germany, whether through a formal declaration or, failing that, by extension of the presidential prerogative to the point where a formal declaration would merely have confirmed existing reality. Either way, Germany and the United States would soon have been at war.\n\nPerversely, therefore, Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States on 11 December 1941, often seen not only as baffling but as a hopelessly foolhardy choice, one which finally condemned Germany to calamity, was probably less fateful than many of the political decisions we have been considering. That is to say, it was not a deciding moment in taking Germany down the path of catastrophe when triumph might have beckoned had a declaration of war been avoided. A different, less headstrong leader might indeed have hesitated, to await developments and, in particular, see how America would react. But, assuming such a leader had taken Germany this far and was not prepared to end the war in some sort of compromise settlement at this point, such an alternative decision would in all probability not have greatly altered history.\n\nGermany did, in fact, recover, remarkably, from the winter crisis before Moscow, and went on to attain new, and in some ways surprising, military success in the first half of 1942. A new big offensive to take the Caucasus oilfields was launched that summer, though with weaker forces than had formed the 'Barbarossa' attack the previous year. Only in the autumn did it become clear, as the terrible battle of Stalingrad ran its course, that Hitler's Reich was in the throes of a cataclysmic defeat which, alongside the massive reverses in north Africa (where the American-led landing, 'Operation Torch', had taken place in early November), proved the unmistakable turning point of the war. Already by then, in the faraway Pacific the decisive battle of Midway in June 1942 had broken Japanese sea-power. This, followed by the hard-earned American victory at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, finally sealed in January 1943, turned the tide of the Pacific War.195 There was a long, long way to go, in the Far East and in Europe. But there was no way back for either Germany or Japan. Both were now increasingly exposed to the seemingly limitless supplies of men and arms from America.\n\nThe entry into the war of the United States at the end of 1941, as it had done in 1917, massively tipped the scales. American might, added to British forces, in the west, together with the relentless steamroller of the Red Army in the east, eventually crushed Germany. But by December 1941 the German gamble for world power was in any case fundamentally lost. Churchill certainly thought so\u2013at least, retrospectively he said he did.196 And Hitler himself fleetingly appears in autumn 1941 to have contemplated for the first time the possibility of defeat in remarking (a point to which he would return in the face of catastrophe in early 1945) that if in the end the German people should not prove strong enough, then Germany deserved to go under and be destroyed by the stronger power.197 It was a momentary flickering, but revealing for all that. Beneath the veneer, Hitler seems to have recognized that his chances of total victory had by now all but evaporated. The plan for the eastern campaign had collapsed. And war with the United States was now as good as inevitable.\n\nHe anticipated this inevitability by declaring war himself. It was a characteristic attempt to wrest back the initiative through a bold move. But for the first time it was a move doomed from the very outset to failure.\n\n## 10\n\n## Berlin\/East Prussia, Summer\u2013Autumn 1941\n\nHitler Decides to Kill the Jews\n\nThey said to us in Berlin: why are you giving us all this trouble? We can't do anything with them in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat [the Ukraine] either. Liquidate them yourselves!...We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible to do so.\n\nHans Frank, Governor General of Poland, 16 December 1941\n\nOn 12 December 1941, the day after he had announced Germany's declaration of war on the United States of America, Hitler addressed his party leaders in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. After a lengthy survey of the state of the war, he turned to the position of the Jews. His Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, recorded what he had to say: 'With regard to the Jewish Question, the F\u00fchrer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied that if they brought about another world war, they would experience their annihilation. This was no empty talk. The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence. This question is to be viewed without sentimentality. We're not to have sympathy with the Jews, but only sympathy with our German people. If the German people has again now sacrificed around 160,000 dead in the eastern campaign, the instigators of this bloody conflict will have to pay for it with their own lives.'1\n\nBy this time the Jews had been 'paying with their own lives', as Hitler saw it, for almost six months. Across the whole of the summer, since the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, killing units of the German Security Police had slaughtered Jews in their tens of thousands, starting mainly with the men but before long including women and children. Just one of the four Einsatzgruppen or task forces, sent in behind the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht to wipe out 'subversive elements', rampaging through the Baltic, had murdered a precisely calculated 229,052 Jews by the end of the year.2 That was the first horrific phase of genocide. But by the autumn the genocide had extended beyond the occupied parts of the Soviet Union and was rapidly entering a second, wider and ultimately comprehensive phase. This aimed at nothing less than the physical extermination of the Jews of the whole of German-occupied Europe\u2013what the Nazis would label the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question'.\n\nThe full implementation of the extermination programme would not get under way until the spring and summer of 1942, when the death-mills in the killing centres of occupied Poland commenced their industrial-style gassing operations and the dragnet became gradually stretched across the whole of Europe, east to west, north to south. The last ghastly stage of the mass transports and immense production-line gassings would not take place until the summer of 1944, when, with Germany forced ever closer to inexorable defeat, almost half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Even then, the torment of the Jews was far from over. Tens of thousands were still to die in the horrors of the 'death marches' from east to west as the death camps in occupied Poland were closed down in the face of the rapid advance of the Red Army and surviving prisoners forced back into already disastrously overfilled labour or concentration camps (such as Bergen-Belsen) inside the Reich.\n\nThis untold misery, suffering and death followed from two crucial decisions\u2013or, better, sets of decisions\u2013in 1941. The first of these, in the summer, was to kill the Jews of the Soviet Union. The second, in the autumn, was to extend the killing to the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe. By the time Hitler's Reich collapsed, the death toll lay, by the most reliable accounts, between 5.29 and just over 6 million Jews.3 The target was, however, close to double this figure. As laid down in January 1942, a total of no fewer than 11 million Jews were envisaged as falling within the 'Final Solution'.4\n\nThe decision to kill the Jews of Europe had no precedent. It was a decision like no other in history. The nearest parallel had been the killing of between a million and a million and a half Armenians by the Turks in 1915 (some two-thirds of those living in Turkey at that time). There were some similarities. There had been a lengthy prehistory of Turkish hostility towards the Armenians, punctuated with outbreaks of terrible violence and massacres. There were ideological imperatives driving along radicalization. And the emergence of full-scale genocide took place in the context of an immensely brutal war. The murderous programme was then carried out with the backing of the Turkish government.5 But there were also important differences.6 Biological racism did not drive this genocide. Possibly as many as 20,000 Armenians avoided slaughter by converting to Islam.7 Conversion to Christianity could, of course, offer no protection to Jews in Nazi Germany. No existing policy of physical destruction of the Armenian community lay behind this earlier genocide. It had not been bureaucratically planned and was initially disorganized, arising from increasingly vicious, cruel responses to unforeseen crises in 1914\u201315.8 The Nazi genocide, though initiated only in 1941, was a logical\u2013indeed, in certain respects inexorable\u2013development from the premisses of Nazi power. From 1933 onwards its quasi-intellectual underpinnings in uncompromising biological antisemitism became enshrined in state ideology (given embodiment in the highest authority in the land). This then impelled systematic, increasingly radical persecution, efficiently implemented by modern bureaucratic machinery, culminating in meticulously planned extermination carried out by new, industrial-style technology, and aimed at the eventual total eradication of every Jew in Europe.\n\nIt was a decision, too, wholly unlike in its nature those which we have been following in previous chapters. Those, including Hitler's, possessed (in varying degrees) a recognizable rationality\u2013given the starting premisses\u2013in terms of the politics behind military strategy. This was certainly the case from the viewpoint of those taking the decisions. And a certain logic behind them\u2013if warped in some cases\u2013can be perceived even today, however disastrous the decisions turned out to be. The decision to kill the Jews was of an entirely different kind. However logical the path to genocide might have been, given the course of Nazi persecution of the Jews, the pathology of demonic antisemitism that lay at its roots defies rationality. And yet this decision, too, was, in a different but most fundamental sense, a war decision. The decision to wage war to the death against the Jews was in Nazi thinking part of and intrinsic to, not separate from, the vast military war in which they were engaged.\n\nI\n\nHitler's address to his party leaders on 12 December 1941 made this clear. The Jews, he believed, had caused the war. They would now have to pay for it by forfeiting their own lives. He had, he said, prophesied this. It was a reference to the passage in his speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of his 'seizure of power', in which he had declared: 'In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it...Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!'9 This was no inauguration of the extermination programme. But it reflected a genocidal mentality, a certainty in Hitler's mind that Jews would carry the blame for another war\u2013as, in his perverted psychology, they had done for the First World War\u2013and that as a consequence they would somehow perish.\n\nIt was a 'prophecy' that never left him. He referred to it more than a dozen times, both privately and in public, during precisely the years when the 'final solution' was in full swing. And he always deliberately misdated his 'prophecy' to 1 September 1939, the day the European war began with the German invasion of Poland\u2013when, in fact, in his Reichstag speech that day he never mentioned the Jews at all. The connection between the Jews and the war was, then, implanted in his mind from the beginning of the conflict. It was still there at the very end, when, dictating his 'Political Testament' on the eve of his suicide in the Berlin bunker, he once more held the Jews responsible for the war, but stated that this time the 'real culprit' had been forced 'to atone for his guilt'.10\n\nThis was Hitler's mentality: the war could never be won unless the Jews were to be destroyed. It was a mentality that had lingered with him since the First World War had ended in what for him was untold catastrophe, cowardly capitulation, detested revolution and national humiliation. Like many others on the Right in Germany at the time, he held the Jews responsible. As the misery, suffering and losses had mounted, the spotlight in the search for scapegoats had been turned, in a ceaseless barrage of propaganda by pro-war lobbies, relentlessly\u2013and utterly unjustifiably\u2013on Jews. They were blamed as war-profiteers, as shirkers avoiding military service and as fomenters of internal unrest that undermined the military effort. Hitler's own existing deep-seated antisemitism fed on these base calumnies. The part played by key figures such as Leon Trotsky in the Russian Revolution, and at home the fact that prominent leaders of the hated socialist upheavals\u2013most plainly in the short-lived Bavarian experiment with a Soviet-style government in April 1919\u2013had been Jewish offered further rich sustenance to the vicious hatred of Jews which was by now rampant on the nationalist Right. Hitler sucked all this in, his own profound prejudices cemented into the pathological fixation that would never leave him: that the Jews were responsible for all Germany's ills.\n\nFor Hitler, a second war had to be fought to undo the calamity of the first, to reverse the course of history. And avenging the causes of that catastrophe that had ushered in the 'Jewish' republic of Weimar, a regime produced by the 'criminals' of November 1918 who had ruined Germany, meant the destruction of the Jews. 'The removal of the Jews altogether' had to be the 'final aim' of any national government in Germany, he had written in his first political statement, in September 1919.11 'The sacrifice of millions at the front', he had declared in a terrible passage towards the end of Mein Kampf a few years later, need not have happened if 'twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas' at the beginning of the war.12 It was not a blueprint for genocide. But the connection between war and the Jews, an idea that, once embedded in Hitler's mind, never left it, had unmistakable genocidal connotations. And from 1933 the man with this idea ruled Germany.\n\nThe idea was not confined only to Hitler's mind. In the direct aftermath of the Reichskristallnacht pogrom on 9\u201310 November 1938, Hermann G\u00f6ring, Hitler's chief paladin, spoke in inner Nazi circles of 'a great showdown with the Jews' in the event of another war.13 Two weeks later, on 24 November, the main SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, spoke of eradicating Jews as criminals 'with fire and sword', resulting in 'the actual and final end of Jewry in Germany, its complete annihilation'. Such sentiments were by this time shared entirely or in good part by other leading Nazis. And, of crucial importance, they had become institutionalized in the most ideologically dynamic segment of the Nazi regime\u2013the burgeoning empire that had come under the aegis of the SS-run Security Police. Here, careers could be made by developing an expertise on the 'Jewish Question'. Adolf Eichmann, later the orchestrator of the 'final solution', was the paradigmatic example.14 But careerism and ideology went hand in hand. Those who earned their spurs by working ceaselessly to find ways of 'solving' the 'Jewish problem' were in the main true believers in the cause. They had long since imbibed the doctrine that the Jew was the root of evil, and that a strong, dominant Reich had to be one purged of 'impure elements', most especially of Jews.15\n\nAs supreme leader of the regime, Hitler embodied the basic belief that Germany's salvation rested on the removal of the Jews. Others strived in different ways to implement this ideological imperative. In the Security Police, the 'mission' had taken institutional form. And it was incorporated in the wider aim of war and conquest. Hitler's explicit linkage of the Jews and war had not only been able to play upon and exploit existing deep antisemitic prejudice. It had also given it a dynamic, messianic, purpose. By the time the war started, the Nazi leadership had been forged into a proto-genocidal elite.\n\nUnderpinning the genocidal mentality was a demonization of the Jew which had become the central figment of the Nazi imagination. This transcended practical considerations. Jews were a tiny minority of the German population\u2013a mere 0.76 per cent in 1933\u2013and self-evidently in no position to challenge for power in the state, make competing claims on territory or scarce resources or pose in any other than phantasmic fashion the sort of perceived threat which served as the pretext for a number of instances of 'ethnic cleansing' in the twentieth century. The Nazi image of the Jew went way beyond conventional hatreds. It presupposed the Jew as nothing less than the supreme existential danger. Within Germany, Jews were seen as 'poisoning' German culture. The 'true' essence of what was supposedly German was set against the subversive currents of 'Jewish' materialism and corruption. But the danger was seen to go even further. Dominating, in Nazi imagery, both the capitalism behind the 'plutocratic' enemies, Great Britain and the United States, and the Bolshevism behind the Soviet enemy, the Jew posed the ultimate threat to Germany's very existence. In fact, the Jew stood for a world which was totally anathema to Nazism, a set of moral values which had filtered through both Judaism and Christianity to form the foundations of the civilization that, as he repeatedly made plain, Hitler wanted to eradicate. In this sense, Nazism amounted to an apocalyptic vision of a renewed nation and society which would arise out of the destruction and eradication of the corrosive values epitomized by the Jew. It was no less than a fundamental attempt to change the course of history, to attain national redemption by eliminating not only all Jewish influence, but the Jews themselves.16\n\nResting upon such a premiss, the decision to kill the Jews of Europe, though it arose in quite specific circumstances in 1941, followed an inexorable, awful logic. In examining other fateful decisions made by political leaders in 1940 and 1941, we have considered what, if any, alternative choices were open to them, as they viewed the situation at the time. But in looking at the decision to kill the Jews, no such alternatives posed themselves; or, rather, they posed themselves only as alternative methods of destruction.\n\nIn another way, too, the decision to kill the Jews was unique among those we have examined. It was no conventional decision, such as to go to war or not, taken after confidential discussions with a small number of ministers, generals or other associates, but then proclaimed publicly. It was a state secret of the highest order, not to be talked about even by the initiated. The most incriminating orders were given orally. Camouflage language was used in discussions at the highest level. Hitler himself never spoke directly of the killing of the Jews, even in his innermost circle. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and responsible to Hitler alone for the implementation of the extermination programme, in contrast, did speak explicitly about the killing of the Jews. But this was at a late stage, in addressing SS men, then, subsequently, party leaders in early October 1943. With the prospect of defeat looming ever larger, it was the openness of a band of sworn conspirators, those who had burned their boats and were in it together. Himmler insisted that they had acted with a moral right and duty 'to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us'. He described the 'extermination of the Jewish people' as a 'glorious page in our history that has never been written and is never to be written'.17 His comments combined perverted pride in a fulfilment of a historic duty with the implicit sense that a crime of enormous proportions had been committed, one which had been necessary but could never be divulged.\n\nGiven such secrecy even within the upper echelons of the regime, a yet further difference from the decisions explored so far is self-evident. The decision to kill the Jews can only be pieced together on the basis of circumstantial evidence. In fact, the question of precisely when and how the decision was taken cannot be answered with certainty. Indeed, to speak of a 'decision' may itself be misleading in its implication of one finite moment when a precise pronouncement was delivered. A series of authorizations, each building cumulatively upon the last, is probably a more appropriate way of imagining what took place. But even if that is what happened, the authorizations, taken together, amounted to a resolve that the Jews of Europe should cease to exist. That is, they added up to a decision\u2013even if it was one made up of parts.\n\nWe have, in fact, already noted that there were at least two parts to the decision: first to kill the Jews of the Soviet Union, then to extend the killing\u2013a second phase which might have necessitated more than a single further authorization. Hitler's role in the making of the decision, or decisions, cannot be precisely reconstructed. No written order has been found. Almost certainly, none will be found. But Hitler's fingerprints are all over the 'final solution'. Jews would doubtless have suffered discrimination under any nationalist leader in Germany at the time. The transformation into all-out genocide nevertheless needed Hitler. When, in March 1942, Goebbels described Hitler as 'the unswerving champion and spokesman of a radical solution' to the 'Jewish Question', he was stating the obvious.18 Without Hitler, the 'final solution' would have been unthinkable.\n\nII\n\nAntisemitism was virulent and endemic throughout most of Europe in the decades preceding the Nazi genocide. As the 'final solution' unfolded, long-standing hatreds ensured that Nazi rulers in the countries they conquered never lacked willing helpers to carry out the deportations, then killing, of Jews. But the 'final solution' itself could not have arisen anywhere other than Germany. It had to be a German creation.19\n\nHatred of Jews had traditionally been at its most vicious in the Russian Empire and eastern Europe, where brutal pogroms\u2013the word itself is Russian\u2013and localized massacres of Jews had long been endemic. In the Habsburg Empire, too, antisemitism was rampant. Hitler himself had in his Vienna days been a youthful admirer of two outspoken antisemites, the Pan-German leader Georg Sch\u00f6nerer and the mayor of the city, Karl Lueger.20 Nor was deep prejudice about Jews lacking in western Europe. France had been rocked just before the turn of the twentieth century by the 'Dreyfus affair', when the trial and sentence to a penitentiary on cooked-up charges of treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, gave rise to a frenzy of antisemitic outpourings.21\n\nGermany before the First World War was far from being Europe's heartland of antisemitism. The small, mainly well-to-do Jewish community wanted to be assimilated. Archaic legal restrictions preventing this had by now been abolished. But the very fact that Jews were thriving in Imperial Germany caused resentment and animosity. Economic depression in the 1880s spawned an upsurge. A specifically antisemitic party was founded in the 1890s, and, though it lost most of its support within a decade or so, this had now mainly found its way into mainstream politics, most notably in the Conservative Party, and into the shrill nationalism of patriotic associations, pressure groups and student unions. There was certainly plenty of hatred of Jews in evidence. Even in Bismarck's time more than five hundred antisemitic publications appeared.22 As the nineteenth century reached its close, published anti-Jewish rhetoric increased rather than lessened in quantity and became, if anything, even more vicious. Theodor Fritsch's populist tract Handbuch der Judenfrage (Handbook of the Jewish Question), which Hitler later claimed to have 'intensively studied', chalked up its twenty-fifth edition within five years of publication in 1887. And the racist diatribe by the Germanized Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (Foundations of the Nineteeth Century), portraying the Jew as the embodiment of evil and 'proving' that Jesus Christ was an aryan, became a bestseller on its appearance in 1900.23\n\nAntisemitism was, then, widespread throughout Germany, but for the most part discriminatory rather than given to major pogrom-like outrages as in eastern Europe (though small-scale, localized violence was no rarity). The rhetoric of the pernicious antisemitic literature in circulation was certainly frightening in its talk of Jews as poison, bacilli, parasites or vermin. The implications were obvious. But politics and rhetoric were far apart. None of this found its way into state-supported action. The Jewish experience in Imperial Germany was ambivalent. Alongside the discrimination ran distinct promise for a better future.24 An observer of the European scene on the eve of war in 1914 would, even with the greatest foresight, have found it hard to imagine that a generation or so later Germany would unleash a programme of mass extermination to wipe out the Jews of Europe.\n\nHatred of Jews would, by itself, not have produced the 'final solution'. It was, of course, an indispensable component. But more was needed. Hitler himself saw in 1919 that hot-headed antisemitic outbursts, leading to pogroms, had to be converted into more systematic 'rational' persecution if the ultimate 'removal' of Jews (by which, at the time, he almost certainly meant expulsion from Germany) was to be attained.25\n\nTo turn commonplace antisemitic prejudice and hatred, however appalling, into a programme for genocide they had first to be harnessed to the more widely appealing goal of national renewal. This had to be popularized through a party which could gain state power. The state power then had to be utilized to make the removal of Jews the central focus of policy within the framework of utopian plans for national salvation. The aim of removal of the Jews had to be institutionalized by organs of the state capable of systematic planning and ruthless implementation. Finally, the immensely brutalized conditions of a total war portrayed as a struggle for national survival were required to produce the accelerated drive to complete eradication of the perceived fundamental enemy. Precisely this, of course, happened under Nazism. It is hard to see how it could have happened anywhere else. There was nothing inevitable about Nazism's triumph, no one-way street from German antisemitism to the death camps. But once Hitler had total power in the state, the odds against a genocidal outcome narrowed sharply\u2013even if no one at the time could conceivably imagine the full scale of the eventual horror.\n\nWithout the First World War this would, in any case, have been unthinkable. As the high hopes of 1914 turned to the immense disillusionment and bitterness that accompanied the mounting losses and dreadful material hardships of the later war years, the search for scapegoats did not have to look far. It became easy to stir up animosity towards Jews. Hysterical antisemitism was built into the agitation of the pro-war lobby. Opposition to the war was decried as Jewish-fomented defeatism. Once the Bolshevik Revolution had taken place, Jews were, in addition, seen as the agents of world revolution. And when catastrophic defeat was accompanied by socialist revolution in Germany, subversion by Jews became a centrepiece of explanations of the trauma.\n\nHitler believed passionately that the Jews had caused Germany's disaster. But he was far from alone in the burning hatred that festered within him from this time. His early successes in the Munich beerhalls came from the way he could tap such sentiments. Most of those who were to become the provincial leaders of his party, the Gauleiter, his indispensable regional viceroys, came from the same generation and felt much as he did about the baleful influence of the Jews. The roughnecks in his paramilitary organization, the SA (Sturmabteilung, the stormtrooper section), were also for the most part vicious antisemites\u2013or became such once they had joined. But both paramilitary activity, embracing vitriolic antisemitism, and the radical ethnic-nationalist (v\u00f6lkisch) ideas of Hitler and the infant Nazi movement, had a far wider currency.\n\nMany in intellectual circles and in the broader, well-read sectors of the middle classes, far removed from the vicious paramilitary thugs, dreamed of national unity and regeneration to overcome the rancour, divisions and perceived cultural and moral decline of the new socialist-run democracy. Removal of what was seen as corrosive Jewish influence fitted into ideas of national resurgence, the rebuilding of the Reich by a future great leader. That Germany's 'redemption' could only come about by 'removing' the Jews had been one strand of political culture stretching back to Richard Wagner\u2013though neither the great composer nor practically anyone else imagined this to mean physical extirpation.26 Amid widespread conservative-reactionary cultural pessimism framed by a lost war, the end of the monarchy, socialist revolution and a hated democratic system, antisemitism found a fertile breeding-ground. The antidote was a new millenarianism, a national rebirth. Among the well-educated young Germans attending universities in the early 1920s were those who would qualify with doctorates in law, taking in and digesting ideas about the inner renewal of the German people by removing 'harmful influences', just as detoxification revitalizes the human body. The most pernicious 'harmful influence' that had to be removed, they learned, was that of the Jew. Some of those swallowing these ideas as students would later join the Security Police, become the planners of genocide and lead the murderous Einsatzgruppen in Russia.27\n\nBetween 1916 and 1923, then, antisemitism had established itself as a central component of right-wing thinking in Germany, and was now taken up in the politics of mass movements, among them of course the still small Nazi Party. The calmer middle years of the Weimar Republic from 1924 to 1929 flattered to deceive. The antisemitic fundamentalists had been temporarily forced out of the limelight. But they had not disappeared. And even in a pluralist democracy Jews, outside their own organizations and some liberal and left-wing circles, found few friends or defenders. Once that democracy crumbled and collapsed from 1930 onwards, opening up the path for Hitler's rise to power, increasing numbers of Germans were exposed to the full antisemitic armoury as they became drawn into the ever-expanding Nazi movement.\n\nAntisemitism was seldom the main attraction of Nazism. But once in the party and its affiliations, there was no escaping it. By the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he had behind him an enormous mass movement of some 850,000 members and around a half a million stormtroopers, all of them wedded to political aims that left no place for Jews in Germany. Beyond the party faithful, more than thirteen million Germans now backed Hitler. They were not all committed antisemites. But they all voted for Hitler in the full knowledge that he and his party favoured measures to ensure the total exclusion of Jews from German society.\n\nThe years of the Weimar Republic between 1919 and 1933 were certainly uneasy ones for Jews. They were subjected to unending agitation, frequent discrimination and sporadic violence. Even so, it was possible for a Jew to feel 'at home' in Germany in those years.28 That altered abruptly on 30 January 1933, when Hitler took power.\n\nHitler's personal paranoid fixation with the Jews as an omnipresent and omnipotent force within and outside Germany, the paramount threat to the nation, responsible for the lost war and all the ills that had followed from it, was shared in its entire lunacy by relatively few. The arcanum of his own peculiar 'world-view' had not won power for Hitler. But through different refractions\u2013mutated, distorted and adapted\u2013his hatred of the Jews had permeated in some sort of way by the time he was appointed Reich Chancellor the crude notions of millions as part of his broad message of restoring national unity and strength. And now, with the power of the state itself at the beckoning of a leader driven by pathological delusions about the Jews, whose word was a command to an army of apparatchiks, and who was accorded near-deified status by an adoring public, the quest to remove the Jews from Germany could take new political and institutional form. From now on, there was no hiding-place for Jews in Germany. The sensible, far-sighted or plain lucky ones left. Many others moved to the relative anonymity of the big city. But there was no safety; only borrowed time.\n\nAlready in spring 1933 the first big discriminatory steps were taken. Jews were ousted from the civil service. Barriers were placed in their way to entering the legal profession, practising as doctors and obtaining school places for their children. A national boycott of Jewish shops and stores lasted only a single day, 1 April, but local and regional attempts to force Jews out of business did not let up. Not only did the antisemitic climate worsen; now the state gave its backing to those who were making the lives of Jews a misery. A second major wave of antisemitic agitation and violence in the spring and summer of 1935 ended with the promulgation of the infamous Nuremberg Laws in September\u2013the overture to a succession of decrees taking away all civil rights from Jews and reducing them to the status of social pariahs. The expansion of the Reich in 1938 saw open antisemitic violence plumb new depths in Vienna, following the Anschluss, then in the annexed Sudetenland. But it was the orgy of destruction unleashed on Jews, their property and their synagogues throughout Germany on the night of 9\u201310 November 1938, cynically dubbed 'Reich Crystal Night' from the amount of broken glass littering the streets of big cities following the pogroms, that opened the eyes of the Jewish community, and the rest of the world, to the full viciousness of Nazi persecution. Wherever they could, Jews fled. To help them on their way, the regime rounded up between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews as pawns until the money for their emigration could be drummed up. Measures were now rapidly taken to force remaining Jews out of the economy. The process of 'aryanization'\u2013the compulsory sales at giveaway prices of Jewish businesses\u2013moved into its final stages. On the eve of war, a terrified, impoverished, numerically much reduced Jewish community stood at the mercy of Hitler's henchmen. Hitler's own rhetoric in his speech of 30 January 1939, and the actions of his regime, had by now left no Jews in any doubt that they had much to fear from the advent of a new war, a prospect which seemed by the day to become more certain.\n\nMuch of the radicalization of persecution between 1933 and 1939 had taken place with little or no specific direction by Hitler himself. Years later, he acknowledged that 'even regarding the Jews' he had been compelled 'for long to remain inactive'\u2013mainly out of foreign policy considerations, not desire, of course.29 He seldom needed to be active, except where a major decision (such as the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, or unleashing the pogrom in November 1938) was concerned. It sufficed that he provided the general guidelines for what was required.30 Characteristically, Hitler would give some 'signal' or 'green light' to his minions to indicate his wishes on measures against the Jews. Radicals would follow the prompt to intensify the persecution. This would either find Hitler's subsequent sanction, or would be channelled into discriminatory legislation. Either way, the momentum of persecution was sustained, its level ever more radical. Hitler's underlings at different levels of the regime were adept at knowing how to 'work towards the F\u00fchrer' along the lines he would wish.31 This was not only the case for party apparatchiks and bureaucrats in government offices. It applied in exemplary fashion to the expanding realm of policing, security and surveillance under the control of Reichsf\u00fchrer-SS Heinrich Himmler and his right-hand man, the arch-technocrat of power Reinhard Heydrich.\n\nBy 1939, 'removal' of the Jews from Germany had proceeded a long way. But from the point of view of the Nazi leadership, it had not gone nearly far enough. Nazi policy towards Jews had been far from a straightforward route to a prescribed goal. It had encountered blockages, had experienced stops and starts and had followed a 'twisted road'32\u2013though never a path that deviated for long from ever-escalating radicalization of persecution. Despite the intensified persecution, by the end of 1938 over two-thirds of the Jewish population of 1933 still lived in Germany. And for most of these, as the Nazi authorities concluded, there was nowhere to go. Emigration was not an option.33 Since 1937, the Jewish desk of the SD had been looking for ways to speed up their expulsion. A far-reaching idea was a territorial solution: ship the Jews out to some foreign, inhospitable place and dump them there. Some of the more barren regions of South America were among the zany ideas mooted for a while.34 Nothing, of course, came of such far-flung notions. They were to recur, however, in a different\u2013and even more dangerous\u2013setting in 1940. Pogroms had been another method contemplated to speed up emigration. And, indeed, the terror of Reichskristallnacht prompted a flood of refugees, desperate now to leave Germany under any circumstances. Foreign doors to Jewish immigration that had largely been closed were temporarily forced open. Almost as many Jews left in 1938\u20139 as in the previous four years of Nazi rule.35 Even so, on the eve of the war Jews in Germany still numbered not much less than half of the figure of 1933. The Nazis were still far from a complete 'solution to the Jewish Question', even within the Reich.\n\nAs late as November 1938, immediately following Reichskristallnacht, Heydrich had thought it would take a decade to be rid of all the remaining Jews.36 He was soon given his chance to take the matter in hand. The wanton destruction of Jewish property by Nazi hordes had been widely criticized\u2013though far less so the aim of forcing Jews out of Germany\u2013and turned out to be the final explosion of large-scale public atrocities within the bounds of the Reich.37 A more 'rational' policy was needed. On 24 January 1939 Heydrich was appointed head of a Central Office for Jewish Emigration. This drew its inspiration from what the Nazi leadership saw as a highly successful operation, masterminded by Adolf Eichmann, in Vienna the previous year (where the proportion of Jews leaving had been far in excess of the rate for Germany itself).38 When units of the Security Police moved into Poland behind the invasion force in September 1939, Heydrich now occupied a pivotal position in dealing with the 'Jewish Question' in the newly conquered territories. It was a task that dwarfed any that he had taken on before the war. The job had then been to expedite the forced emigration of what remained of a Jewish community that had numbered around half a million at the time of Hitler's accession to power. And now, with the initial aim still unfulfilled, the conquest of Poland had brought a further two million Jews within the Nazi orbit. The 'Jewish Question' to be solved was no longer confined to Germany. It was a part of the war. And it had become much larger, not smaller, with the outbreak of hostilities.\n\nIII\n\nPoland became in many ways an experimental ground for what was to come. Three large regions of the conquered country abutting Germany's eastern borders were incorporated into the Reich. But in contrast to Austria and the Sudetenland the year before, where the population had been overwhelmingly ethnic German, most of those in the newly annexed territories were Poles. Ethnic Germans were a minority. And a further small minority in these provinces were Jews. The aim of the new rulers was clear. The provinces, long contested between Germany and Poland, were to become fully Germanized, and as quickly as possible. Removing the Poles, it was plain, could not be done overnight. But clearing out the Jews, the lowest of the low in a vanquished population treated like dirt by the new overlords, seemed an easily manageable task. One of the most ruthless of these overlords, Arthur Greiser, the boss of what came to be designated Gau Wartheland (usually called the 'Warthegau'), with its headquarters in Posen, presumed in November 1939 that the 'Jewish Question' was no longer a problem and would be solved in the immediate future.39 But Greiser, and other Nazi leaders, presumed too much. They had not reckoned with the logistical difficulties that stood in the way of their objectives, however ruthless they were prepared to be.\n\nThe initial idea was to create a huge reservation in a strip lying between the rivers Vistula and Bug, in the extreme east of the part of Poland occupied by Germany (following the division of the country between the Reich and the Soviet Union). Jews from the newly annexed provinces, and in addition all the Reich's Jews and 30,000 Gypsies, would be rounded up, loaded into cattle wagons and packed off to this dumping-ground. Hitler had approved the deportations. Heydrich expected them to last for about a year.40\n\nThis was utterly illusory. Before autumn had passed, the idea of the reservation beyond the Vistula had been given up. Instead, Jews were to be deported into all four districts of the largest part of what remained of Poland, the 'General Government' with its headquarters in Cracow and not designated for incorporation into the Reich. A second notion swiftly to be abandoned\u2013or rather, postponed\u2013was the rapid deportation of the Reich Jews. Eichmann had organized the deportation of several thousand Jews from M\u00e4hrisch-Ostrau in the Protectorate (what remained of Czechoslovakia, now under German rule), Katowice in Upper Silesia, and Vienna to the Lublin district of eastern Poland in autumn 1939, and had presumed this would be the first stage of the removal of the Jews from Germany and Austria. However, the deportations were no sooner started than they were halted on orders from above, most probably from Himmler.41 The Reichsf\u00fchrer-SS had been given broad new powers by Hitler in early October to control resettlement in the occupied eastern territories. His priority was to find space in the newly annexed provinces, beginning with the 'Warthegau', to accommodate ethnic Germans from the Baltic and elsewhere beyond Germany's areas of occupation. This meant the urgent removal not only of Jews but of vast numbers of Poles. In November the figure of a million Poles and Jews to be removed by February was mentioned.42 Deportation of Jews from the Reich, former Austria and the Protectorate had less urgency.\n\nStaggering brutality was deployed in rounding up and deporting Poles and Jews from the 'Warthegau', but the targets in successive grandiose plans proved utterly impossible to meet. Little headway had been made by the time that Hans Frank, the head of the General Government who had earlier welcomed the plans to send Jews east of the Vistula, commenting that 'the more that die the better',43 was closing the doors on further deportations into his area. He simply had no possibility of accommodating huge numbers of deported Poles into his already overpopulated and impoverished region, desperately short of food supplies, he lamented. As for Jews, he wanted to make his area 'Jew-free', not to turn it into a dumping-ground for Jews from other, more privileged areas. But he recognized that in the short term, the General Government would have to take in more than half a million additional Jews and that 'only then can we gradually talk about what must happen to them'. He still had in mind a huge Jewish reservation in the eastern extremities of his region, on the border with the Soviet-controlled part of former Poland.44\n\nBy spring 1940 it was evident to the Nazi leadership that their schemes for immense population transfer and resettlement (of which the Jews were only one part) could not be realized within the existing bounds of the occupied Polish territories. Leaders in the annexed provinces, most of all Greiser in the 'Warthegau', were frantic to be rid of the Jews under their aegis, but no avenue was open for their deportation. Ghettos, initially envisaged as no more than temporary holding places until their inhabitants could be deported, turned into more lasting institutions. The largest of them, \u0141\u00f3d in the 'Warthegau' and later Warsaw in the General Government, offered such opportunities for profit and corruption that their Nazi administrators were loath to contemplate their dissolution. Frank, meanwhile, was becoming even more obdurate. He had, it is true, told Hitler and Himmler that he had no other interest than to serve the Reich's need in making his region 'the receptacle of all elements that stream into the General Government from outside, be they Poles, Jews, Gypsies etc.' But he had then convinced Heydrich that the food situation in the General Government made it impossible to continue the resettlement programme.45 An impasse had been reached.\n\nA possible way out had, however, been mentioned by Frank himself as early as January, when he had seized upon the old antisemitic idea, first advanced by the German racist writer Paul de Lagarde in the 1880s, of settling millions of Jews in Madagascar, a French colony.46 This, Frank suggested, would create space in the General Government.47 At the time, it was no more than a pipe dream. But precisely this prospect opened up with the German military triumph in the western offensive in spring 1940. Five days after the German advance began, Himmler, in a memorandum prepared for Hitler on the treatment of the 'alien population in the east', remarked\u2013seemingly as not much more than an aside\u2013that he hoped to see the term 'Jew' 'completely extinguished through the possibility of a large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa or to some other colony'.48 Perhaps Himmler had put out the idea of deporting the Jews to Africa (Madagascar was not specifically mentioned) as a feeler. If so, he had met with no objection. Hitler approved the memorandum. And it must soon have been obvious in wider sections of the regime's leadership what was in the wind. For, as the defeat of France became a foregone conclusion, a proposal emanating from the Foreign Ministry envisaged Madagascar, not the General Government, as the destination for deported Jews. The idea was rapidly picked up. Madagascar would provide the answer to all the blockages in Poland. When, in July, Himmler halted deportations into his region,49 Frank felt 'colossal relief'.50 His difficulties would soon be over. Not only would no more Jews enter his domain; those there, in excess of two million, were to be shipped overseas and would cease to be his problem.\n\nMadagascar, as the mooted new location of a Jewish reservation, was an idea with a short lifespan. But for several months in 1940 it was taken seriously at the highest level of the Reich leadership. And now, for the first time, a solution to the 'Jewish Question' was envisaged that embraced western Europe. Heydrich swiftly moved to acquire control. He spoke of the need to find a 'territorial final solution' to the 'entire problem' of the three and a quarter million Jews under German rule.51 Eichmann and his associates were put to work to design plans. By mid-August they were ready. Four million Jews\u2013a million per year over the next four years\u2013would be shipped off to the inhospitable island in the Indian Ocean, a faraway place where they would be out of sight and out of mind. The entire operation would be directed by the Security Police. There would be no independent existence there for the Jews. Their new home, a massive reservation or 'super-ghetto', would be run by the SS. The previous autumn, it had been recognized (and welcomed) that deporting the Jews to the Lublin district would decimate the Jewish population.52 Nothing different could have been expected from the 'Magadascar Project'. The Jews, it was obvious, were being sent there to rot. The genocidal implications were plain. But the idea was stillborn. Not even the basic prerequisites were satisfied. Vanquished France could certainly have been compelled to cede Madagascar as a mandate under German aegis. But with Britain refusing to come to terms, the shipping fleet and security on the seas necessary to freight the Jews to Madagascar were unobtainable. Eichmann's blueprint was left to gather dust in a forgotten corner of Heydrich's desk.53 By now, a better option was becoming feasible.\n\nHitler's decision in December 1940 that the attack on the Soviet Union would go ahead the following spring had massive implications for the attainment of racial objectives. On the one hand, millions more Jews would fall into Nazi hands, at a time when no solution had been found to the problem of deporting the existing almost four million (soon to be recalculated at almost six million) in the German sphere. And whichever invasion routes the Wehrmacht might take, large numbers of Jews would lie within their path. On the other hand, the expected rapidly attained victory would open up the possibility of population transfer and resettlement through racial 'cleansing' on a gigantic scale.\n\nBy the time the invasion was launched, plans for precisely this were being compiled. The SS anticipated the removal, mainly through deportation to Siberia, of no fewer than thirty-one million people, mainly Slavs, over the next quarter of a century or so. It was taken for granted that five to six million Jews would 'disappear' as the first stage.54\n\nBefore such plans were conceived, presumed victory in the east conjured up a new potential for solving the 'Jewish Question'. In place of the already obsolete notion of Madagascar, there was now the prospect of deporting Europe's Jews 'to the east', into the icy wastes of former Soviet territory, where the freezing cold, malnutrition, exhaustion and disease could be expected rapidly to take their toll. This is what Hitler had in mind when he cryptically commented at the beginning of February 1941 that, with Madagascar raising insuperable problems, 'he was now thinking about something else, not exactly more friendly'.55\n\nBy this time, Hitler's unfriendly thoughts had already been transmitted to Himmler and Heydrich, who had been quick to see what an attack on the Soviet Union might mean for their own spheres of power. For Himmler, the planning possibilities for reordering the racial composition of eastern Europe were endless. For Heydrich, huge new tasks loomed for his Security Police. Beyond that lay the attainable prospect of accomplishing a 'final solution' to the 'Jewish Question'. From the beginning of 1941 this term was in frequent use. It referred, however, not, as it later came to do, to the programmed extermination in the gas chambers of the death camps, but to a territorial resettlement\u2013though itself genocidal in implication\u2013in the east as a replacement for the 'Madagascar Project'.\n\nCertainly by January 1941, Himmler and Heydrich knew what was in Hitler's mind. On 21 January, Theo Dannecker, one of Eichmann's closest colleagues, noted: 'In accordance with the will of the F\u00fchrer, the Jewish question within the part of Europe ruled or controlled by Germany is to be subjected after the war to a final solution.' Through Himmler and G\u00f6ring,\n\nHitler had commissioned Heydrich with submitting 'a final solution project'. Profiting from his experience, Heydrich had been able to put together the proposal in its essentials very quickly, and it was already in the hands of Hitler and G\u00f6ring. To implement it, however, would require a huge amount of work and detailed planning of both the wholesale deportations needed and also of the 'settlement action in a territory yet to be determined'.56\n\nThe phrase had been first used in notes prepared by Eichmann for a speech on 'settlement' to be made by Himmler on 10 December 1940 to party leaders gathered in Berlin. Eichmann had estimated then that the deportations would encompass 5.8 million Jews\u20131.8 million more than had been foreseen in the intended deportations to Madagascar, since the figure now covered Jews not just in territories under direct German rule, but within the 'European economic sphere of the German people'. The total comprised the number of Jews in continental Europe west of the German-Soviet demarcation line running through Poland.57\n\nHimmler had explicitly referred in his speech to the 'emigration of Jews' from the General Government\u2013an area previously designated to take in Jews (as well as Poles)\u2013in order to make room for Polish workers.58 But where were the two million Jews in the General Government to be sent to? Madagascar, it was obvious, was no longer a possibility. But only a few days later Hitler would give the military directive for an attack the following spring on the Soviet Union. Himmler would certainly have known what was coming. The 'territory yet to be determined' could only mean some still undesignated region of the vast area expected within the coming year to fall under German control.\n\nSince maximum secrecy surrounded the attack on the Soviet Union, no specification of the intended territory for this 'final solution' could be mentioned outside the circle of initiates. There was, therefore, still official talk of the General Government as the location. But those 'in the know' were aware that this was now mere camouflage. Eichmann acknowledged in March that the General Government was in no position to take in any more Jews.59 When G\u00f6ring and Heydrich spoke of the latter's remit having to accommodate the responsibilities of Alfred Rosenberg, earmarked to take over a Ministry for the Eastern Territories, set up to oversee the conquered Soviet lands, it was plain that the territory envisaged for the 'final solution', though not specified, lay farther east than the General Government.60\n\nHitler promised Hans Frank in March, in fact, that his province would be the first to be made free of Jews.61 Other provincial Nazi leaders, sensing what was afoot, now joined in the pressure to have their areas cleared of Jews. Goebbels gleaned misleading information that Vienna would soon be 'free of Jews', and that Berlin's turn was also imminent. 'Later,' Goebbels noted, 'the Jews will have to get out of Europe altogether.'62\n\nMeanwhile, plans had to be made not only for the 'final solution' of the pan-European 'Jewish Question', but for the treatment of the Soviet Jews in the wake of the forthcoming invasion. By spring, such considerations were enmeshed in the wider designs for a war which, Hitler left none of his military leaders in any doubt, would be a far cry from what had taken place in western Europe.63 This, he declared categorically, would be a 'war of annihilation'. The 'Jewish-Bolshevik intelligentsia' was to be 'eliminated'.64 The army leadership collaborated closely with Himmler and Heydrich on methods of operation. Orders were worked out by army leaders to liquidate forthwith all political commissars who were to be captured. G\u00f6ring asked Heydrich to prepare a brief guide for the army about the Soviet secret police, political commissars and Jews 'so that they would know in practice whom they had to put up against the wall'.65 By May, Heydrich was assembling four Einsatzgruppen, each of between 600 and 1,000 men drawn mainly from the Security Police and SD, which would enter the Soviet Union in the rear of the army to deal with all 'subversive elements'. In his briefings, Heydrich was both expansive and imprecise in designating the target groups. Jews, Gypsies, saboteurs and all Communist functionaries were a danger. He emphasized that Jewry was at the root of Bolshevism and, in accordance with the F\u00fchrer's aims, had to be eradicated.66\n\nBy the time German troops crossed the Soviet frontiers on 22 June, then, Hitler's regime had already moved a long way in a genocidal direction. The momentum had built up sharply during a period of nearly two years since Poland had been crushed. The numbers of Jews who had fallen under Nazi rule with the conquest of Poland, the barbarous treatment of the subjugated country\u2013in which Jews were its lowest, most despised stratum\u2013and the impossibility of finding a solution to an invented problem, however grandiose the vistas and however brutal the methods, all forced the ever more frantic search for a way out of the impasse. The favourable fortunes of war had momentarily offered the fantasy of a rapid European-wide remedy overseas, in Madagascar. Britain's obstinacy in insisting on fighting on swiftly ruled out that option. But the decision in late 1940 to smash the Soviet Union the following year opened a new possibility, and drove the radicalization still further. Now, the alluring prospect of a final territorial solution, where the Jews of Europe would die out in the arctic wastes of the Soviet Union, interlocked with plans for an annihilatory war in which Jews, seen as the lifeblood of Bolshevism, lay in the path of the German army and were regarded as open season for the Security Police Einsatzgruppen in the rear. The trajectory was genocidal. But the steps into all-out genocide, even in the Soviet Union, had not yet been taken.\n\nHitler's own role in the development since September 1939 had been decisive and yet shadowy. He had at the outset laid down the ground rules for the barbarity in Poland. Of this there is no doubt.67 Had he not done so, there would surely still have been atrocities. There was too much pent-up anti-Polish as well as anti-Jewish feeling to have prevented serious outbursts of violence against the civilian population. But if Hitler had issued explicit instructions to prevent and outlaw such actions, in all probability nothing remotely on the scale of the programmed inhumanity that occurred would have taken place.\n\nAs it was, having unleashed the ruthless programme of 'ethnic cleansing', Hitler could leave the planning and orchestration to Himmler and Heydrich. He also gave an open licence to his provincial chieftains, the Gauleiter, in the east, saying that he would not ask about the methods they used to Germanize their regions, and that he did not care about legal niceties.68 But where key policy-decisions were necessary, resort had to be made to Hitler.\n\nHe alone could decide about the deportation of Reich Jews, for which some of his underlings were pressing. The mounting deportation problems within occupied Poland were also brought to his attention\u2013not that he could solve them\u2013and he was called upon on more than one occasion to placate Hans Frank about the absorption of Jews into the General Government. He certainly approved the lurch into the ill-conceived 'Madagascar Project'. And, as we noted, Heydrich's commission to work out a proposal to dispatch the Jews of Europe to an unspecified destination in the east, a territorial 'final solution', derived from Hitler. Himmler, Heydrich and G\u00f6ring\u2013nominally in charge of anti-Jewish policy since Reichskristallnacht, and up to his neck in planning for the economic exploitation of the east\u2013were all extremely powerful figures. But their power emanated from Hitler. Without his mandate, their writ did not run. Behind the increasingly radical search for a solution to the 'Jewish Question' lay ultimately, therefore, the ideological imperative embodied by Hitler and by now permeating the entire regime: that another war would somehow bring about the destruction of the Jews.\n\nOn 30 January 1941, precisely as planning for a 'final solution' moved into a new gear with the possibility of deporting Europe's Jews to a dreadful, if unspecified, fate in the Soviet Union, Hitler for the first time returned, in his speech to the Reichstag commemorating the eighth anniversary of his 'seizure of power', to his 'prophecy' of January 1939.69 The timing was no accident. Hitler was obliquely signifying what was in his own mind: that the hour of the showdown with the Jews was approaching.\n\nIV\n\nWith the crossing of the Soviet frontiers in the early hours of 22 June 1941, the 'war of annihilation' that Hitler had promised began. Nazi barbarism moved on to a new plane. Given the instructions to the army before the campaign began, it is hardly surprising that uncontrolled atrocities by ordinary soldiers began immediately. 'I have observed that senseless shootings of both prisoners of war and civilians have taken place,' commented one troop commander only three days after the attack had started. Five days later he had to repeat his order to desist from 'irresponsible, senseless and criminal' shootings, which he bluntly described as 'murder'. He nevertheless reasserted the need to uphold 'the F\u00fchrer's calls for ruthless action against Bolshevism (political commissars) and any kind of partisan', and stated that the aim of the war was to restore peace and order to 'this land which has suffered terribly for many years from the oppression of a Jewish and criminal group'.70\n\nEven for a troop commander such as this one, who deplored and tried to halt arbitrary atrocities committed by his force, there was the acceptance of the need for ruthlessness towards commissars and partisans, and a belief that Jews\u2013bracketed with criminals\u2013were behind the Bolshevik regime. The mentality was widespread. This was a war like no other. And Jews were seen as central to it.\n\nIt was in this ideological climate that the killing of the Jews rapidly escalated as part of an unprecedentedly murderous campaign in which untold butchery was deployed against the civilian population and prisoners of war (who by the autumn would be dying in German camps at the rate of 6,000 per day).71 Heydrich, as we have noted, had briefed the assembled Einsatzgruppen on their tasks when they entered the Soviet Union. But, contrary to what was once widely accepted, he passed on no order at these briefings for wholesale genocide against Soviet Jews. Such a directive, verbally passed on by Himmler, would come some weeks into the campaign, and as the first big leap in an escalatory process of genocide. Even then it would take the shape of an incitement to extreme murderous actions rather than a formal order.\n\nHeydrich's earlier instructions to the Einsatzgruppen had been more restrictive than this subsequent amplification, but, typically, imprecise. On 2 July, probably to cover the actions of the Einsatzgruppen against possible objections from army leaders, he had provided a written remit that stipulated the execution of Communist functionaries, various 'extremist elements' and 'all Jews in party and state positions'.72 This probably corresponded broadly with what he had told the commanders of the killing squads in the earlier verbal briefings, except that these were evidently couched in such a way that wide discretion was conceded to the Einsatzgruppen about the definition of the target-groups, and they were plainly encouraged to interpret the remit on the Jews liberally and as they thought fit. Rather than an explicit order, Heydrich's directions amounted to a murderous but open mandate, obviously capable of being translated into action in differing degrees since the Einsatzgruppen and their sub-units did not behave in uniform fashion during the early stages of 'Barbarossa'.\n\nIn fact, shootings by units from the Einsatzgruppen were only part of the initial wave of killing in which a centrally directed ideological thrust interacted with 'an incoherent, locally and regionally varied sequence of measures' taken by those on the ground.73 Already on 24 June the head of the Gestapo office in Tilsit, in East Prussia near the Lithuanian border, gave the orders to shoot 200 local Jews, allegedly 'for crimes against the Wehrmacht' during the bold but futile resistance by Soviet border troops in the early hours of the invasion. The orders were taken on his own initiative, in accordance with the 'fundamental agreement with the cleansing actions' of the newly appointed leader of the Einsatzgruppe designated for the Baltic, Franz Walter Stahlecker.74 Three days later Police Battalion 309 slaughtered two thousand Jews in Bialystok. More than a quarter of them, including women and children, had been driven into a synagogue which was then set on fire. The 'action' had been initiated by a few fanaticized Nazis within the battalion's ranks.75 But such individuals knew that such murderous brutality was now being verbally encouraged by SS leaders. Word soon passed round about what was expected.\n\nSome units, most notably in the Baltic, were within a short time killing male Jews in very large numbers. In Kowno in Lithuania, for instance, 2,514 Jews were shot in a single day on 6 July.76 Pogroms, deliberately fomented by the German invaders, giving full licence to the vicious and widespread hatred of Jews among the local population, made their own contribution to the unfolding horror.77 In other regions, the killing was less unconstrained and largely confined to the Jewish 'intelligentsia'.78 In this early phase after the invasion, then, there was central encouragement for the killing actions, but a good deal of room was left for local initiative. If the actions were already outrightly murderous on a large scale, there had as yet been no explicit and general genocidal order. For Soviet Jews, the stage of total genocide was, however, soon to be reached.\n\nIt cannot be traced to a single order on a specific day. This is not how Nazi genocidal policy worked. Exactly how and when the key steps into genocide were taken and authorized rests upon the assembly of difficult evidence.79 Hitler's utterly unbureaucratic style of rule, his emphasis upon secrecy and his characteristic usage of camouflage language and signals for action rather than unequivocal orders drape a veil over his interventions. At the next level down, whatever files Himmler and Heydrich kept on the 'final solution' were doubtless incinerated as the Reich fell into ruins. At any rate, they have not survived. And the later testimony of Nazi leaders, leaders of the death squads and middle-managers of mass murder has often proved fallible, at times also contradictory, on matters of detail. It was often, of course, also self-servingly mendacious. Even so, surviving documentation and later testimony permit a highly plausible reconstruction of the main stages of the unfolding genocide.\n\nThese did not follow explicit orders descending from the apex to the base of a pyramid. Rather, there was a complex interrelationship of 'green lights' for action coming from above and initiatives taken from below, combining to produce a spiral of radicalization. Through their own initiative in interpreting how they imagined they were expected to act, those directly involved in the killing forced the pace of rapid radicalization on the ground, in turn affecting the way the leadership itself reacted and amended policy. But the operations at the 'periphery', though they developed their own dynamic, were not independent of central instigation and control. They had been unleashed, fomented and sanctioned by 'guidelines for action' emanating from the 'centre'. That is, the key steps of the escalation into total genocide followed some form of central directive. This was invariably transmitted through verbal indications of what was required or 'encouragement' for action passed on by Heydrich or, more often, Himmler. These were in the main broadly couched imperatives rather than clearly defined instructions. This mirrored, it seems most likely, the way in which Hitler himself indicated his 'wishes' in confidential meetings 'under four eyes' with Himmler.\n\nSuch secret meetings, with no minutes taken and no one else present (except, on occasion, Heydrich), started a dialectical process. The expressed 'wishes of the F\u00fchrer' would find immediate executive action through Himmler. Through the medium of Himmler, then of lower-level leaders of the Security Police, they would percolate down, at different times and in varied formulations, to those carrying out the killing operations. Given a broad mandate which they could interpret in their own way, as long as this matched the imperative of intensified severity, the local leaders would then act as they saw fit, use their own initiative and deploy the invited extreme measures. These would in turn find sanction on high, and result in yet a further upwards ratchet of radicalization. Just such a process occurred in mid-summer 1941. It converted partial into total genocide in the Soviet Union.\n\nOn 15 July Himmler returned to the F\u00fchrer Headquarters in East Prussia, where he had mainly been based since the start of the Russian campaign, after a brief trip to Berlin. Probably, he was expecting to attend an important meeting which Hitler was holding the following afternoon to lay out the framework of the future control and exploitation of the occupied territories of the Soviet Union after a war which was presumed to be as good as won. In the event, Himmler did not attend the meeting, possibly because he was diverted through the need to deal with the capture of an important prisoner of war taken that day\u2013Stalin's son. Whether he saw or spoke by telephone with Hitler before the meeting cannot be established. But if he was away during the time of the meeting, he was soon back at headquarters, where the following day he had a lengthy lunchtime discussion about the previous day's deliberations. Hans Heinrich Lammers, the head of the Reich Chancellery, was present and explained Hitler's orders about the distribution of powers in the occupied east.80 The outcome was that Himmler had been given overall responsibility for policing and security in the east.81\n\nIt was practically an open-ended mandate, only nominally restricted by the exhortation to respect the jurisdiction of the newly appointed Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg. Himmler received the minutes of the meeting shortly afterwards. He would have seen there\u2013and doubtless heard much more about it verbally\u2013that Hitler had spoken of 'exterminating anything opposing us' and pacifying the newly subjugated territory by shooting dead anyone 'who even looked askance'.82 Such draconian sentiments framed Himmler's new security remit, offering the widest scope for extension of his powers. But to take full advantage of this, he needed far larger police forces in the east than were currently available. And, given the mass shootings of Jews that had already taken place and the equation in the Nazi mindset of Jews with subversion and partisan activity (which Stalin had encouraged in his first speech to the people of the Soviet Union since the German invasion, on 3 July), it was obvious that more police meant more killing\u2013an intensification of the aim to 'cleanse' the newly occupied areas of Jews and thereby, in Nazi thinking, to 'secure' them.\n\nOn 18 July, the day after receiving Hitler's decree according him responsibility for security in the east, Himmler cancelled a planned journey to the General Government.83 Most likely, he was already at work in exploiting his new position. It is plausible to presume that he spoke at least by telephone with Hitler about his new tasks, and the need, if they were to be accomplished, to increase drastically the police forces in the eastern territories. He had in fact already had such ideas in mind even before the invasion took place. Hitler's allocation of responsibilities for the east in the meeting on 16 July now gave him the chance to put the ideas into operation\u2013and thereby substantially to extend his own powers. Between 19 and 22 July, Himmler dispatched two big SS brigades, totalling 11,000 men, to sweep through the Pripet marshes, the huge boggy region stretching over parts of southern Belorussia and northern Ukraine. With this, he had almost quadrupled the numbers of SS men behind the German lines within a week of Hitler's meeting. This was only the start. Further huge expansion in policing followed. By the end of 1941, the numbers in police battalions in the east had reached 33,000\u2013more than eleven times the size of the original Einsatzgruppen that had been sent in the previous June.84\n\nHimmler needed no specific orders from Hitler to focus the attention of the newly dispatched units on killing Jews. From the outset of the eastern campaign, Jews had been the prime target of the killing squads. Already the numbers of Jews murdered vastly outstripped those of other victims. Their alleged subversive and oppositional behaviour was used as pseudo-justification for the massacres. The new remit for the most rapid and comprehensive 'pacification' of the eastern territories inevitably, therefore, had the direst consequences for Jews. The Pripet marshes, the location of Himmler's newly dispatched SS brigades, were seen as a particular trouble spot in the occupied territories.85 On 1 August the SS Cavalry-Regiment 2 circulated an explicit order from Himmler: 'All Jews must be shot. Drive the female Jews into the swamps.'86 Commanders still managed to interpret the 'explicit' order in varying ways.87 But within a fortnight, they were reporting the 'de-Jewification' (Entjudung) of entire towns and villages in the region. Not just male Jews but women and children were now also being killed. One commander took Himmler literally and reported that the women and children had been driven into the swamps, which, however, were too shallow for drowning.88 A comment some weeks later by Hitler shows that he was aware of the Pripet action. He had just reminded his evening guests\u2013Himmler and Heydrich\u2013of his 'prophecy', and again blamed the Jews for the dead of the First World War and of the present conflict, when he said: 'Don't anyone tell me we can't send them into the marshes! Who bothers, then, about our people? It's good when the horror precedes us that we are exterminating Jewry.'89\n\nIn his oblique comments, Hitler had linked together the Pripet action, the extermination of the Jews and his own 'prophecy' from 1939. As the widened assault on Jews in the east was beginning, on 1 August, the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich M\u00fcller, pointed out that Hitler wanted reports on the work of the Einsatzgruppen to be regularly sent to him.90 On the same date, M\u00fcller had ordered illustrative material on the Einsatzgruppen operations to be assembled for Hitler 'as quickly as possible'. A fortnight later, Hitler's cameraman, Walter Frentz, was present at the shooting of Jews in Minsk, attended by Himmler, to film the massacre. Whether Hitler or Himmler actually viewed the film cannot be proven. But, clearly, Hitler was keen to be informed about the progress in exterminating the Jews in the east, and at a crucial juncture.91 His expressed interest might fairly be taken to indicate an awareness that a new, more overtly and outrightly genocidal phase was beginning in the Soviet Union.\n\nEven now, not all Jews everywhere were immediately slaughtered. Manpower and logistics alone constituted a hindrance. And the way directives were passed down left much scope for differing interpretations and emphases. The rate and timing of escalation in the murder were, therefore, not uniform. One of the units of Einsatzgruppe A, for instance, operating with exceptional brutality in Lithuania, registered 4,239 Jews (135 of whom were women) killed in July, but 37,186 in August (most of them in the second half of the month) and 56,459 in September, the majority comprising women and children.92 On the other hand, it was the second half of September before the already high killing rate of Einsatzgruppe B, in Belorussia, sharply increased. Women and children were, even so, often, if not always, included in the shootings. But in this region, too, entire Jewish communities were now being eradicated.93\n\nOverall, the numbers massacred assumed dimensions far beyond those of the first weeks of the Soviet campaign. The major escalation followed Himmler's visit to the Minsk area in mid-August, where he experienced a mass shooting of Jews (including some women), discussed gassing methods with two of his commanders and, according to some postwar testimony, spoke of the 'total liquidation of Jews in the east', apparently claiming to have received an order from Hitler stipulating that all Jews, including women and children, were to be exterminated.94 The testimony is not wholly reliable, and no other evidence exists for the transmission of a clear order from Hitler. Whether or not Himmler himself actually gave direct orders now that women and children were also to be killed is also less than certain.95 That is, nevertheless, what appears to have been understood. Himmler had conveyed to his leading commanders his widened security remit with its clear implication to wipe out the Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. This was not written down and transmitted in an explicit message. It was far too sensitive for that. The verbal transmission, passing down through briefings at varying levels, meant that different units heard at different times what was required of them.96 But, by word of mouth, the news still circulated rapidly. By the end of August, the genocidal attempt to wipe out Soviet Jewry was well under way.\n\nThe escalation in the slaughter followed from a process of mutually reinforcing radicalization between those carrying out the killing and those at the regime's heart, laying down the guidelines of a policy of annihilation. Himmler was the main carrier of the mandate, the conveyer of guidelines for action to his commanders and police chiefs in the occupied territories, who passed it down the line to their men. But there was a still higher authority.\n\nThe huge extension of the police forces in the east arose immediately from Himmler's remit to 'pacify' the occupied territories, decreed by Hitler on 17 July following the crucial meeting on laying down the political jurisdiction of Nazi bosses. And it was scarcely coincidental that Hitler showed marked interest in the killing operations at the beginning of August, precisely at the time that Himmler was about to pass on widely couched instructions about extending the murder to Jewish women and children. Hitler's 'green light' to shoot anyone 'who even looked askance'\u2013and, very probably, other drastic comments that were not minuted\u2013had been sufficient to instigate the genocidal radicalization. Despite the variations in the timing of implementation, the widened remit of Himmler following the meeting in Hitler's headquarters on 16 July, and the inclusion, made known by mid-August, of Jewish women and children in the killing, amounted to a decision to eradicate the Jews of the Soviet Union.\n\nV\n\nThe broader decision, to kill all the Jews of Europe, had not yet been taken. It was linked to, if separable from, the prior decision to wipe out Soviet Jewry.\n\nIn January 1942 the numbers of Soviet Jews were still estimated at five millions, although by then hundreds of thousands had been slaughtered.97 But when around the turn of the year 1940\u201341 Eichmann had worked out the numbers of those from Europe west of the Soviet Union to be deported into a 'territory yet to be determined', he had made no reference to the millions of Jews already on Soviet soil. Excluding Soviet Jews, Eichmann reckoned the number to be deported to total almost six million (to which now several hundred thousand in the former Soviet area of Poland had to be added).98\n\nPlainly, by the time German troops crossed the Soviet border in June no clear and conclusive decision had been reached about an overall policy towards Soviet Jews\u2013whether they were to be deported further east or simply killed. But ideology and logistics combined to make the rapid emergence of total genocide in the captured Soviet territories practically inevitable.\n\nDeportation could never have been a feasible option. Even had the eastern campaign swiftly ended in German victory, as had been presumed, the mobilization of transport to ferry millions of Jews from all over Europe to some distant destination in former Soviet territory would have been a colossal undertaking. And if the Soviet Jews were not simply to be massacred where they were, there was the additional problem of transporting these, too, to whatever immense reservations were vaguely envisaged. The difficulties would have been equally enormous. In reality, of course, these issues never arose. As the German advance slowed, a continuation of the war into the coming year became a certainty and the prospect of a territory into which to expel the non-Soviet Jews faded into a lingering fantasy, the fate of the Soviet Jews themselves was sealed. By midsummer it had become plain. The only solution was to kill them wherever they could be found. And in an already genocidal climate, but with the option of deporting the remainder of Europe's Jews into the Soviet Union rapidly receding, the question of what should be done with them now gained intense urgency.\n\nAt first, it had looked as if early victory over the Red Army would swiftly open up the possibility of a total solution through mass deportation. Soon after the Russian campaign had begun, Hitler had spoken more than once of Jews as a bacillus. He felt like the Robert Koch (the discoverer of the tuberculosis bacillus) of politics, he said, describing the Jews as the 'ferment of all social decomposition'. He had proved, he went on, that a state could live without Jews.99 He repeated the bacillus analogy when meeting the visiting Croatian minister Marshal Sladko Kvaternik a few days later. 'If there were no more Jews in Europe,' he told Kvaternik, 'the unity of the European states would be no longer disturbed.' Whether they were sent to Siberia or Madagascar, he added, was a matter of indifference.100 For his foreign visitor, Hitler was holding to the fiction of overseas deportation. For Nazi leaders, however, every 'special announcement' by the Wehrmacht of further advances in the Soviet Union raised new expectations of the imminent deportation of the Jews to 'the east' or 'Siberia' (taken loosely to mean somewhere in the Soviet Union). Hitler's comments offer clues to his thinking about the Jews at this juncture. At a time when massacres were crystallizing into full-scale genocide in the Soviet Union, such hints about the need for a radical solution throughout Europe would not have been lost on Himmler or Heydrich.\n\nIn July, as German victory in the Soviet Union, to be followed by the capitulation of Great Britain and a triumphant end to the war, seemed tantalizingly close, plans were compiled in the Reich Security Headquarters for a grandiose 'final solution of the Jewish Question' which Heydrich had already announced in May as 'doubtless forthcoming'.101 At the end of the month, Heydrich instructed Eichmann to draft an authorization from G\u00f6ring (nominally in charge of the 'Jewish Question' since November 1938) to prepare 'a complete solution of the Jewish Question in the German sphere of influence in Europe'. Heydrich, we might recall, had already provided G\u00f6ring in March 1940 with a draft plan to solve the 'Jewish Question'. What he was now seeking was formal authorization of what he had already verbally been granted\u2013a step he evidently felt necessary at a key juncture in order to deal with heads of the civil administration and other agencies (especially Rosenberg's 'Eastern Ministry') which could interfere with the implementation of his plans. With Europe seemingly at Germany's feet, the time had arrived, it appeared, to carry out the deportation of the Continent's Jews into the Soviet Union\u2013and to their deaths through 'natural wastage' from slave labour, malnutrition and exposure to a raw climate. For Jews incapable of working\u2013children, elderly, infirm\u2013suggestions of liquidation as a solution were already being proposed.102\n\nOver the following weeks, however, as the German advance slowed and the magnitude of the misjudgement about the fighting capacity of the Red Army was glaringly revealed, the genocidal solution through deportation to the Soviet Union\u2013the prospect which had been the dominant idea since the start of the year\u2013rapidly became unrealistic. The last hopes of territorial 'resettlement' in 'the east', after the General Government then Madagascar had come to nothing, were postponed indefinitely. But the pressure to deport the Jews had meanwhile intensified, not lessened. There was simply no possibility of reconciling the increased pressure to deport with the insurmountable blockages on doing so. Meanwhile, mass killing of Jews had spread rapidly in the Soviet Union. And in the Reich itself, as news of the bitter fighting in the east filtered through, the public mood against the Jews, fomented by Goebbels' propaganda, was turning extremely ugly.\n\nJews in German towns and cities, hounded and persecuted at every turn, were depicted by vicious propaganda as subversives, agitators and troublemakers. They were portrayed as idlers who ought to be 'carted off' to Russia or, better still (it was ominously suggested), simply killed.103 In the middle of August Goebbels put the case for compelling the Jews to wear an identifying badge to a fractious and ailing Hitler, and was given the green light. The wearing of the 'Yellow Star' by all Jews was introduced on 1 September. The Jews in Germany were now a marked minority\u2013clearly visible, openly exposed to their persecutors, totally defenceless. The move was accompanied by the circulation to all Nazi Party offices of Hitler's 'prophecy' of 1939, that another war would result in the destruction of the Jews.104\n\nHeydrich had been less successful with a proposal in August to deport Germany's Jews. Hitler had turned down the suggestion of 'evacuations during the war'. But he gave permission for a 'partial evacuation of the larger cities'.105 Perhaps the old notion that the Jews were 'hostages' or 'pawns' whose presence in German hands might help to fend off an entry into the war by the supposedly Jewish-dominated United States still influenced him. More likely, he held to the view that there was simply nowhere to send the Jews to as long as the war in the east was unfinished. Poland, it had long been accepted, could take in no more Jews. But deporting the Jews into the Soviet Union at this juncture was not practicable. All available transport was needed for the front. This was for the time being a more urgent cause than using trains to ferry German Jews into Russia. Moreover, since Hitler viewed the Jews as a treacherous 'fifth column', deporting them to the Soviet Union while a bitter war against the 'Jewish-Bolshevik' enemy was still raging would in his eyes have been a dangerous move. The areas behind the battle-lines, where Soviet Jews were being slaughtered in their tens of thousands, were in any case scarcely fitted to accommodate a mass import of Jews from the Reich. And if the Jews were simply to be deported there in order to be shot, then the existing killing-units, though expanded since the outset of the eastern campaign, would need to be much enlarged. The 'final solution of the Jewish Question', Hitler presumably told Heydrich, would have to wait a little longer, until the war was over.\n\nNevertheless, within the upper echelons of the SS and Security Police preparations for the 'coming final solution' continued. And the question was now posed about the fate of the deportees. Were they to be given 'a certain form of existence'; or were they to be 'completely eradicated'?106 The question gained immediate urgency when, in the middle of September, Hitler changed his mind on the deportation of the Reich Jews. Stalin's brutal deportation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans, for centuries settled along the Volga, appears to have prompted the volte-face. The pressure from within Germany and in some occupied countries, most notably at this time France, to 'evacuate' the Jews to the east had become intense. Vengeance for the fate of the Volga Germans, an argument pressed on Hitler by a number of Nazi leaders, placated his underlings in opening the previously closed door to deportation from the Reich. This was the decision, unquestionably Hitler's, which initiated the emergence over the coming weeks of the culminating phase of the genocidal process.\n\nWithin the following three months, what the 'final solution' meant would become clarified for those directly involved in its planning and organization. No longer did it refer to a territorial settlement on former Soviet territory (with the unspoken implication that the Jews would gradually die out). It now meant the physical annihilation of Jews throughout Europe. And since the prospect of deportation into the Soviet Union was rapidly receding, this would have to take place closer to home. Parts of occupied Poland were now starting to come under consideration as the location of the extermination programme. This most closely guarded secret was, in autumn 1941, in its full ramifications still confined to the leadership of the SS and Security Police. The civil authorities were as yet not fully initiated into what was planned. The uncertainties and confusion that prevailed that autumn reflected both the level of secrecy attached to the 'final solution', and the fact that it was still in its planning stage; imminent, rather than fully developed. But, triggered by Hitler's agreement in September to the deportation of the Reich Jews, the steps into total genocide now followed rapidly.\n\nThe issue of where the Jews were to go, and what was to happen to them on arrival, now became extremely pressing. On 18 September Himmler informed Arthur Greiser, boss of the 'Warthegau', that he would have to accommodate 60,000 Jews in the Lo\u00b4 d$$$$ ghetto in his area for the winter, prior to further deportation 'to the east' the following spring. This was to meet Hitler's wish to have the Jews removed from the Reich and the former Czech lands as soon as possible.107 But the Lo\u00b4 d$$$$ ghetto was bursting at the seams, protested the local authorities. It could take in no more Jews. Himmler insisted, though the figure was reduced to 20,000 Jews (and 5,000 Gypsies). The suggestion had already been made in July that Jews in the Lo\u00b4 d$$$$ ghetto incapable of working should be killed on the grounds that the ghetto could not sustain them.108 And now large additional numbers were being sent precisely there. The quid pro quo, almost certainly, was permission granted from Berlin to exterminate the Jews of Lo\u00b4 d$$$$ who were unable to work. The search for a suitable extermination site in the region began within weeks of the deportation order reaching Greiser. The gassing of Jews at Chelmno commenced in the first week of December.109\n\nThe 'Warthegau' was only one of the regions designated for the reception of the deported Jews. Heydrich specifically mentioned Riga and Minsk, alongside the 'Warthegau', in early October.110 No clear blueprint for systematic mass murder had been devised by the time the first deportation trains started to rumble out of Vienna, Prague, Berlin and other cities, beginning on 15 October.111 But the message emanating from Himmler and Heydrich\u2013themselves certainly acting in accordance with Hitler's wish, however broadly he had couched it\u2013was that the final hour for the Jews of Europe was about to toll.\n\nIn the meantime, those being sent Jews should act as they saw fit and take whatever radical initiative was needed. The invitation was accepted. During October and November, killing of Jews in huge numbers was adopted in differing regions of the Nazi empire as the way out of the self-manufactured problems. German Jews transported to Kowno and Riga in November were shot immediately on arrival. By now, mass shooting had spread beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. Close collaboration between the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Foreign Ministry led to the shooting of 8,000 Jews in Serbia in October as reprisals against partisan activity. In East Galicia, incorporated since the beginning of 'Barbarossa' into the General Government, around 30,000 Jews were shot in the autumn, though mass shooting in this region had been a feature since June.112\n\nThe use of poison gas was now starting to be recognized as an alternative method of killing\u2013one which Himmler was ready to see adopted as being 'more humane' for the killers than shooting. In October, Heydrich commissioned the extended use of gas-vans. Reconnoitring a site for their deployment was already under way in the 'Warthegau'. A similar method was foreseen for Riga. And a stationary gas chamber, it seems, was planned for Mogilev, to deal with the Jews being sent to Minsk. In the General Government, which was spared the intake of further Jews, the first stages of what would become Belzec extermination camp had begun in September (when the gassing experts from the 'euthanasia action', halted the previous month, had become available). Construction of gas chambers started at the beginning of November, by which date Hans Frank was aware that the Jews of his domain who were incapable of working were to be deported 'over the Bug', to their certain deaths.113\n\nThese regional killings still fell short of a systematic, coordinated programme. The civilian authorities in the occupied territories were certainly as yet unaware of any comprehensive, central directive for genocide. In Minsk, the local Nazi leader, the General Commissar of Belorussia, Wilhelm Kube, objected to the shooting of Reich Jews\u2013'human beings from our cultural sphere', whom he distinguished from the 'native brutish hordes'\u2013and sought clarity on the treatment of Jews with war decorations, those married to 'aryans', and part-Jews (Mischlinge). Hinrich Lohse, Reich Commissar for the Eastern Territory, pressed by the army to keep skilled Jewish workers, wanted to know whether economic considerations made a difference to the treatment of Jews.114 Lohse was soon told that economic criteria were irrelevant. Jews were to be eradicated whatever the economic disadvantages might be.\n\nTo all appearances, a fundamental decision to exterminate Europe's Jews had by now been taken. Conceivably, it happened the previous month, in November.115 In this month\u2013and November was so pivotal in the Nazi calendar for its connections both with the 'shameful' German capitulation in 1918 and the 'heroism' of the failed putsch of 1923\u2013it looks as if the calamity of 1918 and the fate of the Jews were much on Hitler's mind in the context of the current war. At lunchtime on 5 November, with Himmler present, he had said he could not permit 'criminals' to stay alive while 'the best men' were dying at the front. 'We experienced that in 1918,' he said. He made no specific mention of the Jews. It is unlikely, however, that they were far from his mind. That evening, after Himmler had left, he rambled on at length about the Jews. The end of the war would bring their ruin, he declared. He ended his diatribe with the words: 'We can live without the Jews, but they can't live without us. If that is known in Europe, a feeling of solidarity will quickly arise. At present the Jew lives from the fact that he destroys this.'116 Three days later, in Munich, addressing the party's putsch veterans on the eighteenth anniversary of the event, he castigated the Jews as the instigators of the war. A world coalition inspired by Jews, such was his message, would never triumph over Germany. It was the continuation of the struggle that did not end in 1918, he claimed. Germany had been cheated of victory then. Who the cheats were was unspoken but obvious. 'But that was only the beginning, the first act of this drama,' he stated. 'The second and the finale will now be written. And this time we will make good what we were then cheated of.'117 It was allusive, not direct. And so were his comments to his usual entourage in his field headquarters in the early hours of the night of 1\u20132 December, where he said: 'He who destroys life, exposes himself to death. And nothing other than this is happening to them.' He meant: to the Jews.118 Within a week the gas-vans at Chelmno, the first of the death installations to begin operations, started their terrible work.\n\nBy now, the time was ripe for general clarification. With that in mind, Heydrich had sent out invitations on 29 November to those in the civilian administration most affected by the changing policy towards the Jews\u2013several state secretaries, and a number of SS representatives. Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland, and the SS chief in his domain, Friedrich-Wilhelm Kr\u00fcger, were swiftly added to the list, though their initial omission suggests that the General Government\u2013not intended as the recipient for any deported German Jews\u2013was not regarded as central to the discussion. Plainly, therefore, the participants were not about to learn of a detailed programme for gassing millions of Jews in extermination camps located in that region. Nor were precise arrangements for deportations a subject for a meeting that lacked a transport specialist. The recipients of the invitation were, in fact, largely in the dark about the aim of the meeting.\n\nSome divined, correctly, that the treatment of Mischlinge would figure on the agenda. But the most important clues were contained in the wording of the invitation. This began by repeating the commission, nominally from G\u00f6ring, to Heydrich of 31 July, then went on to speak about the necessity 'of achieving a common view among the central agencies involved' in 'the organisational and technical preparations for a comprehensive solution of the Jewish Question', a matter of 'extraordinary significance'.119 In other words, Heydrich's authority had once more to be established beyond question as the organization of the 'comprehensive solution of the Jewish Question', already laid down in July, entered its crucial phase. Heydrich's meeting had been scheduled to take place on 9 December. But crucial events intervened in the first days of the month, and the meeting had to be postponed.\n\nOn the 5th the German advance ground to a halt in intense cold not far from Moscow as a huge and devastating Soviet counter-offensive began. Any thoughts of deporting vast numbers of Jews into the Soviet Union in the foreseeable future were now completely illusory. The deportation plans that had underpinned Nazi hopes of solving the 'Jewish Question' over the past year had to be abandoned. Two days later, on the 7th, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, triggering the German declaration of war on the United States on the 11th, and confirming that the conflict had become truly global. On the 12th Hitler explained to his party leaders, as we saw, what this meant for the Jews. In his 'prophecy' of 30 January 1939, he had promised their destruction in the event of another world war. His terrible conclusion followed: 'The world war is here. The annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.'120\n\nIt was no conventional order. Nor was it an explicit decision. But it was an unmistakable signal. Those listening to Hitler were no clearer than they had been before about how the Jews were going to be destroyed. But they were left under no illusions: the destruction would take place, and now during the war rather than once victory had been won. This was the message to be relayed to subordinates in key positions in the occupied territories.\n\nAmong those in Hitler's audience on 12 December had been Hans Frank. He returned to the General Government and, four days later, repeated what he had heard to his own underlings in his domain. He even used some of Hitler's own phrases. Notably, he cited the 'prophecy'. The war would be only a partial success if Europe's Jews were to survive it, he remarked. They had to disappear. He said he had entered negotiations about deporting the Jews to the east, and referred to a large meeting which would take place in Berlin about this\u2013a reference to Heydrich's meeting, postponed because of the events of early December. 'In any event,' Frank went on, 'a great Jewish migration will commence.' He came to the murderous consequences\u2013the aim horribly clear, if the method of attainment was not. 'But what is to happen to the Jews?' he asked. 'Do you believe they'll be accommodated in village settlements in the Ostland? They said to us in Berlin: why are you giving us all this trouble? We can't do anything with them in the Ostland or in the Reich Commissariat [the Ukraine] either. Liquidate them yourselves!...We must destroy the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible to do so.' Though Frank was still anticipating the deportation of the Jews of the General Government to the east, he was being told that it was pointless to send them there and encouraged to resort to mass killing on his own territory. He had as yet no clear notion of how this was to be carried out. He estimated the number of Jews in his region at 3.5 million (including half-Jews). 'We can't shoot these 3.5 million Jews,' he said, 'we can't poison them, but we must be able to take steps that will somehow lead to success in extermination.'121 At this stage, Frank evidently knew nothing of a programme to carry out the 'final solution of the Jewish Question' on the territory of the General Government itself, instead of further east, and through gas chambers installed in a number of extermination camps. Yet with the exclusion for the indefinite future of Soviet territory as a deportation venue, precisely this new extermination strategy started to take shape in the weeks to come.\n\nHeydrich's meeting was reconvened for 20 January 1942 at a different venue close to the Wannsee, a beautiful large lake on the outskirts of Berlin. The participants differed slightly from those scheduled for the original meeting. But they represented similar interests. Much had happened since the G\u00f6ring mandate had been signed, back in July. And there had been major developments even since the initial invitations had been sent out. What was now being organizationally and technically prepared was no longer a deportation plan for territorial settlement in the east, however murderous that would have been in practice, but a coherent genocidal programme to kill eleven million European Jews in ways and by means still to be fully established, but in need of Continental coordination. Eichmann later doctored the minutes of the meeting to eliminate 'certain over-plain talk'.122 But probably Heydrich did not go into detail about the methods of killing. No one doubted what was intended. When Hans Frank's representative at the meeting, Dr Josef B\u00fchler, his State Secretary, asked for the 'final solution' to start by removing the Jews of the General Government (who, he said, were mainly unable to work) since transport and manpower posed no great problem, he plainly grasped the new possibilities of mass killing, and closer to hand than the territory of the Soviet Union.123 Since Hans Frank had been aware in the autumn of discussions about the construction of Belzec,124 there was presumably some notion of what those possibilities might entail. There was no need for Heydrich to elaborate.\n\nIt would be some weeks after the Wannsee Conference, in March 1942, that the gas chambers of Belzec, then Sobibor and Treblinka started their grisly operations in the General Government. The largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Upper Silesia, would also begin killing Jews in March. And only by the spring would the deportations of Jews from western Europe to the death camps in occupied Poland commence.125 The Wannsee Conference was still an interim stage in the emergence of the 'final solution'. But if the arrangements in January 1942 were still in an embryonic stage, by this time the decision to kill the Jews of Europe had already been taken.\n\nVI\n\nHeinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, has been described as 'the architect' of the 'final solution'.126 So has his immediate subordinate, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Security Police.127 But ultimate authority rested with neither of them. Nor was the mind behind what was to emerge as the 'final solution' that of either Himmler or Heydrich. Indeed, if the construction metaphor is to be retained, Himmler might be described as the architect of the murderous edifice, and Heydrich as the master-builder. But the person who commissioned the project, the inspiration behind the design, had mandated both of them. This was Hitler.\n\nOf course, the complex 'politics of annihilation' can by no means be reduced simply to an expression of Hitler's will. Many agencies throughout the Nazi regime, not just the top echelons of the SS, were necessary for total genocide to emerge over time as the 'final solution of the Jewish Question'. Complicity was widely shared. Hitler was no 'micro-manager'. That was not his style. In any case, he did not need to be. There was no shortage of those endeavouring to the best of their ability to put into practice what they took to be his wishes. No regular flow of edicts or decrees from Hitler was required to push along the radicalization.\n\nEven so, at all crucial junctures of policy-making even in the 1930s\u2013for example, the boycott of April 1933, the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, the pogrom of November 1938 and its aftermath\u2013Hitler's authorization had been needed. This continued during the war. The decision to impose on Jews the wearing of the 'Yellow Star' from September 1941 onwards, all subordinate leaders accepted, could only be taken by Hitler. So could the decision later that month to deport the Reich Jews\u2013a decision which practically overnight enormously intensified the genocidal pressures. It is inconceivable that the decision to move to all-out physical extermination did not also require Hitler's authorization.\n\nHimmler, Heydrich and others directly involved in the 'final solution' indicated that they were acting in accordance with Hitler's wishes, or with his approval. With the extermination programme moving towards its climacteric in summer 1942, Himmler declared: 'The occupied eastern territories are being made free of Jews. The F\u00fchrer has placed the implementation of this very difficult order on my shoulders.'128 Subordinate SS leaders were repeatedly informed, and were in no doubt, that in implementing the 'final solution' they were fulfilling 'the wish of the F\u00fchrer'.129 Unquestionably, they were correct.\n\nHitler's 'wish' may never have been expressed, even to Himmler, as a precise, unequivocal directive, given on a specific occasion, to kill the European Jews. It would have sufficed to give blanket authorization to the Reichsf\u00fchrer-SS to proceed with the 'final solution'. But both key stages in the autumn directly involved Hitler. The first was the decision in September to deport the Reich Jews at a time when there was nowhere to send them. Genocidal impulses in a number of different regions followed rapidly, one after the other, from this decision. They did not yet amount to a programme. But the direction was plain, and the momentum building. The second was the new impetus given to finding a comprehensive 'final solution' that followed the declaration of war on the United States and the beginning of a prolonged global conflict in December. Deportation into Soviet territory, it was obvious, could not now be carried out for many months, if at all. But the 'final solution' could not wait. By the time Heydrich was able to convene the previously postponed Wannsee Conference, no further fundamental decision was needed. The task had become one of organization and implementation.\n\nAs the most terrible war in history, which Hitler more than any other single individual was responsible for unleashing, drew to its horrific close, the German dictator sought to justify the conflict to his own entourage\u2013and to posterity. Once again, he resorted to his 'prophecy': 'I have fought openly against the Jews,' he stated. 'I gave them a last warning at the outbreak of war'\u2013as always a misdating of his 'prophecy' to the date that war began. 'I never left them in uncertainty', he continued, 'that if they were to plunge the world into war again they would this time not be spared\u2013that the vermin in Europe would be finally eradicated.' He was proud of what he had done. 'I have lanced the Jewish boil,' he declared. 'Posterity will be eternally grateful to us.'130\n\nOf all the fateful decisions we have considered in preceding chapters, the decision to kill the Jews, unfolding over the summer and autumn of 1941, is the one where it is least possible to conceive of alternatives. Had the invasion of the Soviet Union proceeded as the German leadership hoped it would, the 'final solution' known to history would not have taken that particular form. The killing fields would, in all probability, then have been mainly in the Soviet Union, not in Poland. But as long as the Nazi regime was in power and engaged in the war, the Jews would have perished in one way or another. Only the method and timing would have differed.\n\nThe decision to kill the Jews arose from an earlier aim, absolutely intrinsic to Nazism, to 'remove' them. Hitler had never lost sight of this aim since 1919. It did not initially mean physically annihilate. But such a meaning was potentially, and over the course of time actually, also embraced by it. The aim of 'removal' was in this way proto-genocidal. Only the 'successful' (from the Nazi perspective) expulsion of Germany's Jews before war began could have prevented the logical progression into genocide itself for these Jews. But even then the intended expansion by conquest of the Nazi leadership would inevitably have resulted\u2013as in practice it did\u2013in vast numbers of further Jews falling within the clutches of the Third Reich. 'Removal' of these Jews was impossible without genocide, even if that had largely arisen from the deliberately imposed ravages of slave labour, malnutrition and disease. Only the prevention of war (ruled out by the politics of appeasement), the toppling of Hitler from within (for which the will was lacking among the German elites) or the rapid defeat of Hitler's Germany in the early stages of the war (an utter impossibility in military terms) could have precluded such an outcome. Otherwise, the only other way in which the Jews might have been spared their appalling fate is if better prepared Soviet defences had repelled a German invasion, forcing a compromise peace settlement, perhaps even with Hitler no longer in power. Stalin's obtuseness ruled out this possibility.\n\nGermany's aggression was the main cause of Europe's second descent into war within a generation. It was also the crucial trigger, in the summer of 1940, to the spiral of events that we have followed, transforming conflicts at opposite ends of the globe by December 1941 into world war. Behind that aggression lay an ideological 'mission' embodied by the figure of Adolf Hitler. And inherent in that 'mission' was the 'removal' of the Jews. In this way, the Nazi war on the Jews was a central component of, inextricable from, the Second World War itself\u2013the greatest slaughter the world has ever known.\n\n## Afterthoughts\n\nThings might have turned out differently. The British government could have chosen in May 1940 to seek out a negotiated settlement with Hitler. The German leadership could have concentrated its attack on the Mediterranean and north Africa, not the Soviet Union. Japan could have decided to extricate herself from the damaging China imbroglio and not embarked upon the risky expansion to the south. Mussolini might have awaited events before deciding whether it was worthwhile taking his country into the war and could in any case have avoided the disaster in Greece. Roosevelt might have sided with the isolationists and not run the political risks of helping Britain and pushing to the brink of direct involvement in the war. Stalin might have heeded the numerous warnings and better prepared his country to meet the German onslaught. The Japanese could have attacked the Soviet Union from the east while the Germans were still advancing from the west. Hitler might have refrained from declaring war on the United States, an enemy he did not know how to defeat.\n\nIn theory these were alternative options. Any one of them could have altered the course of history. A rich variety of imaginary 'what if' scenarios might be constructed on such a basis\u2013a harmless but pointless diversion from the real question of what happened and why. For the preceding chapters have shown in each case why these alternatives were ruled out.\n\nAmong the more feasible propositions was the possibility of Britain putting out feelers towards a negotiated peace in the spring of 1940. The immediate context of military catastrophe in France, together with the known readiness of some figures in the British establishment\u2013including, at the very heart of government, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax\u2013to consider such an outcome, and the relatively weak position at this point of the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, meant it could not be dismissed out of hand. But when three days of debate in the War Cabinet eventually concluded with a firm decision to fight on, it was on the basis of reasoned argument, led by Churchill but accepted by a collective decision of all those involved, including Halifax.\n\nAt the other end of the spectrum, Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union and the Japanese decision to expand into south-east Asia were choices where alternatives had minimal chance of acceptance\u2013or even of finding a hearing.\n\nHitler had for nearly twenty years seen war against the Soviet Union at some point as vital for Germany's future. This was his war. He had wanted to undertake the crucial showdown with Britain's assistance, or at least tolerance. Had Britain capitulated in 1940, the attack would surely have gone ahead on those terms. As it was, he had to reckon with Britain's continued hostility. But far from reducing the commitment to war in the east, and in the foreseeable future, this intensified it. For in 1940\u201341 Hitler's ideological fixation merged with military and strategic considerations into the decision for invasion. For years, he had justified the need to expand without delay with the argument that time was running against Germany. Now he could put that argument with force. He was aware that from 1942 onwards American arms and resources would increasingly weigh in the scales on the side of Great Britain. He still had no means of combating this. Meanwhile, in central and eastern Europe he could see a future Soviet threat to German dominance surely emerging (and confirmed in his mind by what he had heard when Molotov visited Berlin in November 1940).\n\nThe preferences of those in the German military leadership for a priority to be given to north Africa and the Mediterranean cut no ice with Hitler. Given the nature of the German regime, there was no possibility of any alternative based upon those premisses countering the strategy favoured by Hitler himself. From Hitler's point of view, the decision to attack and destroy the Soviet Union\u2013an undertaking he wanted ideologically\u2013was strategically forced upon him. He had to gain victory in the east before Stalin could build up his defences and before the Americans entered the war. Rapid triumph over the Soviet Union was the route to complete victory in the war\u2013compelling capitulation from Britain, keeping the Americans out and destroying any basis for future Soviet challenge for dominance in central Europe and the Balkans.\n\nJapan's choice of southern expansion was equally inflexible, and paired here with similar inflexibility over the war in China. No alternative was feasible from a Japanese perspective. The China quagmire allowed no retreat for Japan without national humiliation. The more the Americans dug their heels in over China, the greater the impasse became. At the same time the commitment to expansion to cement Japan's standing as a great power, with extended dominion to provide the lasting basis for assured supremacy in east Asia, had permeated all sections of the elite, particularly the army and navy, and was backed by a manufactured shrill consensus of public opinion. No retreat from this commitment was possible either. It was a big risk. Expansion into south-east Asia would axiomatically lead to confrontation not only with Great Britain, but, even more importantly, with the United States in the Pacific. The extreme Japanese dependency on America for raw materials, especially oil, greatly increased the risk. But without the oil of the Dutch East Indies to supplant American oil, the economic self-sufficiency seen as essential for great-power status could never be achieved. Japan would always remain precariously dependent upon the United States. So when the upheaval in Europe following the German victory over France provided what was seen as a golden opportunity, no segment of the power-elite opposed it. Collectively, the Japanese government chose imperialist expansion to the south, despite the risks.\n\nWhen an alternative choice posed itself, for a brief moment, following the German attack on the Soviet Union, it was for expansion to the north, against the old Russian enemy. Even then the southern advance would merely have been postponed for a time. When the northern alternative was rejected, since a strike to the north was adjudged too premature to be certain of benefits, the southern advance\u2013favoured by the dominant elements in both navy and army\u2013was reconfirmed. A clash with the United States then became inevitable. Even though the Japanese leadership was aware that such a clash would most probably result in national disaster if victory were not swiftly attained, prestige allowed no pulling back, either from the southern expansion or from the war in China. Not only Pearl Harbor, but the road to Hiroshima and Nagasaki beckoned.\n\nThe colossal risks which both Germany and Japan were prepared to undertake were ultimately rooted in the understanding among the power-elites in both countries of the imperative of expansion to acquire empire and overcome their status as perceived 'have-not' nations. The imperialist dominance of Great Britain and the international power (even without formal empire) of the United States posed the great challenge. The need to counter with the utmost urgency the growing economic disparity, quite especially the increasing material strength of the United States, which could only work over time against the 'have-not' nations, meant that the quest for dominion as the foundation of national power could not be delayed. This was the basis of the rationale, accepted by the power-elites in Germany and Japan, for undertaking such high-level risks that even national survival was put at stake. Economic domination of the Eurasian land mass by Germany and of south-east Asia by Japan would, as American analysts recognized, have undermined the position of the United States as a world power. This was certainly the presumption in Berlin and Tokyo. From the perspective of the German and Japanese leadership, the gamble had to be taken.\n\nIn parallel fashion, if less grandiose in vision, the imperial dream underpinned Mussolini's ambitions. He, too, was determined to overcome the disadvantages widely regarded within Italy's elite as stemming from her weakness as a 'have-not' nation. The fateful choices of 1940 were framed by this imperative. In the summer of 1940, as Germany's final victory seemed imminent, Italy's ruling elites (including the King), despite some cold feet, were persuaded by Mussolini's belligerency. The advantages of joining a war apparently already won outweighed, it seemed, the risks of becoming involved in a war Italy was ill-equipped to fight.\n\nIn the case of the calamitous decision to attack Greece, the elites were divided. The military leadership was cautious, aware of the risks involved. But opposition was at best muted. Mussolini could reckon with their compliance, if not their enthusiasm. Egged on by Ciano, his Foreign Minister, the Duce saw the Balkans, and Greece in particular, as the chance to create an Italian imperium\u2013at the same time showing Hitler that he was not compelled to be tugged along in the German dictator's slipstream. Here, too, prestige played its part in the courting of disaster. But the decision to invade Greece was waiting to happen. It was ultimately also preformed by long-standing Italian ambitions\u2013embodied in Mussolini\u2013to join the 'have' nations, and become an imperialist 'great power'.\n\nStalin's options were drastically narrowed by his own staggering misjudgement of German intentions. And given Stalin's unchallengeable supremacy within the Soviet regime, his miscalculations\u2013as with those of Hitler and Mussolini\u2013were the miscalculations of an entire system. His paranoid suspicions, long since an inherent component of his rule, meant that he distrusted and disbelieved good intelligence while perversely (since it supported his subjective assessment) believing deliberate German disinformation. In the climate of fear and suspicion that pervaded the regime, he was also fed distorted evaluations by those in charge of sifting the intelligence, themselves victims of the general ideological presupposition that the interests of the western democracies lay in fomenting war between Germany and the Soviet Union, a notion abetted by the successful German disinformation campaign. Stalin's certainty that there would be no German attack before an ultimatum posing severe demands\u2013perhaps a new 'Brest-Litovsk'\u2013and that he could gain the time necessary to complete the rebuilding of the Red Army (which had been severely and unnecessarily weakened by his own brutal purges some years earlier) led him, catastrophically, to ignore all warnings and to berate his increasingly worried military advisers. They in turn were certain, in their own postwar apologias, that Stalin, even at the risk of provoking the Germans and even with the frantic rearmament programme still incomplete, could have mobilized Soviet defences to be ready to meet any invasion. The strategic thinking of the Soviet military leadership, which Stalin relied upon, was, however, also deficient. Deployment of Soviet defences not on the border, but in much deeper-lying formations, would have avoided the rapid demolition of front-line forces in the immediate German attack, and provided the basis for organized counter-offensives. The initial huge breakthrough by the Wehrmacht would thereby have been prevented. But military strategy had long rested upon the principle of offensive action as the best form of defence. This, and Stalin's disastrous certainty in his own judgement, exposed the Soviet Union to the calamity of 22 June 1941.\n\nRoosevelt's choices, too, appear more open in theory than in practice. His early leanings towards isolationism in foreign policy were already fading fast in the later 1930s, as German and Japanese bellicosity increasingly threatened world peace\u2013and American interests. The President had to reckon with isolationist feeling in the country, and even more so in Congress. The isolationist minority sustained a loud, discordant clamour. But it had no following within the administration. Among the President's advisers\u2013some more belligerent, some more cautious\u2013there was unanimity behind the need urgently to rearm and build up American defences. There was soon extensive acknowledgement, too, of the necessity\u2013again in America's own interest\u2013of underwriting the British war effort, and of resolute firmness against Japanese aggression in the Far East. From these premisses, the destroyer deal, lend-lease, the Atlantic Charter, the 'undeclared war' in the Atlantic and Cordell Hull's unbending 'Ten Points'\u2013seen as an ultimatum in Japan\u2013were logical developments, in the thrust of their policy more rather than less likely. By the autumn of 1941, the most obvious outcome, whether through formal declaration or not, was war in the near future against both Japan and Germany.\n\nOnce Japan had pre-empted the need for any decision by Roosevelt to risk a vote in Congress on a declaration of war, outright confrontation with Germany\u2013still seen in Washington as the greater danger\u2013was never likely to be long delayed. Again, any difficult choice on political tactics was taken from Roosevelt by Hitler's rapid decision to declare war on the United States. But, far from being the arbitrary irrationality that it has often puzzlingly seemed, this decision was inherently logical from Hitler's point of view. America had long been an adversary which Hitler knew Germany would at some point have to confront. By the autumn of 1941 his options were reduced to the question of when to open hostilities. Pearl Harbor gave him what seemed a gilt-edged chance. The conclusion of new, more binding ties to a seemingly indomitable ally provided the opportunity to anticipate the inevitable and declare war in order to turn the tables on America in the Atlantic while her hands were full in the Pacific.\n\nOver the previous months, Hitler had commissioned the 'final solution', aimed at ending Jewish existence in Europe. As the war had widened, with no likelihood of imminent German victory, this 'final solution' had emerged as the inexorable outcome of an escalating Nazi persecution which was increasingly genocidal in character. At the root of the Jewish tragedy was the Nazi ideological obsession, held more fervently by Hitler than any other, of 'removing' the Jews to 'cleanse' the German nation and pave the way for a racially pure 'new order' in Europe which would overthrow the centuries-old dominance of Judaeo-Christian values and beliefs. Here, by 1941, the only choice had turned out to be the methods and location of killing. Alternatives had by this time been reduced to techniques and organization of mass murder.\n\nThe fateful choices that were made were not predetermined or axiomatic. But they did reflect the sort of political system that produced them.\n\nThe fascist-style authoritarian systems made the most dynamic, but also the most catastrophic, choices. In both Germany and Italy, highly personalized regimes had been established in which the making of decisions was vested in all-powerful leaders. These could rely upon the backing\u2013or at very least obedient acceptance\u2013of all sections of the power-elite. Their supremacy was also upheld by plebiscitary acclamation from the masses, manufactured and manipulated by the toxicity of ceaseless propaganda and the ruthless repression of dissentient views. In these systems, the leaders might or might not choose to listen to advice. But they reserved the right\u2013seen as the prerogative of leadership\u2013to decide alone. In governmental terms, it was an extraordinary level of freedom\u2013but one fraught with equally extraordinary risk, with the inbuilt potential for calamitous error.\n\nHitler's own freedom of action had been increasingly unshackled from institutional constraints after he took power in 1933. By the time war broke out it was as good as absolute. Not even the remnants of collective government were left. The Reich Cabinet had ceased to meet. The armed forces were directly under Hitler's control. All vital agencies in the regime, most importantly the apparatus of repression, were held by Hitler loyalists. Even the sections of the German power-elites that did not share the complete Hitlerian world-view supported the parts of it that added up to expansion, conquest and establishment of Germany's Continental dominance at the cost of brutally subjugated peoples, particularly those of eastern Europe. They had shared Hitler's triumphs, most singularly the remarkable victory over France in 1940. Whatever private misgivings they might have harboured, they were in no position to oppose the logical extension of his great gamble: war against the Soviet Union, then against the United States.\n\nMussolini's internal position was inherently less strong than Hitler's. He was not the head of state, and the army's allegiance (as proved to be critical in 1943) was ultimately to the King, not to the Duce. Even so, his own internal dominance was unchallenged. He controlled all the important ministries of state. The party ensured loyalty and was the main conduit for the Duce cult. This, parallel to the F\u00fchrer cult in Germany, had helped establish a personal supremacy which meant that arbitrary decision-making had become structurally embedded in the Fascist system. The fateful choices to enter the war, then, utterly ill-prepared, to invade Greece, were, as much as the disastrous decisions by Hitler that invited immense suffering and bloodshed for his own German people, both the free choices of an all-powerful individual, and at the same time systemically pre-programmed disasters in waiting.\n\nThe Japanese system shared many affinities with the regimes of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. But there were also significant differences. Here, no possibility of arbitrary decision-making fell to any individual. In fact, of the six systems examined, this was in many respects the most overtly collective form of government. The Emperor was more than a figurehead, but had no dictatorial, or genuinely regal, powers to force decisions upon his country. Nor did he attempt to do so. Rather, he backed\u2013sometimes hesitantly, even fearfully\u2013the decisions of his government. Imperial majesty was only upheld by posing as the last resort of regime consensus, not by risking confrontation with his government, even less with his military. The Achilles heel of the system was, in fact, the position of the military. Constitutionally subject only to the Emperor, not the civilian government, the armed forces enjoyed a high degree of autonomy to shape national policy. Ministers falling foul of the military were soon ousted\u2013or assassinated. The Prime Minister, therefore, had to act largely at the behest of the dominant forces in the army and navy. These in turn, in a peculiarity of the Japanese system, were heavily influenced by the views percolating upwards from factions based in the middle echelons of the officer corps.\n\nIn reality, however, the pressure from below operated within the framework of fixed ideological parameters of the quest for national greatness resting upon expansion, conquest and dominion. The strategy and tactics leading to these goals could give rise to heated debate. The goals themselves were not in dispute. The collective government was, therefore, wedded to the same inflexible ends. And, as with Germany and Italy, national prestige played an inordinate part in the making of crucial decisions. Anything that smacked of loss of face was guaranteed unanimous rejection. Ultimately, therefore, the collective decision-making in Japan worked in similar fashion to the individualistic pattern in Germany and Italy. There was an inherent propensity to take the high-risk gamble rather than withdraw to a perceived humiliating compromise that would undermine the central ideological objectives and advertise national weakness, not strength.\n\nStalin's gamble, that Hitler would not attack in 1941, was of a different kind. But his grave error of judgement also reflected his system of rule. Here, as in Hitler's Germany, the personality of the ruler had become a determinant of the system itself. Terror and purges had undermined bureaucratic stability and military efficiency. The institutions of collective government, as in Germany, had long since been eroded. The most important of them, the Politburo, had in recent years met less and less frequently. Even when it did meet, it was no more than a vehicle of Stalin's own power. Fear, intimidation, toadying and sycophancy prevailed even at the highest levels of the regime. They meant that there was no counter to Stalin's own assessment. Here too, then, the ruler had an autonomy in the making of decisions that was unusual even in authoritarian systems of rule.\n\nThe contrast with the two democratic systems, those of Great Britain and the United States, was stark. Here, given long-established, well-oiled bureaucratic machinery of government that framed the policy-choices for the leaders, allowing for rational assessment of risks and advantages, there was little scope for arbitrary decision-making. Yet there were divergences in the way these systems operated.\n\nThe British War Cabinet in May 1940 was a genuine collective, even if its members carried differing weight. Churchill had the dignity of the office of Prime Minister behind his views. But he was new to the post, and at this stage was regarded with scepticism if not outright disapproval by some elements even within his own party (which he did not yet lead). He could not dictate policy, and had to accept the continued importance of the two heavy-weights of the previous administration, Chamberlain and Halifax, while the two Labour members, Attlee and Greenwood, had as yet little standing. Churchill carried the day through sound argument as well as force of personality. Even in the extreme gravity of the situation, the decision had arisen from rational debate. Halifax and Chamberlain, like Churchill, had advanced reasoned calculations. The ideological parameters were as plain as in the case of the authoritarian systems, and were agreed by all. But they were defensive in nature: upholding Britain's independence as a nation, and preserving her Empire. Only the ways to those ends separated Churchill and Halifax. At the end of the debate, Halifax did not demur at the decision arrived at, even though it ran counter to his own suggestion. Churchill's own position, building upon his propagandistic exploitation of the 'miracle of Dunkirk', now went from strength to strength. His dominance within the Cabinet was soon ensured. Since he controlled the Defence Ministry, too, the balance tipped in the direction of prime-ministerial and away from outrightly collective government. Churchill's personality traits prompted frequent intervention (or interference) in military matters, much to the irritation of his chiefs of staff and commanders. But his sense of collective responsibility for government remained. At their meeting at Placentia Bay in August 1941, Roosevelt was surprised at the need felt by Churchill to wire his Cabinet colleagues in London to seek their approval for what he was doing. Some of the President's own Cabinet colleagues were not even aware of where Roosevelt was at the time.\n\nThe presidential system of the United States, unlike the British form of government, was not based upon collective responsibility for decisions. Roosevelt's Cabinet was an advisory body. Some of the members of his administration had great experience and their views carried much weight. Hull and Welles at the State Department, Morgenthau at the Treasury, Stimson and Marshall for the army, Knox and Stark for the navy, each backed by expert staff, were prominent among the individuals to whom Roosevelt listened. But the decisions were his alone. The checks here, as provided by the makers of the Constitution, did not come from within the executive, but from the legislature. Roosevelt was, and felt himself to be, confined by Congress to an extent that Churchill never experienced with the British Parliament.\n\nAnd behind Congress there was public opinion to consider. Of the six systems under review, only in the United States was the opinion of ordinary citizens a factor of the first importance in the making of decisions. In Britain, public opinion was irrelevant to the crucial decision of May 1940. Thereafter, it was heavily steered by the government while continuing to have little or no input into decision-making. Morale was more important than opinion. And Churchill's rousing rhetoric of the summer of 1940, linked to the outward signs of national defiance, the staving off of the Luftwaffe in the 'Battle of Britain' and the failure of Hitler's forces to invade, ensured that this was high\u2013something not to be underestimated, especially compared with what it had been under his predecessor or what it might have been under an alternative premier. In the four variants of authoritarianism considered, opinion expressed in public was that which propaganda and indoctrination had manufactured and induced. Its role was to provide plebiscitary backing for regime action, to deter the formation of oppositional attitudes and on occasion to stimulate pressure to encourage the leadership to move in the direction that it wanted to anyway. Only in the United States did public opinion have a marked influence upon executive action. From the summer of 1940 down to Pearl Harbor, and even to the German declaration of war four days later, Roosevelt felt obliged to keep public opinion on his side. He could massage it through his 'fireside chats' and other public addresses. But he could not ignore it. His policy in these crucial months was determined in good measure by the need to prepare the public for something it did not want and which he had solemnly promised to avoid: sending American troops to fight in another war in Europe.\n\nWithout the individuals whose names have dominated the preceding pages\u2013Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Konoe and Tojo, Churchill and Roosevelt\u2013the course of history would have been different. But how different? The role of the individual set against the impersonal, external determinants of change is a perpetual conundrum in the interpretation of history. In a sense, it poses a false dichotomy. Individuals are not detached from the impersonal forces that condition their actions, as previous chapters have clearly shown. Relative economic strength and potential was one such force, in turn imposing constraints on the mobilization of resources and manpower. The conduct of the enemy was another. This could only be anticipated through the gathering and interpretation of intelligence. Yet in each case, the governments under review either had deficient intelligence at its disposal or made lamentable use of good intelligence, or both. And even the best intelligence supply, as in the American ability (through MAGIC) to crack Japanese codes, did not prevent Pearl Harbor. So in all instances governments had to react to unpredictable circumstances. This was particularly the case with those governments (Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union) which were reacting defensively to the strategic initiatives of Germany, Italy and Japan.\n\nYet another impersonal force operated within each governmental system. Bureaucratic planning and evaluation of policy proposals contributed to the 'pre-packaging' of decisions, often as the outcome of in-fighting for influence and resources within organizations. The scope for this was greater, however, in the differently structured democratic systems of Great Britain and the United States, as well as in the strange form of 'collective authoritarianism' in Japan, than it was in Germany, Italy or the Soviet Union, where bureaucracies served as the functioning tools of dictatorship.\n\nDespite the existence of such external and internal determinants, the individuals at the centre of our enquiry were not ciphers or mere 'front-men'. They had an input that is not simply reducible to a personalized representational function of such forces. Historical change, certainly in the short term, invariably results from the interaction of external determinants and individual agency. The fateful choices reviewed in preceding chapters provide ample evidence of this.\n\nThe individuals with the greatest political autonomy were the dictators of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union. Other leaders in their place might well have taken other decisions, avoiding the disastrous judgements they made. Would a Reich Chancellor G\u00f6ring have chosen to attack the Soviet Union? Would a Prime Minister Badoglio have decided to invade Greece? Would a General Secretary Malenkov have rejected the flood of warnings about a German strike? Simply to pose the questions offers not only unlikely scenarios, but enters a conjectural realm where no answers are possible. It does, however, serve to underline the indispensability to their actions of the personalities of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Their fateful choices were directly determined by the sort of individuals they happened to be. At the same time, though, they were not made in a vacuum as arbitrary whims of personality. They were choices made under preconditions and under external constraints.\n\nIdeological fixations were an important part of this. So were the actions of others whom they could not control. In Hitler's case, the sense of time running strongly against Germany\u2013a correct appreciation\u2013forced his hand in deciding on 'Operation Barbarossa' and in declaring war on America. Mussolini, too, felt under great pressure, in this instance to forge his own empire in the Mediterranean and Balkans before it was too late and he was completely upstaged by Germany. Stalin's confine was the state of his army and the knowledge that he would not be ready to confront Germany with the necessary forces before 1942, prompting the need he felt to avoid any conceivable provocation to tempt Hitler to invade before then. In each case, these individuals made history\u2013although, to adapt a thought of Karl Marx, not under circumstances of their choosing.\n\nAt the opposite end of the scale, the personality of the Japanese Prime Minister was not of the first importance in the making of policy decisions. Konoe and Tojo were certainly very different individuals. By autumn 1941 Konoe would have been prepared to go a long way to appease the United States, while Tojo was inflexible in refusing any concession to American demands. But both had earlier committed themselves to the same policy of expansion in south-east Asia while maintaining the attritional war in China. Konoe became dispensable once he showed himself ready to retreat too far from this commitment. Matsuoka, the most forceful personality in Japanese politics, had already left the scene when his own inimitable attempt to upturn the existing priorities took him outside the mainstream consensus, failed to win support and stirred powerful enemies anxious to bring about his downfall. In the consensual nature of a formation of decisions that had emanated from the most powerful military factions, the scope allowed to the individual was necessarily diminished.\n\nIn the differently structured democracies, the role of the individual in the making of the fateful choices was greater than in the case of Japan, though arguably less crucial when compared with the dictatorships. Like the dictators, the democratic leaders operated on the basis of widely accepted ideological belief-systems. In fact, the ideological commitment\u2013in this case, to democratic freedoms and the political and social structures that supported them\u2013was almost certainly both deeper and wider than the fascistic and militaristic values of Germany, Italy and Japan, or the Communist world-view in the Soviet Union.\n\nWithout Churchill, the decision in the British Cabinet in May 1940 might conceivably have gone another way\u2013with unforeseen consequences. Both Halifax and Churchill were striving for the same ends: national survival and independence. But Halifax's policy choice could\u2013most probably would\u2013have inaugurated a different course of development, one probably more damaging for Britain. So it was the country's inordinate good fortune to have as its Prime Minister Churchill, not Halifax. Personality mattered. But so did reasoned argument. It had to. Churchill was not yet the national hero he subsequently became, when his personality certainly became a factor of the first importance to the British war effort.\n\nThe value of Roosevelt's personal role is similarly hard to overestimate. Yet the quandary he faced would have confronted any President at the time. His opponent in the presidential election campaign of 1940, Wendell Willkie, a dynamic figure and attractive personality, was no isolationist. He was as firm as the President about the need for America to combat the dangers to American interests from Europe and Japan. He favoured the policy of aid for Britain. Some in Britain thought at the time that he might prove better than Roosevelt at mobilizing American industry. Willkie, like Roosevelt, would have had to straddle the line between helping Britain yet not alienating public and congressional opinion. Whether, however, he would have done it as well as Roosevelt; whether he would have had the experience\u2013and political cunning\u2013to pull it off as the President did; whether he could have sufficiently freed himself from the isolationist lobby within his Republican Party (which had persuaded him to denounce the destroyer deal); whether he would have had the lateral thinking needed to create the idea of lend-lease; whether he would have struck the vital rapport with Churchill that was so important to the forging of the alliance: on all of these, a sceptical answer is justified. Roosevelt's personality was as important as Churchill's to the style of governance he adopted, to the fateful choices he made and to the way he made them.\n\nThe choices faced by these men between May 1940 and December 1941 were unenviable. In each case the stakes were enormous. What seems to posterity an inevitable course of events did not look like that at the time. The fateful choices made by the leaders of Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, Great Britain and the United States in those nineteen months changed the world.\n\nFor nearly four years after the events explored here, the global war raged on. The stupendous losses from military combat, and from genocide, mounted drastically. For over two years, between the summer of 1940 and the autumn of 1942, the outcome was far from certain. Both Hitler and the Japanese leadership knew that the odds would tell against them in a long war. So it proved. But it was a close-run thing\u2013closer than is often presumed. Eventually, but only from 1943 onwards, the defeat of the Axis was in sight, at first dimly, then more brightly, and in the end glaringly. The unlikely combination of an indomitable Soviet fighting machine and limitless American resources and resolve finally ensured victory in both Europe and the Far East. The courage and tenacity of the British armed forces and those of the Empire had also made an indispensable contribution to the defeat of Nazism and Japanese militarism. But it was the curtain-call as a world power of a battered and bankrupt Britain. The liquidation of the British Empire followed\u2013if gradually, then nevertheless inexorably. The next decades belonged to the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, the victors of the war. The foundations of another potential superpower of the future, China, were laid soon after the end of the great conflict in the wake of the turmoil in the Far East. Between them, the leaders of Germany and Japan had produced a world which was the exact opposite of all that they had striven for. Whatever the gigantic cost, it had been worth paying to see that the world they had wanted could never come about.\n\n## Notes\n\nABBREVIATIONS\n\nFORETHOUGHTS\n\n1. For the term, an invention of the American Cold War diplomat George Kennan, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler, 'Die Urkatastrophe. Der Erste Weltkrieg als Auftakt und Vorbild f\u00fcr den Zweiten Weltkrieg', Der Spiegel, 8 (16 Feb. 2004), reprinted in Stephan Burgdorff and Klaus Wiegrefe (eds.), Der Erste Weltkrieg. Die Urkatastrophe des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich, 2004, pp. 23\u201335.\n\n2. For the scale of mortalities, see Niall Ferguson, The War of the World. History's Age of Hatred, London, 2006, pp. xxxiv\u2013xxxv, 649\u201350; and Norman Davies, Europe. A History, London, 1996, pp. 1328\u20139, where the losses in the Second World War are probably conservative estimates.\n\n3. For a superb account of the legacy of the war for the European continent, see the magisterial work by Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe since 1945, London, 2005.\n\n4. The term was invented by the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, was used in the indictment of major German war criminals a year later and enshrined in a United Nations convention in 1948 (Leo Kuper, Genocide. Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, Harmondsworth, 1981, pp. 19\u201323; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005, p. 17).\n\n5. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms. A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, p. 186, expresses similar sentiments in stating that 'the next five years of war [after September 1940] would see the decisions made in the last months of its first year carried out', though this compression of timescale omits some dramatic and fundamental decisions over subsequent months, considered in the later chapters of this book.\n\n6. The case for playing down the role of government leaders as 'rational actors' in the taking of vital decisions in foreign policy and emphasizing the structuring of political choices through the input of governmental bureaucracies and the jockeying for influence of competing groups within a system was articulated by Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision. Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Boston, 1971.\n\n7. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Rendezvous with Destiny, Boston, 1990, pp. 348\u20139.\n\n8. See David Reynolds, In Command of History. Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, London, 2004, pp. 169\u201373, for the way Churchill concealed the divisions that surfaced in the War Cabinet discussions of late May 1940, and more generally for an excellent analysis of the way his war memoirs were constructed and how they have shaped subsequent views on the great conflict.\n\n9. The balance of economic power only shifted inexorably to the Allies during 1942, to become overwhelming from 1943 onwards. See Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II. Six Great Powers in International Comparison, Cambridge, 1998, especially the editor's introductory chapter on 'The Economics of World War II. An Overview' (pp. 1\u201342); and I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War, Oxford\/New York, 1995, pp. 1060\u201362.\n\n10. Emphatic in his view that ultimate triumph in the Second World War might have gone to the Axis powers is Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, London, 1995, esp. pp. 314\u201325.\n\nCHAPTER 1. LONDON, SPRING 1940\n\n1. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2: Their Finest Hour, London, 1949, p. 157 (and similar comments on p. 199). See David Reynolds, In Command of History. Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, London, 2004, p. 169.\n\n2. In fact, an oversight led to a tacit acknowledgement that precisely this issue had indeed been mooted. The text of the telegram which Churchill sent to the French premier, M. Paul Reynaud, on 28 May 1940 included the following sentence: 'In the formula prepared last Sunday by Lord Halifax it was suggested that if Signor Mussolini would co-operate with us in securing a settlement of all European questions which would safeguard our independence and form the basis of a just and durable peace for Europe we should be prepared to discuss his claims in the Mediterranean' (Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 110). See Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 171\u20132, for the editorial lapse that allowed this trailer to events to be retained when Churchill had expunged reference to it in the text.\n\n3. 'Cato', Guilty Men, London, 1940. And see Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory. Britain 1900\u20131990, London, 1996, p. 198.\n\n4. Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed. European International History 1919\u20131933, Oxford, 2005, pp. 25\u20137.\n\n5. See Clarke, pp. 128\u201334.\n\n6. Charles Loch Mowat, Britain between the Wars, 1918\u20131940, London, 1956, pp. 259\u201362.\n\n7. See A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914\u20131945, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 330.\n\n8. Steiner, p. 609.\n\n9. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 5: 1922\u20131939, London, 1976, p. 76.\n\n10. See the outstanding biography by Jonathan Wright, Gustav Stresemann, Weimar's Greatest Statesman, Oxford, 2002, pp. 301\u20137 and chapter 8.\n\n11. Quoted in R. A. C. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement. British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War, London, 1993, p. 37.\n\n12. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, pp. 38\u20139.\n\n13. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 43.\n\n14. Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler. Lord Londonderry and Britain's Road to War, London, 2004, p. 105.\n\n15. See Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, pp. 272\u201393; and, for the priority given to air rearmament and a comparison of spending on the three services, N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, vol. 1: Rearmament Policy, London, 1976, p. 532.\n\n16. Quoted in Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 66.\n\n17. Quoted in Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 65.\n\n18. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 69.\n\n19. See John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory. A Political Biography, London, 1993, p. 344, also for scepticism about the likely deterrent impact of a 'grand alliance'.\n\n20. Quoted in Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 252.\n\n21. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC18\/1\/1158, 25.5.40.\n\n22. Parker, Chamberlain and Appeasement, p. 184.\n\n23. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1: The Gathering Storm, London, 1948, p. 292 (where he mentions that his words gave rise to hefty and prolonged protest in the House of Commons); and quoted in R. A. C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement, London, 2000, p. 187.\n\n24. Quoted in David Irving, Churchill's War, vol. 1: The Struggle for Power, Bullsbrook, Australia, 1987, p. 9.\n\n25. Taylor, English History, 1914\u20131945, p. 321.\n\n26. Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters 1931\u20131950, London, 1954, p. 204. 'You are the only man who can hold Winston, who is amazingly valuable, but whose judgement is not 100% reliable,' Lord Hankey, Minister without Portfolio in the War Cabinet, told Chamberlain on the day before his resignation (Churchill Archives Centre, HNKY 4\/32, 9.5.40).\n\n27. N. J. Crowson, Facing Fascism. The Conservative Party and the European Dictators 1935\u201340, London, 1997, p. 185.\n\n28. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement, pp. 143\u20134, 224\u20135.\n\n29. Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, London, 1946, p. 424.\n\n30. Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler, pp. 300\u2013301.\n\n31. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 1938\u20131945, ed. David Dilks, London, 1971, pp. 221\u20134 (7\u201312.10.39); Christopher Hill, Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy. The British Experience, October 1938\u2013June 1941, Cambridge, 1991, pp. 115\u201326, 144. The door was far from closed, however, on a negotiated settlement on the basis of acceptable terms. News filtered through to the Germans later in October that R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had made this plain to both the Soviet and Italian ambassadors in London (Das Politische Archiv des Ausw\u00e4rtigen Amtes, Berlin, R29570, Fiche-Nr. 187, Frames 169830, 169847).\n\n32. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, p. 494.\n\n33. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, p. 526.\n\n34. See esp. Andrew Roberts, 'The Holy Fox'. The Life of Lord Halifax, paperback edn., London, 1997, pp. 195 ff.\n\n35. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, p. 601.\n\n36. Charmley, pp. 399\u2013400.\n\n37. Chips. The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, ed. Robert Rhodes James, London, 1967, p. 252 (13.5.40). And see Charmley, p. 396. The initial lack of warmth for Churchill on the Conservative benches qualifies the point made by Hill (p. 170), that a new Prime Minister could conventionally call upon support, and that Churchill started with the legitimacy of one who had long advocated rearmament and had opposed the Munich settlement.\n\n38. Churchill himself was not sure that his government would last. See David Dilks, 'The Twilight War and the Fall of France. Chamberlain and Churchill in 1940', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 28 (1978), p. 81.\n\n39. Roberts, p. 208; John Lukacs, Five Days in London. May 1940, paperback edn., New Haven\/London, 2001, p. 14; Taylor, English History, 1914\u20131945, p. 579.\n\n40. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC18\/1\/1155 (11.5.40). Churchill had actually written on 10 May, the day he took office: 'To a very large extent I am in your hands\u2013and I feel no fear of that' (quoted in Feiling, p. 442).\n\n41. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A (10.5.40); Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 17.\n\n42. Quoted in Guy Nicholas Esnouf, 'British Government War Aims and Attitudes towards a Negotiated Peace, September 1939 to July 1940', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, King's College, London, 1988, p. 189.\n\n43. Angus Calder, The People's War, London, 1969, p. 106.\n\n44. The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey 1937\u20131940, ed. John Harvey, London, 1970, p. 362 (19.5.40).\n\n45. Quoted in The Earl of Avon, The Eden Memoirs. The Reckoning, London, 1965, p. 107; and see also Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 18\u201319.\n\n46. P. M. H. Bell, A Certain Eventuality...Britain and the Fall of France, London, 1974, p. 19.\n\n47. Paul Reynaud, In the Thick of the Fight 1930\u20131945, London, 1955, p. 320; The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay, London, 1960, pp. 126\u20139; Bell, pp. 18, 32.\n\n48. Churchill's private pessimism, or rather, perhaps, disappointment, about the United States in these days surfaced in his rejection on 27 May of Lord Lothian's suggestion that Britain should lease landing grounds on British territory for American security and in order to make a deep impression on the American administration. 'The United States had given us practically no help in the war,' Churchill rejoined, 'and now that they saw how great was the danger, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything which would help us for their own defence' (PRO, Cab 65\/7, Frame 00294, fol. 172; and extract printed in The Churchill War Papers, vol. 2: Never Surrender, May 1940\u2013December 1940, ed. Martin Gilbert, London, 1995, p. 163).\n\n49. Notes of Paul Baudouin, Secretary of the French War Cabinet, quoted by William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937\u20131940, New York, 1952, p. 453.\n\n50. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, pp. 285 (17.5.40), 288 (21.5.40).\n\n51. The British public were unaware of the full desperation of the plight, and of the scale of the evacuation from Dunkirk, until 31 May (Juliet Gardiner, Wartime Britain 1939\u20131945, London, 2004, p. 172).\n\n52. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC18\/1\/1156. Ismay, too, was struck, on returning to London from Paris, by 'a world in which everyone seemed calm, cheerful and resolute' (Memoirs, p. 129).\n\n53. Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 27\u201338, for a summary of the varied shades of opinion.\n\n54. General Ismay recalled, however, how fleeting the optimism was before the anxieties resurfaced (Memoirs, p. 130).\n\n55. Bell, p. 15; Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 27.\n\n56. Christa Schroeder, Er war mein Chef. Aus dem Nachla\u00df der Sekret\u00e4rin von Adolf Hitler, ed. Anton Joachimsthaler, Munich\/Vienna, 1985, p. 105; Hitlers politisches Testament. Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945, Hamburg, 1981, p. 113.\n\n57. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945. Nemesis, London, 2000, pp. 295\u20136 and p. 921 nn. 63 and 66; also Heinz Magenheimer, Hitler's War. Germany's Key Strategic Decisions 1940\u20131945, London, 1998, p. 24.\n\n58. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 67.\n\n59. Reynaud, pp. 379 ff. The British Cabinet was no more convinced than Churchill himself of the irreversible defeat of the French until 26 May, when the British Expeditionary Force was already preparing for embarkation (Hill, p. 152).\n\n60. The Churchill War Papers, vol. 2, p. 133 (War Cabinet minutes, 24.5.40).\n\n61. The Ironside Diaries, 1937\u20131940, ed. Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly, London, 1962, p. 331 (23.5.40).\n\n62. The Ironside Diaries, 1937\u20131940, p. 332 (25.5.40); and see Esnouf, p. 195.\n\n63. Quoted in Reynaud, p. 379, from Gort's report to the government of 25.5.40.\n\n64. Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 137.\n\n65. Hill (p. 181) adjudges that 'had the B.E.F. in fact been lost, Britain's military position would have seemed irredeemable'\u2013with likely implications for the way the War Cabinet viewed the situation.\n\n66. David Reynolds, 'Churchill and the British \"Decision\" to Fight on in 1940. Right Policy, Wrong Reasons', in Richard Langhorne (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War, Cambridge, 1985, p. 148.\n\n67. Reynaud, pp. 398\u2013400.\n\n68. Reynaud, p. 403; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 108. The drafts of Churchill's letter to Mussolini of 16 May are in PRO, Prem 4\/19\/5.\n\n69. The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 367 (25.5.40).\n\n70. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 289 (24.5.40); Esnouf, p. 204.\n\n71. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A, fols. 108\u20139 (16.5.40).\n\n72. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 23 (15.5.40), 51 (18.5.40).\n\n73. PRO, Cab 65\/7, fol. 172 (27.5.40).\n\n74. Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 76.\n\n75. PRO, Cab 65\/7, Frame 266, p. 243 (24.5.40).\n\n76. Roberts, pp. 211\u201312; David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937\u20131941. A Study in Competitive Co-operation, Chapel Hill, NC, 1982, pp. 103, 324 n. 39.\n\n77. PRO, Cab 65\/7, Frame 300, p. 274 (27.5.40).\n\n78. Reynaud, pp. 406\u20139; The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 368 (26.5.40); Bell, p. 39; Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. 1, London, 1970, pp. 234\u20135, 237\u20138.\n\n79. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan (24.5.40); Roberts, pp. 212\u201313. The published edition of the Cadogan diaries says 'Van approached...with suggestion we should offer to discuss Mediterranean with Italy', omitting the words from the manuscript (Churchill Archives Centre, ACAD 1\/9) 'by Paresci'. Unless the name could not be deciphered, it is hard to understand why it was not included. See also John Costello, Ten Days that Saved the West, London, 1991, p. 193.\n\n80. PRO, Cab 65\/7, Frame 278, p. 255 (25.5.40).\n\n81. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 289 (25.5.40).\n\n82. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 159, 160v, Halifax dispatch to Sir Percy Loraine (Rome), 25.5.40; Esnouf, pp. 206\u20139; Roberts, pp. 213\u201314; Lukacs, pp. 92\u20134; Hill, p. 156; Woodward, pp. 236\u20137. Halifax thought the meeting went well. But feedback from Paresci was that the Foreign Secretary had made a poor impression through offering no concrete proposals. Immediate satisfaction of Italian claims in the Mediterranean had seemingly been expected. In Sir Alexander Cadogan's view, Bastianini was 'an ass' and there was 'nothing to be got out of him' (The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, pp. 289\u201390 (25.5.40, 26.5.40) ). Bastianini's own memoirs (Giuseppe Bastianini, Volevo fermare Mussolini. Memorie di un diplomatico fascista, Milan, 2005; orig. edn., Uomini, cose, fatti. Memorie di un ambasciatore, Milan, 1959) omit all reference to his important meeting with Halifax.\n\n83. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 140\u201341 (26.5.40).\n\n84. PRO, Cab 66\/7, fols. 319\u201326; Bell, pp. 49\u201351; Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 106\u20138. As Hill (pp. 154\u20135) points out, the conclusions reached may in part have been prompted by the way Churchill had couched the terms of reference, hinting at the sort of answer he wanted.\n\n85. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 146\u20138 (26.5.40).\n\n86. Reynaud, pp. 404\u20136.\n\n87. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A, fols. 114\u201317 (26.5.40); The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 290 (26.5.40).\n\n88. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930\u20131964, ed. Stanley Olson, New York, 1980, pp. 185\u20136 (26.5.40).\n\n89. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A, fols. 114\u201317 (26.5.40).\n\n90. Lukacs, p. 113, implies that something more grave was at stake in a meeting under 'conditions of secrecy' which 'had no precedent in the modern history of Britain', but Chamberlain (Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A, fols. 116\u201317 (26.5.40) ) specifically mentions that, once Reynaud had left, 'Greenwood was sent for and told what had passed'. This would account for a brief, informal gathering of the War Cabinet ministers before formal proceedings recommenced. Greenwood's sole point, according to Chamberlain, was that 'we had a good chance of outlasting Hitler'. Chamberlain had the impression that Greenwood had not 'thought things out'.\n\n91. Borthwick Institute, University of York, Diary of Lord Halifax, A7.8.4, fols. 140\u201341 (26.5.40).\n\n92. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 148\u201350 (26.5.40); Lukacs, pp. 114\u201316.\n\n93. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 150\u201352 (26.5.40); Bell, pp. 41\u20132.\n\n94. PRO, Cab 66\/7, fols. 335\u20137 (26.5.40); Esnouf, pp. 213\u201316; Bell, p. 40; Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 118\u201319. The second part of Halifax's paper outlined the text, agreed with the French, of Roosevelt's approach to Mussolini, put forward that day. Halifax added a postscript, warning his colleagues in the War Cabinet that, according to information received from the British ambassador in Rome, Sir Percy Loraine, Roosevelt's previous intervention had been resented by Mussolini and any further approach 'would only be interpreted as a sign of weakness and would do no good'. Even so, it was thought that the Reynaud approach could not make matters worse, and that it was important to point out the implications for Mussolini of German dominance in Europe. By the time the War Cabinet met next day, Halifax had received a cryptic note from Loraine to say 'that matters had now gone beyond the stage at which his [i.e. Sir Percy's] views counted for anything'. Loraine had reported that 'Herr Hitler thought that he could reach a satisfactory conclusion with the French on his own account', and did not want the Italians to enter the war (PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 175\u20136 (27.5.40)).\n\n95. Esnouf, pp. 214\u201315; Roberts, p. 218.\n\n96. Summarized in Lukacs, Five Days in London, pp. 141\u20135.\n\n97. See Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 89.\n\n98. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 77, 80,.\n\n99. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, pp. 290\u201391 (27.5.40).\n\n100. John Colville, The Fringes of Power. Downing Street Diaries 1939\u20131955, London, 1985, pp. 140\u201341 (27.5.40).\n\n101. Borthwick Institute, University of York, Diary of Lord Halifax, A7.8.4, fol. 142 (27.5.40).\n\n102. For British perceptions of German economic crisis and social unrest, see Reynolds, 'Churchill and the British \"Decision\" to Fight on in 1940', pp. 157\u20139; and R. J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich, Oxford, 1994, pp. 208\u201312.\n\n103. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 175\u201381 (27.5.40); Bell, pp. 42\u20135; Esnouf, pp. 218\u201320; Lukacs, pp. 146\u201353; Roberts, pp. 219\u201320. Jonathan Knight, 'Churchill and the Approach to Mussolini and Hitler in May 1940. A Note', British Journal of International Studies, 3 (1977), pp. 92\u20136, also discusses this meeting of the War Cabinet, though (p. 93)\u2013after misdating Halifax's meeting with Bastianini to 26 rather than 25 May\u2013he then appears to assume that it comprised the only discussion of the peace terms and mistakenly concludes: 'it quickly became apparent that the Cabinet was opposed to making any approach to Mussolini.'\n\n104. Borthwick Institute, University of York, Diary of Lord Halifax, A7.8.4, p. 142 (27.5.40). Halifax voiced his anger and frustration to the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, and also told him of his scarcely veiled resignation threat, saying he could not work with Churchill any longer. Cadogan's response was: 'Nonsense: his rhodomontades probably bore you as much as they do me, but don't do anything silly under the stress of that.' Before he did anything, Cadogan advised, he should consult Chamberlain. Halifax promised to do this, and added that, as Cadogan knew, he was not one to take hasty decisions (The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 291 (27.5.40)).\n\n105. See Roberts, pp. 220\u201321.\n\n106. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A, fol. 118 (27.5.40).\n\n107. Reynaud, p. 408, citing the account of William Phillips, the American ambassador in Rome.\n\n108. Ciano's Diary 1939\u20131943, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, London, 1947, p. 255 (27.5.40).\n\n109. The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 291.\n\n110. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 84\u20136 (quotation p. 84).\n\n111. Reynaud, pp. 411\u201312; The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 371 (27.5.40).\n\n112. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A, fol. 119 (28.5.40).\n\n113. The following report of the discussion at the War Cabinet from PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 184\u201390 (28.5.40); extracts in Lukacs, pp. 180\u201383.\n\n114. Hill, pp. 174\u20135. How far, in fact, Churchill himself believed that an eventual negotiated peace settlement was avoidable has been questioned by David Reynolds, 'Churchill the Appeaser? Between Hitler, Roosevelt and Stalin in World War Two', in Michael Dockrill and Brian McKercher (eds.), Diplomacy and World Power. Studies in British Foreign Policy, 1890\u20131950, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 211\u201315.\n\n115. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A, fol. 119 (28.5.40).\n\n116. Borthwick Institute, University of York, Diary of Lord Halifax, A7.8.4, p. 144 (28.5.40).\n\n117. His own views were outlined in an incomplete, undated and unsigned handwritten draft among Churchill's papers, which was prepared around this time as the basis of his comments either to the War Cabinet or to the wider group of ministers whom he met on 28 May. In the draft, Churchill stated: 'I cannot feel that the offer wh[ich] France is proposing to make to Mussolini will have the slightest influence upon the realities of the case ['situation' crossed out]', continuing: 'I fear that if we entered upon this path we sh[oul]d soon find that it lead [sic] to Mussolini being a mediator between us & Germany, & to an armistice & conference under the conditions of our being at Hitler's mercy' (PRO, Prem 3\/174\/4, fols. 11\u201313).\n\n118. A point made by Charmley, p. 405.\n\n119. The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, 1940\u20131945, ed. Ben Pimlott, London, 1988, pp. 26, 28; also printed in The Churchill War Papers, vol. 2, pp. 182\u20134.\n\n120. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 87\u20138; and see Bell, pp. 46\u20138; Charmley, pp. 405\u20137; Lukacs, pp. 2\u20135, 183\u20134; Roberts, p. 225; and Roy Jenkins, Churchill, London, 2001, pp. 607\u20138.\n\n121. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 189\u201390 (28.5.40).\n\n122. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fol. 189.\n\n123. The concession, which Churchill had made at the War Cabinet, of leaving open the possibility of mediation by Mussolini at some future date was the one worrying aspect of the reply in the eyes of Oliver Harvey, formerly private secretary to Anthony Eden and now at the British embassy in Paris. Harvey had evidently read between the lines of the telegram, or heard something of Halifax's proposal: 'It looks as if Halifax', whom he had also served as private secretary, 'may have evolved some scheme for mediation by Italy on an offer of terms of Hitler,' he wrote. 'Incredible though it sounds, I cannot put it past him. It would be fatal' (The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 372 (29.5.40)).\n\n124. PRO, Cab 65\/13, fols. 197\u20138; printed in Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 109\u201311, and Reynaud, pp. 412\u201313. See also Bell, p. 47; and Esnouf, 220\u201322.\n\n125. Reynaud, pp. 414\u201315; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 111.\n\n126. Ciano's Diary, p. 263 (10.6.40).\n\n127. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 102; Bell, p. 17. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms. A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 142\u20133, suggests that 'only until it became obvious, as it did by May 28 and 29, that substantial numbers of the British Expeditionary Force could be extricated from the disaster on the continent, was there any willingness even to think about the possibility of peace. As evacuation became a reality, and it thus appeared possible to organize some defense of the home islands, all thought of a compromise vanished.' But by 30 May no more than 120,000 men had been brought off the Dunkirk beaches (Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 95), and even then organized successful home defence was far from assured. The decision not to entertain negotiation had been taken before there appeared to be any hope of rescuing almost the whole of the trapped army.\n\n128. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 103\u20134; and quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill 1939\u20131941, vol. 6: Finest Hour, paperback edn., London, 1983, pp. 464, 468.\n\n129. Quoted in Hill, p. 183. This did not, however, stop the speculation in Britain and abroad that a peace settlement would still be sought. The high point of the rumours and suspicions, which continued to circulate in June and July, came on the day of the French capitulation when an indiscretion by R. A. Butler, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, reported by the Swedish charg\u00e9 d'affaires in London, Bjorn Prytz, created a misleading impression (which soon leaked out) that Britain was ready to entertain a compromise peace. Prytz also passed on remarks from other Members of Parliament that Lord Halifax would soon replace Churchill as Prime Minister. For a reliable summary of the Butler\u2013Prytz affair, see Ulrich Schlie, Kein Friede mit Deutschland. Die geheimen Gespr\u00e4che im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939\u20131941, Munich\/Berlin, 1994, pp. 214\u201316. Lukacs, pp. 203\u20134, provides a brief account, Costello, pp. 303\u201320, a longer one\u2013though an interpretation much criticized in an unpublished paper, 'The Political Beliefs of R. A. Butler', by Patrick Higgins (which the author kindly allowed me to see).\n\n130. Hill (pp. 160\u201362) suggests that Halifax, despite his experience and seniority, was at a disadvantage not just\u2013or even mainly\u2013because of Churchill's dynamism and force of personality, but because he was attempting to feel his way towards an argument in which a deal with Mussolini and a general settlement involving Hitler were not clearly separated, and in a War Cabinet where he was opposed by the leader of the government while his other colleagues were initially undecided. Even so, this is another way of stating that the clearer\u2013and more compelling\u2013argument was on Churchill's side.\n\n131. As Reynolds, 'Churchill the Appeaser?', p. 213, points out, though it was perhaps in part a debating gambit to show Halifax that he was not an unreasonable 'diehard', Churchill meant it.\n\n132. A point also recognized by Jenkins, p. 602.\n\n133. See Dalton's recollection of what Churchill had said at the meeting of those ministers not in the War Cabinet on 28 May 1940, in The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, p. 28.\n\n134. Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 171.\n\n135. They were first fully examined by Philip Bell, in chapter 3 of A Certain Eventuality, thoroughly explored in chapters 7 and 8 of Esnouf's doctoral thesis (which, remarkably, was never published), analysed by Reynolds, 'Churchill and the British \"Decision\" to Fight on in 1940', and by Hill (ch. 6), vividly described in Costello, chs. 9\u201310, again outlined, if briefly, in Roberts's fine biography of Halifax (ch. 22), and made into a gripping book-length drama in Lukacs' Five Days in London. The debt owed in this chapter to these works will be obvious.\n\n136. According to Costello, pp. 254\u20135, the evidence suggests that 'Halifax was correct in his argument that Germany was prepared to offer terms that did not threaten British independence'. This is to misread Nazi intentions. Hitler's expressions of his readiness to spare Britain and her Empire did not mean that he would have granted her the independence which Costello implies. Any independence would have been only of the sort accorded the Vichy regime in France, and then merely in the short term. It is an extremely naive view of Hitler's long-term goals to presume that they allowed for the survival of Britain and her Empire as an independent power entity. In reality, satellite status dependent upon Germany would have been inevitable. A more balanced appraisal is provided by Reynolds, 'Churchill the Appeaser?', pp. 200\u2013206.\n\n137. The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton, p. 28.\n\n138. Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 128; Nicolson, p. 166 (20.8.39).\n\n139. Birmingham University Library, Neville Chamberlain Papers, NC2\/24A, fol. 119 (28.5.40). And see Dilks, pp. 82\u20133. Lukacs, p. 129, writes that 'during the crucial days of late May Lloyd George's name did not come up'. As Chamberlain's diary entry indicates, it did.\n\n140. Reynolds, 'Churchill and the British \"Decision\" to Fight on in 1940', pp. 150\u201351.\n\n141. Schlie, p. 217.\n\n142. The German Foreign Office learned in mid-July 1940 from sources said to be close to the Duke of Windsor that he had described himself as a firm supporter of a peaceful settlement with Germany, and thought that continued strong bombing would make Britain amenable to negotiations (Politisches Archiv des Ausw\u00e4rtigen Amtes, Berlin, R29571, Fiche-Nr. 191, Frame B002546).\n\nCHAPTER 2. BERLIN, SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1940\n\n1. Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch. T\u00e4gliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939\u20131942, vol. 2: Von der geplanten Landung in England bis zum Beginn des Ostfeldzuges (1.7.1940\u201321.6.1941), ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Stuttgart, 1963, p. 49 (31.7.40); trans. The Halder War Diary, 1939\u20131942, ed. and trans. Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, London, 1988, pp. 244\u20135.\n\n2. David Stevenson, Cataclysm. The First World War as Political Tragedy, New York, 2004, p. 107; Norman Davies, Europe. A History, Oxford, 1996, p. 903.\n\n3. Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, The Macmillan Dictionary of the First World War, London, 1995, p. 83.\n\n4. In a speech on 31 May 1921: Eberhard J\u00e4ckel and Axel Kuhn (eds.), Hitler. S\u00e4mtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905\u20131924, Stuttgart, 1980, p. 426.\n\n5. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, p. 33; Barry A. Leach, German Strategy against Russia 1939\u20131941, Oxford, 1973, p. 58.\n\n6. Quoted in Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I, Cambridge, 2000, p. 278.\n\n7. Liulevicius, pp. 6\u20137.\n\n8. J\u00e4ckel and Kuhn, p. 773; trans. Geoffrey Stoakes, Hitler and the Quest for World Dominion, Leamington Spa, 1986, p. 137.\n\n9. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 876\u2013880th reprint, Munich, 1943, pp. 741\u20133; trans. (slightly amended), Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim with an Introduction by D. C. Watt, paperback edn., London, 1973, pp. 597\u20138.\n\n10. Eberhard J\u00e4ckel, Hitlers Weltanschauung. Entwurf einer Herrschaft, T\u00fcbingen, 1969, chs. 2\u20133.\n\n11. See Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg. Hitlers Chefideologe, Munich, 2005, pp. 49, 57\u20138. The 20,000 or so ethnic Germans from the Baltic, settled in Germany after the war, particularly in and around Munich, had influence in rightist circles in the immediate postwar years disproportionate to their numbers. See Niall Ferguson, The War of the World. History's Age of Hatred, London, 2006, illustration 11 (between pp. 122 and 123), for an example of the association of Jewish leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution and 'Asiatic' methods of brutality. Such imagery fed into the press of the extreme Right in Germany at this time.\n\n12. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 741\u20133; trans. Mannheim (slightly amended), pp. 597\u20138.\n\n13. Hitler's Second Book. The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, New York, 2003, p. 28.\n\n14. Hitler's Second Book, p. 152.\n\n15. Lew Besymenski, Stalin und Hitler. Das Pokerspiel der Diktatoren, Berlin, 2004, pp. 51\u20136.\n\n16. Thilo Vogelsang, 'Neue Dokumente zur Geschichte der Reichswehr 1930\u20131933', Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 2 (1954), pp. 434\u20135.\n\n17. For the term, see Martin Broszat, 'Soziale Motivation und F\u00fchrer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus', Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 18 (1970), p. 403.\n\n18. See Jost D\u00fclffer, 'Zum \"decision-making process\" in der deutschen Au\u00dfenpolitik 1933\u20131939', in Manfred Funke (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die M\u00e4chte: Materialen zur Au\u00dfenpolitik des Dritten Reiches, D\u00fcsseldorf, 1978, pp. 186\u2013204.\n\n19. DGFP, 1, doc. 19, p. 29.\n\n20. Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932\u20131945, Wiesbaden, 1973, p. 1446.\n\n21. Klaus-J\u00fcrgen M\u00fcller, Das Heer und Hitler. Armee und nationalsozialistisches Regime 1933\u20131940, Stuttgart, 1969, p. 208.\n\n22. Domarus, p. 606.\n\n23. See Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London, 2006, chs. 7\u20139, esp. pp. 206\u20137, 250\u201359, 285\u20139, 293\u20134.\n\n24. See Timothy W. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, Cambridge, 1995, ch. 4, esp. pp. 128\u20139.\n\n25. Hans-Henning Abendroth, 'Deutschlands Rolle im Spanischen B\u00fcrgerkrieg', in Funke, Hitler, Deutschland und die M\u00e4chte, 1978, pp. 477, 479.\n\n26. 'Hitlers Denkschrift zum Vierjahresplan 1936', ed. Wilhelm Treue, Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 3 (1955), p. 205.\n\n27. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fr\u00f6hlich, part I, vol. 3\/II, Munich, 2001, p. 389 (23.2.37); part I, vol. 4, Munich, 2000, p. 214 (10.7.37).\n\n28. The emergence and conclusion of the pact are extensively surveyed in Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Deadly Embrace. Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact 1939\u20131941, London, 1988.\n\n29. Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission 1937\u20131939, Munich, 1962, p. 272; trans. Klaus Hildebrand, The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich, London, 1973, p. 88. For doubts about the authenticity of the remarks, see Paul Stauffer, Zwischen Hofmannsthal und Hitler: Carl J. Burckhardt. Facetten einer aussergew\u00f6hnlichen Existenz, Zurich, 1991, pp. 178\u2013201; and Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945. Nemesis, London, 2000, pp. 898\u20139 n. 118.\n\n30. See Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, pp. 264\u201371, 290\u201391. For the number of new deadlines for the attack, see Milan Hauner, Hitler. A Chronology of his Life and Time, 2nd edn., Basingstoke\/New York, 2005, p. 150.\n\n31. On peace-feelers around this time, see Bernd Martin, 'Das \"Dritte Reich\" und die \"Friedens\"-Frage im Zweiten Weltkrieg', in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Au\u00dfenpolitik, Darmstadt, 1978, pp. 534\u20137; and esp. Ulrich Schlie, Kein Friede mit Deutschland. Die geheimen Gespr\u00e4che im Zweiten Weltkrieg 1939\u20131941, Munich\/Berlin, 1994, chs. 10, 12.\n\n32. Nicolaus von Below, Als Hitlers Adjutant 1937\u20131945, Mainz, 1980, p. 242; Domarus, pp. 1540\u201359 for the speech, p. 1158 for the passage relating to Britain.\n\n33. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2: Their Finest Hour, London, 1949, pp. 229\u201330 for the British response.\n\n34. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, p. 21 (13.7.40); trans. The Halder War Diary, p. 227.\n\n35. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, pp. 30\u201334 (22.7.40); trans. The Halder War Diary, pp. 230\u201332.\n\n36. Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler's Headquarters 1939\u201345, Novato, Calif., n.d. (original English-language edn., London, 1964), pp. 111\u201312.\n\n37. Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Frankfurt am Main, 1969, p. 188.\n\n38. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, p. 49; trans. The Halder War Diary, p. 244.\n\n39. Tooze, pp. 402\u20133, p. 430, also emphasizes the strategic considerations involving Britain and the United States.\n\n40. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, p. 33 (21.7.40).\n\n41. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, pp. 46\u20137 (30.7.40).\n\n42. Hitler still insisted on the correctness of his decision, for these reasons (and for posthumous justification), near the end of his life (Hitlers politisches Testament. Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945, Hamburg, 1981, pp. 78\u201380).\n\n43. DRZW) vol. 4, 1983, pp. 99\u2013106, 109.\n\n44. Quoted in DRZW, vol. 4, p. 110. See also Tooze, p. 420, and Heinz Magenheimer, Hitler's War. Germany's Key Strategic Decisions 1940\u20131945, London, 1998, pp. 63\u20134.\n\n45. DRZW, vol. 4, p. 113.\n\n46. DRZW, vol. 4, pp. 9\u201310. And see Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, p. 307 and p. 924 n. 157, for evidence which counters the view of Robert Cecil, Hitler's Decision to Invade Russia 1941, London, 1975, p. 74, that there is no indication of the generals anticipating Hitler's wishes in planning the invasion of the Soviet Union, a point (correctly) asserted by Leach, p. 53.\n\n47. A point also made by Leach, p. 73, whose understanding of a 'divided and uncertain' military leadership is closer to the mark than Cecil's claim (p. 76) that the leaders of the armed forces were 'at one' in that they did not want an invasion of Russia.\n\n48. A point also made by Magenheimer, pp. 44\u20135; Leach, p. 72, correctly points out, however, that the preparations continued unabated and that Hitler's verbal orders of 31 July were confirmed in late September 1940.\n\n49. The naval leadership was not least anxious to emphasize that it had advanced an alternative which stood a good chance of success but had been spurned by Hitler's insistence upon the attack on Russia (Erich Raeder, Mein Leben, T\u00fcbingen\/Neckar, 1957, pp. 246\u20138, and Kurt Assmann, Deutsche Schicksalsjahre, Wiesbaden, 1950, pp. 211\u201312). Raeder had already claimed his opposition to the Russian war, with reference to his audience with Hitler on 26 September, in his testimony at Nuremberg (Der Proze\u00df gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher vor dem Internationalen Milit\u00e4rgerichtshof, N\u00fcrnberg, 14 November 1945\u20131. Oktober 1946, 42 vols., Nuremberg, 1947\u20139, vol. 14, pp. 117\u201319). See also Michael Salewski, Die deutsche Seekriegsleitung 1935\u20131945, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main, 1970, pp. 271\u20132.\n\n50. The title of the early postwar classic by Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe, Wiesbaden, 1946.\n\n51. See Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegf\u00fchrung 1940\u20131941, 3rd edn., Bonn, 1993, pp. 190\u201391; Lothar Gruchmann, 'Die \"verpa\u00dften strategischen Chancen\" der Achsenm\u00e4chte im Mittelmeerraum 1940\/41', Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcrgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 27\/2 (1980), pp. 69\u201399; and Gerhard Schreiber's contribution to DRZW, vol. 3, 1984, p. 270.\n\n52. Explicitly demonstrated by Gerhard Schreiber, 'Zur Kontinuit\u00e4t des Gro\u00dfund Weltmachtstrebens der deutschen Marinef\u00fchrung', Milit\u00e4rgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 25\/2 (1979), pp. 101\u201371.\n\n53. On the twin strands of German imperialism, see Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism, New York\/Oxford, 1986.\n\n54. See Jost D\u00fclffer, Weimar, Hitler und die Marine. Reichspolitik und Flottenbau 1920\u20131939, D\u00fcsseldorf, 1973, pp. 492 ff.\n\n55. BA\/MA, Freiburg, RM6\/71, 'Gedanken des Oberbefehlshabers der Kriegsmarine zum Kriegsausbruch 3.9.1939'; quoted in Salewski, vol. 1, p. 91, and in English translation in Charles S. Thomas, The German Navy in the Nazi Era, London, 1990, p. 187.\n\n56. See Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie, pp. 242\u201355; Gerhard L. Weinberg, 'German Colonial Plans and Policies 1938\u20131942', in Waldemar Besson and Friedrich Frhr. Hiller v. Gaertringen (eds.), Geschichte und Gegenwartsbewu\u00dftsein. Historische Betrachtungen und Untersuchungen, G\u00f6ttingen, 1963, pp. 462\u201391; Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich. Hitler, NSDAP und koloniale Frage 1919\u20131945, Munich, 1969, pp. 652\u2013700; Salewski, vol. 1, pp. 234\u201341; Gerhard Schreiber, Revisionismus und Weltmachtstreben. Marinef\u00fchrung und deutsch-italienische Beziehungen 1919 bis 1944, Stuttgart, 1978, pp. 288\u201397; and DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 250\u201371.\n\n57. Salewski, vol. 3, Frankfurt am Main, 1973, pp. 106\u20138; DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 254\u20135.\n\n58. Salewski, vol. 3, pp. 108\u201314; DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 255\u20136. And see the two additional memoranda from this period (Salewski, vol. 3, pp. 114\u201318), and a further memorandum of 4 July 1940 (pp. 122\u201335) outlining the implications of the massive territorial expansion for the growth of the fleet.\n\n59. BA\/MA, RM6\/83, printed in Schreiber, 'Zur Kontinuit\u00e4t', pp. 142\u20137; DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 257\u20138.\n\n60. Staatsm\u00e4nner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen \u00fcber die Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes 1939\u20131941, ed. Andreas Hillgruber, paperback edn., Munich, 1969, p. 102 (Hitler's remarks to Serrano Su\u00f1er, at the time Minister of the Interior in Spain, shortly afterwards to become Foreign Minister, 17.9.40).\n\n61. BA\/MA, RM7\/894, 'Studie Nordwest (Landung in England)', dated December 1939, considered possibilities of a landing in Great Britain, indicating beaches which might come into question, the difficulties of coastal lines, and other factors. Raeder reported the findings\u2013based, he said, on analysis that had begun the previous November\u2013to Hitler on 21 May 1940 (Karl Klee (ed.), Dokumente zum Unternehmen 'Seel\u00f6we'. Die geplante deutsche Landung in England 1940, G\u00f6ttingen, 1959, p. 239).\n\n62. Kriegstagebuch der Seekriegsleitung 1939\u20131945, ed. Werner Rahn and Gerhard Schreiber, Herford\/Bonn, 1989 (= KTB der Seekriegsleitung), vol. 10, part A (mimeographed reproduction from BA\/MA, 7\/13), p. 186 (18.6.40).\n\n63. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie, pp. 157\u20138.\n\n64. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie, pp. 169\u201371.\n\n65. KTB der Seekriegsleitung, vol. 11, part A (= BA\/MA, 7\/14), p. 190 (19.7.40), pp. 219\u201324 (19.7.40). And see Salewski, vol. 1, pp. 58\u20139.\n\n66. KTB der Seekriegsleitung, vol. 11, part A, p. 201 (18.7.40).\n\n67. KTB der Seekriegsleitung, vol. 12, part A, (= BA\/MA, 7\/15), p. 3 (1.8.40).\n\n68. KTB der Seekriegsleitung, vol. 12, part A, pp. 353\u20134 (30.8.40).\n\n69. KTB der Seekriegsleitung, vol. 12, part A, pp. 354\u20136 (30.7.40), pp. 364\u20135 (31.7.40); Lagevortr\u00e4ge des Oberbefehlshabers der Kriegsmarine vor Hitler 1939\u20131945, ed. Gerhard Wagner, Munich, 1972, pp. 126\u20138 (31.7.40).\n\n70. Karl Klee, Das Unternehmen 'Seel\u00f6we'. Die geplante deutsche Landung in England 1940, G\u00f6ttingen, 1958, p. 205.\n\n71. Salewski, vol. 1, pp. 259\u201360.\n\n72. Salewski, vol. 1, pp. 275\u20136.\n\n73. KTB der Seekriegsleitung, vol. 11, part A, pp. 236\u20139 (21.7.40).\n\n74. Salewski, vol. 3, pp. 137\u201344.\n\n75. Schreiber, 'Der Mittelmeerraum', pp. 78\u20139.\n\n76. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, 1965, pp. 17\u201318, 31\u20132 (9.8.40, 14.8.40); Schreiber, 'Der Mittelmeerraum', pp. 78\u20139.\n\n77. BA\/MA, RM7\/233, fols. 78\u201385: 'Kriegf\u00fchrung gegen England bei Ausfall der Unternehmung \"Seel\u00f6we\"'; printed in Lagevortr\u00e4ge, pp. 138\u201341 (6.9.40). See also Schreiber, Revisionismus, pp. 281\u20132.\n\n78. BA\/MA, RM7\/233, fols. 83\u20134.\n\n79. On the destroyer deal, see Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, chapter 20; also John Lukacs, The Duel. Hitler vs. Churchill, Oxford, 1992, pp. 225\u20137; and Chapter 5 below.\n\n80. DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 192\u20134; Schreiber, 'Der Mittelmeerraum', p. 80.\n\n81. Lagevortr\u00e4ge, pp. 134\u201341 (6.9.40). Curiously, the passage on 'Problem S' is omitted in the translated Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs 1939\u20131945, London, 1990, p. 135.\n\n82. Lagevortr\u00e4ge, pp. 143\u20136 (26.9.40); Schreiber, 'Der Mittelmeerraum', p. 81; DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 199\u2013201; Gruchmann, p. 463.\n\n83. He nevertheless put the arguments for full cooperation with France less forcefully than they had been advanced within the Naval Warfare Executive. See BA\/MA, RM8\/1209, 'Die Bem\u00fchungen der Skl. um einen Ausgleich mit Frankreich und um die Sicherstellung des franz\u00f6sischen Kolonialreiches in Afrika', draft analysis of Vice-Admiral Kurt Assmann. Compiled in 1944, this was intended to absolve the Seekriegsleitung (Naval Warfare Executive) from responsibility for the disastrous course of the war. It nonetheless points up the divergence in strategic preference. In the introduction (fol. 11), Assmann wrote: 'The problem of a French-German understanding and the upholding of the French colonial empire in north and west Africa was one of the fateful questions of this war. In dealing with this issue, the decisions and actions of the supreme German leadership were not in accord with the views of the Skl. The Skl. correctly foresaw the coming development, repeatedly warned against it, and tried to convey its view.'\n\n84. KTB d. Seekriegsleitung, vol. 13, part A (= BA\/MA, 7\/16), p. 352 (26.9.40), 'F\u00fchrer agrees in principle with the ideas of the head of the Naval Warfare Executive' ('F\u00fchrer stimmt den Gedankeng\u00e4ngen des Chefs Skl. grunds\u00e4tzlich zu'). See also Raeder, pp. 246\u20138 and Assmann, pp. 211\u201312, though, in fact, Hitler's reported remarks to his naval adjutant were ambivalent\u2013that Raeder's comments to him had been most valuable in that it served as a control on his own views, to see 'if he was right'.\n\n85. Lagevortr\u00e4ge, pp. 143\u20134 (26.9.40).\n\n86. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, p. 124 (3.10.40).\n\n87. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie, pp. 178, 190; Wolfgang Michalka, Ribbentrop und die deutsche Weltpolitik 1933\u20131940, Munich, 1980, pp. 247\u201359.\n\n88. Wolfgang Michalka, 'Vom Antikominternpakt zum euro-asiatischen Kontinentalblock. Ribbentrops Alternativkonzeption zu Hitlers au\u00dfenpolitischen \"Programm\"', in Michalka, Nationalsozialistische Au\u00dfenpolitik, pp. 490\u201391.\n\n89. Andreas Hillgruber, 'Der Faktor Amerika in Hitlers Strategie 1938\u20131941', in Michalka, Nationalsozialistische Au\u00dfenpolitik, p. 513.\n\n90. Schreiber, 'Der Mittelmeerraum', p. 80; DRZW, vol. 3, p. 194.\n\n91. Hillgruber, 'Amerika', pp. 512\u201313.\n\n92. Staatsm\u00e4nner, pp. 112\u201313.\n\n93. Reports of the discussions in Staatsm\u00e4nner, pp. 104\u201323; and Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, London, 1948, pp. 395\u20139.\n\n94. Staatsm\u00e4nner, pp. 132\u201340; and see Paul Preston, 'Franco and Hitler. The Myth of Hendaye 1940', Contemporary European History, 1 (1992), pp. 1\u201316.\n\n95. Die Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere 1933\u20131950, ed. Leonidas E. Hill, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, p. 221 (21.10.40)\u2013before Hitler's meeting with Franco. Hitler retrospectively asserted that he recognized the limited strategic value of Spanish intervention: the acquisition of Gibraltar, but also of much Atlantic coastline that would have needed defending (Hitlers politisches Testament, p. 60). For the extent of Spanish demands, see Elena Hen\u00e1ndez-Sandoica and Enrique Moradiellos, 'Spain and the Second World War, 1939\u20131945', in Neville Wylie (ed.), European Neutrals and Non-Belligerents during the Second World War, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 251\u20133.\n\n96. Staatsm\u00e4nner, pp. 142\u20139.\n\n97. Die Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere, pp. 220\u201321 (21.10.40).\n\n98. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms. A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, p. 206. Towards the end of his life (Hitlers politisches Testament, p. 73), Hitler regarded Germany's lenient treatment of Vichy France as 'complete nonsense' (vollkommener Unsinn).\n\n99. Below, p. 250.\n\n100. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, pp. 163\u20136 (4.11.40), quotation p. 165; KTBd. OKW, vol. 1, pp. 148\u201352 (4.11.40).\n\n101. Warlimont, p. 120; Donald S. Detwiler, Hitler, Franco und Gibraltar. Die Frage des spanischen Eintritts in den Zweiten Weltkrieg, Wiesbaden, 1962, pp. 68\u201379; DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 205\u20137; Schreiber, 'Der Mittelmeerraum', pp. 84\u20135; Gruchmann, p. 466.\n\n102. For the talks, see Staatsm\u00e4nner, 165\u201393.\n\n103. Hitlers Weisungen f\u00fcr die Kriegf\u00fchrung. Dokumente des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, ed. Walther Hubatsch, paperback edn., Munich, 1965, pp. 77\u201382.\n\n104. Heeresadjutant bei Hitler 1938\u20131943. Aufzeichnugen des Majors Engel, ed. Hildegard von Kotze, Stuttgart, 1974, p. 91 (15.11.40).\n\n105. Lagevortr\u00e4ge, pp. 151\u20135, 160\u201363 (14.11.40); Schreiber, 'Der Mittelmeerraum', pp. 86\u20137.\n\n106. Schreiber, 'Der Mittelmeerraum', p. 87.\n\n107. Below, p. 253.\n\n108. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, pp. 208\u20139 (5.12.40).\n\n109. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, p. 222 (10.12.40); Hitlers Weisungen, p. 90.\n\n110. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, p. 255 (9.1.41). On 28 January (p. 284), he accepted that there was no possibility of renewing preparations to take Gibraltar, which he momentarily envisaged taking place in April, because troops were needed for 'Barbarossa'. Even in mid-February, he was exhorting Franco to reconsider his decision not to enter the war (Domarus, p. 1666).\n\n111. Hitlers Weisungen, p. 96.\n\n112. In the eyes of the navy leadership, the chance to exploit British weakness in the Mediterranean was still not exhausted in spring 1941, following the German landing in Crete and Rommel's successes in north Africa (Lagevortr\u00e4ge, pp. 240, 258\u201362 (6.6.41); Gruchmann, pp. 471\u20134). By this time, however, there was not a shadow of doubt about Hitler's priorities. Preparations for the imminent 'Barbarossa' took such precedence that, unlike autumn 1940, any strategic alternative existed purely in theory.\n\n113. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, p. 996 (17.12.40).\n\n114. Hitler pointed this out to Mussolini during their meeting on 4 October 1940 (Staatsm\u00e4nner, p. 115).\n\n115. Paul Schmidt, Statist auf diplomatischer B\u00fchne 1923\u201345. Erlebnisse des Chefdolmetchers im Ausw\u00e4rtigen Amt mit den Staatsm\u00e4nnern Europas, Bonn, 1953, pp. 516\u201317; Heeresadjutant, p. 88 (28.10.40).\n\n116. By the end of 1940, in duress, Mussolini reversed his earlier objections to an increase in French strength in the Mediterranean and had come to favour an arrangement between Germany and France (Weinberg, A World at Arms, p. 214 n. a). But by then the strategic situation was different to that of the preceding October, when Hitler and P\u00e9tain had met. Most importantly, the decision to attack Russia had been confirmed. The Mediterranean was now for Hitler\u2013though this had not always been the case\u2013a sideshow.\n\n117. This remained his view as the end of the Third Reich approached (Hitlers politisches Testament, pp. 78\u201380). Hitler, unlike others in the Nazi leadership, was never interested in increased trade with the Soviet Union as an alternative to military conquest. On this, see the interesting study by Heinrich Schwendemann, Die wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem Deutschen Reich und der Sowjetunion von 1939 bis 1941. Alternative zu Hitlers Ostprogramm?, Berlin, 1993, esp. pp. 355\u20137.\n\n118. Warlimont, p. 115.\n\n119. Warlimont, pp. 257\u20138, for Jodl's uncritical admiration of Hitler; see also Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, p. 533.\n\n120. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, p. 21 (13.7.40).\n\n121. Alfred Kube, Pour le m\u00e9rite und Hakenkreuz. Hermann G\u00f6ring im Dritten Reich, Munich, 1986, pp. 336\u20137.\n\n122. Warlimont, p. 118.\n\n123. There is, therefore, a certain unreality to Magenheimer's conclusion, pp. 69\u201371 (quotation p. 70), that 'the critical omission on the German side...was not to have shifted the temporary strategic focus to the Mediterranean in the summer of 1940'.\n\n124. Fedor von Bock, The War Diary 1939\u20131945, ed. Klaus Gerbet, Atglen, Pa., 1996, pp. 197\u20138 (1.2.41); KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, p. 300 (3.2.41).\n\nCHAPTER 3. TOKYO, SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1940\n\n1. Ian Nish, Japanese Foreign Policy 1869\u20131942, London, 1977, pp. 133\u201342; Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, London\/New York, 1987, pp. 2\u20134; Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed. European International History 1919\u20131933, Oxford, 2005, pp. 375\u20137, 708\u201310.\n\n2. See Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific. An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations, New York, 1967, pp. 208\u20139; Roger D. Spotswood, 'Japan's Southward Advance as an Issue in Japanese-American Relations, 1940\u20131941', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington, 1974, p. 20. Joyce C. Lebra, Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in World War II. Selected Readings and Documents, Kuala Lumpur, 1975, pp. 3\u201354, provides extracts from contemporary writings illustrating differing concepts of Japanese economic dominance of the region.\n\n3. For a detailed analysis of the background, from Japanese sources, Seki Hiroharu, 'The Manchurian Incident 1931', in James William Morley (ed.), Japan Erupts. The London Naval Conference and the Manchurian Incident 1928\u20131932, New York, 1984, pp. 139\u2013230.\n\n4. For an extensive analysis of the way the field army's expansionist aims propelled Japan towards war with China, see Shimada Toshihiko, 'Designs on North China 1933\u20131937', in James William Morley (ed.), The China Quagmire. Japan's Expansion on the Asian Continent, 1933\u20131941, New York, 1983, pp. 11\u2013230.\n\n5. Text in Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part I), Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, Japanese Monographs, 144, appendix 1 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/144\/144app01.html); Iriye, Origins, pp. 34\u20135; Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, London, 2001, pp. 308\u201312.\n\n6. See Joseph C. Grew, Ten Years in Japan, New York, 1944, pp. 169\u201378, the account of the American ambassador, who was on the spot; also Iriye, Origins, p. 33; Bix, pp. 297\u2013306; Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan from Tokugawa Times to the Present, New York\/Oxford, 2003, p. 198; and for a vivid description, John Toland, The Rising Sun. The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936\u20131945, New York, 1970, Modern Library edn., 2003, ch. 1.\n\n7. Imai Seiichi, 'Cabinet, Emperor, and Senior Statesmen', in Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto (eds.), Pearl Harbor as History. Japanese-American Relations 1931\u20131941, New York, 1973, p. 66; Iriye, Origins, p. 34. Nish, pp. 215\u201316, brings out the way in which the Foreign Ministry was 'outpointed' by the military and started to play a less significant role. According to Robert J. C. Butow, Tojo and the Coming of the War, Princeton, 1961, p. 86, the Cabinet of Hirota Koki, which entered office after the attempted coup of February 1936, 'can hardly be regarded as an unwilling tool of the imperial army and navy'.\n\n8. Iriye, Origins, pp. 37\u20139.\n\n9. See, for a detailed analysis, Hata Ikuhiko, 'The Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 1937', in Morley, The China Quagmire, pp. 243\u201386.\n\n10. Bix, p. 320.\n\n11. Quoted in Bix, p. 322.\n\n12. Bix, pp. 325\u20136.\n\n13. Iriye, Origins, p. 45.\n\n14. Bix, p. 332.\n\n15. Bix, pp. 334\u20135.\n\n16. See Bix, pp. 340\u201341.\n\n17. Iriye, Across the Pacific, pp. 178\u20139.\n\n18. Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part I), Japanese Monographs, 144, appendix 11 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/144\/144app11.html).\n\n19. Bix, p. 345.\n\n20. Bix, p. 346.\n\n21. Iriye, Origins, p. 67.\n\n22. Iriye, Origins, p. 68.\n\n23. Akira Iriye, Power and Culture. The Japanese-American War, 1941\u20131945, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, p. 6.\n\n24. Bix, p. 353.\n\n25. David Bergamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, New York, 1971, vol. 2, p. 908; Iriye, Origins, pp. 76\u20137; Spotswood, pp. 32\u20134.\n\n26. John P. Fox, Germany and the Far Eastern Crisis 1931\u20131938. A Study in Diplomacy and Ideology, Oxford, 1982, ch. 10; Hartmut Blo\u00df, 'Deutsche Chinapolitik im Dritten Reich', in Manfred Funke (ed.), Hitler, Deutschland und die M\u00e4chte. Materialien zur Au\u00dfenpolitik des Dritten Reichs, D\u00fcsseldorf, 1978, pp. 419\u201323.\n\n27. Sheffield University Library, Wolfson Microfilm 431, Diary of Marquis Kido Koichi (American translation of extracts for use in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials), doc. no. 1632BB (1), 22.8.39. For Kido, see Bix, pp. 370\u20131; and Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 79.\n\n28. Iriye, Origins, p. 81; Nish, p. 231.\n\n29. Iriye, Origins, pp. 83\u20134.\n\n30. James William Morley (ed.), The Fateful Choice. Japan's Advance into Southeast Asia, 1939\u20131941, New York, 1980 (translated essays by Hosoya Chihiro on 'Northern Defence', Nagaoka Shinjiro on 'Economic Demands on the Dutch East Indies', Hata Ikuhiko on 'The Army's Move into Northern Indochina', Nagaoka Shinjiro on 'The Drive into Southern Indochina and Thailand' and Tsunoda Jun on 'The Navy's Role in the Southern Strategy', based upon Japanese documentation), p. 121.\n\n31. Gordon, pp. 92\u20133; Misawa Shigeo and Minomiya Saburo, 'The Role of the Diet and Political Parties', in Borg and Okamoto, Pearl Harbor as History, pp. 321\u20134.\n\n32. Shigeo and Saburo, pp. 324\u20136; Gordon, pp. 126\u201331, 162\u201373, 187\u20139.\n\n33. Gordon, p. 333.\n\n34. Gordon, p. 193.\n\n35. Shigeo and Saburo, pp. 326\u20137.\n\n36. Eugene Sathre, 'Communication and Conflict: Japanese Foreign Policy leading to the Pacific War', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1978, pp. 43\u201350.\n\n37. The above all based upon Nobutaka Ike (ed.), Japan's Decision for War. Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences, Stanford, Calif., 1967, pp. xv\u2013xix. See also Butow, pp. 149\u201350.\n\n38. Ike, p. xviii; F. C. Jones, Japan's New Order in East Asia. Its Rise and Fall, 1937\u201345, Oxford, 1954, pp. 7\u20139.\n\n39. Nazli Choucri, Robert C. North and Susumu Yamakage, The Challenge of Japan before World War II and After, London\/New York, 1992, p. 165.\n\n40. Bix, pp. 10\u201311; Jones, pp. 11\u201312.\n\n41. Lesley Connors, The Emperor's Adviser. Saionji Kinmochi and Pre-War Japanese Politics, London, 1987, pp. 186\u201399.\n\n42. Iriye, Origins, pp. 86\u20137, 99\u2013100.\n\n43. Yoshitake Oka, Konoe Fumimaro. A Political Biography, Tokyo, 1983, pp. 10\u201313. For a brief description of Konoe's early career and the development of his ideas, see also Seiichi, pp. 66\u20138.\n\n44. Oka, pp. 36\u20138.\n\n45. Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 73.\n\n46. Oka, pp. 46\u20137; Murakami Hyoe and Thomas J. Harper (eds.), Great Historical Figures of Japan, Tokyo, 1978, p. 299.\n\n47. Oka, pp. 75, 78.\n\n48. Bix, pp. 344\u20136.\n\n49. Oka, pp. 84\u20135. In a proclamation on 1 August 1940, Matsuoka Yosuke stated that 'our present foreign policy is to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere', which was 'the same as the New Order in East Asia Sphere or the Security Sphere, and its scope includes southern areas such as the Netherlands Indies and French Indo-China; the three nations of Japan, Manchuria and China are one link'. Achieving this would 'avoid all obstacles' to the 'completion of dealing with the China Incident' (Lebra, pp. 71\u20132).\n\n50. Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 61.\n\n51. Iriye, Origins, p. 106.\n\n52. Quoted in Butow, pp. 141\u20132.\n\n53. Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, New York, 1948, vol. 1, p. 902.\n\n54. Grew, p. 328 (1.9.40). He swiftly came to see in Matsuoka, nevertheless, the image of 'a nation determined to achieve its objectives at all cost' (Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., American Ambassador. Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition, Boston, 1966, pp. 243\u20135).\n\n55. Oka, pp. 97\u20138.\n\n56. Quoted in Bix, p. 374.\n\n57. Iriye, Origins, p. 106.\n\n58. Butow, pp. 143\u20137 (and pp. 115\u201319 for his earlier appointment as Vice-Minister of War under the first Konoe government); see also the pen-portrait of Tojo in Mark Weston, Giants of Japan. The Lives of Japan's Greatest Men and Women, New York\/Tokyo\/London, 1999, pp. 182\u20139.\n\n59. James William Morley (ed.), Deterrent Diplomacy. Japan, Germany, and the USSR 1935\u20131940, New York, 1976 (translated essays by Ohata Tokushiro on 'The Anti-Comintern Pact, 1935\u20131939', Hata Ikuhiko on 'The Japanese-Soviet Confrontation, 1935\u20131939' and Hosoya Chihiro on 'The Tripartite Pact, 1939\u20131940', based upon Japanese documentation), pp. 229\u201330.\n\n60. Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 201\u20132; Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 136\u20137. On the American stance in June and July 1940, in the context of the dramatically altered circumstances following the German victory, see Heinrichs, American Ambassador, pp. 309\u201312.\n\n61. Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 206\u20137.\n\n62. Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor. The Coming of the War between the United States and Japan, Princeton, 1950, pp. 51\u20132, 66\u201371; Iriye, Origins, pp. 102\u20133; Spotswood, pp. 95\u20139.\n\n63. Bergamini, vol. 2, p. 934.\n\n64. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 138\u20139.\n\n65. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 158\u20139.\n\n66. Morley, The Fateful Choice, p. 159; Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 206\u20137 (quotation p. 207).\n\n67. Iriye, Origins, p. 102.\n\n68. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 245\u20136.\n\n69. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 241\u20132.\n\n70. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 243\u20134.\n\n71. Morley, The Fateful Choice, p. 250.\n\n72. Morley, The Fateful Choice, p. 249.\n\n73. Morley, The Fateful Choice, p. 247.\n\n74. Text in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 208\u20139; see also Iriye, p. 102; and Spotswood, pp. 99\u2013104.\n\n75. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 247\u20138. See also, for the army's recognition of a 'golden opportunity', the remarks of Grew, p. 324 (1.8.40).\n\n76. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 250\u201351.\n\n77. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 251\u20132.\n\n78. Sheffield University Library, Wolfson Microfilm 431, Diary of Marquis Kido Koichi, doc. no. 1632X, 8.7.40. And see Butow, p. 141 and Feis, pp. 76\u201383.Manoeuvres behind the scenes, orchestrated by Kido, to install Konoe as next Prime Minister had begun as early as May (Tanaka Nobumasa (ed.), Dokyumento Showa Tenno Dai Nikkan [Documents of the Showa Emperor], vol. 2, Tokyo, 1988 [in Japanese], p. 113).\n\n79. Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632X, 17.7.40.\n\n80. Bix, pp. 178, 373; Tanaka, pp. 114\u201317; and Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632X, 17.7.40.\n\n81. The army had been content to leave the selection of a Foreign Minister 'entirely to Prince Konoye' (Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632X, 8.7.40), though in the confidence that he would choose Matsuoka.\n\n82. Oka, p. 98.\n\n83. DGFP, 10, doc. 212, p. 278.\n\n84. Text in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 218\u201319; and Spotswood, p. 109.\n\n85. Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, p. 220; see also Iriye, Origins, p. 107.\n\n86. Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 214\u201315. On 26 July Matsuoka told the American ambassador in Tokyo 'that history is based largely on the operation of blind forces which in a rapidly moving world cannot always be controlled' (Grew, p. 322).\n\n87. Iriye, Origins, p. 107; Oka, p. 99; Bix, p. 375; Butow, pp. 148\u20139.\n\n88. Text in Political Strategy Prior to Outbreak of War (Part II), Japanese Monographs, 146, appendix 2 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/146\/146app02.html).\n\n89. Bix, p. 375; Butow, pp. 150\u201353.\n\n90. Text in Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part II), Japanese Monographs, 146, appendix 3 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/146\/146pp03.html).\n\n91. Morley, The Fateful Choice, p. 141.\n\n92. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 254\u20137, 261.\n\n93. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 256\u201360.\n\n94. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 259\u201361.\n\n95. Text in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 283\u20138, and see p. 221.\n\n96. Grew, pp. 324\u20135 (1.8.40); see also his entry of 2.7.40, pp. 320\u201321.\n\n97. Theo Sommer, Deutschland und Japan zwischen den M\u00e4chten 1935\u20131940. Vom Antikominternpakt zum Dreim\u00e4chtepakt, T\u00fcbingen, 1962, pp. 384\u20135; Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, p. 227. The 'destroyer deal' is more fully examined in Chapter 5 below.\n\n98. Sommer, pp. 386\u20137; Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 225\u20136.\n\n99. Matsuoka Yosuke. The Man and his Life, Tokyo, 1974 [in Japanese], pp. 768\u20139.\n\n100. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 264\u20135. Matsuoka, and some in the army leadership, were initially suspicious that Yoshida's illness was no more than a 'diplomatic' one (Matsuoka Yosuke, pp. 768\u20139).\n\n101. Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 229\u201330, 266\u20138; Oka, p. 104.\n\n102. Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 228\u201333.\n\n103. Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 232\u20137; Spotswood, pp. 127\u20139.\n\n104. Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop, paperback edn., London, 1994, p. 303.\n\n105. Sommer, p. 387.\n\n106. Quoted in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, p. 233.\n\n107. Quoted in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, p. 239.\n\n108. Quoted in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, p. 241.\n\n109. Butow, p. 163.\n\n110. Quoted in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, p. 238.\n\n111. Quoted in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 238\u20139.\n\n112. Ike, pp. 4\u201313, for notes of the Conference.\n\n113. Quoted in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, p. 248.\n\n114. Bix, p. 382.\n\n115. Oka, p. 105.\n\n116. Fully examined in Sommer, pp. 394\u2013426, and Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 233\u201354.\n\n117. Text in Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part II), Japanese Monographs, 146, pp. 23\u201330 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/146\/146chap1.html). See also Feis, pp. 118\u201319. Butow, pp. 179\u201380, points out that no precise minutes were taken, as was normal in such conferences, and that the secretaries recorded the gist of what was said. Nevertheless, there seems no reason to doubt that the words cited represented the views of Konoe, Matsuoka and Tojo. Grew, p. 339 (2.10.40), recorded his impressions of extensive lack of enthusiasm for the pact.\n\n118. Iriye, Origins, p. 116.\n\n119. Text in Morley, Deterrent Diplomacy, pp. 298\u20139; and DGFP, 11, doc. 118, p. 204.\n\n120. The United States regarded the pact as no more than confirmation of a relationship which had in practice long existed (Hull, vol. 1, p. 909).\n\n121. Iriye, Origins, p. 117; Morley, The Fateful Choice, pp. 188\u2013203.\n\n122. Feis, pp. 105\u20139; William Carr, Poland to Pearl Harbor. The Making of the Second World War, London, 1985, pp. 109\u201310; Spotswood, pp. 157\u201363. The American ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, only became aware of the possibility of a deal between Japan and Germany as late as mid-September and remained largely in the dark until the Tripartite Pact was actually signed (Heinrichs, American Ambassador, p. 319).\n\n123. Iriye, Origins, p. 117.\n\n124. Carr, pp. 110\u201311.\n\n125. That control over south-east Asia was the pivotal issue, with Japanese leaders determined to expand and control the area, and American policy-makers increasingly resolute in their resistance, is particularly emphasized by Iriye, Across the Pacific, p. 201, and Spotswood, pp. 13\u201318.\n\n126. Morley, The Fateful Choice, p. 274; also quoted by Bergamini, vol. 2, p. 952;and see Weston, p. 193. Yamamoto had told Prince Konoe in August 1940 that he had no expectation of success in a war that lasted longer than twelve months (Bergamini, vol. 2, p. 958).\n\n127. Carr, pp. 107\u20138.\n\n128. Iriye, Origins, p. 116.\n\n129. Measured by gross national product, of the 'great powers' only Italy was weaker than Japan in 1940. Japan had also the smallest of the armed forces (apart from the United States, which was only just beginning to rearm), but spent almost as high a proportion of her national income on armaments as Germany (Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II. Six Great Powers in International Comparison, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 10, 14, 21). Akira Hara, 'Japan: Guns before Rice' (pp. 224\u201367 of the same volume) brings out the important point (p. 225) that Japan's economy had been organized on a wartime basis since the beginning of the conflict with China in 1937.\n\n130. Carr, p. 111.\nCHAPTER 4. ROME, SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1940\n\n1. Quoted in R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini, London, 2002, p. 369.\n\n2. MacGregor Knox, Common Destiny. Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 61, 67\u20139.\n\n3. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914\u201345, London, 1995, p. 383; I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War, Oxford\/New York, 1995, p. 583.\n\n4. In 1928 Hitler had written a lengthy tract\u2013in the event left unpublished\u2013setting out his policy renouncing claims on South Tyrol in the interests of an alliance with Italy. He had already, two years earlier, taken issue with those on the German nationalist Right using the issue of South Tyrol for anti-Italian agitation. See Hitler's Second Book. The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, New York, 2003, pp. xvi\u2013xxi, and Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889\u20131936: Hubris, London, 1998, pp. 291\u20132.\n\n5. Knox, Common Destiny, p. 96.\n\n6. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini, paperback edn., London, 1983, p. 235.\n\n7. Alberto Aquarone, 'Public Opinion in Italy before the Outbreak of World War II', in Roland Sarti (ed.), The Ax Within. Italian Fascism in Action, New York, 1974, p. 212; Paul Corner, 'Everyday Fascism in the 1930s. Centre and Periphery in the Decline of Mussolini's Dictatorship', Contemporary European History, 15 (2006), pp. 215\u201318, pointing out the negative effect on the Duce cult of the alliance with Nazi Germany and the growing likelihood of war.\n\n8. Quoted from MacGregor Knox, Mussolini Unleashed 1939\u20131941. Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War, paperback edn., Cambridge, 1986, pp. 39\u201340.\n\n9. Ciano's Diary 1939\u20131943, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, London, 1947, pp. 45\u20136.\n\n10. Ray Moseley, Mussolini's Shadow. The Double Life of Count Galeazzo Ciano, New Haven\/London, 1999, p. 55.\n\n11. Quoted in Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 41.\n\n12. Ciano's Diary, p. 90.\n\n13. See Mario Toscano, The Origins of the Pact of Steel, Baltimore, 1967, chs. 4\u20135.\n\n14. H. James Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period 1918\u20131940, Westport, Conn., 1997, p. 194.\n\n15. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 42; Burgwyn, p. 194.\n\n16. DGFP, 6, pp. 574\u201380; and see Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany. Starting World War II, 1937\u20131939, Chicago\/London, 1980, pp. 579\u201381 (and p. 579 n. 188 for the authenticity of the document, which had been called into question at the Nuremberg Trial and afterwards).\n\n17. Ciano's Diary, p. 116.\n\n18. Ciano's Diary, pp. 122\u20133.\n\n19. Quotations in Ciano's Diary, pp. 123\u20135.\n\n20. Ciano's Diary, pp. 126\u201330.\n\n21. Ciano's Diary, p. 133.\n\n22. DGFP, 7, doc. 271, p. 286 (25.8.39); Burgwyn, pp. 203\u20134.\n\n23. DGFP, 7, doc. 317, p. 323; Burgwyn, pp. 204\u20135.\n\n24. Ciano's Diary, pp. 134\u20136; Enno von Rintelen, Mussolini als Bundesgenosse. Erinnerungen des deutschen Milit\u00e4rattach\u00e9s in Rom 1936\u20131943, T\u00fcbingen\/Stuttgart, 1951, p. 71; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 43. On the concept of 'non-belligerency', see Neville Wylie (ed.), European Neutrals and Non-Belligerents during the Second World War, Cambridge, 2002, p. 4.\n\n25. What follows relies on Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 16\u201319; and MacGregor Knox, Hitler's Italian Allies. Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940\u20131943, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 29\u201332.\n\n26. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 10.\n\n27. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini as a Military Leader, Reading 1974, pp. 17, 28\u20139. Nor\u2013what became harmful to accurate evaluation\u2013was there an integrated intelligence service (which Mussolini saw as a threat to his own power) (MacGregor Knox, 'Fascist Italy Assesses its Enemies, 1935\u20131940', in Ernest R. May (ed.), Knowing One's Enemies. Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars, Princeton, 1983, pp. 347\u201372, atp. 372).\n\n28. For the following, see Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 18\u201330; and Knox, Common Destiny, pp. 152\u20137.\n\n29. Quoted in Knox, Common Destiny, p. 155; and Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 10. Measured by gross national product, Italy was in economic terms by far the weakest of the major belligerent powers in 1940 and her military spending only a third as high as Germany's (Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II. Six Great Powers in International Comparison, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 10, 21). In her contribution to this volume (pp. 177\u2013223), Vera Zamagni, 'Italy: How to Lose the War and Win the Peace', concludes that Italy's level of development did not allow the country to fight the war effectively, let alone to win it.\n\n30. For the concept, in its application to Hitler's regime, see Peter H\u00fcttenberger, 'Nationalsozialistische Polykratie', Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2 (1976), pp. 417\u201342; and the summary in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th edn., London, 2000, pp. 58\u20139.\n\n31. Payne, pp. 119, 122.\n\n32. Payne, p. 117.\n\n33. Adrian Lyttleton, The Seizure of Power, London, 1973, pp. 72\u20135, 175; Bosworth, Mussolini, pp. 154\u20135, 160\u201365.\n\n34. Payne, pp. 116, 118\u201319.\n\n35. Martin Broszat, Der Staat Hitlers, Munich, 1969, p. 262; Dieter Rebentisch, F\u00fchrerstaat und Verwaltung im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart, 1989, p. 422.\n\n36. Maurizio Bach, Die charismatischen F\u00fchrerdiktaturen. Drittes Reich und italienischer Faschismus im Vergleich ihrer Herrschaftsstrukturen, Baden-Baden, 1990, p. 111.\n\n37. Payne, p. 221.\n\n38. See Corner, esp. pp. 199, 206\u201317.\n\n39. See Piero Melograni, 'The Cult of the Duce in Mussolini's Italy', Journal of Contemporary History, 11 (1976), pp. 221\u201337.\n\n40. S. J. Woolf (ed.), Fascism in Europe, 2nd edn., London, 1981, p. 62.\n\n41. Payne, pp. 219\u201320.\n\n42. Knox, Common Destiny, p. 96; Burgwyn, p. 120; John Whittam, Fascist Italy, Manchester, 1995, p. 113.\n\n43. Knox, Common Destiny, p. 96.\n\n44. R. J. B. Bosworth, Italy, the Least of the Great Powers. Italian Foreign Policy before the First World War, Cambridge, 1979, esp. chs. 1, 2, 4, emphasizes the the broad consensus among the social and political elites behind Italy's pre-war great-power ambitions.\n\n45. Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 255; Mack Smith, Mussolini as a Military Leader, p. 7.\n\n46. Mack Smith, Mussolini as a Military Leader, pp. 5, 31.\n\n47. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 10, 18.\n\n48. Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 347.\n\n49. See Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 246.\n\n50. Burgwyn, pp. 145\u20136.\n\n51. Mack Smith, Mussolini as a Military Leader, p. 5.\n\n52. Ciano's Diary, pp. 144\u20135.\n\n53. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 55\u20136.\n\n54. Ciano's Diary, pp. 145\u20136, 151, 157 (quotation p. 157).\n\n55. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 62.\n\n56. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 79.\n\n57. Ciano's Diary, p. 163.\n\n58. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, London, 1948, pp. 314\u201315 (quotation p. 314).\n\n59. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 61.\n\n60. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 68; DGFP, 8, doc. 504, pp. 608\u20139 (letter of Mussolini to Hitler, written on 3.1.40, but sent, with minor amendments, on 5.1.40). Ciano thought Mussolini's letter 'a fine document, full of wisdom and restraint' (Ciano's Diary, p. 194).\n\n61. Ciano's Diary, p. 164.\n\n62. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 71, 75.\n\n63. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 52\u20134, quotation p. 52.\n\n64. Ciano's Diary, pp. 222\u20133.\n\n65. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, pp. 364\u20135; Staatsm\u00e4nner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen \u00fcber die Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes 1939\u20131941, ed. Andreas Hillgruber, paperback edn., Munich, 1969, pp. 52\u20133, 55, 57; DGFP, 9, doc. 1, pp. 1\u201316.\n\n66. Ciano's Diary, pp. 224\u20135.\n\n67. Ciano's Diary, pp. 225\u20136.\n\n68. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 89; DDI, vol. 3, doc. 669, pp. 576\u20139; Burgwyn, p. 212. See also Ciano's Diary, p. 232.\n\n69. Ciano's Diary, p. 231.\n\n70. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 90\u201391, 93\u20134.\n\n71. Ciano's Diary, pp. 234, 235, 236 and 243, and see Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 108.\n\n72. Ciano's Diary, p. 221.\n\n73. Ciano's Diary, p. 253. For the changing climate of opinion regarding war, see Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire, London\/New York, 1976, pp. 209\u201313.\n\n74. Giuseppe Bottai, Diario 1935\u20131944, ed. Giordano Bruno Guerri, Milan, 1982, p. 192.\n\n75. See Knox, Common Destiny, pp. 113\u201347, for a penetrating analysis of the elements of continuity and break in Mussolini's foreign policy. See also R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship. Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism, London, 1998, pp. 99\u2013101; and Stephen Corrado Azzi, 'The Historiography of Fascist Foreign Policy', Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 187\u2013203, atpp. 196\u20137, 199\u2013200.\n\n76. Ciano's Diary, pp. 249, 256.\n\n77. Ciano's Diary, p. 250.\n\n78. Ciano's Diary, p. 254.\n\n79. Ciano's Diary, pp. 249, 250, 261.\n\n80. Ciano's Diary, p. 261; Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire, p. 214; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 104\u20135.\n\n81. Ciano's Diary, p. 258; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 104\u20135.\n\n82. Ciano's Diary, p. 257.\n\n83. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 119, 121\u20133.\n\n84. Moseley, p. 103.\n\n85. Reynolds and Eleanor Packard, Balcony Empire. Fascist Italy at War, London, 1943, p. 82.\n\n86. Quoted in Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 111\u201312.\n\n87. Ciano's Diary, p. 255.\n\n88. Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932\u20131945, Wiesbaden, 1973, p. 1518; Ciano's Diary, p. 257. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 117, has Hitler meeting Alfieri on 31 May at Bad Godesberg, but a Deutsches Nachrichtenb\u00fcro report mentions the meeting at the Felsennest the previous day.\n\n89. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 116.\n\n90. Pietro Badoglio, Italy in the Second World War. Memories and Documents, London\/New York\/Toronto, 1948, pp. 14\u201315.\n\n91. Badoglio, pp. 15\u201316.\n\n92. Elizabeth Wiskemann, The Rome\u2013Berlin Axis. A Study of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini, London, 1966, p. 255.\n\n93. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 116; DDI, vol. 4, doc. 642, pp. 495\u20137; Badoglio, pp. 15\u201317.\n\n94. Ciano's Diary, pp. 256\u20137.\n\n95. Ciano's Diary, p. 259.\n\n96. Packard and Packard, pp. 85\u20136.\n\n97. Bottai, p. 193.\n\n98. Badoglio, p. 20.\n\n99. Ciano's Diary, p. 264. For the lack of enthusiasm of the crowd, see also Rintelen, p. 85.\n\n100. Luigi Villari, Italian Foreign Policy under Mussolini, London, 1959, p. 255.\n\n101. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2: Their Finest Hour, London, 1949, p. 106.\n\n102. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 71\u20134.\n\n103. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 82.\n\n104. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 107.\n\n105. See Rintelen, p. 93, who states that it would have been more expedient (for German war strategy) had Italy retained her 'non-belligerent' status and the Mediterranean remained out of the direct conflict.\n\n106. Moseley, pp. 106\u20137.\n\n107. Ciano's Diary, p. 266.\n\n108. Ciano's Diary, p. 267. Ciano thought the Duce feared 'that the hour of peace is growing near and sees that unattainable dream of his life, glory on the field of battle, fading once again'.\n\n109. Ciano's Diary, p. 268; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 129\u201330.\n\n110. Ciano's Diary, p. 269.\n\n111. Ciano's Diary, pp. 270\u201371.\n\n112. Bottai, p. 204.\n\n113. Ciano's Diary, p. 278.\n\n114. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 294.\n\n115. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 138.\n\n116. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 295.\n\n117. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 134\u20137, 155\u201365; William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940\u20131941, New York, 1953.\n\n118. Ciano's Diary, p. 87.\n\n119. Mario Cervi, The Hollow Legions. Mussolini's Blunder in Greece, 1940\u20131941, London, 1972, pp. 7\u201310; also Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 271. Ciano had written in his diary on 12 September 1939 that Mussolini had given 'instructions for an understanding with Greece, a country too poor for us to covet' (Ciano's Diary, p. 151).\n\n120. Bottai, p. 191 (25.5.40).\n\n121. Bottai, p. 224 (29.6.40).\n\n122. Archivio Centrale, Rome, Carte Graziani, b. 42, Roatta Diary, 7.7.40.\n\n123. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, pp. 377\u20138; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 139\u201342; Cervi, pp. 14\u201317; Ehrengard Schramm-von Thadden, Griechenland und die Gro\u00dfm\u00e4chte im Zweiten Weltkrieg, Wiesbaden, 1955, pp. 48\u201351.\n\n124. DRZW, vol. 3, 1984, p. 360. Roatta had nevertheless somehow gleaned information of Hitler's comment to Ciano that it was essential not to disturb the peace in the Balkans, from which the deduction was easily reached 'that we should do nothing against Yugoslavia' (Roatta Diary, 14.7.40).\n\n125. Ciano's Diary, p. 281.\n\n126. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 166\u20137.\n\n127. Ciano's Diary, pp. 281\u20132.\n\n128. Ciano's Diary, p. 282.\n\n129. Cervi, pp. 18\u201323; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 167\u201371.\n\n130. Cervi, p. 34; Moseley, p. 114.\n\n131. Ciano's Diary, pp. 282\u20133.\n\n132. Ciano's Diary, p. 283.\n\n133. The anti-Italian feeling intensified when an old Greek cruiser, the Helli, was torpedoed on 15 August by a submarine that everyone presumed\u2013correctly, as it turned out\u2013to be Italian. The truth about the incident only emerged long after the war. It had been instigated, on his own initiative, by one of the Duce's particularly wild underlings, the notably arrogant and impetuous Fascist veteran Cesare Maria De Vecchi di Val Cismon, governor of the Italian islands in the Aegean (Cervi, pp. 29\u201332).\n\n134. Quoted in Cervi, pp. 22\u20133; varying trans. in DGFP, 10, doc. 333, pp. 471\u20132.\n\n135. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, p. 381.\n\n136. DRZW, vol. 3, p. 361; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 174.\n\n137. Cervi, p. 23.\n\n138. Ciano's Diary, p. 284.\n\n139. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 175\u20136.\n\n140. DDI, vol. 5, p. 436; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 176\u20137; DRZW, vol. 3, p. 365; Cervi, pp. 24, 42\u20133; Roatta Diary, 22.8.40.\n\n141. Ciano's Diary, p. 285.\n\n142. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, p. 385.\n\n143. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 178\u20139.\n\n144. Quoted in Cervi, p. 43; see also Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 181.\n\n145. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 186.\n\n146. Quoted in Cervi, p. 45.\n\n147. Ciano's phrase: Ciano's Diary, p. 291.\n\n148. Enno von Rintelen, the German military attach\u00e9 in Rome, had already indicated in early August that, though the offensive against England was in full preparation, its realization presented 'serious difficulties' (Roatta Diary, 7.8.40).\n\n149. Cited in Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 191.\n\n150. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, p. 391.\n\n151. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, p. 392; Schramm-von Thadden, p. 88; DGFP, 11, doc. 73, p. 121; DRZW, vol. 3, p. 369.\n\n152. Moseley, p. 115, citing the comments of General Puntoni, the aide-de-camp to the King, that 'Ciano showed an impatience to give a lesson to Greece for its conduct which, he says, is ambiguous'.\n\n153. Schramm-von Thadden, pp. 88\u201390; DRZW, vol. 3, p. 370; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 190.\n\n154. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 196\u20137.\n\n155. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 197.\n\n156. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 195.\n\n157. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 193\u20134; Renzo De Felice, Mussolini l'alleato 1940\u20131945, vol. 1, Turin, 1990, pp. 295\u20136; Cervi, pp. 56\u20137; DRZW, vol. 3, p. 372.\n\n158. Ciano's Diary, p. 294.\n\n159. The support lacked real warmth, however. When Ciano had presented, for a country that had scarcely been involved in any fighting, an embarrassingly long list of territorial demands at his meeting with Hitler on 7 July, Ribbentrop, no less, had told him that 'one must be moderate and not have eyes bigger than one's stomach'. Paul Schmidt, Statist auf diplomatischer B\u00fchne 1923\u201345. Erlebnisse des Chefdolmetschers im Ausw\u00e4rtigen Amt mit den Staatsm\u00e4nnern Europas, Bonn, 1953, pp. 502\u20133; F. W. Deakin, The Brutal Friendship. Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism, London, 1962, p. 11.\n\n160. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, pp. 395\u20138; Ciano's Diary, p. 296.\n\n161. Ciano's Diary, p. 296.\n\n162. Schramm-von Thadden, pp. 88\u20139, 96. One tantalizing fragment of information passed from Soddu to Roatta suggests that Hitler and Mussolini might have agreed privately at the Brenner\u2013though there is no mention in the official minutes of their meeting\u2013that an Italian regiment should accompany the German military mission to Romania (Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 202; De Felice, p. 297). Knox surmises that the comment derived from a private t\u00e9te-\u00e0-t\u00e9te between Mussolini and Hitler. It seems unlikely, however, that Hitler gave any specific promise. And whether Soddu's information related to a comment made, or an Italian presumption deriving from a misunderstanding, cannot be determined. Ciano denied to Bottai that there had been any discussion at the Brenner of the German move into Romania (Bottai, p. 227).\n\n163. De Felice (p. 297) dismisses the notion that Mussolini could have been taken completely by surprise at the German intervention in Romania, since the Italian Foreign Ministry had been informed of the positive German response to the Romanian 'request' to send troops. He accepts, however, that Mussolini might have been taken by surprise at the speed of the German action. But surely not just that; the manner in which he learned of the arrival of the German detachment could only have infuriated him.\n\n164. Ciano's Diary, p. 297.\n\n165. Bottai, p. 227.\n\n166. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 187, 203, 205\u20137; DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 374\u20135.\n\n167. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 207\u20138.\n\n168. Ciano's Diary, p. 297. He told Bottai, however, that the military task would be harder than it would have been in August, when he was urging action, though he was still certain of success (Bottai, p. 227).\n\n169. Churchill, The Second World War, vol 2, pp. 383\u20134; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 152\u20133.\n\n170. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 208\u20139. A secondary motive was, perhaps, as De Felice, pp. 300\u2013305, suggests, that victory over Greece would ensure him the bargaining power he would need were his fellow dictator to attempt to discuss peace terms with Vichy France at the cost of Italy's territorial claims, as seemed distinctly possible following Hitler's meetings with Laval and P\u00e9tain.\n\n171. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 202; Martin van Creveld, Hitler's Strategy 1940\u20131941. The Balkan Clue, Cambridge, 1973, p. 34.\n\n172. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 208.\n\n173. Quoted in Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 209; see also Schramm-von Thadden, p. 101; DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 376\u20137; and on the earlier planning, Cervi, pp. 36\u20137.\n\n174. Cervi, pp. 61\u20132. A note from Mussolini to Graziani, soon after the Brenner meeting on 4 October, had nevertheless given a first indication that the occupation of the whole of the Greek mainland, not just Ciamuria, would be the objective of an invasion (Creveld, Hitler's Strategy, pp. 35\u20136).\n\n175. Cervi, p. 62; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 210.\n\n176. Schramm-von Thadden, p. 102; Cervi, p. 65; Mack Smith, Mussolini as a Military Leader, p. 31. Badoglio, p. 26, has Cavagnari and Pricolo in attendance, but this seems to be an error of memory.\n\n177. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 211.\n\n178. Text in DDI, vol. 5, doc. 728, pp. 699\u2013705; reproduced in Schramm-von Thadden, pp. 209\u201317; quotations above from the English translation in Cervi, pp. 311\u201320. See also the summary in Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 211\u201314 and the caustic comments on the meeting by Mack Smith, Mussolini's Roman Empire, pp. 232\u20133. The account by Sebastiano Visconti Prasca, Io ho aggredito la Grecia, 2nd edn., Milan, 1947, pp. 61\u201370, claimed that the stenograph of the meeting had been 'doctored' by Mussolini and was inaccurate (particularly regarding Visconti Prasca's own contribution), though it confirms the substance and dilettante nature of the discussion.\n\n179. Visconti Prasca, pp. 68\u201370. The minutes of the meeting on 15 October do not support the statement of Walter Rauscher, Hitler und Mussolini. Macht, Krieg und Terror, Graz, 2001, p. 413, that Badoglio spoke out against an operation against Greece, but Mussolini did not want to listen.\n\n180. Ciano's Diary, p. 298.\n\n181. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 214\u201317.\n\n182. The following based on Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 217\u201319.\n\n183. Schramm-von Thadden, p. 108.\n\n184. See Ciano's Diary, p. 300; and Bottai, p. 229.\n\n185. Quoted in Moseley, p. 117.\n\n186. Quotations in Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 220\u201321.\n\n187. Ciano's Diary, p. 300.\n\n188. Ciano's Diary, p. 301.\n\n189. Heeresadjutant bei Hitler 1938\u20131943. Aufzeichnungen des Majors Engel, ed. Hildegard von Kotze, Stuttgart, 1974, p. 88 (28.10.40); Schmidt, pp. 516\u201317. That Hitler was taken aback and angry about Mussolini's unilateral action against Greece is disputed by Creveld, Hitler's Strategy, pp. 39\u201351, and Martin van Creveld, '25 October 1940. A Historical Puzzle', Journal of Contemporary History, 6 (1971), pp. 87\u201396. But Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 346 n. 84 and p. 350 n. 156, has some telling criticism of Creveld's argument.\n\n190. See Ernst von Weizs\u00e4cker, Erinnerungen, Munich\/Leipzig\/Freiburg, 1950, pp. 302\u20133. According to Weizs\u00e4cker, State Secretary in the German Foreign Ministry, he had proposed sending an unequivocal warning to Mussolini not to widen the war without German agreement. Ribbentrop, wrote Weizs\u00e4cker, approved of this course of action, but Hitler had said that he did not want to restrain his fellow dictator and had indirectly, therefore, opened the way to Mussolini's foolhardy move. Hitler's later professed surprise was, in Weizs\u00e4cker's view, feigned. Weizs\u00e4cker accepted that Hitler had possibly not been prepared to believe in Mussolini's determination to carry out the attack.\n\n191. Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 222\u201330; Cervi, pp. 87\u201392. See also Rintelen, pp. 108\u201310.\n\n192. Schramm-von Thadden, p. 113, quoting Hitler's letter to Mussolini of 20 November 1940. Crete had been part of German strategic thinking on joint operations with Italy to force the British out of the eastern Mediterranean and north Africa. See Creveld, Hitler's Strategy, p. 37.\n\n193. Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, p. 400.\n\n194. The Italian record of the meeting is in Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, pp. 399\u2013404, the German version in Staatsm\u00e4nner, pp. 150\u201365. Perhaps in tacit acknowledgement of Hitler's acceptance of his Greek coup, Mussolini was less uncompromising about Vichy France than had been expected (De Felice, p. 307).\n\n195. Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 302; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 236; Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 375.\n\n196. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 481.\n\n197. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 544; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 256 (where the figure of captured Italians is given as 115,000); Lothar Gruchmann, Der Zweite Weltkrieg, Munich, 4th edn., 1975, p. 107, gives figures of 130,000 Italian prisoners and 470 tanks together with 1,300 artillery pieces lost between early December and early February. British losses were very small.\n\n198. Before the Italian invasion, Britain had been very lukewarm about both the feasibility and the value of providing military aid to shore up Greece. See John S. Koliopoulos, Greece and the British Connection 1935\u20131941, Oxford, 1977, pp. 134\u201342. Once the attack had taken place, Britain was anxious to keep the Italo-Greek war going, but was keen to avoid Greece falling under German control. Greece and Crete were seen as important to the vital defence of Egypt. The British aid that could be spared from north Africa was, however, severely limited. See Martin van Creveld, 'Prelude to Disaster. The British Decision to Aid Greece, 1940\u201341', Journal of Contemporary History, 9 (1974), pp. 65\u201392. There was no major British military presence before a force was rushed from the Middle East at the end of March 1941 in the light of the crisis in Yugoslavia\u2013a move later recognized as a strategic error which allowed the enemy to take the initiative in north Africa. The German attack on Yugoslavia and Greece began on 6 April. By the end of that month some 50,000 British and Commonwealth troops had been evacuated, and a further 7,000 were taken into captivity (Dear and Foot, pp. 102\u20136).\n\n199. DRZW, vol. 3, pp. 421\u20132.\n\n200. Creveld, Hitler's Strategy, pp. 134\u20135.\n\n201. The Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler\u2013Bormann Documents February\u2013April 1945, ed. Fran\u00e7ois Genoud, London, 1961, pp. 65, 72\u20133, 81.\n\n202. See Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegf\u00fchrung 1940\u20131941, 3rd edn., Bonn, 1993, p. 506 n. 26.\n\n203. Rintelen, pp. 90, 92\u20133, 98\u20139, emphasizes from the German point of view the strategic mistake of not taking Malta.\n\n204. Rintelen, p. 101.\n\n205. James J. Sadkovich, 'The Italo-Greek War in Context. Italian Priorities and Axis Diplomacy', Journal of Contemporary History, 28 (1993), pp. 439\u201364, atp. 440, and see also p. 455.\n\n206. Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs 1939\u20131945, London, 1990, pp. 154\u20135.\n\n207. James J. Sadkovich, 'Understanding Defeat. Reappraising Italy's Role in World War II', Journal of Contemporary History, 24 (1989), pp. 27\u201361, atp. 38.\n\n208. Dear and Foot, pp. 504\u20138. The terrible conditions in Greece at the end of the German occupation, as the descent into civil war was beginning, are vividly described in Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece. The Experience of Occupation, 1941\u201344, New Haven\/London, 1993, pp. 362\u201373.\n\n209. See Creveld, Hitler's Strategy, p. 163.\n\n210. Sadkovich, 'The Italo-Greek War', p. 446.\n\n211. See Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 209.\n\n212. Badoglio, p. 29; also cited in Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, p. 236; and (with slightly differing translation) Cervi, pp. 149\u201350.\n\n213. Ciano's Diary, p. 298; Knox, Mussolini Unleashed, pp. 215\u201316.\n\n214. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 548. The assertion is nevertheless accepted by Brian R. Sullivan, ' \"Where One Man, and Only One Man, Led\". Italy's Path from Non-Alignment to Non-Belligerency to War, 1937\u20131940', in Wylie, p. 149.\n\n215. Mack Smith, Mussolini as a Military Leader, p. 23, points out how recourse to the 'genius' of the Duce relieved senior officers of a sense of responsibility.\n\nCHAPTER 5. WASHINGTON, DC, SUMMER 1940\u2013SPRING 1941\n\n1. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman, vol. 9, New York, 1940, p. 517.\n\n2. Public Opinion 1935\u20131946, ed. Hadley Cantrill, Westport, Conn., 1951, p. 971.\n\n3. Public Opinion, p. 973.\n\n4. Yale University Library, Henry L. Stimson Diaries 1909\u20131945, Reel 6, entry for 19.12.40; William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940\u20131941, New York, 1953, p. 243.\n\n5. Quoted in John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries, vol. 2: Years of Urgency, 1938\u20131941, Boston, 1965, p. 254 (from the diary entry of 14.5.41).\n\n6. Stimson Diaries, Reel 6, entry for 22.4.41; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 442.\n\n7. Public Papers and Addresses, vol. 8 (1939), p. 3; Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, American White Paper. The Story of American Diplomacy and the Second World War, London, 1940, p. 31; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932\u20131945, New York, 1979, p. 179; Robert A. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent. American Entry into World War II, New York, 1965, p. 56; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear. The American People in Depression and War, 1929\u20131945, New York\/Oxford, 1999, p. 427.\n\n8. Quoted in Alsop and Kintner, p. 68.\n\n9. Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., Threshold of War. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II, New York\/Oxford, 1988, p. 11.\n\n10. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2: Their Finest Hour, London, 1949, p. 503.\n\n11. Churchill and Roosevelt. The Complete Correspondence, ed. Warren F. Kimball, Princeton, 1984, vol. 1, doc. C-84x, pp. 181\u20132 (3.5.41); Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 81.\n\n12. Quoted in Kennedy, p. 496.\n\n13. The title of chapter 3 of Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War. Churchill, Roosevelt and the Second World War, London, 1997.\n\n14. Roosevelt's role in the New Deal was indispensable, to the point that his input was decisive to areas of success, while his lack of interest, for example in low-cost housing, and his indecision on industrial strategy helped to determine the inadequacies of the system (Tony Badger, The New Deal. The Depression Years, 1933\u201340, London, 1989, p. 9). Patrick Renshaw, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Profiles in Power, London, 2004, p. 107, points out the importance of Roosevelt's 'sheer force of personality' in the recovery of the nation's morale after 1933.\n\n15. See Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Rendezvous with Destiny, Boston, 1990, p. 252. See also Renshaw, p. 120; and Badger, pp. 94\u2013104.\n\n16. Freidel, p. 287; Kennedy, pp. 347\u20139; Hugh Brogan, The Pelican History of the United States of America, Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 565. The Republicans won eighty seats in the House of Representatives and eight in the Senate. Though the Democrats still controlled both the House and the Senate, cross-party alignments meant that the anti-Roosevelt forces were substantially strengthened.\n\n17. On American loans, and insistence on repayment, see Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed. European International History 1919\u20131933, Oxford, 2005, pp. 38\u20139, 185, 188.\n\n18. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 8\u201310; Kennedy, pp. 387\u20138.\n\n19. Quoted in Kennedy, p. 386.\n\n20. Freidel, p. 171.\n\n21. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 17\u201322.\n\n22. Kennedy, p. 393.\n\n23. Kennedy, pp. 395\u20136. For American oil and the Abyssinian war, see Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, New York, 1948, vol. 1, pp. 422\u201342, esp. Hull's admission on p. 442 that, 'we had gone as far as we could', but although 'exports of oil from the United States to Italy were morally embargoed', the 'United States Government did not have legal authority to impose an oil embargo'. And see Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, Baltimore, 1969, pp. 11\u201313.\n\n24. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 29.\n\n25. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 31\u20133; Cordell Hull laid out the government's position, and defended it, in Hull, vol. 1, pp. 476\u201385.\n\n26. Kennedy, pp. 398\u20139.\n\n27. Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his Lieutenants, and their War, London, 1987, pp. 32\u20133.\n\n28. The passage containing the quotation is included in Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, p. 9; and also quoted in Brogan, p. 569.\n\n29. Quoted in John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, New York, 1956, pp. 90\u201392.\n\n30. Flynn, p. 92.\n\n31. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 48\u20139.\n\n32. Kennedy, p. 388.\n\n33. For Hull's background and career, see Irwin F. Gellman, Secret Affairs. Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles, Baltimore\/London, 1995, pp. 20\u201336.\n\n34. Alsop and Kintner, pp. 14, 25.\n\n35. David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937\u20131941. A Study in Competitive Co-operation, Chapel Hill, NC, 1982, p. 27.\n\n36. Quoted in Kennedy, p. 405. In a careful analysis of American public opinion at the time of the quarantine speech, Michael Leigh, Mobilizing Consent. Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, 1937\u20131947, Westport, Conn., 1976, p. 48, concluded that, far from being constrained by popular attitudes, Roosevelt 'was able to project his own hesitancy on to the mass public', with the result that he 'deferred action even when popular isolationism was crumbling'.\n\n37. Quoted in William R. Rock, Chamberlain and Roosevelt. British Foreign Policy and the United States, 1937\u20131940, Columbus, Ohio, 1988, p. 48.\n\n38. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1: The Gathering Storm, London, 1948, p. 229. The initiative had been prompted by Sumner Welles, and taken up by the President, but opposed by the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull. See Sumner Welles, Seven Major Decisions, London, 1951, pp. 29\u201344; and Rock, pp. 51\u201377.\n\n39. Rock, p. 70.\n\n40. Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers 1938, vol. 1, Washington, 1955, p. 688; also quoted in Rock, p. 124, and Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 54. See also Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, pp. 20\u201323, for the impact of the Czech crisis on Roosevelt.\n\n41. Kennedy, p. 419.\n\n42. Kennedy, pp. 416\u201317.\n\n43. David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt's America and the Origins of the Second World War, Chicago, 2001, pp. 42\u20133.\n\n44. Alsop and Kintner, pp. 25, 41. For Welles's personality and the development of his career, see Gellman, pp. 59\u201369.\n\n45. Alsop and Kintner, pp. 28\u20139.\n\n46. For the weight attached to the development of a strong air force, see Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power. The Creation of Armageddon, New Haven\/London, 1987, pp. 76\u201391.\n\n47. Freidel, pp. 307\u201313.\n\n48. Alsop and Kintner, pp. 57\u20139.\n\n49. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 56\u201363.\n\n50. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945. Nemesis, London, 2000, p. 189.\n\n51. Quoted in William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937\u20131940, New York, 1952, pp. 160\u201361.\n\n52. Freidel, p. 318.\n\n53. FDR's Fireside Chats, ed. Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, New York, 1992, pp. 148\u201351.\n\n54. Quoted in Alsop and Kintner, p. 31.\n\n55. Quoted in Alsop and Kintner, pp. 85\u20136.\n\n56. Alsop and Kintner, p. 86.\n\n57. Alsop and Kintner, pp. 81\u20132, 90; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 76.\n\n58. Alsop and Kintner, p. 83.\n\n59. Kennedy, p. 432.\n\n60. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 67.\n\n61. Quoted in Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 65.\n\n62. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 66\u201373.\n\n63. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 35.\n\n64. Kennedy, p. 433; Freidel, p. 323.\n\n65. Sumner Welles, The Time for Decision, London, 1944, pp. 61\u2013118. Welles's original dispatch from London (12.3.40) conveyed less enthusiasm than his later published account. It indicated that Churchill had 'consumed a good many whiskeys' and was far from sober as he delivered a monologue\u2013'a cascade of oratory', though constituting merely a 'rehash' of views which he had already published\u2013that lasted one hour and fifty minutes (http:\/\/www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu\/psf\/box6\/a73g02.html).\n\n66. P. M. H. Bell, A Certain Eventuality...Britain and the Fall of France, London, 1974, p. 39.\n\n67. Welles, Time for Decision, pp. 118\u201319.\n\n68. For the President: Personal and Secret. Correspondence between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt, ed. Orville H. Bullitt, London, 1973, p. 416.\n\n69. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 473. Dallek, p. 222, has even smaller numbers.\n\n70. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 462.\n\n71. Freidel, p. 331.\n\n72. Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 78.\n\n73. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 103\u20134; Winston S. Churchill, Great War Speeches, paperback edn., London, 1957, pp. 23\u20134; and quoted in Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 497.\n\n74. Kennedy, p. 440.\n\n75. Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 81.\n\n76. John Lukacs, Five Days in London. May 1940, paperback edn., New Haven\/London, 2001, pp. 75\u20136.\n\n77. Alsop and Kintner, pp. 104\u201310.\n\n78. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt. The Soldier of Freedom 1940\u20131945, London, 1971, p. 9.\n\n79. Burns, p. 61.\n\n80. Robert E. Sherwood, The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, vol. 1, London, 1948, pp. 202\u201319, has a good description of Roosevelt's working environment. See also Burns, pp. 58\u201362; Alsop and Kintner, p. 23; and Larrabee, pp. 26\u20137.\n\n81. Richard M. Pious, The American Presidency, New York, 1979, p. 31.\n\n82. Larrabee, p. 42; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 88.\n\n83. Pious, pp. 53\u20135.\n\n84. Pious, pp. 142, 154\u20135.\n\n85. Kimball, Forged in War, pp. 18\u201319.\n\n86. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, pp. 17, 19.\n\n87. Stimson Diaries, Reel 6, entries for 7.11.40, 18.12.40.\n\n88. Pious, pp. 240\u201342.\n\n89. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 181.\n\n90. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 472.\n\n91. Freidel, pp. 341\u20132.\n\n92. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 478; Freidel, p. 342; Blum, pp. 147\u20138.\n\n93. Freidel, p. 324; Blum, p. 264.\n\n94. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 181.\n\n95. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 674; quotation from Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 181.\n\n96. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 478.\n\n97. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 164\u20135; Freidel, p. 342.\n\n98. Blum, p. 165; Flynn, pp. 221\u20132.\n\n99. Burns, p. 39; Blum, p. 166.\n\n100. Blum, p. 166; Larrabee, p. 45; Burns, p. 38.\n\n101. Kimball, Forged in War, p. 53.\n\n102. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 18.\n\n103. Larrabee, p. 45.\n\n104. Larrabee, p. 98; Kennedy, pp. 430\u201331.\n\n105. Larrabee, p. 121.\n\n106. Quoted in Freidel, p. 339.\n\n107. Blum, pp. 166\u20137.\n\n108. Blum, p. 44.\n\n109. Blum, p. 44; William Carr, Poland to Pearl Harbor. The Making of the Second World War, London, 1985, p. 48.\n\n110. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 20.\n\n111. See Gellman, pp. 2, 226\u201334.\n\n112. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 3\u201313; Larrabee, pp. 25\u20136; Kennedy, pp. 145\u20136, 161; Freidel, p. 347; quoted phrase, Burns, p. 60.\n\n113. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 20, for the above paragraph and for the quotation.\n\n114. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 99; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 94.\n\n115. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 86\u20138; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, pp. 92\u20134.\n\n116. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 479. This was the only, short-lived, period when opinion surveys indicated that a majority of Americans thought Germany would win the war. See the graph in Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade. Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Germany, Oxford\/New York, 2001, p. 26.\n\n117. Quoted in Kimball, Forged in War, pp. 15, 35.\n\n118. Kimball, Forged in War, pp. 13, 22\u20133; Freidel, p. 332; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 114. For Hopkins's disparagement of Roosevelt's 'vile' cocktails, see Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 113.\n\n119. Kimball, Forged in War, p. 31.\n\n120. Kimball, Forged in War, p. 36.\n\n121. Quoted in Freidel, p. 333.\n\n122. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 22\u20133; Churchill and Roosevelt, vol. 1, C-9x(15.5.40), pp. 37\u20138.\n\n123. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 98, citing a Foreign Office minute of 17.5.40.\n\n124. Quoted in Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 98 (italics in the original).\n\n125. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 99. After Roosevelt had sent an encouraging message to Reynaud on 13 June, Churchill\u2013echoed by Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production\u2013expected America's entry into the war 'in the near future'. Disillusionment of such unrealistic hopes soon followed (Christopher Hill, Cabinet Decisions on Foreign Policy. The British Experience, October 1938\u2013June 1941, Cambridge, 1991, p. 168).\n\n126. Freidel, p. 331. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was forceful in voicing its opposition on 3 June to delivering material to other countries which might be required for national defence. Later in the month, Congress forbade the sale of army and navy supplies unless deemed non-essential for national defence (Dallek, pp. 227, 243).\n\n127. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 481\u20132; see also Hull, vol. 1, pp. 765\u20136; and Blum, p. 151.\n\n128. Blum, pp. 150\u201352.\n\n129. Freidel, p. 333.\n\n130. Hull, vol. 1, p. 166; and see Blum, pp. 149\u201358.\n\n131. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 483.\n\n132. Text in Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 485; and Churchill and Roosevelt, vol. 1, R-4x, 16.5.40, pp. 38\u20139; see also Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 23; Kimball, Forged in War, p. 49; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 114.\n\n133. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 496.\n\n134. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 489\u201390, 494.\n\n135. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 486\u20137.\n\n136. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 516\u201317.\n\n137. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 88.\n\n138. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 86. Putting this in perspective, Britain's defence outlay almost trebled between 1939 and 1940 and practically quadrupled from 1939 to 1941; German expenditure was less than double (from a high base) in 1939\u201340, and increased almost two-and-a-half fold from 1939 to 1941 (Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919\u20131945. A Documentary Reader, vol. 2, Exeter, 1984, p. 298).\n\n139. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 50\u201351; Churchill and Roosevelt, vol. 1, C-10x, C-11x, C-17x, pp. 39\u201340, 49\u201351; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 115; Lukacs, Five Days in London, p. 73.\n\n140. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 491.\n\n141. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 205.\n\n142. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 744.\n\n143. Freidel, p. 334.\n\n144. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 205\u201311; Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill 1939\u20131941. The Partnership that Saved the West, New York, 1976, p. 165; Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 573; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 119; Kennedy, p. 452.\n\n145. Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, vol. 3: The Lowering Clouds 1939\u20131941, New York, 1955, p. 233.\n\n146. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, pp. 119\u201320.\n\n147. Freidel, pp. 342\u20133.\n\n148. Flynn, pp. 214\u201315; Kennedy, pp. 456\u20137.\n\n149. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 174.\n\n150. Lash, p. 206.\n\n151. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 117, 167.\n\n152. Blum, p. 162.\n\n153. Kimball, Forged in War, pp. 53\u20134.\n\n154. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 356\u20137; Churchill and Roosevelt, vol. 1, C-20x, pp. 56\u20137.\n\n155. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 506\u20137.\n\n156. Ickes, pp. 270\u201371, 293; Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 745\u20136.\n\n157. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 175\u20136.\n\n158. The Roosevelt Letters, vol. 3: [1928\u20131945], ed. Elliott Roosevelt, London, 1952, pp. 324\u20135; also printed in Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 745.\n\n159. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 747\u20139.\n\n160. Ickes, p. 283.\n\n161. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 749\u201351; Burns, pp. 177\u20139; Ickes, pp. 292\u20133.\n\n162. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 358\u201360.\n\n163. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 751\u20133.\n\n164. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 753\u20137, quotation p. 757.\n\n165. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 758\u20139; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 360\u201361.\n\n166. Dallek, p. 245; Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 760\u201361; Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, p. 36.\n\n167. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, pp. 128\u201331.\n\n168. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 361\u20138; Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 762\u20139.\n\n169. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 769; Blum, pp. 182\u20133.\n\n170. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 131; Kennedy, p. 461.\n\n171. Ciano's Diary 1939\u20131943, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, London, 1947, p. 288; Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 775.\n\n172. Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch. T\u00e4gliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939\u20131942, vol. 2: Von der geplanten Landung in England bis zum Beginn des Ostfeldzuges (1.7.1940\u201321.6.1941), ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Stuttgart, 1963, p. 75 (23.8.40), p. 98 (14.9.40); Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs 1939\u20131945, London, 1990, p. 134; Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegf\u00fchrung 1940\u20131941, 3rd edn., Bonn, 1993, pp. 201\u20133.\n\n173. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 24; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 132; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 87.\n\n174. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, pp. 770\u201376.\n\n175. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 768. When, towards the end of the year, Halifax had reluctantly accepted the position as ambassador to Washington, Churchill thanked him 'for undertaking this heavy task', emphasizing the vital nature of American aid: 'If they do not help us wholeheartedly,' he wrote, 'there will only be miseries to share in this Island. If they give us the aid we deserve, you will have brought us inestimable blessings' (Borthwick Institute, University of York, Diary of Lord Halifax, A.7.8.7, Churchill letter appended to entry for 22.12.40).\n\n176. Churchill, Great War Speeches, p. 59; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 362.\n\n177. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 358.\n\n178. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 765; Gloria J. Barron, Leadership in Crisis. FDR and the Path to Intervention, Port Washington, NY\/London, 1973, p. 69.\n\n179. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 776.\n\n180. Kennedy, p. 466; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 35.\n\n181. Kennedy, p. 464; Dallek, p. 255.\n\n182. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 212 (also for the quotation); and see Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, pp. 102\u20133.\n\n183. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 150 (also for the quotation). Churchill had to be pressed hard by Lothian to overcome his reluctance at 'putting all our cards on the table' for Roosevelt (David Reynolds, In Command of History. Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, London, 2004, p. 202).\n\n184. Warren F. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act. Lend-Lease 1939\u20131941, Baltimore, 1969, pp. 96\u20137.\n\n185. Blum, pp. 199\u2013200; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 100\u2013101; Dallek, p. 253. U-boats accounted for 352,000 tons of shipping in October 1940, a record not subsequently matched. See Dan van der Vat, The Atlantic Campaign. The Great Struggle at Sea 1939\u20131945, London, 1988, p. 147.\n\n186. Ickes, p. 367.\n\n187. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 42.\n\n188. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 223\u20135; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, p. 99.\n\n189. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 221; Ickes, pp. 374\u20136.\n\n190. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 226\u20138 (also for the quotations); Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 101\u20134; Blum, pp. 200\u2013201.\n\n191. Blum, pp. 202\u20134; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 229\u201330; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 106\u201311.\n\n192. Hull, vol. 1, pp. 872\u20133.\n\n193. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 501. This was, even so, a belated recognition of the singular importance of the letter. Churchill had, in fact, dragged his feet over its drafting and then sending. His own emphasis had been placed on the need for American help in overcoming the growing crisis in shipping and transportation, rather than on finance, which Lothian had urged him to stress. Following Lothian's 'calculated indiscretion' about the state of British finances on his return to America, it was this aspect, rather than shipping, that caught the attention of Roosevelt. See Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 202.\n\n194. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, pp. 493\u2013501, quotations pp. 500\u2013501; Churchill and Roosevelt, vol. 1, C-43x, pp. 102\u20139.\n\n195. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 231; see also Blum, p. 204.\n\n196. Blum, pp. 206\u20138; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 233\u20135; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 112\u201315.\n\n197. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 223.\n\n198. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 119\u201320, 124.\n\n199. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, p. 115.\n\n200. Stimson Diaries, Reel 6, entry for 13.12.40; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 236\u20137.\n\n201. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 223; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, p. 117.\n\n202. Blum, pp. 208\u20139.\n\n203. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 238.\n\n204. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, p. 123.\n\n205. Public Papers and Addresses, vol. 9 (1940), pp. 604\u201315; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 239\u201341; Blum, p. 209; Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 223\u20134; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 121\u20132; Dallek, p. 255.\n\n206. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 746; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 77, 123.\n\n207. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 224.\n\n208. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 241\u20134; Kennedy, p. 478.\n\n209. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 245\u20136.\n\n210. FDR's Fireside Chats, p. 167.\n\n211. FDR's Fireside Chats, pp. 164\u201373.\n\n212. Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 108; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 249\u201350, quoting the New York Herald Tribune, 30.12.40, the Christian Science Monitor, 30.12.40, and the New York Times, 31.12.40. For the 'fireside chats', reactions to them and Roosevelt's cautious handling of public opinion, see Casey, pp. 30\u201337.\n\n213. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 253.\n\n214. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 254, citing New York Times, 12.1.41. Opinion in December and January did not vary greatly in its ratio of roughly 2:1 of those in favour of helping Britain even at the risk of getting into the war, and those anxious to 'keep out of war ourselves' (Leigh, p. 78).\n\n215. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 253\u20134; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, pp. 108\u20139.\n\n216. Blum, pp. 211\u201317; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 132\u20139.\n\n217. Public Opinion, pp. 409\u201310.\n\n218. Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 111.\n\n219. Richard Norton Smith, The Colonel. The Life and Legend of Robert R. McCormick 1880\u20131955, Boston\/New York, 1997, pp. 398\u2013409.\n\n220. Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, pp. 110\u201314, and Kennedy, pp. 470\u201374, for brief summaries. The drafting, then progress through Congress, of the Lend-Lease bill is extensively covered in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 254\u201384, and, especially, Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 132\u2013229.\n\n221. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 265\u20137.\n\n222. Public Papers and Addresses, vol. 10 (1941), pp. 61, 63.\n\n223. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 501; Churchill, Great War Speeches, p. 101. See also Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 264. King George VI appears to have been less enamoured, while of course recognizing the importance of the new American commitment. Writing to Lord Halifax on 14 April 1941, the King said he 'did not feel too happy about the Lease of the Bases as the Americans wanted too much written & laid down. Everything was done in their interests, no give & take in certain circumstances...I do hope that the Americans will not try & bleed us white over the dollar asset question. As it is they are collecting the remaining gold in the world, which is of no use to them, & they cannot wish to make us bankrupt. At least I hope they do not want to' (Borthwick Institute, University of York, Halifax Papers, A2.278.26.1).\n\n224. Churchill, Great War Speeches, p. 105 (from his broadcast on 22.6.41).\n\n225. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, pp. 9, 241; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 106.\n\n226. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie, pp. 400\u2013401; Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fr\u00f6hlich, part I, vol. 9, Munich, 1998, p. 186 (14.3.41); Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 422.\n\n227. Quoted in Freidel, p. 362.\n\n228. Freidel, p. 323. Many others thought the same. See Wayne S. Cole, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle against American Intervention in World War II, New York\/London, 1974, pp. 146\u20137.\n\n229. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 267\u20138.\n\n230. Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, pp. 114\u201316.\n\n231. Stimson Diaries, Reel 6, entry for 29.12.40; Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act, p. 129.\n\n232. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 271. And see Freidel, p. 366 for Roosevelt's belief that victory could only follow engagement of a huge American expeditionary force with the German enemy. Roosevelt talked during the spring and summer of 1941 of organizing a 75,000-man American expeditionary force for use outside the western hemisphere (Casey, p. 15).\n\n233. A sign of the relative weighting attached by the administration to the dangers from across the Atlantic and in the Pacific is that, in his public addresses, Roosevelt made only four references to Japan in the eleven months before Pearl Harbor, whereas he attacked Hitler and Nazism more than 150 times over the same period (Casey, pp. 39\u201340).\n\n234. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 38.\n\n235. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 221\u20132; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 38.\n\n236. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 271\u20133; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 285\u20139; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, pp. 182\u20135; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, pp. 117\u201318; Kennedy, pp. 479\u201382.\n\n237. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 270; quotation from Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 289.\n\n238. Quoted in Kimball, Forged in War, p. 84. See also Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 81; and Freidel, p. 368 for Churchill's disappointment in Roosevelt around this time.\n\n239. Freidel, p. 368.\n\n240. Blum, p. 251.\n\n241. See Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 85 for the rising support for escorting in April and May.\n\n242. Roosevelt was pressing in May for action to take over the Azores, and also the Cape Verde Islands, to forestall what he imagined might be a German move into Spain and Portugal 'at any moment'. He wanted a landing force of 50,000 men ready within a month. But when he was told of the difficulties in finding sufficient numbers of vessels for the action within such a short space of time, he 'let himself be argued out of the thing' (Sheffield University Library, Wolfson Microfilm 575, The Presidential Diaries of Henry Morgenthau 1938\u201345 [Microform], Frame 0931, 22.5.41).\n\n243. Freidel, pp. 369\u201370; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, pp. 125\u20137; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 198; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 46. See also Ickes, p. 466, for the reported comment by Roosevelt that 'things are coming to a head: Germany will be making a blunder soon', causing Ickes to infer that the President was anticipating an incident that would justify a declaration of war or, at least, escorts for convoys. Roosevelt implied around seven times in the first half of 1941 that a German retaliation in the Atlantic would be welcome in giving him justification for a more belligerent approach (Casey, pp. 14\u201315).\n\n244. See Barron, pp. 91\u20134.\n\n245. For the President, p. 512.\n\n246. Lash, pp. 309\u201310.\n\n247. Churchill and Roosevelt, C84x, p. 182; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 199.\n\n248. Ickes, pp. 512\u201313; Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 293.\n\n249. Quoted in Blum, p. 253; and see Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 455\u20136.\n\n250. Quoted in Larrabee, p. 55. Morgenthau confided to his diary on 17 May: 'I gathered that he [Roosevelt] wanted to be pushed into the war rather than lead us into it' (Morgenthau Diaries, Frame 0929, 17.5.41). See also Dallek, p. 265; and Divine, Roosevelt and World War II, p. 42.\n\n251. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 298; Larrabee, p. 56; Burns, pp. 99\u2013101; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, pp. 202\u20133. Stimson had no doubt that Hull had toned down the speech. He said he 'felt rather depressed and tired and for that reason I was rather inclined to be disappointed with the President's speech, which he nevertheless thought was a good one' (Stimson Diaries, Reel 6, entries for 27\u201328.5.41).\n\n252. FDR's Fireside Chats, pp. 184, 187; Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 296\u20138.\n\n253. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 463; Larrabee, p. 60; Burns, p. 101.\n\n254. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 457, 463; Ickes, pp. 526\u20137; Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 299.\n\n255. Larrabee, p. 62.\n\n256. Barron, p. 98, citing an interview with Benjamin V. Cohen.\n\n257. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 337, 342; Welles, Time for Decision, pp. 135\u20136.\n\n258. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 528; Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 132; Dallek, p. 268. Stimson noted in his diary, reflecting still prevalent misinterpretations of a German ultimatum preceding war: 'The dominating news over all is the fact that Russia and Germany are at the point of war in a negotiation in which Germany is bringing every bit of her gigantic pressure to bear on Russia to get some enormous advantages at the threat of war and at present, from all the dispatches, it seems to be nip and tuck whether Russia will fight or surrender. Of course I think the chances are that she will surrender' (Stimson Diaries, Reel 6, 17.6.41).\n\n259. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 299; Ickes, p. 552; Freidel, p. 372; Lash, p. 339; Dallek, pp. 267\u20138; Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt. The Undeclared Naval War, New York, 1979, pp. 138\u201343.\n\n260. Churchill, Great War Speeches, p. 102; Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3: The Grand Alliance, London, 1950, p. 210; Churchill and Roosevelt, p. 178.\n\n261. Freidel, p. 369.\n\n262. Heavily critical of Roosevelt, claiming\u2013as is a commonplace revisionist argument\u2013that he was actively seeking to take America into war, is Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War. The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, Chicago, 1952. A similar approach informed the argument of one of Roosevelt's contemporary critics, Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming of War 1941. A Study in Appearance and Realities, New Haven, 1948. Flynn, though his critique is largely directed at domestic policy, also claims that, while preaching peace, Roosevelt 'had made up his mind to go into the war as early as October 1940'(p. 295)\u2013the date of his express promise not to send American troops into a foreign war. A different line of attack, that Roosevelt 'shut so many doors to peace' through parochialism and simplistic idealism, is adopted, along with a highly generous view of the motives of the German and Japanese military, in Frederick W. Marks III, Wind over Sand. The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt, Athens, Ga., 1988 (quotation p. 288). Bitter divides in interpretation of his foreign policy have peppered the historiography and still not wholly subsided.\n\n263. Van der Vat, pp. 196\u2013201; David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill. Men of Secrets, paperback edn., London, 2000, p. 60. For the sharp rise in losses again in 1942, when the German navy changed the cipher, see Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War. The Secret Story, paperback edn., London, 2001, pp. 209\u201310.\n\nCHAPTER 6. MOSCOW, SPRING\u2013SUMMER 1941\n\n1. Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, Tak bylo [That's How It Was], Moscow, 1999, p. 390. Also quoted in Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin. Triumph and Tragedy, New York, 1991, p. 410, and see p. 607 n. 11. Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, New York, 1996, p. 468, quotes a similar obscenity, derived from the unpublished memoirs of Y. Chadaev, chief administrative assistant to the Council of People's Commissars (who was not, however, present, as Mikoyan was, when Stalin made the comment). See also Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin. The Court of the Red Tsar, London, 2003, pp. 330, 331 n. (referring to variants of the same comment); and Roy Medvedev and Zhores Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin. His Life, Death, and Legacy, Woodstock\/New York, 2004, p. 242 ('screwed up'), from Khrushchev's memoirs (Russian version; the English version, Khrushchev Remembers, ed. Strobe Talbott, London, 1971, p. 591, sanitizes it, in the 1956 denuciation speech, to 'All that which Lenin created we have lost forever'). Khrushchev was not there at the time, and apparently heard the comment from Beria. Sergo Beria, Beria. My Father, London, 2000, p. 70, has: 'Lenin left us a state and we have turned it into shit.' This account, however, has the Defence Commissar, Semion Konstantinovich Timoshenko, present, though Stalin made the comment once he and his associates had left the generals. Apart from Mikoyan, the only direct witness to the comment who left a record of it was Vyacheslav Molotov in Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev, Chicago, 1993, p. 39 ('we blew it'). I am grateful to the late Dr Derek Watson (University of Birmingham) for advice on the textual references to Stalin's utterance.\n\n2. Montefiore, p. 34.\n\n3. Volkogonov, p. 410 includes Andrei Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo, Leningrad party boss and close associate of Stalin, and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov (the former Defence Commissar). Whether Zhdanov had returned from holiday at Sochi, a Black Sea resort, where he had gone to recuperate from illness just before the Germans invaded (Molotov Remembers, p. 25; and Mikoyan, p. 380) is unclear. Neither Molotov nor Mikoyan indicated his presence at the meeting. Mikoyan's memoirs (p. 390) make no mention of Voroshilov going to the Defence Commissariat, and refer only to Molotov, Malenkov, Beria and himself, alongside Stalin.\n\n4. Molotov Remembers, p. 39. For a character sketch of the man who, after the war, remained so obedient to Stalin that he was prepared to believe the Politburo's ludicrous charges of treason against his Jewish wife, rather than her own assertions of innocence, see Roy Medvedev, All Stalin's Men, Oxford, 1983, pp. 82\u2013112; and for a full study of his career, Derek Watson, Molotov. A Biography, London, 2005.\n\n5. Quoted in Medvedev and Medvedev, p. 237; also (with varied translation) in David E. Murphy, What Stalin Knew. The Enigma of Barbarossa, New Haven\/London, 2005, p. xv.\n\n6. For the lavish birthday tributes in December 1939, see Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power. The Revolution from Above, 1928\u20131941, New York, 1990, pp. 607\u20139. In fact, it has been established that Stalin was born not, as he himself always claimed, on 21 December 1879, but on 6 December 1878 (Robert Service, Stalin. A Biography, London, 2004, p. 15).\n\n7. Quoted in Tucker, p. 119.\n\n8. See J. Arch Getty, 'The Politics of Repression Revisited', in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (eds.), Stalinist Terror. New Perspectives, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 43\u20139.\n\n9. Tucker, p. 444.\n\n10. Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System. Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia, New York, 1985, pp. 308\u20139.\n\n11. Quoted in Montefiore, p. 197.\n\n12. Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century, London, 2005, pp. 100\u2013104.\n\n13. Lewin, The Soviet Century, pp. 100, 106\u20137.\n\n14. Roger R. Reese, 'The Red Army and the Great Purges' in Getty and Manning, pp. 199, 210.\n\n15. Reese, p. 213; Bernd Bonwetsch, 'Stalin, the Red Army, and the \"Great Patriotic War\"', in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.), Stalinism and Nazism. Dictatorships in Comparison, Cambridge, 1997, p. 187.\n\n16. Lew Besymenski, Stalin und Hitler. Das Pokerspiel der Diktatoren, Berlin, 2004, p. 96; slightly differing figures in Volkogonov, p. 368, and Gabriel Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion. Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia, New Haven\/London, 1999, p. 115.\n\n17. Montefiore, p. 29.\n\n18. Richard Overy, The Dictators. Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, London, 2004, p. 469; Montefiore, p. 197.\n\n19. Tucker, pp. 433\u20134.\n\n20. Besymenski, p. 96.\n\n21. Besymenski, pp. 97\u20138.\n\n22. Volkogonov, p. 369; Lewin, The Soviet Century, p. 110.\n\n23. Gregor Suny, 'Stalin and his Stalinism. Power and Authority in the Soviet Union', in Kershaw and Lewin, pp. 26\u20137.\n\n24. Quoted in Overy, Dictators, p. 64.\n\n25. Tucker, p. 439.\n\n26. Overy, Dictators, p. 65.\n\n27. Montefiore, p. 29; Evan Mawdsley, The Stalin Years. The Soviet Union, 1929\u20131953, Manchester, 1998, p. 17.\n\n28. Watson, p. 146.\n\n29. Lewin, The Soviet Century, pp. 86\u20137.\n\n30. Quoted in Service, p. 383. For the growth in bureaucracy, see Moshe Lewin, 'Bureaucracy and the Stalinist State', in Kershaw and Lewin, pp. 62\u20136.\n\n31. Tucker, p. 595; Geoffrey Roberts, Unholy Alliance. Stalin's Pact with Hitler, London, 1989, pp. 128\u20139; Watson, pp. 153\u20137.\n\n32. Albert L. Weeks, Stalin's Other War. Soviet Grand Strategy 1939\u20131941, Lanham, Md., 2002, p. 108.\n\n33. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 34.\n\n34. A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, Harmondsworth, 1964, p. 76.\n\n35. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 35; Heinrich Schwendemann, Die wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem Deutschen Reich und der Sowjetunion von 1939 bis 1941. Alternative zu Hitlers Ostprogramm?, Berlin, 1993, p. 23.\n\n36. Besymenski, pp. 51\u20136 (Soviet report on the cooperation, 1928).\n\n37. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 41.\n\n38. Quoted in Besymenski, p. 67.\n\n39. Quoted in Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 57.\n\n40. Quoted in Besymenski, pp. 21\u20132. See also Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 100, and Barton Whaley, Codeword Barbarossa, Cambridge, Mass., 1973, p. 200, for further references, in 1935\u20136, by Soviet leaders to Hitler's professed aggressive aims towards the Soviet Union in Mein Kampf.\n\n41. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, pp. 43\u20134.\n\n42. David M. Glantz, The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union. A History, London, 1992, pp. 58, 60.\n\n43. Quoted in Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 109.\n\n44. Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 69\u201370. G. Zhukov, Reminiscences and Reflections, Moscow, 1985, vol. 1, p. 209, states that 'up to 40 divisions were massed in regions adjacent to the western border'.\n\n45. Besymenski, pp. 98\u2013101, 116\u201318; Roberts, Unholy Alliance, pp. 87\u201392.\n\n46. Text of the foreign policy section of Stalin's speech in Besymenski, pp. 134\u201342; 'chestnuts' quotation, p. 142, and quoted in Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 116 and Watson, p. 152. Both Roberts (p. 118) and Watson (p. 313 n. 55) point out that the literal translation of what Stalin said was 'to rake the fire with someone else's hands'.\n\n47. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 130. The USSR was prepared to commit 70 per cent of the specified armed forces directly deployed by Britain and France in the event of a German attack on the west. In the event of a German attack against the USSR, Britain and France would immediately deploy 70 per cent of specified Soviet forces (Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 212\u201316).\n\n48. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 134.\n\n49. For a full account of the failure of Britain and France to make common cause with the Soviet Union against the threat of Hitler, and the strong anti-Communism that lay behind the half-hearted diplomacy, see Michael Jabara Carley, 1939. The Alliance that Never Was and the Coming of World War II, Chicago, 1999.\n\n50. Ivan Maisky, Who Helped Hitler?, London, 1964, p. 133.\n\n51. The background to and conclusion of the pact is well described by Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Deadly Embrace. Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact 1939\u20131941, London, 1988, chs. 13\u201323. The relevant diplomatic documents (from German files) were conveniently brought together in Nazi\u2013Soviet Relations 1939\u20131941, ed. Raymond James Sontag and James Stuart Beddie, New York, 1948, pp. 1\u201378. The closer economic relations since spring 1939 are dealt with by Schwendemann, pp. 44\u201354.\n\n52. See Besymenski, pp. 67\u201388; and Roberts, Unholy Alliance, pp. 101\u20138.\n\n53. Besymenski, pp. 186\u201392.\n\n54. Quoted in Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 139.\n\n55. Carley, pp. 196\u20138.\n\n56. Besymenski, pp. 238\u20139; Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany. Starting World War II, 1937\u20131939, Chicago\/London, 1980, p. 604; Volkogonov, p. 353.\n\n57. See Gustav Hilger and Alfred G. Meyer, The Incompatible Allies. A Memoir of German\u2013Soviet Relations 1918\u20131941, New York, 1953, pp. 293\u2013301.\n\n58. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945. Nemesis, London, 2000, p. 205.\n\n59. Khrushchev Remembers, p. 128.\n\n60. Quoted in Montefiore, p. 275.\n\n61. Volkogonov, p. 352; and see Montefiore, p. 272.\n\n62. Nazi\u2013Soviet Relations, pp. 131\u20132 (memorandum on the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement of 11 February 1940); Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941\u20131945, paperback edn., New York, 1984, p. 113; Roberts, Unholy Alliance, pp. 175\u20138; Schwendemann, p. 143.\n\n63. Quoted in Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 185.\n\n64. Gorodetsky, pp. 5, 14.\n\n65. Khrushchev Remembers, p. 166.\n\n66. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 186.\n\n67. Besymenski, pp. 279\u201381.\n\n68. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 195. The Soviet unease was plainly expressed by Molotov in a memorandum for the German government delivered on 21 September 1940 (Nazi\u2013Soviet Relations, pp. 189\u201394).\n\n69. The official German accounts of the meetings are in DGFP, 11, docs. 325\u20139, 339.\n\n70. Besymenski, pp. 315\u201318.\n\n71. Stalin interrupted Molotov's report on the talks with anti-German comments, berated the Nazi leaders and stated that 'the chief principle of their policy is perfidy' (quoted in Watson, p. 186).\n\n72. 1941 god. Dokumenty [The Year 1941. Documents], ed. A. N. Iakovlev, V. P. Naumov et al., Moscow, 1998, vol. 1, docs. 41\u20132, 44, 53, 58, 93 (all from July and August 1940); also Gorodetsky, p. 38.\n\n73. Besymenski, pp. 97\u20138.\n\n74. Gorodetsky, p. 118.\n\n75. Gorodetsky, p. 120.\n\n76. Seweryn Bialer (ed.), Stalin and his Generals, London, 1970, pp. 35\u20136; Albert Seaton, Stalin as Warlord, London, 1976, pp. 87\u20139; Adam Ulam, Stalin. The Man and his Era, Boston, 1989, p. 530; Mikoyan, p. 382.\n\n77. Besymenski, p. 368.\n\n78. Seaton, p. 91.\n\n79. Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 158\u201360, 163\u20134.\n\n80. Besymenski, pp. 282\u201398 (Timoshenko's report of 7 December 1940). David M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus. The Red Army on the Eve of World War, Lawrence, Kan., 1998, p. 89, refers to the report as the joint work of Voroshilov and Timoshenko on 8 May 1940. This date was, however, that of the handover of responsibility to Timoshenko, not of the report itself. Timoshenko received the background material from the Red Army's central administration at that time. But there is no indication that Voroshilov assisted in compiling the report which was eventually submitted by Timoshenko on 7 December 1940.\n\n81. Bonwetsch, p. 186; Besymenski, p. 98; Louis Rotundo, 'Stalin and the Outbreak of War in 1941', Journal of Contemporary History, 24 (1989), p. 280; Glantz, Military Strategy, p. 92; Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, p. 107; and see Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 228, 244\u20135.\n\n82. Mark von Hagen, 'Soviet Soldiers and Officers on the Eve of the German Invasion. Toward a Description of Social Psychology and Political Attitudes', in Robert W. Thurston and Bernd Bonwetsch (eds.), The People's War. Responses to World War II in the Soviet Union, Urbana\/Chicago, 2000, pp. 191\u20139.\n\n83. John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad. Stalin's War with Germany, vol. 1, London, paperback edn., 1998, pp. 62\u20134. See also Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 233\u201343 for the deficiencies in rearmament, communications and defence.\n\n84. Jacques Sapir, 'The Economics of War in the Soviet Union during World War II', in Kershaw and Lewin, p. 216. The Red Army's weaknesses and inadequacy for battlefield combat on the eve of 'Barbarossa' are fully outlined in David M. Glantz, 'The Red Army in 1941', in David M. Glantz (ed.), The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front, 22 June\u2013August 1941, London, 1993, pp. 1\u201339; and David M. Glantz, Barbarossa. Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941, Stroud, 2001, pp. 22\u20138.\n\n85. Gorodetsky, pp. 116\u201317; Sapir, pp. 210\u201311; Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 65\u20136.\n\n86. John Erickson, 'Threat Identification and Strategic Appraisal by the Soviet Union 1930\u20131941', in E. R. May (ed.), Knowing One's Enemies. Intelligence Assessment between the Two World Wars, Princeton, 1983, pp. 416\u201318; Whaley, pp. 175, 181, 199, 223, 228, 242; Roberts, Unholy Alliance, pp. 187, 213; Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 61\u20132. The Red Army's General Staff continued to work on the assumption that the Wehrmacht would take ten to fifteen days to mobilize and deploy, ruling out, therefore, a surprise attack (Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, p. 96).\n\n87. Gorodetsky, p. 126. The continuity of strategic thinking, also under Zhukov, is also stressed by Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 87\u20138. Zhukov later remarked (Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 245): 'Military strategy was chiefly based on the correct assertion that an aggressor can only be defeated by offensive operations.'\n\n88. Besymenski, pp. 355\u201363. See also Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 70\u201375; and Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 90\u201392.\n\n89. Quoted in Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, p. 93 and Besymenski, p. 364. Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 250, recalled Stalin saying: 'Nazi Germany will not be able to wage a major lengthy war without those vital resources.'\n\n90. Besymenski, pp. 364\u20135; 1941 god, vol. 1, docs. 95, 134; Evan Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon. Soviet Plans for Offensive War in 1940\u20131941', International History Review, 25 (2003), pp. 821\u20133; Gorodetsky, pp. 122\u20134; Jacob Kipp, 'Soviet War Planning', in Glanz, Initial Period of War, pp. 46\u20137; Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 78\u201381.\n\n91. Gorodetsky, p. 127. For the proceedings of the conference, see Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, pp. 40\u201346.\n\n92. Gorodetsky, pp. 128\u20139; Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 825\u20137; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, pp. 50\u20135; Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 81\u20136; Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 221\u20135.\n\n93. Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 827\u201332; 1941 god, vol. 1, doc. 315; extracts in Besymenski, pp. 365\u20137; Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 250.\n\n94. Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 827\u20139; Besymenski, p. 368; Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 100\u2013102, 108. Those units that did exist found themselves short of equipment, weaponry and ammunition, lacking transport and hampered by poor communications (Catherine Merridale, Ivan's War. The Red Army 1939\u20131945, London, 2005, pp. 87\u201390).\n\n95. Besymenski, pp. 368\u201370.\n\n96. Richard Overy, Russia's War, London, 1997, pp. 64\u20135. See also Rotundo, p. 282; Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 75, 79; and Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, p. 88: 'Given the scarcity of resources, although primacy was accorded to the erection of defences along the new border, neither set was fully prepared or manned in June 1941.' See also Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 251\u20133.\n\n97. Mikoyan, p. 377.\n\n98. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4: The Hinge of Fate, London, 1951, p. 443.\n\n99. Gorodetsky, pp. 113\u201314; Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 205.\n\n100. Quoted in Gorodetsky, p. 174.\n\n101. Gorodetsky, pp. 173, 176 (and passim in ch. 8); Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 268, where the wording varies slightly from Gorodetsky's quotation of the Russian version of Zhukov's memoirs; also Whaley, pp. 62\u20133. For similar sentiments attributed to Stalin, see Mikoyan, p. 377: 'It would be a great advantage for Churchill if we entered the war, but for us it is useful to stay on the sidelines for a little longer.'\n\n102. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3: The Grand Alliance, London, 1950, pp. 316, 322\u20133.\n\n103. For Soviet intelligence agencies, see Whaley, pp. 192\u2013200, and the more recent extensive survey in Murphy, esp. pp. 62\u2013116.\n\n104. Gorodetsky, p. 130.\n\n105. Khrushchev Remembers, p. 340.\n\n106. Gorodetsky, p. 54. See Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 233\u201357, for the distrust of both civilian and military intelligence\u2013a distrust aided and abetted by the tone of the reports passed to Stalin, which frequently placed the emphasis upon misinformation.\n\n107. See Whaley, pp. 170\u201377, 180\u201381; Read and Fisher, pp. 594\u2013601; Glantz, Barbarossa, p. 31.\n\n108. Whaley, p. 242.\n\n109. 1941 god, vol. 1, doc. 204; and see Gorodetsky, p. 124.\n\n110. Quoted in Gorodetsky, p. 125; 1941 god, vol. 1, doc. 227. See also Whaley, p. 34.\n\n111. 1941 god, vol. 1, doc. 301.\n\n112. 1941 god, vol. 1, doc. 308. At the end of May 1941, Stalin was still prepared to believe that Hitler was ignorant about the contraventions of Soviet airspace, and that the Wehrmacht was operating on its own initiative. See Gorodetsky, p. 225. And see below for Stalin's initial reaction to the attack on the Soviet Union, that it had been carried out without Hitler's knowledge.\n\n113. 1941 god, vol. 1, doc. 321.\n\n114. 1941 god, vol. 1, doc. 340.\n\n115. For example, 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 376. On 24 April a communication from the German naval attach\u00e9 in Moscow to the naval High Command mentioned rumours allegedly emanating from the British ambassador accurately predicting 22 June as the day of the outbreak of war (Nazi\u2013Soviet Relations, p. 330).\n\n116. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 377.\n\n117. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 394.\n\n118. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 421 and doc. 592 for a calendar of twenty-five important reports from 'Starshina' and 'Corsican' between 6 September 1940 and 16 June 1941 (German trans. in Gerd R. Uebersch\u00e4r and Lev A. Bezymenskij (eds.), Der deutsche Angriff auf die Sowjetunion 1941. Die Kontroverse um die Pr\u00e4ventivkriegsthese, Darmstadt, 1998, pp. 199\u2013212). The calendar was put together, on Stalin's bidding, on 20 June 1941. It was passed to Merkulov, the head of external security, only after the German invasion had taken place (Gorodetsky, p. 297).\n\n119. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 443. For Sorge's activities in the weeks preceding the German invasion, see Robert Whymant, Stalin's Spy. Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring, London\/New York, 1996, chs. 11\u201312; and Murphy, pp. 84\u201390.\n\n120. See, for example, the reports printed in Sekrety Gitlera no stole u Stalina [Hitler's Secrets on Stalin's Desk], Moscow, 1995, docs. 3\u20134, 6\u20137, 15\u201316. 18; and Gorodetsky, pp. 130\u201336.\n\n121. Most of the eighty-four warnings assembled by Whaley (chs. 3\u20135) came through foreign channels. But some of the best information, as we have noted, was provided by Soviet agents. Stalin even thought that Dekanozov, the Soviet ambassador in Berlin, was being duped by British agents and passing on their disinformation (Mikoyan, p. 377).\n\n122. 1941 god, vol. 1, doc. 327. See also Murphy, pp. 156\u20138; Rotundo, p. 290; and Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 241\u20132. The report included information on the date and character of the German attack which turned out to be almost wholly accurate predictions, but had already been damaged in presentation by Golikov's disclaimer that they had mainly derived from Anglo-American sources. For Golikov's way of presenting intelligence to Stalin, see Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 272\u20133; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, pp. 88\u20139; Whaley, pp. 194\u20136; and Murphy, pp. 141\u201361.\n\n123. See Whaley, p. 227, for the general failure of intelligence systems to interpret German intentions correctly; also Waldo, Heinrichs, Jr., Threshold of War. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II, New York\/Oxford, 1988, pp. 24\u20136.\n\n124. Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 265\u20136; Whaley, pp. 172\u20135, 181; Murphy, pp. 173\u201384.\n\n125. Gorodetsky, pp. 156\u20137, 164\u20135; Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 217.\n\n126. Molotov Remembers, p. 22. Stalin spoke on similar lines to Zhukov on 14 June on hearing intelligence reports on the war-readiness of the advanced German divisions: 'You can't believe everything intelligence says' (Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 275\u20136). Zhukov was adamant (p. 274) that the Defence Commissariat was not privy to the non-military intelligence reports sent to Stalin.\n\n127. Medvedev and Medvedev, p. 229.\n\n128. DGFP, 12, doc. 468; Nazi\u2013Soviet Relations, pp. 335\u20136. And see Gorodetsky, p. 211.\n\n129. Isaac Deutscher, Stalin. A Political Biography, revised edn., London, 1988, p. 444.\n\n130. Besymenski, p. 379.\n\n131. Besymenski, pp. 374\u20135.\n\n132. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 437; Besymenski, pp. 380\u201386, 391\u20133; extracts from notes made by Georgi Dimitrov in Uebersch\u00e4r and Bezymenskij, pp. 184\u20135.\n\n133. See Besymenski, pp. 394\u20137; Gorodetsky, p. 208 and p. 365 n. 36; Montefiore, p. 311 n.; Overy, Russia's War, pp. 68\u20139; R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, London, 1997, pp. 56\u20138; and Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War. Russo-German Relations and the Road to War, 1933\u20131941, London, 1995, p. 144. The relevant historiography, Russian and German, which poses the 'preventive war' hypothesis is well surveyed\u2013and its findings roundly dismissed\u2013in Uebersch\u00e4r and Bezymenskij, especially the contributions by Gerd R. Uebersch\u00e4r, 'Hitlers \u00dcberfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941 und Stalins Absichten. Die Bewertung in der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung und die neuere \"Pr\u00e4ventivkriegsthese\"' (pp. 48\u201369) and Alexander I. Boroznjak, 'Ein russischer Historikerstreit? Zur sowjetischen und russischen Historiographie \u00fcber den deutschen Angriff auf die Sowjetunion' (pp. 116\u201328). The case for an intended pre-emptive offensive by the Red Army, forestalled by Hitler's launch of 'Barbarossa', has recently been strongly advanced by Weeks, esp. chs. 5 and 8, and Heinz Magenheimer, Hitler's War. Germany's Key Strategic Decisions 1940\u20131945, London, 1998, pp. 51\u20137, while Constantine Pleshakov, Stalin's Folly. The Secret History of the German Invasion of Russia, June 1941, London, 2005, sees (p. 77) the 15 May strategic plan as the blueprint for an attack that Stalin intended to carry out in 1942. The balanced appraisal of 'traditionalist' and 'revisionist' interpretations by Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 864\u20135, judiciously concludes that, while offensive war\u2013as a counter-offensive, that is\u2013constituted an intrinsic part of Soviet military planning in 1940\u201341, there were no plans to stage an offensive pre-emptive strike in 1941. See in addition also now the sensible comments of Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin's Wars. From World War to Cold War, 1939\u20131953, New Haven\/London, 2006, pp. 76\u20139.\n\n134. See Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 850\u201351; Besymenski, pp. 438\u201340. Colonel I. T. Starinov, a commander in the Western Army Group, later recalled the discrepancy between the claims in Stalin's speech and the awareness of military leaders that 'rearming was just beginning' (though, he said, they did not speak of this, even among themselves). See Bialer, p. 223.\n\n135. DGFP, 12, doc. 593.\n\n136. Besymenski, p. 387. Gorodetsky, p. 208, suggests that the speech was deliberately leaked abroad, though gives no indication that it reached Berlin. Medvedev and Medvedev, p. 232, also presume that the speech was meant as disinformation, though again provide no evidence of knowledge of its genuine content in Berlin. The brilliant British journalist Alexander Werth, based at the time in Moscow, gleaned information about the speech, but only some weeks later, once the Soviet Union was involved in the war. What he heard, however (see Werth, pp. 122\u20133), did not accord with the surviving notes of the speech, indicating, in contrast to what Stalin actually said, that he pointed to the weaknesses, rather than strength, of the Red Army. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, p. 82, on the other hand, correctly contrasts the false impression gained abroad with the real content of the speech.\n\n137. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 242\u20134.\n\n138. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 473; Uebersch\u00e4r and Bezymenskij, pp. 186\u201393. Analyses in Besymenski, pp. 435\u201353 and Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 833\u201362.\n\n139. Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 834\u20137.\n\n140. Glantz, Military Strategy, p. 87, points out that the plan of 15 May 'sits comfortably within the context of previous Soviet strategic planning and, in particular, the experiences of the January war games'. He also pertinently remarks (p. 89) that the plan 'established limited objectives well short of the destruction of the German state', amounting to 'a clear example of justifiable preventative war involving the conduct of a strategic offensive operation with definite limited aims'.\n\n141. Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', p. 839.\n\n142. See Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 244\u20135.\n\n143. Quoted in Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 852\u20133. Mawdsley concludes that Stalin was almost certainly shown the plan (which Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, p. 95, and Roberts, Stalin's Wars, p. 76, doubt) but did not approve it (a point that 'revisionist' historians, rejecting Zhukov's testimony as tendentious and self-serving, dispute).\n\n144. Quoted in Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', p. 853.\n\n145. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 560 (Mikoyan to the Council of People's Commissars, the Central Committee and Stalin, 16 June 1941); Schwendemann, p. 354 (and pp. 315\u201352 for a full analysis of economic relations in the months running up to the invasion, in which extensive German industrial exports to the Soviet Union were also made). And see Werth, p. 114. A German memorandum of 15 May 1941 on trading relations, listing the huge amounts of grain, petrol, cotton and metals delivered that year by the Soviet Union (with high figures for April), commented that 'the status of Soviet raw materials still presents a favourable picture' (Nazi\u2013Soviet Relations, pp. 339\u201341).\n\n146. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, p. 91.\n\n147. Quoted in Besymenski, p. 444.\n\n148. Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', pp. 861\u20132. Glantz, Military Strategy, p. 88, concludes that Zhukov's plan was flawed in a number of important respects, that it could not have been executed before mid-July at the earliest\u2013too late to pre-empt the Germans\u2013and that Stalin's decision to ignore the proposal 'seems to have been prudent'.\n\n149. DGFP, 12, doc. 505.\n\n150. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, p. 78; Deutscher, pp. 443\u20134.\n\n151. Quoted in Gorodetsky, p. 214.\n\n152. Quoted in Hilger and Meyer, p. 328 and Gorodetsky, p. 206. Schulenburg's official report is in DGFP, 12, doc. 423, and Nazi\u2013Soviet Relations, pp. 330\u201332.\n\n153. Gorodetsky, pp. 206\u20137, 221; Besymenski, pp. 425\u20138.\n\n154. F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, London, 1993, pp. 106\u20139; also F. H. Hinsley, 'British Intelligence and Barbarossa', in John Erickson and David Dilks (eds.), Barbarossa. The Axis and the Allies, Edinburgh, 1994, pp. 63\u20136.\n\n155. See Gorodetsky, pp. 266\u20137.\n\n156. Khrushchev Remembers, p. 133.\n\n157. Gorodetsky, pp. 263\u20135, 267\u201374; Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 218; and Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War, p. 144.\n\n158. Quoted in Gorodetsky, p. 224.\n\n159. Quoted in Gorodetsky, p. 279, from the Russian edition of Zhukov's memoirs. The English version, Reminiscences and Reflections, vol. 1, p. 275, only contains part of the quotation. Medvedev and Medvedev, p. 233, place Stalin's comment on 15 June, though Zhukov's memoirs make plain that it was uttered on the previous day. For the belated emergency defence measures, see Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 259, 264; Gorodetsky, p. 280; also Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, p. 246.\n\n160. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 102\u20137.\n\n161. Medvedev and Medvedev, pp. 233\u20134, 238\u20139.\n\n162. Volkogonov, p. 393; Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, p. 251.\n\n163. Gorodetsky, p. 307.\n\n164. Gorodetsky, p. 275.\n\n165. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 513.\n\n166. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 514. And see Whymant, pp. 164\u20137.\n\n167. Whymant, p. 184.\n\n168. Murphy, p. 87 (who comments further (p. 88) that Sorge's reports had been dismissed as 'German disinformation' by Stalin as early as 1936).\n\n169. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 543.\n\n170. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 544.\n\n171. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 570; Sekrety Gitlera, doc. 72.\n\n172. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 581.\n\n173. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, p. 93; Whaley, pp. 99\u2013103; Read and Fisher, p. 609.\n\n174. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 590.\n\n175. Medvedev and Medvedev, p. 239.\n\n176. Sekrety Gitlera, docs. 73\u20137.\n\n177. Molotov Remembers, p. 31. For the Tass communiqu\u00e9, see Whaley, pp. 207\u20138.\n\n178. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 218.\n\n179. Gorodetsky, p. 289.\n\n180. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, pp. 109\u201311; Hinsley, 'British Intelligence and Barbarossa', pp. 69\u201370; Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, p. 93; Whaley, pp. 230\u201334.\n\n181. Gorodetsky, pp. 301\u20133.\n\n182. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 599.\n\n183. Besymenski, p. 421.\n\n184. Quoted in Besymenski, p. 409.\n\n185. Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 277\u20138, 280 (quotation p. 277); Khrushchev Remembers, p. 167; Mikoyan, p. 388; Medvedev and Medvedev, p. 240; Glantz, Barbarossa, p. 31 and (for the text of the directive) p. 242; Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 252\u20134; Murphy, pp. 213\u201315.\n\n186. The preceding account is based on Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 281\u20132; Volkogonov, pp. 402\u20134; Montefiore, pp. 321\u20134; Radzinsky, pp. 458\u20139; Gorodetsky, pp. 311\u201313; Service, pp. 437\u20138; Tucker, p. 625; Ulam, pp. 538\u20139; Read and Fisher, pp. 5\u20136, 635\u20137, 639\u201342; Watson, p. 189; and Overy, Russia's War, pp. 73\u20134.\n\n187. Montefiore, p. 324.\n\n188. Volkogonov, p. 407; text of the directive in Glantz, Barbarossa, p. 242 and Amnon Sella, '\"Barbarossa\". Surprise Attack and Communication', Journal of Contemporary History, 13 (1978), p. 571. See Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 282: 'it [the directive] proved plainly unrealistic\u2013and was therefore never carried out.'\n\n189. Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', p. 863; text of the directive in Glantz, Barbarossa, pp. 242\u20133. And see Sella, pp. 559\u201373 for the confusion, incoherence and lack of coordination in the Soviet response to the surprise attack.\n\n190. Mikoyan, p. 388.\n\n191. Quoted in Watson, pp. 189\u201390.\n\n192. Quoted in Radzinsky, p. 462. For the response to the radio address, see Sella, p. 575.\n\n193. 'Iz vospominanii upravliyushchego delami sovnarkoma SSSR Ya. E. Chadaev' ['From the Memoirs of the Head of Sovnarkom USSR\u2013Yakov Ermolaevich Chadaev'], Otechestvennaya Istoriya, 2 (2005), pp. 8\u201310; also Zhukov, vol. 1, pp. 305, 309.\n\n194. Volkogonov, pp. 421\u20132; Bonwetsch, p. 196.\n\n195. Mikoyan, pp. 390\u20132; Stepan A. Mikoyan, 'Barbarossa and the Soviet Leadership', in Erickson and Dilks, pp. 127\u20138; Volkogonov, pp. 409\u201312; Montefiore, pp. 329\u201334; Radzinsky, pp. 468\u201372; Medvedev and Medvedev, pp. 241\u20135; Service, pp. 441\u20133. Stalin's unscheduled absence from his duties lasted only two days. It was simply not the case, as his full list of appointments detailed in his appointments book demonstrates, that 'for ten days the Soviet Union was leaderless', as is asserted by Jonathan Lewis and Phillip Whitehead, Stalin. A Time for Judgement, London, 1991, p. 89.\n\n196. 1941 god, vol. 2, doc. 651. This is a memorandum presented by Sudoplatov to the Soviet Council of Ministers on 7 August 1953, after Stalin's death and in the context of moves to discredit Beria. In his published memoirs many years later (Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness. A Soviet Spymaster, Boston, 1994, pp. 145\u20138), Sudoplatov suggests the meeting was intended to spread disinformation 'intended to weaken German resolve' by implying that the Blitzkrieg had failed and a prolonged war was inevitable. Overy, Russia's War, p. 96, accepts the disinformation argument, though he places the Stamenov meeting in October, not in July. If it was meant as disinformation, it is strange that\u2013to go from the lack of evidence on the German side\u2013nothing reached the enemy. And in the context of the massive German advances and conquests during July the disinformation claim sounds implausible. Nor is the story undermined by being part of an anti-Beria campaign in 1953. The peace-feelers were, in fact, mentioned by two other sources. See Volkogonov, pp. 412\u201313 and Radzinsky, p. 474.\n\n197. Montefiore, p. 346.\n\n198. John Barber, 'The Moscow Crisis of October 1941', in Julian Cooper, Maureen Perrie and E. A. Rees (eds.), Soviet History, 1917\u201353. Essays in Honour of R. W. Davies, Basingstoke, 1995, pp. 201\u20135.\n\n199. Werth, pp. 232, 236\u20137. See also the vivid account in Rodric Braithwaite, Moscow 1941. A City and its People at War, London, 2006, pp. 242\u201359, 271\u20136.\n\n200. Barber, pp. 209\u201311; Mikhail M. Gorinov, 'Muscovites' Moods, 22 June 1941 to May 1942', in Thurston and Bonwetsch, pp. 122\u20135; Roy A. Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism, Oxford, 1979, pp. 128\u201332; Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin's Secret War, London, 1981, p. 241; and Overy, Russia's War, pp. 95\u20138. Mikoyan, pp. 417\u201322, outlines the measures to evacuate the government and prepare to detonate installations within Moscow, but misleadingly claims (p. 420) that calm prevailed and that there was no panic in the city's population.\n\n201. Radzinsky, p. 482.\n\n202. Barber, p. 206; Volkogonov, pp. 433\u20134; Montefiore, pp. 349\u201350; Radzinsky, pp. 482\u20133.\n\n203. BBC interview with Nikolai Vasilievich Ponomariov, c. 1998, typescript, fols. 29\u201335. See also the 'heroic' depiction of Stalin during these days in A. T. Rybin, Next to Stalin. Notes of a Bodyguard, Toronto, 1996, pp. 31\u20134.\n\n204. Watson, p. 193.\n\n205. A point emphasized by Schwendemann, pp. 354\u201363.\n\n206. Molotov Remembers, pp. 21\u201332.\n\n207. Khrushchev Remembers, pp. 587\u201392.\n\n208. Gorodetsky, p. 323 (also p. 239).\n\n209. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fr\u00f6hlich, part I, vol. 4, Munich, 2000, p. 214 (10.7.37).\n\n210. This is the presumption of the counter-factual assessment by Valentin Falin, Zweite Front. Die Interessenkonflikte in der Anti-Hitler-Koalition, Munich, 1995, pp. 100\u2013103.\n\n211. Had they followed Soviet proposals for a full-scale military pact in 1939, however, Britain and France would have committed themselves to direct military intervention in the event of a German attack on Poland, presuming the Poles, Romanians and Lithuanians would have permitted the Red Army to pass through their territories to engage in the conflict (Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 214).\n\n212. Roberts, Unholy Alliance, p. 225.\n\n213. Glantz, Barbarossa, p. 31; Overy, Russia's War, p. 71.\n\n214. See Rotundo, pp. 295\u20136.\n\n215. Volkogonov, p. 470.\n\n216. Quoted in Mawdsley, 'Crossing the Rubicon', p. 864.\n\n217. Glantz, Barbarossa, p. 30; Whaley, pp. 217\u201318. Tolstoy, pp. 224\u201330, finds Stalin's emphasis on avoidance of provocation so unpersuasive as an explanation of his stance in spring 1941 that he posits the hypothesis that Hitler himself sent a personal assurance to lull the Soviet leader's suspicions, suggesting that conspiratorial elements in the German High Command were pressing for aggression that he opposed. There is, however, no evidence for this hypothesis. Nothing exists in either German or Russian archives to lend authentication to the text of two purported letters from Hitler to Stalin, of 31 December 1940 and 14 May 1941. These (printed in Murphy, pp. 256\u20138, apparently based upon their publication in a Russian novel of 1997) are almost certainly forgeries. Despite major question marks over the provenance of the alleged documents, Murphy (pp. 185\u201391) seems prepared to offer them some credence. John Lukacs, June 1941. Hitler and Stalin, New Haven\/London, 2006, pp. 150\u201358, is, however, wisely dismissive of the letters.\n\n218. The threat of such an attack had been sharply reduced by the Neutrality Pact of 13 April 1941. Though, as the deliberations by the Japanese government following the German invasion would show, there was no guarantee that Japan would adhere to the pact, from the Soviet perspective 'the treaty held promise of a certain gain in time' (Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 257).\n\n219. For the lamentable failings of German intelligence\u2013which did little more than uphold existing prejudice about the weakness of the Red Army\u2013see David Kahn, Hitler's Spies. German Military Intelligence in World War II, New York, 2000, pp. 445\u201361. See also Whaley, p. 33. There appears to have been no attempt made by Soviet military intelligence to spread disinformation to advertise the strength of the Red Army.\n\n220. Erickson, Road to Stalingrad, pp. 69\u201373, 81, 86; Glantz, Military Strategy, pp. 63, 98, 101\u20132; Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, p. 97. See also Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 249.\n\n221. Medvedev and Medvedev, p. 245.\n\n222. Zhukov, vol. 1, p. 250, immediately adding that Stalin's conjecture that the Germans would strike in the south, not the north, had proved incorrect. Zhukov (pp. 300\u2013301) nevertheless admitted the military's part of the responsibility for the tactical and strategic errors made on the eve of the invasion and immediately thereafter. See also Roberts, Stalin's Wars, pp. 74, 80, and the comments on the failings of Soviet intelligence in Glantz, Stumbling Colossus, pp. 254\u20137. The general failure of the intelligence services of the major powers to anticipate 'Barbarossa' is emphasized by Whaley, p. 227.\nCHAPTER 7. WASHINGTON, DC, SUMMER\u2013AUTUMN 1941\n\n1. Robert E. Sherwood, The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, London, 1948, vol. 1, pp. 304\u20135; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Rendezvous with Destiny, Boston, 1990, p. 373.\n\n2. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3: The Grand Alliance, London, 1950, pp. 330\u201333. The 'token assistance' which Churchill was prepared in practice to offer the Soviet Union, despite his forthright expressions of vocal support, is emphasized by Sheila Lawlor, 'Britain and the Russian Entry into the War', in Richard Langhorne (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 171\u20134.\n\n3. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940\u20131941, New York, 1953, p. 537. This was essentially the view in the State Department. When Roosevelt decided to aid the Soviet Union, he did so (as has been said) 'with only hope and intuition to guide him' (Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler. Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman, Princeton, 1991, pp. 27, 40).\n\n4. On MAGIC, see I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War, Oxford\/New York, 1995, pp. 706\u20139.\n\n5. The Roosevelt Letters, vol. 3: [1928\u20131945], ed. Elliott Roosevelt, London, 1952, p. 375.\n\n6. Quoted in Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor. The Coming of the War between the United States and Japan, Princeton, 1950, p. 227.\n\n7. Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., Threshold of War. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II, New York\/Oxford, 1988, pp. 104\u20135, 174, 206.\n\n8. Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt. The Undeclared Naval War, New York, 1979, pp. 263\u20134.\n\n9. Winston S. Churchill, Great War Speeches, paperback edn., London, 1957, p. 109.\n\n10. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 541.\n\n11. Quoted in Robert A. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent. American Entry into World War II, New York, 1965, p. 123.\n\n12. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 541.\n\n13. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 303\u20134.\n\n14. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 538; and James McGregor Burns, Roosevelt. The Soldier of Freedom 1940\u20131945, London, 1971, p. 104.\n\n15. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 309.\n\n16. Yale University Library, Henry L. Stimson Diaries 1909\u20131945, Reel 6, entry for 2.7.41; also in Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, New York, 1948, p. 371.\n\n17. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 538.\n\n18. Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, vol. 3: The Lowering Clouds 1939\u20131941, New York, 1955, pp. 557\u20138.\n\n19. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 542.\n\n20. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 542\u20136.\n\n21. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 309.\n\n22. Joseph E. Davies, Mission to Moscow, New York, 1941, p. 488.\n\n23. Davies, pp. 494\u20135, 497; also printed in Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 306\u20139.\n\n24. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 560\u201361; Burns, pp. 114\u201315.\n\n25. Quotations from Ickes, vol. 3, pp. 592\u20133.\n\n26. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 561.\n\n27. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 545, 558\u201363; Freidel, p. 374. Nor was the initial help from Britain, which dispatched the first Arctic convoy to the Soviet Union in August 1941, of great value. The materials shipped to aid the Soviet fight against Hitler's forces began, however, to play a significant role in 1942.\n\n28. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 319.\n\n29. Kimball, The Juggler, pp. 22, 31\u20134, 36.\n\n30. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 313\u201322; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, pp. 377\u20138, for Hopkins's talks in London.\n\n31. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 324\u201349, for the Moscow visit; p. 325, for the hat.\n\n32. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 329.\n\n33. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 337.\n\n34. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 335\u201342, 347.\n\n35. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 342\u20134.\n\n36. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 350; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, p. 381.\n\n37. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 129.\n\n38. Freidel, p. 375.\n\n39. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, pp. 174\u20135; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, pp. 417\u201319, for the British contribution.\n\n40. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 396.\n\n41. Ickes, vol. 3, p. 620.\n\n42. Freidel, p. 376.\n\n43. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 818\u201319; Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 399\u2013400; Freidel, p. 376. When the Lend-Lease bill had first come before Congress early in 1941, it had already prompted opposition from those unwilling to see aid extended to the Soviet Union (Warren F. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act. Lend-Lease 1939\u20131941, Baltimore, 1969, p. 189).\n\n44. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 560; Freidel, p. 376.\n\n45. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 544.\n\n46. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 738; David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear. The American People in Depression and War, 1929\u20131945, New York\/Oxford, 1999, pp. 486\u20137; David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937\u20131941. A Study in Competitive Co-operation, Chapel Hill, NC, 1982, p. 212; Mark A. Stoler, Allies and Adversaries. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Grand Alliance, and U.S. Strategy in World War II, Chapel Hill, NC\/London, 2000, pp. 47, 49, 50, 55; substantial extracts from the text in Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 413\u201323.\n\n47. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 544.\n\n48. The Roosevelt Letters, vol. 3, p. 378.\n\n49. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 539, 579.\n\n50. Burns, p. 104; Stimson Diaries, Reel 6, entries for 6\u20137 July 1941, indicate Knox's disappointment and frustration at Roosevelt's lack of boldness.\n\n51. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 110; Freidel, p. 383.\n\n52. Quoted in Burns, p. 105.\n\n53. Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill 1939\u20131941. The Partnership that Saved the West, New York, 1976, pp. 341\u20132.\n\n54. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 576; Ickes, vol. 3, p. 571.\n\n55. Bailey and Ryan, p. 155.\n\n56. The Churchill War Papers, vol. 3: The Ever-Widening War, 1941, ed. Martin Gilbert, London, 2000, p. 914 (9.7.41); Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 578.\n\n57. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 208.\n\n58. Burns, p. 105. In the Far East, too, the imposition of oil sanctions makes it possible to view July 1941 as a turning point in American strategic thinking and diplomacy. See David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt's America and the Origins of the Second World War, Chicago, 2001, p. 143.\n\n59. Ickes, vol. 3, p. 571; Bailey and Ryan, p. 156.\n\n60. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 577.\n\n61. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 578. See Lash, p. 343, for the muted isolationist protest.\n\n62. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 367.\n\n63. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 367\u20139; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 570\u201374; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, pp. 129\u201331.\n\n64. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 368.\n\n65. Stimson and Bundy, p. 377; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 574.\n\n66. Quoted in Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 368.\n\n67. Quoted in Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 169.\n\n68. Both quotations in Lash, p. 391.\n\n69. See Lash, p. 392.\n\n70. Extensive coverage of the conference in Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 350\u201366; Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, pp. 385\u2013400; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 663\u201392; Lash, pp. 393\u2013400; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, pp. 148\u201361; and, especially, Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit. Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay 1941, London, 1970.\n\n71. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 670\u201377; Wilson, pp. 112\u201313, 117, 119, 163\u20136, 215, 241\u20134.\n\n72. Freidel, p. 386.\n\n73. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, pp. 388\u20139; Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 356; Wilson, pp. 88, 160\u201363; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 157.\n\n74. Wilson, p. 144.\n\n75. Wilson, p. 145.\n\n76. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 216; Freidel, p. 392; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 143.\n\n77. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 164.\n\n78. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932\u20131945, New York, 1979, p. 286.\n\n79. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 217.\n\n80. Quoted in Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, pp. 214\u201315 (where it is pointed out that some of Churchill's Cabinet colleagues were sceptical of his positive account); and Dallek, p. 285.\n\n81. Text in Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, pp. 393\u20134; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 687\u20138; and Wilson, p. 206.\n\n82. See Wilson, pp. 174, 260\u201362.\n\n83. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, pp. 384, 394 (for the quotation); Wilson, pp. 108\u201311 for a description of the service.\n\n84. Quoted in Wilson, p. 111.\n\n85. Wilson, p. 203.\n\n86. Freidel, p. 385.\n\n87. Wilson, pp. 210\u201311; text in Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, pp. 395\u20136.\n\n88. Wilson, p. 203; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 159.\n\n89. Wilson, pp. 212, 214.\n\n90. See Wilson, pp. 223\u20134 and 231\u20134, 266\u20137, for reactions in the United States.\n\n91. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 369.\n\n92. Freidel, p. 389.\n\n93. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 374.\n\n94. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 168\u201373.\n\n95. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 173\u20134.\n\n96. The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman, vol. 10 (1941), New York, 1950, pp. 374\u201383; Bailey and Ryan, pp. 175\u20136.\n\n97. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 171, 173, 175.\n\n98. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, pp. 371\u20133 (quotation p. 373). Stimson told Hopkins that he had not been consulted about the speech, but took the view that 'unless the President was prepared to say something good and strong, it were better for him not to speak at all'. When he heard it, he thought Roosevelt's speech 'the most decisive one which he has made' (Stimson Diaries, Reel 7, entries for 9\u201310.9.41). In his memoirs, Cordell Hull mentions his agreement on the evening of the 10th that the President 'should make it emphatically plain that our naval vessels in the Atlantic would fire on any Axis submarines or surface warships seeking to intercept shipping in our defensive waters', though does not refer to his intervention the next day in the hope of toning down the speech (Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, New York, 1948, vol. 2, p. 1047).\n\n99. Lash, p. 417.\n\n100. Public Papers and Addresses, vol. 10, pp. 384\u201392; FDR's Fireside Chats, ed. Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, New York, 1992, pp. 189\u201396.\n\n101. FDR's Fireside Chats, pp. 188\u20139.\n\n102. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 742, 746.\n\n103. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 746.\n\n104. Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 168.\n\n105. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 747; Lash, p. 419.\n\n106. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 177 n. and 182 n.\n\n107. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 747.\n\n108. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 747.\n\n109. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 749.\n\n110. FDR's Fireside Chats, p. 196.\n\n111. Even so, Roosevelt's short-circuiting of Congress through executive action resting upon the presentation of misleading information, even in a good cause, has been interpreted as establishing a harmful precedent for later action in Vietnam (Lash, pp. 420\u201321).\n\n112. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 749.\n\n113. Quoted in Dallek, p. 289. Robert Divine's comment, 'the public reaction [to the introduction of escorting] was so favourable that Roosevelt could have begun convoys months earlier with solid public support', takes insufficient account of the fundamental contradiction in American public opinion (and the President's perception of this), even though figures from Gallup polls reflecting it are presented on the same page (Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 144).\n\n114. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 751.\n\n115. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 188\u201391.\n\n116. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 191\u20132, 195\u20136.\n\n117. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 196\u20137.\n\n118. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 219; Nicholas John Cull, Selling War. The British Propaganda Campaign against American 'Neutrality' in World War II, New York\/Oxford, 1995, pp. 170\u201373.\n\n119. Public Papers and Addresses, vol. 10, pp. 438\u201345.\n\n120. Public Papers and Addresses, vol. 10, pp. 444\u20135.\n\n121. Quoted in Dallek, p. 289.\n\n122. Freidel, p. 394; Bailey and Ryan, p. 208; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 146.\n\n123. Hull, vol. 2, p. 943.\n\n124. The Senate's leading spokesmen on foreign affairs had told Roosevelt that, while in their view there was a majority in favour of revision, there would be prolonged debate and isolationist filibustering (Lash, p. 426).\n\n125. Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1046\u20137.\n\n126. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 380.\n\n127. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 752.\n\n128. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 752\u20136; Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 381.\n\n129. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 146.\n\n130. Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 383.\n\n131. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 757.\n\n132. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 758; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent, p. 147.\n\n133. See Dallek, p. 292.\n\n134. Quoted in Bailey and Ryan, p. 209.\n\n135. See Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 218.\n\n136. Some of the following points are presented in Bailey and Ryan, pp. 260\u201363; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 218; and Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor, p. 157.\n\n137. This was explicitly stated in a memorandum by Admiral Stark in late September, relating to the issue of whether to press for a revision of the neutrality legislation. But Stark, who had consistently pressed for direct American involvement in the war, was of the opinion that 'the United States should enter the war against Germany as soon as possible, even if hostilities with Japan must be accepted' (quoted in Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 381). Roosevelt, as we have seen, had not been ready to follow such a course of action.\n\n138. Quoted in Dallek, p. 289; and Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 353 n. 114.\n\n139. Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, pp. 219\u201320.\n\n140. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 923; Kennedy, pp. 487\u20138.\n\n141. Kennedy, p. 487.\n\n142. Quoted in Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 415.\n\n143. In autumn 1941, Roosevelt still thought, it seems, that he could possibly avoid sending troops to fight in Europe if the Soviet Union could hold out, and saw provision of aid to Russia as a vehicle to help prevent the use of American ground forces. The army, however, took the view that the Soviet Union and Great Britain would be incapable of defeating Germany without American deployment of troops. Aid to both countries was, from this perspective, aimed at sustaining military resistance until American rearmament was complete. In the event, lend-lease to the Soviet Union equipped approximately 101 army divisions and meant that American deployment in Europe was smaller than that envisaged in the Victory Program (Stoler, pp. 55\u20138, and 285 n. 64).\n\n144. Quoted in Sherwood, White House Papers, vol. 1, p. 419.\n\nCHAPTER 8. TOKYO, AUTUMN 1941\n\n1. Nobutaka Ike (ed.), Japan's Decision for War. Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences, Stanford, Calif., 1967, p. 72.\n\n2. The deliberations about the northern option can be followed in the essay by Hosoya Chihiro, 'Northern Defence', in James William Morley (ed.), The Fateful Choice. Japan's Advance into Southeast Asia, 1939\u20131941, New York, 1980, pp. 94\u2013112. The emergence of the navy's stance on the southern advance is explored in the essay in the same volume by Tsunoda Jun, 'The Navy's Role in the Southern Strategy', esp. pp. 287\u201395.\n\n3. Figures in Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, London, 2001, p. 400.\n\n4. Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, London\/New York, 1987, p. 148; James William Morley (ed.), The Final Confrontation. Japan's Negotiations with the United States, 1941, Columbia, NY, 1994 (translated essays of Tsunoda Jun, based upon Japanese documentation), p. 159.\n\n5. David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937\u20131941. A Study in Competitive Co-operation, Chapel Hill, NC, 1982, pp. 234\u20136; William Carr, Poland to Pearl Harbor. The Making of the Second World War, London, 1985, p. 153; Iriye, Origins, pp. 149\u201350.\n\n6. Iriye, Origins, p. 147.\n\n7. Iriye, Origins, pp. 148\u20139.\n\n8. Bix, p. 401.\n\n9. Sheffield University Library, Wolfson Microfilm 431, Diary of Marquis Kido Koichi, doc. no. 1632W (63) 31.7.41, (63) 2.8.41, (66) 7.8.41; Carr, pp. 154\u20135.\n\n10. Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor. The Coming of the War between the United States and Japan, Princeton, 1950, remarks (p. 244): 'From now on the oil gauge and the clock stood side by side. Each fall in the level brought the hour of decision closer.' Using a similar analogy (p. 270), he comments: 'Time had become the meter of strategy for both governments. But one did not mind its passing, while the other was crazed by the tick of the clock.'\n\n11. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 157; Foreign Relations of the United States. Japan 1931\u201341, vol. 2 [= Japan II], Washington, 1943, pp. 549\u201350.\n\n12. Sheffield University Library, Wolfson Microfilm 437, copied from National Archives, Washington, Record Group 243: Records of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, File 1d (10), Memoirs of Prince Konoye [Konoe] [=Konoe Memoirs] March 1942, fols. 29\u201330.\n\n13. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 179.\n\n14. Yoshitake Oka, Konoe Fumimaro. A Political Biography, Tokyo, 1983, pp. 139\u201340.\n\n15. John Toland, The Rising Sun. The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936\u20131945, New York, 1970, Modern Library edn., 2003, p. 100; Ike, p. 151 and n. 35; Feis, p. 282.\n\n16. Bix, pp. 403\u20134; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 181.\n\n17. Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 180\u201381.\n\n18. Konoe Memoirs, fols. 30\u201331; Oka, p. 139; Robert J. C. Butow, Tojo and the Coming of the War, Princeton, 1961, pp. 243\u20134; Roger D. Spotswood, 'Japan's Southward Advance as an Issue in Japanese-American Relations, 1940\u20131941', unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Washington, 1974, pp. 398\u2013401.\n\n19. Quotations in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 180.\n\n20. Iriye, Origins, p. 157; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 181. For Nomura's appearance and character, Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, New York, 1948, vol. 2, p. 987; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 67; Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept. The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, London, 1982, p. 6.\n\n21. Foreign Relations of the United States. Diplomatic Papers 1941, vol. 4: The Far East, Washington, 1956 [= FRUS, 1941], p. 359; also quoted in Carr, pp. 154\u20135. Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1014\u201315, indicates the Secretary of State's conviction, following the invasion of southern Indochina, that war between Japan and the United States was now a likely eventuality.\n\n22. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 182.\n\n23. Iriye, Origins, p. 156.\n\n24. Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 91. For the different emphases in strategy towards Japan between Churchill and Roosevelt, see Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., Threshold of War. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II, New York\/Oxford, 1988, pp. 152\u20135; and Feis, pp. 256\u20137.\n\n25. Konoe Memoirs, fol. 33; The 'MAGIC' Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 3, Washington, 1977, appendix, pp. A38\u20139; Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1019\u201320; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 183\u20134; Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, p. 239 (for the shift in Roosevelt's position on return from Placentia Bay, on the advice of the State Department).\n\n26. Japan II, p. 565; also quoted in Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 93; Grew's subsequent dispatch is in FRUS, 1941, vol. 4, pp. 382\u20133. See also Joseph C. Grew, Ten Years in Japan, New York, 1944, pp. 416\u201321; Hull, vol. 2, p. 1025; Waldo H. Heinrichs, Jr., American Ambassador. Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition, Boston, 1966, pp. 309\u201312, 337\u201343; and Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 186\u20137.\n\n27. Ike, pp. 124\u20135.\n\n28. Konoe Memoirs, fol. 35.\n\n29. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940\u20131941, New York, 1953, pp. 700\u2013701; Oka, p. 141; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 185.\n\n30. Hull, vol. 2, p. 1024; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 701; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 185\u20138; Oka, pp. 141\u20132.\n\n31. Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 165, 169, 364\u20136 (appendix 6); Ike, pp. 135\u20136; Iriye, Origins, p. 159.\n\n32. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 365.\n\n33. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 366.\n\n34. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 169.\n\n35. Ike, pp. 129\u201333; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 267\u201374.\n\n36. Bix, p. 410.\n\n37. Sheffield University Library, Wolfson Microfilm 431, Diary of Marquis Kido Koichi, doc. no. 1632W (67), 5.9.41; Oka, pp. 145\u20136.\n\n38. Bix, pp. 412\u201313; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 174; Konoe Memoirs, fols. 40\u201341.\n\n39. Bix, p. 410. Bix argues that the Emperor faced 'the most important decision of his entire life', that he 'clearly had options at this moment', that a withdrawal from Indochina and loss of the chance of seizing the Dutch East Indies would have met with the approval of at least some of the navy's top leadership, and that, consequently, Hirohito freely and willingly chose the route to war.\n\n40. Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632W (68), 6.9.41; Bix, p. 413; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 98.\n\n41. The following (except where otherwise referenced) all from Ike, pp. 138\u201351.\n\n42. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 172.\n\n43. Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632W (68), 6.9.41; Konoe Memoirs, fol. 41; Bix, p. 414; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 176; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 99; Oka, pp. 146\u20137.\n\n44. Quoted Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 170\u201371.\n\n45. Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 103.\n\n46. Konoe Memoirs, fol. 42; Japan II, pp. 604\u20136; Grew, pp. 425\u20138 (6.9.41); Oka, pp. 148\u20139; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 100\u2013102 (partly on the basis of an interview with Konoe's (unnamed) mistress); Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1028\u201331; Heinrichs, American Ambassador, p. 346; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 716; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, pp. 185\u20136. David Bergamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, New York, 1971, vol. 2, p. 1019, has Baron Ito's daughter serving the food and drink. Feis, p. 271, refers to the 'daughter of the house'. Konoe recalled the talk lasting one and a half hours; Grew (p. 425) notes that 'the conversation lasted for three hours'. Hull was anxious that Grew maintained caution in his dealings with Japanese leaders. He cabled the ambassador on 9 September: 'While the [State] Department perceives no objections to your carrying on conversations paralleling those here with a view to obtaining further elucidation of the intent of the Japanese Government, it is felt that, as the subject is a matter in which the President has a close and active interest, any definitive discussions concerned with the reaching of an agreement on principle should continue to be conducted here' (FRUS, 1941, p. 434). For the 'Four Principles', see Hull, vol. 2, pp. 994\u20135.\n\n47. Konoe Memoirs, fol. 36; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 704\u20135; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 189, 194; Carr, p. 156.\n\n48. The 'MAGIC' Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 3, appendix, pp. A88\u201390; Iriye, Origins, p. 163; Ike, p. 169.\n\n49. Ike, pp. 170\u201371. Grew expressed his pessimism when he met Toyoda on 22 September (Grew, pp. 432\u20134).\n\n50. Iriye, Origins, p. 163.\n\n51. See Ike, pp. 155\u20136. The timing had been laid down in the 'Reference Materials for Answering Questions at the Imperial Conference on September 6 Regarding \"The Essentials for Carrying Out the Empire's Policies\"', prepared after consultation between the government and the Supreme Command (Ike, pp. 152\u201363).\n\n52. Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632W (71), 26.9.41; Oka, pp. 150\u20131; Ike, pp. 176\u20138; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 105; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 209.\n\n53. FRUS, 1941, pp. 494\u20137; Japan II, pp. 656\u201361; Hull, vol. 2, p. 1033; Konoe Memoirs, fol. 47; Heinrichs, American Ambassador, p. 350.\n\n54. Ike, pp. 179\u201380.\n\n55. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 210.\n\n56. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 213.\n\n57. Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 213\u201317; Iriye, Origins, pp. 164\u20135.\n\n58. Konoe Memoirs, fols. 49\u201350; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 222\u20135; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 109\u201311; Oka, pp. 154\u20136. And see Tojo's postwar testimony at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East on the meeting (differing in some detail): Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part III), Japanese Monographs, 147, Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, appendix 6 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/147\/147app06.html).\n\n59. Konoe Memoirs, fols. 50\u201351; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 111\u201312; Oka, pp. 155\u20136.\n\n60. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 227; Bix, p. 417; Oka, p. 156; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 112\u201313.\n\n61. Iriye, Origins, pp. 165\u20136.\n\n62. Oka, pp. 156\u20137.\n\n63. Konoe Memoirs, fols. 85\u20136.\n\n64. Konoe Memoirs, fols. 52\u20133; Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632W (79\u201382, quotation 80); Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 230\u201345; Butow, pp. 285\u2013301, 308; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 113\u201318; Bix, pp. 418\u201319; Oka, pp. 157\u20139; Feis, pp. 285\u20136.\n\n65. Takashi Ito, Tadamitsu Hirohashi and Norio Katashima (eds.), The Secret Documents of Prime Minister Tojo. Records of the Words and Deeds of General Hideki Tojo [in Japanese], Tokyo, n.d., p. 478.\n\n66. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 239.\n\n67. Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632W (81), 17.10.41; Butow, pp. 301\u20132; Feis, pp. 286\u20137; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 241, 243\u20134; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 118.\n\n68. Butow, pp. 302\u20135; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 246\u20137.\n\n69. Iriye, Origins, pp. 168\u201370.\n\n70. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 842\u20133; Carr, p. 161; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932\u20131945, New York, 1979, pp. 304\u20135.\n\n71. Hull, vol. 2, p. 1054. Ambassador Grew in Tokyo, on the other hand, was initially not unduly pessimistic. He was persuaded that Tojo could control the army and make it accept a settlement (Grew, p. 460 (20.10.41); Heinrichs, American Ambassador, p. 354). Nor was the State Department's estimate of the Tojo Cabinet, written on 18 October 1941 by Maxwell M. Hamilton, Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs, totally negative. 'It is not believed', Hamilton wrote, 'that the new cabinet will reject a negotiated solution of Japan's international relations, but at the same time will take every measure possible to insure that, if such negotiated solutions are not forthcoming or are not successful, the opportunity for a solution by force will not be lost through lack of preparation or deployment of forces' (FRUS, 1941, pp. 522\u20133). This was similar to the view which Grew came to advance (Grew, pp. 469\u201370 (3\u20134.11.41)), that Japan was obviously preparing 'to implement an alternative program in the event the peace program fails'.\n\n72. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 845\u20136 (memorandum of the Joint Board of the Army and Navy, 5.11.41). See also Carr, p. 161.\n\n73. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 249.\n\n74. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 247.\n\n75. Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 248\u20139.\n\n76. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 249.\n\n77. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 252.\n\n78. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 250.\n\n79. Ike, p. 195.\n\n80. Ike, p. 188.\n\n81. Ike, p. 191. This was prescient. The flaws in Japanese planning and the increasing gaps as the war lengthened between estimated and real availability of mat\u00e9riel and shipping are exposed in Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 267\u2013303.\n\n82. Ike, pp. 191\u20132, 195. Tojo testified after the war that it would have taken between four and seven years to produce the minimal requirement of synthetic oil. During this time, Japan would have had to rely upon her stock supplies, which could not have lasted for such a period (Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part III), Japanese Monographs, 147, appendix 7 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/147\/147app07.html)).\n\n83. Ike, p. 198.\n\n84. Ike, pp. 197\u20138.\n\n85. Ike, pp. 198\u20139.\n\n86. All the quotations from contributions to the Conference that follow, unless otherwise referenced, are from the text in Ike, pp. 199\u2013207.\n\n87. Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 255\u20138; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 124.\n\n88. Text in Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 368\u20139 (appendix 9).\n\n89. Text in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 370 (appendix 9); and Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 878.\n\n90. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 263\u20134.\n\n91. Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 264\u20135. Looking back from 1945, Togo\u2013defending his actions, but with some justice\u2013pointed to the impossible odds with which he had to contend in attempting at this late juncture to avoid war (Sheffield University Library, Translation of Japanese Documents [prepared for the Tokyo War Crimes Trial], Wolfson Microfilm 306, Togo Memoirs, April\u2013August 1945, fol. 1).\n\n92. Bix, p. 424.\n\n93. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 266; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 130.\n\n94. All the above quotations from contributions to the Conference, unless otherwise referenced, are from Ike, pp. 208\u201339.\n\n95. Iriye, Origins, pp. 177\u20138.\n\n96. Grew, pp. 468\u20139 (his report to Washington, 3.11.41; almost identical wording in his diary entry, 4.11.41); Japan II, pp. 703\u20134.\n\n97. Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 129, 136.\n\n98. Hull, vol. 2, p. 1062.\n\n99. Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 129\u201330.\n\n100. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 285; and see Bergamini, vol. 2, pp. 1020\u201322. Yamamoto\u2013ironically, an opponent of war against the United States\u2013had, in fact, conceived his brilliant plan of attack as early as November 1940 and had brought it to the attention of the Emperor, who was interested in it. In January 1941 Hirohito had ordered research on the plan to be undertaken, which concluded 'that the attack would be extremely hazardous but would have a reasonable chance of success' (Bergamini, vol. 2, pp. 954\u20135 and n. 1). Word must have leaked out (see Prange, p. 31), since Grew reported to Washington already on 27 January 1941: 'There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor' (Grew, p. 368). See also Hull, vol. 2, p. 984; FRUS, 1941, p. 17. For a pen-picture of Yamamoto, see Mark Weston, Giants of Japan. The Lives of Japan's Greatest Men and Women, New York\/Tokyo\/London, 1999, pp. 190\u2013200.\n\n101. Iriye, Origins, pp. 170\u201371.\n\n102. Quoted in Feis, p. 296; and (with slightly varied translation) Bergamini, vol. 2, p. 1041.\n\n103. Bix, p. 423; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 265.\n\n104. Bix, pp. 421\u20132.\n\n105. Examples in Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 132\u20135. The note to p. 133 indicates that there is no evidence of intentional mistranslation. See also Butow, p. 335 and n. 38, which indicates 'that the distortions did not essentially do violence to the reality of Japan's intentions'.\n\n106. Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1056\u20137, 1060.\n\n107. See Grew, pp. 468\u20139 (3.11.41) for the difference in tone from that of the State Department in Washington; and Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 310\u201311.\n\n108. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 855\u201366; Japan II, pp. 729\u201337; Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1058\u201362; Feis, pp. 303\u20135.\n\n109. Feis, pp. 307\u20138; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 863\u20134; Ike, p. 251 (Togo's report to the Liaison Conference of 20.11.41); Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1063\u20134; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 301\u20135.\n\n110. Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1069\u201371 (quotation p. 1070); and Butow, pp. 336\u20138. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 880, are critical of 'the depth of Mr. Hull's indignation over Japanese-sponsored suggestions which in many respects resembled ideas current in the State Department itself'. Spotswood (pp. 450\u201351) defends Hull's judgement, particularly in the light of the rapid growth of the numbers of Japanese troops in Indochina.\n\n111. FRUS, 1941, pp. 635\u20136 (final draft pp. 661\u20134); Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 881\u20132.\n\n112. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 872.\n\n113. Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1072\u20133.\n\n114. FRUS, 1941, pp. 640, 650\u201351, 655\u20136, 659\u201361, 666; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, pp. 209\u201311.\n\n115. The 'MAGIC' Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 4, Washington, 1978, appendix, p. A89. The President told his close advisers on 25 November that 'we were likely to be attacked perhaps next Monday [1 December], for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we should do'. A difficult issue, he felt, was 'how we should manoeuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves' (Yale University Library, Henry L. Stimson Diaries 1909\u20131945, Reel 7, entry for 25.11.41).\n\n116. FRUS, 1941, pp. 660\u201361; Stimson Diaries, Reel 7, entry for 26.11.41.\n\n117. FRUS, 1941, p. 665.\n\n118. Hull, vol. 2, p. 1081.\n\n119. Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1074\u20136, 1082; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 140\u20133; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 305\u20137, 309; Carr, p. 163; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, pp. 208\u201312; Stimson Diaries, Reel 7, entry for 27.11.41.\n\n120. Japan II, pp. 766\u201370; text also in Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 896\u20137; and Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part III), Japanese Monographs, 147, appendix 9 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/147\/147app09.html). They were far tougher than the proposals advanced six months earlier, on 21 June (see Japan II, pp. 483\u20135)\u2013themselves described as 'an uncompromising restatement of the principles of international relations so frequently enunciated by Secretary Hull' (Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 632).\n\n121. Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 313\u201315, 317\u201318; Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 893, 898; Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1081\u20134; Carr, pp. 163\u20134; Bix, p. 428.\n\n122. Quoted in Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 143.\n\n123. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 313.\n\n124. See Tojo's postwar testimony to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, where he stated the view at the time that the United States' proposal was an ultimatum, and that 'all were dumbfounded at the severity' of the demands (Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part IV), Japanese Monographs, 150, appendix 3 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/150\/150app03.html)). Togo, in a cable to Nomura and Kurusu on 28 November, spoke of 'this humiliating proposal', which had been 'quite unexpected and extremely regrettable' (The 'MAGIC' Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 4, pp. 84\u20136 and appendix, pp. A118). Nomura had, two days earlier, stated that he and Kurusu were 'dumbfounded' when Hull confronted them with the Ten Points (vol. 4, appendix, p. A102\u20133).\n\n125. Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 145.\n\n126. Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 315\u201317; Ike, pp. 256\u20137.\n\n127. Quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 320.\n\n128. Bix, p. 430; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 176\u20139; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 324\u20136.\n\n129. Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part IV), Japanese Monographs, 150, appendix 4 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/150\/150app04.html).\n\n130. Bix, pp. 430\u201331; Iriye, Origins, p. 182; Ike, pp. 262\u20133 (where the fleet departure time is mistakenly given as 6.00 p.m.); Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 332; Prange, p. 390; Bergamini, vol. 2, pp. 1057\u20139.\n\n131. Ike, p. 261 and n. 46; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 327; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 179.\n\n132. Quoted in Bix, pp. 430\u201331.\n\n133. Bix, p. 431.\n\n134. Ike, p. 271.\n\n135. Ike, p. 279.\n\n136. Ike, p. 282.\n\n137. Ike, pp. 282\u20133; Bix, p. 433.\n\n138. Butow, p. 363; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 182.\n\n139. Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 183; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 323.\n\n140. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 344; The 'MAGIC' Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 4, appendix, pp. A130\u201334.\n\n141. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 329.\n\n142. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 338.\n\n143. Robert E. Sherwood, The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, London, 1948, vol. 1, p. 430; also quoted in Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 344; Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 194.\n\n144. Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 193\u20134, 198\u20139; Bix, p. 436.\n\n145. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 344; Iriye, Origins, p. 183.\n\n146. A 'prophetic' survey undertaken the previous July had, in fact, raised the possibility of exactly such a carrier-led air attack, and pointed to the need to strengthen defences at Pearl Harbor (Prange, pp. 185\u20138). The subsequently devised Joint Army-Navy Hawaiian Defense Plan for the protection of Pearl Harbor against a surprise attack from the air was, however, a very good one (Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 195). No one seemed to recall the warning passed on by Grew the previous January (Grew, p. 368).\n\n147. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 926\u20137 (and p. 911); Iriye, Origins, p. 183; Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 345; Heinrichs, Threshold of War, p. 216.\n\n148. Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 201\u20132; Morley, The Final Confrontation, pp. 334\u20135, 344\u20135.\n\n149. Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 338.\n\n150. I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War, Oxford\/New York, 1995, p. 872; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 221, 235; Dallek, p. 311; Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms. A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 260\u201361.\n\n151. Letter to Sasakawa Ryochi, 24 January [1941], appended as a last folio to the Konoe Memoirs.\n\n152. It was such that conspiracy theories\u2013essentially, that the American administration knew of the forthcoming attack, but deliberately avoided proper security precautions and let the devastating assault take place as the event necessary to justify the United States entering the war\u2013rapidly surfaced and have never entirely been put to rest. They were always wildly far-fetched, and the thorough analyses by Prange of the military build-up to Pearl Harbor on both the American and Japanese sides (see here particularly the remarks in his concluding chapter, pp. 725\u201338), and of American intelligence by Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor. Warning and Decision, Stanford, Calif., 1962, esp. pp. 382\u201396, have pointed unmistakably to a catalogue of errors and misjudgements, not Machiavellian plotting, behind the extraordinary events. This is underpinned by the more recent study of Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan. Britain, America and the Politics of Secret Service, Cambridge, 2000. This dispatches (pp. 68\u201384) a further strand of conspiracy theory: that Churchill received clear intelligence about Pearl Harbor, but deliberately withheld it from Roosevelt.\n\n153. Toland, The Rising Sun, p. 227. When Kido, in the royal palace, heard the 'great news', he 'felt that the Gods had come to our aid' (Kido Diary, doc. no. 1632W (90), 8.12.41).\n\n154. Bix, pp. 436\u20137; text of the Imperial Rescript on the Declaration of War, in Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part IV), Japanese Monographs, 150, appendix 7 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/150\/150app07.html).\n\n155. Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1095\u20137 (quotation p. 1096); Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 338; The 'MAGIC' Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 4, p. 101; Toland, The Rising Sun, pp. 224\u20135. Nomura's description is in Political Strategy Prior to the Outbreak of War (Part IV), Japanese Monographs, 150, appendix 6 (http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/pha\/monos\/150\/150app06.html).\n\n156. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Rendezvous with Destiny, Boston, 1990, p. 407; Bergamini, vol. 2, p. 1096; Carr, p. 166.\n\n157. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, pp. 938\u20139.\n\n158. Nazli Choucri, Robert C. North and Susumu Yamakage, The Challenge of Japan before World War II and After, London\/New York, 1992, pp. 37\u20138, 40\u201343, 118\u201320, 132\u20137.\n\n159. See Paul W. Schroeder, The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations 1941, Ithaca, NY, 1958, pp. 203\u20138. Carr, p. 157, poses the same question, to which he then offers a cogent answer: 'No American president, especially one as sensitive to public opinion as Roosevelt, could possibly have carried through a volte-face on this scale in the teeth of an outraged public...Also, any hint of surrender to Japan would have had a demoralizing effect on the enemies of the Axis.'\n\n160. See on this the pertinent comments of Feis, pp. 274\u20135, that Konoe 'was a prisoner, willing or unwilling, of the terms precisely prescribed in conferences over which he presided', and 'it is unlikely that he could have got around them or that he would have in some desperate act discarded them. The whole of his political career speaks to the contrary.'\n\n161. See, for instance, Toland, The Rising Sun, notes to pp. 141 and 145; and Morley, The Final Confrontation, p. 319.\n\n162. See Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War, p. 721.\n\n163. See Iriye, Origins, pp. 178\u20139.\n\nCHAPTER 9. BERLIN, AUTUMN 1941\n\n1. Sebastian Haffner, Von Bismarck zu Hitler. Ein R\u00fcckblick, paperback edn., Munich, 1989, p. 293. See also Enrico Syring, 'Hitlers Kriegserkl\u00e4rung an Amerika vom 11. Dezember 1941', in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Zweite Weltkrieg. Analysen, Grundz\u00fcge, Forschungsbilanz, Munich\/Zurich, 1989, p. 683.\n\n2. Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932\u20131945, Wiesbaden, 1973, p. 1809.\n\n3. Text in Domarus, p. 1808 n. 543; and DGFP, 13, doc. 577, pp. 1004\u20135; see also Paul Schmidt, Statist auf diplomatischer B\u00fchne 1923\u201345. Erlebnisse des Chefdolmetschers im Ausw\u00e4rtigen Amt mit den Staatsm\u00e4nnern Europas, Bonn, 1953, p. 554.\n\n4. Meldungen aus dem Reich. Auswahl aus den geheimen Lageberichten des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1939\u20131944, ed. Heinz Boberach, Neuwied\/Berlin, 1965, p. 198.\n\n5. Harry W. Flannery, Assignment to Berlin, London, 1942, p. 291.\n\n6. Mein Tagebuch. Geschichten vom \u00dcberleben 1939\u20131947, ed. Heinrich Breloer, Cologne, 1984, p. 64.\n\n7. 'Inside Germany Report' for December 1941, cited in Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich. Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung 1933\u20131945, Stuttgart, 1997, p. 321.\n\n8. Wilm Hosenfeld, 'Ich versuche jeden zu retten'. Das Leben eines deutschen Offiziers in Briefen und Tageb\u00fcchern, ed. Thomas Vogel, Munich, 2004, p. 561.\n\n9. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fr\u00f6hlich, part II, vol. 2, Munich, 1996, p. 453 (8.12.41).\n\n10. Nicolaus von Below, Als Hitlers Adjutant 1937\u20131945, Mainz, 1980, p. 296.\n\n11. Karl D\u00f6nitz, Memoirs. Ten Years and Twenty Days, New York, 1997, p. 195.\n\n12. Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler's Headquarters 1939\u201345, Presidio edn., Novato, Calif., n.d., p. 208.\n\n13. Warlimont, p. 203.\n\n14. Warlimont, p. 50.\n\n15. The Ribbentrop Memoirs, London, 1954, p. 160.\n\n16. Ernst von Weizs\u00e4cker, Erinnerungen, Munich\/Leipzig\/Freiburg, 1950, p. 328.\n\n17. Even as late as 24 February 1945, Hitler still spoke of the 'vast territory' of the United States, 'ample to absorb the energies of all their people', as the model which he hoped to emulate for Germany in Europe, 'to ensure for her complete economic independence inside a territory of a size compatible with her population', adding that 'a great people has need of broad acres' (The Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler\u2013Bormann Documents, February\u2013April 1945, ed. Fran\u00e7ois Genoud, London, 1961, p. 88). For textual problems with this source, see Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945. Nemesis, London, 2000, n. 121, pp. 1024\u20135.\n\n18. Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen. Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, ed. Institut f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, vol. 3, part 1, Munich, 1994, p. 161 (18.10.28).\n\n19. Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, vol. 4, part 1, p. 417 (25.6.31).\n\n20. The preceding paragraph draws on the informative analysis in Gassert, pp. 87\u2013103.\n\n21. Gassert, pp. 34\u20136.\n\n22. Eberhard J\u00e4ckel and Axel Kuhn (eds.), Hitler. S\u00e4mtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905\u20131924, Stuttgart, 1980, pp. 96\u20137, 99.\n\n23. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 876\u2013880th printing, Munich, 1943, pp. 722\u20133; trans. Ralph Mannheim with an Introduction by D. C. Watt, paperback edn., London, 1973, pp. 582\u20133.\n\n24. Dietrich Aigner, 'Hitler und die Weltherrschaft', in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Nationalsozialistische Au\u00dfenpolitik, Darmstadt, 1978, p. 62.\n\n25. See Gassert, pp. 95\u20136; and Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany. Diplomatic Revolution in Europe 1933\u201336, Chicago\/London, 1970, p. 21; Gerhard L. Weinberg, 'Hitler's Image of the United States', American Historical Review, 69 (1964), p. 1009.\n\n26. Hitler's Second Book. The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, New York, 2003, p. 112.\n\n27. Hitler's Second Book, pp. 116\u201317.\n\n28. Hitler's alleged remarks about the United States in tainted and discredited sources, Edouard Calic, Unmasked. Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, London, 1971, and Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, London, 1939, cannot be regarded as authentic statements.\n\n29. Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler. The Missing Years, paperback edn., New York, 1994, p. 188.\n\n30. Gassert, pp. 93\u20134; Andreas Hillgruber, 'Der Faktor Amerika in Hitlers Strategie 1938\u20131941', Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Beilage zur Wochenzeitung 'Das Parlament', 11 May 1966, p. 4; Weinberg, 'Hitler's Image', pp. 1010\u201312.\n\n31. Weinberg, Diplomatic Revolution, pp. 133\u201358, esp. pp. 145, 149, 157.\n\n32. See Gassert, pp. 183\u2013246, for an extensive survey of these features of German depictions of the United States.\n\n33. Akten der Reichskanzlei. Die Regierung Hitler, ed. Karl-Heinz Minuth, vol. 1, Boppard am Rhein, 1983, p. 317; and see Gassert, pp. 183\u20134.\n\n34. IMT, vol. 25, pp. 402\u201313, doc. 386-PS; trans. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919\u20131945. A Documentary Reader, vol. 3, Exeter, 1988, pp. 680\u201387.\n\n35. DGFP, 1, doc. 423, p. 656; Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 7. For the 'quarantine speech', chiefly targeting Japan, see Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932\u20131945, New York, 1979, p. 148.\n\n36. Gassert, pp. 246\u201359.\n\n37. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Rendezvous with Destiny, Boston, 1990, p. 314; Gassert, pp. 258\u20139.\n\n38. Saul Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall. Hitler and the United States, 1939\u20131941, New York, 1967, pp. 8\u20139.\n\n39. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London, 2006, p. 283.\n\n40. Wilhelm Treue (ed.), 'Rede Hitlers vor der deutschen Presse (10. November 1938)', Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 6 (1958), p. 191.\n\n41. DGFP, 4, doc. 158, p. 192; Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 9.\n\n42. Domarus, p. 1058; trans. Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, p. 1049. And see Tooze, pp. 283\u20134.\n\n43. See Dallek, p. 181 for Roosevelt's remarks, made in private, but leaked to the press; and Gassert, p. 261 for the German propaganda response.\n\n44. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937\u20131940, New York, 1952, pp. 84\u20135; Cordell Hull The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, New York, 1948, vol. 1, p. 621.\n\n45. Below, p. 161.\n\n46. Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 87.\n\n47. Domarus, pp. 1166\u201379, for the parts of the speech given over to the 'answer' to Roosevelt.\n\n48. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fr\u00f6hlich, part I, vol. 6, Munich, 1998, p. 332 (29.4.39). See Gassert, pp. 263\u20136 for the positive impact of the speech within Germany.\n\n49. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary, 1934\u20131941, paperback edn., London, 1970, p. 133. Shirer was correct in presuming that Hitler's comments would go down well with isolationists. See Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 89.\n\n50. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, pp. 50\u201351; Gassert, pp. 271\u20137.\n\n51. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, pp. 61, 65.\n\n52. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, 1965, p. 108E; Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 8.\n\n53. DGFP, 8, doc. 172, p. 180 (1.10.39); doc. 405, pp. 470\u201371 (1.12.39); Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 9.\n\n54. DGFP, 7, doc. 378, p. 377 (28.8.39); Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 9.\n\n55. Below, p. 200.\n\n56. Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch. T\u00e4gliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939\u20131942, vol. 1: Vom Polenfeldzug bis zum Ende der Westoffensive (14.8.1939\u201330.6.1940), ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Stuttgart, 1962, pp. 86\u201390.\n\n57. DGFP, 9, doc. 192, p. 277; Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 9.\n\n58. Quoted in Langer and Gleason, Challenge, p. 516.\n\n59. DGFP, 10, doc. 199, pp. 259\u201360; Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 12.\n\n60. Wolfgang Michalka, 'From the Anti-Comintern Pact to the Euro-Asiatic Bloc. Ribbentrop's Alternative Concept of Hitler's Foreign Policy Programme', in H. W. Koch (ed.), Aspects of the Third Reich, London, 1985, pp. 281\u20132.\n\n61. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 125.\n\n62. Gassert, p. 281.\n\n63. Gassert, pp. 284\u20136.\n\n64. Fuehrer Conferences on Naval Affairs 1939\u20131945, London, 1990, p. 162.\n\n65. DGFP, 11, doc. 633, pp. 1061\u20132.\n\n66. Friedl\u00e4nder, p. 172.\n\n67. Domarus, p. 1661.\n\n68. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, pp. 257\u20138; also quoted in Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie. Politik und Kriegf\u00fchrung 1940\u20131941, 3rd edn., Bonn, 1993, p. 364.\n\n69. Fuehrer Conferences, p. 172.\n\n70. Quoted in Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 175.\n\n71. Quoted in Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 175 n. 1.\n\n72. Heeresadjutant bei Hitler 1938\u20131943. Aufzeichnungen des Majors Engel, ed. Hildegard von Kotze, Stuttgart, 1974, p. 99 (24.3.41).\n\n73. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 203.\n\n74. Fuehrer Conferences, p. 199 (22.5.41); Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, pp. 205\u20138; Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt. The Undeclared Naval War, New York, 1979, pp. 122\u20139.\n\n75. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 129\u201332, 138\u201344.\n\n76. Fuehrer Conferences, p. 218 (6.6.41).\n\n77. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 148\u20139.\n\n78. Fuehrer Conferences, pp. 219\u201320 (21.6.41).\n\n79. Hitlers Weisungen f\u00fcr die Kriegf\u00fchrung. Dokumente des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht, ed. Walther Hubatsch, paperback edn., Munich, 1965, p. 121.\n\n80. DGFP, 12, doc. 78, pp. 144\u20135.\n\n81. See Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, pp. 196, 202.\n\n82. DGFP, 12, doc. 281, p. 382.\n\n83. DGFP, 12, doc. 222, pp. 388\u201392.\n\n84. DGFP, 12, doc. 266, pp. 455\u20136.\n\n85. DGFP, 12, doc. 496, pp. 777\u201380; Ciano's Diary 1939\u20131943, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge, London, 1947, p. 341 (12.5.41).\n\n86. DGFP, 12, doc. 596, pp. 967\u201370.\n\n87. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1, p. 996.\n\n88. Quoted in Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 255.\n\n89. Fuehrer Conferences, p. 221 (9.7.41).\n\n90. Fuehrer Conferences, p. 222 (25.7.41).\n\n91. Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch. T\u00e4gliche Aufzeichnungen des Chefs des Generalstabes des Heeres 1939\u20131942, vol. 3: Der Ru\u00dflandfeldzug bis zum Marsch auf Stalingrad (22.6.1941\u201324.9.1942), ed. Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, Stuttgart, 1964, p. 38.\n\n92. Hitlers Weisungen, pp. 159\u201362.\n\n93. Fuehrer Conferences, p. 199; Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 18.\n\n94. See Eberhard J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, Hanover\/London, 1984, p. 72.\n\n95. Staatsm\u00e4nner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen \u00fcber die Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes 1939\u20131941, ed. Andreas Hillgruber, paperback edn., Munich, 1969, pp. 292\u2013303; and see Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 17.\n\n96. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 1, Munich, 1996, p. 263 (19.8.41).\n\n97. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 3, p. 170 (11 Aug. 1941); trans. The Halder War Diary, 1939\u20131942, ed. Charles Burdick and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, London, 1988, p. 506.\n\n98. See Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, London, 2000, pp. 407\u201318.\n\n99. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 1, pp. 236\u20137 (15.8.41). And for German propaganda about the Atlantic Charter, see Friedl\u00e4nder, pp. 268\u20139; Gassert, pp. 312\u201313.\n\n100. DGFP, 13, doc. 209, p. 323; Friedl\u00e4nder, p. 267.\n\n101. David Kahn, Hitler's Spies. German Military Intelligence in World War II, New York, 2000, pp. 80\u201383.\n\n102. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, pp. 266\u20137, citing B\u00f6tticher's telegram of 14 August 1941.\n\n103. For Churchill's critics at this point, see John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory. A Political Biography, London, 1993, pp. 448\u20139.\n\n104. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 1, p. 263 (19.8.41).\n\n105. Fuehrer Conferences, pp. 228\u20139 (22.8.41).\n\n106. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, pp. 275\u201381.\n\n107. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 1, pp. 367\u20138, 370\u201371, 375\u20136 (6\u20138.9.41), quotation p. 376.\n\n108. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 1, pp. 407\u20138 (13.9.41).\n\n109. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 1, p. 417 (14.9.41).\n\n110. Fuehrer Conferences, pp. 231\u20133 (17.9.41). Ernst von Weizs\u00e4cker, State Secretary in the Foreign Office, had noted in his diary on 19 September the utmost caution to be exercised towards the United States, even though Roosevelt had eight days earlier declared that American ships would shoot on sight (Die Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere 1933\u20131950, ed. Leonidas E. Hill, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, p. 270).\n\n111. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 3, p. 219 (10.9.41); J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 75; Die Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere, p. 268 (6.9.41).\n\n112. DGFP, 13, doc. 316, p. 505; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 75.\n\n113. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 280.\n\n114. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, Munich, 1966, pp. 136, 149 (18, 21. 10.41), quotation p. 136.\n\n115. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, pp. 140, 145 (19\u201320.10.41); Bailey and Ryan, p. 202.\n\n116. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, pp. 216 (quotation), 223 (1\u20132.11.41).\n\n117. Domarus, p. 1778.\n\n118. Fuehrer Conferences, p. 239 (13.11.41); see also Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 294.\n\n119. William Carr, Poland to Pearl Harbor. The Making of the Second World War, London, 1985, p. 143.\n\n120. Dr Henry Picker, Hitlers Tischgespr\u00e4che im F\u00fchrerhauptquartier 1941\u20131942, ed. Percy Ernst Schramm, Stuttgart, 1963, p. 145 (10.9.41); Staatsm\u00e4nner, p. 319 (conversation with Ciano, 25.10.41); Hillgruber, 'Amerika', pp. 4, 18.\n\n121. DieWeizs\u00e4cker-Papiere, p. 274 (21.10.41); Weizs\u00e4cker, Erinnerungen, p. 326.\n\n122. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 180 (26.10.41).\n\n123. DGFP, 13, doc. 434, p. 717; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 75.\n\n124. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 240 (6.11.41).\n\n125. J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 75. See also DGFP, 13, p. 745 n. 3.\n\n126. DGFP, 13, doc. 480, p. 799; cited also in J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 76, with slightly varying translation; see also Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 306; and Gerhard Krebs, 'Deutschland und Pearl Harbor', Historische Zeitschrift, 253 (1991), pp. 341\u20132. Krebs (pp. 327\u201347) offers a thorough account of the Japanese efforts to secure a guarantee of German assistance.\n\n127. DGFP, 13, doc. 487, pp. 806\u20137; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 76; Friedl\u00e4nder, p. 306; Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich. Deutsche Au\u00dfenpolitik von Bismarck bis Hitler, Stuttgart, 1995, pp. 762\u20133. Unsurprisingly, Ott interpreted Ribbentrop's answer as approval to support for Japan in circumstances not covered by the Tripartite Pact, namely Japanese aggression. This prompted great relief in the Japanese leadership (Krebs, p. 342).\n\n128. DGFP, 13, doc. 492, p. 813; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 77.\n\n129. Staatsm\u00e4nner, pp. 256\u20137 (4.4.41).\n\n130. Nobutaka Ike (ed.), Japan's Decision for War. Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences, Stanford, Calif., 1967, pp. 241\u20132 (12.11.41).\n\n131. Die Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere, p. 277 (23.11.41).\n\n132. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 308 (18.11.41).\n\n133. Possibly preparation for Hitler's involvement for three days, from 27 to 29 November, in a series of talks with foreign dignitories in Berlin to celebrate the extension of the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 delayed matters. See Milan Hauner, Hitler. A Chronology of his Life and Time, 2nd edn., Basingstoke\/New York, 2005, p. 171.\n\n134. DGFP, 13, doc. 506, pp. 847\u20138; Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop, paperback edn., London, 1994, p. 346.\n\n135. The 'MAGIC' Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 4, Washington, 1978, appendix, p. A383; DGFP, 13, doc. 512, p. 870, n. 4; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 79. See Krebs, pp. 346\u20137, and Syring, pp. 688\u20139, for the question of the authenticity of the evidence on Hitler's quoted words. Krebs, p. 369, cites Oshima's telegram of 29 November to Tokyo as stating: 'I have found to be confirmed that he [Hitler] will support Japan with all his might if a conflict should arise in Japanese-American relations.'\n\n136. IMT, vol. 31, doc. 2898-PS, p. 268. Friedl\u00e4nder, p. 306, mistakenly gives the date as 10 November, and places Ott's conversation with Tojo.\n\n137. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, United States Government, vol. 6, Washington, 1946, doc. 3598-PS; also quoted in John Toland, Adolf Hitler, London, 1977, p. 694.\n\n138. The 'MAGIC' Background of Pearl Harbor, vol. 4, appendix, pp. A387\u20138; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 80. See also Carl Boyd, Hitler's Japanese Confidant. General Oshima Hiroshi and MAGIC Intelligence, 1941\u20131945, Lawrence, Kan., 1992, p. 36. Syring, p. 689 (and see p. 695 n. 57), leaves open the question, disputed by historians, whether the date was 1 or 2 December. Little hinges on the point.\n\n139. Krebs, pp. 352\u20133; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, pp. 80\u201381; Bloch, p. 346.\n\n140. Ciano's Diary, pp. 405\u20136 (3, 5.12.41).\n\n141. DGFP, 13, doc. 546, pp. 958\u20139; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 81; Krebs, pp. 352\u20133.\n\n142. Die Weizsacker-Papiere, p. 279 (6.12.41).\n\n143. Weizs\u00e4cker, Erinnerungen, p. 327; Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 468 (10.12.41).\n\n144. Die Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere, pp. 278\u20139 (6.12.41).\n\n145. Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 3, p. 332 (7.12.41); trans. Halder War Diary, p. 582.\n\n146. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 439 (6.12.41).\n\n147. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 307.\n\n148. Weizs\u00e4cker, Erinnerungen, p. 328. Jodl's own surprise was, he thought, shared by Hitler (IMT, vol. 15, p. 397).\n\n149. Schmidt, p. 553.\n\n150. Ciano's Diary, p. 407 (8.12.41).\n\n151. Die Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere, pp. 279\u201380 (8.12.41).\n\n152. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 453 (8.12.41).\n\n153. Institut f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, Munich, ED 100, Diary of Walther Hewel (8.12.41); also quoted in David Irving, Hitler's War, London, 1977, p. 352.\n\n154. Franz von Papen, Memoirs, London, 1952, p. 484.\n\n155. Generalfeldmarschall Keitel: Verbrecher oder Offizier? Erinnerungen, Briefe, Dokumente des Chefs OKW, ed. Walter G\u00f6rlitz, G\u00f6ttingen, 1961, p. 285. Otto Dietrich, 12 Jahre mit Hitler, Munich, 1955, p. 85, also recalled the immediate change in Hitler's demeanour when given the news of Pearl Harbor.\n\n156. Warlimont, pp. 207\u20138.\n\n157. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, pp. 469 (10.12.41).\n\n158. Below, p. 296.\n\n159. Unpublished notes and tape-recording of an interview of Wolfgang Brocke by Hans Mommsen, 25.4.97. I am most grateful to Professor Mommsen for access to this material.\n\n160. Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, p. 285.\n\n161. Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms. A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994, p. 262; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 82; Friedl\u00e4nder, p. 308.\n\n162. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, pp. 464\u20135 (10.12.41).\n\n163. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Washington, 1948, supplement B, p. 1199; with slightly different wording, also in IMT, vol. 10, p. 298; and The Ribbentrop Memoirs, p. 160.\n\n164. See Domarus, pp. 1806\u20137.\n\n165. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 494 (13.12.41).\n\n166. Domarus, p. 1807.\n\n167. Friedl\u00e4nder, Prelude to Downfall, p. 308.\n\n168. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 476 (11.12.41).\n\n169. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 468 (10.12.41).\n\n170. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, supplement B, p. 1199; the same sentiments in slightly different wording in The Ribbentrop Memoirs, p. 160.\n\n171. The Ribbentrop Memoirs, pp. 160, 167.\n\n172. DGFP, 13, doc. 569, p. 994; Friedl\u00e4nder, p. 308.\n\n173. DGFP, 13, doc. 562, p. 982; J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 82.\n\n174. Domarus, pp. 1809\u201310.\n\n175. A point made by J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 86.\n\n176. Syring, p. 691.\n\n177. J\u00e4ckel, Hitler in History, p. 83; Syring, p. 688.\n\n178. See Syring, p. 692; Gassert, p. 317.\n\n179. Weizs\u00e4cker, Erinnerungen, p. 328.\n\n180. Die Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere, p. 280 (10.12.41).\n\n181. See Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, pp. 433, 439 (5\u20136.12.41).\n\n182. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 468 (10.12.41).\n\n183. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie, p. 554.\n\n184. D\u00f6nitz, pp. 202\u20136. Even so, D\u00f6nitz lamented how few U-boats were placed at his disposal as the needs of submarine warfare in the Mediterranean and to protect Norway made competing claims.\n\n185. Kahn, pp. 83\u20134.\n\n186. See Hitler's comments to Oshima on 3 Jan. 1942, that if Japan and Germany act together so that 'England loses India, an entire world collapses. India is the heart of the English Empire' (quoted in Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich, p. 764).\n\n187. Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich, p. 762.\n\n188. Hull, vol. 2, pp. 1099\u2013100.\n\n189. Freidel, p. 408.\n\n190. Dallek, p. 312.\n\n191. Freidel, p. 407.\n\n192. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear. The American People in Depression and War, 1929\u20131945, New York\/Oxford, 1999, pp. 565\u20139.\n\n193. Weinberg, A World at Arms, p. 330.\n\n194. This differs from the implication in Kennedy, p. 524, that 'in the absence of such a legal declaration, Roosevelt might well have found it impossible to resist demands to place the maximum American effort in the Pacific, against the formally recognized Japanese enemy, rather than in the Atlantic, in a nondeclared war against the Germans'.\n\n195. Kennedy, p. 543; I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Second World War, Oxford\/New York, 1995, p. 860.\n\n196. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, London, 1995, p. 15, writes that 'on the face of things, no rational man in early 1942 would have guessed at the eventual outcome of the war'. 'On the face of things', that may have been the case. But Churchill, to go from his later account, recognized that, after Pearl Harbor and with the United States drawn into the conflict, 'we had won the war...Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force' (Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3: The Grand Alliance, London, 1950, p. 539).\n\n197. Staatsm\u00e4nner, p. 329 (Hitler's meeting with the Danish Foreign Minister, Erik Scavenius, 27.11.41). He repeated similar sentiments to his own entourage on 27.1.42 (Picker, p. 171). Both are quoted by Hillgruber, 'Amerika', p. 20.\n\nCHAPTER 10. BERLIN\/EAST PRUSSIA, SUMMER\u2013AUTUMN 1941\n\n1. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fr\u00f6hlich, part II, vol. 2, Munich, 1996, pp. 498\u20139 (13.12.41).\n\n2. Helmut Krausnick and Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD 1938\u20131942, Stuttgart, 1981, p. 619.\n\n3. Dimension des V\u00f6lkermords. Die Zahl der j\u00fcdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Wolfgang Benz, Munich, 1991, p. 17.\n\n4. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham (eds.), Nazism 1919\u20131945. A Documentary Reader, vol. 3, Exeter, 1988, p. 1130; Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting. Wannsee and the Final Solution, London, 2002, pp. 111\u201312. The target figure included Jews in England, as well as in neutral countries such as Switzerland, Turkey, Sweden, Ireland and Spain.\n\n5. Donald Bloxham, 'The Armenian Genocide of 1915\u201316. Cumulative Radicalization and the Development of a Destruction Policy', Past and Present, 181 (2003), pp. 141\u20133, 146, 186\u201391; Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred. Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, Mass.\/London, 2001, pp. 18\u201336.\n\n6. Also pointed out by Robert S. Wistrich, Hitler and the Holocaust, New York, 2001, p. 238.\n\n7. Naimark, p. 35.\n\n8. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 140, 145; Bloxham, p. 152. And see Naimark, pp. 28\u201330.\n\n9. Max Domarus (ed.), Hitler. Reden und Proklamationen 1932\u20131945, Wiesbaden, 1973, p. 1058; trans. Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, p. 1049.\n\n10. Werner Maser (ed.), Hitlers Briefe und Notizen. Sein Weltbild in hand-schriftlichen Dokumenten, D\u00fcsseldorf, 1973, pp. 360\u201361; trans. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, United States Government, Washington, 1946\u20138, vol. 6, p. 260.\n\n11. Eberhard J\u00e4ckel and Axel Kuhn (eds.), Hitler. S\u00e4mtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905\u20131924, Stuttgart, 1980, pp. 89\u201390; trans. Noakes and Pridham, vol. 1, Exeter, 1983, pp. 12\u201314.\n\n12. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 876\u2013880th reprint, Munich, 1943, p. 772; trans. Ralph Mannheim, Hitler's Mein Kampf, with an Introduction by D. C. Watt, London, 1973, p. 620.\n\n13. IMT, vol. 28, pp. 538\u20139.\n\n14. On the development of Eichmann's career, see David Cesarani, Eichmann. His Life and Crimes, London, 2004, chs. 1\u20133.\n\n15. See, especially, Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das F\u00fchrungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes, Hamburg, 2002, specifically on career opportunities, pp. 163\u201389.\n\n16. Otto Dov Kulka, 'Die deutsche Geschichtsschreibung \u00fcber den Nationalsozialismus und die \"Endl\u00f6sung\". Tendenzen und Entwicklungsphasen 1924\u20131984', Historische Zeitschrift, 240 (1985), pp. 628\u20139; and Otto Dov Kulka, 'Critique of Judaism in European Thought. On the Historical Meaning of Modern Antisemitism', Jerusalem Quarterly, 52 (1989), pp. 128\u20139. See also Saul Friedl\u00e4nder. Nazi Germany and the Jews. The Years of Persecution, 1933\u201339, London, 1977, pp. 84, 87\u201390, for the notion of 'redemptive antisemitism'.\n\n17. IMT, vol. 29, pp. 145\u20136; trans. Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, pp. 1199\u20131200.\n\n18. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 3, Munich, 1994, p. 561 (27.3.42).\n\n19. This is not, however, to support the controversial claims of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York, 1996, p. 77, emphasizing Germany's specific path to genocide by asserting that 'eliminationist antisemitism' had throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries been 'extremely widespread in all social classes and sectors of German society, for it was deeply embedded in German cultural and political life and conversation, as well as integrated into the moral structure of society'.\n\n20. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889\u20131936. Hubris, London, 1998, pp. 33\u20135.\n\n21. L\u00e9on Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, vol. 4: Suicidal Europe, 1870\u20131933, Oxford, 1977, pp. 52\u20137.\n\n22. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866\u20131918, vol. 2: Machtstaat vor der Demokratie, Munich, 1992, p. 295.\n\n23. Nipperdey, pp. 299, 305; George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology. Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, London, 1966, pp. 93\u20137, 112. Hitler's claim to have studied Fritsch was made in a letter he wrote to the antisemitic author on 28 November 1930. He said he was convinced that Fritsch's book had paved the way for the Nazi antisemitic movement (Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen. Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, ed. Institut f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, vol. 4, part 1, Munich\/London\/New York\/Paris, 1994, p. 133).\n\n24. See Nipperdey, pp. 290, 303, and his balanced account, pp. 289\u2013311.\n\n25. J\u00e4ckel and Kuhn, p. 89.\n\n26. Otto Dov Kulka, 'Richard Wagner und die Anf\u00e4nge des modernen Antisemitismus', Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts, 4 (1961), pp. 281\u2013300, locates an early manifestation of messianic, redemptive antisemitism as the basis of a revolutionary ideology in Wagner's writings.\n\n27. Ulrich Herbert, ' \"Generation der Sachlichkeit\". Die v\u00f6lkische Studentenbewegung der fr\u00fchen zwanziger Jahre in Deutschland', in Werner Johe and Uwe Lohalm (eds.), Zivilisation und Barbarei, Hamburg, 1991, pp. 115\u201344; and, extensively, in Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten.\n\n28. Peter Gay, 'In Deutschland zu Hause...Die Juden der Weimarer Zeit', in Arnold Paucker (ed.), Die Juden im Nationalsozialistischen Deutschland 1933\u20131943, T\u00fcbingen, 1986, pp. 31\u201343.\n\n29. Adolf Hitler. Monologe im F\u00fchrerhauptquartier, ed. Werner Jochmann, Hamburg, 1980, p. 108.\n\n30. See Martin Broszat, 'Soziale Motivation und F\u00fchrer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus', Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 18 (1970), p. 403.\n\n31. For the term, see Kershaw, Hitler, 1889\u20131936, pp. 529\u201330.\n\n32. See Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz. Nazi Policy toward German Jews 1933\u20131939, Urbana, Ill., 1970.\n\n33. Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard J\u00e4ckel (eds.), Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933\u20131945, D\u00fcsseldorf, 2004, pp. 372\u20133 (from the SD's report on German Jewry for 1938).\n\n34. Michael Wildt, Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935 bis 1938. Eine Dokumentation, Munich, 1995, pp. 32\u20133.\n\n35. Avraham Barkai, Vom Boykott zur 'Entjudung'. Der wirtschaftliche Existenzkampf der Juden im Dritten Reich 1933\u20131943, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, p. 156.\n\n36. Peter Longerich (ed.), Die Ermordung der europ\u00e4ischen Juden. Eine umfassende Dokumentation des Holocaust 1941\u20131945, Munich\/Zurich, 1989, p. 45; Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, p. 566.\n\n37. See the reports from the regime's own agencies in Kulka and J\u00e4ckel, pp. 304\u201378; a thorough analysis has been conducted by Martin Korb, 'Deutsche Reaktionen auf die Novemberpogrome im Spiegel amtlicher Berichte', unpubl. Magisterarbeit, Technische Universit\u00e4t Berlin, 2004.\n\n38. Kulka and J\u00e4ckel, pp. 367\u20138, 372\u20133.\n\n39. Gl\u00f3wna Komisa Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce [Archive of the Central Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland, Ministry of Justice, Poland], Process Artura Greisera, vol. 27, fol. 167.\n\n40. Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by J\u00fcrgen Matth\u00e4us, The Origins of the Final Solution. The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939\u2013March 1942, Lincoln, Nebr., 2004, pp. 26\u20137.\n\n41. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 36\u201343.\n\n42. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 47.\n\n43. Quoted in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 45.\n\n44. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 62.\n\n45. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 71.\n\n46. Magnus Brechten, 'Madagaskar f\u00fcr die Juden'. Antisemitische Idee und politische Praxis 1885\u20131945, Munich, 1997, p. 16.\n\n47. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 57.\n\n48. Helmut Krausnick, 'Denkschrift Himmlers \u00fcber die Behandlung der Fremdv\u00f6lkischen im Osten (Mai 1940)', Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 5 (1957), p. 197; trans. Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, p. 932.\n\n49. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 72.\n\n50. Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen 1939\u20131945, ed. Werner Pr\u00e4g and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Stuttgart, 1975, p. 252; and quoted in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 84.\n\n51. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 83.\n\n52. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 45.\n\n53. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 88.\n\n54. Helmut Heiber, 'Der Generalplan Ost', Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 6 (1958), pp. 281\u2013325.\n\n55. Heeresadjutant bei Hitler 1938\u20131943. Aufzeichnungen des Majors Engel, ed. Hildegard von Kotze, Stuttgart, 1974, pp. 94\u20135.\n\n56. Quoted in Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung. Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung, Munich\/Zurich, 1998, p. 287; also in G\u00f6tz Aly, 'Endl\u00f6sung'. V\u00f6lkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europ\u00e4ischen Juden, Frankfurt am Main, 1995, p. 269; and Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 103\u20134. See also \u00c9douard Husson, 'Nous pouvons vivre sans les Juifs': Novembre 1941. Quand et comment ils d\u00e9cid\u00e8rent de la solution finale, Paris, 2005, pp. 71\u20133. I am indebted to M. Husson for providing me with a copy of Dannecker's memorandum from the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (Paris), reference DCL1\u20132, V-59.\n\n57. Aly, pp. 195\u2013201.\n\n58. Aly, p. 200.\n\n59. Aly, p. 268; Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, p. 287.\n\n60. Aly, pp. 270\u201371; Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 104.\n\n61. Diensttagebuch, pp. 332\u20133, 336\u20137.\n\n62. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part I, vol. 9, Munich, 1998, p. 192 (18.3.41).\n\n63. See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945. Nemesis, London, 2000, pp. 353\u201360, for a summary of the developments mentioned in this paragraph.\n\n64. KTB d. OKW, vol. 1: 1. August 1940\u201331. Dezember 1941, 1965, p. 341.\n\n65. Aly, p. 270.\n\n66. Heinz H\u00f6hne, The Order of the Death's Head. The Story of Hitler's SS, London, 1969, p. 330.\n\n67. See Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, pp. 243\u20137.\n\n68. Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, p. 251.\n\n69. Domarus, p. 1663.\n\n70. Quoted in Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front 1941\u201345. German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, New York, 1986, pp. 116\u201317.\n\n71. J\u00fcrgen Matth\u00e4us, 'Operation Barbarossa and the Onset of the Holocaust, June\u2013December 1941', in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 244.\n\n72. Longerich, Ermordung, pp. 116\u201318; Krausnick and Wilhelm, p. 164.\n\n73. Matth\u00e4us in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 258\u20139.\n\n74. Matth\u00e4us in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 253\u20135; Richard Breitman, The Architect of Genocide. Himmler and the Final Solution, London, 1991, p. 168.\n\n75. Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, pp. 345\u20138.\n\n76. Krausnick and Wilhelm, p. 163.\n\n77. See Matth\u00e4us in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 268\u201377.\n\n78. Krausnick and Wilhelm, p. 196.\n\n79. See Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 313, 317.\n\n80. Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941\/42, ed. Peter Witte et al., Hamburg, 1999, pp. 184\u20135.\n\n81. 'F\u00fchrer-Erlasse' 1939\u20131945, ed. Martin Moll, Stuttgart, 1997, pp. 188\u20139 (17.7.41).\n\n82. IMT, vol. 38, pp. 86\u201394, doc. 221\u2013L.\n\n83. Dienstkalender, p. 185.\n\n84. Christopher R. Browning, The Path to Genocide. Essays on Launching the Final Solution, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 105\u20136; Breitman, pp. 181\u20134; Yehoshua B\u00fcchler, 'Kommandostab Reichsf\u00fchrer-SS. Himmler's Personal Murder Brigades in 1941', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1\/1 (1986), pp. 11\u201325; Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, pp. 362\u20136.\n\n85. Matth\u00e4us in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 279.\n\n86. Quoted in Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, p. 367; Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts-und Vernichtungspolitik in Wei\u00dfru\u00dfland 1941 bis 1944, Hamburg, 1999, p. 560; and Matth\u00e4us in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 281.\n\n87. See Raul Hilberg, 'The Kommandostab Revisited', Yad Vashem Studies, 34 (2006), pp. 360\u201362.\n\n88. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. 560\u201366; Matth\u00e4us in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 281\u20132.\n\n89. Adolf Hitler. Monologe, p. 106 (25.10.41).\n\n90. Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, paperback edn., Berkeley\/Los Angeles, 1994, pp. 73\u20134.\n\n91. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. 573\u20134.\n\n92. Alfred Streim, Die Behandlung sowjetischer Kriegsgefangener im 'Fall Barbarossa', Heidelberg\/Karlsruhe, 1981, pp. 85\u20136.\n\n93. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. 567\u20139.\n\n94. Matth\u00e4us in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 283, and p. 504n. 212; Breitman, pp. 195\u20136; Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, pp. 372\u20133.\n\n95. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. 572\u20133 and n. 435.\n\n96. See Streim, pp. 89\u201393.\n\n97. Roseman, p. 101; Aly, pp. 302\u20133 and n. 10.\n\n98. In East Galicia alone, a further half a million Jews fell under Nazi control (Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 347).\n\n99. Institut f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, Munich, ED 100, Diary of Walther Hewel (10 July 1941); also quoted in David Irving, Hitler's War, London, 1977, p. 291; and Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, p. 470.\n\n100. Staatsm\u00e4nner und Diplomaten bei Hitler. Vertrauliche Aufzeichnungen \u00fcber die Unterredungen mit Vertretern des Auslandes 1939\u20131941, ed. Andreas Hillgruber, paperback edn., Munich, 1969, p. 310; also quoted in Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, p. 470; and Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 315.\n\n101. Quoted in Aly, p. 285, and see pp. 301\u20136 for the convincing suggestion that the figures provided at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 mainly reflect the planning perspectives of June and July 1941.\n\n102. Aly, pp. 273, 328; Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, p. 471.\n\n103. Quoted in Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 318.\n\n104. Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, pp. 473\u20134 and plate 45.\n\n105. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 319.\n\n106. Aly, p. 338; Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 321\u20132.\n\n107. Longerich, Ermordung, p. 157.\n\n108. Longerich, Ermordung, pp. 74\u20135.\n\n109. Ian Kershaw, 'Improvised Genocide? The Emergence of the \"Final Solution\" in the \"Warthegau\"', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 2 (1992), pp. 62\u201371.\n\n110. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 329.\n\n111. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 375\u20137, for the city of origin of the deportations.\n\n112. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 342\u20133, 346, 351.\n\n113. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 372.\n\n114. Christian Gerlach, 'Die Wannsee-Konferenz, das Schicksal der deutschen Juden und Hitlers politische Grundsatzentscheidung, alle Juden Europas zu ermorden', Werkstattgeschichte, 18 (1997), p. 17; Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung, p. 464.\n\n115. This is the plausible claim in the fine, short study by Husson, pp. 145\u201355.\n\n116. Adolf Hitler. Monologe, pp. 125\u20136, 130\u201331.\n\n117. Domarus, pp. 1772\u20133, 1781.\n\n118. Adolf Hitler. Monologe, p. 148.\n\n119. Roseman, pp. 56\u201360.\n\n120. Die Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, part II, vol. 2, p. 498 (13.12.41).\n\n121. Diensttagebuch, pp. 457\u20138; trans. Noakes and Pridham, vol. 3, pp. 1126\u20137; and Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, pp. 408\u20139. See also Bogdan Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung und Judenverfolgung im Generalgouvernement, Wiesbaden, 1999, pp. 218\u201320.\n\n122. Cesarani, p. 114. At his Jerusalem trial, Eichmann recalled, he said, that there had been talk at the conference of 'killing and eliminating and exterminating' (Longerich, Ermordung, p. 93). See Roseman, pp. 68\u201379 for the most plausible interpretation of the deliberately opaque written record of the meeting.\n\n123. The civil administration in the General Government was already anticipating the 'final solution' in its organizational preparations (Musial, pp. 220\u201322).\n\n124. Roseman, p. 77.\n\n125. It is far more convincing to see this as an extension of the murderous programme, rather than as the outcome of a fundamental decision to carry out the 'final solution' taken as late as June 1942 (see Florent Brayard, La 'solution finale de la question juive'. La technique, le temps et les cat\u00e9gories de la d\u00e9cision, Paris, 2005, esp. pp. 16\u201318, 30\u201338).\n\n126. The title of Richard Breitman's impressive book was The Architect of Genocide. Himmler and the Final Solution.\n\n127. Eberhard J\u00e4ckel, 'From Barbarossa to Wannsee. The Role of Reinhard Heydrich', unpublished essay kindly made available by the author.\n\n128. Berlin Document Centre, SS-HO, 933, Himmler to Gottlob Berger, 28.7.42.\n\n129. Fleming, pp. 106\u201312.\n\n130. Hitlers politisches Testament. Die Bormann Diktate von Februar und April 1945, Hamburg, 1981, pp. 69\u201370. These last recorded monologues by Hitler survive in a somewhat dubious form (see Kershaw, Hitler, 1936\u20131945, pp. 1024\u20135 n. 121). Despite necessary caveats, the comments have an authentic ring of Hitler about them.\n\n## List of Works Cited\n\n1941 god. Dokumenty [The Year 1941. Documents], ed. A. N. Iakovlev, V. P. 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Power and Authority in the Soviet Union', in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin (eds.), Stalinism and Nazism. Dictatorships in Comparison, Cambridge, 1997.\n\nSyring, Enrico, 'Hitlers Kriegserkl\u00e4rung an Amerika vom 11. Dezember 1941', in Wolfgang Michalka (ed.), Der Zweite Weltkrieg. Analysen, Grundz\u00fcge, Forschungsbilanz, Munich\/Zurich, 1989.\n\nDie Tageb\u00fccher von Joseph Goebbels, ed. Elke Fr\u00f6hlich, part I: Aufzeichnungen, 9 vols.; part II: Diktate 1941\u20131945, 15 vols., Munich, 1993\u20132005.\n\nTansill, Charles Callan, Back Door to War. The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, Chicago, 1952.\n\nTaylor, A. J. P., The Origins of the Second World War, Harmondsworth, 1964.\n\n\u2014\u2014English History 1914\u20131945, Harmondsworth, 1970.\n\nThe Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler\u2013Bormann Documents, February\u2013April 1945, ed. Fran\u00e7ois Genoud, London, 1961.\n\nThomas, Charles S., The German Navy in the Nazi Era, London, 1990.\n\nTokushiro, Ohata, 'The Anti-Comintern Pact, 1935\u20131939', in James William Morley (ed.), Deterrent Diplomacy. Japan, Germany, and the USSR 1935\u20131940, New York, 1976.\n\nToland, John, The Rising Sun. The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936\u20131945, New York, 1970, Modern Library edn., 2003.\n\n\u2014\u2014Adolf Hitler, London, 1977.\n\nTolstoy, Nicolai, Stalin's Secret War, London, 1981.\n\nTooze, Adam, The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, London, 2006.\n\nToshihiko, Shimada, 'Designs on North China 1933\u20131937', in James William Morley (ed.), The China Quagmire. Japan's Expansion on the Asian Continent, 1933\u20131941, New York, 1983.\n\nToscano, Mario, The Origins of the Pact of Steel, Baltimore, 1967.\n\nTreue, Wilhelm (ed.), 'Rede Hitlers vor der deutschen Presse (10. 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The Great Struggle at Sea 1939\u20131945, London, 1988.\n\nVillari, Luigi, Italian Foreign Policy under Mussolini, London, 1959.\n\nVisconti Prasca, Sebastiano, Io ho aggredito la Grecia, 2nd edn., Milan, 1947.\n\nVogelsang, Thilo, 'Neue Dokumente zur Geschichte der Reichswehr 1930\u20131933', Vierteljahrshefte f\u00fcr Zeitgeschichte, 2 (1954).\n\nVolkogonov, Dmitri, Stalin. Triumph and Tragedy, New York, 1991.\n\nWarlimont, Walter, Inside Hitler's Headquarters 1939\u201345, Novato, Calif., n.d. (original English-language edn., London, 1964).\n\nWatson, Derek, Molotov. A Biography, London, 2005.\n\nWeeks, Albert L., Stalin's Other War. Soviet Grand Strategy 1939\u20131941, Lanham, Md., 2002.\n\nWehler, Hans-Ulrich, 'Die Urkatastrophe. Der Erste Weltkrieg als Auftakt und Vorbild f\u00fcr den Zweiten Weltkrieg', Der Spiegel, 8 (16 Feb. 2004).\n\nWeinberg, Gerhard L., 'German Colonial Plans and Policies 1938\u20131942', in Waldemar Besson and Friedrich Frhr. Hiller v. Gaertringen (eds.), Geschichte und Gegenwartsbewu\u00dftsein. Historische Betrachtungen und Untersuchungen, G\u00f6ttingen, 1963.\n\n\u2014\u2014'Hitler's Image of the United States', American Historical Review, 69 (1964).\n\n\u2014\u2014The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany. Diplomatic Revolution in Europe 1933\u201336, Chicago\/London, 1970.\n\n\u2014\u2014The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany. Starting World War II, 1937\u20131939, Chicago\/London, 1980.\n\n\u2014\u2014A World at Arms. A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, 1994.\n\nWeizs\u00e4cker, Ernst von, Erinnerungen, Munich\/Leipzig\/Freiburg, 1950.\n\nDie Weizs\u00e4cker-Papiere 1933\u20131950, ed. Leonidas E. Hill, Frankfurt am Main, 1974.\n\nWelles, Sumner, The Time for Decision, London, 1944.\n\n\u2014\u2014Seven Major Decisions, London, 1951.\n\nWerth, Alexander, Russia at War, 1941\u20131945, paperback edn., New York, 1984.\n\nWeston, Mark, Giants of Japan. The Lives of Japan's Greatest Men and Women, New York\/Tokyo\/London, 1999.\n\nWhaley, Barton, Codeword Barbarossa, Cambridge, Mass., 1973.\n\nWhittam, John, Fascist Italy, Manchester, 1995.\n\nWhymant, Robert, Stalin's Spy. Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring, London\/New York, 1996.\n\nWildt, Michael, Die Judenpolitik des SD 1935 bis 1938. Eine Dokumentation, Munich, 1995.\n\n\u2014\u2014Generation des Unbedingten. Das F\u00fchrungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes, Hamburg, 2002.\n\nWilson, Theodore A., The First Summit. Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay 1941, London, 1970.\n\nWiskemann, Elizabeth, The Rome\u2013Berlin Axis. A Study of the Relations between Hitler and Mussolini, London, 1966.\n\nWistrich, Robert S., Hitler and the Holocaust, New York, 2001.\n\nWohlstetter, Roberta, Pearl Harbor. Warning and Decision, Stanford, Calif., 1962.\n\nWoodward, Llewellyn, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. 1, London, 1970.\n\nWoolf, S. J. (ed.), Fascism in Europe, 2nd edn., London, 1981.\n\nWright, Jonathan, Gustav Stresemann, Weimar's Greatest Statesman, Oxford, 2002.\n\nWylie, Neville (ed.), European Neutrals and Non-Belligerents during the Second World War, Cambridge, 2002.\n\nZamagni, Vera, 'Italy: How to Lose the War and Win the Peace', in Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II. Six Great Powers in International Comparison, Cambridge, 1998.\n\nZhukov, G., Reminiscences and Reflections, 2 vols., Moscow, 1985.\n\n## Index\n\nAbe Nobuyuki, General\n\nAbyssinia\n\nItalian campaign in\n\nAdowa, battle of (1896)\n\nAfrica, German colonial ambitions in\n\nAgnelli, Giovanni\n\nAlbania\n\nItalian occupation\n\nAlexandrovsky, Sergei, at Berlin embassy\n\nAlfieri, Dino, Italian ambassador in\n\nBerlin\n\nAlgeria\n\nAlsace-Lorraine\n\nAlsop, Joseph, Century Group\n\nAmerica First organization\n\nAnami Korechika, Japanese Vice-War Minister\n\nAnti-Comintern Pact (1936)\n\nantisemitismin Europe\n\nin Germany\n\nHitler's\n\nin Soviet Union\n\nsee also Jews\n\nAntonescu, General Ion, Romanian dictator\n\nArita Hachiro, Japanese Foreign Minister\n\nArmelli, Quirino, deputy to Badoglio\n\nArta, Greece\n\nAthens\n\nAtlantic Charter\n\nAtlantic Ocean American convoy escorts\n\nattacks on American shipping\n\nBritish shipping losses\n\nand effect of Pearl Harbor\n\nGerman dominance of as threat to America\n\nGerman naval view of\n\nUSS Greer incident\n\nwar in\n\natomic bombs, decision to commission\n\natrocities by Japanese in China\n\nNanking (1937)\n\npogroms\n\nTungchow (1937)\n\nAttlee, Clement, Lord Privy Seal, in War Cabinet\n\nAttolico, Bernardo, Italian ambassador in Berlin\n\nAugusta USS\n\nAuschwitz-Birkenau\n\nAustralia\n\nAustria\n\nAzores\n\nas possible German base\n\nBadoglio, Marshal Pietro, chief of Italian General Staff\n\nand decision to invade Greece\n\npessimism about intervention in war\n\nand preparations for invasion of Greece\n\nBalbo, Italo, Italian commander and Fascist leader\n\nBaldwin, Stanley, Prime Minister\n\nBalkans\n\nGerman intervention in (1941)\n\nMussolini's ambitions in\n\nSoviet Union and\n\nBastianini, Count Giuseppe, Italian ambassador to London\n\nmeeting with Halifax\n\nBastico, General Ettore\n\n'Battle of Britain'\n\nBeaverbrook, Lord, Minister of Supply\n\nBeck, General Ludwig, resignation\n\nBelgian army, numbers rescued from Dunkirk\n\nBelgium capitulation\n\nGerman invasion of\n\nnear defeat\n\nBelow, Nicolaus von\n\nBelzec extermination camp\n\nBergen-Belsen concentration camp\n\nBeria, Lavrenti, head of Soviet State Security\n\nand intelligence reports\n\nBessarabia (Romania) see also Romania\n\nBolshevism, equated with Jewish rule\n\nBoothby, Robert, MP\n\nBorah, William E., US Senator\n\nBoris, king of Bulgaria\n\nBottai, Giuseppe, Italian Minister of Education\n\nB\u00f6tticher, General Friedrich von, German embassy in Washington\n\nBoulogne, fall of\n\nBrauchitsch, Field Marshal Werner von\n\nBrest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918)\n\nBriey\n\nBritish Empire\n\nFar East\n\nGerman naval plans for\n\nHitler's view of\n\nBritish Expeditionary Force (BEF) expectation of losses\n\nnumbers rescued\n\nretreat to Dunkirk\n\nBritish Somaliland\n\nBrjansk, German encirclement of\n\nBrocke, Wolfgang\n\nB\u00fchler, Dr Josef\n\nBukharin, Nikolai\n\nBukovina, northern\n\nBulgaria\n\nBullitt, William, US ambassador in Paris\n\nBunkichi Ito, Count\n\nBurckhardt, Carl, Swiss Commissioner to League of Nations\n\nBurma\n\nButler, R. A.\n\nCadogan, Sir Alexander, Foreign Office\n\non likely capitulation of France\n\nCalais\n\nCanada\n\nCanary Islands\n\nCape Verde Islands\n\nCaporetto, Italian defeat at (1917)\n\nCarls, Admiral Rolf\n\nCavagnari, Admiral Domenico, chief of Italian naval staff\n\nCentury Group, and military aid to Britain\n\nCephalonia\n\nChamberlain, Houston Stewart\n\nChamberlain, Neville\n\nand approach to Mussolini\n\nenmity with Lloyd George\n\nfears for French defeat\n\nand need for American support\n\nas Prime Minister, appeasement\n\non public mood (May 1940)\n\nsupport for Churchill\n\nand unreadiness for war\n\nChannel Islands\n\nChelmo, gas chambers\n\nChiang Kai-shek, Chinese nationalist leader\n\nAmerican support for\n\nJapanese attempt to cut supplies to\n\nand Japanese\u2013American negotiations\n\nSoviet support for\n\nand war with Japan\n\nChicago, Democratic Convention\n\nChicago Tribune\n\nChina\n\nAmerica and\n\nanti-Japanese feeling\n\nnationalism\n\n'Open Door' principle (1917)\n\nwar with Japan (1894\u20135)\n\nwestern support for\n\nsee also Chiang Kai-shek; Japan, war with China\n\nChinchow, bombing\n\nChurchill, Winston\n\naddress to Cabinet (28 May)\n\nadvocate of alliance with France and Soviet Union\n\nand approach to Italy\n\nand British ability to resist Germany\n\non case for Italian neutrality\n\ncharacter and career\n\ndetermination 'to go down fighting'\n\nand Iceland\n\nand Lloyd George\n\nmeeting with French leaders in Paris\n\n'never surrender' speech\n\nand Norway campaign\n\nopposition to appeasement\n\nas Prime Minister\n\nrelations with Chamberlain\n\nChurchill, Winston\u2013cont.\n\nand Soviet Union\n\nspeech on (22 June 1941)\n\nand Stalin\n\nand United States: and appeal to\n\ncorrespondence with Roosevelt\n\nand deal on destroyers\n\nhope for active support from\n\nand lend-lease deal\n\nmeeting with Hopkins\n\nmeeting with Roosevelt (August 1941)\n\nand visit of Welles\n\nview of risks entailed in negotiations\n\nsee also War Cabinet\n\nCiano, Count Galeazzo, Italian Foreign Minister\n\nagreement to intervention\n\nAlbania as 'grand duchy' for\n\nand blame for Greek disaster\n\nand fall of France\n\ninfluence on Mussolini\n\nmeetings with Hitler\n\nand Pearl Harbor\n\nreluctance to enter war\n\nview of Britain\n\nand war on Greece\n\nCohen, Benjamin, assistant to Roosevelt\n\nCold War\n\nColville, John, private secretary to Churchill\n\nComintern (Third Communist International)\n\nCommittee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies\n\nsee also Century Group\n\nCommunist Party, Soviet Union\n\nCompi\u00e8gne, Franco-German armistice at\n\nCorbin, Charles, French ambassador to London\n\nCorfu\n\nCorsica\n\nCrete\n\nCripps, Sir Stafford, British ambassador in Moscow\n\nCroatia, Mussolini's ambitions for\n\nCzechoslovakia German invasion (March 1939)\n\nSoviet Union and\n\nSudetenland ceded to Germany\n\ntreaty obligations to\n\nDakar\n\nDaladier, \u00c9douard, French Minister of Defence\n\nDalton, Hugh, Minister for Economic Warfare\n\nDannecker, Theo\n\nDanube, as Italian sphere of influence\n\nDavies, Joseph E., assistant to Hull\n\ndecision-making\n\ncollective agreement of British War Cabinet\n\neffect of public opinion\n\nideological fixations\n\ninfluence of bureaucracy\n\nin Italy\n\nJapan\n\nand nature of governments\n\nin Nazi regime\n\npressures on\n\nsignificance of personalities\n\nin United States\n\nuse of intelligence\n\ndecisions, and alternatives\n\nGermany\n\nGreat Britain\n\nItaly\n\nJapan\n\nSoviet Union\n\nUnited States\n\nDekanozov, Vladimir, Soviet ambassador to Berlin\n\nDenmark, German invasion of\n\nDieckhoff, Hans Heinrich, German ambassador in Washington\n\nDimitrov, Georgi, Comintern\n\ndisarmament, policy of\n\nDisarmament Conference (1932\u20133)\n\nDjibouti, French Somaliland\n\nDollfuss, Engelbert, Austrian Chancellor\n\nD\u00f6nitz, Admiral Karl 384, 409\n\nDooman, Eugene H., US embassy in Tokyo\n\nDowding, Air Chief Marshal Hugh\n\nDreyfus, Alfred\n\nDunkirk evacuation of\n\nretreat to\n\nDurazzo, port of\n\nDutch East Indies\n\nJapanese ambitions in\n\nJapanese attack on\n\nEarle, George, Governor of Pennsylvania\n\nEast Africa\n\neconomy, world\n\nsee also individual countries; Wall Street\n\nEden, Anthony\n\nEdison, Charles, US Naval Secretary\n\nEdward VIII, King (Duke of Windsor)\n\nEgypt\n\nBritish forces in\n\nItalian offensive against\n\nEichmann, Adolf\n\nand deportation of Jews\n\nand Wannsee Conference\n\nElizabeth, Queen\n\nEpirus, Greece\n\nErbach-Sch\u00f6nberg, Prince Viktor zu, German ambassador in Athens\n\nEritrea\n\nEstonia\n\nFar East ABCD powers\n\nEuropean and American interests in\n\nJapanese ambitions in\n\nand Washington Nine Power Treaty (1922)\n\nsee also China; Indochina; Japan; Philippines\n\nFarinacci, Roberto, Fascist leader in Cremona\n\nFascist party (Italy)\n\nFascist Grand Council\n\nrelationship to state\n\nsplits in\n\nand support for war\n\nFinland\n\n'Winter War'\n\nFirst World War\n\nAmerica and\n\nGerman invasion of Russia\n\nItaly in\n\nJews blamed for\n\npostwar settlement\n\nFiume, ceded by Yugoslavia to Italy (1923)\n\nFrance\n\nappeals to America for arms\n\narmistice terms\n\non brink of defeat\n\ncapitulation\n\nItalian territorial demands\n\nand Mussolini\n\npossibility of approach to\n\nunilateral appeal to\n\ntreaty obligations to Czechoslovakia\n\nsee also Free French; French army; French navy\n\nFrance, Vichy\n\nFranco, General (Francisco Franco Bahamonde)\n\nmeeting with Hitler\n\nand Spanish neutrality\n\nFran\u00e7ois-Poncet, Andr\u00e9, French ambassador in Rome\n\nFrank, Hans, Governor General of Poland\n\nand gas chambers\n\nand Wannsee Conference\n\nFree French, in Africa\n\nFreemasonry\n\nFreetown\n\nFrench army\n\nnumbers rescued from Dunkirk\n\nand retreat to Dunkirk\n\nFrench colonial empire\n\nFrench Equatorial Africa\n\nFrench navy\n\nBritish destruction of fleet at Mers-el-Kebir\n\nFrentz, Walter, Hitler's cameraman\n\nFrick, Wilhelm, Reich Minister of Interior\n\nFricke, Rear-Admiral Kurt, Naval Warfare Executive\n\nFritsch, Theodor\n\nFukudome Shigeru, Japanese naval Operations Division\n\nFunk, Walther, Economics Minister\n\nFushimi Hiroyasu, Prince, Japanese army chief of staff\n\nGaulle, General Charles de, and Free French\n\ngenocide\n\nArmenians (1915)\n\nsee also Jews\n\nGeorge VI, King\n\nGerman army Hitler's control over\n\nleadership's view of war in west\n\norganizational structure\n\npreference for Mediterranean offensive\n\nview of war with Russia\n\nGerman colonies, former\n\nGerman navy\n\nand invasion of Britain\n\nNaval Warfare Executive\n\npreference for Mediterranean offensive\n\nstrategic preferences\n\nand territorial annexation\n\nZ-Plan\n\nGermany\n\nanti-American propaganda\n\ndesire for empire\n\ndevelopment of dictatorship\n\neconomy\n\nincursion into Rhineland (1936)\n\ninternational perceptions of\n\nintervention in Greece\n\ninvasion of Poland\n\nand Italy\n\neffect of fiasco in Greece on\n\noffer of troops in north Africa\n\nthreat in Balkans\n\nand Japan\n\neffect of Pearl Harbor on\n\nJapanese expectation of victory\n\nJapanese negotiations with America\n\nand role of\n\nTripartite Pact with\n\nand killing of Jews: antisemitism\n\nNuremberg Laws\n\nrole of Einsatzgruppen\n\nsecrecy of decision\n\nand League of Nations: membership\n\nwithdrawal from\n\nLebensraum and eastward expansion\n\nmilitary successes in 1942\n\nnaval treaty with Britain (1935)\n\nOlympic Games (1936)\n\nand Pact of Steel\n\npublic opinion\n\nrearmament\n\nReich Cabinet\n\nReichskristallnacht (1938)\n\nand risks of war on two fronts\n\nSecurity Police\n\nand Soviet Union\n\nanti-Bolshevism\n\neconomic reasons to attack\n\nideological reasons for attack\n\ninvasion of\n\nstrategic reasons to attack\n\nand Treaty of Locarno\n\nand United States\n\nanti-American propaganda\n\navoidance of provocation (1939\u201341)\n\nperception of American support for Allies\n\npre-war relations with United States\n\nand prospect of war with United States\n\nreaction to attack on Pearl Harbor\n\nWeimar Republic\n\nwestern offensive: advance on Dunkirk\n\nand defeat of France\n\ninvasion of Belgium\n\nsee also German army; German navy; Hitler, Adolf; Luftwaffe;\n\nOperation Sealion Gibraltar\n\nGerman plans to take\n\nGoebbels, Joseph\n\non Atlantic Charter\n\nand declaration of war on United States\n\nand extermination of Jews\n\nand Japan\n\nand Pearl Harbor\n\non Roosevelt\n\nGolikov, General Filip, Soviet military intelligence\n\nG\u00f6ring, Hermann, Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief\n\nand Dunkirk offensive\n\nand Jews\n\nGort, General Lord, commander of BEF\n\nGrandi, Dino, Fascist leader in Bologna\n\nGraziani, Marshal Rodolfo, chief of Italian army staff\n\nin north Africa\n\nGrazzi, Emanuele, Italian ambassador in Athens\n\nGreat Britain\n\nand American aid\n\nand American lend-lease agreement\n\nappeal to America for destroyers\n\nand appeasement\n\narmy see British Expeditionary\n\nForce (BEF)\n\nCabinet discussion\n\ndecision to stay in war\n\ndeclaration of war on Germany\n\neconomic weakness\n\nand Greece: guarantees to (and Romania)\n\nintervention in\n\nand Italian invasion\n\nintelligence\n\nmilitary weakness\n\nand Mussolini\n\nnaval treaty with Germany\n\npessimism about Red Army\n\nand Poland\n\npolicy towards Japan\n\nand possibility of alliance with Stalin\n\npossibility of negotiated peace\n\nrisks entailed\n\npropect of invasion\n\npublic opinion\n\nand Churchill's 'never surrender' speech\n\nmood of pessimism (May 1940)\n\nsignificance of Mediterranean to\n\nurgency of rearmamen\n\nwar aims (1939)\n\nsee also British Empire; Churchill,\n\nWinston; War Cabinet\n\n'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere'\n\nas fundamental to Japanese policy\n\nGreece British as guarantors of independence\n\nBritish intervention\n\ncivil war\n\neffect of Italian fiasco on German war\n\nGerman occupation\n\nHelli incident\n\nItalian invasion\n\nGreek forces, underestimation of\n\nGreenland\n\nGreenwood, Arthur, Minister without Portfolio in War Cabinet\n\nGreer, USS, encounter with U-boat\n\nGreiser, Arthur, head of Gau Wartheland\n\nGrew, Joseph C., American ambassador in Tokyo\n\nand Japanese decision for war\n\nmeeting with Konoe\n\nand proposed meeting of Konoe and Roosevelt\n\nGuadacanal, battle of\n\nGuadalajara, Italian defeat at (1937)\n\nGuilty Men\n\nGuzzoni, General Alfredo, Italian commander in Albania\n\nHainan Island\n\nHalder, Colonel-General Franz, chief of German army General Staff\n\nand invasion of Soviet Union\n\nand Japanese entry into war\n\nHalifax, Lord, British Foreign Secretary\n\nand American occupation of\n\nIceland\n\nand appeal to Roosevelt\n\nand approach to Mussolini\n\nbroadcast speech on intention to\n\nfight on\n\nmeeting with Bastianini\n\nrelations with Churchill\n\non Roosevelt's Greer speech\n\nsearch for alternatives to fighting\n\nHanfstaengl, Ernst\n\nHara Yoshimichi, president of Japanese Privy Council\n\nHarnack, Arvid (the 'Corsican')\n\nGerman communist agent\n\nHarvey, Oliver, British embassy in Paris\n\nHata Shunroku, Japanese Army Minister\n\nHaushofer, Karl\n\nHess, Rudolf\n\nHeydrich, Reinhardas architect of 'final solution'\n\nand deportations\n\nand gas chambers\n\nand 'Jewish Question'\n\nand Soviet Jews\n\nand Wannsee Conference\n\nHigashikuni, Prince\n\nHillmann, Sidney, Amalgamated Clothing Workers\n\nHimmler, Heinrich, head of SS\n\nas architect of 'final solution'\n\nand deportations of Jews\n\nand elimination of Jews\n\nand gas chambers\n\nand Soviet Jews\n\nHindenburg, Paul von, President of Germany\n\nHirohito, Emperor of Japan\n\nand decision for war\n\nand 'Essentials' plan for war\n\nopposition to war with America\n\nand possibility of negotiated settlement with America\n\npowers of\n\nand proposed meeting of Konoe with Roosevelt\n\nand resignation of Konoe\n\nHiroshima\n\nHitler, Adolfaddress to party leaders (December 1941)\n\nalternatives open to\n\nand Britain\n\nadmiration for Lloyd George\n\nand effect of decision to fight on\n\nand invasion of\n\nand need to remove from war\n\nnotion of continental block against\n\n'peace offer' to (October 1939)\n\nview of British Empire\n\ncharacter and motivations: ambitions\n\nantisemitism\n\nas gambler\n\nideological\n\nmegalomania\n\npreoccupation with secrecy\n\nracism\n\nfear of conflagration in Balkans\n\nforeign policy: from\n\nfrom\n\nand France: armistice terms P\u00e9tain\n\nand Franco\n\nas head of state\n\nnature of dictatorship\n\nand Italian entry into war\n\nand Italian invasion of Greece\n\nand Japan\n\nJapanese attack on Singapore\n\nJapanese intentions\n\n'no-separate-peace' agreement\n\noptimism about\n\nand Oshima\n\nand visit of Matsuoka\n\nand war on Soviet Union\n\nand Jews: antisemitism\n\nblamed for all ills\n\nand 'Jewish-Bolshevism'\n\nand killing of Jews\n\ndecision\n\nimplications of invasion of Soviet Union on\n\nrole in planning\n\nand Lebensraum\n\nMein Kampf\n\nand Mussolini\n\nmeetings with\n\nReichstag speeches: (30 January 1939)(19 July 1940)(11 December 1941)\n\nremilitarization\n\nrise to power\n\nand Roosevelt\n\nand South Tyrol\n\nand Soviet Union: attack on\n\nintention to invade\n\nand Molotov\n\nand need to keep America out of war\n\noptimism about war in\n\norder for Operation\n\nBarbarossa\n\nand\n\nStalin\n\nand United States\n\nand agreement with Japan\n\nand Atlantic Charter\n\ndeclaration as matter of prestige\n\ndeclaration of war\n\nexpectation of war with\n\nand Greer incident\n\nhostility towards\n\nreaction to\n\nPearl Harbor\n\nand war in the Atlantic\n\nwar strategy\n\nRaeder's 'peripheral strategy'\n\nand war on two fronts\n\nwestern offensive urgency of\n\n'world-view'\n\nsee also Non-Aggression Pact (Hitler\u2013Stalin) Hoare, Sir Samuel\n\nHodja, Daud, Albanian bandit\n\nHong Kong\n\nHopkins, Harry, adviser to Roosevelt\n\nand FDR's speech on Greer incident\n\nand lend-lease\n\nvisit to Stalin\n\nHornbeck, Stanley K., US State Department\n\nHull, Cordell, US Secretary of State\n\ncommitment to world peace\n\nand FDR's speech on Greer incident\n\n'Four Principles' for negotiation with Japan\n\nand inevitability of war with\n\nGermany\n\nand Kurusu\n\nand lease of military bases in British possessions\n\nand oil embargo on Japan\n\nand Pearl Harbor\n\nand proposed meeting of Konoe and Roosevelt\n\nrejection of Japan's terms\n\nand repeal of neutrality laws\n\n'Ten Points' counter-proposals to\n\nKusuru\n\nview of Japan\n\nview of Tojo\n\nHungary\n\nmurder of Jews\n\nIceland\n\nAmerican occupation of\n\nIckes, Harold, US Secretary of the\n\nInterior\n\nsupport for destroyers for Britain\n\nand support for intervention\n\nand threat from Japan\n\nIndia\n\nJapanese threat to\n\nIndian Ocean\n\nIndochina\n\nJapanese invasion\n\nInner Mongolia\n\nintelligence\n\nagents\n\nMAGIC intercepts of Japanese signals\n\nSoviet military\n\nStalin's distrust of\n\ntranslation distortions\n\ninternational relations\n\nsystem of collective security\n\nsee also League of Nations\n\nIreland\n\nIronside, General Sir Edmund, CIGS\n\nItalian armed forces\n\nair force\n\narmy: 'in no condition to wage war'\n\nofficers\n\nnavy\n\nand plans for invasion of Greece\n\nItaly alternatives to intervention in war neutrality\n\nambitions: dream of great power status\n\nexpansionist policy\n\nand opportunities offered by war\n\nAmerican oil supplies to\n\nand Austria\n\ncult of the Duce\n\neconomy\n\nFascist Party\n\nForeign Ministry\n\nand France: Alpine offensive\n\neffect of French defeat on\n\nwar against\n\nand Germany: alliance with\n\nanti-German feeling in\n\nrole in\n\nGerman naval strategy\n\nindustry\n\ninfluence of Church\n\ninter-war foreign policy\n\ninvasion of Abyssinia\n\nand invasion of Greece\n\noffensives against British territories\n\npre-eminence of state\n\npublic opinion\n\nrearmament\n\nstructure of government\n\nswitch of allegiance (1943)\n\nterritorial claims\n\nand Tripartite Pact\n\nand war with United States\n\nsee also Albania; Italian armed forces; Mussolini, Benito\n\nIto Seiichi, Japanese navy vice-chief of staff\n\nJackson, Robert H., US Attorney General\n\nJacomoni, Francesco, Ciano's deputy in Albania\n\nJapan\n\nalternatives to war\n\nand Britain\n\ndecision for war with\n\ncult of Emperor\n\ndecision-making\n\neconomy\n\ndependence on United\n\nStates\n\nimports of raw materials\n\nshortage of oil and steel\n\nsupport for autarky\n\n'Essentials (Plan) for Carrying out the Empire's Policies' (plan for war)\n\nforeign policy: 1930s\n\nambitions for empire\n\neffect of European war on\n\n'new order' in East Asia\n\nopportunities in Far East\n\nperceived need for territorial expansion\n\nreaction to\n\nNazi\u2013Soviet Pact (1939)\n\nsouthern expansion policy\n\n'Fundamental Principles of National Policy'\n\nand Germany\n\nand military alliance with Axis powers\n\n'no-separate-peace' agreement with Germany\n\nTripartite Pact\n\n(September 1940)\n\ngovernment\n\nconstitution (1889)\n\nImperial\n\nConferences\n\nLiaison\n\nConferences\n\npolitical parties\n\npowers of emperor\n\nresignation of government (1939)\n\nrole of Privy Council\n\nweakness of democracy\n\ninternational standing membership of League of Nations\n\ninvasion of Indochina\n\nisolationism in\n\nnational character: fatalism\n\nimportance of concept of honour\n\nmilitarism\n\noccupation of Manchuria (1931)\n\n'Outline of a Basic National Policy'(July 1940)\n\npublic opinion\n\nmass politics\n\nrise of nationalism\n\nand Soviet Union\n\nchange of policy considered\n\nloss as potential ally\n\nand United States\n\ncommitment to war\n\nand deadlines for negotiation\n\ndecision to attack\n\ndiplomatic demands\n\neconomic dependence on\n\nembargoes\n\nfear of war\n\nfinal reply to\n\nWashington\n\ngrowing intransigence\n\npossibility of war with\n\npossible concessions\n\nand pressures of time\n\nreaction to 'Hull Note'\n\nand reaction of US to alliance with Axis powers\n\nJapan\u2013cont. war with China (1894\u20135)\n\nwar planning\n\nwar with Russia (1904\u20135)\n\nsee also Japan, war with China;\n\nJapanese army; Japanese navy;\n\nManchuria\n\nJapan, war with China ('China incident')\n\n'Basic Terms of Peace'\n\nKonoe's view of\n\nand negotiations with America\n\npossibility of ending war\n\nsee also Chiang Kai-shek\n\nJapanese army\n\nand inevitability of war with\n\nAmerica\n\ninfluence in government\n\nand need for mobilization\n\nand negotiations with America\n\n'Outline of the Main Principles for\n\nCoping with the Changing World\n\nSituation'\n\nstrategy\n\nsupport for alliance with Axis powers\n\nand war with Soviet Union\n\nJapanese navy\n\ncommitment to war\n\nand 'Essentials for Carrying out the\n\nEmpire's Policies'\n\nfear of war with United States\n\ninfluence in government\n\nand negotiations with America\n\nreluctance for alliance with Axis powers\n\nstrategy\n\nJewsin America\n\nblamed for world wars\n\ndeath toll\n\ndevelopment of policy against\n\nemigration from Germany\n\nequated with Bolshevism\n\n'final solution' (annihilation)\n\ngas chambers\n\ngenocide\n\nfirst phase\n\nin soviet Union\n\nghettos\n\nimpracticability of deportation\n\nNazi demonization of\n\nNuremberg Laws\n\npersecution of (from 1933)\n\nplans for mass deportations\n\npogroms\n\nand Reichskristallnacht (1938)\n\nreservation for (beyond Vistula)\n\nand Wannsee Conference\n\nwearing of 'Yellow Star'\n\nin Weimar Republic\n\nJodl, General Alfred, head of Wehrmacht Operations Staff\n\nand declaration of war on United\n\nStates\n\nand 'peripheral war' plan\n\nJohnson, Hiram\n\nKan'in Kotohito, Prince, chief of\n\nJapanese imperial staff\n\nKatowice, deportation of Jews from\n\nKaya Okinori, Japanese Finance\n\nMinister\n\nKearny, USS, torpedo attack on\n\nKeitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm\n\nKelly, Edward J., mayor of Chicago\n\nKennedy, John F.\n\nKennedy, Joseph, US ambassador in\n\nLondon\n\nKenya\n\nKhrushchev, Nikita\n\nKido Koichi, Marquis, Japanese Lord Privy Seal\n\nand alliance with Axis powers and negotiations with America Kiev\n\nKing, Admiral Ernest J., US Atlantic\n\nFleet\n\nKing, W. L. Mackenzie, Canadian\n\nPrime Minister\n\nKirov, Sergei, Leningrad party boss\n\nKirponos, Lieutenant-General\n\nKnox, Frank, US Secretary of the\n\nNavy\n\nand aid for Britain\n\nand Atlantic convoys\n\non German invasion of Soviet\n\nUnion\n\nKnudsen, William, General Motors\n\nKondo Bobutake, vice-chief of Japanese navy staff\n\nKonoe Fumimaro, Prince, Japanese Prime Minister\n\nand alliance with Axis power\n\nand 'Essentials' plan for war\n\nfirst administration (1937\u20139)\n\nand 'Four Pillars Conference'\n\nmeeting with Grew\n\nand negotiations with America\n\nopposition to war with America\n\nproposal for meeting with\n\nRoosevelt\n\nsecond administration (1940\u201341)\n\nresignation\n\nKorea, Japanese occupation\n\nKr\u00fcger, Friedrich-Wilhelm, SS chief\n\nKube, Wilhelm, Commissar of Belorussia\n\nKurusu Saburo, Japanese special envoy to Washington\n\nKvaternik, Marshal Sladko, Croatian minister\n\nLagarde, Paul de\n\nLammers, Hans Heinrich, head of the Reich Chancellery\n\nLateran Pacts (1929)\n\nLatvia\n\nLeague of Nations\n\nGerman withdrawal from\n\nand Italian invasion of Abyssinia\n\nJapanese withdrawal from\n\nand Mukden Incident\n\nSoviet membership of\n\nUnited States and\n\nLeHand, Marguerite, secretary to\n\nFDR\n\nLemkin, Raphael\n\nLenin, V. I.\n\nLeopold, King of the Belgians\n\nLibya\n\nItalian defeat by British and Italian expansion in north-Africa\n\nLindbergh, Charles A.\n\nLithuania\n\nshooting of Jews\n\nLitvinov, Maxim, Foreign Commissariat\n\nLloyd George, David\n\nLocarno, Treaty of (1925)\n\nLo \u00b4 d$$$$, Poland, ghetto\n\nLohse, Hinrich, Commissar for Eastern Territory\n\nLoraine, Sir Percy, British ambassador to Rome\n\nLothian, Marquis of, British ambassador to Washington\n\non Britain's ability to pay for aid\n\nLublin, German advance on\n\nLudendorff, General Erich\n\nLueger, Karl, mayor of Vienna\n\nLuftwaffe\n\nand long-range capability against United States\n\nLytton, Lord, Commission on Manchuria\n\nMcCormick, Colonel Robert R., isolationist\n\nMackensen, Hans Georg von, German ambassador in Rome\n\nMadagascar as potential colony for deported Jews\n\nMadeira\n\nMaginot Line\n\nM\u00e4hrisch-Ostrau, deportation of Jews from\n\nMaisky, Ivan, Soviet ambassador in London\n\nMalay peninsula\n\nJapanese attack on\n\nMalenkov, Georgi\n\nMalta\n\nItalian air raids\n\nItalian demands for\n\nManchuria Chinese nationalism in\n\nclash with Soviet troops\n\n('Nomonhan Incident')\n\nJapanese occupation of (1931)\n\n('Mukden Incident')\n\nKwantung Army\n\nand state of Manchukuo\n\nManstein, Lieutenant-General Erich von\n\nMao Zedong, warning to Soviet Union on Germany\n\nMarshall, General George C., US army chief of staff\n\nMatsuoka Yosuke, Japanese Foreign Minister\n\nand alliance with Germany\n\nbrinkmanship of\n\nand costs of alliance with US\n\nexpectation of German victory\n\nand Greater East Asia\n\nmeeting with Hitler\n\nneutrality pact with Soviet Union\n\nproposed attack on Soviet Union\n\nand prospect of war with Britain and US\n\nMauritius\n\nMediterranean German army view of\n\nand German naval strategy\n\nItalian ambitions in\n\nsignificance to Britain\n\nMeiji, emperor of Japan\n\nMekhlis, L. Z., Red Army Political Directorate\n\nMeretskov, General K. A., chief of Soviet General Staff\n\nMerkulov, Vsevolod, head of NKGB\n\nMers-el-Kebir, destruction of French fleet at\n\nMersa Matruh, Egypt\n\nMetaxas, Ioannis, Greek dictator\n\nMiddle East\n\nBritish influence in see also Suez Canal\n\nMidway, battle of\n\nMikoyan, Anastas, Soviet foreign trade expert\n\nMinsk German advance on\n\nmassacre of Jews\n\nMolotov, Vyacheslav, Soviet\n\nCommissar for Foreign Affairs\n\ndiscussions with Hitler\n\nand German invasion\n\nand intelligence reports\n\nand possible alliance with France and Britain\n\nMorea, Greece\n\nMorgenthau, Henry, US Treasury Secretary\n\nand lend-lease scheme\n\nMorocco\n\nMoscow, German advance on\n\nMosley, Oswald\n\nMukden Incident see Manchuria\n\nM\u00fcller, Heinrich, head of Gestapo\n\nMunich Agreement\n\nrole of Mussolini in\n\nMussolini, Benito and Abyssinian war\n\nand Anglo-French approach (1935)\n\nBritish view of\n\ncharacter\n\ngrandiose visions\n\nvanity of\n\ncontrol of state ministries\n\nand cult of the Duce\n\ndecision-making\n\ndeposition and execution\n\nand France\n\nand Germany: anger at German occupation of Romania\n\nconfidence in German victory\n\nstate visit (1937)\n\nsupport for remilitarization\n\nand Greece: ambitions for decision to attack\n\ninvasion of\n\nand Hitler\n\nresentment of\n\nand King Victor Emmanuel\n\nMussolini, Benito\u2013cont. limits to power of\n\nmeetings with Hitler\n\nBrenner Pass (March 1940)\n\nBrenner Pass (October 1940)\n\nFlorence (October 1940)\n\nand Nazi\u2013Soviet Non-Aggression\n\nPact\n\npersonal policy-making\n\npossibility of British negotiation with\n\nrejection of Roosevelt's offer of mediation\n\nrelations with armed forces\n\nrise of\n\nand Sal\u00f2 Republic\n\nvision as mediator between\n\nGermany and Britain\n\nand war: alternatives to intervention\n\ncommitment to intervention\n\ndecision to enter\n\nenthusiasm for\n\npostponement of\n\nand Yugoslavia\n\nNagano Osami, chief of Japanese naval General Staff\n\ncommitment to war\n\nand negotiations with America\n\nwar preparations\n\nNagasaki\n\nNanking, Chinese nationalist government in\n\nNapoleon Bonaparte, invasion of Russia\n\nNazism antisemitism of party members\n\ndemonization of Jews\n\nand genocide of Jews\n\noutrages\n\nNetherlands German invasion\n\nsee also Dutch East Indies\n\nNeurath, Konstantin von, German Foreign Minister\n\nNew Guinea\n\nNew York Times\n\nNew Zealand\n\nNomura Kichisaburo, Admiral, Japanese ambassador in Washington\n\nas Foreign Minister\n\nand negotiations between Japan and\n\nAmerica\n\nand proposed meeting of Konoe and Roosevelt\n\nNon-Aggression Pact (Hitler\u2013Stalin)(August 1939)\n\nto buy time for Stalin\n\nnorth Africa\n\nBritish offensive in\n\nGerman campaign in\n\nItalian campaign in\n\nOperation Torch\n\nsee also Egypt; Libya\n\nNorthern Rhodesia\n\nNorway, German invasion of\n\nnuclear weapons see atomic bombs\n\nOikawa Koshiro, Japanese Navy Minister\n\nand alliance with Axis powers\n\nand negotiations with America\n\noil American embargo on Japan\n\nAmerican exports\n\nDutch East Indies supplies\n\nJapanese dependence on imports\n\nRomanian\n\nOkamoto Kio Puku, General\n\nOperation Barbarossa\n\nintelligence warning to Stalin\n\nOperation Dynamo (evacuation of Dunkirk)\n\nOperation Sealion (German invasion of Britain)\n\nOran\n\nOshima Hiroshi, Japanese ambassador in Berlin\n\nand declaration of war\n\nOtt, General Eugen, German ambassador to Tokyo\n\nOumansky, Konstantin, Soviet ambassador in Washington\n\nOuter Mongolia, Japanese clashes with Soviet troops\n\nPacific, war in\n\n'Pact of Steel' (May 1939)\n\nPalestine\n\nPanay, USS gunboat, Japanese bombing of\n\nParesci, Gabriele, press attach\u00e9 at Italian embassy\n\nPariani, Alberto, Italian Under-Secretary for War\n\nParis, German occupation\n\nParis Peace Conference (1919)\n\nPavlov, General D. G.\n\nPearl Harbor\n\nattack on\n\ncasualties\n\nGerman reaction to\n\npreparations for\n\nPeking, skirmish at Marco Polo bridge (1937)\n\nPershing, General John J.\n\nPersian Gulf\n\nPetacci, Claretta\n\nP\u00e9tain, Marshal Philippe\n\nmeeting with Hitler\n\nPhilippines Japanese attack on\n\nneutrality of\n\nPhillimore, Lord\n\nPirelli, Alberto\n\nPoland\n\ndivision of\n\nelimination of Jews from\n\nGerman invasion\n\nGerman non-aggression treaty (1934)\n\nJewish ghettos\n\nPonomariov, Nikolai Vasilievich\n\nPortugal\n\npress German right-wing\n\nJapan\n\nSoviet\n\nsee also public opinion\n\nPricolo, Francesco, Italian air force chief of staff\n\nPrince of Wales, HMS\n\nPripet marshes\n\nmurder of Jews in\n\nPrytz, Bjorn, Swedish charg\u00e9 d'affaires in London\n\npublic opinion Britain\n\nGermany\n\nItaly\n\nJapan\n\nWest, anti-Japanese\n\nsee also United States of America\n\nRaeder, Grand Admiral Erich\n\nand Greer incident\n\nrecommendation of 'peripheral strategy'\n\nand war with United States\n\nRankin, Jeannette, US Representative\n\nRapallo, Treaty of (1922)\n\nRed Army\n\nair defences\n\ncasualties\n\ncounter-offensive\n\ndefence strategy (war games)\n\ndeficiencies\n\neffect of purges on\n\nexpectation of direction of German attack\n\nand German invasion\n\ngrowing US optimism about\n\nlack of operational war plan\n\nlack of trained leadership\n\nand military intelligence of German preparations\n\nmobilization plans\n\nrearmament\n\nsize of\n\nand Stalin Line fortifications\n\nStalin's speech to Military Academy\n\nstrategic theory\n\nsuggestion of pre-emptive strike\n\nunderestimated\n\nand Winter War in Finland\n\nsee also Soviet Union; Stalin, Joseph\n\nReuben James, USS, sinking of\n\nReynaud, Paul, French Prime Minister appeal to United States\n\nand approach to Mussolini\n\nexpectation of defeat\n\nvisit to London (26 May)\n\nWar Cabinet reply to\n\nRhineland, German remilitarization\n\n, Ribbentrop, Joachim von, Foreign Minister\n\nand declaration of war on United\n\nStates\n\nand Italy\n\nand Japan\n\non Pearl Harbor\n\nand Soviet Union\n\nRichardson, Admiral James O., US naval Commander-in-Chief\n\nRiga, killing of Jews at\n\nRoatta, General Mario, deputy chief of Italian army staff\n\nRobin Moor, USS\n\nRomania German troops in\n\noil wells at Ploesti\n\nSoviet annexations\n\nRome, Franco-Italian armistice\n\nRommel, General Erwin\n\nRoosevelt, Eleanor\n\nRoosevelt, Elliott\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin D., US President\n\nand 1940 presidential election\n\nand aid for Soviet Union\n\nappeals for peace (1939)\n\nand Atlantic convoys\n\ncareer and character\n\nand Churchill: correspondence with\n\nmeeting with (August 1941)\n\ncollective security initiative (1938)\n\ncommitment to Britain\n\ncommitment to neutrality (1939\u201340)\n\nand deal to lend destroyers to\n\nBritain\n\ndecision to prepare for war\n\nand defence policy\n\nexploitation of Greer incident,\n\n[speech to nation]\n\nand hawks among advisers\n\non Hitler\n\nand inevitability of war with\n\nGermany\n\nand Japan\n\ncondemnation of (1937)\n\ndeclaration of war\n\nlast-ditch negotiations ('modus vivendi')\n\npersonal message to\n\nHirohito\n\nand proposed meeting with Konoe\n\nreluctance to commit to war in Pacific\n\nand lend-lease deal\n\nidea for\n\nand Mussolini: proposed intercession with\n\nrebuff by\n\nand New Deal\n\noptions available to\n\npersonal role of\n\npolitical opposition to\n\nand possibility of negotiated peace\n\nand public opinion\n\nand debates over Iceland\n\n'quarantine speech' (1937)\n\nreluctance to commit to war\n\nand Soviet Union\n\nspeech on armed defence (October 1941)\n\nState of the Union address (January 1941)\n\nstyle of government\n\non threat to America (December 1940)\n\nand 'undeclared war'\n\nand war planning\n\nRoosevelt, Theodore, US President\n\nRosenberg, Alfred, German minister for Eastern Territories\n\nRosenman, Judge Samuel, speech-writer to FDR\n\nR\u00f6ssler, Rudolf ('Lucy'), Soviet agent in Lucerne\n\nRosso, Augusto, Italian ambassador in\n\nBerlin\n\nRoyal Air Force\n\nRoyal Navy\n\nsuggestion of removal to Canada\n\nRundstedt, Colonel-General Gerd von\n\nRusso-Japanese war (1904\u20135)\n\nSaint-Germain, Treaty of\n\nSaionji Kinmochi, Japanese imperial adviser\n\nSakhalin Island, Japanese occupation\n\nSalonika\n\nSawada Shigeru, vice-chief of Japanese army General Staff\n\nScholl, Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin\n\nSch\u00f6nerer, Georg, Pan-German leader\n\nSchulenburg, Count Friedrich Werner von der, German ambassador in Moscow\n\nSchulze-Boysen, Harro ('Starshina'), German communist agent\n\nSecond World War course of\n\nlegacy of\n\n'phoney war'\n\nSeychelles\n\nShanghai, bombing of\n\nShaposhnikov, V. M., chief of Soviet General Staff\n\nSherwood, Robert, speech writer for Roosevelt\n\nShetland Islands\n\nShigemitsu Mamoru, adviser to\n\nHirohito\n\nShimada Shigetaro, Japanese Navy Minister\n\nShirer, William, journalist\n\nSiberia, as potential colony for deported Jews\n\nSidi Barrani, Egypt\n\nSimon, Sir John, British Foreign Secretary\n\nSinclair, Archibald, leader of Liberal Party\n\nSingapore\n\nJapanese attack on\n\nSmolensk\n\nSobibor camp\n\nsocial Darwinism\n\nSoddu, General Ubaldo, deputy head of Italian Supreme Command\n\nSomaliland\n\nSorge, Richard ('Ramzai'), Soviet agent in Tokyo\n\nSouth Africa\n\nSouth China Sea, Japanese expansion into\n\nSouth Tyrol\n\nSouthern Rhodesia\n\nSoviet Union\n\nantisemitism in\n\nand Britain\n\nand Chinese nationalists\n\ncollective responsibility in\n\nCommunist Party\n\nand Czechoslovakia\n\neconomic weakness\n\nand cooperation with Germany\n\nforeign relations: collective security\n\ndiplomatic efforts to postpone war\n\ninternational isolation (after Revolution)\n\npolicy\n\nand France\n\nGerman aerial reconnaissance\n\nGerman invasion\n\ncounter-offensive\n\neffect in America\n\neffect in Japan\n\ngrowing resistance to\n\nunprepared for\n\nand Germany\n\neconomic cooperation with\n\nmilitary cooperation with\n\nand Nazi\n\nGermany\n\npossibility of diplomatic solution\n\ntrade with\n\nand inevitability of war\n\nand intelligence reports\n\ndistrust of British\n\nand Italy\n\nand Japan\n\nmurder of Jews in\n\nneutrality pact with Turkey\n\nNKVD (secret police)\n\nand Poland\n\nPolitburo\n\nrearmament\n\nrequests to America for aid\n\nand Romania\n\nand Spain\n\nand threat of war in Balkans\n\nsee also Red Army; Stalin, Joseph\n\nSpain German expectations of\n\nneutrality\n\nSpanish Civil War\n\nItaly and\n\nSpear, Major-General Sir Edward, British embassy in Paris\n\nSpratly Islands\n\nStahlecker, Franz Walter Einsatzgruppe leader\n\nStahmer, Heinrich, envoy to Japan\n\nStalin, Joseph\n\nand 'Big Five'\n\ncharacter\n\nparanoid distrust\n\npersonality cult\n\nas dictator\n\nand German invasion: decision to stay in Moscow\n\neconomic appeasement\n\nand intelligence reports on\n\nGerman intentions\n\nlack of preparedness for\n\nreaction to\n\nand suggestion of pre-emptive strike\n\nand Hitler: certainty of Hitler's intentions\n\nfear of provoking\n\nknowledge of Mein\n\nKampf\n\nand risk of war on two fronts\n\nmeeting with Hopkins\n\nand NKVD\n\nas official head of state government\n\noptions available to\n\nand Politburo\n\npossibility of alliance with western powers\n\npurges ('Great Terror')\n\nand Red Army\n\nspeech to Military\n\nAcademy (May 1941)\n\nStalin, Joseph\u2013cont. relations with Britain\n\nrise of\n\nand war: expectation of\n\nhope for American intervention\n\nneed to delay\n\nsee also Non-Aggression Pact\n\n(Hitler\u2013Stalin); Red Army; Soviet\n\nUnion\n\nStalingrad, battle of\n\nStamenov, Ivan, Bulgarian ambassador to Moscow\n\nStarace, Achille, Fascist Party Secretary\n\nStark, Admiral Harold R., US head of naval operations\n\nand Atlantic convoys\n\nand destroyer deal\n\nand occupation of Iceland\n\nand Pearl Harbor\n\nStimson, Henry L., US Secretary of War\n\nadvice to Roosevelt\n\nand aid for Britain\n\nand defence production\n\non German invasion of Soviet\n\nUnion\n\nand negotiations with Japan\n\nsupport for intervention\n\nand war with Germany\n\nStresa, Conference of (1935)\n\nStresemann, Gustav, German Foreign Minister\n\nSudan\n\nSudoplatov, General Pavel\n\nSuez Canal\n\nGerman intentions for\n\nItaly and\n\nSugiyama Gen, chief of Japanese army General Staff\n\nand decision for war\n\nand 'Essentials' plan for war\n\nand negotiations with America\n\nSugiyama Gen, Japanese Army Minister\n\nSuzuki, General Teiichi\n\nand decision for war\n\nSwitzerland, Ticino Italian enclave\n\nSyria\n\nTaiwan, Japanese occupation\n\nTakamatsu, Prince\n\nTanaka Shin'chi, Japanese army Operations Division\n\nTaranto, Italian fleet at\n\nTass, communiqu\u00e9on British press reports\n\nTexas, USS\n\nThailand\n\nTientsin, blockade of\n\nTilsit, shooting of Jews\n\nTimoshenko, Marshal S. K. on deficiencies of Red Army\n\nand German invasion\n\non prospects for war\n\nand suggestion of pre-emptive strike\n\nwar plans\n\nTogo Shigenori, Japanese Foreign Minister\n\nappointment\n\nand decision for war\n\nwish to avoid war\n\nTojo Hideki, General, Japanese Prime Minister\n\nas Army Minister\n\nand alliance with Axis powers\n\nand decision for war\n\ndifficulties with High Command\n\nand negotiations with America\n\noptions to avoid war\n\nToyoda Soemu\n\nToyoda Teijiro, Admiral, Japanese Foreign Minister\n\nand negotiations with America\n\nopposition to war with America\n\nand proposed meeting of Konoe with Roosevelt\n\nas Vice-Minister for Navy\n\nTreblinka camp\n\nTrianon, Treaty of\n\nTripartite Pact: Japan, Germany and Italy (September 1940)\n\nBulgaria and\n\nand German declaration of war on\n\nUnited States\n\nand obligations to Japan\n\nRoosevelt's view of\n\nSoviet Union and\n\nTrotsky, Leon\n\nTruman, Harry S., US President\n\nTsukada Osamu, Japanese army vice-chief of staff\n\nTukhachevsky, Marshal Mikhail\n\nTully, Grace, assistant secretary to FDR\n\nTungchow, atrocity (1937)\n\nTunis\n\nTunisia\n\nTurati, Augusto, Fascist Party Secretary\n\nTurkey\n\nUganda\n\nUkraine\n\nUnited States of America\n\naid for Britain\n\n'cash-and-carry' trade provisions\n\nand China\n\nsupport for\n\nChiang Kai-shek\n\nCongress\n\namendment of\n\nSelective Service Act\n\nisolationists in\n\nand revisions to 1931 Neutrality Act\n\nCouncil of National Defense\n\ndestroyers for Britain\n\nin exchange for military bases\n\neconomy\n\nand Germany\n\nattack on Soviet Union\n\nGerman naval view of\n\nindignation at treatment of\n\nJews (1938)\n\nand inevitability of war with\n\nGreer incident\n\nimmigration legislation\n\nisolationists\n\nin Congress\n\nand destroyer deal\n\nand lend-lease\n\nopposition to aid for Soviet Union\n\nand trade provisions\n\nweakening of\n\nUnited States of America\u2013cont. and Japan\n\ndeclaration of war on\n\nembargoes on\n\nfinal reply from\n\ngrowing intransigence\n\nlast-minute negotiations\n\nnegotiations\n\npossibility of embargo on\n\nreaction to attack on Pearl Harbor\n\nreaction to Japanese alliance with\n\nAxis powers\n\nand threat from\n\nJohnson Act\n\nLend-Lease Act (March 1941)\n\neffect on German thinking\n\nextension to Soviet\n\nUnion\n\nnegotiations for\n\npossible alternatives to\n\nNational Defense Advisory\n\nCommission\n\nnaval security cordon\n\nNeutrality laws\n\nand arming of merchant ships\n\narms embargo laws\n\nrevisions to\n\noccupation of Iceland\n\nOffice for Emergency Management\n\nOffice of Production Management\n\npolitical structure\n\npowers of President\n\npresidential election (1940)\n\npublic opinion\n\ngrowing support for intervention\n\nhostility to communism and\n\nSoviet Union\n\nopposition to intervention\n\npessimism about\n\nBritain\n\npositive view of Stalin\n\nsupport for aid to Britain\n\nand support for aid for Soviet\n\nUnion\n\nsupport for Atlantic convoys\n\nrearmament\n\nrefusal to join League of Nations\n\nrole of Cabinet\n\nSelective Service Act\n\nand Soviet Union: pessimism about\n\nRed Army\n\nrecognition of\n\nand signs of Soviet resistance\n\nState Department view of war\n\nand war\n\nand commitment to intervention\n\nand decision to join\n\nin the Pacific\n\nsee also Atlantic Ocean; Roosevelt,\n\nFranklin D.\n\nUnited States military forces Army\n\nand defence production\n\nfunding for\n\nlimited preparedness\n\nmobilization\n\nNavy\n\npossible expeditionary force\n\nsupport for aid to Soviet Union\n\nVictory Program\n\nwar planning (ABC-1)\n\nUshiba Tomohiko, Konoe's private secretary\n\nVansittart, Sir Robert, Permanent Under-Secretary in Foreign Office\n\nVasilevsky, Marshal Alexander Mikhailovich\n\nVersailles, Treaty of (1919)\n\nViaz'ma, German encirclement of\n\nVictor Emmanuel III, King of Italy\n\nand Abyssinian war\n\nacquiescence to entry into war\n\nhostility to intervention in war\n\non invasion of Greece\n\nloyalty of armed forces to\n\nMussolini's memorandum to\n\nRoosevelt and\n\nVienna\n\nVisconti Prasca, General Count Sebastiano, Italian commander in Albania\n\nVladivostok\n\nVoroshilov, Marshal Kliment\n\nWagner, Admiral Gerhard\n\nWagner, Richard\n\nWall Street stock-market crash (1929)\n\nWang Ching-wei, rival to Chiang Kai-shek\n\nWannsee Conference\n\nWar Cabinet (Britain)\n\nand approach to Mussolini\n\n'British Strategy in a Certain\n\nEventuality'\n\ncollective agreement to continue to\n\nfight\n\ndiscussion of possible terms to end war\n\nmeetings (26 May): first\n\nsecond\n\nthird\n\nmeetings (27 May): first\n\nsecond\n\nthird\n\npessimism of\n\nand risks entailed in negotiations\n\n'Suggested Approach to Signor\n\nMussolini'\n\nWarlimont, Major-General Walter\n\nand declaration of war on United States\n\nWarthegau (Gau Wartheland)\n\nWashington Nine Power Treaty (1922)\n\nWatson, Major General Edwin W., military aide to FDR\n\nWeizs\u00e4cker, Ernst von, German Foreign Ministry\n\nand declaration of war on United States\n\nand Japanese entry into war\n\nWelles, Sumner, US Under-Secretary of State\n\nand opposition to Hitler\n\nand repeal of neutrality laws\n\nrivalry with Hull\n\nvisit to Europe\n\nWerth, Alexander, British journalist in Moscow\n\nWeygand, General Maxime, French Commander-in-Chief\n\nWheeler, Burton K., US Senator\n\nWhite, William Allen, support for US intervention\n\nWillkie, Wendell, US presidential candidate\n\nand support for deal on destroyers\n\nWilson, Woodrow, US President\n\nWoodring, Harry H., US Secretary of War\n\nYamamoto Isoroku, Admiral\n\nYonai Mitsumasa, Admiral, as Prime Minister\n\nYoshida Zengo, Admiral, Navy Minister\n\nresignation\n\nYoshihito, emperor of Japan\n\nYugoslavia, Mussolini's ambitions in\n\nZante, Greece\n\nZhdanov, Andrei\n\nZhukov, General Georgi\n\nand suggestion of pre-emptive strike\n\nwar plans\n\n## About the Author\n\nIan Kershaw studied at Liverpool and Oxford universities. He has taught at the University of Manchester, at the Ruhr University in Bochum, West Germany, at the University of Nottingham and since 1989 has been professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield. He is the author, most recently, of Making Friends with Hitler, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and the definitive two-volume biography of Hitler Hitler 1889\u20131936: Hubris and Hitler 1936\u20131945: Nemesis. The first volume was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, and the second volume won the Wolfson Literary Award for History and the inaugural British Academy Prize.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":"\n\nBokf\u00f6rlaget Atlas \u00e4r en del av Arenagruppen.\n\nBokf\u00f6rlaget Atlas\n\nDrottninggatan 83\n\nIII 60 Stockholm\n\nwww.arenagruppen.se\n\nDen ensamma fallosen\n\n\u00a9 Anja Hirdman och Bokf\u00f6rlaget Atlas 2008\n\nOmslagsfoto: John\u00e9r bildbyr\u00e5\n\nOmslag och grafisk form: Conny Lindstr\u00f6m\n\nISBN: 978-91-7-389836-2\n\nE-boksproduktion: Publit, 2012\nF\u00f6r min son Alexander\n 1. F\u00f6rord\n\n 1. [**_1. \nMaskulinitet och (o)synlighet_**](chapter001.html)\n 2. Bildens lockelser\n 3. Maskulinitet och k\u00e4nslornas betydelse\n 4. Autonomi och fr\u00e5nvaro\n 5. Oberoende och f\u00f6rakt\n 6. Den mystiska fallosen\n 7. Den manliga blicken\n\n 1. [**_2. \nPornografiska former f\u00f6rr och nu_**](chapter002.html)\n 2. Litter\u00e4r transvestism\n 3. Pornografiska bilder och det kroppsliga seendet\n 4. Nutida pornografi\n 5. Pornografiska koder och konsumtion\n 6. Hyperestetik och porno-kroppen\n\n 1. [**_3. \nDen maskulina kroppen och h\u00e5dpornografi_**](chapter003.html)\n 2. Muskulatur och kroppsgr\u00e4nser\n 3. Den sargade kroppen\n 4. H\u00e5rdpornografi och fallosbesv\u00e4r\n 5. Den seri\u00f6sa penisen och maskinell sexualitet\n 6. Kroppen som inte \u00e4r\n 7. Fr\u00e5nvarande beg\u00e4r?\n\n 1. [**_4. \nDen feminina kroppen och mjukpornografi_**](chapter004.html)\n 2. Pinuppan som krigssymbol\n 3. Lekande pojkar och deras lekkamrater\n 4. Den nya grabben och hans tidningar\n 5. Viljan att bli sedd: Den exhibitionistiska flickan\n 6. Vithet och klass\n 7. Mediala playmate-scener\n 8. Den feminina kroppen: Splittrade blickar och chauvinism\n 9. Okroppslig maskulinitet\n 10. Det ironiska tilltalet\n 11. Osynlighet och beg\u00e4r\n\n 1. [**_5. \nJaget som bild_**](chapter005.html)\n 2. N\u00e4rhet och kroppsliga tilltal\n 3. Distans och okroppslighet\n 4. Medial bed\u00f6mningskultur\n 5. \u00c5tr\u00e5v\u00e4rda positioner och genusregler\n 6. Den manliga blicken som hot och lockelse\n\n 1. [**_6. \nOroade blickar och kroppsliga dilemman_**](chapter006.html)\n 2. F\u00f6rakt, l\u00e4ngtan och (o)beroende\n 3. Kroppsgr\u00e4nser och k\u00e4nslokontroll\n 4. Den ensamma fallosen \u2013 p\u00e5 v\u00e4g mot uppl\u00f6sning?\n\n 1. Noter\n 2. Referenser\n\n## F\u00d6RORD\n\n> I ett avl\u00e4gset fj\u00e4rran upptr\u00e4der m\u00e4nniskorna med m\u00e5nga k\u00f6n, men utan de namn som inte h\u00f6r samman med dem. Namnl\u00f6sa inte d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att de blivit tillintetgjorda, utan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att de skulle svara mot och inte svara mot, kunde men inte m\u00e5ste svara mot varje t\u00e4nkbart namn.\n> \n> (Klaus Theweleit, _Mansfantasier_ s. 571)\n\nDet \u00e4r en utopisk bild Klaus Theweleit m\u00e5lar upp i citatet ovan; k\u00f6n och kroppar som inte svarar mot n\u00e5gra namn, som inte tyngs ned av allt som h\u00f6r till dessa namn. En tanke som ocks\u00e5 \u00e4r sv\u00e5r att uttrycka i ord n\u00e4r spr\u00e5ket gillrar sina egna f\u00e4llor, av hon, han, av j\u00e4mf\u00f6relser och motsatser, med det ena b\u00e4ttre och det andra s\u00e4mre.\n\nMen kanske \u00e4r det s\u00e5 att bilden, mer \u00e4n orden, kan binda id\u00e9er om k\u00f6n till kroppen genom att l\u00e5ta dem ta gestalt framf\u00f6r oss i fysisk form \u2013 genom att visa oss hur k\u00f6n ser ut (eller b\u00f6r se ut).\n\nDetta \u00e4r en bok om kroppar i mediala bilder, om kroppar som visas upp \u2013 och om kroppar som inte visas upp.\n\nJag vill tacka v\u00e4nner och kollegor som har l\u00e4st och kommenterat i olika faser av arbetet: Madeleine Kleberg, Tom Olsson, Yvonne Hirdman och Michael Westerlund samt Tora Hedin f\u00f6r hennes spr\u00e5k\u00f6ga. Och inte minst Richard Herold p\u00e5 Atlas som s\u00e5g till att det blev gjort.\n\nStockholm, december 2007\n\n# 1.\n\n# Maskulinitet och (o)synlighet\n\n> \"Genus kan du vara sj\u00e4lv\"\n\nN\u00e5got som \u00e4r utm\u00e4rkande f\u00f6r v\u00e5r tid \u00e4r besattheten av sex. Sexualitet \u00e4r ett centralt tema n\u00e4r det g\u00e4ller att locka publik inom flertalet medier. Det cirkulerar omkring oss i bek\u00e4nnelseintervjuer, i tips- och r\u00e5dmaterial, i nyhetss\u00e4ndningar, i reklam och i mjuk- och h\u00e5rdpornografi. Men i allt detta tal finns det n\u00e5got som inte n\u00e4mns eller diskuteras: f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om manlig heterosexualitet.\n\nAtt manlig heterosexualitet \u00e4r osynlig kan framst\u00e5 som ett konstlat p\u00e5st\u00e5ende, f\u00e5 saker tar v\u00e4l s\u00e5dan plats som just denna. Vi har en global mediemarknad av tidningar, filmer och bilder som ska egga och f\u00f6rf\u00f6ra m\u00e4n. Men vad dessa bilder talar till och formas efter \u00e4r en sexualitet som ska uppfattas som sj\u00e4lvklar. Det finns ett motst\u00e5nd inf\u00f6r att synligg\u00f6ra sv\u00e5righeter f\u00f6r m\u00e4n i relation till sexualitet och, kanske framf\u00f6r allt, inf\u00f6r att diskutera de f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar som maskulin sexualitet vilar p\u00e5. Det \u00e4r som om manlig heterosexualitet \u00e4r just bara det, sexualitet, den vanliga, den som andra former av sexualitet m\u00e4ts emot, kvinnors och homo- och bisexuella m\u00e4ns. Filmforskaren Richard Dyer har uttryckt det som att manlig sexualitet \u00e4r s\u00e5 sj\u00e4lvklar att den inte syns, den \u00e4r \u00f6verallt och samtidigt ingenstans:\n\n> Man skulle kunna tro att ingenting vore enklare \u00e4n att skriva om bilder av manlig sexualitet. Vi lever i en v\u00e4rld fylld av bilder, genomsyrad av sexualitet. Men det \u00e4r en av orsakerna till att det \u00e4r s\u00e5 sv\u00e5rt att skriva om den. Manlig sexualitet \u00e4r som luften \u2013 du andas in den hela tiden utan att vara s\u00e4rskilt medveten om den.\n> \n> (Dyer 1985 s. 28)\n\nEtt \u00e5terkommande tema bland politiker och allm\u00e4nhet \u00e4r oro kring ton\u00e5rsflickors sexualitet och de uttryck den tar sig i mode och medier. Det handlar i m\u00e5nga fall om att vilja \"skydda\" unga flickor mot sexualitetens konsekvenser: utnyttjande, \u00f6vergrepp, sjukdomar, graviditet, men \u00e4ven kraven som det sexuella anses kunna medf\u00f6ra, som att beh\u00f6va ha en viss kropp, g\u00f6ra saker man inte vill och s\u00e5 vidare. De unga ton\u00e5rspojkarna och deras relation till sexualitet \u00e4r d\u00e4remot s\u00e4llan f\u00f6rem\u00e5l f\u00f6r samma uppm\u00e4rksamhet och oro. Ett talande exempel \u00e4r den debatt om sexualiserat mode f\u00f6r flickor som \u00e5terkommer regelbundet. Mode som florerar bland unga killar, d\u00e4r jeansen till exempel dras ned \u00f6ver stj\u00e4rten, har inte diskuterats som uttryck f\u00f6r en kommersiellt sexualiserad kultur som etsas in p\u00e5 den unga manskroppen. Denna obalans b\u00f6r tas p\u00e5 allvar eftersom den pekar p\u00e5 djupg\u00e5ende skillnader i hur vi tolkar sexuella uttryck beroende p\u00e5 k\u00f6n och visar vad vi problematiserar och inte problematiserar.\n\nMycket litteratur vittnar om det stora glappet mellan id\u00e9n om den naturligt potenta manliga sexualiteten och m\u00e4ns upplevelser av sexuell oro (exempelvis drabbas varannan man mellan 40 och 70 \u00e5r av n\u00e5gon grad av potensproblem). I de fr\u00e5gor som behandlas av olika r\u00e5dgivningsinstanser uttrycks manlig sexualitet ofta i termer av os\u00e4kerhet. Man oroar sig f\u00f6r k\u00f6nets storlek, f\u00f6r impotens, f\u00f6r att inte veta hur man g\u00f6r, f\u00f6r att inte kunna tillfredst\u00e4lla en kvinna och s\u00e5 vidare.\n\nDet finns ocks\u00e5 speciella f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntningar p\u00e5 m\u00e4n n\u00e4r det g\u00e4ller sexuell kompetens och kunskap. De ska veta hur man g\u00f6r, de ska aktivt ta initiativ och de ska alltid vilja ha sex \u2013 vi har alla f\u00e5tt h\u00f6ra att unga killar t\u00e4nker p\u00e5 sex var tredje minut (eller \u00e4r det varannan?). Samtidigt \u00e4r den kropp som intar h\u00f6gs\u00e4tet i dagens mediekultur och d\u00e4r sexualitet skrivs in, den unga \u2013 ofta vita \u2013 kvinnokroppen. En s\u00e5dan massiv bildkultur har v\u00e4xt upp runt denna feminina kropp de senaste hundra \u00e5ren att det kan vara sv\u00e5rt att se f\u00f6rbi den. D\u00e4r har vi henne uppvisad, ut- och inv\u00e4nd, in till d\u00f6den tillg\u00e4nglig, inbjudande, vacker och framf\u00f6r allt d\u00e4r f\u00f6r att bli sedd, synad, bed\u00f6md och \u00e5tr\u00e5dd. Symbol f\u00f6r, menar n\u00e5gra, kapitalismens beg\u00e4rskultur, eller, menar andra, en komplicerad l\u00e4ngtan tillbaka till moderkroppen. Men vad s\u00e4ger denna bildkultur om maskulin sexualitet? Vad \u00e4r det f\u00f6r id\u00e9er om maskulinitet den f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla?\n\nDen brittiska medieforskaren Anthony Easthope diskuterar i sin bok _What a man's gotta do_ de myter kring maskulinitet som frodas i popul\u00e4rkulturen. Enligt honom f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker dessa myter alltid f\u00e5 det maskulina att framst\u00e5 som det normala, det universella. Och f\u00f6r att kunna framst\u00e5 som sj\u00e4lvklara m\u00e5ste de f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar och myter som skapar maskulinitet vara dolda f\u00f6r insyn:\n\n> Den maskulina myten har alltid f\u00f6rs\u00f6kt bibeh\u00e5lla sin makt genom att l\u00e5tsas vara osynlig. S\u00e5 snart maskulinitet kan ses som maskulinitet, blir dess makt utmanad, ifr\u00e5gasatt.\n> \n> (Easthope 1990 s. 167\u2013168)\n\nFr\u00e5gor om synlighet, om vad som kan ses och inte kan ses, \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r avg\u00f6rande f\u00f6r att myter om det maskulina ska uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5llas, inte minst om manlig auktoritet. Auktoritet \u00e4r en egenskap som tillskrivs n\u00e5gon. En auktorit\u00e4r person \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r, mer \u00e4n n\u00e5gon annan, beroende av att framst\u00e5 som respektingivande och av att vissa delar av jaget h\u00e5lls undan offentlig synlighet och publika blickar.\n\nSynlighet kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s p\u00e5 flera s\u00e4tt. Det kan vara n\u00e5got positivt eftersom det visar att du finns, du har en plats p\u00e5 en (medial) offentlig arena. Men synlighet kan ocks\u00e5 inneb\u00e4ra att bli uppvisad och framvisad f\u00f6r besk\u00e5dan. Osynlighet kan s\u00e5ledes vara en b\u00f6rda likav\u00e4l som ett privilegium. Att sj\u00e4lv kunna v\u00e4lja vad som ska visas fram och att kunna h\u00e5lla undan sidor av sig sj\u00e4lv fr\u00e5n allm\u00e4n insyn har ofta varit f\u00f6rbeh\u00e5llet personer i en privilegierad position. Synlighetens form \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r avg\u00f6rande \u2013 vad som visas upp och vad som inte visas upp, eller r\u00e4ttare sagt: vem som till\u00e5ts f\u00e5 veta vad om vem.\n\nM\u00f6jligheterna f\u00f6r det maskulina att uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla en skyddande osynlighet har blivit sv\u00e5rare. Ett allt st\u00f6rre intresse riktas mot m\u00e4n b\u00e5de inom forskning och popul\u00e4rmedier. Medelklassmannen \u00e4r mode- och kosmetikaindustrins nya heta konsument. Sk\u00f6nhetsprodukter f\u00f6r m\u00e4n \u00e4r en snabbt v\u00e4xande marknad.\n\nNya livsstilstidningar f\u00f6r m\u00e4n dyker upp liksom tv-program d\u00e4r m\u00e4n stajlas, och numera deklarerar \u00e4ven m\u00e4n med glansiga ansikten tv-reklamens v\u00e4letablerade sk\u00f6nhetsslogan: \"Because you're worth it\". F\u00f6rvisso \u00e4r de inte placerade i vita rum, utan ute och joggar eller p\u00e5 arbetet och kr\u00e4men ska uttryckligen anv\u00e4ndas f\u00f6r att se pigg ut p\u00e5 jobbet \u2013 men \u00e4nd\u00e5.\n\nV\u00e5r mediekulturs besatthet av sexualitet och kroppar g\u00f6r det ocks\u00e5 sv\u00e5rt f\u00f6r denna kropp att h\u00e5lla sig utanf\u00f6r bildramen \u2013 eller vara kvar i halvdunklet utanf\u00f6r kameraljuset. \u00c4ven det manliga k\u00f6nsorganet f\u00e5r alltmer uppm\u00e4rksamhet, kanske som ett slags sista tabu att riva ned. I _Dagens Nyheter_ rapporterade man att trendspanare i tidningen _Rodeo_ 2006 slagit fast att h\u00f6stens accessoar var kuken:\n\n> Det \u00e4r kuken som alla vill ha kring halsen, det \u00e4r kuken som snart kommer att finnas p\u00e5 Lucien Pella-Finets kashmirtr\u00f6jor, det \u00e4r kuken som \u00e4r modets nya fixstj\u00e4rna.\n> \n> (DN 11.12.06)\n\nG\u00f6r det faktum att maskulinitet och den manliga kroppen b\u00f6rjar synas alltmer att vi ser en uppluckring av den, enligt Easthope, n\u00f6dv\u00e4ndiga osynligheten och d\u00e4rmed av den sj\u00e4lvklarhet som fyllt den maskulina myten? Hur hanteras denna synlighet n\u00e4r m\u00e4n kliver in p\u00e5 det territorium som \u00e4r s\u00e5 kopplat till femininitet? Vilka strategier anv\u00e4nds f\u00f6r att visa upp den manliga kroppen? Med andra ord: kan id\u00e9n om maskulinitet som n\u00e5got unikt, n\u00e5got som inte kan likst\u00e4llas med andra kroppar, fortleva i denna synlighet?\n\nTittar vi sedan p\u00e5 pornografin som en av v\u00e5r tids stora ber\u00e4ttelser om kroppar, sexualitet och k\u00f6n kan vi se att den manliga kroppen och dess plats h\u00e4r \u00e4r understuderad. Pornografins etablerade plats inom det mediala och senmoderna samh\u00e4llet kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s utifr\u00e5n att den \u2013 kanske mer \u00e4n n\u00e5got annat \u2013 artikulerar sp\u00e4nningen mellan privat och offentligt. H\u00e4r visar man upp eller ger anspelningar p\u00e5 intima sexuella akter f\u00f6r offentliga blickar. Pornografi \u00e4r samtidigt del i det moderna individbaserade projektet. Vad den framf\u00f6rallt hyllar och syftar till \u00e4r onani (\u00e4ven om den naturligtvis kan anv\u00e4ndas p\u00e5 andra s\u00e4tt). Pornografi \u00e4r p\u00e5 m\u00e5nga s\u00e4tt den narcissistiska m\u00e4nniskans ultimata spegling. Publiken utlovas snabb sexuell tillfredst\u00e4llelse utan behov av personliga m\u00f6ten eller relationer (cirka femton minuter r\u00e4knar filmproducenter med att det tar f\u00f6r betraktaren att f\u00e5 utl\u00f6sning, varf\u00f6r den ofta \u00e4r gjord i sekvenser). P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet passar den som hand i handske i ett tidseffektivt samh\u00e4lle.\n\nTrots att pornografi kan tala till autentiska beg\u00e4r utifr\u00e5n en slags urfantasins dramaturgi, \u00e4r den inte desto mindre en iscens\u00e4ttning som bygger p\u00e5 id\u00e9er om sexualitet, k\u00f6n och, n\u00e4r det g\u00e4ller visuell pornografi, om bilden som medium.\n\n## BILDENS LOCKELSER\n\nBildens betydelse i skapandet av k\u00f6n \u00e4r som jag ser det central. En f\u00f6ljd av att leva i en medial kultur \u00e4r att just symboliska representationer, som bilder, blir alltmer betydelsefulla f\u00f6r v\u00e5r uppfattning om v\u00e4rlden och om oss sj\u00e4lva. De flesta av oss \u00e4r i dag omgivna av fler bilder \u00e4n m\u00e4nniskor n\u00e5gonsin tidigare varit i historien. Det \u00e4r inte bara antalet bilder som har \u00f6kat utan ocks\u00e5 kopplingen mellan kunskap och seende:\n\n> [...] en kultur som beskrivs som visuell, h\u00e4mtar allts\u00e5 kunskap, s\u00e4tt att till\u00e4gna sig kunskap och de n\u00e4tverk av betydelser detta ger upphov till, ur seendet.\n> \n> (Becker 1998 s. 19).\n\nNumer finns ett alltmer likartat bildspr\u00e5k som \u00f6verf\u00f6rs via globala medief\u00f6retag och som kan s\u00e4gas s\u00e4tta ramarna f\u00f6r en stor del av den kommersiella bildkulturen i v\u00e4rlden.\n\nHur m\u00e4nniskor framst\u00e4lls i bilder har ocks\u00e5 stor betydelse f\u00f6r hur maktrelationer uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lls. Framf\u00f6r allt g\u00e4ller detta repetitiva bilder, d\u00e4r vi f\u00e5r se samma budskap om och om igen, och d\u00e4r relationer mellan grupper av olika k\u00f6n, klass och etnicitet blir familj\u00e4ra och \"naturliga\" genom att de st\u00e4ndigt upprepas. Men trots att det \u00e4r via bilder som mycket information, v\u00e4rderingar och attityder f\u00f6rmedlas, \u00e4r det ofta texter vi f\u00e5r l\u00e4ra oss att vara kritiska mot, att se vems perspektiv de skrivs utifr\u00e5n och s\u00e5 vidare, medan bilden bara \u00e4r.\n\nAtt s\u00e4ga n\u00e5got med bilder \u00e4r inte samma sak som att s\u00e4ga det med text eller tal. Bilder anses ha f\u00f6rm\u00e5gan att tala direkt till oss, att v\u00e4cka minnen, erfarenheter och k\u00e4nslor till liv. Ofta s\u00e4ger bilder ocks\u00e5 s\u00e5dant som inte skulle g\u00e5 att skriva eller s\u00e4ga verbalt utan att det framstod som inskr\u00e4nkt, f\u00f6rdomsfullt eller bara f\u00e5nigt. Men n\u00e4r det \"s\u00e4gs\" med bilder verkar vi acceptera det p\u00e5 ett annat s\u00e4tt (tittar vi p\u00e5 reklamen blir detta tydligt: k\u00f6p den h\u00e4r produkten och du kommer bli lycklig, vacker och springa runt med vackra v\u00e4nner p\u00e5 vita str\u00e4nder).\n\nV\u00e5r fascination inf\u00f6r bilden \u00e4r beroende av att den kan frysa ett \u00f6gonblick av n\u00e5got som har h\u00e4nt, av n\u00e5gon som har varit d\u00e4r framf\u00f6r linsen. Samtidigt \u00e4r ju bilder precis som ord, ber\u00e4ttelser som visar en sak och inte en annan (ibland p\u00e5 bekostnad av en annan). Det \u00e4r som Susan Sontag p\u00e5pekar m\u00e4nniskor, inte bilder, som ber\u00e4ttar.\n\nBilder har en unik f\u00f6rm\u00e5ga att blanda samman symboliska representationer och det \"verkliga\". De \u00e4r verklighetens perfekta avbild och p\u00e5 samma g\u00e5ng fyllda av symboler och koder som vi m\u00e5ste l\u00e4ra oss f\u00f6rst\u00e5 f\u00f6r att begripa vad bilden s\u00e4ger.\n\nAtt vi s\u00e5 ofta godtar bilden som \"sanning\" \u00e4r inte f\u00f6rv\u00e5nande, eftersom v\u00e5r personliga erfarenhet av verkligheten, av hur vi m\u00f6ter och tar in omv\u00e4rlden, i mycket \u00e4r upplevd via synen. Seendet \u00e4r inte heller isolerat fr\u00e5n resten av kroppen, det vi ser kan ge rent kroppsliga reaktioner som gl\u00e4dje, sorg, \u00e4ckel, upphetsning, skr\u00e4ck. Att bilder kan ha en omedelbar effekt p\u00e5 kroppen visar p\u00e5 v\u00e5r s\u00e5rbarhet och k\u00e4nslighet inf\u00f6r det vi ser.\n\nV\u00e5r fascination inf\u00f6r bilden kan ocks\u00e5 bero p\u00e5 att v\u00e5ra f\u00f6rsta intryck av andra m\u00e4nniskor och av oss sj\u00e4lva, kommer via seendet, l\u00e5ngt innan vi kan kommunicera med ord. Enligt den franska psykoanalytikern Jacques Lacan \u00e4r \"spegelfasen\" utg\u00e5ngspunkten f\u00f6r v\u00e5r identitet. Det \u00e4r d\u00e5 barnet f\u00f6r f\u00f6rsta g\u00e5ngen ser sig sj\u00e4lv som en komplett gestalt och kan se sig sj\u00e4lv i andras \u00f6gon. I denna f\u00f6rsta spegling upplevs bilden av jaget som mer full\u00e4ndad och hel \u00e4n den egna erfarelsen av kroppen. Den tidiga fascinationen inf\u00f6r oss sj\u00e4lva som bild skapar en l\u00e4ngtan, ett beg\u00e4r efter att \u00e5teruppleva denna idealisering av jaget b\u00e5de i v\u00e5ra egna och andras \u00f6gon.\n\nVi vill alla tro att det finns en m\u00f6jlighet att bli sedd och f\u00f6rst\u00e5dd av dem vi \u00e4lskar eller vill bli \u00e4lskade av, att uppg\u00e5 helt i den andra vilket f\u00f6r\u00e4lskelsen \u00e4r ett uttryck f\u00f6r. Denna l\u00e4ngtan efter en direkt l\u00e4nk till en annan person, om att bli \"hel\" i dennes blick, kan inte uppn\u00e5s genom spr\u00e5ket \u2013 som splittrar oss genom sin struktur \u2013 men bilden kan fortfarande b\u00e4ra p\u00e5 id\u00e9n om att det \u00e4r m\u00f6jligt (vilket det naturligtvis inte \u00e4r, eftersom bilden f\u00f6rblir livl\u00f6s). En av bildens egenheter \u00e4r emellertid att den kan locka fram v\u00e5r l\u00e4ngtan att bli sedda och att bli beg\u00e4rda.\n\nBilder anv\u00e4nds allts\u00e5 f\u00f6r att idealisera och skapa beg\u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att de kan g\u00f6ra det \u2013 och detta p\u00e5 ett helt annat s\u00e4tt \u00e4n texter kan. De _visar_ kroppar, kroppar som vi ska f\u00f6rh\u00e5lla oss till, som ska v\u00e4cka l\u00e4ngtan, upphetsning och andra former av beg\u00e4r. Utan att \u00f6verdriva kan man s\u00e4ga att dessa tv\u00e5 aspekter hos bilden (beg\u00e4r och idealisering), ligger till grund f\u00f6r det enorma anv\u00e4ndandet av just bilder f\u00f6r att \u00f6verf\u00f6ra olika former av sexuella och kommersiella budskap.\n\nKroppen \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 det mest p\u00e5tagliga, konkreta uttryck vi har av oss sj\u00e4lva och v\u00e5rt utseende placerar in oss i kategorier av k\u00f6n, klass, etnicitet, \u00e5lder och sexualitet. Vissa kroppar har, som jag vill visa, f\u00f6retr\u00e4de \u00f6ver andra och behandlas med mer respekt, tillskrivs mer integritet och mer auktoritet. Och det finns, vilket jag ocks\u00e5 vill visa, en tydlig sp\u00e4nning och ambivalens n\u00e4r den manliga kroppen presenteras i sexuella bilder.\n\nSedan sjuttiotalet har en omfattande forskning lyft fram bilders betydelse f\u00f6r id\u00e9er om femininitet. Vem som f\u00e5r se p\u00e5 vem och hur, har f\u00f6rklarats vara del i maktrelationen mellan k\u00f6nen, allt sedan den feministiska filmvetaren Laura Mulveys ber\u00f6mda begrepp \"den manliga blicken\" och konstvetaren John Bergers analyser av den sj\u00e4lvgranskande blick som belastar kvinnors identitet och navigerande i v\u00e4rlden. Men vilken funktion den manliga blicken har i skapandet av maskulinitet har inte granskats n\u00e4mnv\u00e4rt.\n\nMan kan ocks\u00e5 fr\u00e5ga sig, vilket g\u00f6rs i denna bok, varf\u00f6r det maskulina beg\u00e4ret presenteras och ska uppfattas som universellt och likadant. Som om det alltid varit detsamma oavsett tid, plats och person; ett slags om\u00e4ttlig aptit som s\u00f6ker tillfredsst\u00e4llelse \u00f6verallt. Precis som hunger \u00e4r sexuellt beg\u00e4r en drift, men hur vi \u00e4ter, vad vi \u00e4ter och vilken plats mat tilldelas i samh\u00e4llet skiftar genom historien. Detsamma g\u00e4ller sexualiteten, det vill s\u00e4ga hur den ska tillfredst\u00e4llas, hur den ska uttryckas och vilken betydelse den tillm\u00e4ts f\u00f6r olika grupper. Samtidigt som sexualitet ska vara uttryck f\u00f6r ett av de mest naturliga och spontana av v\u00e5ra m\u00e4nskliga behov, \u00e4r det ocks\u00e5 fyllt av icke-erotiska betydelser f\u00f6r kvinnor och m\u00e4n. Det kan handla om beroende, om r\u00e4dsla, om skam, eller om attityder vi f\u00e5r med oss fr\u00e5n lekparken, i det mediala vardagsutbudet och i h\u00e5rdpornografins genitala uppvisningar. Sexualitet \u00e4r b\u00e5de det mest intima och det mest offentliga, det mest fysiskt grundade och det mest symboliskt framst\u00e4llda, det mest medf\u00f6dda och det mest inl\u00e4rda, det mest autonoma och det mest relationella i tillvaron.\n\nDet \u00e4r d\u00e4remot v\u00e4ldigt l\u00e4tt att tala om sexualiteten som \"naturlig\" eftersom den vid f\u00f6rsta \u00f6gonkastet verkar s\u00e5 biologisk, s\u00e5 djupt och tidl\u00f6st rotad i k\u00f6ttet. Detta g\u00e4ller s\u00e4rskilt manlig heterosexualitet som ska f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en instinkt, som alltid svarar, som en automatisk reflex, p\u00e5 bilder av Kvinnan. Och svarar d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att den, likt en pavlovsk hund, inte kan annat. Detta \u00e4r, som Easthope p\u00e5pekar, naturligtvis nonsens. Lika lite som det finns _ett_ kvinnligt beg\u00e4r finns det _ett_ manligt beg\u00e4r.\n\nMen denna insisterande id\u00e9 fyller i mycket den sexuella bildkultur vi har omkring oss. Att, som s\u00e5 ofta g\u00f6rs, se sexualiserade framst\u00e4llningar av det feminina som uttryck f\u00f6r patriarkal makt och beg\u00e4r \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att se denna maskulinitet _just s\u00e5 som den vill bli sedd_ : som fullkomlig, aktiv och sj\u00e4lvklar. Ist\u00e4llet, menar jag, \u00e4r denna bildkultur uttryck f\u00f6r flera av de mots\u00e4ttningar som fyller heterosexuell maskulinitet, som det komplicerade f\u00f6rh\u00e5llandet mellan synlighet och den manliga kroppen, mellan kontroll och alienation, mellan l\u00e4ngtan efter och f\u00f6rakt inf\u00f6r det feminina.\n\nDet \u00e4r allts\u00e5 tv\u00e5 teman som l\u00f6per genom denna bok. Det ena \u00e4r hur maskulinitet tar form genom den _kvinnliga_ kroppen i sexuella bilder och det andra \u00e4r hur maskulinitet framst\u00e4lls genom den _manliga_ kroppen i sexuella bilder.\n\nMen innan detta g\u00f6rs vill jag s\u00e4tta bakgrundsramen f\u00f6r hur jag menar att maskulinitet och (hetero)sexualitet kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s.\n\n## MASKULINITET OCH K\u00c4NSLORNAS BETYDELSE\n\nB\u00e5de i forskningen och i den allm\u00e4nna debatten kring bilder och sexualitet \u00e4r det ofta det feminina k\u00f6net som blir unders\u00f6kt och uppvisat, st\u00f6tt och bl\u00f6tt. N\u00e4r maskulinitet och sexualitet studeras och diskuteras handlar det ofta om dess problematiska konsekvenser f\u00f6r andra, kvinnor och homosexuella m\u00e4n. Utan att p\u00e5 n\u00e5got vis ifr\u00e5gas\u00e4tta vikten av dessa perspektiv, \u00e4r f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar kring maskulin heterosexualitet (och hur de framst\u00e4lls i bilder) viktiga att unders\u00f6ka. Om vi nu inte ser m\u00e4n som v\u00e4senskilda med en egen artbest\u00e4mning \u2013 tydligast uttryckt genom v\u00e5ld och sexualitet \u2013 utan som b\u00e4rare av en konstruerad genusidentitet, beh\u00f6ver kopplingen mellan maskulinitet och sexualitet tittas n\u00e4rmare p\u00e5. Och om Simone de Beauvoirs ofta citerade sentens \u2013 man f\u00f6ds inte till kvinna, man blir det \u2013 ska ha n\u00e5gon b\u00e4ring s\u00e5 borde detta g\u00e4lla \u00e4ven m\u00e4n \u2013 man f\u00f6ds inte till man, man blir det.\n\nSj\u00e4lva grundpremissen f\u00f6r att maskulinitet \u00e4r en till\u00e4gnad identitet, en konstruktion, st\u00f6ter dock fortfarande p\u00e5 mer patrull \u00e4n tanken om femininitet som en konstruktion.\n\nInte minst \u00e4r detta tydligt i de \u00e5terkommande diskussionerna om att manligheten \u00e4r i \"kris\". Det \u00e4r ett p\u00e5st\u00e5ende som visar hur djupt rotad id\u00e9n om maskulinitet som det omarkerade k\u00f6net \u00e4r, det k\u00f6n som bara \"\u00e4r\". Det bygger p\u00e5 uppfattningen att det faktiskt finns en manlighet, en manlighet som n\u00e4r den inte \u00e4r i \"kris\" _\u00e4r_ auktorit\u00e4r, kontrollerad, familjef\u00f6rs\u00f6rjande och n\u00e4r m\u00e4n inte f\u00e5r vara ifred i dessa positioner hamnar de i kris.\n\nM\u00e5nga \u00e4r de paradoxer och mots\u00e4ttningar som dyker upp n\u00e4r man b\u00f6rjar dra i id\u00e9er kring maskulinitet, och det \u00e4r l\u00e4tt att f\u00f6rst\u00e5 de m\u00e5nga forskare som radar upp olika typer av maskulinitet _er_. Det \u00e4r ju ett s\u00e4tt att visa alla sorter: Titta, vi har b\u00e5de den starka och den svaga, hj\u00e4lten och anti-hj\u00e4lten, dandyn, den k\u00e4nslosamma och den h\u00e5rdf\u00f6ra actionmannen. Men vad alla olika typer av maskuliniteter snarare visar \u00e4r att maskuliniteten om n\u00e5got \u00e4r elastisk. Den f\u00f6refaller kunna t\u00e4njas i o\u00e4ndlighet utan att brista. Egenskaper som beskriver och tillskrivs mannen med stort M kommer och g\u00e5r, l\u00e4ggs till, dras ifr\u00e5n, utan att Hans position faller och g\u00e5r under. Mansforskaren Robert Connell menar att det alltid finns en ledande version av manlighet vid olika tidpunkter \u2013 den hegemoniska maskuliniteten \u2013 som b\u00e5de m\u00e4n och kvinnor f\u00e5r f\u00f6rh\u00e5lla sig till. Och en av de egenskaper som utm\u00e4rker den hegemoniska maskuliniteten \u00e4r just att den kan omformas och fyllas med nya betydelser, men alltid p\u00e5 ett s\u00e5dant s\u00e4tt att den f\u00f6rblir \u00f6verordnad. I relation till den hegemoniska st\u00e5r den delaktiga och den underordnande maskuliniteten, den sistn\u00e4mnda \u00e4r den homosexuella mannen som enligt Connell finns i botten av m\u00e4ns genushierarki.\n\nM\u00e5nga analyser av maskulinitet konstaterar att det \u00e4r f\u00e5 m\u00e4n som k\u00e4nner igen sig i talet om hegemoni eller \u00f6verordnade positioner. Detta tas d\u00e5 upp som ett problem, som skulle det inneb\u00e4ra en svaghet i analysen. I analyser av femininitet \u00e4r detta emellertid en sj\u00e4lvklarhet, ja, en utg\u00e5ngspunkt \u00e4r att glappet mellan en ideal femininitet och kvinnors upplevelse av sig sj\u00e4lva visar att det \u00e4r en maskerad. Det \u00e4r n\u00e5gonting kvinnor f\u00e5r f\u00f6rh\u00e5lla sig till och f\u00f6rhandla med, b\u00e5de p\u00e5 ett strukturellt och p\u00e5 ett personligt plan. Men medan kvinnors upplevelse av glappet mellan det feminina som idealbild och jaget tas som pant f\u00f6r att det \u00e4r en konstruktion, blir glappet f\u00f6r m\u00e4n snarare ett tecken p\u00e5 att det \u00e4r analyserna som haltar.\n\nF\u00f6rvisso lever f\u00e5 m\u00e4n upp till en heroisk, framg\u00e5ngsrik manlighetsmall. Men \u00e4ven om bara f\u00e5 m\u00e4n f\u00f6rkroppsligar de hypermaskulina idealen, drar en stor del m\u00e4n trots allt nytta av dem, p\u00e5pekar Connell. Dessa delaktiga maskuliniteter \u00e4r allts\u00e5 en del av hegemonin, eftersom de tillgodog\u00f6r sig de f\u00f6rdelar som m\u00e4n kan vinna p\u00e5 kvinnors generella underordnade st\u00e4llning: myter om att m\u00e4n \u00e4r mer rationella, mindre k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssigt styrda, mer p\u00e5litliga, b\u00e4ttre ledare och s\u00e5 vidare.\n\nEftersom de flesta m\u00e4n f\u00e5r utdelning av denna patriarkala ordning utan att k\u00e4nna igen sig i den hegemoniska maskuliniteten, kan flertalet m\u00e4n ocks\u00e5 avf\u00e4rda dessa analyser genom att h\u00e4vda och anse att det inte handlar om dem sj\u00e4lva. Privilegierna uppfattas som sj\u00e4lvklara.\n\nS\u00e5 p\u00e5 samma g\u00e5ng som anpassning till en normativ manlighet sker, kan m\u00e4n leva i en n\u00e4stan or\u00f6rd aura av individualitet, i en fiktion av att bara vara sig sj\u00e4lva. Men den delaktiga maskuliniteten handlar som jag ser det inte bara om f\u00f6rdelar. F\u00f6r att f\u00e5 ta del av dessa f\u00f6rm\u00e5ner kr\u00e4vs att m\u00e4n godtar och inte ifr\u00e5gas\u00e4tter sj\u00e4lva grunden f\u00f6r den hegemoniska maskuliniteten. D\u00e4rf\u00f6r blir ocks\u00e5 flera av dess grundvalar inf\u00f6rlivade p\u00e5 olika s\u00e4tt \u00e4ven hos de delaktiga m\u00e4nnen.\n\nAtt studera maskulinitet blir l\u00e4tt som att dra i en tr\u00e5d som snabbt utvecklas till ett helt nystan av variabler att ta h\u00e4nsyn till: klass, etnicitet, kultur, social bakgrund, upplevelser av sj\u00e4lvet, relationer i det offentliga, relationer i det privata och framf\u00f6r allt m\u00e4ns upplevelser av sig sj\u00e4lva. Det \u00e4r som om id\u00e9n individ = man, verkligen stretar emot att brytas upp och inlemmas i n\u00e5gra strukturer.\n\nI syfte att verkligen komma \u00e5t och visa upp maskulinitet tror jag inte att det r\u00e4cker med att lyfta fram olika typer av manligheter vid olika tidpunkter. Vad som ocks\u00e5 beh\u00f6ver tas upp \u00e4r de (ibland mots\u00e4gelsefulla) f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar som fyller den hegemoniska maskuliniteten. Den som \u00e4r normgivande och som andra former av maskulinitet m\u00e4ts emot. Om hegemonisk maskulinitet alltid \u00e4r l\u00e5ngt fr\u00e5n den upplevelse m\u00e4n har av sig sj\u00e4lva, men \u00e4nd\u00e5 de facto fortlever, blir fr\u00e5gan hur den klarar av att f\u00f6r\u00e4ndra sig och placera sig som ledande vid olika tidpunkter och hur detta g\u00f6rs med hj\u00e4lp av representationer \u2013 inte minst genom bilder.\n\nDet som f\u00f6ljer nedan \u00e4r brett skisserade penseldrag och ska inte ses som f\u00f6rs\u00f6k att beskriva genusformandet i alla dess delar. Jag vill h\u00e4r snarare visa vad jag ser som angel\u00e4get i psykoanalytiska teorier och i psykologiska diskussioner kring m\u00e4n och intimitet, f\u00f6r analyser av sexualitet och maskulint beg\u00e4r.\n\nPsykoanalysens understrykande av sexualitetens betydelse f\u00f6r hur vi formar och f\u00e5r v\u00e5ra jag formade \u00e4r s\u00e4rskilt l\u00e4mplig som bakgrundsmall f\u00f6r att f\u00f6rst\u00e5 sexuella bilders betydelse och hur detta med beg\u00e4r kan tolkas. Flertalet av de arbeten jag h\u00e4nvisar till \u00e4r skrivna av heterosexuella m\u00e4n som med utg\u00e5ngspunkt i feministiska maktanalyser uppm\u00e4rksammar maskulinitet och sexualitet som ett b\u00e5de samh\u00e4lleligt och individuellt problem.\n\n## AUTONOMI OCH FR\u00c5NVARO\n\nVilka \u00e4r d\u00e5 den ledande maskulinitetens grundvalar?\n\nDet som f\u00f6ljer id\u00e9er om maskulinitet som en enveten skugga \u00e4r autonomi och rationalitet. Mannen \u00e4r, eller b\u00f6r vara, ett autonomt sj\u00e4lv som inte \u00e4r beroende av n\u00e5gon eller n\u00e5got. Som inte l\u00e5ter k\u00e4nslorna (eller kroppen) dra iv\u00e4g med honom, utan som kan sortera, strukturera och fatta f\u00f6rnuftiga beslut. Denna myt idealiserar ocks\u00e5 mannen som entrepren\u00f6r, som alltf\u00f6r upptagen med olika livsprojekt f\u00f6r att f\u00f6rverkliga sig sj\u00e4lv i relationen med kvinnor. Ber\u00e4ttelser om den oberoende mannen som v\u00e4rjer sig mot intimitet och som kvinnor, med en m\u00e4ngd invecklade tekniker, m\u00e5ste l\u00e4ra sig f\u00e5nga och h\u00e5lla kvar, \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 ett k\u00e4rt tema inom mycket medieutbud. B\u00e4sts\u00e4ljaren _Sex at the office_ , en f\u00f6ljetong i tidningen _Veckorevyn_ p\u00e5 sextiotalet, \u00e4r bara ett exempel. H\u00e4r fanns ing\u00e5ende instruktioner om hur kvinnor skulle locka m\u00e4n in p\u00e5 sina arbetsrum med hj\u00e4lp av blommor och glada f\u00e4rger. Ett annat exempel \u00e4r artikelserien \"Hustruskolans\" klaustrofobiska tips till kvinnor om att kliva upp en timme tidigare \u00e4n han om morgonhum\u00f6ret var d\u00e5ligt, alltid byta utseende och aldrig bli arg eller kr\u00e4va hans uppm\u00e4rksamhet. Dagens r\u00e5d till kvinnor kommer f\u00f6rvisso i en annan tappning, men det fokus som kvinnor f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas \u00e4gna m\u00e4n och deras k\u00e4nslotillst\u00e5nd har fortfarande ingen som helst motsvarighet i det mediala utbudet riktat till m\u00e4n. Denna k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssiga f\u00f6rst\u00e5else av m\u00e4n, vad de g\u00f6r och inte g\u00f6r och varf\u00f6r, bygger p\u00e5 att kvinnor ska kunna identifiera sig med m\u00e4n och med det som s\u00e4gs vara deras s\u00e4tt att f\u00f6rst\u00e5 och f\u00f6rh\u00e5lla sig i v\u00e4rlden (ett uppdrag f\u00e5 kvinnor oavsett \u00e5lder \u00e4r obekanta med). Att m\u00e4n ska l\u00e4ra sig att k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssigt f\u00f6rst\u00e5 och identifiera sig med det feminina (eller med vad det s\u00e4gs vara) \u00e4r d\u00e4remot inte i samklang med maskulinitetsid\u00e9n. M\u00e4n ska snarare vara, eller framst\u00e5 som, k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssigt oberoende av kvinnor.\n\nI flera studier kring maskulinitet och identitet \u00e5terkommer begreppen avsaknad och fr\u00e5nvaro. Den v\u00e4letablerade klyschan om att m\u00e4n har problem med att uttrycka och hantera k\u00e4nslor visar sig i kliniska studier ofta st\u00e4mma. Detta visar i sin tur p\u00e5 b\u00e5de sociala och individuella problem hos m\u00e5nga m\u00e4n. Om en stor del av den manliga befolkningen \u00e4r k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssigt illitterat inneb\u00e4r det att sj\u00e4lva processen att bli maskulin skapar en fr\u00e5nvaro och tystnad i m\u00e4ns sociala och intima relationer. Eller som sociologen Anthony Giddens mer dramatiskt uttrycker det:\n\n> Den manliga identitetens ursprung \u00e4r sammanfl\u00e4tad med en djup k\u00e4nsla av os\u00e4kerhet \u2013 en k\u00e4nsla av f\u00f6rlust \u2013 som hems\u00f6ker individens undermedvetna minnen.\n> \n> (Giddens 1992 s. 11)\n\nF\u00f6rklaringar till detta finns b\u00e5de i djuppsykologiska strukturer och i de kulturella f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntningar m\u00e4n m\u00f6ter. Den maskulinitet pojkar ska f\u00f6rh\u00e5lla sig till och anamma \u00e4r minst sagt mots\u00e4gelsefull.\n\nTv\u00e4rtemot Freuds teser om maskulinitet som den s\u00e5 att s\u00e4ga enklare genusidentiteten att ta till sig i barndomen, visar studier i dag det motsatta. Det \u00e4r pojkar som tidigt m\u00e5ste avidentifiera sig med Modern, den som tar hand om oss (vilket jag \u00e5terkommer till). M\u00e4n tenderar i vuxen \u00e5lder att ha betydligt st\u00f6rre sv\u00e5righeter med sin genusidentitet \u00e4n kvinnor. Transvestism \u00e4r betydligt vanligare hos m\u00e4n \u00e4n hos kvinnor. Med detta inte sagt att det \u00e4r tecken p\u00e5 en st\u00f6rd identitet. Tv\u00e4rtom. Det kan snarare f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en vantrivsel inom de traditionella ramarna f\u00f6r maskulint upptr\u00e4dande, utseende och beteende.\n\nAtt producera sig sj\u00e4lv som man \u00e4r en seri\u00f6s syssels\u00e4ttning. Det finns ofta en oro runt sm\u00e5 pojkar som leker med \"fel\" leksaker eller kl\u00e4r sig i \"fel\" kl\u00e4der (l\u00e4s feminina), som handlar om att de utvecklar en icke-manlig sexuell identitet. Sm\u00e5 flickors lekar och kl\u00e4dval pr\u00e4glas s\u00e4llan av samma oro f\u00f6r en \"st\u00f6rd\" heterosexuell identitet, utan ses snarare som tecken p\u00e5 frig\u00f6relse fr\u00e5n traditionella genusf\u00f6rv\u00e4ntningar. Vill m\u00e4n i vuxen \u00e5lder b\u00e4ra kvinnokl\u00e4der patologiseras det som ett \"st\u00f6rt\" beteende, eller som tydliga tecken p\u00e5 en icke-heterosexuell maskulin identitet. Detta \u00e4ven om det g\u00e4ller m\u00e4n som lever med och har sex enbart med kvinnor. Att m\u00e4n som kl\u00e4r sig i kvinnokl\u00e4der betraktas som avvikande \u00e4r i sig talande f\u00f6r den reglering av maskulint beteende som finns (i USA \u00e4r exempelvis p\u00e5 sina h\u00e5ll tidningar med bilder p\u00e5 manliga transvestiter f\u00f6rbjudna, se bildark s. 1). Det som g\u00f6r att kvinnoattribut anses inneb\u00e4ra ett hot \u00e4r just, menar jag, att de visar en identifikation med det feminina, n\u00e5got som m\u00e4n ska h\u00e5lla ifr\u00e5n sig.\n\n## OBEROENDE OCH F\u00d6RAKT\n\nF\u00f6r att bli egna individer m\u00e5ste vi alla separera fr\u00e5n den som sk\u00f6ter om oss, men denna separation \u00e4r avh\u00e4ngig f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om k\u00f6n. I v\u00e5r kultur \u00e4r modern till stor del den som tar hand om det lilla barnet. Det \u00e4r henne vi modellerar oss efter och imiterar f\u00f6r att l\u00e4ra oss g\u00e5, tala, \u00e4ta.\n\nDetta \u00e4r ett resultat av en viss familjestruktur d\u00e4r kvinnor till st\u00f6rsta delen tilldelas ansvar f\u00f6r det privata hemmet och barnen under de f\u00f6rsta \u00e5ren. I den tidiga processen d\u00e4r den lilla pojken ska separera fr\u00e5n modern, m\u00e5ste han ge upp tryggheten och n\u00e4rheten i det han k\u00e4nner till och identifiera sig med fadern och med en mer diffus maskulin v\u00e4rld. Det som \u00e4r maskulint tr\u00e4der mer fram som skugglika f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar av vad det _inte_ \u00e4r (ickefeminint). Avst\u00e5ndstagande fr\u00e5n modern inbegriper d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att distansera sig fr\u00e5n de egna k\u00e4nslor och uttryck som definieras som feminina och \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r sm\u00e4rtsamt och icke-humant, anser Tony Eardley.\n\nUtvecklandet av maskulin identitet handlar d\u00e4rmed inte bara om att tillskansa sig egenskaper och roller, utan ocks\u00e5 om att fr\u00e5ns\u00e4ga sig behov av samh\u00f6righet, intimitet och n\u00e4rhet. Man kan naturligtvis kritisera dessa teorier f\u00f6r att utg\u00e5 fr\u00e5n en traditionell familjenorm som, om \u00e4n l\u00e5ngsamt, b\u00f6rjar luckras upp p\u00e5 sina h\u00e5ll. Men avst\u00e5ndstagandet fr\u00e5n det feminina \u00e4r del i den sociala f\u00f6rest\u00e4llning om manlighet som barn m\u00f6ter tidigt ocks\u00e5 utanf\u00f6r familjen. Den privata v\u00e4rlden och den offentliga \u00e4r trots allt fortfarande v\u00e4ldigt k\u00f6nsdefinierade och v\u00e5rdaren kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som feminin i \u00f6verf\u00f6rd bem\u00e4rkelse (oavsett om det \u00e4r en mor eller far).\n\nV\u00e4gen till att bli maskulin kr\u00e4ver allts\u00e5 att man separerar sig fr\u00e5n, och _inte_ identifierar sig med, det som vid olika tidpunkter definieras som typiskt feminint. Detta avst\u00e5ndstagande \u00e4r inte alls lika starkt f\u00f6r femininiteten, vilken kanske snarare har en l\u00e4ngtan efter den frihet som f\u00f6rknippas med den offentliga (maskulina) v\u00e4rlden. \u00d6nskan som kan finnas hos b\u00e5de pojkar och flickor att identifiera sig med fadern (med honom som ofta kommer och g\u00e5r de tidiga \u00e5ren) handlar om att han i det lilla barnets v\u00e4rld ofta \u00e4r representant f\u00f6r v\u00e4rlden \"utanf\u00f6r\". Det betyder att identifikationen \u00e4r med _den position_ m\u00e4n tilldelas historiskt, ekonomiskt och kulturellt och inte bunden till den manliga kroppen i sig eller till penisavund, som Freud envetet h\u00e4vdade. Vad kvinnor saknar \u00e4r snarare en viss plats i samh\u00e4llet, markerad som den falliska. Det \u00e4r allts\u00e5 kastration i en symbolisk mening som binds till den kvinnliga kroppen.\n\nDe egenskaper och attribut som tillskrivs femininitet: beroende, intimitet, k\u00e4nslosamhet och n\u00e4rhet, \u00e4r till stor del de som m\u00e4n ska l\u00e4gga utanf\u00f6r sig sj\u00e4lva f\u00f6r att bli maskulina. Det \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 i denna separationsprocess som nedv\u00e4rderandet av det som kopplas till det feminina sker. Den maskulinitet pojkar ska ikl\u00e4 sig b\u00f6r vara just icke-feminin, de ska inte vilja ha samma kl\u00e4der eller leka med samma saker som flickor. Pojkar ska inte heller visa k\u00e4nslor p\u00e5 samma s\u00e4tt som flickor, de ska inte gr\u00e5ta, eller \u00e5tminstone gr\u00e5ta mindre och inte lika l\u00e4tt som flickor. Och vi kan ocks\u00e5 se att m\u00e5nga m\u00e4n i vuxen \u00e5lder uppt\u00e4cker att de inte kan gr\u00e5ta, att de har gl\u00f6mt hur man g\u00f6r eller har extremt sv\u00e5rt f\u00f6r det. S\u00e5 djupt inskrivna blir f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar i v\u00e5ra kroppar och beteenden att de l\u00e4tt upplevs som \"naturliga\", och inte som uttryck f\u00f6r kulturella id\u00e9er.\n\nUnder slutet av sjuttonhundratalet \u00e5terfinns den sentimentala manliga hj\u00e4lten i den popul\u00e4ra litteraturen. Passivitet omg\u00e4rdade hans figur liksom storslagna naturlandskap, d\u00e4r han h\u00e4ngav sig \u00e5t k\u00e4nslosamhet och t\u00e5rar. D\u00e5 dessa egenskaper under artonhundratalet blev kriterier f\u00f6r id\u00e9er om femininitet, det svaga k\u00e4nslosamma k\u00f6net, f\u00f6rsvann de snabbt fr\u00e5n en accepterad repertoar f\u00f6r manligt uttryck och beteende, och har knappt kommit tillbaka \u00e4n.\n\nM\u00e5nga psykologer och psykoterapeuter som arbetar med m\u00e4n och med olika former av r\u00e5dgivning menar att det oberoende och den autonomi som f\u00f6rknippas med maskulinitet kan ta sig uttryck i r\u00e4dsla f\u00f6r intimitet och n\u00e4rhet med kvinnor. Dessa r\u00e4dslor har emellertid andra r\u00e4dslor i botten som \u00e4r knutna till den avsaknad som omg\u00e4rdar maskulinitet. Den ena \u00e4r r\u00e4dslan att \"manligheten\" (och d\u00e4rmed jaget) kan f\u00f6rloras, l\u00f6sas upp, eftersom separerandet fr\u00e5n det feminina och de k\u00e4nslor som det f\u00f6rknippas med framst\u00e4lls som s\u00e5 viktigt f\u00f6r att bli man. Att f\u00f6rneka sina k\u00e4nslor av beroende och att k\u00e4nna obehag inf\u00f6r intimitet kan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r ses som ett resultat av att s\u00e5 mycket k\u00e4nslor f\u00f6rbundna med n\u00e4rhet och intimitet har tryckts undan.\n\nR\u00e4dslor och obehagsk\u00e4nslor inf\u00f6r intimitet b\u00e4r d\u00e4rmed i f\u00f6rl\u00e4ngningen p\u00e5 det motsatta: en l\u00e4ngtan efter f\u00f6rening, efter n\u00e4rhet och beroende, att f\u00e5 bli en och densamma med kvinnan eller snarare med allt det som undertryckts. En l\u00e4ngtan man kanske inte alltid kan hantera eller f\u00f6rst\u00e5 utan h\u00e5ller ifr\u00e5n sig.\n\nSp\u00e4nningar inom maskuliniteten skapas med andra ord av alla dessa k\u00e4nsloregleringar och de behov eller \u00f6nskningar som helt g\u00e5r emot dem. Dubbelheten inf\u00f6r det feminina \u2013 f\u00f6rakt och l\u00e4ngtan \u2013 blir f\u00f6ljaktligen en konsekvens av de id\u00e9er som maskulinitet vilar p\u00e5. Om det feminina ska st\u00e5 f\u00f6r det som m\u00e4n inte ska eller b\u00f6r vara, men beh\u00f6ver, kan kvinnor bli b\u00e4rare b\u00e5de av det som nedv\u00e4rderas \u2013 det man inte vill veta av \u2013 och utifr\u00e5n samma projektion ett ideal \u2013 det man inte kan uttrycka sj\u00e4lv men l\u00e4ngtar efter.\n\nJu starkare denna maskulinitet upplevs som en del av jaget desto st\u00f6rre konflikt kan det \u00e5stadkomma inom individen och desto st\u00f6rre r\u00e4dsla, f\u00f6rakt eller hat kan riktas mot den som ska representera l\u00e4ngtan efter det man har skjutit bort \u2013 eller tvingats skjuta bort. Inte minst d\u00e5 denna l\u00e4ngtan kan uppfattas som en svaghet hos det maskulina jaget. Den sj\u00e4lvkontroll som f\u00f6rknippas med manlighet handlar om att inte falla, som Claes Ekenstam p\u00e5pekar, och om att d\u00e4rf\u00f6r bevaka sig sj\u00e4lv och sina k\u00e4nsloupplevelser, b\u00e5de inf\u00f6r sig sj\u00e4lv och inf\u00f6r andra.\n\nDessa m\u00f6nster och processer ska inte ses som universella eller f\u00f6r evigt fastslagna, utan som konsekvenser av v\u00e5ra socialt definierade f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntningar p\u00e5 k\u00f6n. Att f\u00f6rst\u00e5 maskulinitet i moderna samh\u00e4llen p\u00e5 detta s\u00e4tt hj\u00e4lper emellertid till att belysa de mots\u00e4gelsefulla och ibland sv\u00e5rf\u00f6rst\u00e5eliga uttryck som manlig heterosexualitet tar sig i mycket mjuk- och h\u00e5rdpornografi.\n\n## DEN MYSTISKA FALLOSEN\n\nAtt sexualitet har s\u00e5 stor betydelse f\u00f6r id\u00e9er om maskulinitet beror p\u00e5 att det handlar om s\u00e5 mycket annat \u00e4n sexuell tillfredsst\u00e4llelse. Det rymmer aspekter av manlighet \u00f6verlag. Det kopplas till initiativtagande, till kontroll och till handlingskraft.\n\nF\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar och uttryck f\u00f6r maskulin sexualitet fyller det offentliga livet i de mest skiftande former. I amerikanska tr\u00e4ningsl\u00e4ger f\u00f6r soldater sjunger till exempel m\u00e4n: \"This is my rifle [och h\u00e5ller upp vapnet], this is my gun [pekande p\u00e5 k\u00f6net]; one's for killing, the other's for fun\". [Det h\u00e4r \u00e4r mitt gev\u00e4r, det h\u00e4r \u00e4r mitt vapen: den ena \u00e4r till f\u00f6r att d\u00f6da, den andra f\u00f6r att ha kul.]\n\nSexualitetens vikt f\u00f6r f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om maskulinitet \u00e4r p\u00e5 flera s\u00e4tt helt central f\u00f6r att denna koppling p\u00e5 n\u00e5got s\u00e4tt ska fungera och inte ses som of\u00f6rst\u00e5elig eller l\u00f6jev\u00e4ckande. Vad vi ser h\u00e4r \u00e4r id\u00e9n om penisen som _fallosen_ , det erekta, st\u00e5lkl\u00e4dda (d\u00f6dsbringande?) objektet. I kapitel tre diskuteras detta n\u00e4rmare, men h\u00e4r vill jag bara komma in p\u00e5 sj\u00e4lva begreppet fallos.\n\nFallos \u00e4r ursprungligen det grekiska ordet f\u00f6r mannens lem men ocks\u00e5 f\u00f6r avbildningar av f\u00f6rem\u00e5l som anses likna den (s\u00e4rskilt n\u00e4r det g\u00e4llde dyrkandet av stenar eller statyer under Antiken). Inom den filosofiska och psykoanalytiska teorin st\u00e5r fallosbegreppet f\u00f6r n\u00e5got betydligt mer komplext. I sin _The meaning of the phallus_ definierar Jacques Lacan fallosen som tecknet f\u00f6r makt och auktoritet och p\u00e5 samma g\u00e5ng n\u00e5got som \u00e4r tomt p\u00e5 betydelse. Det falliska st\u00e5r f\u00f6r beg\u00e4ret efter det ouppn\u00e5eliga, det som m\u00e5ste vara dolt f\u00f6r att kunna vara auktorit\u00e4rt.\n\nHos flera feminister har \"fallocentrism\" kommit att beteckna den maskulina utg\u00e5ngspunkt som spr\u00e5ket, symboler, definitioner och talet om sexualitet har.\n\nFallosen \u00e4r allts\u00e5 en symbol, f\u00f6r id\u00e9er och egenskaper vi l\u00e4r oss koppla till maskulinitet. Fallosen \u00e4r kraftfull och m\u00e4ktig som symbol f\u00f6r maskulin sexualitet just f\u00f6r att den inte bara ses som en penis utan som en metafor f\u00f6r auktoritet, en bild av det m\u00e4ktiga. Den b\u00e5de \u00e4r och \u00e4r inte penisen.\n\nEller med Klaus Theweleits ord:\n\n> Det \"jag\" som k\u00e4mpar om makten, det jag som konstitueras av att man inte \u00e4r \"d\u00e4rnere\", hyllar st\u00e4ndigt p\u00e5 nytt den fiktiva fallosen i h\u00f6jden, den som ingen har men som f\u00f6rkroppsligas i statsmaktens organ \u2013 som m\u00e5ttstock f\u00f6r allt som g\u00f6rs, s\u00e4gs och skrivs [...] medan tillkortakommaren, flopp-snoppen, blir till en skamp\u00e5le i det egna k\u00f6ttet.\n> \n> (Theweleit 1979\/1995 s. 536)\n\nFallisk makt ska reflektera en manlig h\u00f6gre position i samh\u00e4llet. Den \u00e4r n\u00e5got som inte kan ses eller tas p\u00e5. Det finns en viss mystik och romantik i detta resonemang; fallosen som alla beg\u00e4r men som ingen verkligen kan \u00e4ga eller ha, detta mycket m\u00e4ktiga n\u00e5got som arbetar i v\u00e4rlden, som f\u00e5r effekter men som inte kan ses \u2013 eller f\u00f6rst\u00e5s. Den blir n\u00e5got som lyfts ut fr\u00e5n m\u00e4n och samtidigt f\u00f6rklarar varf\u00f6r m\u00e4n \u00e4r d\u00e4r de \u00e4r.\n\nMen om vi f\u00f6r tillbaka penisen till en fysisk niv\u00e5 s\u00e5 \u00e4r den trots allt bevis f\u00f6r maskulinitet. \u00c4ven om den inte \u00e4r fallosen har den blivit ett objekt sammankopplat med makt, eftersom de med makt i ett patriarkalt samh\u00e4lle oftast har en penis, som Marjorie Kibby och Brigid Costello uttrycker det. Och p\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet hj\u00e4lper den, i alla sina skepnader och metaforer (muskler, vapen, spjut), till att uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla id\u00e9n eller myten om att en viss maskulinitet, den som leder och styr, \u00e4r f\u00f6rutbest\u00e4md till att g\u00f6ra det p\u00e5 grund av sin anatomi. Detta \u00e4r den maskulinitet som l\u00e4gger det som kopplas till det feminina helt utanf\u00f6r sig sj\u00e4lv, och som skyr homosexuella m\u00e4n, eftersom manlig sexualitet ska f\u00f6rst\u00e5s och uttryckas som n\u00e5got enhetligt, ett beg\u00e4r som ska riktas mot samma sak. Den ilska och ibland hat som riktas mot homosexuella m\u00e4n \u00e4r ett tecken p\u00e5 den betydelse sexualitet har f\u00f6r det maskulina.\n\nTecken p\u00e5 intimitet, v\u00e4rme och v\u00e4nskap mellan (hetero)m\u00e4n ses ofta som utslag av homoerotiska eller homosexuella tendenser. Hur befriande dessa ofta queera l\u00e4sningar av hypermaskulina hj\u00e4ltar som Sylvester Stallone och Mel Gibson \u00e4n blir, \u00e4r det samtidigt talande att det st\u00e4ndigt \u00e4r i termer av sexualitet maskulina uttryck diskuteras. N\u00e4r den heterosexuella maskuliniteten ska demaskeras, eller n\u00e4r man vill visa att den just \u00e4r en maskerad (precis som femininiteten), g\u00f6rs det genom att visa att den inte \u00e4r heterosexuell. Att peka p\u00e5 att heterosexuella m\u00e4n egentligen \u00e4r homosexuella eller har homoerotiska tendenser f\u00f6refaller ibland vara den st\u00f6rsta dekonstruering av maskulinitet som kan g\u00f6ras.\n\nDen manliga sexualitetskonstruktionen \u00e4r \u00e5 ena sidan knuten till kontroll (som ska vara ett manligt k\u00e4nnetecken) och \u00e5 andra sidan upplevelsen av sexualitet som en okontrollerbar kraft. Stephen Frosh menar att sexualiteten b\u00e4r p\u00e5 ett hot genom sin sammanl\u00e4nkning med kroppen, med naturen och med ambivalensen inf\u00f6r det feminina:\n\n> Denna erfarenhet (av skam och fixering vid sexuella k\u00e4nslor) \u00e5terspeglar ett gigantiskt schakt av metaforiska kopplingar som binder kroppen till k\u00f6n, naturen, kvinnor och r\u00e4dslan f\u00f6r femininiteten. St\u00e4ndigt hotande att bryta s\u00f6nder den komplicerade och sk\u00f6ra strukturen av maskulin identitet blir sexualiteten fascinerande och skr\u00e4mmande.\n> \n> (Frosh 1994 s. 104)\n\nD\u00e4rf\u00f6r handlar det i m\u00e5nga sammanhang om att isolera det sexuella fr\u00e5n k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssiga faror och uppl\u00f6sande. Eller att \u00e5tminstone f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka.\n\nDet sexuella fogas ihop med id\u00e9er om framg\u00e5ng och misslyckande som ska pr\u00e4gla hegemonisk maskulinitet, det \u00e4r n\u00e5got som ska uppn\u00e5s och utf\u00f6ras som ett bevis p\u00e5 \"herrav\u00e4lde\". Och ett uttryck f\u00f6r denna position \u00e4r just den \"manliga blicken\", den som ska riktas mot den andras kropp, och h\u00e5llas l\u00e5ngt bort fr\u00e5n den egna.\n\n## DEN MANLIGA BLICKEN\n\nEtt viktigt, f\u00f6r att inte s\u00e4ga centralt element f\u00f6r f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om maskulinitet som flyter omkring i samh\u00e4llet och st\u00e4ndigt bef\u00e4sts i det mediala \u00e4r tittande p\u00e5 kvinnor. Vi tittar naturligtvis alla p\u00e5 varandra och kommunicerar olika k\u00e4nslor med hj\u00e4lp av blickar, inte minst av \u00e5tr\u00e5 och beg\u00e4r. Men blicken-p\u00e5-Kvinnan \u00e4r en blick som intar en s\u00e4rskild plats i g\u00f6randet av maskulinitet. M\u00e4n ska titta, ska tycka om att titta och g\u00e4rna titta tillsammans. Skapandet av denna broderskapsblick framst\u00e4lls som essentiell och naturlig f\u00f6r maskulin identitet. Den f\u00f6rkroppsligar sj\u00e4lva myten om ett manligt enat beg\u00e4r.\n\nV\u00e5rt seende \u00e4r fyllt av koder som vi ofta \u00e4r s\u00e5 f\u00f6rtrogna med att vi s\u00e4llan uppm\u00e4rksammar deras betydelse. Genom dessa koder etableras och f\u00f6rklaras olika positioner mellan m\u00e4nniskor b\u00e5de vad g\u00e4ller \u00e5lder, k\u00f6n och social status. Som barn f\u00e5r vi tidigt l\u00e4ra oss att det \u00e4r oartigt att stirra, framf\u00f6r allt p\u00e5 vuxna. Men vi ska titta och inte vika undan med blicken f\u00f6r att inte verka oh\u00f6vliga, dock inte f\u00f6r l\u00e4nge och p\u00e5 r\u00e4tt st\u00e4llen (ansiktet och helst \u00f6gonen) och inte p\u00e5 andra kroppsdelar. Genom historien har auktoritet och makt manifesterats genom just betraktandet. Personer med h\u00f6g status har alltid haft r\u00e4tten att titta medan de med l\u00e4gre status har f\u00e5tt sl\u00e5 ned blicken som tecken p\u00e5 undergivenhet.\n\nDet klassiska heterosexuella m\u00f6tet, tusentals g\u00e5nger beskrivet p\u00e5 film, bygger p\u00e5 ett uppvisande av specifika blickar: han ser henne, stannar upp som slagen av blixten inf\u00f6r hennes uppenbarelse. Hon tittar upp, ser honom iaktta henne och sl\u00e5r d\u00e5 ner blicken och l\u00e5ter sig besk\u00e5das. Denna s\u00e5 kallade \"shot-reverseshot\"-teknik d\u00e4r vi ser den som ser, ser vad denne ser och sen \u00e5ter ser den som betraktar, \u00e4r ett s\u00e4tt att skapa en viss blickposition, i de h\u00e4r sammanhangen ofta manlig.\n\nBegreppet \"den manliga blicken\" lanserades f\u00f6r att synligg\u00f6ra hur kvinnor framst\u00e4lldes som beg\u00e4rliga blickf\u00e5ng i en kultur styrd av en patriarkal beg\u00e4rsstruktur.\n\nH\u00e4r introducerades en teori om att maskulin makt skapas och uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lls ocks\u00e5 genom seendet, genom vem som f\u00e5r se p\u00e5 vem och hur. Utifr\u00e5n psykoanalytiska perspektiv h\u00e4mtade fr\u00e5n Freud och Lacan argumenterade Laura Mulvey f\u00f6r att blicken i Hollywoodfilmer, med hj\u00e4lp av olika tekniker (kameravinklar och ljuss\u00e4ttning) samt inv\u00e4vda m\u00f6nster av lust och identifikation, delas upp efter maskulint aktivt seende och feminint passivt \"to-be-looked-at-ness\". Vad som s\u00e4gs utg\u00f6ra den manliga blicken \u00e4r att kvinnan framst\u00e4lls som ett erotiskt objekt, att framst\u00e4llningen av femininitet \u00e4r gjord f\u00f6r m\u00e4ns njutning och att detta seendef\u00f6rh\u00e5llande p\u00e5 ett tydligt s\u00e4tt symboliserar maskulin \u00f6verordning.\n\n\u00c4ven om kritik under \u00e5ren riktats mot Mulvey, bland annat f\u00f6r den n\u00e5got ohistoriska och generaliserande synen p\u00e5 varf\u00f6r denna uppdelning sker, formulerade hon allm\u00e4ngiltiga fr\u00e5gest\u00e4llningar som sedan dess intagit en central plats i b\u00e5de bildanalyser och medial debatt. Nu n\u00e4r mer \u00e4n trettio \u00e5r har g\u00e5tt sedan begreppet introducerades, kan man konstatera att det till stor del fortfarande anv\u00e4nds f\u00f6r att studera personen framf\u00f6r denna blick \u2013 kvinnan \u2013 och inte den som f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas st\u00e5 bakom den.\n\nAtt fokus har legat p\u00e5 kvinnan har naturligtvis sin f\u00f6rklaring i de problematiska konsekvenser dessa seendem\u00f6nster har f\u00f6r kvinnor i en kultur d\u00e4r, f\u00f6r att parafrasera John Berger, kvinnor l\u00e4r sig g\u00f6ra sig till en anblick, ett objekt f\u00f6r seende. Berger argumenterade f\u00f6r att detta inte bara p\u00e5verkar f\u00f6rh\u00e5llandet mellan k\u00f6nen utan f\u00f6rst och fr\u00e4mst relationen kvinnor f\u00e5r till sig sj\u00e4lva, som ett tudelat jag:\n\n> En kvinna \u00e4r n\u00e4stan st\u00e4ndigt \u00e5tf\u00f6ljd av sin egen bild av sig sj\u00e4lv. Ocks\u00e5 n\u00e4r hon g\u00e5r genom ett rum eller n\u00e4r hon gr\u00e5ter \u00f6ver sin d\u00f6de far, kan hon knappast undvika att f\u00f6rest\u00e4lla sig sj\u00e4lv g\u00e5ende eller gr\u00e5tande. Fr\u00e5n tidig barndom har hon f\u00e5tt l\u00e4ra sig och \u00f6vertalats att st\u00e4ndigt iaktta sig sj\u00e4lv.\n> \n> (Berger 1972 s. 46)\n\nAtt st\u00e4ndigt se sig sj\u00e4lv utifr\u00e5n id\u00e9n om hur andra ser en, att vara f\u00f6rem\u00e5l f\u00f6r andras blickar, banar l\u00e4tt v\u00e4gen f\u00f6r ett inf\u00f6rlivande av en reglerande utifr\u00e5n-blick.\n\nEller som filosofen Jean-Paul Sartre uttryckte det i ett annat sammanhang:\n\n> Det finns en massa m\u00e4nniskor i v\u00e4rlden som \u00e4r i helvetet d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att de \u00e4r alltf\u00f6r beroende av andra m\u00e4nniskors omd\u00f6me, m\u00e4nniskor som alltid m\u00e5ste se sig sj\u00e4lva s\u00e5som andra ser dem, som f\u00f6rst och fr\u00e4mst \u00e4r f\u00f6rem\u00e5l f\u00f6r andras blickar.\n> \n> (ur \u00d6sterberg 1995 s. 153)\n\nBerger pekade p\u00e5 att den verkliga huvudpersonen n\u00e4r kvinnor portr\u00e4tteras \u00e4r betraktaren. Det \u00e4r han som ska tilltalas av det han ser. Genom olika tekniker som snabbt fick ett f\u00e4ste i bildkulturen, skulle det framg\u00e5 att den kvinnliga modellens uppm\u00e4rksamhet var riktad mot betraktaren: sm\u00e5leendet, de l\u00e4tt s\u00e4rade l\u00e4pparna, blicken riktad in i kameran, kroppen v\u00e4nd ut\u00e5t (se bildark s. 2). Anledningen till detta menade Berger var de materiella och ekonomiska f\u00f6rh\u00e5llanden mellan k\u00f6nen, d\u00e4r kvinnor till stor del genom historien varit tvungna att f\u00f6rh\u00e5lla sig till m\u00e4n f\u00f6r sin sociala och ekonomiska status.\n\nMen det \u00e4r, som jag po\u00e4ngterat tidigare, inte bara den faktiska betraktaren som \u00e4r viktig, utan \u00e4ven f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningarna om denna betraktare.\n\nF\u00f6r den manliga blicken handlar naturligtvis i allra h\u00f6gsta grad om myter kring maskulinitet. N\u00e4r andra maktrelationer analyseras med hj\u00e4lp av bilder, s\u00e5som etnicitet och klass, har utg\u00e5ngspunkten i flera fall varit att bilden reflekterar och definierar dem med makt, de _utanf\u00f6r_ bildramen. Vad vi \"ser\" \u00e4r allts\u00e5 dem som inte sj\u00e4lva syns i bild. P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet kan bilden visa upp en relation \u00e4ven n\u00e4r bara en av parterna \u00e4r synlig. N\u00e4r det g\u00e4ller heterosexuella maktrelationer i bilder finns dock inte samma utg\u00e5ngspunkt, h\u00e4r till\u00e5ts betraktaren vara osynlig i analyserna.\n\nDen manliga blicken \u2013 den som ser utan att synas \u2013 f\u00f6rklarar ocks\u00e5 att den kropp som ska beses \u00e4r den feminina par excellence. Denna blick har ju ocks\u00e5 med f\u00f6rtjusning pr\u00e4glat unders\u00f6kandet och problematiserandet av den feminina kroppen s\u00e5v\u00e4l inom medicinen som inom den tidiga psykoanalysen. Kanske eller delvis f\u00f6r att p\u00e5 s\u00e5 vis avleda uppm\u00e4rksamheten fr\u00e5n problemen med det maskulina. Kanske \u00e4r det ocks\u00e5 d\u00e4rf\u00f6r bilden av det feminina egentligen s\u00e4ger s\u00e5 mycket mer om maskulinitet \u00e4n om femininitet. Inte minst n\u00e4r temat \u00e4r sexualitet.\n\nI de f\u00f6ljande kapitlen tittar jag p\u00e5 sexualitet och k\u00f6n utifr\u00e5n olika bildmaterial: h\u00e5rdpornografi, mjukpornografi och ungdomars sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt p\u00e5 Internet. De exempel jag tar upp kommer b\u00e5de fr\u00e5n den svenska och den nordamerikanska mediemarknaden. Det har flera orsaker. Dels har den pornografiska marknaden blivit alltmer global, inte minst p\u00e5 grund av Internet, dels \u00e4r mycket mainstreampornografi i dag transnationell d\u00e4r framg\u00e5ngsrika tidningar, s\u00e5som _Playboy, FHM_ och _Hustler,_ finns i allt fler l\u00e4nder och p\u00e5 allt fler spr\u00e5k. Det finns ocks\u00e5 en m\u00e4ngd medier som \u00e4r mer eller mindre plagierade f\u00f6r en nationell marknad, exempelvis tidningen _Slitz_ , vars f\u00f6rebild \u00e4r den engelska tidningen _Loaded_.\n\n# 2.\n\n# Pornografiska former f\u00f6rr och nu\n\nGrafiska texter eller bilder som visar personer involverade i n\u00e5gon form av sexuell handling, har en l\u00e5ng historisk tradition, ofta daterad till det antika Rom och Grekland.\n\nMer spridd blev den dock f\u00f6rst under sjuttonhundratalet, d\u00e5 flera pornografiska klassiker skrevs: _Fanny Hill_ (1748), med sin franska motsvarighet _Th\u00e9r\u00e9se philosophe_ (1748), _Memoirs of a women's pleasure_ (1778\/79) och Markis de Sades _La Philosophie dans le boudoir_ (1795), f\u00f6r att n\u00e4mna n\u00e5gra. Att s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga publikationer kom under mitten av sjuttonhundratalet \u00e4r inte en slump. Dels bredde boktryckarkonsten l\u00e5ngsamt ut sig, dels har, som flera av f\u00f6rfattarna till antologin _The invention of pornography_ visar, pornografin starka kopplingar till Upplysningen, till frit\u00e4nkande, vetenskap, filosofi och politisk kritik. I mycket av den erotiska eller pornografiska litteraturen fanns en radikal och politiskt satirisk ton. Syftet verkar i lika h\u00f6g grad ha varit att hyckla de ledande skikten \u2013 inte minst kyrkan och monarkin \u2013 som att egga sin publik. Denna litteratur var ocks\u00e5 bunden till d\u00e5tida filosofiska str\u00f6mningar, som naturalism och materialism. Inom naturalismen, med sin tanke om jaget som likst\u00e4llt med kroppen och dess behov, s\u00e5gs undertryckandet av lusten som n\u00e5got onaturligt. Detta \u00e5terspeglas i den pornografiska litteraturen med kroppar som m\u00f6ts i o\u00e4ndliga variationer drivna av r\u00f6relsen och mekanismen hos lustens lagar. Popul\u00e4ra metaforer var \u00e4ven kopplade till nya begrepp s\u00e5som \"maskiner\", \"pumpar\" och \"motorer\". En illustration fr\u00e5n Tyskland 1790 visar exempelvis en elektrisk maskin liknande tv\u00e5 gungor som skjuter kvinnans och mannens kroppar mot varandra.\n\nI en intressant expos\u00e9 j\u00e4mf\u00f6r Margaret C. Jacob den naturalistiska och den materialistiska pornografin som dyker upp i England och Frankrike vid denna tid.\n\nDe naturalistiskt influerade texterna var beskrivande och utgick fr\u00e5n ett slags sj\u00e4lvklar f\u00f6rst\u00e5else av sexualitet och lust, med mannen som den aktiva och kvinnan som den passiva. De materialistiska var d\u00e4remot mer ber\u00e4ttande och kretsade kring det ov\u00e4ntade (bisexualitet, anv\u00e4ndandet av en m\u00e4ngd kroppsdelar och s\u00e5 vidare), och framf\u00f6rallt fanns h\u00e4r den kvinnliga ber\u00e4ttaren. Den materialistiska pornografin gav allts\u00e5 kvinnor en mer dominant och auktorit\u00e4r r\u00f6st.\n\n## LITTER\u00c4R TRANSVESTISM\n\nRedan i dessa tidiga verk var den manliga sexualiteten fr\u00e5nvarande som ber\u00e4ttelsetema. Fokus l\u00e5g ist\u00e4llet p\u00e5 framst\u00e4llningen av kvinnlig sexualitet. Det var, menar Lynn Hunt, som om manlig sexualitet var alltf\u00f6r hotfull f\u00f6r att ber\u00f6ra.\n\nDet finns dock en annan intressant aspekt. Inom det materialistiska pornografiska ber\u00e4ttandet etablerades en tradition d\u00e4r m\u00e4n inte bara skrev om kvinnlig sexualitet, utan skrev som om det vore deras egna jag. Dessa ber\u00e4ttarjag var, som i _Th\u00e9r\u00e9se philosophe_ och den senare _Julie philosophe_ (1791), ofta en bel\u00e4st kvinna som s\u00e5g p\u00e5 v\u00e4rlden med en klar och genomsk\u00e5dande blick, som avsl\u00f6jade hyckleri och som hade sex utanf\u00f6r de g\u00e4ngse normerna. Mannen som skrev som om han vore en kvinna, menar Margaret C. Jacob, kan ses som en litter\u00e4r transvestit. Detta var tecken p\u00e5 en vilja att \u00f6ppna upp f\u00f6r en mer till\u00e5tande sexuell fantasi som skulle kunna upplevas av vem som helst. Lockelsen f\u00f6r publiken kunde vara att dessa nya r\u00f6ster h\u00f6rdes. Det kan naturligtvis ocks\u00e5 ha varit ett s\u00e4tt att undvika den manliga sexualiteten, eller snarare att slippa beskriva dess best\u00e5ndsdelar, men det kan lika g\u00e4rna ha varit det omv\u00e4nda. Med ett kvinnligt ber\u00e4ttarjag blev manlig sexualitet och manliga kroppar mer \"naturliga\" att beskriva. Den feminina r\u00f6sten kunde beskriva manliga kroppar och deras g\u00f6randen utan att fr\u00e5gan om homosexualitet vidr\u00f6rdes.\n\nDen kvinnliga ber\u00e4ttaren f\u00f6rsvann dock alltmer som pornografisk r\u00f6st under artonhundratalet och ersattes antingen av en manlig eller av en opersonlig r\u00f6st utan genus.\n\nUnder artonhundratalet v\u00e4xer nya st\u00e4der upp i Europa och en ny offentlig kulturell milj\u00f6 ser dagens ljus med bredare gator, elektrisk belysning, varuhus och teatrar. En ny massproducerad press g\u00f6r s\u00e4llskap med den moderna tiden och genererar ber\u00e4ttelser f\u00f6r folklig konsumtion i en omfattning som inte varit m\u00f6jlig tidigare.\n\nDetta g\u00e4ller \u00e4ven pornografi som med den mer utvecklade tryckkonsten, och sedermera fotografiet, \u00f6kar i omf\u00e5ng och n\u00e5r en allt st\u00f6rre publik.\n\nDet var ocks\u00e5 en tid d\u00e5 fr\u00e5gor kring k\u00f6n, klass och sexualitet fick en ny och framtr\u00e4dande betydelse n\u00e4r den nya borgarklassen skulle definiera sig sj\u00e4lv. Sexualiteten kom, som bland annat Michel Foucault visat p\u00e5, i fokus f\u00f6r kategoriseringar och best\u00e4mmelser om vad som fick f\u00f6rekomma i offentligheten, vem som fick visa vad, vem som fick se vad och vem som fick vilja vad. Sexualiteten reglerades inte i f\u00f6rsta hand genom lagar och f\u00f6rordningar utan genom de olika egenskaper som kn\u00f6ts till k\u00f6n. Kvinnor och m\u00e4ns sexualitet delades upp som tv\u00e5 motsatta halvor vilka, om allting fungerade, skulle komplettera varandra; han med driften, hon med moderskapet.\n\nDet var ocks\u00e5 nu sj\u00e4lva begreppet \"pornografi\" etablerades som ben\u00e4mning p\u00e5 en viss genre av litteratur och bilder. Ordet \u00e4r i sig sammansatt av grekiskans \"porno\" (sk\u00f6ka) och \"grafi\" (skriva). I en ordbok fr\u00e5n England \u00e5terfinns det f\u00f6r f\u00f6rsta g\u00e5ngen 1857 och i Frankrike 1769 med en bok titulerad _Pornografen_. Det anv\u00e4nds ocks\u00e5 i en mer konstvetenskaplig betydelse f\u00f6r m\u00e5lade \"obscena\" motiv och inneh\u00e5ll. S\u00e5 sm\u00e5ningom likst\u00e4lldes pornografi med verk (text eller bild) som syftade till att vara sexuellt stimulerande f\u00f6r mottagaren. Ett pornografiskt material definierades allts\u00e5 utifr\u00e5n de fysiska effekter det ger, eller kan t\u00e4nkas ge upphov till, inte utifr\u00e5n intentionerna hos upphovsmannen. Denna definition lever i stort sett kvar \u00e4n i dag.\n\n## PORNOGRAFISKA BILDER OCH DET KROPPSLIGA SEENDET\n\nMed framv\u00e4xten av fotografiet och den m\u00f6jlighet till massproduktion av bilder som skedde kring mitten av artonhundratalet b\u00f6rjade ocks\u00e5 en mer djupg\u00e5ende omst\u00e4llning. Det sexuella var nu inte l\u00e4ngre bara en upplevelse av en aktivitet, det blev alltmer ett omr\u00e5de f\u00f6r visuell uppvisning och en fr\u00e5ga om seende. Fotografiet m\u00e5ste p\u00e5 ett avg\u00f6rande s\u00e4tt ha p\u00e5verkat m\u00e4nniskors erotiska erfarenhetsv\u00e4rld.\n\nH\u00e4r kunde man (bildligt talat) st\u00e5 \u00f6ga mot \u00f6ga eller hud mot hud med det \u00e5tr\u00e5v\u00e4rda, och d\u00e5 kameran varit delaktig i sj\u00e4lva h\u00e4ndelsen h\u00f6ll den kvar en nu-k\u00e4nsla. Med fotografiets grafiska realism skapas dessutom en illusion av n\u00e4rkontakt som \u00e4r sj\u00e4lva kameramediets budskap och som \u00e4r s\u00e4rskilt tydlig i den erotiska bildens lockelse. De nakna kropparna har faktiskt varit d\u00e4r framf\u00f6r kameran, inte minst den nakna kvinnokroppen med sin vagina och sitt pubesh\u00e5r.\n\nI tidiga pornografiska bilder fr\u00e5n 1890-talet syns i stort sett samma akter som i dag \u2013 \u00e4ven om estetiken \u00e4r annorlunda. Liksom i fallet med skrivna texter kom den erotiska bilden i f\u00f6rsta hand att avbilda den feminina och inte den maskulina kroppen. Det finns f\u00f6rvisso bilder p\u00e5 kopulerande par, medan bilder p\u00e5 ensamma poserande m\u00e4n \u00e4r betydligt sv\u00e5rare att finna. I en av de st\u00f6rre samlingarna som bevarats i Sverige fr\u00e5n slutet av artonhundratalet \u00e4r m\u00e4n snarare med som statister i de olika scenarierna, inte s\u00e4llan if\u00f6rda l\u00f6ssk\u00e4gg f\u00f6r att kunna f\u00f6rbli anonyma.\n\nDet pornografiska seendet \u00e4r n\u00e5got som ger, eller f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas ge, kroppsliga reaktioner. M\u00e5lningar och statyer hade visserligen tidigare ansetts kunna skapa en fysisk reaktion, som inte alltid inskr\u00e4nkte sig till upphetsning utan \u00e4ven kunde ta sig mer direkta uttryck. En kvinna ska exempelvis under femtonhundratalet ha blivit s\u00e5 uppt\u00e4nd att hon satte sig p\u00e5 en staty med en erekt penis och hundra \u00e5r senare st\u00e4lldes flera personer i Venedig inf\u00f6r r\u00e4tta efter att ha f\u00f6rs\u00f6kt kopulera med en Kristusstaty.\n\nMen med fotografiet och den massproducerade bilden b\u00f6rjar en allt st\u00f6rre publik f\u00f6rf\u00f6ras och hetsas upp p\u00e5 ett direkt och m\u00e5ngtydigt s\u00e4tt, och fr\u00e5gan om vem som ska f\u00e5 se vad aktualiseras.\n\nPubliken har alltid varit en viktig del i diskussioner om pornografi. Det \u00e4r i sig talande att pornografi b\u00f6rjar ses som ett samh\u00e4lleligt problem n\u00e4r dess bilder och texter blir alltmer tillg\u00e4ngliga. Att manliga betraktare som grupp genom historien har kunnat njuta av erotiskt tittande mer \u00e4n kvinnor \u00e4r nog ett faktum. De har haft st\u00f6rre social makt och varit friare att se vad de har velat.\n\n\u00c4ven om vi inte vet med s\u00e4kerhet vem som tittade, finns det olika indikationer p\u00e5 att pornografiska bilder var \u00e4mnade f\u00f6r m\u00e4n. Hos det popul\u00e4ra \"tittsk\u00e5pet\" fanns exempelvis ibland en s\u00e4rskild lucka f\u00f6r husfadern som gick att l\u00e5sa, d\u00e4r han kunde ha sina pornografiska bilder \u2013 och p\u00e5 s\u00e5 s\u00e4tt censurera dem f\u00f6r kvinnor och barn. Eftersom detta var illegala bilder \u00e4r det emellertid sv\u00e5rt att med s\u00e4kerhet veta vem som s\u00e5g och vem som inte s\u00e5g. I skydd av det viktorianska hemmet kan medel- och \u00f6verklasskvinnor mycket v\u00e4l ha \u00e4gnat sig \u00e5t pornografiskt tittande. D\u00e4remot f\u00f6refaller bildpornografin sedan f\u00f6rra sekelskiftet ha definierats som i f\u00f6rsta hand maskulin, riktad till en publik av m\u00e4n. \u00c4ven om kvinnor naturligtvis kunde titta och njuta av bilder p\u00e5 par eller av andra kvinnor, finns, i den explosion av pornografiska bilder som skedde i Europa kring f\u00f6rra sekelskiftet, inga bilder p\u00e5 sexuellt poserande m\u00e4n som explicit var d\u00e4r f\u00f6r att egga en kvinnlig betraktare.\n\nPornografiska bilder \u00e4r i huvudsak av tv\u00e5 typer. I den ena \u00e5terfinns sexuella akter och handlingar mellan tv\u00e5 eller fler personer, i den andra finns uppvisandet av kroppar i sexuella poser. De tusentals bilder som cirkulerade runt f\u00f6rra sekelskiftet b\u00e5de definierade och omdefinierade vad som var attraktivt och upphetsande; vad som var acceptabelt sexuellt uppvisande urskiljdes fr\u00e5n mer tabubelagda bilder, s\u00e5som kopulerande par och ensamma m\u00e4n i sexuella poser riktade till m\u00e4n. Erotiserade bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor b\u00f6rjade emellertid inf\u00f6rlivas med offentligheten \u2013 i reklamen och i hela den framv\u00e4xande konsumtionskulturen.\n\nKvinnor hade visserligen erotiserats p\u00e5 bild l\u00e5ngt innan kameran uppfanns, men med detta nya medium tillkom \u00e5tskilliga nya konventioner. Flera typer av poser som vi k\u00e4nner igen i dag finns i dessa tidiga bilder som den sexualiserade sj\u00e4lvber\u00f6ringen och vaginaperspektivet (\"the beaver shot\"). Det \u00e4r som om vissa ritualer f\u00f6r att illustrera sexualitet inf\u00f6rdes f\u00f6r att passa den nya kameratekniken. D\u00e4rf\u00f6r kan dessa bilder inte bara ses som en f\u00f6rl\u00e4ngning av tidigare nakenm\u00e5lningar av kvinnor. Konstn\u00e4rer undvek exempelvis oftast det kvinnliga k\u00f6net och avbildade kvinnokroppen utan tecken p\u00e5 eller antydan om en \u00f6ppning eller en springa. Med fotografiet kom kravet, eller konventionen, att kvinnors genitalier skulle vara mer exponerade och \u00f6ppna. Det kan bero p\u00e5 att m\u00f6jligheten nu fanns att se p\u00e5 ett nytt s\u00e4tt, och p\u00e5 att fotografiet sammanf\u00f6ll med naturvetenskapens vilja att veta genom att ing\u00e5ende granska. I de pornografiska bilderna syns ett kunskapst\u00f6rstande \u00f6ga riktat mot den kvinnliga kroppen, som \u00f6ppnar upp, tittar in.\n\nDet \u00e4r naturligtvis sv\u00e5rt med definitioner av bilder p\u00e5 ensamma kvinnor (eller ensamma personer \u00f6verlag). \u00c4r de erotiska eller pornografiska? Inte minst eftersom vad som \u00e4r och inte \u00e4r pornografi \u00e4r s\u00e5 kopplat till en samtid och f\u00f6r\u00e4ndrar sig \u00f6ver tid. Tittar vi p\u00e5 \u00e4ldre pornografiska bilder, till exempel de amerikanska Kinseysamlingarna, finns en typ av bilder p\u00e5 ensamma kvinnor som ans\u00e5gs pornografiska under sin tid. H\u00e4r syns nakna eller halvnakna kvinnor som visar k\u00f6n eller br\u00f6st. Samtidigt \u00e5terses samma poser b\u00e5de i dessa (f\u00f6r tiden) illegitima bilder och i andra offentliga bilder, men d\u00e5 med en mer p\u00e5kl\u00e4dd kvinnokropp. Det f\u00f6rra sekelskiftets enorma m\u00e4ngd bilder p\u00e5 feminina kroppar som p\u00e5 ett eller annat s\u00e4tt \u00e5terger en sexuell retorik har flera historiska r\u00f6tter och referenser, b\u00e5de pornografiska och ickepornografiska. Vi ser dem i alltifr\u00e5n \"carte postale\" med kvinnor fr\u00e5n exotiska platser och nakenm\u00e5lningar till det erotiska fotografiet, cigarettkort och s\u00e5 vidare.\n\nDet \u00e4r som om fr\u00e5nvaron av kvinnor som akt\u00f6rer i det offentliga livet fylldes ut med kompensatoriska fantasier om det feminina \u2013 inte minst genom erotiska bilder. Konstvetaren Abigail Solomon-Godeau menar att den manliga kroppen under artonhundratalet alltmer f\u00f6rsvinner fr\u00e5n det offentliga bildrummet och ers\u00e4tts av den feminina. Kvinnan blir det k\u00f6n vars kropp knyts till olika former av beg\u00e4r. Sj\u00e4lva fenomenet \"masskultur\", med sin inriktning p\u00e5 konsumtion av s\u00e5v\u00e4l produkter som nya medier och bilder, anser hon, f\u00f6ds parallellt med och \u00e4r beroende av just cirkulation av erotiska bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor. Den visuella framst\u00e4llningen av femininitet blir n\u00e4mligen inte bara en bild f\u00f6r olika varor utan snarare f\u00f6r det som ska vara varans lockelse:\n\n> Att \u00e5tr\u00e5 den fashionabla, tillg\u00e4ngliga kvinnan-som-varan \u00e4r att \u00e5tr\u00e5 sj\u00e4lva bytesv\u00e4rdet som s\u00e5dant, det vill s\u00e4ga kapitalismens sj\u00e4lva essens.\n> \n> (Walter Benjamin, ur Solomon-Godeau 1996 s. 129)\n\nMer eller mindre \u00f6ppet erotiserade bilder av kvinnor har, med sin f\u00f6rm\u00e5ga att b\u00e5de vara socialt acceptabla och samtidigt inneh\u00e5lla n\u00e5gon form av sexuell association, anv\u00e4nts f\u00f6r att saluf\u00f6ra det mesta. Kvinnor har \u00f6verlag i st\u00f6rre utstr\u00e4ckning \u00e4n m\u00e4n portr\u00e4tterats som symboler f\u00f6r n\u00e5got utanf\u00f6r dem sj\u00e4lva och i sammanhang inte direkt relaterade till dem som personer.Deras kroppar har symboliserat frihet, r\u00e4ttvisa och demokrati \u00e4ven i tider n\u00e4r kvinnor varken har haft r\u00f6str\u00e4tt eller medborgerliga r\u00e4ttigheter. Ett par k\u00e4nda exempel \u00e4r frihetsgudinnan i New York eller Fru Justitia, symbolen f\u00f6r r\u00e4ttvisa, som smyckar domstolsbyggnader v\u00e4rlden \u00f6ver.\n\nDet f\u00f6refaller ocks\u00e5 som om varje ny teknologisk uppfinning och produkt under nittonhundratalet har lanserats och annonserats med, ofta erotiserade, bilder av en inbjudande ung kvinna: cykeln, dammsugaren, telefonen, bilen, t\u00e5get, elektriska lampor, motorcyklar, flygplan, stridsvagnar och datorer f\u00f6r att n\u00e4mna n\u00e5gra (se bildark s. 3).\n\nUppvisandet av en leende, l\u00e4ttkl\u00e4dd ung kvinna \u00e4r det som introducerar olika produkter innan n\u00e5gon annan bild kan g\u00f6ra det. Det kan bero p\u00e5 att ny teknik och nya varor ska associeras med ett nytt beg\u00e4r, med det moderna och vad kan d\u00e5 passa b\u00e4ttre \u00e4n den kropp som inkarnerar sj\u00e4lva beg\u00e4rskulturen. N\u00e4r produkter sedan blir mer allm\u00e4nt vedertagna, n\u00e4r beg\u00e4ret inte l\u00e4ngre \u00e4r nytt, kan de illustreras av annat, exempelvis djur, landskap, m\u00e4n eller abstrakta symboler.\n\n## NUTIDA PORNOGRAFI\n\nI dag \u00e4r vi l\u00e5ngt fr\u00e5n den tidigare anv\u00e4ndningen av pornografi som satir eller politisk kritik. Det som omger pornografi i dag \u00e4r att den ska tas p\u00e5 allvar, och den tas ocks\u00e5 p\u00e5 allvar av s\u00e5v\u00e4l dess kritiker som av dess publik. Om den pornografiska formen b\u00f6rjade kommersialiseras under f\u00f6rra sekelskiftet med b\u00f6cker och bilder i stora upplagor, \u00e4r det inneh\u00e5llet som kommersialiseras under nittonhundratalet. Filmer, b\u00f6cker och tidskrifter finns p\u00e5 en mer eller mindre l\u00e4ttillg\u00e4nglig marknad och med ett varierat pornografiskt inneh\u00e5ll.\n\nDet \u00e4r emellertid f\u00f6rst under sextiotalet som pornografi p\u00e5 allvar b\u00f6rjar inf\u00f6rlivas b\u00e5de i debatten och i vissa mediegenrer \u2013 det \u00e4r till exempel d\u00e5 de f\u00f6rsta herrtidningarna startar. I Sverige fanns innan dess tidningar som _Piff, Paff_ och _Raff_ , med bilder p\u00e5 nakna eller n\u00e4stan nakna kvinnor men utan text eller redaktionellt material.\n\nPornografin b\u00f6rjar samtidigt alltmer predika sin egen legitimitet utifr\u00e5n id\u00e9n om sexuell lust som n\u00e5got naturligt och dess undertryckande som n\u00e5got onaturligt. P\u00e5 sextiotalet s\u00e5gs exempelvis pornografi som en m\u00f6jlig v\u00e4g till sexuell frig\u00f6relse.\n\nD\u00e5 skrevs pornografiska s\u00e5 kallade kvalitetsb\u00f6cker, det h\u00f6lls s\u00e5 kallade sex-happenings och flera ledande liberaler h\u00e4vdade behovet av att l\u00e5ta gamla unkna konventioner f\u00f6rsvinna, s\u00e5 att den naturliga sexualiteten kunde blomma fritt. Njutning och personlig tillfredsst\u00e4llelse var de utopiska visionerna kring det som skulle komma om restriktionerna kring pornografi f\u00f6rsvann.\n\nI dag anv\u00e4nds pornografi i olika former snarare f\u00f6r att skapa en konsumerande publik, knappast en sexuellt frigjord, vilket de f\u00f6rtjusta r\u00f6sterna och debatt\u00f6rerna fr\u00e5n sextiotalet nog inte hade kunnat f\u00f6rest\u00e4lla sig.\n\nTrots att pornografi funnits i massproducerad form under de senaste hundrafemtio \u00e5ren \u00e4r den som n\u00e4mnts inte l\u00e4tt att definiera som kategori. I de f\u00f6rs\u00f6k som gjorts har det slagits fast att ett pornografiskt material ska best\u00e5 av tv\u00e5 delar: ett sexuellt motiv och syftet att vara sexuellt upphetsande. Det \u00e4r som man kan se ganska flytande och godtyckliga definitioner. Inom forskningen och den allm\u00e4nna debatten finns \u00e4n fler s\u00e4tt att fastst\u00e4lla vad som \u00e4r och inte \u00e4r pornografi och hur vi ska tolka dess betydelse i samh\u00e4llet.\n\nPornografin \u00e4r i dag offentlig i en aldrig tidigare sk\u00e5dad omfattning och pornografiska koder och konventioner \u00e4r en inarbetad del av mediekulturen. Den f\u00f6r\u00e4ndrade status som pornografi har f\u00e5tt genom att den refereras till p\u00e5 s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga omr\u00e5den kan, menar Anette D. S\u00f8rensen, f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en \"clean-up\"-process. Det pornografiska har borstats av, gjorts rumsrent och fyllts med nya inneb\u00f6rder vilket har gett det en h\u00f6gre status. Denna tendens, d\u00e4r det pornografiska som estetik kopplas till mode, musik och olika livsstilar, har ocks\u00e5 kallats f\u00f6r \"porno-chic\".\n\nEn av orsakerna till pornografins f\u00f6r\u00e4ndrade kulturella status i Sverige och i v\u00e4stv\u00e4rlden i stort \u00e4r utvecklingen inom kommunikationsteknologin. Med satellits\u00e4ndningar i tv \u00f6ppnades det upp f\u00f6r pornografiska filmer och med Internet har tillg\u00e4ngligheten av pornografiskt material, s\u00e5v\u00e4l h\u00e5rd- som mjukpornografiskt, aldrig varit s\u00e5 stor som i dag. H\u00e4r finns ocks\u00e5 en st\u00f6rre anonymitet, d\u00e4r vi som publik inte l\u00e4ngre beh\u00f6ver ge oss ut f\u00f6r att hyra eller k\u00f6pa den pornografi vi vill se, utan kan sitta vid v\u00e5ra datorer i hemmet eller p\u00e5 arbetsplatsen. Med hj\u00e4lp av webbkameran kan vem som helst vara deltagare i olika pornografiska scenarier eller l\u00e4gga ut egenproducerat material och bli sin egen, eller n\u00e5gon annans, porrmodell.\n\nPornografins f\u00f6r\u00e4ndrade status h\u00e4nger ocks\u00e5 samman med att ett visuellt mer mjukpornografiskt pr\u00e4glat inneh\u00e5ll f\u00f6rekommer i en rad olika medieutbud. Medan h\u00e5rdpornografi n\u00e4stan alltid ses som en egen genre av filmer, videor, tidningar och bilder, har mjukpornografin sin plats _inom_ olika genrer: tidningar, reklam, tv-program och s\u00e5 vidare. Detta har sin f\u00f6rklaring i att det tillh\u00f6r det som vid olika tidpunkter definieras som offentligt accepterade former av sexuella uttryck.\n\nOfta ses mjukpornografiska bilder som en variant av h\u00e5rdpornografi, som en del av samma mynt. Fr\u00e5gan \u00e4r om denna sammanblandning inte bara skapar f\u00f6rvirring.\n\nDet r\u00f6r sig f\u00f6rvisso i b\u00e5da fallen om typer av sexuella framst\u00e4llningar i bild eller text, men vi kan ocks\u00e5 se att de har olika ursprung, och b\u00e5de nu och tidigare tillh\u00f6r skilda former av representationssystem. Gr\u00e4nserna \u00e4r ibland h\u00e5rfina, det ska medges, men genom att binda mjukpornografin till det h\u00e5rdpornografiska, d\u00e4r det sistn\u00e4mnda utbudet ofta ses som p\u00e5drivande f\u00f6r de mjukpornografiska uttrycken, riskerar man att missa den ram som det mjukpornografiska \u00e4r del av. H\u00e5rdpornografin har alltid definierats som det obscena och det icke-respektabla. Mjukpornografi, fr\u00e4mst bilder med sexuella associationer, \u00e4r mer bunden till sj\u00e4lva det moderna, till industrialiseringen, masspressen, fotografiet, reklamen och hela den beg\u00e4rskultur som pr\u00e4glar det konsumtionssamh\u00e4lle som v\u00e4xte fram under slutet av artonhundratalet. Inneh\u00e5llsm\u00e4ssigt kommer den samtidigt ur nakenm\u00e5lningens tradition \"the female nude\", ett av de mest avbildade objekten i konsthistorien.\n\nUppdelningen mellan h\u00e5rd- och mjukpornografi \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 bunden till id\u00e9er om k\u00f6n. Penisen \u00e4r i mycket det organ som best\u00e4mmer definitionerna, sj\u00e4lva prefixen \"h\u00e5rd\" och \"mjuk\" associeras till penisens tillst\u00e5nd. Kriteriet f\u00f6r h\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r uppvisandet av en erekt manslem medan \"mjuk\" har associationer antingen till en slak lem (som inte platsar i h\u00e5rdpornografin) eller till kvinnokroppens former. Det som g\u00f6r att det inte \u00e4r h\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r att vi _vet_ att penisen inte kommer att visas \u2013 och om den g\u00f6r det \u00e4r den inte erekt.\n\nEller som det uttrycks p\u00e5 Wikipedia:\n\n> Mjukpornografi \u00e4r en informell ben\u00e4mning p\u00e5 pornografi som \u00e5terger ett sexuellt beteende p\u00e5 ett mindre direkt s\u00e4tt \u00e4n h\u00e5rdpornografin. Den visar inte eregerade penisar, ejakulation, penetration eller masturbation [manlig, min anm]. \u00c4ven om samlag eller fellatio visas s\u00e5 \u00e4r penetration liksom det manliga k\u00f6net dolt.\n\nDen kvinnliga kroppen kan allts\u00e5 inte ensam, eller v\u00e4ldigt s\u00e4llan, beteckna h\u00e5rdpornografi. F\u00f6r det kr\u00e4vs det manliga k\u00f6nets n\u00e4rvaro, eller objekt\/maskiner som fyller samma funktion. Det manliga organet och dess tillst\u00e5nd avg\u00f6r genreben\u00e4mningen. \u00c4ven n\u00e4r kvinnor fotograferas i den klassiska \"beaver shot\"-posen med k\u00f6net uppvisat f\u00f6r kameran, \u00e4r detta definierat som mjukpornografi, vilket en s\u00f6kning p\u00e5 termen p\u00e5 Google visar.\n\n## PORNOGRAFISKA KODER OCH KONSUMTION\n\nI takt med att ett sexuellt bildspr\u00e5k blir allt vanligare b\u00e5de i det ordin\u00e4ra medieutbudet och inom reklam och mode, luckras gr\u00e4nserna upp f\u00f6r vad som traditionellt ses som pornografi och inte. Hur ska man d\u00e5 definiera denna form av sexualiserat vardagsutbud? Det handlar som jag ser det om att f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka ringa in de olika funktioner som pornografi tillskrivs i v\u00e5rt samh\u00e4lle utanf\u00f6r de traditionella pornografiska rummen. Man ska komma ih\u00e5g att referenser till ett pornografiskt bildspr\u00e5k \u2013 blickar, gester eller poser \u2013 som finns i till exempel reklam och modebilder, _inte_ handlar om att skapa sexuell upphetsning, \u00e5tminstone inte i f\u00f6rsta hand. Denna typ av mer vardagligt utbud kan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r b\u00e4st ben\u00e4mnas som \"semipornografiskt\", allts\u00e5 d\u00e4r man anv\u00e4nder ett sexuellt bildspr\u00e5k, men med ett annat syfte \u00e4n att hetsa upp sin publik. Semipornografi p\u00e5minner i mycket om det mjukpornografiska, eftersom man anv\u00e4nder sexuella associationer och inte sexuella akter, men det semipornografiska \u00e4r en b\u00e4ttre ben\u00e4mning p\u00e5 fr\u00e4mst reklamens bildspr\u00e5k. B\u00e5de mjuk- och semipornografi karakteriseras av att de visar upp det som vid olika tidpunkter ses och upplevs som acceptabla sexuella uttryck. De b\u00e4r till skillnad fr\u00e5n h\u00e5rdpornografi p\u00e5 en id\u00e9 om det respektabla. Men medan mjukpornografi ocks\u00e5 kan ha ett sexuellt syfte (det finns sexuellt material som g\u00e5r under ben\u00e4mningen mjukpornografi, som vissa filmer och b\u00f6cker), \u00e4r den huvudsakliga avsikten med semipornografi som sagt inte sexuell upphetsning, inte att sl\u00e4ppa l\u00f6s det sexuella beg\u00e4ret, tv\u00e4rtom. Det handlar snarare om att undertrycka eller f\u00f6rneka det till f\u00f6rm\u00e5n f\u00f6r andra typer av beg\u00e4r och l\u00e4ngtan. Framf\u00f6r allt \u00e4r det beg\u00e4r kopplat till konsumtion av olika varor, medieprodukter, programutbud och\/eller idealiserade kroppstyper.\n\nSemipornografi antyder en scen d\u00e4r sex \u00e4r \"about-to-happen\" men aldrig g\u00f6r det. I motsats till h\u00e5rdpornografins mer direkta stimuli-respons-modell, kan det semipornografiska h\u00e5lla kvar en h\u00f6g k\u00e4nslointensitet och l\u00e5ta den f\u00e5 andra utlopp, vare sig det g\u00e4ller k\u00f6p av varor eller medieutbud. Kanske \u00e4r det just detta \u2013 att en m\u00e4ngd olika budskap kan f\u00f6ras fram med hj\u00e4lp av denna sexuella retorik, utan att det handlar om sexuell utl\u00f6sning \u2013 som g\u00f6r det till ett s\u00e5 uppskattat och fungerande tilltal i reklamen och i m\u00e5nga mediegenrer. D\u00e4rf\u00f6r ska denna typ av pornografisk bild allts\u00e5 inte ses som en del av h\u00e5rdpornografin, utan snarare som dess sexuella antites.\n\nSamtidigt b\u00f6r man vara medveten om att pornografi inte kan normaliseras fullt ut utan att tappa sin pornografiska status. Om det sugs upp alltf\u00f6r mycket i offentligheten och inf\u00f6rlivas i vardagsutbudet slutar det uppfattas som pornografi. Det h\u00e5rdpornografi ska kunna erbjuda sin publik \u00e4r n\u00e5got exklusivt, n\u00e5got man inte kan ta del av utanf\u00f6r det pornografiska \"rummet\". D\u00e4rmed \u00e4r den paradoxalt nog beroende av att det finns censur (som den ofta s\u00e4ger sig vara emot). Den \u00e4r beroende av gr\u00e4nser, av sexuella normer f\u00f6r att ha n\u00e5got att vara v\u00e5gad emot. Vi kan se hur porraff\u00e4rer uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5ller detta hemliga rum med sina m\u00f6rka f\u00f6nsterrutor, som inte bara beror p\u00e5 risken f\u00f6r insyn av kritiker eller bes\u00f6kares anonymitet, utan ocks\u00e5 p\u00e5 att man vill visa att detta \u00e4r n\u00e5got speciellt. Detta \u00e4r ett avgr\u00e4nsat \"privat\" rum i offentligheten.\n\nDet \u00e4r ju just pornografins status som n\u00e5got \"utanf\u00f6r\" som g\u00f6r den lockande. S\u00e5 detta inf\u00f6rlivande i offentligheten, denna \"clean-up\"-process, blir mots\u00e4gelsefull. N\u00e4r reklam och modebilder anv\u00e4nder pornografiska koder \u00e4r det f\u00f6r att de _ska_ uppfattas (och kanske debatteras) som just pornografiska koder \u2013 \u00e4ven om flera stora f\u00f6retag st\u00e4ndigt nekar till det. Varf\u00f6r ska man anv\u00e4nda referenser till n\u00e5got om de inte uppfattas som just referenser, i en kultur d\u00e4r tecken \u00e4r allt? I reklam- och mediesammanhang \u00e4r pornografiska koder en form av socialt och kulturellt kapital.\n\nDet \u00e4r ett s\u00e4tt att placera sig och definiera sin produkt, vare sig det \u00e4r ett tv-program eller en reklamkampanj, som lite \"v\u00e5gad\". Och h\u00e4r ser vi ett typiskt uttryck f\u00f6r ett slags r\u00e4ddh\u00e5gad radikalism hos medelklassen. Enligt sociologen Pierre Bourdieu \u00e4r en av de viktigaste f\u00f6r\u00e4ndringarna under efterkrigstiden uppkomsten av \"petit bourgeoisie\", som arbetar inom medierelaterade omr\u00e5den, mode, reklam och s\u00e5 naturligtvis i medierna sj\u00e4lva.\n\nMed utg\u00e5ngspunkt i hans resonemang argumenterar Mark Jankovich och Jane Arthurs (p\u00e5 var sitt h\u00e5ll) f\u00f6r att detta p\u00e5verkar synen p\u00e5 kroppar och sexualitet i dagens tv-utbud. Denna medel- eller medieklass f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker definiera sig sj\u00e4lv och sin kulturella trov\u00e4rdighet genom att omfamna en etik d\u00e4r \"kul\" \u00e4r ledordet f\u00f6r att s\u00e5 framst\u00e5 som mer moderna och sofistikerade \u00e4n den tidigare medelklassen. I detta projekt ing\u00e5r ett slags kalkylerad \u00f6verdrivenhet, en hedonism, som p\u00e5verkar attityden kring sexualitet. Det sexuellt \"frig\u00f6rande\" levereras i form av undervisning, disciplin och en intensiv uppm\u00e4rksamhet riktad mot det egna jaget och beteendet. Denna nya klassformation, menar Arthurs, ligger bakom det sj\u00e4lvterapeutiska medieutbudet, bakom livsstilsguider och bakom uppvisandet av kroppar och kroppsbeteenden. Det \u00e4r fr\u00e4mst tv som f\u00f6rmedlar denna medelklasskultur. H\u00e4r finns ett potpurri av mer eller mindre sexuellt utpr\u00e4glade genrer, men den mer \"groteska\", utlevande pornografin \u00e4r bannlyst, f\u00f6rutom som kittlande inblickar i dokument\u00e4rprogram d\u00e4r de l\u00e5nar av genrens f\u00f6rmenta seriositet. Eller i freakshowbetonade program d\u00e4r penisf\u00f6rstoringar (\"V\u00e4rldens st\u00f6rsta penis\"), extremt feta kvinnors sexualliv och liknande \u00e4r teman. Den typ av program som dominerar \u00e4r emellertid s\u00e5dana d\u00e4r sexualiteten inbakas som del i livsstils-manualer, som b\u00e5de ger \"kul\" underh\u00e5llning och undervisar publiken om sexuella beteenden, s\u00e5som \"Sex inspectors\", \"Virgin school\". Andra exempel \u00e4r \"My bare lady\" som visades p\u00e5 svensk tv v\u00e5ren 2007, d\u00e4r engelska teaterregiss\u00f6rer p\u00e5 kort tid skulle g\u00f6ra \"riktiga\" sk\u00e5despelare av unga amerikanska kvinnor fr\u00e5n porrfilmsbranschen och s\u00e4tta upp en pj\u00e4s i London.\n\nDen mer utbredda voyeuristiska relationen till \"vanliga\" m\u00e4nniskors sexualliv syns ocks\u00e5 i de m\u00e5nga realityprogram eller vad som kan kallas \"docuporn\" som \"Big Brother\", \"Paradise Hotel\" med flera, riktade fr\u00e4mst till en yngre publik.\n\n## HYPERESTETIK OCH PORNO-KROPPEN\n\nPornografins status har s\u00e5ledes f\u00f6r\u00e4ndrats. Att bli sedd som en del av porno-chic-kulturen \u00e4r ett s\u00e4tt att positionera sig mot dem som inte f\u00f6rst\u00e5r, s\u00e5 att vissa grupper utesluts fr\u00e5n den gemenskap som dessa koder ska skapa. Detta \u00e4r s\u00e4rskilt vanligt i kommersiella budskap som riktar sig till ungdomar, d\u00e4r ungdom b\u00e5de kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en viss \u00e5ldersgrupp och som en viss livsstil. I musikvideor och reklamkampanjer \u00e5terfinns scener som tagna ur pornografiska filmer men utan samlag, i kv\u00e4llspressen visas kopulerande par under t\u00e4cken, bland ungdomar anv\u00e4nds t-tr\u00f6jor med texter som \"pornostar\", och uttryck som att \"porra sig\" (vilket inte syftar p\u00e5 att man har haft sex med n\u00e5gon utan att man anv\u00e4nder en viss typ av kl\u00e4desplagg, gester och ansiktsuttryck). Annonser i tjejtidningar talar om att man kan sms:a in och f\u00e5 sitt eget \"pornostarnamn\". Detta visar att pornografi har f\u00e5tt en ny funktion, d\u00e4r den ska konsumeras som ett attribut. Det handlar med andra ord inte l\u00e4ngre, eller inte bara, om sexuell upphetsning och tillfredsst\u00e4llelse, utan om anammandet av symboliska koder, om att ikl\u00e4 sig ett pornografiskt bildspr\u00e5k.\n\nN\u00e5got som karakteriserar denna trend \u00e4r att det \"chica\" med pornografi knyts till den kvinnliga kroppen. Det \u00e4r den som beh\u00e4ngs med pornografiska tecken, inte den manliga. I h\u00e5rdpornografi har \u00e4ven manskroppen ett visst estetiskt uttryck, men det \u00e4r inte specifikt knutet till denna genre. Tv\u00e4rtom. Muskul\u00f6sa bringor och magar (som numer \u00e4r vanliga i heteropornografi) kan associeras med en m\u00e4ngd andra betydelser \u00e4n pornografiska. En viss typ av kvinnokropp \u00e4r dock genom olika kroppsposer, br\u00f6stens form och storlek, k\u00f6nets utseende \u2013 rakat eller specifikt friserat \u2013 enbart sedd som pornografisk, som en porno-kropp.\n\nP\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet har den kvinnliga kroppen alltmer estetiserats till ett slags pornografiskt r\u00e5material och det \u00e4r denna feminina kropp som f\u00f6rs ut fr\u00e5n pornografins rum och figurerar i andra mediesammanhang. Den b\u00e4r b\u00e5de p\u00e5 associationer till det h\u00e5rdpornografiskt \"f\u00f6rbjudna\" samtidigt som den, genom att inte f\u00f6rekomma tillsammans med sexuella aktiviteter och m\u00e4n, kan inlemmas i en redan etablerad accepterad tradition av sexuell bildsymbolik \u2013 den erotiserade feminina kroppen.\n\nOfta har de bilder av kvinnokroppar som finns inom semioch mjukpornografin lanserats som ett tecken p\u00e5 en progressiv tid, p\u00e5 en frig\u00f6relse fr\u00e5n gamla moraliska konventioner. Det \u00e4r heller ingen slump att det mjukpornografiska medieutbudet, med den feminina kroppen i sitt fokus, efter kommunistregimernas s\u00f6nderfall i de forna \u00f6ststaterna blivit en av den v\u00e4sterl\u00e4ndska kapitalismens (frihets)symboler. Under 1990-talet introduceras exempelvis tidningen _Playboy_ nationellt i Tjeckien (1991), Polen (1992), Kroatien (1997), Ungern (1999), Rum\u00e4nien (1999) och Ryssland (1995). Och detta utan att denna feminina kropp p\u00e5 n\u00e5got s\u00e4tt upph\u00f6r att vara sj\u00e4lva sinnebilden f\u00f6r maskulin heterosexualitet. Att se bilden av det sexualiserade feminina som tecken f\u00f6r id\u00e9er om maskulinitet handlar om att unders\u00f6ka de positioner mellan k\u00f6nen som bilder uttrycker vid olika historiska tidpunkter. Relationer som handlar om makt, beg\u00e4r och \u00f6msesidiga behov. Det \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 ett s\u00e4tt att rikta uppm\u00e4rksamheten mot den position maskulinitet f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas ha i v\u00e5r kultur generellt och i f\u00f6rh\u00e5llande till sexualitet i synnerhet.\n\n# 3.\n\n# Den maskulina kroppen och h\u00e5dpornografi\n\nNu till detta med den manliga kroppens synlighet. Under antiken var den manliga kroppen det centrala i konsten, den stod som tecken f\u00f6r civilisation och personifierade b\u00e5de M\u00e4nniskan och Gudarna. K\u00f6nsorganet visades \u00f6ppet och symboliserade patriarkat och fertilitet. Fallosen var d\u00e4r att besk\u00e5das av alla och kunde ses som ett lustfyllt och m\u00e4ktigt objekt f\u00f6r b\u00e5de m\u00e4n och kvinnor. Skulpturer av den romerska guden Priapus, med en enorm erekt penis, placerades p\u00e5 s\u00e4desf\u00e4lt och i tr\u00e4dg\u00e5rdar f\u00f6r att ge en b\u00e4ttre sk\u00f6rd (den ska ocks\u00e5 ha anv\u00e4nts f\u00f6r att skr\u00e4mma bort o\u00f6nskade f\u00e5glar och tjuvar, se bildark s. 4). Med kristendomens inf\u00f6rande kom den erigerade penisen att f\u00f6rbjudas fr\u00e5n offentlig plats och homosexualitet kom, som vi vet, att betraktas som n\u00e5got avvikande. Men den manliga dominansen f\u00f6rsvinner inte, som vi ocks\u00e5 vet, i och med att det offentliga uppvisandet av manliga kroppar minskar. Det patriarkala blir snarare mer genomtr\u00e4ngande och allomfattande n\u00e4r det f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker vara osynligt och inte lika m\u00e4rkbart. N\u00e4r manlig makt inte symboliseras med den nakna kroppen ska den snarare f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en inre mental styrka \u2013 den t\u00e4nkande, rationella mannen: huvudet.\n\nSom n\u00e4mndes i f\u00f6rra kapitlet b\u00f6rjade den manliga kroppen f\u00f6rsvinna fr\u00e5n konsten under artonhundratalet och den offentliga bildmilj\u00f6n utvecklades fr\u00e4mst runt den feminina kroppen. Det finns en m\u00e4ngd inv\u00e4ndningar som kan g\u00f6ras mot detta p\u00e5st\u00e5ende. Under 1920- och 1930-talen hyllades och visades den manliga kroppen genom fascismens och nazismens ideala soldatman och idrottsr\u00f6relsen smidiga manskropp.\n\nVi har ocks\u00e5 Hollywoodfilmens olika hj\u00e4ltar och deras kroppar med alltifr\u00e5n Burt Lancaster till James Dean med flera: kroppar att l\u00e4ngta efter, att fantisera om. Och naturligtvis \u00e4r det s\u00e5. Men, och detta \u00e4r ett avg\u00f6rande men, de \u00e4r inte uppvisade med det uttalade syftet att f\u00f6rf\u00f6ra och tilltala kvinnor. Den manliga kroppen i bild har inga speciella poser, gester eller blickar designade efter id\u00e9n om en feminin lust. Naturligtvis kan kvinnor titta och har tittat p\u00e5 m\u00e4ns kroppar med njutning, men detta har, som b\u00e5de Susan Bordo och Liesbeth van Zoonen visar, varit ett konsumerande p\u00e5 ett privat, inte offentligt, plan. Uppvisandet av den manliga kroppen ses i f\u00f6rsta hand som en kroppslig aff\u00e4r m\u00e4n emellan. Ett tydligt uttryck f\u00f6r detta \u00e4r att bilder p\u00e5 mer eller mindre avkl\u00e4dda m\u00e4n n\u00e4stan alltid v\u00e4cker fr\u00e5gor om homosexualitet eller homoerotism mellan m\u00e4n. Med andra ord: bilden av mannens kropp har r\u00f6rt fr\u00e5gor om m\u00e4n f\u00f6r m\u00e4n. Och h\u00e4r menar jag att vi fortfarande i dag ser ett slags tomrum i v\u00e5r bildkultur. Den manliga kroppen fr\u00e5ns\u00e4ger sig med best\u00e4mdhet att helt och fullt bjuda in en kvinnlig betraktare, eller tydligt f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka v\u00e4cka en feminin lust (eller en id\u00e9 om denna lust). Detta \u00e4r inte en kropp som s\u00e4ger: \"Jag \u00e4r h\u00e4r f\u00f6r Dig \u2013 tycker Du om vad Du ser?\" De v\u00e4grar bli sedda p\u00e5 annat s\u00e4tt \u00e4n som de vill. Som kraftfulla och ointagliga kroppar.\n\nS\u00e5 det \u00e4r _hur_ en manlig kropp synligg\u00f6rs som \u00e4r det centrala.\n\nEn naken kropp \u00e4r en s\u00e5rbar kropp, b\u00e5de rent fysiskt (eftersom kl\u00e4der skyddar fr\u00e5n kyla och hetta) och socialt; kl\u00e4der \u00e4r mark\u00f6rer f\u00f6r k\u00f6n, klass, prestige och social status. Nakenhet kan avsl\u00f6ja kroppens otillr\u00e4ckligheter i j\u00e4mf\u00f6relse med sociala ideal och \u00e4ven visa p\u00e5 den relativa likheten mellan kvinno- och manskroppen, som kvinnor med h\u00e4ngbukar och m\u00e4n med sm\u00e5 br\u00f6st till exempel. Den nakna kroppen kan s\u00e5ledes b\u00e4ra p\u00e5 ett hot om att \u00f6verskrida den fastslagna skillnad som kl\u00e4der insisterar p\u00e5. Samtidigt \u00e4r kroppen i sig en effektiv yta f\u00f6r att tydligg\u00f6ra skillnader och d\u00e4rf\u00f6r finns ett v\u00e4rde i att visa upp den manliga kroppen, inte minst i att visa upp den som muskul\u00f6s. F\u00f6r n\u00e4r denna kropp v\u00e4l exponeras b\u00f6r den kunna legitimera m\u00e4ns maktpositioner p\u00e5 olika s\u00e4tt genom att skilja ut den fr\u00e5n andra kroppar.\n\nGenom historien har avbildandet av m\u00e4n vilat p\u00e5 tv\u00e5 arketyper: den sensuella \"feminiserade\" unga mannen och den mer virila vuxna mannen (se bildark s. 4). Det \u00e4r framf\u00f6r allt den unga manskroppen som erotiserats (och feminiserats). De unga pojkkropparna har till\u00e5tits vara f\u00f6rf\u00f6rande, lekfulla, passiva, d\u00e4r att flirta med, eftersom de inte utgjort n\u00e5got reellt hot mot maskulina heroiska ideal. Den unga pojkkroppen har f\u00e5tt b\u00e4ra drag av det som sedan f\u00f6rsvinner n\u00e4r en vuxen manlighet tar vid. I bilder av en fullv\u00e4rdig manlig medborgare tycks falliska attribut d\u00e4remot vara en n\u00f6dv\u00e4ndighet.\n\nM\u00e5lningar och statyer har ofta avbildat den vuxna mannens kropp p\u00e5 ett n\u00e4stan konfronterande s\u00e4tt, med tydligt markerade muskler, som Michelangelos statyer.\n\nDessa tv\u00e5 prototyper \u2013 den mer sensuella, unga och den virila muskul\u00f6sa \u2013 beh\u00f6ver inte ses som varandras motsatser, utan snarare som tv\u00e5 l\u00f6pare d\u00e4r den ene tar vid stafettpinnen d\u00e4r den andra slutar. Dessa tv\u00e5 historiska versioner av uppvisad maskulinitet syns \u00e4n i dag. Den mer \"feminiserade\" och tillg\u00e4ngliga mannen \u00e5terses exempelvis i reklamen, ofta fotograferad i traditionellt feminina poser med nedslagen blick, en framskjuten h\u00f6ft och s\u00e5 vidare (se bildark s. 5, \u00f6verst), medan den andra, n\u00e4stan skulpterat muskul\u00f6sa kroppen, som stirrar kallt p\u00e5 betraktaren, \u00e4nd\u00e5 \u00e4r den som dominerar. Den ofta ih\u00e4rdigt tillbakastirrande blick som brukar \u00e5tf\u00f6lja den muskul\u00f6sa mannen med blottad bringa kallar Bordo \"face-off masculinity\". Det \u00e4r en blick som refererar till machokulturens dominansspel, d\u00e4r den som viker undan f\u00f6rst \u00e4r den svaga (se bildark s. 5, underst).\n\nDen bjuder inte in, utan anspelar p\u00e5 maskulinitetens autonomi och p\u00e5 hierarkier mellan m\u00e4n. Detta kyliga, hotfulla blickm\u00f6te som tecken p\u00e5 manlighet mellan m\u00e4n ser vi flera exempel p\u00e5 i popul\u00e4rkulturen. I filmer d\u00e4r unga m\u00e4n ska bli m\u00e4n, genom det milit\u00e4ra, f\u00e5r de l\u00e4ra sig att m\u00f6tande blickar med \u00f6verordnade inte kan komma p\u00e5 tal f\u00f6rr\u00e4n de har visat sig f\u00f6rtj\u00e4nta av dem, har klarat testet. Som n\u00e4r sergeanten vr\u00e5lar: \"Don't you eyeball me boy!\" till de nyanl\u00e4nda m\u00e4nnen i filmen _En officer och en gentleman_ (1982), eller i _Swordfish_ (2001): \"Well, you eyeball me once more boy and I'll stick it so far up your ass you'll be begging me for this bullet.\"\n\nListan kan g\u00f6ras o\u00e4ndlig p\u00e5 konversationer mellan m\u00e4n i filmer d\u00e4r tittandet \u00e4r ett s\u00e4tt att visa sin makt och den andres svagare position. Detta med att bli tittad p\u00e5, att underst\u00e4lla sig n\u00e5gon annans blick, framst\u00e4lls p\u00e5 m\u00e5nga h\u00e5ll som ett verkligt hot f\u00f6r m\u00e4n. Den klassiska v\u00e4sternfilmen \u00e4r ett exempel med sina suggestiva n\u00e4rbilder p\u00e5 sammanbitna mansansikten som nagelfar omv\u00e4rlden efter tecken p\u00e5 om de blir iakttagna. Betraktandet framst\u00e4lls som ett s\u00e4tt att ha kontroll \u00f6ver s\u00e5v\u00e4l sin omgivning som \u00f6ver andra m\u00e4n.\n\nDen yngre, mer feminina, sensuella mannen och den muskul\u00f6sa mannen har emellertid alltmer sm\u00e4lt samman till en offentlig bildkropp. Under \u00e5ttiotalet b\u00f6rjade mer \u00f6ppet erotiserade bilder av m\u00e4n anv\u00e4ndas i reklamen. Kl\u00e4dskaparen Calvin Klein var bland de f\u00f6rsta att etablera den unga sexiga, avkl\u00e4dda manskroppen som symbol i sin jeansreklam vid denna tid. Id\u00e9n l\u00e4r han ha f\u00e5tt under ett bes\u00f6k p\u00e5 b\u00f6gbaren Flamingo i New York 1974:\n\n> Bilden av barbr\u00f6stade unga m\u00e4n med muskul\u00f6sa \u00f6verkroppar, alla i jeans, \u00f6versta knappen uppkn\u00e4ppt, en antydan av h\u00e5rv\u00e4xt vid naveln som f\u00f6rsvinner ner i jeansen, skulle inspirera och genomsyra Calvin Kleins annonser och tv-reklam de f\u00f6ljande tio \u00e5ren.\n> \n> (Bordo 1999b s. 23)\n\nDet \u00e4r allts\u00e5 inte i f\u00f6rsta hand till heterosexuella kvinnor denna bild v\u00e4nder sig eller \u00e4r utformad att tilltala. Ist\u00e4llet b\u00e4r den p\u00e5 en sexuell tvetydighet, vilket Bordo menar utm\u00e4rker en \"dual marketing\"-strategi f\u00f6r att kunna locka b\u00e5de heterosexuella och homosexuella manliga konsumenter. Den starka k\u00f6pgruppen av homosexuella m\u00e4n b\u00f6rjade uppm\u00e4rksammas under sjuttiotalet, och begreppet \"the pink dollar\" myntades i San Francisco i samband med att de m\u00e4rkte sina sedlar med ett rosa streck f\u00f6r att visa p\u00e5 sin k\u00f6pkraft. I bilder som \u00e4r typiska f\u00f6r denna dubbla marknadsf\u00f6ring korsas ofta flera koder f\u00f6r hetero- och homosexualitet: androgyna, ibland sminkade, unga m\u00e4n med halvl\u00e5ngt h\u00e5r som poserar med kvinnor (f\u00f6r att markera heterosexualitet), eller ensamma muskul\u00f6sa avkl\u00e4dda m\u00e4n mer aggressivt framst\u00e4llda. Det handlar om att kunna l\u00e4mna utrymme f\u00f6r en b\u00e5de hetero- och homosexuell l\u00e4sning av manskroppen. Bilder av maskulinitet som har ett dubbelt syfte \u00e4r inte heller sv\u00e5ra att skapa i en kultur som v\u00e5r, d\u00e4r den muskul\u00f6sa manliga kroppen har en l\u00e5ng och framg\u00e5ngsrik estetisk historia.\n\n## MUSKULATUR OCH KROPPSGR\u00c4NSER\n\nManskroppen som n\u00e4stan verkar kl\u00e4dd i muskler, \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 prototypen f\u00f6r utvikningsmannen. Denna dyker upp p\u00e5 kalendrar, vykort och i andra medier till\u00e4gnade en kvinnlig heterosexuell publik under mitten av \u00e5ttiotalet. Han skiljer sig p\u00e5 flera s\u00e4tt fr\u00e5n sin kvinnliga dito. Ett karakteristiskt drag \u00e4r exempelvis anspelningar p\u00e5 aktivitet. Om han inte g\u00f6r n\u00e5got i bild, som att raka sig, finns ofta saker i bild som f\u00f6r tanken till handling som sport, brandbilar, flygplan. \u00c4r han bara d\u00e4r f\u00f6r att bli betraktad understryks hans muskulatur med hj\u00e4lp av ljuss\u00e4ttning och kameravinklar (se bildark s. 6).\n\nAtt det i s\u00e5 h\u00f6g grad \u00e4r det muskul\u00f6sa som ska f\u00f6retr\u00e4da maskulinitet som kropp p\u00e5 den offentliga bildarenan kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s p\u00e5 flera s\u00e4tt. Muskulatur blir ett s\u00e4tt att omg\u00e4rda kroppen med anspelningar p\u00e5 kraft, aktivitet och handling. \u00c4ven om inte alla m\u00e4n \u00e4r muskul\u00f6sa uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5ller den muskul\u00f6sa manskroppen f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningen om att dessa egenskaper \u00e4r knutna till maskulinitet.\n\nFlera referenser finns h\u00e4r till Antikens idealiserade manskropp med dess id\u00e9er om perfektion och om vad kroppen kan uppn\u00e5. Med sina tydliga konturer \u00e4r detta en kropp som inte riskerar att sm\u00e4lta in, eller ihop, med andra kroppar \u2013 som kvinnors.\n\nDen muskul\u00f6sa kroppen \u00e4r en kropp som blir till genom handling, den har skapats av disciplin och planering. Den \u00e4r h\u00e5rd och konturerad med huden sp\u00e4nd \u00f6ver musklerna som ett pansar (se bildark s. 7). H\u00e5rl\u00f6s och rakad synligg\u00f6rs musklerna tydligt. Kroppsh\u00e5r kan ocks\u00e5 anspela p\u00e5 n\u00e5got mer djurlikt, medan h\u00e5rl\u00f6shet visar att man \u00f6vervinner naturen eller str\u00e4var efter att \u00f6vervinna den.\n\nDen muskul\u00f6sa kroppen \u00e4r skapad, planerad och verkst\u00e4lld och i det perspektivet \u00e4r den ett tecken p\u00e5 ett slags mental manlig styrka och framg\u00e5ng. Och d\u00e4rf\u00f6r talar den om f\u00f6r betraktaren att den trots sin kroppslighet (eller just p\u00e5 grund av den) \u00e4r beviset f\u00f6r att tanken kan \u00f6vervinna fysiska begr\u00e4nsningar. S\u00e5 i sin extrema kroppslighet visar denna kropp just det motsatta \u2013 icke-kroppen, anden.\n\nBlir kroppen d\u00e4remot f\u00f6r extrem i sin muskulatur kan detta kroppsliga entrepren\u00f6rskap ruckas. I en alltf\u00f6r uppumpad form riskerar den att bli f\u00f6r stor f\u00f6r den kostym som \u00e4r medelklassmannens fr\u00e4msta kl\u00e4dsymbol. En \u00f6verdriven kroppslighet f\u00f6r l\u00e4tt tanken till arbetarklassens manliga kropp, den som har sin kvinnliga motsvarighet i inopererade br\u00f6stimplantat (vilket diskuteras i n\u00e4sta kapitel). Den muskul\u00f6sa kroppen kan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r riskera att signalera en mer ambivalent klasstillh\u00f6righet, d\u00e4r just det kroppsliga representerar en l\u00e4gre status.\n\nH\u00e4r kan vi f\u00f6r ett kort tag ocks\u00e5 v\u00e4nda blickarna mot den kostymkl\u00e4dda kroppen, den som till stor del representerar statsmannakroppen. H\u00e4r \u00e4r muskler fr\u00e5nvarande, detta \u00e4r inte heller en bild av mannen som kropp, snarare det motsatta. Det \u00e4r den rationella maskuliniteten d\u00e4r kroppen \u00e4r skymd och ser likadan ut som alla andra som b\u00e4r dessa plagg (\u00e5tminstone mer eller mindre). Statsmannakroppen, eller f\u00f6retagsledaren, skildras ofta i bild som l\u00e5ng och som en symbol f\u00f6r manlig auktoritet tornar den h\u00f6greste ledaren upp sig inf\u00f6r v\u00e5ra \u00f6gon (se bildark s. 8). I v\u00e5r kultur har h\u00f6jd och social status ett n\u00e4ra samband, inte minst n\u00e4r det g\u00e4ller myter om maskulinitet. Framg\u00e5ngsrika m\u00e4n ska vara, eller framst\u00e5 som, l\u00e5nga och de ska alltid vara l\u00e4ngre \u00e4n kvinnor. Samma m\u00f6nster ser vi \u00e4ven i filmens v\u00e4rld, alltifr\u00e5n Humphrey Bogart som stod p\u00e5 l\u00e5dor osynliga f\u00f6r publiken i scener mot den betydligt l\u00e4ngre Ingrid Bergman, till Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, med flera. M\u00e5nga \u00e4r de k\u00e4nda manliga sk\u00e5despelare som s\u00e4llan n\u00e5r \u00f6ver en och sjuttiostrecket men som i bilder och filmer framst\u00e5r som huvudet l\u00e4ngre \u00e4n alla andra.\n\nOfta reagerar man ocks\u00e5 med f\u00f6rv\u00e5ning n\u00e4r en man, som \u00e5terkommande portr\u00e4tterats i medier st\u00e5r framf\u00f6r en \u2013 och ser s\u00e5 liten ut. S\u00e5 genomgripande \u00e4r denna konvention att framst\u00e4lla manliga ledare, eller k\u00e4nda m\u00e4n, i den mediala offentligheten som resliga, att dess betydelse knappast kan \u00f6verdrivas. Det \u00e4r ett tydligt s\u00e4tt att symboliskt f\u00f6rankra kopplingen mellan auktoritet, makt och maskulinitet som n\u00e5got \"naturligt\".\n\n## DEN SARGADE KROPPEN\n\nMen tillbaka till den manliga kroppen som avkl\u00e4dd kropp. Om vi tittar p\u00e5 de m\u00e5nga popul\u00e4rfilmer d\u00e4r m\u00e4n innehar huvudrollerna, dominerar manliga hj\u00e4ltar och deras kroppar: v\u00e4sternfilmer, \"blue-collar\"-filmer (fyllda av undertr\u00f6jor och spelande armmuskler), sportfilmer, f\u00e4ngelse, action- och krigsfilmer. Dessa genrer \u00e4r \u00f6verbefolkade av m\u00e4n som interagerar med andra m\u00e4n. Kvinnor \u00e4r n\u00e4stan helt uteslutna fr\u00e5n denna djungel av m\u00e4n, eller snarare d\u00e4r f\u00f6r att f\u00f6rs\u00e4kra publiken om att hj\u00e4ltarna fortfarande \u00e4r heterosexuella.\n\nDet \u00e4r i slagsm\u00e5ls- och tortyrscener som den manliga kroppen visas upp b\u00e5de f\u00f6r publiken och andra filmkarakt\u00e4rers blickar. Ingen annanstans kan vi se en idealiserad, manlig kropp n\u00e4stan naken och helt \"\u00f6ppen\" inf\u00f6r kameran, om det inte handlar om att denna kropp ska sl\u00e5s, skjutas, br\u00e4nnas eller sk\u00e4ras i. Det \u00e4r inte narcissism eller exhibitionism som \u00f6ppnar den f\u00f6r betraktelse, utan det v\u00e5ld den uts\u00e4tts f\u00f6r. N\u00e5gra av de st\u00f6rsta kassa- och publikframg\u00e5ngarna, framf\u00f6r allt hos m\u00e4n, sedan slutet av \u00e5ttiotalet \u00e4r fyllda av dessa sargade, avkl\u00e4dda, vita manskroppar (\u00e4ven om svarta akt\u00f6rer f\u00f6rekommer i dessa filmer \u00e4r de s\u00e4llan huvudpersoner och s\u00e4llan lika kroppsligt framvisade): Sylvester Stallones _Rambo_ och _Rocky_ , Mel Gibsons _D\u00f6dligt vapen_ , Bruce Willis _Die Hard_ , Arnold Schwarzeneggers _Conan, barbaren_ , f\u00f6r att n\u00e4mna n\u00e5gra (flera har fortsatt att produceras in p\u00e5 2000-talet). Den manliga h\u00e5rdf\u00f6ra hj\u00e4lten \u00e4r inte n\u00e5got nytt fenomen, men sedan \u00e5ttiotalet \u00e4r han mer kroppslig och kampen utspelas mer direkt p\u00e5 och via hans kropp.\n\nClint Eastwood, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart med flera tidigare manliga filmhj\u00e4ltar var f\u00f6rvisso v\u00e5ldsamma, men det var ett v\u00e5ld som f\u00f6r det mesta h\u00f6lls utanf\u00f6r deras kroppar.\n\nDet finns flera f\u00f6rklaringar till att det \u00e4r just under \u00e5ttiotalet vi ser dessa nya hj\u00e4ltar. K\u00f6nens olikhet blir mer kroppsligt f\u00f6rankrad i kropps- och gymkulturen som f\u00e5r f\u00e4ste och tal om moderskap, hormoner och kvinnors f\u00f6rmodade gr\u00f6t-i-huvudettillst\u00e5nd blir mer legio. Kanske kan detta f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en reaktion mot sjuttiotalets betoning p\u00e5 likheten mellan k\u00f6nen. Sjuttiotalets s\u00e5 kallade velourman \u2013 ett begrepp som syftade p\u00e5 att m\u00e4n skulle \u00e4gna mer tid \u00e5t att leka med sina barn och d\u00e4rf\u00f6r b\u00e4ra n\u00e5got mer passande \u00e4n kostym \u2013 denna bespottade parentes i manlighetens historia, pareras exempelvis av den amerikanska _J\u00e4rn-Hans_ , en bok som sl\u00e5r igenom p\u00e5 bred front i v\u00e4stv\u00e4rlden med sina id\u00e9er om att \u00e5terfinna den \"sanna\" maskuliniteten d\u00e4r aggressivitet, skogen och \"ur-mannen\" st\u00e5r i centrum.\n\nI de ovan n\u00e4mnda filmerna ser vi ocks\u00e5 hur en ny form av hypermaskulinitet skrivs in p\u00e5 den vita hj\u00e4ltens kropp genom v\u00e5ld och sm\u00e4rta. Pl\u00e5gade och ofta bl\u00f6dande kroppar fyller bildrutorna \u2013 minns Bruce Willis i flygplatsdramat d\u00e4r hans s\u00e5riga f\u00f6tter \u00e4r med i halva filmen \u2013 och visar en heterosexuell maskulinitet som \u00e4r kroppslig men inte feminin (se bildark s. 9). Den sargade manskroppen och det lidande den utst\u00e5r f\u00f6r ocks\u00e5 med sig en k\u00e4nsla av dignitet. Det \u00e4r en kropp som \u00e4r \u00f6verl\u00e4gsen den sm\u00e4rta som \u00e5samkas den. Detta f\u00f6ljer den uppdelning av mannen i f\u00f6rnuft och k\u00e4nsla (ande\/kropp), d\u00e4r det kroppsliga genom historien kopplats till det feminina. Vad dessa blodiga manskroppar som sl\u00e4par, gr\u00e4ver sig fram, springer genom kulregn, simmar i iskallt vatten med knivs\u00e5r och s\u00e5 vidare visar oss \u00e4r att han inte \u00e4r kropp i f\u00f6rsta hand. Den styr honom inte, hans jag \u00e4r s\u00e5 mycket st\u00f6rre. Det som bevisligen inte kan brytas ned, detta n\u00e5got som g\u00f6r att han inte ger upp (hur illa tilltygat k\u00f6ttet \u00e4n blir), sitter inte i kroppen. Den lidande vita manskroppen a priori i v\u00e5r kultur, Kristuskroppen, miljontals g\u00e5nger gestaltad upph\u00e4ngd p\u00e5 korset med blodet rinnande ur huvud, h\u00e4nder och f\u00f6tter, inkarnerar grundmyten om den tudelade maskuliniteten. Han \u00e4r helt och h\u00e5llet k\u00f6tt och m\u00e4nsklig kropp, han kan bl\u00f6da, men han kan ocks\u00e5 motst\u00e5, eller snarare utst\u00e5 kroppsliga lidanden. I uppst\u00e5ndelsen visas just andens triumf \u00f6ver k\u00f6ttet. Medan kvinnor \u00e4r sina kroppar, \u00e4r m\u00e4n n\u00e5got annat, f\u00f6rvisso realiserat genom kroppen, men aldrig reducerbart till det kroppsliga. Och denna ambivalens inf\u00f6r kroppen \u00e4r tydlig ocks\u00e5 inom h\u00e5rdpornografin n\u00e4r det manliga beg\u00e4ret ska visas upp.\n\n## H\u00c5RDPORNOGRAFI OCH FALLOSBESV\u00c4R\n\n\"Respect the cock\", m\u00e4ssar Tom Cruise i rollen som den karismatiske sexgurun f\u00f6r m\u00e4n, i filmen _Magnolia_ (1999). Han sammanfattar d\u00e4rmed en av de stora underliggande myterna om maskulin sexualitet \u2013 varat med ett n\u00e4stan eget v\u00e4sen vars vilja styr s\u00e5v\u00e4l kvinnor som m\u00e4n.\n\nDet som i f\u00f6rsta hand representerar manlig sexualitet genom kroppen \u00e4r k\u00f6net, penisen. Till skillnad fr\u00e5n kvinnlig sexualitet som ska f\u00f6rknippas med en m\u00e4ngd uttryck och koder \u2013 smekande h\u00e4nder, halvs\u00e4nkta \u00f6gonlock, \u00f6ppna munnar, f\u00f6r att n\u00e4mna n\u00e5gra \u2013 \u00e4r det k\u00f6net som st\u00e5r f\u00f6r och ska omfatta manlig sexualitet, trots att m\u00e4n har en m\u00e4ngd andra erogena zoner. Penisen, antingen direkt visad eller frammanad som bild genom associationer till fallosen som n\u00e5got h\u00e5rt, styvt, upprest, med hj\u00e4lp av pilar, spjut, vapen, kameraobjektiv (m\u00e5nga \u00e4r de objekt som kan f\u00f6ra tanken till detta organ), \u00e4r uttrycket f\u00f6r manlig sexualitet. \u00c4r den inte erekt har den heller ingen plats inom h\u00e5rdpornografin. I denna specifika id\u00e9 om penisen befinner vi oss l\u00e5ngt fr\u00e5n det sk\u00f6ra, k\u00e4nsliga organ som den faktiskt \u00e4r, mjukt och rundat \u2013 \u00e4ven i erigerat tillst\u00e5nd. F\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om penisen, och s\u00e5ledes om manlig sexualitet, som n\u00e5got separerat fr\u00e5n mannen och fr\u00e5n andra k\u00e4nslotillst\u00e5nd, utg\u00f6r sj\u00e4lva basen f\u00f6r v\u00e5r tids f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar och ber\u00e4ttelser om manlig sexualitet. De g\u00e5r som en r\u00f6d tr\u00e5d i sk\u00e4mt, i klich\u00e9er, eller i betydligt allvarligare sammanhang, som exempelvis f\u00f6rklaringar till \u00f6vergrepp.\n\nH\u00e4r understryks ofta att k\u00f6net \u00e4r n\u00e5gonting utanf\u00f6r mannen, inte bara rent faktiskt, utan n\u00e5got med ett eget liv, ett eget personnamn (Petter-Niklas), en egen vilja som i b\u00e4sta fall kan styras av den manliga individen, men inte alltid (ett tema som den italienska f\u00f6rfattaren Alberto Moravia uttrycker i titeln _Jag och Han_ fr\u00e5n 1971).\n\nDetta syns\u00e4tt reducerar inte bara manlig sexualitet till penisen p\u00e5pekar Richard Dyer, det kan ocks\u00e5 separera m\u00e4n fr\u00e5n den egna sexualiteten, eller skapa en k\u00e4nsla av \"utanf\u00f6rhet\" i den egna kroppen.\n\nFlera forskare har visat bristen p\u00e5 \u00f6verensst\u00e4mmelse mellan fallosen som symbol (styv och m\u00e4ktig) och det faktiska manliga k\u00f6net. Ett s\u00e4tt att hantera detta gap inom konsten har varit att i m\u00e5lningar, p\u00e5 statyer och s\u00e5 vidare, framst\u00e4lla det manliga k\u00f6net som litet f\u00f6r att understryka att storleken inte spelar n\u00e5gon roll. Sambandet mellan maskulin sexualitet och fallisk auktoritet vilar ist\u00e4llet p\u00e5 en symbolisk koppling, inte p\u00e5 en faktisk kroppslig liknelse. P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet kan penisen oavsett storlek och utseende uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla en fallisk ordning \u2013 \u00e4ven om m\u00e4ns oro f\u00f6r deras k\u00f6n, b\u00e5de dess storlek och dess f\u00f6rm\u00e5ga att fungera, genererar en hel industri av f\u00f6rl\u00e4ngning, f\u00f6rstoring och piller.\n\nFallosen \u00e4r kraftfull och m\u00e4ktig som symbol f\u00f6r maskulin sexualitet just f\u00f6r att den inte bara ses som en penis, utan som en metafor f\u00f6r auktoritet, f\u00f6r makt och mystik. Eller r\u00e4ttare sagt: fallosen \u00e4r en typ av penis, den erekta, den h\u00e5rda, den kraftfulla: den som ska liknas vid maskiner och vid vapen, den som \"st\u00f6ter\" och \"skjuter\".\n\nDet h\u00e4r har ocks\u00e5 betydelse f\u00f6r hur vi l\u00e4r oss tolka och f\u00f6rst\u00e5 penisen som den st\u00e4ndigt aktiva parten, den penetrerande. Det \u00e4r i sig intressant hur stark denna koppling \u00e4r, att den och inte vaginan \u00e4r den som \"g\u00f6r\". Den \"g\u00e5r in\" och i detta ska aktiviteten ligga medan vaginan \"tar emot\". Detta f\u00f6rh\u00e5llande skulle naturligtvis, som Sara H\u00f8jgaard Cawood p\u00e5pekar, kunna f\u00f6rst\u00e5s tv\u00e4rtom, \u00e4ven om det \u00e4r sv\u00e5rt att t\u00e4nka helt om kring n\u00e5got s\u00e5 invant. N\u00e4r handen h\u00e5ller om ett glas ser vi handen som den \"g\u00f6rande\" och inte glaset som det som h\u00e5ller handen.\n\nDet som omsluter skulle likav\u00e4l kunna tolkas som den \"g\u00f6rande\" parten, allts\u00e5 vaginan som aktivt tar och h\u00e5ller penisen. Att detta \u00e4r sv\u00e5rt att t\u00e4nka visar hur stark den falliska id\u00e9n \u00e4r. Det \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 intressant att en av de f\u00e5 myter d\u00e4r vaginan tilldelas en mycket kraftfull roll \u00e4r som \"vagina dentata\", den tandbekl\u00e4dda som slukar det som kommer in.\n\n## DEN SERI\u00d6SA PENISEN OCH MASKINELL SEXUALITET\n\nI h\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r penisen (hur vi \u00e4n tolkar vad den g\u00f6r) dock allt annat \u00e4n osynlig och sambandet med fallosen finns inte bara p\u00e5 en symbolisk niv\u00e5.\n\nDen upplysta scen som penisen h\u00e4r ska upptr\u00e4da p\u00e5 f\u00f6r med sig ett behov av att s\u00e4kra den som n\u00e5got spektakul\u00e4rt och enast\u00e5ende, st\u00e4ndigt erekt (och ofta stor). Kring den alienerade penis som Dyer talar om, \u00e5terfunnen i m\u00e5nga ber\u00e4ttelser om manlig heterosexualitet, understryks ocks\u00e5 dess enorma betydelse f\u00f6r b\u00e5de kvinnor och m\u00e4n. Filmvetaren Peter Lehman pekar dock p\u00e5 en ny trend i hur detta organ representeras i flera popul\u00e4ra filmer under nittiotalet. H\u00e4r \u00e4r den varken humoristisk (allts\u00e5 liten och d\u00e4rmed f\u00f6rem\u00e5l f\u00f6r sk\u00e4mt) eller erekt (som i h\u00e5rdpornografin), utan, som i filmen _Full Monty_ (1997), sj\u00e4lva filmens h\u00f6jdpunkt \u2013 den _melodramatiska_ penisen. Den melodram som omger penisens uppvisande syftar till att understryka dess status som unik och dess uppvisande som ber\u00e4ttelsers klimax. Denna tendens, menar Lehman, kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en reaktion mot kvinnors \u00f6kade deltagande i samh\u00e4llet generellt, och inom tidigare manligt dominerade omr\u00e5den i synnerhet. Allt detta medf\u00f6r behovet av att s\u00e4kra penisens betydelse \u2013 det som kvinnor inte har och aldrig kan f\u00e5. Om den melodramatiska penisen \u00e4r en teknik, ett s\u00e4tt att synligg\u00f6ra detta organ i popul\u00e4rkulturen utan att den ska f\u00f6rlora sin status, \u00e4r h\u00e5rdpornografin ett omr\u00e5de d\u00e4r den framst\u00e4lls som sj\u00e4lvklar, hyperseri\u00f6s och av st\u00f6rsta vikt b\u00e5de f\u00f6r kvinnor och m\u00e4n.\n\nI mycket heterosexuell h\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r den underliggande problematiken kring alienation och manlig sexualitet tydlig. Trots att kvinnor (och deras k\u00f6n) tilldelas en framtr\u00e4dande visuell plats, handlar materialet till st\u00f6rsta delen om maskulinitet, om en sexualitet konstruerad i termer av distans och kontroll.\n\nH\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r en genre som k\u00e4nnetecknas av sina anspr\u00e5k p\u00e5 realism och den \u00e4r i den bem\u00e4rkelsen lik dokument\u00e4rgenren. Som publik ska vi \u00f6vertygas om att det vi ser faktiskt har h\u00e4nt, att personerna faktiskt har sex med varandra. Bevisen f\u00f6r detta har sett olika ut vid olika tidpunkter. Fram till slutet av sjuttiotalet var s\u00e5 kallade \"meatshots\" vanliga, m\u00e4n och kvinnor som l\u00e5g ovanp\u00e5 varandra, med k\u00f6nen i varandras kroppar. Med filmen _L\u00e5ngt ner i halsen_ (1972), den f\u00f6rsta riktigt popul\u00e4ra och socialt accepterade, h\u00e5rdpornografiska filmen, syns en f\u00f6r\u00e4ndring. H\u00e4r b\u00f6rjar den manliga utl\u00f6sningen hyllas. Publiken f\u00e5r se inklipp fr\u00e5n sprutande vulkaner, enorma font\u00e4ner och jordb\u00e4vningar i samband med att filmens huvudperson f\u00e5r utl\u00f6sning. Alltsedan dess \u00e4r det \"the cumshot\" (eller \"moneyshot\" som branschen sj\u00e4lv kallar dem, eftersom utl\u00f6sning \u00e4r det de manliga akt\u00f6rerna f\u00e5r betalt f\u00f6r) som i \u00e4ndl\u00f6sa upprepningar avslutar bildserier och filmer. Detta st\u00e5r som det synliga beviset p\u00e5 mannens lust och det som etablerar h\u00e4ndelsernas trov\u00e4rdighet \u2013 att det vi ser verkligen har h\u00e4nt. Till skillnad fr\u00e5n denna synlighet \u00e4r kvinnors lust inte lika enkelt bevisad. Deras njutning illustreras ist\u00e4llet med ansiktsuttryck, poser och bedyranden i tal eller text.\n\nP\u00e5 samma g\u00e5ng som h\u00e5rdpornografi bygger p\u00e5 sin k\u00e4nsla av realism, \u00e4r syftet mer det imagin\u00e4ra, att frammana ett fantasilandskap d\u00e4r alla typer av sex kan ig\u00e5ngs\u00e4ttas var som helst med vem\/vilka som helst. Basformeln f\u00f6r m\u00e5nga h\u00e5rdpornografiska filmer och bildber\u00e4ttelser \u00e4r ofta likartad. Personer m\u00f6ts, det s\u00e5 kallade \"dirty talk\" b\u00f6rjar, under vilket de flesta deltagare tar av sig kl\u00e4derna (eller det mesta av dem), sedan utf\u00f6r kvinnan\/kvinnorna ofta fellatio, inte s\u00e4llan i utdragna scener med flera olika kameravinklar. Efter det sker ibland cunnilingus (under kortare tid), och sedan startar penetration, som avslutas med mannens utl\u00f6sning. Det tal som ofta f\u00f6reg\u00e5r sj\u00e4lva sexakterna (i filmer) bygger ofta p\u00e5 att mannen s\u00e4ger vad kvinnan ska g\u00f6ra och kommer att tycka om att g\u00f6ra. Han talar sin lust snarare \u00e4n visualiserar den med kroppen, eftersom hon ofta \u00e4r i bild och illustrerar det han s\u00e4ger.\n\nP\u00e5 ett plan \u00e4r penisen h\u00e5rdpornografins huvudperson och kvinnors lust kretsar kring hyllandet av detta organ som alltings b\u00f6rjan och slut. I texter och bilder beskrivs numer n\u00e4stan genomg\u00e5ende penisens storlek, tillst\u00e5nd och den njutning den ger kvinnor. Ber\u00e4ttelserna handlar till st\u00f6rsta delen om var penisen penetrerar (oralt, vaginalt, analt) och hur (h\u00e5rt, rytmiskt, l\u00e5ngsamt, l\u00e4nge) och vilka kvinnor som \u00e4r lyckliga nog att f\u00e5 ta emot detta organ (skolflickor, oskulder, storbr\u00f6stade). Kameravinkeln \u00e4r i m\u00e5nga standardscener, som vid fellatio, ocks\u00e5 en slags penisens \"point of view\". Vad som visualiseras \u00e4r med andra ord en heterosexuell ideologi som s\u00e4ger att den sexuella akten startar med manlig erektion och avslutas med manlig ejakulation.\n\nDet \u00e4r det synliga uppvisandet, \"cumshoten\", som representerar klimaxen, inte samlag eller fellatio, vilket skulle g\u00f6ra penisen och dess klimax osynlig. Vi kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5 detta n\u00e4stan tv\u00e5ngsm\u00e4ssiga uppvisande som att manlig orgasm absolut inte f\u00e5r ske utom synh\u00e5ll f\u00f6r publiken. Detta uppvisande \u00e4r inte i f\u00f6rsta hand d\u00e4r f\u00f6r kvinnornas skull. De kan, och ska, s\u00e4llan se m\u00e4nnen komma, eftersom det ofta sker p\u00e5 deras ryggar, ansikten eller bakdelar. Det \u00e4r ist\u00e4llet inf\u00f6r mannens egna och publikens \u00f6gon ejakuleringen \u00e4ger rum. P\u00e5 detta s\u00e4tt bildar \"cumshoten\" en form av sexuellt band mellan de manliga akt\u00f6rerna och publiken. Scott Macdonald skriver i sin artikel \"Confessions of a feminist porn watcher\" _,_ hur detta fokus p\u00e5 denna v\u00e4tska, som han l\u00e4rt sig uppfatta som n\u00e5got \u00e4ckligt, var en l\u00e4ttnad att se \u2013 och inte minst att kvinnor h\u00e4r sade sig uppskatta den.\n\nDe manliga akt\u00f6rernas kroppar \u00e4r emellertid inte d\u00e4r f\u00f6r att visas upp p\u00e5 samma s\u00e4tt som de kvinnliga. Ett vanligt argument \u00e4r att h\u00e5rdpornografiska bilder fragmenterar den kvinnliga kroppen och presenterar henne som enbart k\u00f6n och br\u00f6st. Men detta \u00e4r numer snarare utm\u00e4rkande f\u00f6r hur den manliga kroppen visas i mycket h\u00e5rdpornografi. Vad vi till\u00e5ts se \u00e4r avpersonifierade muskul\u00f6sa bringor, ben och k\u00f6nsorgan. Kroppsdelar som utstr\u00e5lar aktivitet och kontroll. M\u00e4ns ansikten \u00e4r ofta osynliga och utanf\u00f6r bilden. Det \u00e4r vad m\u00e4n _g\u00f6r_ som \u00e4r det centrala, inte hur de visar hur denna upplevelse k\u00e4nns. Detta till skillnad fr\u00e5n kvinnor vars k\u00e4nslor inf\u00f6r det som p\u00e5g\u00e5r ljudligt och tydligt registreras. M\u00e4ns njutning ska f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en kontrollerad lust, bosatt i en kropp som inte ger sig h\u00e4n. Han ska utf\u00f6ra och handla med en sj\u00e4lvbeh\u00e4rskning som s\u00e4llan eller aldrig sviktar, medan hon f\u00f6rkroppsligar en mer okontrollerad lust, ig\u00e5ngsatt av m\u00e4ns kroppar (eller organ) och av sj\u00e4lva kameran (teknologin).\n\nSexuell exhibitionism \u00e4r ett \u00e5terkommande tema och anv\u00e4nds ofta som f\u00f6rklaring till kvinnors deltagande p\u00e5 en pornografisk scen. Sj\u00e4lva akten att bli fotograferad, att veta att m\u00e4n ser bilderna, ger tillfredsst\u00e4llelse och kameran framst\u00e4lls som en \u00e5tr\u00e5dd fallossymbol, vilket ett axplock av rubriker visar: \"Tills vidare forts\u00e4tter jag med modelljobbet och f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker f\u00f6rf\u00f6ra s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga kameror som m\u00f6jligt [...]\"; \"Jag blir ordentligt upphetsad under fotograferingen men jag blir \u00e4nnu k\u00e5tare n\u00e4r jag sedan ser bilderna i tidningarna och fantiserar om hur m\u00e5nga killar som just d\u00e5 sitter och runkar till bilderna med mig...Wow!\"; \"Jag kan f\u00e5 den ena orgasmen efter den andra n\u00e4r jag poserar framf\u00f6r kameran!\" ( _Fib aktuellt_ 1995); \"Jag hade inget emot att ligga naken i fotoatelj\u00e9en\" ( _Lektyr_ 2007).\n\nSj\u00e4lva fotograferandet f\u00f6rklaras vara en k\u00e4lla till njutning, och inte s\u00e4llan f\u00e5r publiken veta att fotosessionen avslutas med att fotografen och kvinnan har sex.\n\nDen manliga betraktaren tilltalas ofta som en deltagande sexuell akt\u00f6r, inte en tjuvkikande voyeur. I texten sker detta via direkta uppmaningar, d\u00e4r han kan ikl\u00e4 sig rollen av den utf\u00f6rande, den aktiva, vilket alla uppmaningar som \"Ring mig!\" eller \"Ta mig!\" visar. Bilder f\u00f6ljer samma uppmuntrande inbjudan. Med ansiktet v\u00e4nt mot betraktaren, munnen \u00f6ppen som tecken p\u00e5 tillg\u00e4nglighet och lust ger kvinnor intryck av sexuell f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntan.\n\nNjutningen av att se henne utm\u00e5las ocks\u00e5 som en del i njutningen att vara _med_ henne. Kameran \u00e4r i mycket h\u00e5rdpornografi ibland s\u00e5 n\u00e4ra det kvinnliga k\u00f6net att den ger intryck av en medicinsk blick (n\u00e5got som f\u00f6rst\u00e4rks av att k\u00f6net n\u00e4stan genomg\u00e5ende \u00e4r rakat och synligt \u00f6ppet). Tittandets njutning f\u00f6refaller mer och mer beroende av en n\u00e4stintill imagin\u00e4r fysisk ber\u00f6ring, en illusion om kroppslig intimitet. Modellerna erbjuder inte bara sina kroppar att beses utan ocks\u00e5 att intas. S\u00e4rade ben, svankande ryggar och upplyfta bakdelar ut mot publiken utlovar en plats d\u00e4r betraktaren kan kliva in. Detta upp\u00f6ppnande av kroppen f\u00f6r (symbolisk) penetration och den exhibitionistiska njutning det ska signalera, kan ses som ett s\u00e4tt att f\u00f6rs\u00e4kra b\u00e5de betraktarens \"r\u00e4tt\" att se och att inta, att f\u00e5 vara d\u00e4r. Det \u00e4r just de st\u00e4llen p\u00e5 kroppen d\u00e4r penisen kan komma in som lyfts fram mot kameralinsen. Hon kommer med andra ord betraktaren till m\u00f6tes, ger honom m\u00f6jligheten att leva ut i henne (f\u00e5 utl\u00f6sning).\n\nKvinnors blickar \u00e4r n\u00e4stan st\u00e4ndigt riktade ut mot betraktaren, \u00e4ven d\u00e4r det kr\u00e4ver n\u00e4stan akrobatisk vighet. M\u00e4ns blickar \u00e4r i sin tur s\u00e4llan v\u00e4nda mot kameralinsen. De etablerar inte en personlig relation till betraktaren. Ist\u00e4llet \u00e4r de genitala och riktade mot k\u00f6net, det egna eller hennes.\n\nAtt m\u00e4n s\u00e5 s\u00e4llan i h\u00e5rdpornografiska bilder m\u00f6ter v\u00e5ra blickar \u00e4r av stor vikt f\u00f6r de f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om maskulinitet som levereras. F\u00f6r att f\u00f6rst\u00e5 vad dessa blickar \"s\u00e4ger\" f\u00e5r vi se vad de inte s\u00e4ger, med andra ord vad en direkt \u00f6gonkontakt h\u00e4r skulle kunna medf\u00f6ra. Utbytet av blickar mellan m\u00e4n anses kunna inneb\u00e4ra ett igenk\u00e4nnande av en delad sexualitet, ett tecken p\u00e5 ett homosexuellt identitetsutbyte, genom att antyda den visuella kontakt som finns i flirtandet och letandet efter andra m\u00e4n. \u00d6gonkontakten mellan m\u00e4n och de manliga akt\u00f6rerna ska d\u00e4rf\u00f6r aldrig vara s\u00e5 direkt att den st\u00f6r den dominanta blicken, som f\u00f6respr\u00e5kar en heterosexuell identitet. Men att s\u00f6ka f\u00f6rst\u00e5 dessa bilder enbart i termer av homosexualitet eller inte \u00e4r alltf\u00f6r begr\u00e4nsat. Pornografiska bilder spelar upp en scen byggd p\u00e5 f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om en gemensam, delad maskulin sexualitet i f\u00f6rh\u00e5llande till kvinnor. Det \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r, menar jag, inte en homosexuell utan snarare en heterosexuell igenk\u00e4nnelse som skapas, d\u00e4r det manliga organet och dess presterande ska f\u00f6rena alla m\u00e4n och presentera manlig sexualitet som fallisk och likadan.\n\nMedan kvinnors sexualitet placeras i hela kroppen, ja, hela deras person \u00e4r sex, \u00e4r den sexuella upplevelsen hos m\u00e4n \"utanf\u00f6r\" honom sj\u00e4lv. Den delade gemensamma sexualitet m\u00e4n ska k\u00e4nna igen sig i \u00e4r den mer eller mindre maskinella, uppbyggd kring alienation, distans och kontroll. En sexualitet d\u00e4r de flesta synliga tecken p\u00e5 lust, vid sidan av ejakulering, \u00e4r bannlysta. Man kan d\u00e4rmed f\u00f6rst\u00e5 avsaknad av k\u00e4nslouttryck och \u00f6gonkontakt som tecken p\u00e5 en maskulinitet fylld av sj\u00e4lvkontroll, ett tecken p\u00e5 att detta \u00e4r kroppen som beh\u00e4rskar lusten.\n\nKvinnorna \u00e4r till skillnad fr\u00e5n m\u00e4nnen, s\u00e4llan helt nakna, vilket visar kl\u00e4ders pornografiska funktion. Det \u00e4r alltid samma typ av kl\u00e4der som anv\u00e4nds: bh, spetstrosor, l\u00e5rstrumpor, skor med h\u00f6ga klackar och smycken, fr\u00e4mst p\u00e4rlhalsband. Med sin repetitiva f\u00f6rekomst verkar plaggen inte bara associeras med den kvinnliga kroppen, de f\u00f6ruts\u00e4tts fungera k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssigt och representera \u00e5tr\u00e5 och \u00f6nskningar f\u00f6r betraktaren. Med hj\u00e4lp av plaggen \u00e4r det alltid samma kvinna vi m\u00f6ter, f\u00f6rvisso med olika namn men inte med olika betydelser.\n\nFetischismer kan ocks\u00e5 anv\u00e4ndas f\u00f6r att skapa och uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla skillnader mellan k\u00f6nen, vilka inom h\u00e5rdpornografin inte finns i beg\u00e4ret. D\u00e5 den pornografiska ber\u00e4ttelsen inte bara betonar likheten i lusten, utan \u00e4ven ofta hennes starkare drift, kr\u00e4vs en tydlig form av is\u00e4rh\u00e5llande. H\u00e4r blir fetischeringen ett viktigt instrument. Genom anv\u00e4ndandet av standardiserade plagg s\u00e5som spetsunderkl\u00e4der, vilka alla kopplas till det feminina, blir hon avskiljd fr\u00e5n det maskulina. P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet f\u00f6rnekas den igenk\u00e4nning som likheten i det sexuella beg\u00e4ret skulle kunna medf\u00f6ra.\n\nMen kl\u00e4der och smycken har \u00e4ven fler betydelser. De \u00e4r statussymboler och kopplade till v\u00e4lst\u00e5nd: p\u00e4rlhalsband och underkl\u00e4der av blankt dyrt material. \u00c4ven de milj\u00f6er som kvinnor i h\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r placerade i \u2013 slottsliknande parker med font\u00e4ner, privata swimmingpooler eller dyrbara soffor och s\u00e4ngar \u2013 f\u00f6r tankarna till v\u00e4lbest\u00e4lldhet.\n\nVilka associationer \u00e4r detta avsett att ge? Dels placerar det henne i en tillvaro som inte st\u00f6rs av andra plikter \u00e4n njutningen och d\u00e4r sexuella utforskningar \u00e4r tidsf\u00f6rdrivet och deras enda helt absorberande intresse. Dels st\u00e5r det f\u00f6r en tydlig klassaspekt d\u00e4r pornografins kvinnor ska representera ett slags \u00f6verklass som g\u00f6rs till\u00e4nglig f\u00f6r publiken: \"Dom superrika tjejerna som du kan ragga upp!\" ( _Lektyr_ 2007).\n\nM\u00e4n deltar mer som tillf\u00e4lliga bes\u00f6kare i denna luxu\u00f6sa v\u00e4rld. Deras nakenhet understryker en kropp som fysiskt presterar. D\u00e4rmed rubbas inte bilden av maskulinitet som det handlande, utan arbetet f\u00f6rl\u00e4ggs i det sexuella utf\u00f6randet. Denna muskul\u00f6sa nakenhet visar ocks\u00e5 mannen av folket som jobbar och tillfredsst\u00e4ller med sin kropp (den som \u00e4r sig sj\u00e4lv nog). Utifr\u00e5n ett publikperspektiv kan detta f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som att l\u00e4saren antingen kan identifiera sig med en mindre v\u00e4lbest\u00e4lld, arbetande klass, eller som att \u00e4ven kvinnor med status och pengar \u00e4r tillg\u00e4ngliga. Deras ekonomiska, sociala klass \u00e4r ointressant \u2013 de \u00e4r \u00e4nd\u00e5 sina kroppar f\u00f6rst och fr\u00e4mst. Och denna kropp beh\u00f6ver en man.\n\nDen fragmenterade manskroppen och den mer i helhet uppvisade kvinnan skapar ocks\u00e5 ett scenario d\u00e4r m\u00e4ns lust riktas mot en viss kvinnlig estetisk typ, en viss kropp, ett visst utseende. Kvinnors beg\u00e4r \u00e4r mer diffust och framf\u00f6r allt riktat mot alla m\u00e4n. Oavsett utseende, \u00e5lder, klass och ekonomisk status \u00e4r Han beg\u00e4rd \u2013 bara Han har ett fungerande k\u00f6n. \u00c4ven om potensfr\u00e5gor inte diskuteras i h\u00e5rdpornografiskt material (med undantag f\u00f6r en period p\u00e5 sjuttiotalet), finns de som en underliggande, outtalad fond i ber\u00e4ttelserna, eller snarare det som man st\u00e4ndigt talar emot \u2013 ordl\u00f6st av m\u00e4n och ljudligt av kvinnor.\n\nDet \u00e4r som om den sj\u00e4lvtillr\u00e4cklighet som ska kopplas till maskulin sexualitet inte nog kan understrykas. Man kan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r se de n\u00e4rmast maniska upprepningarna av uppvisade utl\u00f6sningar som att manlig potens (liksom maskuliniteten sj\u00e4lv) alltid m\u00e5ste bevisas och f\u00f6rs\u00e4kras, och hela tiden knytas till k\u00f6net. Detta medf\u00f6r att hyperpenetrering st\u00e4ndigt hyllas, b\u00e5de i bild och text, som kvinnors enda v\u00e4g till njutning och m\u00e4ns enda funktion.\n\nPenetreringsmodellen levereras som en friktionsfri mall d\u00e4r allt missn\u00f6je mellan k\u00f6nen \u00e4r bortbl\u00e5st och d\u00e4r kvinnor n\u00e5r tillfredst\u00e4llelse enbart med hj\u00e4lp av m\u00e4n. Den l\u00f6ser ocks\u00e5 sp\u00e4nningen mellan k\u00f6nen genom att f\u00f6rs\u00e4kra att detta \u00e4r vad kvinnor egentligen vill. Och den enda som kan tillhandah\u00e5lla det \u00e4r m\u00e4n \u2013 om de kan prestera. F\u00f6r m\u00e4n kan detta naturligtvis ocks\u00e5 skapa en oro inf\u00f6r att ha ett organ som inte orkar g\u00f6ra det den ska. Den k\u00f6r av kvinnor som unisont f\u00f6rs\u00e4krar att det h\u00e4r \u00e4r precis vad de vill ha, visar dock en mycket bekr\u00e4ftande sj\u00e4lvbild f\u00f6r en manlig publik.\n\nI sin bok _Hardcore_ menar Linda Williams att h\u00e5rdpornografi kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en slags \"pornotopia\", en utopisk bild av k\u00f6nens relation. Problem mellan k\u00f6nen f\u00e5r i denna, f\u00f6r m\u00e4n, bekr\u00e4ftande frizon sin l\u00f6sning. Och man \u00e4r b\u00f6jd att h\u00e5lla med.\n\nDetta st\u00e4ndiga utropande (n\u00e4stan vr\u00e5lande) och lovsjungande fr\u00e5n kvinnor kring m\u00e4ns organ \u2013 hur gott det smakar, hur sk\u00f6nt det \u00e4r, att man aldrig kan f\u00e5 nog \u2013 kan kanske bara f\u00f6rst\u00e5s i hela sin bejakande form om vi f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker t\u00e4nka oss det motsatta. En miljardindustri av bilder och texter d\u00e4r m\u00e4n unisont prisar vaginans lov, dess utseende, form, smak och hur sv\u00e5rt de har att klara sig utan den, och att ingenting ger dem st\u00f6rre tillfredsst\u00e4llelse \u00e4n att f\u00e5 visa upp sig inf\u00f6r kvinnors upphetsade blickar.\n\n## KROPPEN SOM INTE \u00c4R\n\nFr\u00e5nvaron av k\u00e4nslouttryck, och en mer mekanisk uppvisning av manlig sexualitet, kan \u00e4ven ses som del av den maskulina kroppens behov av att uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla id\u00e9n om en egen unik essens. Att ha kontroll \u00f6ver sin kropp \u00e4r en paradox inom h\u00e5rdpornografin. H\u00e4r, om n\u00e5gonstans, f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas den ge efter f\u00f6r njutning, att str\u00e4va mot lusten att f\u00f6rl\u00f6sa sexuell sp\u00e4nning. Men m\u00e4n \u00e4r som sagt s\u00e5 mycket mer \u00e4n sina kroppar. Vad som best\u00e4mmer dem \u00e4r inte n\u00e5got som kan reduceras till kroppen, eller till en njutning som tar kontroll \u00f6ver kroppen. Det manliga sexuella drama som blir s\u00e5 uppenbart i mycket h\u00e5rdpornografi r\u00f6r fr\u00e5gor om hur m\u00e4n besitter sexuellt beg\u00e4r samtidigt som de kontrollerar detta beg\u00e4r, hur de b\u00e5de \u00e4r kropp och f\u00f6rnekar denna position. Ett s\u00e4tt att d\u00f6lja eller hantera denna mots\u00e4ttning \u00e4r att placera det beg\u00e4r som transformerar kroppen i en annan kropp \u00e4n den manliga.\n\n\u00c4ven om alla m\u00e4n inom h\u00e5rdpornografin \u00e4r reducerade till en serie kroppsdelar \u00e4r detta \u00e4n mer utm\u00e4rkande f\u00f6r svarta m\u00e4n. De representeras vanligen som de mest kroppsliga och sexuella m\u00e4nnen av dem alla, utifr\u00e5n myten om deras enorma k\u00f6n. En Google-s\u00f6kning p\u00e5 termen \"black men\" resulterar exempelvis i pornografiska bildsidor s\u00e5som \"Penisbot\". Termen \"white men\" handlar ist\u00e4llet om ber\u00f6mda vita m\u00e4ns politiska uttalanden (och regiss\u00f6ren Michael Moores film _Stupid white men_ ).\n\nI en av de mest s\u00e4ljande h\u00e5rdpornografiska tidningarna i v\u00e4rlden, den amerikanska _Hustler,_ syns svarta m\u00e4n \u00e5terkommande i de tecknade serierna, d\u00e4r de beskrivs som sexuellt aggressiva och hotande fr\u00e4mst f\u00f6r vita kvinnor vars underliv inte klarar av deras stora k\u00f6n. Eller som beskrivningen av en filmen _2 Big 2 B True_ , p\u00e5 en pornografisk topplista deklarerar: \"These ladies loves to suck the magic meat missiles\", illustrerad med en bild av en vit kvinnas ansikte n\u00e4stan helt skymt bakom tv\u00e5 svarta penisar.\n\nMen \u00e4ven om svarta m\u00e4n framst\u00e4lls som mer kroppsliga \u00e4n vita m\u00e4n, \u00e4r de b\u00e5da f\u00f6renade i den hyperfalliska pornografiska id\u00e9n, och f\u00f6renade i hur de framst\u00e4lls i relation till kvinnor. Deras k\u00e4nslouttryck \u00e4r kontrollerade, deras kroppar muskul\u00f6sa och p\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet avskilda, intakta i f\u00f6rh\u00e5llande till den feminina kroppen.\n\n## FR\u00c5NVARANDE BEG\u00c4R?\n\nMen vad finns egentligen bakom den seri\u00f6sa penisen och den kontrollerade manliga kroppen i h\u00e5rdpornografin?\n\n\u00c5 ena sidan \u00e4r penisen hela tiden bejakad, s\u00e5som beskrivits ovan, \u00e5 andra sidan illustrerar den en relativt fr\u00e5nvarande manlig heterosexualitet. I mycket h\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r m\u00e4n s\u00e5v\u00e4l i bilder som texter tysta \u2013 efter sitt inledande mer okroppsliga \"dirty talk\". De \u00e4r om n\u00e5got rytm och erektion. Den som artikulerar, l\u00e5ter och s\u00e4ger vad hon vill \u00e4r kvinnan. Vi kan naturligtvis se det som att detta bekr\u00e4ftar en fallisk ordning, det vill s\u00e4ga att han ger henne vad hon \"saknar\", men det visar samtidigt att den sexuella njutningen \u00e4r n\u00e5got han \u00e4r utesluten fr\u00e5n. Och \u00e4ven om han utf\u00f6r, penetrerar och hon tar emot, \u00e4r m\u00e4n i detta scenario f\u00f6rv\u00e5nansv\u00e4rt passiva. De visar inte n\u00e5gon motivation f\u00f6r sitt handlande \u2013 f\u00f6rutom att ge henne vad hon \"vill ha\" \u2013 och verkar d\u00e4rmed alienerade fr\u00e5n sin egen lust. I texter framst\u00e4lls mannen och hans beg\u00e4r inte som ett aktivt subjekt utan som mer underst\u00e4lld pornografins lagar. M\u00e4n ger kvinnor vad kvinnor vill ha: \"Jag gav henne\" \u00e4r en standardfras.\n\nDetta givande \u00e4r naturligtvis p\u00e5 ett s\u00e4tt en aktiv handling, men det visar samtidigt p\u00e5 det motsatta \u2013 en passivitet, d\u00e4r den som tar emot \u00e4r den aktiva, som har uttryckt vad som ska \"ges\".\n\nKvinnor \u00e4r i den betydelsen alltid aktiva i det att de uttrycker sitt beg\u00e4r, vad de vill och hur (\u00e4ven om det \u00e4r att bli tagen och dominerad). Och deras \u00e4r ett beg\u00e4r som blir h\u00f6gljutt tillfredsst\u00e4llt till skillnad fr\u00e5n m\u00e4ns tysta sprutande och sammanbitna eller osynliga ansikten.\n\nPornografin uttrycker, menar vissa, en id\u00e9 om kvinnlig njutning baserad p\u00e5 och m\u00e4tt efter m\u00e4ns lustar och den falliska ordningen. Men om den bild av m\u00e4n och manlig sexualitet som framst\u00e4lls i mycket h\u00e5rdpornografi, ska tala om en fallisk manlighet, \u00e4r denna n\u00e4stan ljudl\u00f6s och sp\u00e5rl\u00f6s. M\u00e4n framst\u00e5r p\u00e5 flera s\u00e4tt som lustens statister.\n\nF\u00f6rvisso kan detta ses som bel\u00e4gg f\u00f6r tesen att det enda h\u00e5rdpornografi visar \u00e4r kvinnan som produkten av, och uttrycket f\u00f6r, en manlig fantasi om det egna jaget, d\u00e4r kvinnor p\u00e5 olika s\u00e4tt upprepar: \" Ingen g\u00f6r det b\u00e4ttre \u00e4n du, baby!\" Om detta st\u00e4mmer \u00e4r det i s\u00e5 fall en fantasi d\u00e4r det manliga jaget \u00e4r f\u00f6rv\u00e5nansv\u00e4rt fr\u00e5nvarande som just ett jag.\n\nDet \u00e4r frestande att ist\u00e4llet se det som ett uttryck f\u00f6r den dubbelhet av r\u00e4dsla och l\u00e4ngtan inf\u00f6r det feminina som finns inbyggd i hypermaskuliniteten. Den f\u00f6rening som i den \"verkliga\" v\u00e4rlden kan upplevas som ett hot, en uppl\u00f6sning av jaget d\u00e5 maskulinitet skapas genom separerandet fr\u00e5n det feminina, f\u00e5r ett utlopp i h\u00e5rdpornografin. Eftersom kvinnor \u00e4r de som uttrycker njutning med starka k\u00e4nslor, (via ansiktsuttryck, texter och tal), f\u00e5r de ocks\u00e5 tillg\u00e5ng till en sexuell njutning som m\u00e4n inte har enligt h\u00e5rdpornografins manuskript. Detta kan g\u00f6ra dem till symboler f\u00f6r b\u00e5de l\u00e4ngtan, frustration och avund. Den tystnad, b\u00e5de bokstavligt och symboliskt, som omg\u00e4rdar maskulin sexualitet i mycket h\u00e5rdpornografi ska visa maskulinitet som det autonoma, det kontrollerade och styrande. Men det f\u00e5r som en paradoxal konsekvens att egentligen visa de b\u00e5da k\u00f6nen som ett: det feminina. Genom att placera den utlevande bilden av sexualitet i den feminina kroppen och samtidigt g\u00f6ra den maskulina tyst och mer uttrycksl\u00f6s, blir det den f\u00f6rstn\u00e4mnda som ska f\u00f6rmedla b\u00e5das lust.\n\nDet kan ses som uttryck f\u00f6r det totala uppg\u00e5endet i den feminina kroppen, d\u00e4r b\u00e5de l\u00e4ngtan efter f\u00f6rening och den \"f\u00f6rbjudna\" identifikationen med det feminina sammanf\u00f6rs. Kanske \u00e4r h\u00e5rdpornografin en legitim plats f\u00f6r denna (undertryckta) l\u00e4ngtan eftersom den, n\u00e4stan \u00f6vertydligt, f\u00f6rs\u00e4krar oss om att kvinnor \u00e4r beroende av m\u00e4n, och inte m\u00e4n av kvinnor. M\u00e4ns beroende av kvinnor finns dock b\u00e5de p\u00e5 en ber\u00e4ttelseniv\u00e5 \u2013 om vi hade tv\u00e5 tysta sammanbitna individer \u00e4r det troligt att mycket av den pornografiska lockelsen skulle f\u00f6rsvinna \u2013 och p\u00e5 en symbolisk niv\u00e5, eftersom han inte f\u00f6refaller kunna uttrycka sin sexualitet f\u00f6rutom via henne.\n\nOch ju tystare m\u00e4n har blivit i h\u00e5rdpornografin desto mer frenetiskt arbetar penisen, och desto mer avskild fr\u00e5n den manliga kroppen visas den. Reducerandet av manlig sexualitet till penisen hotar ocks\u00e5 att g\u00f6ra mannen helt fr\u00e5nvarande \u2013 eller on\u00f6dig? Ett exempel p\u00e5 detta \u00e4r Internetsajten \"fuckingmachines.com\". H\u00e4r \u00e4r penisen tr\u00e4dd p\u00e5 diverse maskiner vilka penetrerar kvinnor (se bildark s. 10). Det \u00e4r den ultimata bilden av alienerad manlig sexualitet d\u00e4r mannen \u00e4r helt ersatt av sitt k\u00f6n.\n\nI den pornografi som h\u00e4r har tagits upp \u2013 och som jag menar \u00e4r typisk f\u00f6r heterosexuell mainstream h\u00e5rdpornografi \u2013 \u00e4r manlig sexualitet reducerad till en h\u00e5rt intensivt arbetande penis, som verkar g\u00f6ra allt f\u00f6r att leva upp till den fallosmyt som utanf\u00f6r h\u00e5rdpornografins v\u00e4ggar blir alltmer ifr\u00e5gasatt. H\u00e5rdpornografi d\u00e4r kvinnor och m\u00e4n f\u00f6rekommer tillsammans riskerar alltid att synligg\u00f6ra ambivalenser, d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att den manliga kroppen och beg\u00e4ret faktiskt visas upp, och riskerar att uppfattas p\u00e5 ett annat s\u00e4tt \u00e4n vad som kanske \u00e4r t\u00e4nkt.\n\nI f\u00f6rs\u00f6ken att visa manlig sexualitet som helt fr\u00e5nskild det feminina, som kontrollerad och oberoende, blir den hypermaskulina fallosid\u00e9n som en karikatyr av sig sj\u00e4lv. Den makt och auktoritet som ska associeras till mannen och hans k\u00f6n blir uppbl\u00e5st till s\u00e5dana proportioner att den n\u00e4stan helt f\u00f6rsvinner. Kvar blir ist\u00e4llet bara en ih\u00e5lig man som inget \u00e4r utan den feminina kroppen och den k\u00e4nslosamma sexualitet som hon tilldelas.\n\nOch kanske \u00e4r det d\u00e4rf\u00f6r som mjukpornografin, som vi nu ska titta p\u00e5, och dess fokus p\u00e5 den feminina kroppen \u00e4r ett lugnare, mindre os\u00e4kert omr\u00e5de. H\u00e4r beh\u00f6ver det maskulina \u00f6ver huvud taget inte visa sig utan kan luta sig tillbaka och se vad f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningarna om hans lust genererar f\u00f6r bilder.\n\n# 4.\n\n# Den feminina kroppen och mjukpornografi\n\nAnv\u00e4ndandet av erotiserade bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor \u00e4r, och har under l\u00e5ng tid varit, popul\u00e4rkulturens mest inflytelserika s\u00e4tt att signalera att man v\u00e4nder sig till heterosexuella m\u00e4n. Med anor fr\u00e5n trettiotalets \"Petty Girls\" och \"Vargas Girls\", uppkallade efter sina manliga tecknare i den amerikanska herrtidningen _Esquirer,_ till det makal\u00f6st framg\u00e5ngsrika koncept som lanserades i tidningen _Playboy_ p\u00e5 femtiotalet med den \"lekande pojken\" och hans \"lekkamrat\" (\"the playmate\") har dessa bilder lanserat en id\u00e9 om sexualitet som b\u00e5de \u00e4r kommersiellt framg\u00e5ngsrik och fylld av strikta regler f\u00f6r b\u00e5da k\u00f6nen.\n\nDenna typ av bild lanserades samtidigt som man b\u00f6rjade tilltala manliga l\u00e4sare som konsumenter av livsstilstidningar och produkter. Eftersom konsumtion av mode och liknande hade ett feminint skimmer \u00f6ver sig kr\u00e4vdes n\u00e5got som tydligt markerade maskulinitet. Och det var med l\u00e4ttkl\u00e4dda, h\u00f6gbystade kvinnor som denna barri\u00e4r mellan k\u00f6nen bevakades, som en tydlig p\u00e5minnelse till en manlig publik att de var enade i sin attityd till kvinnor (och helt skilda fr\u00e5n hur de framst\u00e4lldes). Dessa (bild) kvinnor placerades som \"naturliga\" ingredienser i en maskulin livsstil inriktad p\u00e5 konsumtion.\n\nDen klassiska pinuppan utvecklades av George Petty och Alberto Vargas. I de tidiga bilderna fanns en \u00e4ldre man med (ben\u00e4mnd som \"the geezer\": killen), som dock f\u00f6rsvann efter 1935. Flickan blev ensam kvar, men ofta med en telefonlur i handen (se bildark s. 11, \u00f6verst). N\u00e4r l\u00e4sarens alter ego i form av \"the geezer\" f\u00f6rsvann ur bilden, blev telefonen ett s\u00e4tt att g\u00f6ra henne skenbart tillg\u00e4nglig.\n\nDen skapade associationer till \u00f6msesidig kommunikation d\u00e4r betraktaren kunde \"tala\" med henne. Telefonen presenterades, menar Kakoudaki, som ett feminint, sexualiserat teknologiskt objekt i pinuppbilder p\u00e5 grund av sin koppling till en ung, attraktiv kvinnlig arbetskraft. I USA s\u00e5v\u00e4l som i Sverige var v\u00e4xeltelefonister unga ogifta kvinnor, som n\u00e4r de gifte sig fick sluta arbeta. Med pinuppbilderna f\u00f6rflyttades telefonens feminina r\u00f6st, fr\u00e5n det professionella till en intim syssels\u00e4ttning i det privata (i USA ska genomslaget med pinuppan och telefonluren gjort att man kan knappt kunde se en kvinna tala i telefon under trettio- och fyrtiotalen utan att t\u00e4nka p\u00e5 Petty- och Vargas Girls).\n\nDet som utm\u00e4rker pinuppan, antingen tecknad eller fotograferad, \u00e4r att hon ska upplevas som mycket ung, att hon ofta visas i helfigur och ensam och att blicken \u00e4r riktad ut mot betraktaren, vilket ger ett intryck av intimitet och \u00f6msesidighet.\n\n## PINUPPAN SOM KRIGSSYMBOL\n\nUnder fyrtiotalet kom pinuppan att anv\u00e4ndas i helt andra sammanhang \u00e4n p\u00e5 herrtidningssidor. Hon blev under andra v\u00e4rldskriget en patriotisk symbol och den st\u00f6rsta amerikanska \"pro-war\"-figuren. Sj\u00e4lva ben\u00e4mningen syftar p\u00e5 hur och var bilderna f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntades anv\u00e4ndas: m\u00e4nnen skulle n\u00e5la upp (\"pin up\") dem p\u00e5 sk\u00e5p, v\u00e4ggar eller andra st\u00e4llen d\u00e4r de var synliga f\u00f6r m\u00e5nga. Bilderna var ofta stora vilket i sig var betydelsefullt. Fickformat skulle exempelvis antytt ett privat bruk f\u00f6r den enskilde soldaten, men det h\u00e4r var bilder som inte skulle g\u00f6mmas undan, utan beses kollektivt. Man kan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r f\u00f6rst\u00e5 pinuppbilden som ett slags offentligt identitetsemblem, s\u00e5v\u00e4l f\u00f6r den man som satte upp henne som f\u00f6r den manliga grupp som skulle se henne. P\u00e5 s\u00e5 s\u00e4tt bef\u00e4ste bilden deras identitet som heterosexuella m\u00e4n inf\u00f6r varandra. \u00c4n i dag \u00e4r det just p\u00e5 offentliga (ofta enk\u00f6nat manliga) utrymmen utviksbilder s\u00e4tts upp.\n\nPinuppan blev vid denna tid sinnebilden f\u00f6r \"the boys\". I familjetidningar uppmanades kvinnliga l\u00e4sare att klippa ut och skicka henne till n\u00e5gon ung soldat de k\u00e4nde (650 000 bilder skickades \u00e4ven gratis till soldater fr\u00e5n modellagenturer). Enligt rykten var en pinuppbild av filmstj\u00e4rnan Rita Hayworth fastsatt p\u00e5 den atombomb USA sl\u00e4ppte \u00f6ver den japanska staden Hiroshima i augusti 1945. Engelsm\u00e4nnen ska i sin tur ha haft den tecknade pinuppan \"Jane\" p\u00e5 den f\u00f6rsta av de fordon som n\u00e5dde stranden vid Normandie p\u00e5 D-dagen den 6 juni 1944. \u00c4ven spr\u00e5km\u00e4ssigt finns dessa krigsassociationer, som n\u00e4r vackra kvinnor kallas \"bombnedslag\".\n\nPinuppans relevans i krigstider brukar f\u00f6rklaras med att hon representerar sensuell oskuld och f\u00f6rkroppsligar patriotiska v\u00e4rderingar \u2013 bilden av nationen som det feminina men med erotiska undertoner.\n\nDen feminina kroppens funktion som nationssymbol, som bara kort kan vidr\u00f6ras h\u00e4r, dateras i Europa till 1790. Det var d\u00e5, efter revolutionen, som den franska nationen b\u00f6rjade avbildas som en kvinna med behagfulla drag. En orsak till att man valde att framst\u00e4lla den franska nationen \u2013 som kom att bli modell f\u00f6r andra nya republiker \u2013 som kvinna, var att den gamla f\u00f6rrevolution\u00e4ra ordningen representerades av kungens, mannens kropp. Den moderna nationen m\u00e5ste vara en negation till detta, menar historikern Joan B. Landes i sin bok _Visualizing the Nation._ Den nya relationen mellan medborgare och land var ocks\u00e5 en relation mellan m\u00e4n och en symbolisk kvinna, i Sverige finns som bekant Moder Svea. Den feminina kroppen som krigssymbol \u00e4r, till skillnad fr\u00e5n den nationella bilden, en mer erotiserad kropp som ska kanalisera manlig sexuell upphetsning. Id\u00e9er om manlig sexualitet knyts h\u00e4r till nationalism och v\u00e5ld.\n\n\u00c5 ena sidan \u00e4r det, som Despina Kakoudaki visar, de erotiska kittlingarna som ska g\u00f6ra pinuppan effektiv som krigsbr\u00e4nsle, f\u00f6r att h\u00f6ja stridsmoralen. Men \u00e5 andra sidan finns id\u00e9n om att det (uppt\u00e4nda) manliga beg\u00e4ret ska omvandlas till viljan att sl\u00e5ss, eller d\u00f6da, inte till att ha sex eller onanera. Pinuppan ska med andra ord frammana sexuella k\u00e4nslor vilka inte kr\u00e4ver personlig njutning, utan f\u00e5r sitt utlopp i milit\u00e4risk handling, i krigspotens. Soldatens erotiska respons p\u00e5 pinuppan ska allts\u00e5 leda till aggression gentemot \"de andra\". Tanken om en manlig sexuell energi \u00e4r ett standardelement i krigsmakters glorifierande av \"v\u00e5ra pojkar\". Hon f\u00f6rkroppsligar ocks\u00e5 att \"vi\" har v\u00e4rderingar som \"vi\" sl\u00e5ss f\u00f6r. Pinuppbilder anv\u00e4ndes \u00e4ven n\u00e4r nyanl\u00e4nda soldater skulle l\u00e4ra sig kartors koordinationssystem och m\u00e5let sattes vid hennes skrev f\u00f6r att p\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet feminisera fienden. B\u00e5de l\u00e4ngtan och f\u00f6rakt knyts till denna kvinnokropp. I det f\u00f6rsta fallet f\u00f6rkroppsligar hon l\u00e4ngtan efter hemlandet, i det andra den nedv\u00e4rderade, avmaskuliniserade fienden.\n\nDen amerikanska och brittiska krigsmaktens massiva anv\u00e4ndande av pinuppan pekar ocks\u00e5 p\u00e5 underliggande homofobiska r\u00e4dslor. Dessa stora ansamlingar av unga m\u00e4n som sov, duschade och levde tillsammans skulle, med hj\u00e4lp av henne, ha sin heterosexualitet klistrad p\u00e5 v\u00e4ggarna. P\u00e5 tidningen _FHM_ :s ( _For him magazine_ ) hemsida deklarerar man \u00e4ven i dag att man g\u00e4rna skickar bilder p\u00e5 sina utvikskvinnor till soldater, \"for our brave boys\", som de kan s\u00e4tta upp i sina, som man uttrycker det, heta \u00f6kent\u00e4lt.\n\nMyten om det maskulina beg\u00e4ret som ett och detsamma \u00e4r kanske aldrig s\u00e5 tydlig som i dessa krigsscenarier. H\u00e4r ska m\u00e4n med hj\u00e4lp av samma bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor och deras kroppar f\u00e5 samma reaktion och samma omformning av beg\u00e4ret till n\u00e5got annat \u2013 aggression.\n\n## LEKANDE POJKAR OCH DERAS LEKKAMRATER\n\nMen l\u00e5t oss \u00e5terg\u00e5 till den feminina kroppens plats i mjukpornografiska medier. N\u00e4r Hugh Hefner, grundaren av _Playboy_ , under femtiotalet b\u00f6rjar tilltala m\u00e4n som lekande pojkar f\u00f6refaller han ha kommit \u00e5t en retorisk nerv som inte nog har kunnat f\u00f6rgrena sig och vars popularitet knappast mattats som medial strategi n\u00e4r man riktar sig till m\u00e4n. I sitt historiska sammanhang \u00e4r det inte sv\u00e5rt att se lockelsen f\u00f6r de ansvarstyngda amerikanska m\u00e4nnen, vars medelklassaspirationer skulle vara utbildning, arbete och familj med honom som f\u00f6rs\u00f6rjare \u2013 en kanske inte alltid tilltalande utsikt. Hefner p\u00e5tog sig \u00e4ven uppdraget att sj\u00e4lv f\u00f6rkroppsliga den evigt lekande pojken b\u00e5de till stil, utseende och sexuellt leverne (vilket han forts\u00e4tter att g\u00f6ra \u00e4n i dag, ibland kallad mannen som gav potensmedlet Viagra ett ansikte). I tv-serien \"Girls of the Playboy Mansion\", som kanal 5 visar, f\u00e5r man f\u00f6lja den numer \u00e5ttio\u00e5riga Hefner och hans liv tillsammans med n\u00e5gra unga kvinnor, som alla \u00e4r eller har varit playmates.\n\n_Playboy_ saluf\u00f6rdes i f\u00f6rsta hand genom sitt bildmaterial med kvinnor som gick under ben\u00e4mningen, \"male-pleasing nudestudy\". Det f\u00f6rsta omslaget 1953 pryddes av Marilyn Monroe och hennes kalenderbilder fr\u00e5n Golden Dreams p\u00e5 mittenutviket (se bildark s. 11, underst). _Playboy_ och myten om Monroe f\u00f6ljde varandra p\u00e5 flera s\u00e4tt. Hon skulle f\u00f6rkroppsliga f\u00f6rm\u00e5gan att vara \u00e5tr\u00e5v\u00e4rd utifr\u00e5n id\u00e9n om en skuldfri, naturlig sexualitet f\u00f6r m\u00e4n.\n\nEn viktig ingrediens \u00e4r just playmatens antydan om oskuldsfullhet d\u00e4r kroppen f\u00e5r b\u00e4ra de mer sexuella inslagen (i poser) medan ansiktsuttrycken kan utstr\u00e5la sexuell naivitet (n\u00e5got som ofta f\u00f6rst\u00e4rks av att de \u00e4r mycket unga). Hon ska allts\u00e5 vara lite provokativ men p\u00e5 samma g\u00e5ng lite barnsligt ovetande, hon lovar allt men kr\u00e4ver inget. Hon \u00e4r den oskyldiga \"barnkvinnan\", gjuten i en form av sexuell oskuld blandad med sexuell slagkraft.\n\nStrategin har sedan starten varit att paketera dessa bilder inom ramen f\u00f6r vad en medelklass accepterat som kittlande, men inte st\u00f6tande, pornografi. Den allm\u00e4nna framg\u00e5ngen har f\u00f6rklarats just med playmate-bildernas estetiska betoning, vilken skulle ta udden av det nakna, och att hon f\u00f6rekom tillsammans med annat material: sport, politik med mera. Den livsstil som playmaten knutits till handlar f\u00f6r m\u00e4ns del om individuell framg\u00e5ng, personlighet och stil. _Playboy_ erbj\u00f6d m\u00e4n id\u00e9n om ett s\u00e4tt att leva som involverade konsumtion av en m\u00e4ngd varor \u2013 kl\u00e4der, bilar, stereoapparater \u2013 som ett s\u00e4tt att f\u00e5 den ultimata varan: den attraktiva unga kvinnan. Konceptet med att inte bara erbjuda en manlig publik utl\u00f6sning utan en sexualiserad konsumtionsstil har sedan dess fortsatt att vara en lyckad medial taktik. I dag \u00e4r _Playboy_ den ledande herrtidningen i v\u00e4rlden och _Playboy Enterprises Inc._ ett globalt medief\u00f6retag med tidningar, tv-kanaler, tv-program och ett starkt varum\u00e4rke som syns p\u00e5 alla uppt\u00e4nkliga produkter.\n\nF\u00e5 bilder \u00e4r s\u00e5 sexuellt laddade utan att vara ansedda som pornografiska, som prototypen f\u00f6r utviksflickan, playmaten. Hon som genom att bara definieras av sin \u00e5lder och sin f\u00f6rm\u00e5ga att attrahera intar en egen medial position. Playmaten ska signalera tillg\u00e4nglighet och, vare sig hon visas leende eller inte, utstr\u00e5la v\u00e4nlighet (kamratlighet f\u00f6r att tala med Hefner). Hon ska absolut inte vara sv\u00e5rtillg\u00e4nglig eller allt f\u00f6r sofistikerad, utan n\u00e5gon som m\u00e4n kan n\u00e4rma sig utan r\u00e4dsla f\u00f6r avvisande. Genom att vara den lekande pojkens sexuella lekkamrat, blir kvinnan den som ska trygga en sexualitet utan hot eller krav f\u00f6r m\u00e4n. Hon f\u00e5r inte en man att k\u00e4nna sig otillr\u00e4cklig. Det som g\u00f6r playmaten ofarlig \u00e4r att hon inte betonar kvinnans sexualitet som ett m\u00e5l i sig, utan hans.\n\nDen illusion om tillg\u00e4nglighet som dessa och liknande bilder ska f\u00f6rmedla, f\u00f6rst\u00e4rks ofta av textens information: var de avbildade kvinnorna bor, deras intressen och vilken typ av m\u00e4n de f\u00f6redrar. Tillsammans med en bildtext, ofta skriven i jagform, bidrar det till intrycket att faktisk kontakt inte \u00e4r helt utesluten.\n\nI en genomg\u00e5ng av vad playmaten under \u00e5ren s\u00e4ger sig uppskatta hos m\u00e4n, konstateras att det \u00e4r det enkla och kravl\u00f6sa som dominerar: m\u00e4n beh\u00f6ver inte ha pengar, utseendet spelar inte heller n\u00e5gon roll \u2013 bara de gillar att ha kul och har humor. Ingen man ska k\u00e4nna sig utesluten, utan kan kliva in som hennes imagin\u00e4ra partner. Det \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 viktigt att playmaten inte \u00e4r en professionell modell, utan en \"vanlig\" kvinna som kan uppfattas som \"the girl next door\". Eller som tidningen sj\u00e4lv uttrycker det i ett tidigt nummer:\n\n> Potentiella Playmates finns faktiskt \u00f6verallt omkring dig: den nya sekreteraren p\u00e5 ditt kontor, den oskuldsfulla sk\u00f6nheten som satt mitt emot dig vid g\u00e5rdagens lunch, flickan som s\u00e4ljer skjortor och slipsar i din favoritbutik.\n> \n> ( _Playboy_ , Juli 1955)\n\nPlaymaten ska f\u00f6rutom att vara enkel och okonstlad, ocks\u00e5 g\u00e4rna vara utrustad med n\u00e5got extra \u2013 intelligens, utbildning eller vara kunnig p\u00e5 n\u00e5got speciellt omr\u00e5de. Detta \u00e4r tv\u00e5 teman som g\u00e5r igen och som p\u00e5 ytan ser ut som kontraster. \u00c5 ena sidan insisterandet p\u00e5 en tillg\u00e4nglig stereotyp \u2013 en playmate kan hittas av alla \u2013 \u00e5 andra sidan n\u00e5gon med en mer extraordin\u00e4r sida. Hon \u00e4r p\u00e5 en och samma g\u00e5ng n\u00e5gon som \u00e4r m\u00f6jlig men ocks\u00e5 om\u00f6jlig som partner om man inte matchar hennes standard. Denna aspekt av playmaten menar jag f\u00f6ljer id\u00e9er som ofta omger en idealiserad kvinnokropp. Det ska vara en kropp att aspirera mot, f\u00f6r kvinnor, eller efter, f\u00f6r m\u00e4n. I b\u00e5da fallen knyts den till konsumtion: f\u00f6r kvinnor genom att lansera produkter som underh\u00e5ller kroppen, f\u00f6r m\u00e4n genom att vara del av en viss livsstil inriktad p\u00e5 konsumtion.\n\nPlaymaten ska ocks\u00e5 klassm\u00e4ssigt spegla den medelklassman som ska tilltalas. Det kan ses p\u00e5 flera plan. I intervjuer eller bildtexter understryks att hon inte beh\u00f6ver pengar utan hon har arbete och utbildning. Det \u00e4r enbara _lusten_ att vika ut sig som styr (vilket jag \u00e5terkommer till l\u00e4ngre fram). P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet f\u00f6rklarar man att uppvisandet av kroppen \u00e4r n\u00e5got naturligt f\u00f6r kvinnor, och den ekonomiska struktur som dessa bilder ing\u00e5r i f\u00f6rsvinner. Eftersom hon \u00e4r d\u00e4r f\u00f6r att representera den naturliga sexualiteten \u2013 den maskulina \u2013 b\u00f6r hennes vilja att visa upp sig vara naturlig och inte beroende av pengar.\n\nDenna playmateformula \u00e4r i stort sett orubbad i dag i svenska mjukpornografiska tidningar riktade till unga m\u00e4n.\n\n## DEN NYA GRABBEN OCH HANS TIDNINGAR\n\nUnder nittiotalet uppst\u00e5r i Sverige en framg\u00e5ngsrik genre, eller kanske snarare hybridgenre: de nya grabbtidningarna. F\u00f6reg\u00e5ngare var den engelska _Loaded_ och _FHM_. Dessa tidningar, framf\u00f6r allt representerade av _Slitz_ och sedermera _Moore_ samt _FHM_ under 2000-talet, f\u00f6retr\u00e4der en ny \"glamour\u00f6s\" pornografi som inte ska f\u00f6rknippas med tidigare herrtidningar, utan snarare l\u00e5nar drag fr\u00e5n modebilders estetik. Detta paras med en id\u00e9 om maskulinitet som enkel och r\u00e4ttfram: b\u00e4rs, brudar och bilar, allt med medelklassens estetiska touch, och k\u00e4cka \"girl-next-door\"-utvik med tydliga referenser till _Playboy_ och playmaten. Den kvinna som cirkulerar h\u00e4r l\u00e5nar drag av sina tidigare systrar men kommer i en \u00e4n mer retuscherad paketering i dag. Hon \u00e4r blond, storbystad, infantil i sin framtoning, utan kroppsh\u00e5r och med hud som f\u00f6r tanken till glansigt dyrt fabriksmaterial. Hennes kropp och poser \u00e4r sexuella men ansiktet n\u00e4stan ett barns. Hon f\u00f6rkroppsligar b\u00e5de det som ska beg\u00e4ras och en h\u00e5rt inrutad f\u00f6rest\u00e4llning om k\u00f6nens positioner i det heterosexuella m\u00f6tet.\n\nI denna form av mjukpornografi \u00e4r bildkoderna f\u00f6r feminin sexualitet st\u00e4ndigt likadana. D\u00e5 kroppen h\u00e4r, till skillnad fr\u00e5n i h\u00e5rdpornografin, inte kan visa sex, \u00e4r det genom ansiktsuttryck och poser som sexualitet och tillg\u00e4nglighet kommuniceras. Om vi tittar n\u00e4rmare p\u00e5 typiska utviksbilder i dagens grabbtidningar \u00e4r de unga kvinnornas kroppar inoljade, bl\u00e4nkande och huden starkt retuscherad. Deras h\u00e5r \u00e4r l\u00e5ngt, utsl\u00e4ppt och f\u00f6r det mesta ljust blont. De sm\u00e5ler oftast, men inte alltid, d\u00e4remot \u00e4r blicken genomg\u00e5ende riktad mot betraktaren och benen \u00e4r s\u00e4rade antingen de st\u00e5r eller sitter p\u00e5 kn\u00e4. Br\u00f6sten \u00e4r i sin tur h\u00f6ga, runda och ofta synligt omgjorda. Vare sig br\u00f6stv\u00e5rtor eller k\u00f6n visas upp, medan k\u00f6net d\u00f6ljs av trosor, skyms br\u00f6stv\u00e5rtor ofta av modellens egna h\u00e4nder, en gest som b\u00e5de d\u00f6ljer och drar blickarna till sig. Ansiktsuttrycken \u00e4r \u00f6ppet inviterande med flirtande sidoblickar eller sm\u00e5leende inbjudande mot kameran.\n\nI flera fall \u00e4r de poserande kvinnorna s\u00e5 intill f\u00f6rvillelse lika varandra att de framst\u00e5r som en klonad kropp i flera upplagor (se bildark s. 12). Detta \u00e4r verkligen den hyperreella kroppen. Den \u00e4r en bild av en redan existerande bild, eftersom den starka retuscheringen av huden och de h\u00f6ga br\u00f6sten f\u00f6r tanken till tecknade pinuppor och den fiktiva kroppen.\n\nDet \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 en kropp som ska upplevas av betraktaren som en kopia, en dubblett \u2013 varf\u00f6r placeras annars s\u00e5 ofta unga kvinnor med identiska utseenden, h\u00e5rf\u00e4rg och kroppar bredvid varandra? Och det h\u00e4r \u00e4r, menar jag, n\u00e5got nytt. Playmaten, pinuppan och \u00f6verlag mjukpornografiskt poserande kvinnor f\u00f6ljer en slags global bildmall; de st\u00e5r likadant, anv\u00e4nder liknande gester och har mer eller mindre samma blickar. I de allt vanligare kloningsbilderna ser vi hur detta har dragits till sin spets. Det \u00e4r inte bara poserna som \u00e4r likadana, skillnader i h\u00e5rf\u00e4rg, kropp och bystform \u00e4r mer eller mindre utraderade.\n\nDet som till stor del representerar denna typ av glamor\u00f6s porno-kropp \u00e4r den nya bysten. Det \u00e4r inte den stora bysten i sig som ska locka, utan just den synligt omgjorda. Den som utm\u00e4rks dels av att vara s\u00e5 pass stor att den utan implantat skulle dras ned av sin egen tyngd, dels av br\u00f6stens klotrunda form med sm\u00e5 br\u00f6stv\u00e5rtor samt den mycket markerat upph\u00f6jda klyfta som bildas. Vore bysten mindre skulle den helt f\u00f6rsvinna bakom hennes h\u00e4nder, och i det perspektivet \u00e4r denna bystform v\u00e4ldigt v\u00e4l anpassad till det porno-glamour\u00f6sa bildspr\u00e5ket.\n\nMedan h\u00e5rdpornografin ofta anv\u00e4nder br\u00f6st f\u00f6r att understryka dem som objekt f\u00f6r lust \u00e4ven f\u00f6r kvinnor (de tittar, slickar, masserar dem), \u00e4r de inom mjukpornografin presenterade som sexuella endast f\u00f6r betraktaren. De \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 tecken f\u00f6r modellernas sedesamhet d\u00e5 de t\u00e4cks av deras h\u00e4nder.\n\nDet genomslag som denna byst har som pornografiskt element kan \u00e4ven f\u00f6rklaras av att den kombinerar pornografins tv\u00e5 lockande delar \u2013 fantasi och autenticitet. Dessa br\u00f6sts form och utseende verkar, som n\u00e4mnts, ha sitt ursprung i de tecknade kroppar (Vargas- eller Petty Girls) som genererats ur herrtidningsgenrer, snarare \u00e4n i kvinnokroppens fysik. De visar allts\u00e5 en fiktiv kropp p\u00e5 samma g\u00e5ng som de \u00e4r verkliga. Hyllandet av denna omgjorda byst visar, \u00e5terigen, hur en pornografisk estetik skrivs in p\u00e5 sj\u00e4lva den fysiska feminina kroppen.\n\n## VILJAN AV BLI SEDD: DEN EXHIBITIONISTISKA FLICKAN\n\nDenna feminina kropp, och feminin sexualitet, ska allts\u00e5 upplevas som tillg\u00e4nglig. Den illustrerar ett personligt, intimt tilltal som s\u00e4ger: \"Jag \u00e4r h\u00e4r f\u00f6r Dig.\"\n\nTv\u00e5 n\u00f6dv\u00e4ndiga element i bilden f\u00f6r att skapa detta tilltal \u00e4r exhibitionism och narcissism.\n\nDe exhibitionistiska inslagen utg\u00f6rs av att man understryker att hon vill visa upp sig och sin kropp, vilket texter ocks\u00e5 upplyser l\u00e4saren om, ifall han skulle tvivla. Men kanske \u00e4r begreppet exhibitionism n\u00e5got missvisande. Det syftar p\u00e5 en person som vill visa upp sig och sin kropp (eller delar av den) var som helst i det offentliga. T\u00e4nk till exempel p\u00e5 stereotypen med den heterosexuella mannen, blottarens exhibitionism, ikl\u00e4dd den stora rocken som \u00f6ppnas inf\u00f6r ovilliga kvinnors blickar p\u00e5 offentliga platser. En figur som knappast har n\u00e5gon h\u00f6gt v\u00e4rderad plats i bildkulturen. Den form av exhibitionism som mjukpornografiska bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor talar om sker emellertid _bara inf\u00f6r en kamera_ , det \u00e4r framf\u00f6r den, och bara den, som vissa poser och ansiktsuttryck anv\u00e4nds. Detta \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r snarare uttryck f\u00f6r vad jag skulle vilja kalla \"visibitionism\", d\u00e4r sj\u00e4lva bildtagandet \u00e4r f\u00f6ruts\u00e4ttningen f\u00f6r ett visst beteende, som inte heller anv\u00e4nds utanf\u00f6r kameralinsens omkrets. Ett k\u00e4rt tema i s\u00e5v\u00e4l mjuk- som h\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r just att l\u00e5ta kvinnor f\u00f6rklara hur mycket de tycker om att visa upp sig inf\u00f6r en kamera, som exemplifierades i kapitel tre, att det i sig g\u00f6r dem upphetsade.\n\nNarcissism, som handlar om njutning av det egna jaget (eller sj\u00e4lvk\u00e4rlek), gestaltas i sin tur via blickar, antingen riktade mot n\u00e5gon del av den egna kroppen eller med \u00f6gon njutningsfullt slutna, eller genom sj\u00e4lvber\u00f6ring med h\u00e4nder som smeker kroppen.\n\nP\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet visas att det kvinnliga beg\u00e4ret blir uppt\u00e4nt av sig sj\u00e4lv, av den egna kroppen. Detta kan ocks\u00e5 antyda ett slags o\u00e5tkomlighet, genom att man \u00e4r sig sj\u00e4lv nog. Men koderna f\u00f6r tillg\u00e4nglighet tar ofta udden av detta.\n\nEn av de vanligaste konventionerna i mjukpornografin \u00e4r, som sagt, den m\u00f6tande inbjudande blicken, som skapar en visuell f\u00f6rs\u00e4kran om att \"Jag \u00e4r h\u00e4r f\u00f6r Dig!\" P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet etablerar den kvinnors medvillighet som \u00e4r n\u00f6dv\u00e4ndigt f\u00f6r det mjukpornografiska tilltalet. Men det finns \u00e4ven i bilden en f\u00f6ljdfr\u00e5ga bunden till detta deklarerande, n\u00e4mligen: \"Tycker Du om vad Du ser? \"\n\nBetraktaren ska aldrig tvivla p\u00e5 sin egen betydelse i f\u00f6rh\u00e5llande till henne.\n\nHennes inbjudande blick \u00e4r en blick som tittar ut\u00e5t f\u00f6r att se om n\u00e5gon tittar tillbaka. Dessa bilders uppgift \u00e4r att \u00f6vertyga betraktaren om att han \u00e4r beg\u00e4rd och viktig, att bildens tilltal inte \u00e4r komplett utan honom. Men han \u00e4r inte beg\u00e4rd som sexuellt objekt av henne (han \u00e4r ju trots allt osynlig), utan i sin roll som bed\u00f6mande och bekr\u00e4ftande av hennes \u00e5tr\u00e5v\u00e4rdhet. Det finns inget eget beg\u00e4r knuten till denna bildposition f\u00f6rutom i svaret fr\u00e5n han som ska lockas \u2013 beg\u00e4ret att beg\u00e4ras. Och det \u00e4r betraktarens bed\u00f6mande som avg\u00f6r om det har lyckats eller inte, allts\u00e5: Tycker Du om vad Du ser?\n\n## VITHET OCH KLASS\n\nI denna typ av bilder iscens\u00e4tts en sexuell harmoni mellan k\u00f6nen. H\u00e4r smickras, och kanske lugnas, en t\u00e4nkt betraktare. Han f\u00e5r veta att han har betydelse, att det \u00e4r f\u00f6r hans skull hon sm\u00e5ler, lutar sig fram, poserar. Och, inte minst, att han \u00e4r viktig f\u00f6r henne. Hon som har allt \u2013 ungdom, sk\u00f6nhet och vithet.\n\nTill skillnad fr\u00e5n h\u00e5rdpornografi, d\u00e4r en blandning av kroppar kan anv\u00e4ndas f\u00f6r att hetsa upp (till exempel svarta m\u00e4n och vita kvinnor, eller vice versa), vilar denna glamourpornografi p\u00e5 strikta m\u00f6nster n\u00e4r det g\u00e4ller k\u00f6n och etnicitet. Vad som synligg\u00f6rs \u00e4r den _vita_ femininiteten. Den vita, blonda unga kvinnan \u00e4r p\u00e5 m\u00e5nga s\u00e4tt den perfekta symbolen f\u00f6r denna form av sexuell representation (blond \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 det mest vita av vitt). I takt med att fr\u00e5gor kring etnicitet och m\u00e5ngfald blivit alltmer uppm\u00e4rksammade i samh\u00e4llet i stort, har denna sexuella symbol blivit allt vitare och blondare, inte minst i grabbtidningarna. En specialutg\u00e5va av _Moore_ (februari 2007), inneh\u00e5ller enbart bilder av blonda eller ultrablonda kvinnor. Det \u00e4r som om Hon beh\u00f6ver vara vit (och helst ultrablond) f\u00f6r att inga antydningar kring etnicitet ska st\u00f6ra hennes sexuella betydelse. Om vi s\u00e5g icke-vita kvinnor i denna position skulle fr\u00e5gor kring andra former av representation och diskriminering l\u00e4tt kunna v\u00e4ckas. Den vita feminina unga kroppen erbjuds som den ideala i avsaknad av anspelningar p\u00e5 ras, eftersom kategorin vit s\u00e4llan diskuteras som ras (vilket Richard Dyer i sin bok _White_ , visar med all \u00f6nskv\u00e4rd tydlighet).\n\nAtt utvikskvinnor \u00e4r vita och blonda kan ocks\u00e5 bero p\u00e5 att mjukpornografi ofta visar upp det som ses som acceptabla uttryck f\u00f6r sexualitet. Det finns en l\u00e5ng tanketradition, inte minst inom kristendomen, om den vita kvinnan som tecken f\u00f6r det \"rena\" och oskyldiga medan svarta eller m\u00f6rka kvinnokroppar f\u00f6rknippas med en l\u00e4gre, mer \"djurisk\", \"farlig\" sexuell status. Det \"rena \" och oskyldiga pr\u00e4glar i mycket glamourpornografin d\u00e4r den kvinnliga modellen \u00e4r anst\u00e4ndigheten inkarnerad. Detta visar ocks\u00e5 p\u00e5 mjukpornografins medelklasspr\u00e4gel. Klass, s\u00e4rskilt f\u00f6r kvinnor, avg\u00f6rs utifr\u00e5n vad som ses som respektabelt upptr\u00e4dande och inte. Den sexualitet som den feminina kroppen visar upp i mjukpornografin \u00e4r fylld av koder som associeras till ett traditionellt feminint beteende. Hon g\u00e5r inte utanf\u00f6r n\u00e5gra gr\u00e4nser, hon skyler br\u00f6sten och sm\u00e5ler v\u00e4nligt inbjudande. Det \u00e4r med andra ord en respektabel medelklassfemininitet som syns, som \u00e4r sedesam, v\u00e4lv\u00e5rdad och lockande, men aldrig f\u00f6r mycket. Den \"vulg\u00e4ra\" eller ov\u00e5rdade kroppen har ingen plats h\u00e4r.\n\n## MEDIALA PLAYMATE-SCENER\n\nOm vi flyttar oss ut ur bilden och ser p\u00e5 hur dessa playmates- eller utviksbilder diskuteras i det mediala, i bland annat kv\u00e4llstidningar och veckopress, handlar det om varf\u00f6r man viker ut sig. Och h\u00e4r \u00e4r den kvinnliga utvikningsk\u00f6ren unisont samst\u00e4mmig i sina bedyranden att de vill visa upp sina kroppar, att de inte sk\u00e4ms, att detta inte \u00e4r pornografi utan estetiskt vackra bilder. Understrykandet av medvillighet finns s\u00e5ledes inte bara i bildens tilltal till betraktaren, det sl\u00e5s ocks\u00e5 fast genom dessa \u00e5terkommande bedyranden om att detta \u00e4r vad kvinnor vill g\u00f6ra \u2013 f\u00f6r sin egen skull eller f\u00f6r sin karri\u00e4r. Det \u00e4r intressant att man inte \u2013 vare sig i de tidningar bilderna figurerar i eller i omgivande intervjuer \u2013 n\u00e4mner den ekonomiska aspekten. \u00c4ven om det inte f\u00f6refaller vara s\u00e4rskilt bra betalt, i relation till vad bilderna genererar f\u00f6r kapital till tidningarnas \u00e4gare, \u00e4r det som att betalningen \u00e4r det st\u00f6rsta tabut. Och det \u00e4r klart, om kvinnor f\u00f6rklarade att detta \u00e4r n\u00e5got de g\u00f6r f\u00f6r pengar skulle onekligen den glamour\u00f6sa aspekten ruckas. S\u00e5 ist\u00e4llet \u00e4r det lusten att bli fotograferad hos de uppvisade personerna som lyfts fram i grabbtidningar och i andra medier, frig\u00f6relse och karri\u00e4r. Ett vanligt argument \u00e4r att utviksbilder visar kvinnlig sexualitet som n\u00e5got sj\u00e4lvst\u00e4ndigt:\n\n\" Nu ska Olinda er\u00f6vra v\u00e4rlden \" (AB.05.03.25), \" Jag har aldrig sett s\u00e5 fin ut \" (AB 05.07.22), \" Jag \u00e4r en otrolig k\u00e4rlekspartner \" (AB 05.07.10). Att vika ut sig f\u00f6rklaras vara tecken p\u00e5 frig\u00f6relse \u2013 att man inte sk\u00e4ms \u00f6ver sin kropp, att man v\u00e5gar och vill visa upp sig. \u00c4ven om man h\u00e4r ber\u00f6r fr\u00e5gor om, eller snarare talar i skepnad av, en frigjord kvinnlig sexualitet (som g\u00f6r vad den vill), \u00e4r det sv\u00e5rt att se hur dessa bilder handlar om annat \u00e4n r\u00e4tten att iscens\u00e4tta sig sj\u00e4lv efter ett f\u00f6rskrivet manus. Anledningen till att flertalet av dessa unga kvinnor intervjuas och ses som intressant mediematerial \u00e4r i sig baserat p\u00e5 att de, bevisligen, motsvarar en manligt beg\u00e4rande blick. Det \u00e4r denna position som ger dem ett v\u00e4rde och den mediala uppm\u00e4rksamheten blir en bekr\u00e4ftelse p\u00e5 att investeringar i denna feminina kroppsbild ger utdelning. Inte i n\u00e5gon annan position f\u00e5r unga kvinnor samma utrymme i s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga skilda medier som i playmate-rollen.\n\nAtt detta med att vika ut sig \u00e4r eftertraktat av m\u00e5nga unga kvinnor, eller i alla fall av betydligt fler \u00e4n f\u00f6r tio \u00e5r sedan, \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r inte konstigt. Inte heller att en anstormning av unga kvinnor skickar in bilder p\u00e5 sig sj\u00e4lva i traditionellt f\u00f6rf\u00f6riska poser till grabbtidningars hemsidor och redaktioner, opererar sina br\u00f6st f\u00f6r att f\u00e5 vara med antingen p\u00e5 utvik i tidningar som _Slitz_ , _FHM_ och _Moore_ , eller som deltagare i reality- eller dokus\u00e5paprogram, v\u00e4l medvetna om den redan skrivna roll de ska inta.\n\nI Sverige har vi under varje dokus\u00e5pas\u00e4song en Emma, en Carolina, en Olinda, en Linda, en Natacha, vars kropp och byst blir nationella nyheter (se bildark s. 13, \u00f6verst). Vi har f\u00f6rvisso under senare delen av nittonhundratalet haft ett hav av k\u00e4nda kvinnor vars liv varit visuella ber\u00e4ttelser i medier v\u00e4rlden \u00f6ver: Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Prinsessan Diana, Madonna, Britney Spears med flera. Men i denna programtyp skapar medierna sina egna stj\u00e4rnor \u2013 de lite kittlande semi-pornografiska mediecelebriteterna. I dokus\u00e5por eller realityprogram \u00e4r deras funktion m\u00e5ngfacetterad men alltid knuten till kroppen och sexualiteten i n\u00e5gon form. I kv\u00e4llspressen formas de till mediematerial p\u00e5 flera niv\u00e5er. Till skillnad fr\u00e5n andra l\u00e4nders anv\u00e4ndning av playmaten eller utviksbilder s\u00e5som den brittiska tabloiden _The Sun_ , vilken sedan sjuttiotalet haft sin \"page-three-girl\", placerar svenska kv\u00e4llstidningar dessa bilder i en annan kontext. Syftet s\u00e4gs aldrig vara att bara visa bilderna som blickf\u00e5ng f\u00f6r en manlig publik, utan det ska handla om allt annat \u00e4n detta faktum. Det som g\u00f6r svenska mediers anv\u00e4ndning av playmaten bedr\u00e4glig \u00e4r att hon draperas i en retorik som h\u00e4mtar br\u00e4nsle fr\u00e5n kvinnor\u00f6relsens krav om sj\u00e4lvf\u00f6rverkligande och lika v\u00e4rde blandat med det kommersiellas stenh\u00e5rda logik. Vi erbjuder dig platsen och den har sina regler. Du best\u00e4mmer sj\u00e4lv hur l\u00e5ngt du vill g\u00e5 och vad du \u00e4r beredd att g\u00f6ra. Valet \u00e4r ditt.\n\nDet som st\u00e4ndigt f\u00f6ljer dem \u00e4r dock en dubbelhet som publiken b\u00e5de ska lockas och f\u00f6rfasas \u00f6ver. Medierna visar och fr\u00e5gar, om kroppen, om l\u00e4ppoperationer, om pojkv\u00e4nner, aborter, alkohol. Hur kan de ha sex i tv? Hur kan man operera in tv\u00e5 kilo material i varje br\u00f6st? Varf\u00f6r g\u00f6r de allt f\u00f6r att f\u00e5 vara med i Playboy? Hur kan man som mor g\u00f6ra detta? Ber\u00e4ttelserna med \u00e5tf\u00f6ljande bilder rasar sedan vidare, vilket ett axplock av rubriker visar: \"Pappa betalade mina br\u00f6st\" (Exp 05.09.24), \"Natachas pappa ber\u00e4ttar: D\u00e4rf\u00f6r betalade jag min dotters br\u00f6st\" (Exp 05.09.25), \"Killarna \u00e5t Natachas godisbeh\u00e5\" (Exp 05.09.27), \"Hon vill bli en playmate\" (Exp 05.09.23), \"Jag \u00e5ngrar mina br\u00f6st varje dag\" (AB 07.05.05), \"D\u00e4rf\u00f6r f\u00f6rstorade jag br\u00f6sten\" (AB 07.09.21)(se bildark s. 13, mitten). Deras status kan f\u00f6rvisso f\u00f6r\u00e4ndras. De kan f\u00e5 egna tv-program eller till\u00e5tas f\u00e5 en mer seri\u00f6s framtoning (s\u00e4rskilt om de f\u00f6rminskar de f\u00f6rstorade br\u00f6sten). Men den \u00f6verdrivna kroppen blir l\u00e4tt v\u00e4nd emot dem och tecken p\u00e5 en l\u00e4gre (klass)status. Precis som den \u00f6verdrivet uppumpade manliga kroppen faller utanf\u00f6r medelklassens f\u00f6rmenta okroppslighet, h\u00e4nger kulturell status och bystformat samman f\u00f6r den feminina kroppen.\n\nPlaymate-rollen skulle nog inte locka s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga unga tjejer i dag om den inte odlats fram inom medier riktade till dem sj\u00e4lva \u2013 s\u00e5som i m\u00e5nga veckotidningar. Det \u00e4r i dessa forum detta med att vara beg\u00e4rlig har lanserats som en v\u00e4rdefull egenskap f\u00f6r kvinnor. Det \u00e4r h\u00e4r playmateidealet har inf\u00f6rlivats som en positiv sj\u00e4lvbild, som s\u00e4ger att s\u00e5 blir man v\u00e4rd att betraktas; det \u00e4r h\u00e4r kroppens utseende f\u00f6rklaras vara v\u00e4gen till lycka och framg\u00e5ng, med strama pushups och fuktigt l\u00e4ppglans. Men det \u00e4r inte alltid m\u00e4n som ligger bakom dessa sakernas tillst\u00e5nd. Tv\u00e4rtom \u00e4r olika redaktioner fyllda av kvinnor som l\u00e4r andra kvinnor vilka kl\u00e4der de ska b\u00e4ra, hur ansiktet ska sminkas, kroppen formas, det motsatta k\u00f6net lockas och det egna fyllas av avund eller oro. Tittar vi p\u00e5 tidningar som _Veckorevyn_ och _Cosmopolitan_ finns ofta en m\u00e4ngd material som ger en annan bild, som talar om sexualitet i mer jagst\u00e4rkande termer: g\u00f6r det du vill och tycker om. Men detta \u00e4r i texter. Bilden visar en annan sida av det feminina.\n\nMed en blandning av smicker och uppl\u00e4xning granskar de v\u00e4rderande sin publik och p\u00e5pekar alla de \"brister\" de ser. Det \u00e4r andra kvinnor och deras kroppar som publiken ska bese, begrunda och v\u00e4rdera. M\u00e4n f\u00f6rekommer s\u00e4llan p\u00e5 bild, trots att man v\u00e4nder sig till en heterosexuell kvinnlig publik och s\u00e5 mycket handlar om sexualitet. I den feminina mediekulturen anv\u00e4nds ett bildspr\u00e5k som skulle klassificera b\u00e5de publiken och inneh\u00e5llet som uppenbart homosexuellt om det var m\u00e4n p\u00e5 bilderna riktade till en publik av m\u00e4n. Men det omv\u00e4nda, heterosexuella kvinnor som tittar p\u00e5 mer eller mindre erotiserade bilder av andra kvinnor, verkar snarare st\u00e4rka id\u00e9n om en kvinnlig heterosexuell identitet \u00e4n ifr\u00e5gas\u00e4tta den. F\u00f6rvisso kanske de visar ett \"queerl\u00e4ckage\", ett underliggande lesbiskt beg\u00e4r. Men hur de \u00e4n uppfattas p\u00e5 individniv\u00e5 s\u00e5 syftar inte dessa bilder till att v\u00e4cka en kvinnlig publiks (sexuella) lust, utan snarare att v\u00e4cka beg\u00e4r efter produkter, som i sin tur syftar till uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla den traditionella heterosexuella femininitet som bilderna levererar.\n\n## DEN FEMININA KROPPEN: SPLITTRADE BLICKAR OCH CHAUVINISM\n\nDen manliga blicken har elegant tagits upp och sugits in av en hel feminin mediekultur. Trots f\u00f6rekomsten av kritiska texter kring detta med att \"g\u00f6ra\" femininitet, produceras bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor som \u00e4r identiska med dem som ska riktas mot och f\u00f6rkroppsliga ett manligt beg\u00e4r (se bildark s. 13, underst). Att samma bildkropp figurerar i medier riktade till s\u00e5v\u00e4l kvinnor som m\u00e4n, visar p\u00e5 en n\u00e4rmast klaustrofobisk samst\u00e4mmighet kring vad som \u00e4r en lyckad femininitet och \u2013 kanske \u00e4n viktigare \u2013 vad den misslyckade \u00e4r.\n\nEffekterna av den intensiva granskningen av kvinnokroppen \u00e4r som jag ser det flera. De bidrar till en acceptans av att kroppen ska bed\u00f6mas av andra, b\u00e5de kvinnor och m\u00e4n.\n\nKvinnor har under l\u00e5ng tid definierats och v\u00e4rderats i f\u00f6rh\u00e5llande till sin kropp och sitt utseende. F\u00f6r att kroppen ska kunna bli ett kapital, m\u00e5ste den tilldelas ett symboliskt v\u00e4rde, och det kan bara g\u00f6ras av dem som ges auktoritet att bed\u00f6ma.\n\nN\u00e4r jagets betydelse fastst\u00e4lls utifr\u00e5n andras omd\u00f6men om den egna kroppen, riskerar man att inf\u00f6rliva ett allseende Sauron \u00f6ga som disciplinerar kroppen.\n\nI det feminina medieutbudet d\u00e4r kvinnor ska granska och v\u00e4rdera sin \"egen\" kropp presenteras den b\u00e5de som ett problematiskt objekt (med slapp byst, celluliter, rynkor) och ett hyperestetiserat ideal. Man visar dels en femininitet att efterstr\u00e4va, dels hur den \"misslyckade\" femininiteten ser ut, en att fasa inf\u00f6r.\n\nH\u00e4r, liksom i bilder av den feminina kroppen riktade till m\u00e4n, g\u00f6rs det sj\u00e4lvklart att denna kropp ska betraktas. Men det \u00e4r inte genom en enhetlig blick kvinnor ska se p\u00e5 andra kvinnor utan snarare genom en splittrad blick. Och denna splittring handlar, som flera pekat p\u00e5, om att se sig sj\u00e4lv utifr\u00e5n. Men jag menar att det \u00e4ven handlar om att se det feminina utifr\u00e5n en b\u00e5de idealiserad, l\u00e4ngtansfull och nedv\u00e4rderande blick. \u00c4ven i medier riktade till kvinnor fylls allts\u00e5 den feminina kroppen med f\u00f6rakt och l\u00e4ngtan.\n\nAtt denna blick med s\u00e5dan sj\u00e4lvklarhet riktas mot den feminina kroppen av kvinnor sj\u00e4lva, kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s utifr\u00e5n Simone de Beauvoirs resonemang. Hon pekar p\u00e5 att konstruktionen av kvinnan som \"den andra\" inte bygger p\u00e5 n\u00e5gon \u00f6msesidighet. Vanligtvis vid konflikter mellan grupper skapar man varandra som den andra, men kvinnan \u00e4r den andra inte bara f\u00f6r mannen utan \u00e4ven f\u00f6r sig sj\u00e4lv. Och, kan man till\u00e4gga, hon ska inte se mannen som \"den andre\". I medier som riktar sig till kvinnor och r\u00f6r femininitet och relationer till m\u00e4n, handlar det om att l\u00e4ra sig att identifiera sig med det maskulina (eller med myten om det), inte som en sj\u00e4lvidentifikation, utan om att k\u00e4nna in och f\u00f6rst\u00e5 Honom. Jag skulle ocks\u00e5 vilja h\u00e4vda, nu n\u00e4r mer \u00e4n femtio \u00e5r har g\u00e5tt sedan de Beauvoir skrev _Det andra k\u00f6net_ att det i h\u00f6g grad \u00e4r bilder som anv\u00e4nds f\u00f6r att b\u00e4ra vidare kvinnors \"andrahet\".\n\nFramf\u00f6r allt n\u00e4r det handlar om sexualitet, d\u00e5 sexualitet ju handlar om s\u00e5 mycket mer mellan k\u00f6nen \u00e4n \"bara\" sexualitet. I mycket semi- och mjukpornografi \u00e4r den feminina kroppen p\u00e5 ett paradoxalt s\u00e4tt t\u00f6md p\u00e5 sexualitet, samtidigt som den \u00e4r belamrad med sexuella koder. Om den talade om en feminin autonom sexualitet skulle det i sig blockera m\u00f6jligheterna att tala om annat \u00e4n det sexuella. Detta ser jag som en anledning till att bilder av kvinnokroppar kan anv\u00e4ndas i de mest skilda sammanhang och fyllas med s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga olika betydelser; att de kan kopplas till nya medier, olika produkter, ny teknologi, fungera som estetiska objekt inom olika konstformer eller vara symboler f\u00f6r krig. Antingen denna bild \u00e4r uttalat sexuell eller inte, \u00e4r dess syfte att skapa n\u00e4rhet och en illusion om intimitet med betraktaren. Det \u00e4r en bild till\u00e4gnad den som ser och kan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r fungera som en kanal f\u00f6r beg\u00e4r efter varor, efter upplevelser.\n\nSamtidigt kan man fr\u00e5ga sig varf\u00f6r allt fler kvinnor i v\u00e4stv\u00e4rlden omfamnar en sexuell stereotyp bild av sig sj\u00e4lva. I en intressant bok, _Female chauvinist pigs_ , har den amerikanska journalisten Ariel Levy denna fr\u00e5ga som utg\u00e5ngspunkt.\n\nPlaymateloggor (den lilla kaninen) b\u00e4rs som tecken p\u00e5 frig\u00f6relse och f\u00f6retaget _Playboy. Inc._ leds sedan flera \u00e5r av en kvinna, Hugh Hefners dotter Christina. De kvinnliga l\u00e4sarna av denna och liknande tidningar \u00f6kar hela tiden. Eller som Hugh Hefner sj\u00e4lv lite f\u00f6rundrat uttryckt det: \"Playboy and its likes are being embraced by young women in a curious way in a postfeminist world.\" Om \"male chauvinist pigs\" \u00e4r m\u00e4n som ser kvinnor som kroppsdelar \u00e4r den kvinnliga motsvarigheten kvinnor som ser andra kvinnor och sig sj\u00e4lva som sexobjekt. Att g\u00e5 runt med t-tr\u00f6jor med texten \"pornstar\", att vilja vika ut sig och att titta p\u00e5 kvinnor som strippar \u00e4r ett s\u00e4tt att s\u00e4ga att man inte \u00e4r en trist kvinna, utan n\u00e5gon som ser detta som \"kul\". Ett argument som Levy m\u00f6tte var att detta \u00e4r ett uttryck f\u00f6r sj\u00e4lvf\u00f6rverkligande. Feminismen \u00e4r \u00f6verspelad. Kvinnor har f\u00e5tt sin j\u00e4mst\u00e4lldhet och deras uppvisade sexualitet st\u00e5r som k\u00e4nnetecken f\u00f6r frig\u00f6relse.\n\nLevy menar att dessa resonemang d\u00f6ljer vad det egentligen handlar om \u2013 en \u00f6nskan hos kvinnor om att bli, eller uppfattas som \"one of the guys\", att bli accepterad och upptagen i en manlig gemenskap. Detta kan ocks\u00e5 f\u00f6rst\u00e5s utifr\u00e5n vad psykologerna Edna I. Rawlings och Donna Carter kallar \"ego defence\", d\u00e4r en underordnad grupp omfamnar stereotypa id\u00e9er av sig sj\u00e4lva som ett s\u00e4tt att f\u00e5 den dominanta gruppens gillande.\n\n\u00d6nskan om att identifiera sig med en reaktion\u00e4r maskulinitet leder till en dubbelhet inf\u00f6r det feminina \u00e4ven hos kvinnor. Viljan att f\u00e5 ta del av denna manliga gemenskap kan ocks\u00e5 vara ett resultat av att f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om maskulinitet inte har lyfts fram ordentligt, av att de har f\u00e5tt vara ifred.\n\nP\u00e5 en mer psykosocial niv\u00e5 kan \u00f6nskan att vika ut sig f\u00f6rst\u00e5s efter tv\u00e5 linjer. Den ena \u00e4r den mediala inverkan som diskuterats ovan. Medierna har etablerat sig som en v\u00e4rdefull plats att vara i och detta \u00e4r den position som unga kvinnor kan bli uppm\u00e4rksammade genom. I positionen som beg\u00e4rsobjekt byggs mer positiva sj\u00e4lvbilder upp, d\u00e4r det v\u00e4rde som tillskrivs f\u00f6rm\u00e5gan att v\u00e4cka beg\u00e4r blir offentligt bekr\u00e4ftat och fastslaget \u2013 \u00e4ven om en baksida alltid f\u00f6ljer, med mer f\u00f6raktfulla blickar. Den andra r\u00f6r mer komplexa aspekter. Viljan att bli tittad p\u00e5 med beg\u00e4r \u00e4r allm\u00e4nm\u00e4nsklig; b\u00e5de sexuellt beg\u00e4r och narcissism \u00e4r tv\u00e5 fundamentala delar hos oss alla. I den mediala bildkulturen har de emellertid delats upp mellan k\u00f6nen \u00e4ven om de i praktiken interagerar i var och en av oss.\n\nNumer finns en hel medial flora av sextips som i textform ofta handlar om kvinnlig sexualitet \u2013 hur man onanerar, hur bra det \u00e4r att g\u00f6ra det, vilka hj\u00e4lpmedel som finns. Utloppen f\u00f6r kvinnlig sexualitet via bilder p\u00e5 m\u00e4n \u00e4r emellertid f\u00e5. Inga tidningar f\u00f6r unga kvinnor fyllda med inbjudande manliga kroppar erbjuds dem som publik, d\u00e4r de f\u00f6r en stund kan rikta blicken mot en annan kropp \u00e4n den egna. Ist\u00e4llet \u00e4r det genom att visa upp den egna kroppen p\u00e5 bild, eller genom att titta p\u00e5 andra kvinnors kroppar, som en frigjord kvinnlig sexualitet i det mediala ska uttryckas.\n\nI Sverige har endast tv\u00e5 tidningar med bilder p\u00e5 m\u00e4n riktade till kvinnor getts ut de senaste femtio \u00e5ren. 1966 startade _Route 66_ som utifr\u00e5n ett k\u00f6nspolitiskt syfte visade bilder p\u00e5 nakna m\u00e4n som duschade, kastade kula, eller l\u00e5g utstr\u00e4ckta p\u00e5 gr\u00e4smattor (se bildark s. 14, \u00f6verst). Tidningen anordnade \u00e4ven en fotot\u00e4vling kallad \"Mannen 1966\" d\u00e4r l\u00e4sarna uppmanades skicka in bilder av nakna m\u00e4n. Den fick emellertid ett sn\u00f6pligt slut d\u00e5 redaktionen meddelade att man fann de ins\u00e4nda bilderna underm\u00e5liga och d\u00e4rf\u00f6r avbl\u00e5ste den. Flera av de inkomna bidragen publicerades emellertid f\u00f6r att, som man uttryckte det, l\u00e4sarna sj\u00e4lva skulle f\u00e5 se hur usla de var. Usla eller inte, vad man h\u00e4r ser \u00e4r hur f\u00e5 konventioner f\u00f6r poser som fanns n\u00e4r den manliga kroppen skulle erotiseras inf\u00f6r kvinnliga betraktare (se bildark s. 14, underst). Bilderna visar m\u00e4n som d\u00f6ljer sina ansikten men vars k\u00f6n \u00e4r med; en \u00e4r placerad bakom en pinnstol d\u00e4r penisen tittar fram mellan ryggpinnarna, en annan har en cape sl\u00e4ngd \u00f6ver axlarna och en ridpiska i handen. Tidningen lades ner efter fyra nummer och en av anledningarna var att bilderna p\u00e5 m\u00e4n tog slut. Trettio \u00e5r senare, 1996, kom _Kvinnors aff\u00e4rer_ som \u00e4ven den fick en kortlivad existens.\n\nDet finns n\u00e5gra f\u00e5 internationella tidningar d\u00e4r _Playgirl_ (startad 1973) \u00e4r en av de mest kommersiellt framg\u00e5ngsrika. Bilderna visar h\u00e5rl\u00f6sa muskul\u00f6sa m\u00e4n som \u00e4r sv\u00e5ra att skilja fr\u00e5n reklamens manskropp.\n\nEn av anledningarna till detta magra utbud f\u00f6r kvinnor \u2013 som bara kan f\u00f6rv\u00e5na i en tid n\u00e4r alla aspekter av sexualitetens kommersiella v\u00e4rde eskalerar \u2013 s\u00e4gs ofta vara att kvinnor inte vill se nakna m\u00e4n, att den kvinnliga lusten \u00e4r inriktad \"p\u00e5 annat\". Diskussioner och argument kring kvinnors lust och de uttryck den ska ta sig \u00e4r fyllda av motstridigheter. P\u00e5 sextiotalet f\u00f6rklarade redakt\u00f6ren f\u00f6r den uppm\u00e4rksammade pornografiska antologin _K\u00e4rlek_ att den fr\u00e4mst riktade sig till m\u00e4n (trots att kvinnor var med och skrev), eftersom kvinnor inte var intresserade av pornografisk text.\n\nAndra argument brukar g\u00e5 i motsatt riktning och lansera skriven erotik och pornografi f\u00f6r en kvinnlig publik, till exempel den s\u00e5 kallade tantsnusklitteraturen. De mest l\u00e4sta (och kanske \u00e4ven l\u00e4gst ansedda) \u00e4r Harlequinb\u00f6ckerna, som 2005 s\u00e5lde 144 miljoner exemplar v\u00e4rlden \u00f6ver. Deras senaste satsning har varit tv\u00e5 nya undergenrer, \"Lust\" och \"Passion\", b\u00e5da med mycket explicita och ing\u00e5ende samlagsber\u00e4ttelser.\n\nMen om man tittar f\u00f6rbi detta fokus p\u00e5 unga kvinnor, b\u00e5de i och utanf\u00f6r bilden, och \u00e5terg\u00e5r till huvudfr\u00e5gan: Vad \u00e4r det f\u00f6r id\u00e9er om manlig sexualitet som den blonda unga playmaten f\u00f6rkroppsligar? Och vilken maskulinitetsbild visar dessa grabbtidningar och den glamour\u00f6sa mjukpornografin upp?\n\n## OKROPPSLIG MASKULINITET\n\nGrabbtidningar \u00e4r som begreppet visar riktade till unga m\u00e4n, eller m\u00e4n som ser sig som grabbar. Den \u00e5ldersuppdelning som styr medieutbudet till kvinnor, inte minst p\u00e5 veckopressmarknaden med tidningar f\u00f6r varje \u00e5lder, alltifr\u00e5n _Frida_ till _Amelia_ och _Tara_ , \u00e4r i stort sett fr\u00e5nvarande n\u00e4r det g\u00e4ller m\u00e4n.\n\nLiksom i _Playboy_ \u00e4r en stor anledning till framg\u00e5ngarna den maskulinitetsid\u00e9 som levereras. Denna grabbkultur tar helt avst\u00e5nd fr\u00e5n \u2013 ja, om vi ska ta deras n\u00e4stan \u00e4ngsligt anv\u00e4nda ironiska ton p\u00e5 allvar \u2013 allt. Grabben ska, om vi kan s\u00e4tta n\u00e5gra epitet p\u00e5 honom, gilla att ha kul, vara politiskt inkorrekt, heterosexuell och konsument av s\u00e5v\u00e4l varor som sexualitet. Denna form av maskulinitet framst\u00e4lls som motsatsen till en k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssig, seri\u00f6s man. Grabbigheten levereras med en ironiserande ton d\u00e4r sk\u00e4mt \u00e4r standard, men den knyts ocks\u00e5 till arbetsliv (i st\u00e5ende avdelningar intervjuas professionellt framg\u00e5ngsrika m\u00e4n), festande, tips om hur man \"raggar\" tjejer framg\u00e5ngsrikt, mode, drinktips samt artiklar om uppseendev\u00e4ckande f\u00f6reteelser (massm\u00f6rdare, sexskandaler och liknande). \u00d6ver huvud taget framtr\u00e4der maskulinitet h\u00e4r som en utdragen ton\u00e5rstid d\u00e4r ansvar, vid sidan av ekonomisk framg\u00e5ng skys, jobbet \u00e4r en bisyssla, festandet st\u00e5r i centrum och kvinnor ska er\u00f6vras, men h\u00e5llas p\u00e5 avst\u00e5nd. De homosociala koderna, det vill s\u00e4ga refererandet till en gemensam v\u00e4rdeskala f\u00f6r tidning och l\u00e4sare, \u00e4r starka.\n\nTidningarnas reportrar fungerar som ett slags l\u00e4sarens alter ego, framf\u00f6r allt i relation till kvinnor. Vimmelbilder i _Moore_ och _Slitz_ visar ofta en medarbetare omg\u00e4rdad av unga kvinnor p\u00e5 barer och fester. Tidningarnas reportrar eller chefredakt\u00f6rer ing\u00e5r tydligt i de scener som spelas upp f\u00f6r l\u00e4saren. Ofta \u00e4r det de som i egen person upplever h\u00e4ndelser, avsl\u00f6jar eller iscens\u00e4tter dem. Tidningarna problematiserar inte heller sina l\u00e4sare, eller deras kroppar, utan talar till dem och tittar p\u00e5 v\u00e4rlden tillsammans med dem.\n\nKvinnor framst\u00e4lls efter ett mycket traditionellt m\u00f6nster. De \u00e4r problematiska att f\u00e5 i s\u00e4ng och samtidigt sv\u00e5ra att h\u00e5lla ifr\u00e5n sig; det vill s\u00e4ga, de \u00e4r beroende och ett hot mot m\u00e4ns autonomi. Den gemenskap som lyfts fram \u00e4r ist\u00e4llet med andra m\u00e4n. Detta \u00e4r en direkt motsats till tidningar riktade till unga kvinnor, d\u00e4r k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssigt engagemang i m\u00e4n beskrivs som centralt f\u00f6r det personliga v\u00e4lbefinnandet. I grabbtidningar har kvinnor d\u00e4remot ingen n\u00e4mnv\u00e4rd plats som individuella subjekt. De f\u00f6rekommer knappt i n\u00e5got material som inte har koppling till sexualitet; reportage och intervjumaterial handlar enbart om m\u00e4n.\n\nDet finns i dessa tidningar en mycket strikt uppdelning mellan hur m\u00e4n och kvinnor avbildas. M\u00e4n figurerar n\u00e4stan enbart med ansiktsbilder medan kvinnor i stort sett aldrig avbildas med fokus p\u00e5 ansikte. Medan kvinnor f\u00f6rekommer i vissa utvik p\u00e5 en eller tv\u00e5 sidor, \u00e4r bilderna p\u00e5 m\u00e4n ofta sm\u00e5. N\u00e4stan alla bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor \u00e4r i f\u00e4rg medan bilder p\u00e5 m\u00e4n till stor del \u00e4r svartvita. F\u00e4rgbilder anv\u00e4nds ofta f\u00f6r att \u00f6ka intrycket av n\u00e4rhet till den person som visas medan svartvitt kan skapa en st\u00f6rre k\u00e4nsla av distans. Genom denna skillnad understryks att mannen inte ska ses som beg\u00e4rligt blickf\u00e5ng, varken av m\u00e4n eller kvinnor.\n\nM\u00e4ns ansiktsuttryck \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 ofta slutna med en st\u00e4ngd mun och blicken riktad snett ut\u00e5t eller ned\u00e5t och de ger inte n\u00e5got intryck av att vilja tilltala den som ser. D\u00e4r blicken m\u00f6ter betraktaren \u00e4r den m\u00e5nga g\u00e5nger ih\u00e4rdigt tillbakastirrande och inte inviterande (se bildark s. 15, \u00f6verst).\n\nMen det finns en annan mer kroppslig bild av unga m\u00e4n och det \u00e4r i vimmelbilder fr\u00e5n barer och fester och i den mer karnevaliska sexualitet som visas upp. I tidningen _Moore_ \u00e4r detta s\u00e4rskilt tydligt i alla bilder fr\u00e5n de s\u00e5 kallade Moore-on-tour evenemangen. Via hemsidan kan man boka in tidningens \"Moore-tjejer\" f\u00f6r nattklubbsbes\u00f6k, dessa dokumenteras sedan med en m\u00e4ngd partybilder i s\u00e5v\u00e4l tidningen som p\u00e5 hemsidan, d\u00e4r \"Moore-tjejer\" i linnen, bh och trosor syns i stora samlingar av killar p\u00e5 de olika st\u00e4llen de bes\u00f6ker. Temat i dessa bilder \u00e4r utlevandet och vi ser unga berusade m\u00e4n dra i tjejers trosor, vr\u00e5la mot kameran, sticka ut tungorna \u2013 ibland halvnakna (se bildark s. 15, underst). Det h\u00e4r verkar vara en arena d\u00e4r en mer kroppslig maskulinitet kan synligg\u00f6ras, kanske f\u00f6r att den \u00e4r s\u00e5 inramad av referenser till strippbarer och manligt drickande. Eftersom m\u00e4nnen \u00e4r uppenbart berusade \u00e4r inte heller deras kroppar medvetet framf\u00f6r kameran f\u00f6r att visas upp, till skillnad fr\u00e5n kvinnorna som \u00e4r d\u00e4r just f\u00f6r att tittas p\u00e5. Det \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 i rollen som betraktare m\u00e4nnen avbildas. Vi ser dom n\u00e4r de tittar p\u00e5 Moore-tjejerna, vilket legitimerar deras heterosexualitet och g\u00f6r det mer till\u00e5tet f\u00f6r dem att sj\u00e4lva vara kropp. _Slitz_ har ett liknade bildkoncept kallat \"P\u00e5 spaning\" med en panel av \"test-killar\" som \u00e5ker runt p\u00e5 barer i landet och rapporterar med bilder om tjejerna de tr\u00e4ffar.\n\n## DET IRONISKA TILLTALET\n\nOm m\u00e4n \u00e4r relativt osynliga i bilder (i f\u00f6rh\u00e5llande till kvinnor), glider \u00e4ven definitioner av maskulinitet hela tiden undan, trots att s\u00e5 mycket material handlar om just maskulinitet \u2013 om vad det \u00e4r att vara en man. Den maskulinitet som lanseras i denna mjukpornografiska grabbkultur \u00e4r b\u00e5de undvikande och undflyende. Manlighet beskrivs utifr\u00e5n vad det _inte_ \u00e4r; det \u00e4r inte homosexualitet och det har inget samr\u00f6re med det som ses som det feminina. Och det \u00e4r h\u00e4r den ironiska tonen som verkar vara helt central f\u00f6r denna genre blommar ut.\n\nP\u00e5 ett yttre plan skapar ironi en bekr\u00e4ftande jag-bild f\u00f6r l\u00e4saren. Den l\u00e4mnar ingen plats f\u00f6r reflektioner, eller f\u00f6r den f\u00f6r\u00e4ndrings- och f\u00f6rb\u00e4ttringsretorik som \u00e4r tjejtidningarnas stomme. Man kan ocks\u00e5 se den som ett s\u00e4tt att b\u00e5de skapa och samtidigt undvika en viss definition av maskulinitet. Ironi som form b\u00e4r i sig p\u00e5 en dubbeltydighet d\u00e4r man s\u00e4ger en sak som egentligen betyder n\u00e5got annat. Men f\u00f6r att ironi ska fungera kr\u00e4vs en delad v\u00e4rdegemenskap, annars riskerar den ironiska inneb\u00f6rden att g\u00e5 f\u00f6rlorad. Ironi skapar avst\u00e5nd p\u00e5 flera s\u00e4tt, den s\u00e4tter gr\u00e4nser ut\u00e5t, mot dem som inte f\u00f6rst\u00e5r koderna, men den kan ocks\u00e5 s\u00e4tta gr\u00e4nser in\u00e5t, som ett uttryck f\u00f6r k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssig distans. Anv\u00e4ndningen av den ironiska tonen kan allts\u00e5 tj\u00e4na tv\u00e5 syften. Det ena \u00e4r att skapa ett avst\u00e5nd ut\u00e5t genom att skilja sig fr\u00e5n mer seri\u00f6sa beskrivningar av sexualitet och relationer. Det andra \u00e4r att skapa ett avst\u00e5nd in\u00e5t genom att distansera sig fr\u00e5n mer oroande och intima k\u00e4nslor som kan vara f\u00f6rknippade med just sexualitet, kvinnor och relationer. Uttryckt n\u00e5got annorlunda kan man s\u00e4ga att till\u00e4mpningen av det ironiska \"sk\u00e4mtar bort\" oron som annars kanske omg\u00e4rdar m\u00e5nga fr\u00e5gor kring sexualitet och det egna jaget.\n\nDen starka vi-k\u00e4nsla d\u00e4r tidning och l\u00e4sare framst\u00e5r som en och samma person \u00e4r uppbyggd kring en gemenskap d\u00e4r banden mellan m\u00e4n \u00e4r det centrala. Detta \u00e4r i sig ett uttryck f\u00f6r att maskulinitet, som s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga visat p\u00e5, i f\u00f6rsta hand \"g\u00f6rs\" i grupper av m\u00e4n. Intervjuer med m\u00e4n kring detta med att vara man visar att det ofta finns en uppdelning mellan hur maskulinitet uttrycks tillsammans med andra m\u00e4n och hur den upplevs utanf\u00f6r den manliga gruppen. Tillsammans med andra m\u00e4n p\u00e5 arbetet och i det offentliga finns homosociala koder som de flesta m\u00e4n k\u00e4nner till: t\u00e4vlan, k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssig distans och sexuell positionering av kvinnor. Med det inte sagt att det inte finns manliga gemenskaper som bygger p\u00e5 helt andra premisser och d\u00e4r man tar avst\u00e5nd fr\u00e5n dessa element. Men dessa tre koder utg\u00f6r en grund f\u00f6r m\u00e5nga hypermaskulina eller machoinfluerade sammanhang.\n\nK\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssig distans handlar om att h\u00e5lla inne med tydliga uttryck f\u00f6r sinnesr\u00f6relse, som gr\u00e5t, sorg eller tydlig gl\u00e4dje. Jag tror inte att det \u00e4r slump att storskrattande m\u00e4n p\u00e5 bilder \u00e4r n\u00e5got som dyker upp under mitten av sjuttiotalet i samband med talet om en ny mer unisex manlighet, och sedermera alltmer ers\u00e4tts av det sammanbitna ansiktsuttrycket. Att h\u00e5lla inne med k\u00e4nslor \u00e4r att vidmakth\u00e5lla kontroll, att inte visa upp mer intima sidor av jaget. Ojstein Gullv\u00e5g Holters studier visar ocks\u00e5 hur homosocialiteten v\u00e4xer fram som ett relationsarbete, d\u00e4r m\u00e4n visar varandra respekt genom att inte visa varandra k\u00e4nslor. Det inneb\u00e4r d\u00e5 att man erk\u00e4nner den andra som n\u00e5gon som kan beh\u00e4rska sina k\u00e4nslor och inte \u00e4r i behov av hj\u00e4lp p\u00e5 det omr\u00e5det. T\u00e4vlan i den manliga gruppen kan underl\u00e4tta formandet av hierarkier och erbjuda en scen f\u00f6r att skapa sitt jag b\u00e5de som en autonom individ och som beh\u00f6rigt maskulin. Den sexuella positioneringen av kvinnor underl\u00e4ttar i sin tur en \"positiv\" sj\u00e4lvf\u00f6rst\u00e5else genom att distansera sig fr\u00e5n allt som associeras med att vara feminin och som v\u00e4rderas som l\u00e4gre: att inte vara en \"k\u00e4rring\" eller en \"fitta\".\n\nI en nyligen utf\u00f6rd studie i Danmark av hur bland annat unga killar \"g\u00f6r k\u00f6n\" och f\u00f6rh\u00e5ller sig till varandra i grupp, visade det sig att b\u00e5de ironi, humor och sexualitet var huvuddelar _._ Hierarkier mellan pojkarna skapades genom att de f\u00f6rs\u00f6kte undvika att hamna i en nedv\u00e4rderad position som ofta hade sexuella, feminina tecken. Det g\u00e4llde att inte bli eller ses som en \"pussy\", genom att vara den som tar och inte den som blir tagen.\n\nAnv\u00e4ndandet av humor och ironi i grupper av unga m\u00e4n kan f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som en \"manlig pedagogik\" d\u00e4r man tr\u00e4nas i att inte \"ta \u00e5t sig\", att l\u00e4ra sig kontrollera de k\u00e4nslor som kan komma upp. Denna emotionella kontroll blir ocks\u00e5 knuten till sexualitet d\u00e5 detta ofta \u00e4r det tema som humorn och ironin behandlar, d\u00e4r den l\u00e4gre positionen \u00e4r den sexuellt feminiserade.\n\nKanske kan detta f\u00f6rklara det st\u00e4ndiga anv\u00e4ndandet av ironi och ironiserad humor i grabbtidningar och annat medieutbud som riktar sig till unga m\u00e4n. Det \u00e4r n\u00e5got publiken f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas kunna k\u00e4nna igen som ett maskulint grupptilltal. Det placerar l\u00e4saren inom en traditionell manlig gemenskap med ett etablerat (heterosexuellt) s\u00e4tt att tala om sexualitet, relationer och kvinnor p\u00e5.\n\n## OSYNLIGHET OCH BEG\u00c4R\n\nTillbaka d\u00e5 till den bild som ska f\u00f6rkroppsliga manligt beg\u00e4r i detta utbud.\n\nPlaymaten \u00e4r den bild som kanske mer \u00e4n n\u00e5gon annan bef\u00e4ster _men_ ocks\u00e5 kr\u00e4ver en maskulin sexuell auktoritet. Betraktaren tilltalas som n\u00e5gon som ska inta en viss position till det som \"sker\" i bilden: han som vet vad som ska g\u00f6ras. Dessa bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor talar ju ocks\u00e5 om f\u00f6r betraktaren att han \u00e4r \u00e5tr\u00e5dd. Denna (imagin\u00e4ra) feminina bekr\u00e4ftelse ing\u00e5r som en del i en hypermaskulin gemenskap och visar att denna reaktion\u00e4ra maskulinitet l\u00f6nar sig, den ger utdelning; man blir n\u00e5gon som har r\u00e4tten att se och att bli \u00e5tr\u00e5dd.\n\nVad som framst\u00e5r som en paradox \u00e4r att m\u00e4n i dessa tidningar framst\u00e4lls som styrda av sitt sexuella beg\u00e4r samtidigt som de ska vara k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssigt autonoma i relation till kvinnor. Denna mots\u00e4gelse, d\u00e4r sexualiteten skulle kunna g\u00f6ra honom helt beroende av kvinnors godk\u00e4nnande, l\u00f6ser man genom att de uppvisade unga kvinnorna positioneras som tillg\u00e4ngliga, b\u00e5de symboliskt \u2013 i utviksbilder \u2013 och rent faktiskt \u2013 p\u00e5 olika evenemang och klubbar. De ska f\u00f6rkroppsliga en sexualitet som \u00e4r avskild fr\u00e5n k\u00e4nslom\u00e4ssiga faror och intimitet. P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet kan sexualitet framst\u00e4llas som hedonistiskt utlevande och som en mer okontrollerbar kraft men utan att hota att ta \u00f6ver m\u00e4ns sj\u00e4lvkontroll.\n\nI denna mediala grabbkultur och dess glamour\u00f6sa mjukpornografiska alster framtr\u00e4der en maskulinitet som ekar av de regleringar och sp\u00e4nningar som togs upp i kapitel ett, som l\u00e4ngtan och hotande intimitet. Den illustrerar en id\u00e9 om maskulinitet fylld av b\u00e5de avst\u00e5nd fr\u00e5n och l\u00e4ngtan efter det feminina. Det \u00e4r en \u00e5tr\u00e5 d\u00e4r m\u00e4n ska avvisa det feminina f\u00f6r att kunna bli delaktiga i en manlig gemenskap. Det \u00e4r en manlig gemenskap d\u00e4r det som kvinnor st\u00e5r f\u00f6r ska vara helt separerat fr\u00e5n det som m\u00e4n representerar och det som m\u00e4n absolut inte ska identifiera sig med.\n\nKvinnor placeras som idealiserade kroppar att titta p\u00e5, \u00e5tr\u00e5, f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka f\u00e5nga, eller snarare ragga upp. Samtidigt ska m\u00e4n vara oberoende av kvinnor f\u00f6r att vara \"riktiga\" m\u00e4n. D\u00e4rf\u00f6r kan ocks\u00e5 dessa lockande kroppar uppfattas som hot och avvisas som egna subjekt.\n\nI denna dubbelhet av beg\u00e4r och avst\u00e5ndstagande, levererad som uttryck f\u00f6r en naturlig maskulinitet, blir den sexualitet unga m\u00e4n ska ta till sig konstruerad efter schizofrena linjer. Att l\u00e4ra sig ta avst\u00e5nd fr\u00e5n det som samtidigt ska beg\u00e4ras \u2013 eller att inf\u00f6rliva beg\u00e4r med avst\u00e5ndstagande \u2013 kan naturligtvis skapa f\u00f6rakt eller i vart fall en kluvenhet inf\u00f6r just de k\u00e4nslor som beg\u00e4ret kan v\u00e4cka. Och i f\u00f6rl\u00e4ngningen inf\u00f6r den Hon som ska locka fram dem.\n\nHur dessa bildm\u00f6nster av feminina kroppar och slutna mansansikten eller avkl\u00e4dda berusade m\u00e4n, hanteras n\u00e4r ungdomar g\u00f6r sig sj\u00e4lva till bild diskuteras i n\u00e4sta kapitel, utifr\u00e5n de sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt ungdomar v\u00e4ljer att l\u00e4gga ut av sig sj\u00e4lva p\u00e5 den popul\u00e4ra sajten Snyggast.se.\n\n# 5.\n\n# Jaget som bild\n\n> \"R\u00f6sta sn\u00e4llt...\"\n\nVarje dag loggar tusentals ungdomar, fr\u00e4mst mellan 13 och 18 \u00e5r, in p\u00e5 den popul\u00e4ra webbsajten Snyggast.se f\u00f6r att, med hj\u00e4lp av bilder, f\u00e5 kontakt med varandra.\n\nInternet har skapat nya sociala milj\u00f6er med nya s\u00e4tt att kommunicera mellan m\u00e4nniskor. Det \u00e4r ett massmedium som till skillnad fr\u00e5n tidningar, tv och radio \u00e4r till f\u00f6r _massproducerande,_ inte bara masskonsumerande. Det som l\u00e4ggs ut p\u00e5 n\u00e4tet blir direkt offentligt f\u00f6r en stor publik. Detta medf\u00f6r en ny typ av medial synlighet d\u00e4r man b\u00e5de kan vara publik och producent, d\u00e4r man b\u00e5de kan se och bli sedd.\n\nUppluckringen av gr\u00e4nser mellan privat och offentligt utm\u00e4rker i mycket kommunikationen p\u00e5 Internet. H\u00e4r finns en uppsj\u00f6 material av dagboksliknande karakt\u00e4r d\u00e4r intima k\u00e4nslor och upplevelser, som s\u00e4llan skulle l\u00e4mnas ut i andra offentliga milj\u00f6er (till exempel p\u00e5 arbetsplatser eller skolor), redog\u00f6rs f\u00f6r. Studier i USA visar att ungdomar \u00e4r v\u00e4ldigt m\u00e5na om att presentera en bild av sig sj\u00e4lva som b\u00e5de ger ett moget intryck och \u00e4r i samklang med r\u00e5dande modekoder inom den egna gruppen. En f\u00f6rklaring till att m\u00e5nga ton\u00e5ringar p\u00e5 hemsidor och liknande ber\u00e4ttar s\u00e5dant de annars inte skulle avsl\u00f6ja f\u00f6r fr\u00e4mlingar \u00e4r att de utg\u00e5r fr\u00e5n att publiken till st\u00f6rsta delen \u00e4r personer de redan k\u00e4nner \"(IRL, \"In real life\"). M\u00e5nga av dem var exempelvis s\u00e4kra p\u00e5 att deras f\u00f6r\u00e4ldrar aldrig skulle l\u00e4sa eller se dessa hemsidor. Denna blindhet inf\u00f6r att vem som helst faktiskt kan ta del av det som l\u00e4ggs ut p\u00e5 Internet kan delvis f\u00f6rklaras med att den mesta kommunikationen sker i hemmet, i det egna rummet framf\u00f6r datorn.\n\nDetta kan skapa en k\u00e4nsla av intimitet som \u00f6verskuggar det faktum att det man skriver eller de bilder man l\u00e4gger ut blir offentliga. Det intima (det egna rummet) f\u00f6ljer s\u00e5 att s\u00e4ga med materialet ut i cyberrymden.\n\nSnyggast.se \u00e4r en kommersiell webbsajt som riktar sig till unga. Vid sidan av reklam best\u00e5r inneh\u00e5llet av eget material fr\u00e5n bes\u00f6karna sj\u00e4lva: dikter, ber\u00e4ttelser och bilder. Sajtens bilder \u00e4r indelade i flera grupper: Tjejer & killar\/ Tjejer\/Killar\/Barn\/N\u00e4rbilder\/ Kul bilder\/Djur\/Bakgrundsbild. Under rubrikerna \"Tjejer top-10\" och \"Killar top-10\" finns de som f\u00e5tt flest r\u00f6ster f\u00f6r sina portr\u00e4ttbilder, under en och samma dag kan bilderna byta rangordningsplats. Klickar man h\u00e4r kommer respektive bild upp i huvudrutan, med en kort bildtext fr\u00e5n personen i fr\u00e5ga, under vilken man kan v\u00e4lja mellan \"Skicka bild till mobil\" och \"Skicka sms till mig!\". Under bilden ligger \u00e4ven en rektangul\u00e4r ruta; \"R\u00f6sta f\u00f6r att se n\u00e4sta bild!\", med en po\u00e4ngskala fr\u00e5n 1 (d\u00e4r det st\u00e5r \"Urk\") och 10 (d\u00e4r det st\u00e5r \"Wow!\"), samt texten \"Kommentera bild\". N\u00e4r en r\u00f6st sedan lagts p\u00e5 den utsatta po\u00e4ngskalan kommer man vidare till n\u00e4sta bild av personen ifr\u00e5ga och kan l\u00e4sa kommentarer fr\u00e5n andra samt skicka egna om man \u00e4r inloggad.\n\n\u00c4ven om detta med att kommunicera med hj\u00e4lp av sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt inte \u00e4r n\u00e5got nytt, tillf\u00f6r Internet nya dimensioner. Det handlar inte minst om teknologin som g\u00f6r det m\u00f6jligt med direkt respons fr\u00e5n en potentiellt stor och delvis anonym publik.\n\nEftersom bilderna p\u00e5 Snyggast.se inte bara \u00e4r d\u00e4r f\u00f6r att tittas p\u00e5, utan ocks\u00e5 ska bed\u00f6mas och rangordnas, f\u00e5r betraktarna en domarposition d\u00e4r de b\u00e5de kan r\u00f6sta och skriva kommentarer som sedan andra bes\u00f6kare kan ta del av.\n\nSj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tten p\u00e5 Snyggast.se har flera funktioner. De anv\u00e4nds f\u00f6r att s\u00f6ka kontakt med andra ungdomar, f\u00f6r att s\u00f6ka bekr\u00e4ftelse och de visar ett fysiskt idealt jag som man vill f\u00f6rknippas med. Det sista g\u00e4ller f\u00f6rvisso f\u00f6r m\u00e5nga bildtyper, men \u00e4n mer f\u00f6r dem som uttryckligen ska bed\u00f6mas och po\u00e4ngs\u00e4ttas, som bilderna p\u00e5 Snyggast.se. D\u00e4rmed har bilderna en annan funktion \u00e4n texterna p\u00e5 denna sajt. B\u00e5da kan naturligtvis s\u00e4gas vara d\u00e4r f\u00f6r att visa vem man \u00e4r (eller vill vara), men texterna ing\u00e5r inte i ett rangordningssystem, vilket bilderna g\u00f6r. Den visuella framst\u00e4llningen av jaget \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r mer utsatt f\u00f6r ett direkt och \u00f6ppet v\u00e4rderande. Sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tten _f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas_ bli uppskattade och f\u00e5 b\u00e5de h\u00f6ga po\u00e4ng och positiva kommentarer. De blickar och poser som ungdomarna v\u00e4ljer att anv\u00e4nda kan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som deras versioner av vad en uppskattad femininitet och maskulinitet ser ut som.\n\nTill skillnad fr\u00e5n n\u00e4r vi skriver om oss sj\u00e4lva, d\u00e4r hobbyer, intressen och \u00e5sikter i olika \u00e4mnen kan ing\u00e5, uttrycker bilden f\u00e4rre men kanske mer intensiva aspekter av oss. Med hj\u00e4lp av gester och ansiktsuttryck ska olika k\u00e4nslor f\u00f6rmedlas till betraktaren. K\u00e4nslor som kommunicerar l\u00e4ngtan, lycka, sorgsenhet, sj\u00e4lvs\u00e4kerhet, upphetsning, ensamhet och s\u00e5 vidare. Om detta sedan st\u00e4mmer med vad personen faktiskt k\u00e4nner \u00e4r inte det v\u00e4sentliga, utan snarare id\u00e9n om att bilden visar upp en \"k\u00e4nslosanning\".\n\nEnligt sociologen Erving Goffman f\u00f6rs\u00f6ker vi i umg\u00e4nget med andra m\u00e4nniskor framst\u00e5 p\u00e5 ett s\u00e5dant s\u00e4tt att vi ska bli accepterade och vara n\u00e5gon man tar h\u00e4nsyn till. Vad som sedan \u00e4r ett accepterat beteende \u00e4r beroende av k\u00f6n, klass, etnicitet, \u00e5lder, och _var_ vi \u00e4r, om vi \u00e4r hemma, \u00e4r med v\u00e4nner eller med fr\u00e4mlingar. Och \u00e4ven om Internet skiljer sig fr\u00e5n faktiska fysiska m\u00f6ten, ansikte mot ansikte, \u00e4r detta med att bli accepterad kanske av \u00e4n st\u00f6rre vikt. H\u00e4r kan vi bli m\u00f6tta och v\u00e4rderade av en mycket stor publik \u2013 som ocks\u00e5 kan f\u00e5 ta del av hur andra v\u00e4rderar oss.\n\nI bilder anv\u00e4nder vi m\u00e5nga ansiktsuttryck, blickar och gester h\u00e4mtade fr\u00e5n det vardagliga umg\u00e4nget med andra. Men vi anv\u00e4nder ocks\u00e5 ett slags kamerabeteende n\u00e4r bilder ska tas. Vi fryser vissa r\u00f6relser och kan anv\u00e4nda poser som vi vanligtvis inte anv\u00e4nder offentligt, eftersom de utanf\u00f6r bilden kan verka \u00f6verdrivna och tillgjorda.\n\nI sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt kan vi visa de mest intima sidorna av oss sj\u00e4lva samtidigt som det alltid rymmer ett avst\u00e5ndstagande d\u00e4r vi st\u00e4ller oss \"utanf\u00f6r\" och g\u00f6r oss till en \"bildkropp\" genom att posera p\u00e5 ett visst s\u00e4tt. Sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4ttet \u00e4r skilt fr\u00e5n mer avsl\u00f6jande bilder, som till exempel snapshoten d\u00e4r man ofta \u00e4r omedveten om kameran. Men sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt visar oss som vi vill bli sedda och uppfattade, och i den bem\u00e4rkelsen f\u00f6rmedlar de en \"sann\" bild av jaget.\n\nDen mest anv\u00e4nda kameran p\u00e5 Internet \u00e4r webbkameran och den st\u00f6rsta delen av sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tten p\u00e5 Snyggast.se \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 tagna med s\u00e5dan. Webbkameran skapar i sig en viss bildform eftersom den sitter fast vid datorn och bara f\u00e5ngar in en begr\u00e4nsad yta. D\u00e4rf\u00f6r ser man ibland poser som \u00e4r ovanliga f\u00f6r andra kameratyper, ansiktet som h\u00e5lls riktigt n\u00e4ra linsen och s\u00e5 vidare. Man kan naturligtvis ocks\u00e5 fr\u00e5ga sig hur mycket webbkamerans estetik p\u00e5verkar fotograferande \u00f6verlag. I s\u00e5 kallade partybilder, som \u00e4r en v\u00e4xande bildgenre b\u00e5de p\u00e5 privata hemsidor och i olika medier, syns ofta ansikten upptryckta mot linsen. Webbkameran kan ocks\u00e5 ge intryck av att skapa en mer direkt och \"\u00e4kta\" bild, eftersom det inte finns n\u00e5gra mellanh\u00e4nder utan det vi ser visas direkt f\u00f6r oss. Att det ofta \u00e4r det egna rummet som bilden tas i bidrar s\u00e4kert \u00e4ven det till en k\u00e4nsla av intimitet.\n\n## N\u00c4RHET OCH KROPPSLIGA TILLTAL\n\nDe tjejer som r\u00f6stas fram p\u00e5 tio-i-topp listan och blir h\u00f6gst v\u00e4rderade (i bem\u00e4rkelsen h\u00f6ga tittarsiffror) refererar alla i n\u00e5gon form till en sexuell retorik. Det vanligaste \u00e4r att ansikte och byst \u00e4r i bildfokus. Bysten understryks som en tydlig klyfta, det vill s\u00e4ga markering av br\u00f6stens delning, med hj\u00e4lp av poser och kl\u00e4der \u2013 ofta \u00e5tsmitande urringade linnen eller t-tr\u00f6jor. Poserna kan variera, men kroppen vrids eller placeras s\u00e5 att br\u00f6stklyftan alltid ska vara synlig.\n\nI m\u00e5nga bilder tittar flickorna med en sidoblick mot betraktaren, sm\u00e5ler och h\u00e5ller huvudet lite nedb\u00f6jt s\u00e5 att ansikte och byst har lika stor plats i bilden. Den n\u00e5got flirtande sidoblicken tillsammans med den framh\u00e4vda bysten skapar en typ av \"come-on-look\", men sm\u00e5leendet kan g\u00f6ra tilltalet mer oskyldigt. Denna pose visar p\u00e5 en \"uttalad\" \u00f6nskan om att bli uppskattad f\u00f6r det man visar upp. Genom att l\u00e5ta bysten ta stor plats \u2013 som om bilden av jaget inte \u00e4r fullst\u00e4ndigt utan den \u2013 s\u00e4ger den att jag ser vad du ser, eller vad jag vill att du ser.\n\nI andra bilder \u00e4r kameran placerad n\u00e5got ovanifr\u00e5n s\u00e5 att betraktaren s\u00e5 att s\u00e4ga tittar ned i urringningen. Blickarna \u00e4r h\u00e4r ofta riktade snett ned\u00e5t eller snett ut\u00e5t som om man \u00e4r omedveten om att man blir betraktad. Ansiktet \u00e4r samtidigt vridet s\u00e5 att bysten g\u00f6rs tydligt tillg\u00e4nglig f\u00f6r betraktelse. \u00c4ven h\u00e4r h\u00e5lls huvudet i en position s\u00e5 att det inte intar mer plats \u00e4n bysten, eller snarare inte konkurrerar med bysten. Den bortv\u00e4nda blicken kan ses som ett tecken p\u00e5 att man viker undan och l\u00e5ter sig, eller det man visar upp (bysten), bli besett. Vi kan ocks\u00e5 se hur detta uttrycker en form av \"anst\u00e4ndighet\". I motsats till ett mer \u00f6ppet tillbakatittande, som visar att man medvetet visar upp sig, blir intrycket n\u00e4r man tittar bort en mer \"oskyldig\" exponering. Betraktaren bjuds h\u00e4r in till ett mer klassiskt \"peeping-tom\" - scenario, d\u00e4r lockelsen \u00e4r illusionen om att f\u00e5 se det man egentligen inte ska f\u00e5 se.\n\nI en mindre grupp bilder skapas ett sexuellt tilltal ist\u00e4llet utifr\u00e5n inbjudande ansiktsuttryck, med s\u00e4nkta \u00f6gonlock och halv\u00f6ppna munnar \u2013 ett slags \" face of pleasure\". Andra mindre vanliga bilder visar kroppen i halv- och helformat. Antingen lutas kroppen i sidled, vilket g\u00f6r att bystens form markeras medan en svankad rygg framh\u00e4ver bakdelen, eller s\u00e5 st\u00e5r man v\u00e4nd mot kameran s\u00e5 att kroppen f\u00f6rsvinner ned i bild och fokus \u00e4r p\u00e5 urringning och ansikte.\n\nI alla de framr\u00f6stade bilderna v\u00e4nder sig flickorna tydligt till en t\u00e4nkt betraktare. Kamera\u00f6gat blir b\u00e5de som en spegel inf\u00f6r vilken de poserar och ett f\u00f6nster ut mot betraktaren och dennes reaktioner. Att betraktaren \u00e4r n\u00f6dv\u00e4ndig f\u00f6r att bilden ska fullborda sitt tilltal syns \u00e4ven i de korta bildtexterna d\u00e4r det \u00e4r vanligt med fr\u00e5gor om hur man uppfattas: \"s\u00f6t?\", \"het kropp?\", liksom att man ber den som ser att r\u00f6sta sn\u00e4llt: \"sn\u00e4lla en 10a\", \"r\u00f6sta sn\u00e4llt\". Flickorna ger allts\u00e5 den som tittar en helt central roll b\u00e5de i text och bild. Att visa upp sig som en tillm\u00f6tesg\u00e5ende person verkar ocks\u00e5 viktigt. Leendet, vilket \u00e4r ett tecken p\u00e5 att man \u00e4r v\u00e4nligt inst\u00e4lld till den som ser, betonas ofta. Detta kan \u00e4ven ske i bildtexter n\u00e4r bilden inte visar en leende person, antingen med ett utskrivet * ler * eller tecknet f\u00f6r smiley \u2013 :).\n\nVad som spelas upp i dessa bilder \u00e4r ett scenario d\u00e4r betraktarnas bed\u00f6manden \u00e4r det viktiga. Bed\u00f6manden som (f\u00f6rhoppningsvis) ska bekr\u00e4fta flickorna som beg\u00e4rliga. Denna form av \u00f6ppet erk\u00e4nnande b\u00e5de av dem sj\u00e4lva som \"anblickar\", f\u00f6r att anv\u00e4nda John Bergers ord, och av betraktaren som bed\u00f6mare, verkar vara centralt f\u00f6r den id\u00e9 om korrekt femininitet som cirkulerar p\u00e5 denna sajt.\n\nFlickornas portr\u00e4tt f\u00f6ljer i mycket de poser och ansiktsuttryck som \u00e4r vanliga i semi- eller mjukpornografiska bilder off-line. De visar upp ett inbjudande bildjag som s\u00f6ker uppskattning och d\u00e4r framh\u00e4vandet av bysten understryks (den kroppsdel som framh\u00e4vs mest inom semi- och mjukpornografin).\n\nP\u00e5 Snyggast.se ska flickornas visa att de har en kropp och att de \u00e4r medvetna om att de har en kropp \u2013 br\u00f6st \u00e4r ju \u00e4ven tecken p\u00e5 sexuell mognad i ton\u00e5ren. Men det handlar inte om att bara visa upp bysten, den ska visas efter ett fastst\u00e4llt m\u00f6nster, ha en viss storlek och h\u00f6jd som ger en tydlig klyfta. P\u00e5 samma g\u00e5ng f\u00e5r de inte vara f\u00f6r i\u00f6gonfallande eller f\u00f6r tydligt visa upp sin kropp. I bilder d\u00e4r br\u00f6sten tydligt ser ut som implantat eller \u00e4r f\u00f6r uppenbart framh\u00e4vda kan pendeln sl\u00e5 \u00f6ver. Kommentarer, fr\u00e4mst fr\u00e5n andra tjejer, talar d\u00e5 om att personen \u00e4r en \"hora\" eller \"gjordis\" som bara anv\u00e4nder sin kropp f\u00f6r att f\u00e5 r\u00f6ster. Detta fenomen \u00e5terkommer jag till l\u00e4ngre fram.\n\n## DISTANS OCH OKROPPSLIGHET\n\nI pojkarnas bilder \u00e4r det ansiktet som dominerar. Extrema n\u00e4rbilder med ansiktet eller huvudet v\u00e4nt n\u00e5got bort fr\u00e5n kameran \u00e4r vanliga, men ocks\u00e5 n\u00e4rbilder d\u00e4r ansikte, skuldror och armar syns. I motsats till flickorna verkar man sky allt som kan anspela p\u00e5 en sexuell retorik, tillg\u00e4nglighet eller n\u00e4rhet till betraktaren. De vanligaste ansiktsuttrycken \u00e4r det n\u00e5got melankoliska, det lite vresiga eller det oengagerade. H\u00e4nder och armar \u00e4r med p\u00e5 m\u00e5nga av n\u00e4rbilderna och med dem signalerar man ocks\u00e5 olika k\u00e4nslotillst\u00e5nd.\n\nDen vanligaste bilden \u00e4r d\u00e4r man f\u00f6refaller upptagen av n\u00e5got, exempelvis att stirra in i en datorsk\u00e4rm. Huvudet \u00e4r ofta vridet fr\u00e5n kameran s\u00e5 att ansiktsdragen \u00e4r sv\u00e5ra att urskilja. I m\u00e5nga bilder lutar pojkarna hakan i handen, h\u00e5ller handen vid munnen eller vid huvudet, medan blicken \u00e4r riktad upp\u00e5t eller ned\u00e5t. Det \u00e4r gester som uttrycker fundersamhet, seriositet och en upptagenhet med de egna k\u00e4nslorna och tankarna. Vad som f\u00f6rmedlas \u00e4r ett intryck av sj\u00e4lvupptagen fundersamhet. Deras tankar \u00e4r n\u00e5gon annanstans (riktade mot h\u00f6gre ting), inte \"n\u00e4rvarande\" f\u00f6r att s\u00f6ka kontakt med betraktaren. Dessa tecken p\u00e5 ointaglighet kan ocks\u00e5 vara det som man tror \u00e4r tilltalande f\u00f6r betraktaren.\n\nEn annan attityd uttrycks i de bilder d\u00e4r de h\u00e5ller armen p\u00e5 eller runtom kroppen, som om de tr\u00f6star eller skyddar sig sj\u00e4lva. Dessa poser ger intryck av melankoli, ensamhet och l\u00e4ngtan \u2013 den in\u00e5tv\u00e4nda och samtidigt ledsna unga mannen. I andra bilder \u00e4r armen upplyft och h\u00e5lls antingen p\u00e5 eller bakom huvudet, en gest som drar uppm\u00e4rksamheten till ansiktet men ocks\u00e5 understryker r\u00f6relse. Den visar att man g\u00f6r n\u00e5got, eller \u00e4r p\u00e5 v\u00e4g att g\u00f6ra n\u00e5got, och d\u00e4rf\u00f6r inte \u00e4r engagerad i betraktaren. \u00c4ven om posen pekar p\u00e5 en viss kroppslig sj\u00e4lvmedvetenhet, eftersom man ofta visar \u00f6verarmens biceps, ska det framst\u00e5 som en omedveten posering.\n\nI n\u00e5gra f\u00e5 bilder finns ett mer romantiskt tilltal d\u00e4r man vilar huvudet mot armen och ser rakt in i kameran. H\u00e4r finns det mest uppenbara kontakts\u00f6kandet med betraktaren, som inbjuds att ta del av vad de k\u00e4nner genom att iaktta \u00f6gonens uttryck (kommentarerna visar att detta \u00e4r bilder som flickorna uppskattar). Det \u00e4r ett intimt tilltal som liknar en ansikte-mot-ansikte scen \u2013 precis innan en kyss. Det ska till\u00e4ggas att denna typ av bilder alltmer verkar f\u00f6rsvinna fr\u00e5n pojkarnas tio-i-topp listor.\n\nI de flesta bildtexterna finns beskrivningar i neutrala former s\u00e5som \"jag\", personnamn eller bara l\u00e4ten som \"aggh\". Fr\u00e5gor eller v\u00e4djanden till betraktaren att r\u00f6sta sn\u00e4llt f\u00f6rekommer n\u00e4stan aldrig. Pojkarna ger ist\u00e4llet \u00e4ven i texterna intryck av att vara ober\u00f6rda inf\u00f6r bed\u00f6mningar.\n\nDet st\u00e4ndiga anv\u00e4ndandet av armar och h\u00e4nder i dessa sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt kan ses som ett s\u00e4tt att distansera sig fr\u00e5n betraktaren. De markerar p\u00e5 olika s\u00e4tt att man g\u00f6r n\u00e5got. Man t\u00e4nker, funderar eller \u00e4r p\u00e5 andra s\u00e4tt helt upptagen med sig sj\u00e4lv. Distansering blir s\u00e5ledes ett s\u00e4tt f\u00f6r dem att uts\u00e4tta sig f\u00f6r betraktarens bed\u00f6mningar utan att det kan kopplas till den feminina position detta utg\u00f6r i v\u00e5r kultur. De g\u00f6r vad flickorna g\u00f6r \u2013 l\u00e5ter sig besk\u00e5das \u2013 men utan att l\u00e5tsas om det. De olika hand- och armposerna blockerar allts\u00e5 den icke-maskulina position detta med att bli tittad p\u00e5 som ett tilltalande blickf\u00e5ng kan inneb\u00e4ra. Det \u00e4r just distansering fr\u00e5n betraktaren som verkar anses vara en korrekt uppvisad heterosexuell maskulinitet.\n\nDen kroppsliga sj\u00e4lvmedvetenhet som i stort sett alla flickornas bilder uppvisar \u00e4r inte bara fr\u00e5nvarande i pojkarnas bilder, den verkar snarare vara det som bilderna arbetar mot. Om kroppen visas upp g\u00f6rs det i spexande bilder, alternativt p\u00e5 ett s\u00e4tt s\u00e5 att det inte f\u00f6refaller medvetet. Bilderna pr\u00e4glas av det framh\u00e4vda ansiktet i s\u00e5 h\u00f6g grad att de ibland ger intryck av en okroppslig manlighet.\n\n\u00d6verlag \u00e4r dessa sj\u00e4lvbilder p\u00e5 unga m\u00e4n l\u00e5ngt fr\u00e5n den hypermaskulina kroppen, med muskul\u00f6sa bringor, sammanbitna k\u00e4kar och sv\u00e4llande \u00f6verarmar, som \u00e4r s\u00e5 framtr\u00e4dande inom s\u00e5v\u00e4l data- och tv-spel som i actionfilmer. Pojkarnas oengagerade slutna ansiktsuttryck p\u00e5minner mer om portr\u00e4ttbilder av m\u00e4n som \u00e4r vanliga i tidningar som _Slitz_ och _Moore_. Flera bildposer har sin tur likhet med pojkidolsestetiken, med en tr\u00e5nande pojkromantik, d\u00e4r sorgsenhet ofta \u00e4r en tydlig ingrediens. Jag t\u00e4nker h\u00e4r p\u00e5 pojkband som East 17, Backstreet boys, NKOTB, Take That och Westlife. F\u00f6rvisso \u00e4r bilder av dem mer fokuserade p\u00e5 kroppen \u00e4n dessa sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt, men samtidigt visar de upp en sorts melankolisk otillg\u00e4nglighet (kanske upptagna av sina brustna hj\u00e4rtan som mycket av lyriken handlar om), som kan \u00e5terses p\u00e5 Snyggast.se.\n\nDistansering och melankolisk otillg\u00e4nglighet kan ocks\u00e5 skapa band till betraktaren som handlar om f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka f\u00f6rst\u00e5, f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka tolka vad han p\u00e5 bilden k\u00e4nner. Och eftersom det inte \u00e4r uppenbart blir detta s\u00f6kande efter bildens (eller hans) \"k\u00e4nslosanning\" det som lockar, eller det betraktaren f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas \u00e4gna sig \u00e5t.\n\nDessa sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt av unga m\u00e4n utg\u00f6r en bildform som \u00e4r, eller har varit, relativt osynlig i det offentliga, det vill s\u00e4ga bilder p\u00e5 och av m\u00e4n riktade till och bed\u00f6mda av en kvinnlig betraktare. Den erotiserade kroppen \u00e4r konventionellt kodad f\u00f6r en maskulin blick, antingen det \u00e4r kvinnor eller m\u00e4n p\u00e5 bilderna (den bildkultur d\u00e4r m\u00e4n traditionellt har visats upp p\u00e5 samma s\u00e4tt som kvinnor \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 i sexuella bilder riktade till homosexuella m\u00e4n). Att som ung man placera sig i positionen av den beg\u00e4rliga kan d\u00e4rf\u00f6r \u00e4ventyra en heterosexuellt uppvisad (bild)identitet, \u00e4ven i forum d\u00e4r den r\u00f6stande publiken antas vara unga kvinnor. Det finns \u00e4ven homosociala aspekter som styr hur pojkarnas sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt formas. P\u00e5 samma s\u00e4tt som med de kritiska kommentarerna tjejer emellan inf\u00f6r ett alltf\u00f6r tydligt kroppsligt tilltal, kan killar bli kritiserade av andra killar om de visar kroppen eller \u00e4r \u00f6ppet kontakts\u00f6kande. Av de portr\u00e4tt jag sett fanns bara ett d\u00e4r en pojke visade ansiktet och en bar mage. Kommentarerna var d\u00e5 av typen: \"Ta bort den d\u00e4r b\u00f6gbilden.\"\n\nAtt f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka f\u00e5 betraktarens godk\u00e4nnande och erk\u00e4nnande, eller att visa upp kroppen, \u00e4r f\u00f6r pojkarna, och den maskulinitet de f\u00f6rh\u00e5ller sig till, allts\u00e5 tecken p\u00e5 icke-heterosexualitet och f\u00f6r tjejerna sj\u00e4lva k\u00e4rnan av heterosexualitet.\n\nI flickornas sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt anv\u00e4nds kroppen f\u00f6r att etablera en relation till betraktaren d\u00e4r det prim\u00e4ra \u00e4r de k\u00e4nslor som bilden kan ge upphov till. I pojkarnas bilder \u00e4r betraktaren snarare ombedd att f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka uppleva deras k\u00e4nslor, komma in i deras v\u00e4rld, medan flickornas bilder ger intrycket av att komma ut och omfamna betraktaren. Flickorna \u00e4r mer interaktiva b\u00e5de med kameran och med publiken d\u00e4r de st\u00e4ller direkta fr\u00e5gor om hur de uppfattas och d\u00e4rmed mer \u00f6ppet beroende av responsens form. I pojkarnas fall g\u00e4ller s\u00e4kert \u00e4ven detta men de framst\u00e5r som sagt som om de vore mer ober\u00f6rda inf\u00f6r den som ser. Det som anses of\u00f6renligt med en ideal feminin version av jaget \u00e4r kroppslig omedvetenhet, sj\u00e4lvupptagenhet och ober\u00f6rdhet inf\u00f6r betraktaren, egenskaper som d\u00e4remot karakteriserar den ideala maskulinitet pojkarna f\u00f6rmedlar. Den semi- och mjukpornografiska estetik som flickorna f\u00f6rh\u00e5ller sig till presenteras ofta i det mediala som ett uttryck f\u00f6r sj\u00e4lvtillr\u00e4cklighet, en form av narcissistisk autonomi, vilket jag tog upp i kapitel fyra. Poserna flickorna anv\u00e4nder ska vara ett uttryck f\u00f6r att de \u00e4r sig sj\u00e4lva nog, men de \u00e4r bara effektiva om betraktaren f\u00f6rh\u00e5ller sig uppskattande till dem. Pojkarnas bilder tilldelar inte betraktaren samma centrala roll, kanske f\u00f6r att f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka framh\u00e5lla ett oberoende inf\u00f6r betraktarnas omd\u00f6men, som de anser \u00e4r ett tecken p\u00e5 manlighet.\n\n## MEDIAL BED\u00d6MNINGSKULTUR\n\nI ungdomarnas sj\u00e4lvbilder finns s\u00e5ledes flera av de komponenter som vi kan se i mycket av dagens bildutbud: femininitet uttrycks som kroppslig sj\u00e4lvmedvetenhet och maskulinitet som okroppslighet, ofta med ansiktsbilder. Denna \"face-ism\" kontra \"body-ism\" \u00e4r inte bara en fr\u00e5ga om vilka kroppsdelar som visas upp, utan ocks\u00e5 om hur k\u00f6nen positioneras och positionerar sig sj\u00e4lva i f\u00f6rh\u00e5llande till varandra. Imiterandet av hur kroppar framst\u00e4lls i medier \u00e4r tydligt b\u00e5de i flickornas villighet att referera till denna mediala bildretorik och i pojkarnas motvilja mot att visa upp eller uttrycka sig p\u00e5 ett kroppsligt s\u00e4tt. Det \u00e4r inte f\u00f6rv\u00e5nande att ungdomar vill anv\u00e4nda sexuella koder i kontakten med andra ungdomar, tv\u00e4rtom. Det \u00e4r vid denna tid vi ofta har v\u00e5ra f\u00f6rsta sexuella erfarenheter med n\u00e5gon annan. Att flickorna konsekvent g\u00f6r det och att pojkarna lika konsekvent inte g\u00f6r det, visar emellertid p\u00e5 att det inte i f\u00f6rsta hand \u00e4r fr\u00e5gan om individuella st\u00e4llningstaganden. Flickors och pojkars imiterande av bildm\u00f6nster off-line kan snarare vara ett s\u00e4tt att visa att man kan hantera den plats man utifr\u00e5n sitt k\u00f6n tilldelas i mediekulturen. En plats man kan str\u00e4va mot n\u00e4r man visar upp sig p\u00e5 en offentlig arena som Internet. Viljan att figurera p\u00e5 Snyggast.se kan ses inte bara som en fr\u00e5ga om att kommunicera med andra ungdomar, utan ocks\u00e5 om m\u00f6jligheten att f\u00e5 delta p\u00e5 denna mediala arena. Medier har ju lyckats etablera sig sj\u00e4lva som en h\u00f6gt v\u00e4rderad plats att synas p\u00e5 och ungdomar \u00e4r den mest eftertraktade mediepubliken. De \u00e4r stora mediekonsumenter samtidigt som de utg\u00f6r framtidens publik, eller som en v\u00e4lk\u00e4nd mediedevis lyder: \"Get them while they're young and keep them forever.\"\n\nAtt l\u00e4gga ut en bild av sig sj\u00e4lv f\u00f6r po\u00e4ngbed\u00f6mning, d\u00e4r inga andra f\u00f6rm\u00e5ner eller priser finns f\u00f6rutom att hamna p\u00e5 listan \u00f6ver de mest r\u00f6stade p\u00e5, inneb\u00e4r att s\u00f6ka bekr\u00e4ftelse och uppskattning utanf\u00f6r den n\u00e4ra v\u00e4nskaps- eller familjekretsen. Denna form av synlighet inneb\u00e4r emellertid alltid en risk f\u00f6r att bli offentligt utd\u00f6md. M\u00f6jligheten att f\u00e5 offentlig bekr\u00e4ftelse p\u00e5 att man som ung kvinna \u00e4r beg\u00e4rlig kanske \u00f6verskuggar r\u00e4dslan eller obehaget inf\u00f6r att bli negativt bed\u00f6md. Inte minst d\u00e5 detta med att bli uppfattad som beg\u00e4rlig framst\u00e4lls som avg\u00f6rande f\u00f6r en lyckad femininitet i medieutbudet. Man kan ju ocks\u00e5 fr\u00e5ga sig om inte de som l\u00e4gger ut sina bilder f\u00f6r bed\u00f6mning anar att de kommer bli positivt bem\u00f6tta. Flickornas poser och utseende \u00e4r v\u00e4ldigt likartade (i h\u00f6gre grad \u00e4n vad pojkarnas \u00e4r). Kanske visar detta att man \u00e4r medveten om hur man b\u00f6r se ut f\u00f6r att \u00f6ver huvud taget l\u00e4gga ut bilder av sig sj\u00e4lv, att man har det som \"kr\u00e4vs\" (om man vill ha h\u00f6ga r\u00f6stpo\u00e4ng).\n\nDet erk\u00e4nnande som h\u00f6ga po\u00e4ng ger \u00e4r att man \u00e4r v\u00e4rd att betraktas, och att man \u00e4r v\u00e4rd att betraktas med beg\u00e4r. Detta bekr\u00e4ftande \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 en h\u00f6griskstrategi \u2013 bara de som kan leva upp till idealen f\u00f6r en \u00e5tr\u00e5v\u00e4rd femininitet kan ha sj\u00e4lvf\u00f6rtroende nog att uts\u00e4tta sig f\u00f6r denna bed\u00f6mning. Men det bygger p\u00e5 att man anpassar sig till den bildkropp som s\u00e4gs vara sinnebilden f\u00f6r ett manligt beg\u00e4r. Sj\u00e4lvk\u00e4nslan kan allts\u00e5 ligga i f\u00f6rm\u00e5gan att f\u00f6rkroppsliga den representerade fiktionen av jaget.\n\nStudier har visat p\u00e5 tydliga samband mellan mediebilders kroppsideal och hur unga kvinnor uppfattar den egna kroppen. Fr\u00e5gor om hur unga m\u00e4n p\u00e5verkas av mediebilder av ideala manskroppar \u00e4r emellertid understuderat, \u00e4ven om det b\u00f6rjar komma forskning, i samband med att fler bilder av m\u00e4ns kroppar dyker upp. Begreppet \"adoniskomplex\" syftar exempelvis p\u00e5 den press m\u00e4n s\u00e4ger sig uppleva inf\u00f6r exponeringen av unga v\u00e4ltr\u00e4nade manskroppar. En nyligen gjord studie visar att unga m\u00e4n f\u00f6rh\u00e5ller sig distanserat till bilder av den h\u00e5rdpornografiska hypermannen, men anser det sv\u00e5rare att vara op\u00e5verkade av den v\u00e4ltr\u00e4nade manskroppen i det vardagliga bildutbudet.\n\nAtt unga kvinnors sj\u00e4lvk\u00e4nsla och kroppsuppfattning hitintills varit mer kopplad till mediebilder \u00e4n unga m\u00e4n, tror jag inte bara ligger i antalet bilder p\u00e5 kvinnokroppar.\n\nEn kropp kan ju fyllas med vilka betydelser som helst. Snarare ligger det i formen f\u00f6r uppvisandet d\u00e4r man insisterar p\u00e5 att visa upp den kvinnliga kroppen som ett objekt f\u00f6r granskning och bed\u00f6mning.\n\nAtt vara den som blir sedd tillr\u00e4knas ofta st\u00f6rre betydelse \u00e4n att vara den som ser. Men detta b\u00e4r p\u00e5 en n\u00f6dv\u00e4ndig dubbelhet. I en medial kultur d\u00e4r att bli sedd, att vara visuellt definierad, har ett h\u00f6gt v\u00e4rde \u00e4r den som ser utrustad med en specifik makt \u2013 bed\u00f6mandet. Bed\u00f6mandet av jaget, som \u00e4r sj\u00e4lva k\u00e4rnan p\u00e5 Snyggast.se, utg\u00f6r ocks\u00e5 en stor del av mediekulturen \u00f6verlag i dag. Att v\u00e4lja, att v\u00e4rdera, att r\u00f6sta in eller att r\u00f6sta ut \u00e4r huvudteman inom m\u00e5nga programformat sedan nittiotalet, inte minst i reality- och dokus\u00e5pagenrerna. Bed\u00f6mandet kan ta sig m\u00e5nga olika uttryck. Antingen kan vi som publik delta aktivt och l\u00e4gga v\u00e5ra r\u00f6ster p\u00e5 eller r\u00f6sta bort olika deltagare, eller s\u00e5 ing\u00e5r en jury i sj\u00e4lva programmet. Vilken form v\u00e4rderandet \u00e4n tar sig ska personer kritiskt bed\u00f6mas i olika situationer: som f\u00f6r\u00e4ldrar, som makar, som modeller, som sexpartners, som bantare eller som presumtiva makar. Utseenden och beteenden samt hur v\u00e4l man klarar av att f\u00f6r\u00e4ndra eller f\u00f6rb\u00e4ttra sig och sina \"tillkortakommanden\" \u00e4r de element som ska locka oss till tv-sofforna, eller till att l\u00e4sa kv\u00e4llspressens f\u00f6ljetonger.\n\nVad st\u00e5r d\u00e5 detta bed\u00f6mande f\u00f6r och vad kan det t\u00e4nkas f\u00e5 f\u00f6r konsekvenser?\n\n\u00c5 ena sidan ska det ge publiken en k\u00e4nsla av att vara direkt inblandad i det som sker framf\u00f6r kamerorna, n\u00e5got som ska st\u00e4rka identifikationen med ett visst program och ge h\u00f6ga publiksiffror. \u00c5 andra sidan legitimeras v\u00e5rt v\u00e4rderande av andra utifr\u00e5n deras yttre attribut, deras utseende, deras kl\u00e4dstil och deras kroppsbeteenden. Det \u00e4r uppdelandet, indelandet, avskiljandet som \u00e4r ledmotivet, vilket \u00e4ven f\u00f6ljer en dramaturgisk medielogik, d\u00e4r f\u00e5 nyanser finns och d\u00e4r individers sociala f\u00f6rm\u00e5ga, eller snarare mediala f\u00f6rm\u00e5ga skapar f\u00f6rdelar. Vad som v\u00e4rderas \u00e4r hanterandet av jaget i vissa situationer och inte s\u00e4llan hur man lyckas f\u00f6r\u00e4ndra sig sj\u00e4lv visuellt, allts\u00e5 f\u00f6r\u00e4ndra sin kropp s\u00e5 den blir smalare, friskare, yngre och mer v\u00e4lkl\u00e4dd.\n\nDet som genereras ur denna mediekultur \u00e4r ett v\u00e4rderande seende d\u00e4r vi l\u00e4r oss bed\u00f6ma kroppar och moralisera \u00f6ver deras utseende och upptr\u00e4dande utifr\u00e5n en visuell logik; vi ser och det vi ser ska bed\u00f6mas. Denna v\u00e4rderande medieblick syns p\u00e5 flera h\u00e5ll. _Veckorevyn_ \u00e4r en av de mer tongivande tidningarna f\u00f6r unga kvinnor mellan femton och tjugofem \u00e5r (\u00e4ven om deras publik i m\u00e5nga fall \u00e4r yngre). H\u00e4r kan vi se ett alltmer ing\u00e5ende granskande av andra kvinnor, och allt fler bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor \u00f6ver lag. I ett nummer med cirka trehundra bilder \u00e4r mer \u00e4n \u00e5ttiofem procent bilder p\u00e5 kvinnor och inte p\u00e5 m\u00e4n. Publiken ska v\u00e4rdera kvinnors kroppsdelar och f\u00f6rfasas (eller gl\u00e4djas?) \u00f6ver deras icke-perfektion: vem som har g\u00e5tt upp eller ned i vikt, har slapp byst och s\u00e5 vidare. Bilder med inringade kroppsdelar, f\u00f6ljda av texter s\u00e5som \"H\u00e4r ser vi celluliter \", \" [...] hennes ber\u00f6mda rumpa \u00e4r inte helt felfri \", \" Rynkigt och svullet \", skapar en f\u00f6raktfull blick som var fr\u00e5nvarande f\u00f6r tio \u00e5r sedan ( _Veckorevyn_ 2005\/14). Och i st\u00e4ndigt bildfokus \u00e4r br\u00f6sten. K\u00e4nda kvinnors br\u00f6st diskuteras och visas med mer eller mindre dr\u00e4pande kommentarer (se bildark s. 16). D\u00e5 dessa kroppsdelar visas upp f\u00f6r publiken som objekt att granska och v\u00e4rdera, tilldelas de en fetischistisk funktion, men inte i en sexuell betydelse. Snarare diskuteras de p\u00e5 samma s\u00e4tt som kl\u00e4dstilar, plagg och attribut, allts\u00e5 som element f\u00f6r omarbetning.\n\nEtt resultat av denna ing\u00e5ende granskning \u00e4r att det \u00e4r i kroppen bed\u00f6mandet f\u00f6rl\u00e4ggs: i br\u00f6sten, i huden, i h\u00e5ret och l\u00e4pparnas utseende, inte i kl\u00e4der och mode. S\u00e4rskilt tydligt blir det i de bilder d\u00e4r kvinnor inte \u00e4r medvetna om att de blir betraktade, utan \u00e4r \"caught off guard\" och inte poserar. Det \u00e4r h\u00e4r som kroppens brister \"avsl\u00f6jas\" och riskerar att d\u00f6mas ut av andra kvinnor och offentliga blickar. Det \u00e4r naturligtvis inte vilka kroppar som helst som dissekeras och diskuteras p\u00e5 detta s\u00e4tt. Det \u00e4r framg\u00e5ngsrika, k\u00e4nda kvinnor vars sociala position inte medf\u00f6r n\u00e5gon skyddande osynlighet, tv\u00e4rtom. Den f\u00f6raktfulla tonen verkar ha ett starkt samband med att k\u00e4ndisjournalistiken och dess snapshotbilder ges mer utrymme, h\u00e4r som i s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga andra medier. Denna typ av bilder ing\u00e5r i den alltmer f\u00f6rh\u00e4rskande diskurs som f\u00f6rmedlas i mycket av den feminina mediekulturen, vikten av st\u00e4ndig kroppslig sj\u00e4lvmedvetenhet, av ett st\u00e4ndigt poserande jag. Det \u00e4r ett v\u00e4rderande seende som understryker att den offentligt visade kvinnokroppen (vare sig poserande eller smygtagen) ska bed\u00f6mas p\u00e5 det mest intima s\u00e4tt. Och att det i vissa fall \u00e4r om\u00f6jligt att fly den sociala blickens intima sk\u00e4rsk\u00e5dande.\n\nAtt kvinnor v\u00e4njer sig vid att titta p\u00e5 och bed\u00f6ma andra kvinnor syns \u00e4ven p\u00e5 Snyggast.se. Flickornas bilder har inte s\u00e4llan tiotusentals fler \"tittarsiffror\" \u00e4n pojkarnas, vissa av de framr\u00f6stade bilderna kan ha upp till sextiotusen tittare medan pojkarnas bilder s\u00e4llan kommer \u00f6ver n\u00e5gra tusen (oftast ligger det p\u00e5 n\u00e5gra hundra stycken per bild). Det beh\u00f6ver inte betyda att det bara \u00e4r killar som tittar, utan \u00e4ven att tjejer \u00e4r mer m\u00e5na om att g\u00e5 in och titta p\u00e5 bilder av andra tjejer \u00e4n av killar. Det betyder emellertid att det \u00e4r flickorna som blir mest tittade p\u00e5 och mest bed\u00f6mda, av b\u00e5de kvinnor och m\u00e4n.\n\nPremisserna p\u00e5 Snyggast.se f\u00f6r att f\u00e5 uppskattning i form av r\u00f6ster, \u00e4r att flickor och pojkar accepterar och anammar ett traditionellt bildbeteende. De mer vision\u00e4ra id\u00e9erna om Internet som en arena fri fr\u00e5n de kategoriseringar som omg\u00e4rdar kroppen (k\u00f6n, klass, etnicitet, utseende, vikt) verkar knappast infriade \u00e4n. Kroppen f\u00f6ljer med \u00e4ven in i cyberrymden, liksom beteenden och upptr\u00e4danden som \u00e4r klistrade till hur k\u00f6n \"g\u00f6rs\" och beskrivs i bilder off-line. Det \u00e4r som om det kapital kroppen utg\u00f6r \u00e4r alltf\u00f6r v\u00e4rdefullt f\u00f6r att l\u00e4mnas utanf\u00f6r. Internet skapar emellertid en ny typ av genomskinlighet mellan olika grupper. Milj\u00f6er som tidigare var tillg\u00e4ngliga bara f\u00f6r den som tillh\u00f6rde en viss grupp (till exempel ungdomar) \u00e4r nu \u00f6ppna f\u00f6r vem som helst. Till skillnad fr\u00e5n skolg\u00e5rden, ungdomscaf\u00e9t eller andra platser d\u00e4r unga m\u00e4nniskor kommunicerar med varandra i en milj\u00f6 \"s\u00e4krad\" fr\u00e5n vuxna, inneb\u00e4r Internet en f\u00f6r\u00e4ndrad situation. Hur vi upptr\u00e4der och vad vi visar i en viss social situation avg\u00f6rs av var vi \u00e4r och med vilka, men ocks\u00e5 av var vi inte \u00e4r och av vilka som inte \u00e4r d\u00e4r. N\u00e4r det g\u00e4ller Snyggast.se \u00e4r vuxna personer en typ av publik som inte ska vara d\u00e4r, eller inte f\u00f6rv\u00e4ntas vara d\u00e4r av ungdomarna. En stor del av diskussionen i Sverige kring de bilder av flickor (pojkar \u00e4r som s\u00e5 ofta n\u00e4r det r\u00f6r sexualitet, uteslutna fr\u00e5n denna diskussion) som finns p\u00e5 Snyggast.se handlar inte i f\u00f6rsta hand om inneh\u00e5llet i bilderna utan om denna \u00f6kade genomskinlighet. Det \u00e4r deltagandet av fel publiker (inte minst \u00e4ldre m\u00e4n) som kan leda till eventuella konsekvenser utanf\u00f6r n\u00e4tet. Imiteringen av den feminina bildkropp som figurerar i mycket medieutbud kan leda till nya implikationer beroende p\u00e5 de nya rum som Internet bildar.\n\n## \u00c5TR\u00c5V\u00c4RDA POSITIONER OCH GENUSREGLER\n\nB\u00e5de flickor och pojkar verkar mycket medvetna om vilka typer av gester, poser och blickar de inte b\u00f6r anv\u00e4nda. Dessa sj\u00e4lvregleringar kan \u00e5terses p\u00e5 tv\u00e5 niv\u00e5er. Som i alla offentliga milj\u00f6er l\u00e4r vi oss snabbt hur vi ska och inte ska upptr\u00e4da, vad vi ska och inte ska visa. P\u00e5 Snyggast.se finns, som jag har visat, strikt skilda uttryck f\u00f6r hur det feminina och det maskulina ska visas upp. I flickornas och pojkarnas sj\u00e4lvbilder finns sedan ett slags egna gruppregler. Flickorna ska referera till en sexuell retorik, men utan att det blir f\u00f6r uppenbart, f\u00f6r kroppsligt. F\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om det respektabla \u00e4r uppenbara och det \u00e4r en medelklassfemininitet som visas upp med hj\u00e4lp av vissa semi- och mjukpornografiska koder. S\u00e5som n\u00e4mnts tidigare \u00e4r den sexualitet som den feminina kroppen visar upp i semi- och mjukpornografi fylld av koder som associeras till ett traditionellt feminint beteende \u2013 br\u00f6sten som skyls, sm\u00e5leendet och de inbjudande blickarna. Och om man p\u00e5 Snyggast.se \u00e4r alltf\u00f6r kroppslig kan kommentarer fr\u00e5n andra tjejer, som sagt, vara h\u00e5rda. Det verkar som om anv\u00e4ndandet av en sexuell retorik kr\u00e4ver en disciplinering av kroppen och ett tillr\u00e4ttavisande av andra tjejer. Genom att kalla dem som \u00f6verskrider den mycket h\u00e5rfina gr\u00e4ns (genom en n\u00e5got mer fram\u00e5tb\u00f6jd pose, eller br\u00f6st som \u00e4r lite f\u00f6r stora) f\u00f6r horor, eller andra uttryck som ska vara nedv\u00e4rderande, delar de in sig sj\u00e4lva och andra som respektabla eller icke-respektabla.\n\nMen dessa negativa kommentarer fr\u00e5n andra tjejer verkar inte ha n\u00e5gon st\u00f6rre betydelse eftersom denna typ av bild forts\u00e4tter att dyka upp p\u00e5 listorna. De mots\u00e4gs ocks\u00e5 av killars uppskattande och ibland sexuella kommentarer: \"Du \u00e4r s\u00e5\u00e5\u00e5\u00e5 sexig!\", \"Snygga br\u00f6st, en 10\", \" Jag \u00e4lskar din kropp\", \"F\u00e5r jag k\u00e4nna...\", \"Oh het kropp\" och s\u00e5 vidare. Viktigare \u00e4n neds\u00e4ttande kommentarer fr\u00e5n andra tjejer \u00e4r s\u00e5ledes bekr\u00e4ftelse fr\u00e5n manliga tittare\/r\u00f6stare. Dessa kommentarer och h\u00f6ga r\u00f6stpo\u00e4ng intygar att investeringar i en mer kroppsligt tillg\u00e4nglig femininitet ger utdelning.\n\nIntressant nog verkar ocks\u00e5 killarna l\u00e4gga st\u00f6rre vikt vid andra killars kommentarer \u00e4n tjejers. Vid sidan av bilden som fick kommentarerna \"Ta bort b\u00f6gbilden\", \u00f6verskrids s\u00e4llan formatet med ansikte och axlar, \u00e4ven om man kan spekulera kring om inte mer kroppsliga bilder skulle kunna uppskattas av tjejer. P\u00e5 denna sajt \u00e4r det allts\u00e5 m\u00e4n, inte kvinnor, som har, eller snarare ges, auktoriteten att utdela de bed\u00f6mningar av b\u00e5de tjejer och killar som r\u00e4knas. Det \u00e4r de som tilldelas makten att ange normer f\u00f6r vad som b\u00f6r visas och inte och d\u00e4rmed bekr\u00e4fta om det \u00e4r \"r\u00e4tta\" versioner av pojk- och flickjagen som visas upp.\n\nOm vi skulle l\u00e5ta dessa sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt tala till varandra kan vi se att flickornas bilder tydligt \u00e4r med och \"g\u00f6r\" maskulinitet. De v\u00e4nder sig till en id\u00e9 om ett visst manligt beg\u00e4r och placerar denna Han i rollen som legitim bed\u00f6mare av dem sj\u00e4lva och deras attraktionskraft. Pojkarnas bilder fr\u00e5ns\u00e4ger i sin tur femininitet rollen som bed\u00f6mare, dels genom att inte l\u00e5tsas om att det finns en kvinnlig betraktare, dels genom att inte verka bry sig om de bed\u00f6manden de f\u00e5r av flickor. De kan titta och tycka men deras tittande och tyckande erk\u00e4nns inte som viktiga (\u00e4ven om det naturligtvis kan vara det f\u00f6r varje kille).\n\n## DEN MANLIGA BLICKEN SOM HOT OCH LOCKELSE\n\nOm pojkarna \u00e4r \"tysta\" i sina bilder, det vill s\u00e4ga inte kommunicerar med den som tittar, \u00e4r de desto h\u00f6gljuddare i rollen som betraktare. Det \u00e4r i denna position, d\u00e4r de kommenterar och tittar, som de f\u00f6refaller bekv\u00e4ma som \"kropp\". Som osynlig betraktare kan de tryggare uttrycka sitt beg\u00e4r, ber\u00e4tta vad de upplever n\u00e4r de ser bilderna. H\u00e4r g\u00e4ller det omv\u00e4nda f\u00f6r flickor, som inte s\u00e4ger n\u00e5got med en sexuell antydan i sina kommentarer till pojkarnas bilder, utan visar det i bilder av sig sj\u00e4lva.\n\nPojkarnas kroppsliga (visuella) stumhet blandas med andra ord med ett talat beg\u00e4r. P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet f\u00e5r de mer kontroll \u00f6ver _hur_ deras beg\u00e4r ska uppfattas och mot vem det ska riktas, \u00e4n om det uttryckts i bilder d\u00e4r betraktaren kan vara vem som helst.\n\nMen detta tal handlar mer s\u00e4llan om vad de k\u00e4nner, exempelvis l\u00e4ngtan eller upphetsning, vanligare \u00e4r att det handlar om de br\u00f6st och kroppar de ser i utropsform, exempelvis: \"FY FAAN VAD SNYGGA BR\u00d6ST!!\"\n\nDet mer okroppsliga talandet \u2013 allts\u00e5 d\u00e4r vi ser kvinnor i bild och h\u00f6r en man som talar \u2013 finns ocks\u00e5 i mycket h\u00e5rdpornografiskt \"dirty talk\", vilket togs upp i kapitel tre.\n\nLotta L\u00f6fgren-M\u00e5rtenson och Sven-Axel M\u00e5nsson har visat att unga killar ofta konsumerar h\u00e5rdpornografi innan de sj\u00e4lva har n\u00e5gra sexuella erfarenheter med en annan m\u00e4nniska. Rollen som den sexuella kommentatorn som m\u00e4n intar i mycket h\u00e5rdpornografi kan allts\u00e5 anammas av unga killar som del i en maskulin (grupp)identitet, eftersom man ofta tittar tillsammans.\n\nDet \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 l\u00e4tt att i pojkarnas beteende p\u00e5 Snyggast.se se en koppling till inskolandet i den manliga blicken, den som ser utan att synas. Utifr\u00e5n den platsen kan de vara den beg\u00e4rande av den andres kropp. Men att sj\u00e4lv gestalta beg\u00e4ret efter den andre (h\u00e4r flickorna), blir en om\u00f6jlighet, trots att s\u00e5 mycket p\u00e5 denna sajt handlar om heterosexuellt kontakts\u00f6kande. Vad flickorna g\u00f6r, och vad den feminina kroppen i s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga bilder omkring oss g\u00f6r, \u00e4r att f\u00f6rs\u00f6ka gestalta id\u00e9er om ett manligt beg\u00e4r. Det motsatta \u00e4r, som jag tagit upp, en nollpunkt i v\u00e5r offentliga, mediala bildkultur. Den manliga kroppen har inga motsvarande specifika beteenden och poser som ska st\u00e5 som tecken f\u00f6r feminint beg\u00e4r. I det mediala ses den sexuella blicken per definition som maskulin. D\u00e4rf\u00f6r \u00e4r det utifr\u00e5n den, eller id\u00e9n om den, som sexuella uttryck hos b\u00e5de kvinno- och manskroppar m\u00e4ts och v\u00e4rderas.\n\nKanske \u00e4r det d\u00e4rf\u00f6r som stumhet eller fr\u00e5nvaro, f\u00f6r att \u00e5terv\u00e4nda till de begrepp som anv\u00e4nts tidigare, omg\u00e4rdar pojkarnas bilder av sig sj\u00e4lva. De \"riskerar\" att uppfattas som homosexuella om de anv\u00e4nder ett mer kroppsligt och inbjudande tilltal just d\u00e4rf\u00f6r att detta \u00e4r ett feminint definierat bildbeteende gentemot m\u00e4n. S\u00e5 samma manliga blick som ska lockas av flickornas bilder blir f\u00f6r pojkarna en hotfull blick som de v\u00e4rjer sig emot.\n\nVad b\u00e5da k\u00f6nen f\u00f6rh\u00e5ller sig till p\u00e5 dessa listor \u00e4r allts\u00e5 id\u00e9n om den manliga lusten.\n\nI flickornas fall att flirta med, i pojkarnas fall att h\u00e5lla sig borta fr\u00e5n f\u00f6r att inte skapa ett homosexuellt tilltal. Det finns med andra ord en imagin\u00e4r maskulinitet som reglerar och styr b\u00e5de pojkarnas och flickornas sj\u00e4lvbilder.\n\n# 6.\n\n# Oroade blickar och kroppsliga dilemman\n\n> We've done our thing. We have evolved. We walk on our back legs.\n> \n> The problems solved. We are artists. We are mathematicians.\n> \n> Some of us hold extremely high positions. But we are tired. We're hardly breathing [...] Go tell the women that we are leaving.\n> \n> (Nick Cave)\n\nHar jag tecknat en dystopisk bild av relationen mellan k\u00f6nen och av maskulinitet? L\u00e5t mig d\u00e5 bara understryka att jag har v\u00e4nt blicken mot ett specifikt omr\u00e5de, som \u00e4r det kommersiellt sexuella bildutbudet. En m\u00e4ngd saker h\u00e4nder naturligtvis vilka ocks\u00e5 g\u00e5r emot dessa ofta reaktion\u00e4ra f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om k\u00f6n. Inte desto mindre \u00e4r detta omr\u00e5de av stor vikt; bilder, och kommunicerandet med bilder f\u00f6refaller bara att \u00f6ka, b\u00e5de n\u00e4r vi som privatpersoner kommunicerar med varandra \u2013 inte minst p\u00e5 Internets tiotusentals dejtingsajter \u2013 och n\u00e4r vi i rollen som konsumenter av varor, eller som konsumerande mediepubliker, f\u00e5r information och underh\u00e5llning.\n\nAnledningarna till att det mediala och kommersiella _bildom_ r\u00e5det \u00e4r ett av de mer rigida d\u00e4r k\u00f6n \"g\u00f6rs\" kan vara flera. Bilder \u00e4r, vilket togs upp i inledningen, inte underst\u00e4llda samma inl\u00e4rda kritiska granskande som text, vi f\u00e5r inte l\u00e4ra oss att f\u00f6rst\u00e5 hur de s\u00e4ger det de g\u00f6r. Man kan ocks\u00e5 uttrycka s\u00e5dant i bild som skulle sticka i \u00f6gonen om det skrevs ut i text.\n\nMen \u00e4n viktigare \u00e4r att i bilder tar f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om kroppar, beg\u00e4r och sexualitet fysisk form. De f\u00f6rankrar flera aspekter av v\u00e5rt intima jag, av vad vi vill se i spegeln, av hur vi vill se oss sj\u00e4lva reflekterade i andras \u00f6gon. Sexualitet \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 ett omr\u00e5de fyllt med intima upplevelser av oss sj\u00e4lva och andra och kanske \u00e4r det h\u00e4r, i v\u00e5ra beg\u00e4r och i v\u00e5r l\u00e4ngtan, de mest fundamentala likheterna finns mellan k\u00f6nen \u2013 trots alla de varierade uttryck de kan ta sig. Att de i kommersiella sammanhang framst\u00e4lls efter de mest strikta k\u00f6nsuppdelningar \u00e4r d\u00e4rf\u00f6r en sorglig paradox.\n\nMyten om en viss typ av maskulinitet \u2013 den som kan kontrollera sig sj\u00e4lv och sina k\u00e4nslor, som ska framst\u00e5 som oberoende och auktorit\u00e4r \u2013 genomsyrar id\u00e9n om manlig sexualitet. Utifr\u00e5n f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om denna hegemoniska manlighet och dess lust, skapas en viss typ av bilder b\u00e5de p\u00e5 kvinnor och m\u00e4n, kvinnor som ska tilltala den och m\u00e4n som (f\u00f6r det mesta) inte ska g\u00f6ra det. Detta \u00e4r tydligt i ungdomars sj\u00e4lvportr\u00e4tt p\u00e5 Snyggast.se. Connell pekar p\u00e5 att hegemonisk maskulinitet \u00e4r flexibel och tar sig nya former vid olika historiska tidpunkter. Kanske bilden, med dess prominenta plats i v\u00e5r kultur i dag, \u00e4r det omr\u00e5de d\u00e4r den kl\u00e4nger sig fast, b\u00e5de i form av den manliga blicken riktad mot den feminina kroppen och i bilder av den presterande fallosen.\n\n## F\u00d6RAKT, L\u00c4NGTAN OCH (O)BEROENDE\n\nF\u00f6r att de premisser som den manliga blicken vilar p\u00e5 ska fungera m\u00e5ste den, som sagt, se utan att sj\u00e4lv bli sedd. Bara s\u00e5 kan betraktaren och det beg\u00e4r bilden talar till f\u00f6rbli osynligt, icke-problematiserat eller ifr\u00e5gasatt. Det n\u00e4rmast patologiska uppvisandet av en viss kvinnokropp som tecken f\u00f6r sex h\u00e5ller effektivt undan v\u00e5r blick fr\u00e5n f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om manlig sexualitet. Dessa f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar och myter kan f\u00f6rbli osynliga _just_ f\u00f6r att s\u00e5 m\u00e5nga bilder hela tiden \u00f6vertygar oss om att det manliga beg\u00e4ret \u00e4r en och samma sak, att det s\u00e4tts i g\u00e5ng och lockas av samma bild, samma kropp, samma poser, samma utseende. Och att detta \u00e4r s\u00e5 sj\u00e4lvklart att det inte finns n\u00e5got annat att se.\n\nDenna osynlighet \u00e4r ett dubbeleggat sv\u00e4rd. F\u00f6rvisso inneb\u00e4r det ett privilegium att uppfattas som mer eller mindre sj\u00e4lvklar, att inte beh\u00f6va definieras, men det medf\u00f6r ocks\u00e5 en tystnad kring upplevelser och problem som inte sammanfaller med denna g\u00e4ngse bild av den sj\u00e4lvklara lusten. B\u00e5de p\u00e5 individniv\u00e5 och p\u00e5 en samh\u00e4llelig niv\u00e5. Motst\u00e5ndet mot att se maskulinitet som en konstruerad identitet verkar sitta djupt, inte minst n\u00e4r det handlar om sexualitet. Manlig (hetero)sexualitet ska f\u00f6rst\u00e5s som aktiv, potent, heterosexuell och icke-feminin.\n\nDet \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 id\u00e9n om _ett_ maskulint beg\u00e4r som utg\u00f6r grunden f\u00f6r mjukpornografiska bilder av ensamma kvinnor. Kanske \u00e4r det d\u00e4rf\u00f6r denna typ av bilder, som \u00e4r gjorda f\u00f6r att locka och tala till en auktorit\u00e4r maskulinitet, \u00e4r s\u00e5 viktiga, ja avg\u00f6rande, f\u00f6r att uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla denna maskulinitetsmyt. Det handlar om att framst\u00e4lla den manliga blicken som om den kommer med ett redan definierat beg\u00e4r, ett som kan, vill och vet vad det \u00e4r.\n\nMen det \u00e4r en blick som beh\u00f6ver erk\u00e4nnas f\u00f6r att inte g\u00e5 upp i r\u00f6k. Och h\u00e4ri syns den manliga blickens oro \u2013 den tittar f\u00f6r att se om ocks\u00e5 Han blir tittad tillbaka p\u00e5 och sedd s\u00e5som Han vill bli sedd, som auktorit\u00e4r, betydelsefull och med en sj\u00e4lvklar r\u00e4tt att se och bed\u00f6ma. Det \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 d\u00e4rf\u00f6r som mjukpornografi riktad till m\u00e4n \u00e4r s\u00e5 m\u00e5n om att f\u00f6rklara f\u00f6r betraktaren att kvinnor \u00e4r n\u00f6jda med m\u00e4n som de \u00e4r, att de inte beh\u00f6ver vara framg\u00e5ngsrika, vackra eller unga \u2013 utan bara sn\u00e4lla och ha humor. Alla m\u00e4n ska kunna vara delaktiga i den manliga blicken och dess privilegier.\n\nDetta \u00e4r dock \u00e5terigen tveeggade privilegier som b\u00e5de utg\u00e5r fr\u00e5n och uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5ller en fr\u00e5nvaro. I s\u00e5v\u00e4l mjuk- som h\u00e5rdpornografin finns tydliga tecken p\u00e5 alla svagheter och orosmoment som hegemonisk maskulinitet konstrueras kring. Vad som ska uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5llas \u00e4r distans till den egna och andras kroppar, synen p\u00e5 det feminina som n\u00e5got hotande och lockande men alltid det helt annorlunda. I denna id\u00e9 om manlig sexualitet ska den som beg\u00e4rs b\u00e5de \u00e5tr\u00e5s och f\u00f6raktas \u2013 eller kanske snarare r\u00e4das. F\u00f6r man ska inte gl\u00f6mma att det \u00e4r f\u00f6r vad hon _inte_ \u00e4r som kvinnan p\u00e5 bilden ska bli beg\u00e4rd. Det feminina ska representera k\u00e4nslor och beteenden som det maskulina inte ska visa upp utan m\u00e5ste l\u00e4gga utanf\u00f6r sig sj\u00e4lv.\n\nI h\u00e5rd- liksom i mjukpornografi \u00e4r det kvinnor, inte m\u00e4n, som kommunicerar sex till betraktaren med hj\u00e4lp av poser, blickar, text och ord. I mjukpornografins bilder ikl\u00e4r hon sig hans beg\u00e4r och i h\u00e5rdpornografin f\u00f6rkroppsligar hon den kroppslighet han inte vill l\u00e5ta inta honom.\n\nD\u00e5 kvinnor ska st\u00e5 f\u00f6r det som m\u00e4n inte ska eller b\u00f6r vara, men beh\u00f6ver, f\u00e5r de inta en plats fylld av det nedv\u00e4rderade \u2013 det m\u00e4n inte ska vilja veta av hos sig sj\u00e4lva. Utifr\u00e5n samma projektion, som b\u00e4rare av det m\u00e4n inte f\u00e5r uttrycka sj\u00e4lva men l\u00e4ngtar efter, blir kvinnor idealiserade \u2013 men bara om de f\u00f6ljer dessa riktlinjer.\n\nProblemet \u00e4r allts\u00e5 inte att den manliga blicken g\u00f6r kvinnor till objekt f\u00f6r beg\u00e4r, vi kan alla g\u00f6ra n\u00e5gon till objekt f\u00f6r v\u00e5rt beg\u00e4r, utan att den uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5ller den avsaknad som hypermaskulinitet best\u00e5r av. Den hyllar distansering och konstruerar kvinnor som de kroppsliga andra, de som ska framst\u00e5 som tillm\u00f6tesg\u00e5ende, tillg\u00e4ngliga och bejakande. I denna illusion av sexuell harmoni finns flera implicita krav. Hon som ska f\u00f6rkroppsliga k\u00e4nslor av intimitet, sexualitet och n\u00e4rhet f\u00e5r ocks\u00e5 ansvaret f\u00f6r att de ska bli tillfredst\u00e4llda. Med andra ord \u00e4r inte problemet att m\u00e4n riktar sitt beg\u00e4r mot kvinnokroppen i bilder utan att detta beg\u00e4r ska ta avst\u00e5nd fr\u00e5n vissa k\u00e4nslor, egenskaper och beteenden. I detta avst\u00e5ndstagande \u00e5terfinns den nedv\u00e4rdering som k\u00e4nslor av beroende och identifiering med det feminina hotar att framkalla.\n\nDen manliga blicken \u00e4r allts\u00e5 fylld med n\u00e5got helt annat \u00e4n den utger sig f\u00f6r att vara. Den \u00e4r inte konsekvensen av ett naturligt manligt beg\u00e4r som beh\u00f6ver stimuleras visuellt av en och samma kropp. Den \u00e4r konsekvensen av en id\u00e9 om maskulinitet d\u00e4r en m\u00e4ngd k\u00e4nslor och egenskaper _ska_ vara fr\u00e5nvarande, eller regleras. P\u00e5 det s\u00e4ttet uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5ller denna blick och denna typ av bilder alla de problem som denna maskulinitet \u00e4r fylld av.\n\nVi skulle kunna se dessa massiva bildm\u00f6nster, tydliga i mycket mjuk- och semipornografi, som uttryck f\u00f6r att vi lever i en tid n\u00e4r maskuliniteten fl\u00e4mtar efter luft, efter bekr\u00e4ftelse p\u00e5 sin egen giltighet. Den feminina medvillighet som hela den mjukpornografiska genren riktad till heterosexuella m\u00e4n vilar p\u00e5, visar just samf\u00f6rst\u00e5nd. Eller kvinnan som k\u00e5t (\u00e5tminstone lagom), glad och tacksam f\u00f6r att parafrasera den \u00f6nskan som Peter Dalles karakt\u00e4r i filmen _Ogifta par \u2013 en film som skiljer sig_ (1997) frustrerat efterfr\u00e5gar.\n\nDen \u00f6kning vi sett de senaste tio \u00e5ren av mjukpornografiskt material riktat till heterosexuella m\u00e4n kanske \u00e4r en reaktion mot ifr\u00e5gas\u00e4ttandet av traditionella genusm\u00f6nster. H\u00e4r om n\u00e5gonstans syns en femininitet som bejakar en traditionell manlig heterosexualitet.\n\nMen n\u00e4r det maskulina alltmer b\u00f6rjar diskuteras, n\u00e4r ifr\u00e5gas\u00e4ttande och analyser inte minst av den manliga blicken finns, m\u00e5ste denna blick legitimeras \u00e4n mer. Inte av andra m\u00e4n, utan av symbolerna (kvinnorna) sj\u00e4lva. Och h\u00e4r skiljer sig denna blick och bibeh\u00e5llandet av dess existens fr\u00e5n andra blickar som riktas mot \"de andra\". Den koloniala blicken har bland annat Malek Alloula tr\u00e4ffande beskrivit i sin _The Colonial Harem_ och John Tagg den klassbaserade i sin historiska \u00f6verblick av hur medelklassen skapade den l\u00e4gre eller \"avvikande\" kroppen. I dessa bilder syns ett motst\u00e5nd. Det \u00e4r motstr\u00e4viga ansikten som tittar ut fr\u00e5n fotoramarna, som mer eller mindre tydligt visar att de vet att de f\u00e5r inta en underordnad position.\n\nDen manliga blicken lyckas emellertid framst\u00e5 som naturlig, som om den bara reflekterar en naturlig relation mellan k\u00f6nen. Och detta g\u00f6rs genom att betona att de bilder som g\u00f6der den bygger p\u00e5 \u00f6msesidighet. De inbjudande gesterna, det flirtiga sm\u00e5leendet, alla dessa fabricerade poser, inpr\u00e4ntade p\u00e5 den feminina bildkroppen under mer \u00e4n hundra \u00e5r, \u00e4r n\u00e4stan \u00f6vertydliga i sitt bedyrande av hur betydelsefull den manliga betraktaren \u00e4r.\n\n## KROPPSGR\u00c4NSER OCH K\u00c4NSLOKONTROLL\n\nDen manliga kroppens osynlighet har minskat. Men n\u00e4r kroppen visas \u00e4r teknikerna f\u00f6r att inte sammanblanda den med den feminina uppenbara. Det kan ocks\u00e5 bero p\u00e5 att en erotiserad kroppslig synlighet riskerar att g\u00f6ra jaget osynligt, skymt bakom allt annat som kroppen ska tala om \u2013 varubeg\u00e4r, konsumtion, f\u00f6rakt, idealisering, l\u00e4ngtan. D\u00e4rf\u00f6r \u00e4r den erotiserade bilden minst sagt obekv\u00e4m som visuell plats f\u00f6r m\u00e4n. Den hotar att reducera jaget till en symbol f\u00f6r n\u00e5got utanf\u00f6r det egna jaget, d\u00e4r kroppen b\u00e5de \u00e4r en vara i sig och symbol f\u00f6r andra varor. Detta \u00e4r en antites till den id\u00e9 om autonomi som tillskrivs det maskulina. Den manliga kroppen ska n\u00e4r den visas f\u00f6rst och fr\u00e4mst kommunicera sig sj\u00e4lv. Den ska kl\u00e4s med muskler eller g\u00f6mmas bakom slutna ansiktsuttryck, s\u00e5v\u00e4l i reklam som i mycket h\u00e5rdpornografi. \u00c4ven om det \u00e4r sv\u00e5rt att helt generalisera formerna f\u00f6r uppvisandet av mannen som kropp s\u00e5 \u00e4r en gemensam n\u00e4mnare motst\u00e5ndet mot att l\u00e5ta denna kropp intas av id\u00e9er om feminint beg\u00e4r. F\u00f6r vad den uppvisade manliga kroppen f\u00f6refaller ha stora problem med \u00e4r att i poser, gester och blickar f\u00f6rkroppsliga f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om feminint beg\u00e4r. Med andra ord att inf\u00f6r en kvinnlig betraktare uttrycka: \" Jag \u00e4r h\u00e4r f\u00f6r Dig, tycker Du om vad Du ser? \"\n\nDet \u00e4r ist\u00e4llet en kropp som ska ses som sig sj\u00e4lv nog, och d\u00e4rf\u00f6r kan den inte n\u00e4rma sig eller g\u00e5 upp i betraktaren som den kvinnliga har till uppgift att g\u00f6ra. Den \u00e4r, eller ska upplevas som, separerad och intakt. Och det som g\u00f6r den intakt \u00e4r just att den inte l\u00e5ter det kroppsliga ta \u00f6ver. Behovet av att bevaka den manliga kroppens gr\u00e4nser (och k\u00e4nslor) mot andra kroppar och av att inte uppfattas som kropp i f\u00f6rsta hand visar samtidigt hur br\u00e4cklig denna kroppsid\u00e9 faktiskt \u00e4r. Som om den skulle rasera, ifall detta skedde.\n\nVad som premieras f\u00f6r m\u00e4n \u00e4r emotionell kontroll, att inte ge efter, att inte k\u00e4nna efter. Utvecklandet av maskulin identitet \u00e4r, som diskuterades i kapitel ett, inte i f\u00f6rsta hand en process av att tillskansa sig egenskaper och roller. Snarare handlar det om att minska behovet av samh\u00f6righet, intimitet och uttrycksfullhet. Resultatet \u00e4r en maskulinitet som bara kan h\u00e5llas uppe om den st\u00e4ndigt bevakar de gr\u00e4nser den har satt upp f\u00f6r sig sj\u00e4lv. Rationalitet och sj\u00e4lvkontroll \u00e4r tv\u00e5 honn\u00f6rsord som kroppen och k\u00e4nslosamheten alltid kan hota att bryta ned. De k\u00e4nslor som associeras med kroppen, som stark upphetsning, r\u00e4dsla, sorg eller gl\u00e4dje, \u00e4r n\u00e5got som ska kontrolleras.\n\nP\u00e5 Internetsajter i dag riktade till och fr\u00e4mst anv\u00e4nda av unga killar, blandas autentiska bilder av d\u00f6d och leml\u00e4stning med just h\u00e5rdpornografiska bilder och filmer. Upplevelsen av att se grova realistiska v\u00e5ldsskildringar och bilder av d\u00f6dande och leml\u00e4stning ska allts\u00e5 likst\u00e4llas eller blandas med den k\u00e4nsla man ska f\u00e5 av att se pornografi. B\u00e5da typerna av bilder ger starka kroppsliga reaktioner och n\u00e4r dessa ska l\u00e4nkas samman, eller kanaliseras som sexuell upphetsning, \u00e4r fr\u00e5gan om det \u00e4r v\u00e5ld och d\u00f6d som ska vara upphetsande eller sexualitet som ska vara v\u00e5ldsamt. Som betraktare m\u00e5ste man rimligen uppleva n\u00e5gon form av inre k\u00e4nslokaos av r\u00e4dsla, \u00e4ckel och upphetsning inf\u00f6r sammanblandningen av dessa bilder.\n\nDessa sajter ger uttryck f\u00f6r id\u00e9n om en n\u00e4rmast psykotisk maskulinitet som till varje pris ska l\u00e4ra sig distans till de egna kroppsupplevelserna \u2013 hur starka de \u00e4n \u00e4r.\n\nKopplingen mellan kontroll och distans genomsyrar \u00f6verlag de f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om maskulin sexualitet vi har omkring oss. Det \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 denna koppling som ger upphov till dubbelheten inf\u00f6r det feminina, som b\u00e5de det nedv\u00e4rderade och det idealiserade. Hon blir b\u00e5de de bortst\u00f6tta och idealiserade elementen av kroppslighet och beg\u00e4r som han l\u00e4gger utanf\u00f6r sig sj\u00e4lv. S\u00e5 g\u00f6rs kopplingen mellan beg\u00e4r och avst\u00e5ndstagande inf\u00f6r det feminina \"naturlig\". F\u00f6raktet (eller r\u00e4dslan) f\u00f6r de k\u00e4nslor som skapar beg\u00e4r ligger dock alltid n\u00e4ra den l\u00e4ngtan efter f\u00f6rening eller identifikation med det feminina som ska h\u00e5llas borta och som st\u00e4ndigt aktualiseras i bilder som talar om heterosexualitet.\n\nGenom att skildra den feminina kroppen som med lust tar emot det manliga organet (i h\u00e5rdpornografin), eller som har den manliga lusten som sin utg\u00e5ngspunkt (i mjukpornografin), skapas ett universum d\u00e4r hennes \u2013 den andras \u2013 lust, avvisning eller eventuella makt inte \u00e4r hotande. H\u00e4r finns inga antydningar om uppl\u00f6sning av det v\u00e4lbevakade manliga jagets gr\u00e4nser.\n\nVad man \u00e4n anser om pornografi \u00e4r den motsatsen till tanken om sexualitet som intimitetsskapande och till den sammansm\u00e4ltning med den andra detta kan inneb\u00e4ra. Ist\u00e4llet m\u00f6ts kroppar var som helst, n\u00e4r som helst och har sex med varandra utan en d\u00e5tid eller framtid. Relationen \u00e4r avslutad i och med att sexuell klimax har uppn\u00e5tts. I det perspektivet st\u00f6der pornografi illusionen om att m\u00e4n inte beh\u00f6ver tappa vare sig kontroll eller autonomi.\n\nAtt m\u00e4n \u00e4r de aktiva penetrerarna i h\u00e5rdpornografi \u00e4r som diskuterats dock fyllt av motstridigheter. Den autonomi som ska pr\u00e4gla deras handlande ska gestalta maskulin sexualitet som sj\u00e4lvklar, potent och auktorit\u00e4r. Men vad vi ser \u00e4r snarare det motsatta: en ensam fallos som tyst och envetet s\u00f6ker bekr\u00e4ftelse i h\u00e5rdpornografin och en osynligt stirrande betraktare i mjukpornografin. Vad som tydligg\u00f6rs \u00e4r en maskulinitetsmyt som omhuldar sin fr\u00e5nvaro och som g\u00f6r allt f\u00f6r att h\u00e5lla sina gr\u00e4nser bevakade och intakta, s\u00e5 att den manliga kroppen inte dras in i andra eller intas av andra (och d\u00e4rmed av det mer okontrollerade beg\u00e4ret). Den fr\u00e5nvaro som \u00e4r maskulinitetens k\u00e4rna glorifieras i h\u00e5rdpornografins ensamma presterande fallos och g\u00f6rs sj\u00e4lvklar i mjukpornografin, genom att st\u00e4lla honom utanf\u00f6r bilden som okroppslig betraktare.\n\n## DEN ENSAMMA FALLOSEN \u2013 P\u00c5 V\u00c4G MOT UPPL\u00d6SNING?\n\nMan kan undra om den uppvisade manliga kroppen kan forts\u00e4tta uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla id\u00e9er om sin suver\u00e4nitet s\u00e5 mycket l\u00e4ngre till. Maskulinitetsmyten att kroppen ska kontrolleras och inte tas \u00f6ver av kvinnor \u00e4r sv\u00e5rare att uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5lla n\u00e4r kroppen intar s\u00e5 mycket plats i kulturen som den g\u00f6r i dag, eller som Frosh uttrycker det:\n\n> Kroppens nya betydelsefulla plats kan dra undan den kontroll p\u00e5 vilken maskulin auktoritet baseras.\n> \n> (Frosh 1994 s. 105)\n\nDe n\u00e4stan \u00f6versp\u00e4nda tekniker som anv\u00e4nds n\u00e4r m\u00e4n visas i s\u00e5 mycket pornografi pekar ocks\u00e5 mot en oroad maskulinitet. En som m\u00e5ste framst\u00e4lla sig sj\u00e4lv som auktorit\u00e4r och i kontroll p\u00e5 ett n\u00e4stan hysteriskt s\u00e4tt f\u00f6r att f\u00f6rs\u00e4kra oss om att maskulinitet \u00e4r det individuella, om att penisen aldrig bara kan vara en penis och att mannen \u00e4r vad som helst utom en kropp. Detta f\u00f6rnekande av kroppen och av vissa k\u00e4nslor har ett h\u00f6gt pris. Det \u00e4r, p\u00e5pekar Victor Seidler, genom att f\u00f6rsaka sina behov som m\u00e4n visar att de har den sj\u00e4lvkontroll som s\u00e4krar deras maskulinitet.\n\nD\u00e4r m\u00e4n g\u00f6r anspr\u00e5k p\u00e5 att vara separerade fr\u00e5n kroppen f\u00f6rtrycks den. Kanske \u00e4r det d\u00e4rf\u00f6r vi i dag ser en ensam, tr\u00f6tt fallos, en som vill f\u00f6rsvinna, en som har f\u00e5tt nog av sig sj\u00e4lv, s\u00e5som man kan tolka Nick Caves textrader i kapitlets b\u00f6rjan.\n\nSaker och ting f\u00f6r\u00e4ndras st\u00e4ndigt, om \u00e4n l\u00e5ngsamt. Maskulin auktoritet liksom den s\u00e5 kallade falliska ordningen \u00e4r st\u00e4ndigt under f\u00f6r\u00e4ndring, eftersom den inte \u00e4r av naturen given utan skapas och omskapas av oss alla.\n\n\u00d6nskan, hos b\u00e5de kvinnor och m\u00e4n, om att bli del av, eller vara delaktiga i den hegemoniska maskulinitetens gemenskap kan vara resultatet av att den fortfarande lyckas framst\u00e5 som heroisk och fascinerande \u2013 som emblemet f\u00f6r frihet och autonomi. Det r\u00e4cker uppenbarligen inte med att visa p\u00e5 maktstrukturer mellan k\u00f6nen, eller att m\u00e4n \"erk\u00e4nner\" sin \u00f6verordning som grupp. De k\u00e4nslostrukturer som omg\u00e4rdar det maskulina m\u00e5ste lyftas fram just f\u00f6r att, vilket feminismen har visat oss, det personliga \u00e4r politiskt.\n\nSom jag ser det \u00e4r det dags att h\u00e5lla kvar blicken mot denna maskulinitet och sluta se den som den vill bli sedd, som auktorit\u00e4r, allomfattande, erekt och lite mystisk. Ist\u00e4llet b\u00f6r vi se hur vi alla uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5ller denna maskulinitetsmyt och hur den genererar s\u00e5v\u00e4l manliga som kvinnliga chauvinister.\n\n## NOTER KAPITEL 1\n\n \u00c4ven om det alltid \u00e4r riskabelt att tala om m\u00e4n och kvinnor som enhetliga kategorier, m\u00e5ste vi alla f\u00f6rh\u00e5lla oss till (eller emot) de f\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar om maskulint och feminint som kopplas till k\u00f6n. F\u00f6rest\u00e4llningar som skrivs in p\u00e5 v\u00e5ra kroppar och som s\u00e4tter gr\u00e4nser f\u00f6r vad som kan och inte kan g\u00f6ras, s\u00e4gas eller k\u00e4nnas.\n\n V\u00e5rdguiden.se 2007, se ocks\u00e5 Thomas Johansson (2005) om unga m\u00e4ns oro inf\u00f6r sexualitet och prestationer.\n\n Begreppet \"metrosexuell\" anv\u00e4nds ofta f\u00f6r att ringa in denna \"nya\" man (anv\u00e4nt f\u00f6rsta g\u00e5ngen 1994 i en artikel i _The Independent_ med rubriken \"Here come the mirror men\" av den engelska journalisten Mark Simpson). Den metrosexuella mannen \u00e4r heterosexuell, intresserad av mode och av sitt utseende.\n\n Jfr. John Hartley (1996), Catherine A. Lutz & Jane L. Collins (1993) och John Pultz (1995).\n\n Susan Sontag (1979) och Roland Barthes (1977).\n\n Jacques Lacan (1977).\n\n Laura Mulvey (1975), John Berger (1972).\n\n Susan Faludi pekar i sin bok _Stiffed_ (1999) p\u00e5 efterkrigstidens trauma f\u00f6r amerikanska m\u00e4n med kvinnors frammarsch p\u00e5 tidigare manliga omr\u00e5den. Faktorer som alla lett till att den traditionella manligheten inte l\u00e4ngre har en sj\u00e4lvklar plats. Manlighetens \"kris\" verkar allts\u00e5 handla om de effekter som en mer j\u00e4mst\u00e4lld ideologi genererar.\n\n Robert Connell (1995).\n\n Vilket diskuteras av Claes Ekenstam (2005).\n\n Ibland i en \u00e4n mer kritisk ton \u00e4n m\u00e5nga kvinnor. Klaus Theweleits _Mansfantasier_ (1979\/1995), som analyserar nazismens r\u00f6tter utifr\u00e5n id\u00e9n om det maskulina och soldatkroppen, kan n\u00e4rmast likst\u00e4llas med Valerie Solanas _SCUM-manifestet_ (Society for Cutting Up Men,1967), vilket av kritiker har setts som det mest hatiska verk som har publicerats om m\u00e4n.\n\n Anja Hirdman (2002).\n\n Se till exempel Tom Ryan, Tony Eardley, Andy Metcalf (1985\/1990), Steve Craig (1992), Victor Seidler (1989,1994), Stephen Frosh (1994) och Lynne Segal (1990).\n\n Laura Kipnis (1993).\n\n Tony Eardley (1985\/1990).\n\n Det handlar s\u00e5ledes om vilken betydelse som tillskrivs de anatomiska skillnaderna. F\u00f6r en diskussion om detta se till exempel Griselda Pollock (1990). Sociologen Nancy Chodorow (1999) har ocks\u00e5 lyft fram mor-dotterf\u00f6rh\u00e5llandet.\n\n F\u00f6r studier av maskulinitet i ett historiskt perspektiv se bland annat David Tjeder (2002), och Claes Ekenstam (1999) f\u00f6r en historisk expos\u00e9 \u00f6ver den manliga gr\u00e5ten.\n\n Claes Ekenstam (1999).\n\n I Joshua Goldsteins _War and Gender_ (2001) och Susan Jeffords _The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War_ (1989) diskuteras kopplingar mellan maskulinitet och krig.\n\n Se Jacques Lacan (1958\/1982) samt Betsy Wearing (1996) och Luce Irigaray (1985).\n\n Marjorie Kibby & Brigid Costello (1999).\n\n Se till exempel Frank Mort (1996), Sean Nixon (1997) och Chris Holmlund (1993).\n\n Tydliga exempel \u00e4r de gamla slavekonomierna d\u00e4r den nedslagna blicken gestaltade slavens underordnade st\u00e4llning, vars \"\u00e4gare\" hade r\u00e4tten att s\u00e5v\u00e4l titta som att n\u00e4rg\u00e5nget unders\u00f6ka personen ifr\u00e5ga. Fram till sjuttonhundratalet skulle blicken ocks\u00e5 sl\u00e5s ned n\u00e4r kungen kom in i ett rum.\n\n Se till exempel John Tagg (1988\/1993) om klass och Malek Alloula (1987) om etnicitet.\n\n Karin Johannisson visar i sin bok _Kroppens tunna skal_ (2001) hur kvinnokroppen f\u00e5r en speciell plats i det tidiga medicinska unders\u00f6kandet.\n\n## NOTER KAPITEL 2\n\n Lynda Nead (1992), Lynn Hunt (1996).\n\n Se Robert Darnton (1995). Samma argument m\u00f6ter vi tv\u00e5hundra \u00e5r senare i Sverige n\u00e4r Anderberg ger ut den pornografiska antologin _K\u00e4rlek_ , se Anja Hirdman (2002).\n\n Margaret C. Jacob (1996).\n\n Lynn Hunt (1996).\n\n Se Michel Foucault (1980-1987). Fram till 1700-talet fanns det, menar historikern Thomas Laquer en form av enk\u00f6nsmodell baserad p\u00e5 tanken om mannen som den enda riktiga m\u00e4nniskan, Guds avbild. Utifr\u00e5n denna mall f\u00f6rklarades det kvinnliga k\u00f6nsorganet bara vara ett spegelv\u00e4nt (och mindre perfekt) manligt. Detta f\u00f6rde \u00e4ven med sig att kvinnlig sexualitet inte ans\u00e5gs skilja sig fr\u00e5n manlig. Kvinnor fick, liksom m\u00e4n, utl\u00f6sningar och orgasmer. Under 1800-talet n\u00e4r det feminina intar platsen som det manligas motsats p\u00e5 alla plan, \u00e4ven sexuellt, f\u00f6rsvann den kvinnliga orgasmen s\u00e5 att s\u00e4ga fr\u00e5n det offentliga rummet.\n\n Se Lena Johannesson (1978\/1997).\n\n Paula Findlen (1996).\n\n Linda Williams diskuterar denna \"kroppsliga\" betraktare i artikeln \"Corporeal Observers\" _(_ 1995).\n\n N\u00e5got som tas upp av Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1996).\n\n Liesbeth van Zoonen (1994), Marina Warner (1996) och Anja Hirdman (1998).\n\n Jfr. Despina Kakoudaki (2004).\n\n Anja Hirdman (2000).\n\n Anette D.S\u00f8rensen (2003), Brian McNair (2002).\n\n Pierre Bourdieu (1984), Jane Arthurs (2004) och Mark Jankovich (2001).\n\n Namnet ska associeras till filmen _My Fair Lady_ fr\u00e5n 1964 som handlar om den aristokratiska spr\u00e5kprofessorn som med olika medel ska f\u00f6rvandla en s\u00e5 kallad r\u00e4nnstensflicka till societetsdam.\n\n Uppgifter fr\u00e5n www.playboy.com.\n\n## NOTER KAPITEL 3\n\n Se till exempel Patrik Steorn (2006) om nakna m\u00e4n i den svenska konsten runt 1900.\n\n Se Richard Dyer (1997), se \u00e4ven Tom Olsson (2005) om manlighet, identitet och kl\u00e4der under 1500-talet.\n\n Susan Bordo (1999a).\n\n Se Martin Pumphrey (1989).\n\n Kvinnliga kroppsbyggare understryker st\u00e4ndigt sin femininitet, som kanske ifr\u00e5gas\u00e4tts inte bara f\u00f6r de stora musklerna utan ocks\u00e5 f\u00f6r att denna id\u00e9 bakom den muskul\u00f6sa kroppen kopplas till maskulina egenskaper.\n\n Detta uppvisande g\u00f6r det ocks\u00e5 till\u00e5tet f\u00f6r en publik av m\u00e4n att vila blicken p\u00e5 manliga kroppar utan att beh\u00f6va ifr\u00e5gas\u00e4tta sin heterosexualitet.\n\n Richard Dyer (1993).\n\n Bland m\u00e5nga Abigail Solomon-Godeau (1997) och Marjorie Kibby & Bridgid Costello (1999). Andra orsaker som g\u00f6r det sv\u00e5rt att visa upp penisen i v\u00e5r kultur \u00e4r att kvinnor kan j\u00e4mf\u00f6ra m\u00e4ns k\u00f6n samt att det kan skapa \u00e5ngest f\u00f6r homofobiska m\u00e4n som kan fascineras av att titta p\u00e5 den.\n\n Sara H\u00f8jgaard Cawood (2007).\n\n Peter Lehman (2001).\n\n Se Chris Nagel (2002).\n\n Se till exempel tv\u00e5 av de mest bes\u00f6kta Internetsajterna f\u00f6r pornografiskt material i Sverige, www.porrportal.com och www.internetporr.com.\n\n Enligt Macdonald (1995) finns \u00e4ven en lockelse i vad han kallar undervisandet, d\u00e4r m\u00e4n h\u00e4r till\u00e5ts se p\u00e5 andra m\u00e4ns k\u00f6n, se hur de ser ut n\u00e4r de \u00e4r erigerade och hur de g\u00f6r. Detta heterosexuellt till\u00e5tna tittande skulle kunna ses som ett f\u00f6rbisett voyeuristiskt drag i h\u00e5rdpornografi n\u00e4r m\u00e4n ser p\u00e5 m\u00e4n.\n\n Se bland annat Kaite Berkeley (1995), Annette Kuhn (1985) och Andrea Dworkin (1994\/2000).\n\n Jfr. Frank Mort (1996).\n\n Richard Dyer (1985) menar att \u00e4ven mycket pornografi f\u00f6r homosexuella m\u00e4n uppvisar denna id\u00e9 om manlig sexualitet som m\u00e5linriktad \u2013 om att vara den tagande och att ejakulera synligt.\n\n Linda Williams (1990).\n\n Se www.usvideo.se.\n\n Ett resonemang som finns bland annat hos Luce Irigaray (1985), Andy Moye (1985\/1990), Linda Williams (1990), Andrea Dworkin (1994\/2000) och Annette Kuhn (1985).\n\n Pornografins inneh\u00e5ll blir naturligtvis pr\u00e4glat av Internet, eftersom det inneh\u00e5llsm\u00e4ssigt alltid \u00e4r beroende av det medium d\u00e4r den f\u00f6rekommer. P\u00e5 Internets kommersiella porrsajter \u00e4r den visuella pornografin ofta dragen till sin mest naturalistiska spets, helt utan ber\u00e4ttelser och sammanhang och helt upph\u00e4ngd kring penisen och dess \"g\u00f6randen\".\n\n## NOTER KAPITEL 4\n\n Tidningen _Playboy_ syntes p\u00e5 diskarna f\u00f6rsta g\u00e5ngen 1953 oktober i USA, och framg\u00e5ngen l\u00e4t inte v\u00e4nta p\u00e5 sig. Vid starten hade man 54.000 l\u00e4sare f\u00f6r att 1959 vara uppe i en miljon, i dag ligger den \u00e5rliga upplagan i USA p\u00e5 3 miljoner och 4,5 miljoner s\u00e4ljs \u00f6ver hela v\u00e4rlden (www.playboy.com).\n\n Despina Kakoudaki (2004).\n\n Det finns ocks\u00e5 en m\u00e4ngd pinupkonst, inte minst p\u00e5 Internet av stora bildbibliotek med s\u00e5v\u00e4l gammalt material som nytt, se www.thepinupfiles.com.\n\n Se Despina Kakoudaki (2004).\n\n Jfr. Maud Eduards (2007).\n\n Se Joshua Goldstein (2001).\n\n Den mystiska, sv\u00e5ra kvinnan \u2013 femme fatalen \u2013 representerade otillg\u00e4nglighet och i och med det hot om avvisande och nederlag f\u00f6r m\u00e4n.\n\n Se Richard A. Kalian & Robert D. Brooks (1974) och James Beggan & Scott Allison (2001).\n\n Se Beverly Skeggs (2000).\n\n Detta syns \u00e4ven p\u00e5 tidningen _Moore_ s hemsida d\u00e4r unga kvinnor kan skicka in bilder p\u00e5 sig sj\u00e4lva i syfte att f\u00e5 bli utvikta i tidningen, kallad \"Bubblare. Heta svenska tjejer som vill upp\". Dessa bilder med en kort presentation (namn, \u00e5lder, intresse) \u00e4r tillg\u00e4ngliga f\u00f6r alla som g\u00e5r in p\u00e5 hemsidan och samma poser och koder anv\u00e4nds h\u00e4r som i tidningens utviksbilder.\n\n Som Tiina Rosenberg (2003) menar kan urholka heteronormativitetens system.\n\n Ariel Levy (2005).\n\n Det st\u00f6rsta \u00f6vertrampet en kvinna kan g\u00f6ra \u00e4r ocks\u00e5 att deklarera att hon inte tycker om m\u00e4n, \"manshatare\" \u00e4r ett mycket starkt sk\u00e4llsord.\n\n Edna I. Rawlings & Donna K. Carter (1977), se ocks\u00e5 Loretta K. Woolsey (1987).\n\n Anja Hirdman (2002).\n\n www.harlequin.com.\n\n N\u00e5got som ocks\u00e5 har konstaterats av Bethan Benwell (2004) och David Gauntlett (2002).\n\n Jfr. Michael Westerlund (2007).\n\n Bland m\u00e5nga Peter Lyman (1995), Sharon Bird (1996) och Ojstein Gullv\u00e5g Holter (1994).\n\n I det privata eller i n\u00e4ra relationer utanf\u00f6r dessa manliga sammanhang (som flera av de intervjuade m\u00e4nnen tidvis upplevt som relativt obehagliga), finns andra k\u00e4nslor \u2013 b\u00e5de positiva och intima \u2013 f\u00f6rknippade med att vara man. Detta g\u00f6r ocks\u00e5 att umg\u00e4nget med kvinnor ibland upplevs som andh\u00e5l fr\u00e5n en manliga, mer kr\u00e4vande gemenskap (Suzanna M. Rose 1985).\n\n Se till exempel Jesper Fundbergs (2003) studie av unga killar och fotboll, och Stephan Mendel-Enk (2005) om sport, v\u00e5ld och maskulinitet.\n\n Sara H\u00f8jgaard Cawood (2007), se ocks\u00e5 Peter Lyman (1995) och Neill Korobov (2005).\n\n## NOTER KAPITEL 5\n\n Denna m\u00f6jlighet till ett \u00f6msesidigt tittande utvidgar det som medieforskaren John B. Thompson (2005) har kallat medial synlighet.\n\n Daniel Chandler & Dilwyn Roberts-Young (1998).\n\n Sajtens innehavare var 06.02.22, f\u00f6retaget \"Snyggast i Malm\u00f6 AB\", enligt uppgift fr\u00e5n Nic-se.se 2006.02.22.\n\n Mellan 2004 och 2006 laddade jag ner trehundra bilder fr\u00e5n tio-i-topplistorna f\u00f6r att se vilka bilder av sig sj\u00e4lva som tjejer och killar l\u00e4gger ut. Dessa j\u00e4mf\u00f6rdes sedan med ungef\u00e4r tv\u00e5tusen bilder h\u00e4mtade fr\u00e5n tidningar som alla riktar sig till en publik av unga kvinnor och m\u00e4n: _Frida_ och _Veckorevyn_ samt _Slitz_ och _Moore_. Fr\u00e5gorna g\u00e4llde om och i s\u00e5 fall p\u00e5 vilka s\u00e4tt, id\u00e9er kring k\u00f6n och sexualitet s\u00e5som de uttrycks i mediebilder pr\u00e4glar ungdomarnas sj\u00e4lvbilder, allts\u00e5 n\u00e4r de sj\u00e4lva g\u00f6r sig till bild (se Anja Hirdman 2006). Jag har sedan fortsatt att kontinuerligt (senast i oktober 2007) titta in p\u00e5 dessa listor, de m\u00f6nster jag s\u00e5g tidigare har om n\u00e5got blivit \u00e4n tydligare.\n\n Erving Goffman (1973).\n\n Webbkameror \u00e4r vanliga \u00e4ven i pornografiska sammanhang p\u00e5 Internet. De anv\u00e4nds ocks\u00e5 \"livestream\", filmandet av den egna vardagen (\"jennicam\" var en av de f\u00f6rsta och en av de kanske mest v\u00e4lk\u00e4nda), se Michele White (2003).\n\n Rune Gade (2004) diskuterar dessa begrepp i samband med amat\u00f6rpornografin p\u00e5 Internet.\n\n Det finns bilder p\u00e5 bara \u00f6verkroppar i kategorin N\u00e4rbilder d\u00e4r ansiktet inte visas. Som anonym kan pojkarna allts\u00e5 visa sina kroppar, eller delar av dem.\n\n Jfr. Ulla Carlsson (2005).\n\n Se bland annat Alexis S. Tan (1979), Eric Stice & Sarah K. Bearman (2001) och Monica L. Ward & Kristen Harrison (2005).\n\n Pope G. Harrison et al. (2000).\n\n Niels-Ulric S\u00f8rensen (2006).\n\n Forskning de senaste \u00e5ren har visat att mycket av kommunikationen mellan k\u00f6nen p\u00e5 Internet f\u00f6ljer traditionella genusm\u00f6nster. F\u00f6rklaringar varierar fr\u00e5n att det k\u00e4nns familj\u00e4rt och \"naturligt\" att f\u00f6lja m\u00f6nster off-line, till att m\u00e4n och kvinnor uppr\u00e4tth\u00e5ller dessa m\u00f6nster p\u00e5 grund av att de ger bekr\u00e4ftelse inom olika gemenskaper, se Marjorie Kibby (1997), Jodi O'Brien (1999) och Susan C. Herring (2001).\n\n Se Janet Holland (2004).\n\n Lotta L\u00f6fgren-M\u00e5rtenson och Sven-Axel M\u00e5nsson (2006).\n\n## NOTER KAPITEL 6\n\n S\u00e5som sajten www.exet.nu.\n\n## REFERENSER\n\nAlloula, Malek (1987) _The Colonial Harem_. Manchester: Manchester University Press.\n\nArthurs, Jane (2004) _Television and Sexuality. Regulation and the Politics of Taste_. Berkshire: Open University Press.\n\nBarthes, Roland (1977) _Image, Music, Text_. 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New York: Farrar: Straus and Giroux.\n\nBordo, Susan (1999b) The Gay Men's Revenge, _Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism_ , vol 57 nr 1.\n\nCarlsson, Ulla (2005) _V\u00e5ld och pornografi i medierna_. G\u00f6teborg: Nordicom.\n\nChandler, Daniel och Roberts-Young, Dilwyn (1998) The Construction of Identity in the Personal Homepages of Adolescents ().\n\nChodorow, Nancy (1999) _The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender._ London: University of California Press.\n\nConnell, Robert (1995) _Masculinities._ Berkeley: University of California Press.\n\nCraig, Steve (1992) _Men, Masculinity and the Media._ Newbury Park: Sage.\n\nDarnton, Robert (1995) _Pornografi och revolution. F\u00f6rbjudna b\u00e4sts\u00e4ljare i det f\u00f6rrevolution\u00e4ra Frankrike._ Stockholm: Ordfronts f\u00f6rlag.\n\nDworkin, Andrea (1994\/2000) Against the Male Flood. Censorship, Pornography,\n\nand Equality, i _,_ Drucilla Cornell (red) _Feminism and Pornography_. Oxford: Oxford University Press.\n\nDyer, Richard (1985) Male Gay Porn, _Jump Cut_ vol 30 nr 85.\n\nDyer, Richard, (1993) _The Matter of Images. Essays on Representation_. London: Routledge.\n\nDyer, Richard (1997) _White: Essays on Race and Culture_. London: Routledge.\n\nEardley, Tony (1985\/1990) Violence and Sexuality, i Andy Metcalf och Martin Humphries (red) _The Sexuality of Men._ London: Pluto Press.\n\nEasthope, Anthony (1990) _What a Man's Gotta Do: the Masculine Myth in Popular Culture._ New York: Routledge.\n\nEduards, Maud (2007) _Kroppspolitik_. Stockholm: Atlas.\n\nEkenstam, Claes (1999) R\u00e4dd att falla: gr\u00e5tens och mansbildens sammanfl\u00e4tade historia, i Anna Maria Berggren (red) _Manligt och omanligt i ett historiskt perspektiv_. FRN, Uppsala: Ord & Form AB.\n\nEkenstam, Claes (2005) R\u00e4dslan att falla, _NIKK_ nr 1\/05.\n\nFaludi, Susan (1999) _Stiffed: the Betrayal of the Modern Man_. London: Chatto & Windus.\n\nFindlen, Paula (1996) Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Reinassance Italy, i Lynn Hunt (red) _The Invention of Pornography. Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500\u20131800_. New York: Zone Books.\n\nMichel Foucault (1980-1987) _Sexualitetens historia_. Stockholm: Gidlund.\n\nFrosh, Stephen (1994) _Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis_. London and New York: Routledge.\n\nFundberg, Jesper (2003) _Kom igen, gubbar!: om pojkfotboll och maskuliniteter_. Stockholm: Carlssons.\n\nGade, Rune (2004) Mig selv som billede, _EKKO 24_.\n\nGauntlett, David (2002) _Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction._ London: Routledge.\n\nGiddens, Anthony (1992) _The Transformation of Intimacy. Sexuality, Love & Eroticism in Modern Societies_. Cambridge: Polity Press.\n\nGoffman, Erving (1973) _The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life._ New York: Woodstock.\n\nGoldstein, Joshua, (2001) _War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa_. 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John (2005) The New Visibility, _Theory, Culture & Society_, vol 22 nr 6.\n\nTjeder, David (2002) _The Power of Character: Middle-Class Masculinities, 1800-1900_. Stockholm: Stockholms Universitet.\n\nvan Zoonen, Liesbeth (1994) _Feminist Media Studies_. London: Sage.\n\nWard, L. Monica och Harrison Kristen (2005) The Impact of Media Use on Girl's Beliefs About Gender Roles, their Bodies and Sexual Relationships: A Research Synthesis, i Ellen Cole och Jessica Henderson Daniel (red) _Featuring Females. Feminist Analyses of Media._ Washington: American Psychological Association.\n\nWarner, Marina (1996) _Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form_. London: Vintage.\n\nWearing, Betsy (1996) _Gender: The Pleasure and Pain of Difference_. Melbourne: Longman.\n\nWesterlund, Michael (2007) _Internet och sj\u00e4lvmord_ , (avhandlingsmanus), JMK, Stockholms universitet.\n\nWhite, Michele (2003) Too Close to See: Men, Women and Webcams, _New Media Society_ vol 5 nr 1.\n\nWilliams, Linda (1990) _Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the \"frenzy of the visible\"._ London: Pandora Press.\n\nWilliams, Linda (1995) Corporeal Observers, i Patrice Petro (red) _Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video._ Bloomington: Indiana University Press.\n\nWoolsey K. Loretta (1987) Bonds Between Women and Between Men, Part 1: A Review of Theory, _Atlantis_ , vol 13 nr 1.\n\n\u00d6sterberg, Dag (1995) _Jean-Paul Sartre. Filosofi, konst, politik, privatliv._ G\u00f6teborg: Bokf\u00f6rlaget Korpen.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":" \n# Naked to the Stars\n\nGordon R. Dickson\n\nSTART SCIENCE FICTION \nAn Imprint of Start Publishing LLC \nNew York, New York\n_NAKED TO THE STARS_ \u00a9 1961 by Almat Publishing Corp. \u00a9 1989 by Gordon R. Dickson. \nFirst Start Science Fiction edition 2013.\n\nAll Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Science Fiction, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.\n\nAll characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.\n\nPublished by Start Science Fiction, \nan imprint of Start Publishing LLC \nNew York, New York\n\nISBN: 978-1-62793-468-8\n\n# Chapter One\n\nThe voice, speaking out of the ancient blackness of the nigh ton the third planet of Arcturus\u2014under an alien tree, bent and crippled by the remorseless wind\u2014paused, and cleared its throat... ahem,\" it said. \"Gentlemen...\"\n\nIt seemed to lose its way for a second. It faltered and fell silent. Then it appeared to find strength and speak again:\n\n\". . .it's this way with the soldier. What makes the soldier different from the common, garden-variety murderer is the cause for which the soldier kills\u2014\" the voice broke off to clear its throat, which had become impeded by something soft and liquid.\n\n_\"Bull!\"_ said another voice, out of the wind-dry darkness.\n\n\"In a war,\" continued the first voice, unheeding, \"to defend his hearth and family, for a crusade, during a definite limited time\u2014the shield of high purpose and the feeling that his cause is just may be kept clean and bright. But soldiers become veterans\u2014\"\n\nThe voice broke off once more, on a liquid cough. It cleared its throat with effort.\n\n\"Some do. Yeah,\" said the second voice.\n\n\"\u2014become veterans. And veterans become professional military men. So much so, that while it may remain a fine thing to let the enemy attack before the soldier goes to war, it becomes the practical thing to go to war first. When this happens, the aforementioned shield of high purpose, the heretofore unsullied escutcheon... ah...\" the voice hesitated in its tone of impersonal dictation and muttered off into nonsense.\n\n\"Throw another nerve block into him, Joby,\" said Section Leader Calvin Truant, of the 4th Assault Wing, 91st Combat Engineers, Human Expedition against the Lehaunan.\n\n\"If I do,\" replied the voice that had been answering to the lecturing one, \"I'll shove both thumbs through his spine. It's had it.\"\n\n\"Do it now,\" said Cal. There was a rustle, and the muttering broke off with a light gasp. There followed a moment's unnatural-seeming silence, then the voice resumed confidently.\n\n\". . . become veterans. And veterans become profess\u2014with regard to the present situation of the Expedition, I can only report it as bogged down from the viewpoint of a Contacts Service Officer. Normally, at a time of truce we would expect to make considerable contact on the level of cultural understanding. However, it is by no means clear that the Lehaunan understand exactly what we mean by 'truce'\u2014\"\n\n\"You tell 'em!\" said another, younger voice. \"They were real trucy to you, weren't they, Runyon?\"\n\n\"That's enough of that, Tack,\" said Cal. \"Get back to the cable phone. See if Division hasn't got any orders for us yet.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said the younger voice. Cal heard feet moving off among the gravel and stones of the dark hillside along the side of the little hollow where they all lay, toward the eighty-three other men of what still called itself the 4th Assault Wing. In then early opposite direction, up the slope of the hollow, there was a faint glow in the night sky; a reflection of lights in the valley beyond where the small local community around the Lehaunanarea Power Center was. The glow would have been invisible to any but men who had had no illumination but this for the past hours since the great orange orb of Arcturus had set.\n\n\". . . nor do they think of war in the same sense as we do, apparently. Although evidently capable of defending themselves,with great skill and effect against any powered attack, the Lehaunan appear largely ignorant of the idea of individual angers and hatreds. It appears almost as if they look on the weapon that kills them as somehow unconnected with the soldier who fires it. Under conditions other than these of war, possibly they would be a kindly and naive people...\"\n\n\"Yeah, you put that down, Gutless Won\u2014\" the exhaustion-hoarse voice of Joby broke off in a slight note of embarrassment, similar to that of a person who finds himself talking out of turn and too loudly at a funeral. \"\u2014Contacts Officer,\" he amended.\n\nFrom behind, along the slope, there was the rattle of displaced gravel.\n\n\"Section?\" It was the young voice of the soldier Cal had called Tack.\n\n\"Well?\" said Cal.\n\n\"No orders.\"\n\nThere was a moment of total silence. Even Contacts Officer Lieutenant Harry Runyon paused in the dictation of his delirium-born reports to his superiors.\n\n\"How about the other thing?\" said Cal. \"They get the word passed on to Medics we've got a basket case here?\"\n\n\"Sure, Sec. But they said no beamed-power equipment to be used for fear of the Lehaunan blowing it up. Period. Including ambulances.\"\n\nThe rest of them could hear Joby spit, in the darkness.\n\n\"Thought you didn't like Contacts Officers, Joby?\" jeered Tack.\n\n\"And your sister,\" said Joby. \"He's attached to our outfit.\"\n\n\"Cut it,\" said Cal.\n\nHis own words came to his ears sounding unreally quiet and distant. He was a little surprised to hear them. It was like some-body else talking. The feeling was part of the general sensation he had of being somehow without a body; a feeling he knew was essentially lightheadedness from lack of sleep. He had not slept for one\u2014two days now. Not since Lieutenant James, thelast combat commissioned officer, had been taken off by ambulance, leaving Cal, a Section Leader only, in command of the Wing. (Runyon, of course, being a Contacts Officer and forbid-den to take any part in the fighting, did not count.)\n\n\"Tack,\" said Cal. \"Up top and take a look.\"\n\nThe sound of a quiet slither went away up the slope from them.\n\n\"Truce was up at sunset,\" said Joby. The Contacts Officer had fallen silent again. Perhaps he was mercifully dead. Neither Cal nor Joby moved to find out.\n\n\"Get Walk over here,\" said Cal. Joby went off, back toward the eighty-three men and the cable phone. Left for a moment with no one to know what he did, Cal felt a sudden, almost drunken desire to lie down. He fought it away from him. He heard Joby's return; and Joby spoke.\n\n\"Here we are.\"\n\n\"What's up, Cal?\"\n\nThe second voice, that of Section Leader Walker Lee Blye,had a quality and tone something like Cal's, the latter's exhaustion-tricked and unreal sense of hearing noted. It was not the same voice in an ordinary sense, being deeper, harsher, and more clipped. But there was something in the phrasing, in the breathing, that made it seem like his own voice speaking back to him out of the pain and darkness of the night. It was as if that part of Cal himself which, suffering, struck out in blind retaliation at the universe, had answered back. Cal pushed the light-headed fancy from himself.\n\n\"Tell you as soon as Tack gets back down here,\" he said.They rested together in the darkness, the three of them, able-bodied soldiers. Harry Runyon had taken up his muttering once more, but now in too low a tone to be understood. Joby spoke.\"You ever get the urge?\"\n\nThey thought about it for a moment in the dark.\n\n\"You mean Earth?\" said Walk's voice. \"Stay back there? Go civilian?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Joby.\n\n\"I thought of it,\" said Walk. \"I thought of it. At the end of every expedition I think of it. But I'm not built for it. When I get rich and they shovel me under there'll be the slow drums and the trumpets. Not some damn civilian organ in a mortuary.\" Cal listened without saying anything.\n\n\"Lanson went back,\" said Joby. \"No new coat of varnish for him this trip, he said.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"He's a Congressman from South McMurdo now.\"\n\n\"Kerr went into business back there. Deep-sea farming off Brazil someplace. Guess he did all right.\"\n\n\"Nah,\" said Joby. \"He got himself another coat. Hundred twenty-seventh Armor Assault Group. Section in Ballistics told me.\"\n\n\"Well. And he likes it. I got a letter...\"\n\n\"After a while, I guess\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014we must,\" said Runyon, strongly and suddenly out of his muttering, \"distinguish. The one from the other. The innocent from the guilty. The defenders from the attackers. The\u2014dear sir, if you will refer to my previous reports . . .'' he trailed off back into mumbling.\n\n\"Lots like him back home now,\" said Walk. Cal woke a little out of his lightheadedness at the statement, and looked at Walk's direction. He could not see the other man, but he could imagine the sudden flash of the white teeth in Walk's lean face as he said it, and the sudden glittering glance thrown through the obscurity at Cal.\n\n\"You mean, Runyon?\" said Joby.\n\n\"Him.\"\n\n\"Don't know why the ex-Service people in Government don't put a stop to that,\" said Joby. \"All the good men and women we lost against the Griella. Now against the Lehaunan. And now they start letting these Societies, these Equal-Vote, Non-Violence people put on uniforms right beside us and turn right around after peace is signed and do their best to give back everything we took. Who'n hell has to make friends with Aliens, anyway? We can lick'm, can't we?\"\n\n\"Civilians!\" said Walk.\n\n\"We've got ex-mulebrains in Government,\" said Joby. \"What's wrong with them?\"\n\n\"Well, I tell you,\" said Walk, and again Cal imagined the flash of teeth, the glitter of eyes in his direction. \"They marry civilians; they've got civilian relatives. It affects their point of view.\"\n\n\"No,\" Cal made himself say with a heavy effort. \"The ones who crack their varnish and quit always were half-civilian anyway. That's what it is.\"\n\n\"Someday,\" said Walk, \"a bunch of us'll go back. Up ship,a full Expedition and go back armed.\"\n\n\"And fight Headquarters,\" said Joby.\n\n\"Headquarters'd be on our side.\"\n\n\"Then why don't they order us back?\" asked Joby. \"What the hell\u2014you, me, any of us\u2014we go back there and what happens?\"\n\n\". . . only young men should fight wars,\" said the voice of Runyon, suddenly and clearly out of the blackness, \"to reduce the tax burden and. . .\"\n\n\"I mean,\" said Joby, raising his voice above the sound of Runyon's, \"I go back. All right, I've got my own vote plus one extra for being a veteran. I got veteran's bonus points for government job tests. I got land option and combat pension. Why fight? I ought just be able to take over.\"\n\nThere was another moment of silence during which Runyon muttered about nothing being more certain than a soldier's Death Benefits.\n\n\"No,\" said Joby heavily, after a moment. \"I guess not. Not worth it. We can sweat these holier-than-thou gutless wonders out, I guess.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Walk. \"You were closer to right to start with.You and I know what the answer is\u2014the same answer that always works. Clean them out. Get rid of them.\"\n\nA sound of slithering descent approached them down the slope, invisibly.\n\n\"Sec?\"\n\n\"Here,\" said Cal.\n\n\"Well,\" said Tack's voice, now in their midst, \"it's still going on. I sat up there with Djarali and watched one myself. Something like a truck, and one comes out of that hole in the hill into that walled compound, up at the far end of town. One about every twelve minutes. Djar says he's counted nine more since he went on sentry; and he hasn't seen any go back into the hill.\"\n\n\"And the truce quit at sunset,\" said Joby.\n\nCal stood up. He looked back through the darkness to where the eighty-three men waited. In his mind's eye he saw the heavy equipment and weapons back there all parked and idle with the protection of a little rise in ground between the men and them.\n\n\"Walk,\" he said, \"go back and get on that cable phone. Tell them I'm asking for orders\u2014from the General if necessary. And tell them if they can't get an ambulance up here, they can at least get a runner in here with some drugs for Runyon. Joby can't keep on gigging him with a nerve pinch forever. Tacky!\"\n\n\"Right, here, Cal.\"\n\n\"Got your sketch pad and junk with you?\"\n\n\"I got a pocket kit.\"\n\n\"All right. Keep that.\" Cal began to unclip his weapons harness. \"Get out of your other gear. You and I are going for a stroll, down into that town.\"\n\n\"Down among those Lehaunan?\" said Walk.\n\n\"That's right. You're in charge until I get back. I'm going to try and find out what those trucks, or whatever they are, are bringing in. Ready, Tack?\"\n\nThere were a few final clinks from Tack's direction, and then the sound of a dropped harness.\n\n\"All ready. But, oh Section Leader, sir\"\u2014Tack's voice scaled up in bad mimicry of a high-voiced recruit\u2014\"isn't this one of those volunteer missions?\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" said Cal. \"You're to stick close and not play any games. Walk, give us three hours to get back. After that, it's all yours.\"\n\n\"Right. _Have fun_!\"\n\n\"Oh, we'll have a ball.\"\n\nCal led the way off the slope, hearing Tack close behind him.\n\n# Chapter Two\n\nIn the Lehaunan town, once Cal and Tack got into it, there was plenty of light. It came from tall glowing, barber pole affairs that were the local equivalent, evidently, of street lights.They cast a dim but, to human eyes, garish glare over the rounded buildings and small protuberances that looked like half-barrels sticking up out of the pavement between the buildings. Cal took his way from sight-to-sight.\n\nThere were no true streets, but simply spaces between the buildings and he had not dared to bring even so simple a mechanical device as a compass, after the way the Lehaunan had reacted to Runyon's voice recorder, some hours previously. Cal was fairly sure he was proceeding as directly as was possible through the town to the walled compound against the hillside beyond, but it was slow going and after fifteen minutes or so of threading his way between the buildings, he sat down on one of the half-barrels and waited for Tack to catch up.\n\nThere were two barber pole street lights in this particular open space. One was about fifteen feet high and three feet in diameter, the other about eight feet high and two feet wide. Both glowed with the crackling, hard, amber illumination. It hurt the eyes to look directly at them, but for all their size, the light they threw on the curved walls of the buildings thirty and fifty feet away from them was little more than a campfire in the center of the same area would have provided. A couple of the adult, sooty-furred Lehaunans passed in opposite directions through the space while Cal sat resting. But neither gave him more than a casual glance that seemed to at once recognize his lack of a weapon harness.\n\nWhat was delaying Tack was a young Lehaunan, looking like a black-furred raccoon about three feet high, who had apparently become fascinated by Tack's sketch book and pencil and was tagging inquisitively after the soldier. In the weird glare from the barber poles, they made a humorous-looking pair: the young Lehaunan like a human child encased in animal Halloween costume and shoving close to the fresh-faced young man in the dirty coveralls. Tack had let himself be worked upon to the point where he was actually drawing pictures for his small pursuer.\n\n\"Hurry it up,\" said Cal numbly.\n\n\"Be right with you, Sec,\" said Tack. He made a few steps toward where Cal was sitting, then paused to add several more lines to the sketch he was making at a rough distance of six inches under the curious orange nose of his companion. \"He's cute. Y'know?\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Cal under his breath. He had started thinking again, however, about Walk Blye, and his mind swung off at a tangent. There was a danger in Walk.\n\nThe man had a streak in him. Walk was like a wolf the Wing had once raised from a cub and tried to keep for a mascot, until it went berserk in its fifth year and had to be hunted down with fire rifles, out in the boondocks back of camp. The wolf had been perfectly like a dog in all respects but one. He would press against your knees, shoving his head forward as you petted him.And then, suddenly, there would be something like a light touch against the back of your hand. All at once, blood would bead up along a thin line where he had slashed you. But when you looked from the hand back to him, there he was, still pressing against your knees and begging to be petted.\n\nAt the end he had gone wild, slashing and butchering at all things about him for no reason. And when he had been knocked off his feet with fire rifles and Cal, who was closest, had come up to do the unhappy job of finishing him off, he had whined and raised his head and licked out his tongue at Cal's hand, not as if supplicating or in shame, but almost as if feverishly seeking petting for what he had done. And a hand to slash.\n\nWith Walk, the slash was always in words.\n\n\"Right,\" he had said, as Cal and Tack were leaving. _\"Have fun.\"_\n\nCal had been twenty feet up the slope before it registered on him that the last two words had not been said in the usual tone of rough and friendly irony, but on a driving note of bitter, sneering contempt. As if Cal, instead of taking on a risky mission required by duty, had been dodging out to avoid some unpleasant task where he was. Like the wolf, Walk had slashed without warning; and Cal knew this to be a sign that something was eating at the man. The bitter part was that he was also Cal's oldest friend. They had entered the Service together. They had saved each other's lives before this, and might well again.\n\nCal looked up impatiently. Tack and the young Lehaunan were still twenty feet from him, still immersed in their drawing. Cal got heavily to his feet and stalked over to them.\n\n\". . .a bunny rabbit. See?\" Tack was pointing at a sketch he had drawn and put in the young Lehaunan's hand. \"See the ears? Bunny rabbit. Say _bunny rabbit.\"_\n\n\"Burr. . .\" said the young Lehaunan. \"Burra . . .brrran\u2014\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Cal. \"That's enough.\" He cast a quick glance around, but there were no adult Lehaunan in sight.\"Out!\" He took two more steps forward and cuffed the young Lehaunan sharply. \"Get out of here!\"\n\nThe youngster cried out, and fell back a few steps, still clutching the sheet of paper with the drawing. He whimpered and looked at Tack.\n\n\"Sec!\" said Tack.\n\n\"Shut up!\" Cal said. He took another step toward the young Lehaunan, who hesitated, then held out the paper shyly toward him.\n\n\"Burraba...\" said the little Lehaunan, uncertainly.\n\n\"Get!\" barked Cal, striding forward. The young Lehaunan cried out and scuttled away into the further dimness beyond two of the houses.\n\nCal looked around, sweating. But there were still no adults in view. He let out a relieved breath. He had been dull-witted with exhaustion a moment before, but now he felt as if he had just taken some powerful stimulant. He was once more conscious that he was a soldier, with authority and responsibility. He was wide awake. He turned around and led off once more.\n\nTack followed. Cal could feel the younger soldier's resentment like a hand laid against Cal's back.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" Cal said, without slowing down or turning his head. \"You're carrying that sketch book to put down military information about this town. Not to play games with. And just because the Lehaunan let us walk around here as long as we aren't carrying any power equipment doesn't mean they're harmless. You saw what happened to Runyon when he went up to one of the adults just wearing a recorder\u2014and the truce was still on then, too.\" Cal paused. There was no answer from behind him. \"Do you hear me?\"\n\n\"I hear you,\" said Tack, behind him.\n\n\"All right.\" They walked on. \"And if you're wound up be-cause I had to slap that kid back there, just remember that good military practice\u2014the _smart_ thing to do\u2014would have been tochop him over the ear and hide his body some place safe so he couldn't go tell the wrong parties about what we're doing here.\"\n\nTack said something Cal could not catch.\n\n\" _What's that?\"_\n\n\"I said,\" muttered Tack, \"I could have chased him off without hitting him, if you'd told me.\"\n\n\"I shouldn't have had to tell you.\"\n\nThey went on. After about five more minutes, they came to a wall of the compound where the trucks had been spotted. They walked along the outside of the wall from end to end. But there was no way to get over, or even see over it, without equipment they had not dared bring. And there was no way visible through it but a pair of blank, high, locked gates. Tack made a number of sketches, but in the end they were forced to turn away without learning anything that explained the trucks.\n\n\"We could try up around the hill from behind,\" said Tack.\n\n\"No time,\" said Cal. He looked at the timepiece set in his wrist scope. \"Five hours to dawn. Come on back to camp.\"\n\nOn their way once more through the town, they did not see the little Lehaunan again.\n\n\"Sec?\" said Joby's voice as Cal and Tack came down the slope near the cable phone and the waiting men.\n\n\"Joby?\" said Cal. \"How come you're still here? Runyon get rich?\"\n\n\\- \"No, he's still alive. A tech-nurse made it in from Division on her own two feet. You know that Lieutenant Anita Warroad that came out with the replacements last month? That little brunette?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Cal. \"She bring drugs?\"\n\n\"Yeah. She's got him back knowing where he is.\"\n\n\"Any news from Division?\"\n\n\"That's what I've been going to tell you,\" said Joby. \"There was a directive to all units from General Harmon, over the cable phone. All unit commanders, pending further orders, are to take whatever independent action they consider individually necessary to hold their present positions.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Cal softly, under his breath.\n\nHe stood for a second.\n\n\"All right,\" he said, raising his voice. \"Everybody in here where I can talk to them. Get them in, Joby. Where's Walk?\"\n\n\"Here,\" answered Walk's voice, so close at hand it was startling.\n\n\"Want to talk to you.\"\n\nCal led off into the darkness. He could hear Walk following.After a dozen steps he turned and stopped. Walk's steps stopped. \"That order,\" said Cal in a low voice. \"It leaves it up to me.\"\n\n\"It does that,\" said Walk, without expression in his voice. Cal waited a moment, but there was silence.\n\n\"Have _you_ got something in mind?\" said Cal.\n\n\"It's your show.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Cal. \"That's right, I guess. It's my show. All right.\" He stepped around where Walk would be and headed back. He heard Walk's footsteps start and followed behind him again like a mockery. Cal counted off the dozen steps back and stopped.\n\n\"Joby?\" he said.\n\n\"They're all here,\" said Joby.\n\n\"All right. Section units,\" said Cal. \"Sound off. One?\"\n\n\"Here,\" said a voice out of the night, \"all present and accounted for.\"\n\n\"Two?\"\n\n\"Here.\"\n\n\"Three?\"\n\n\"All here.\"\n\nHe went on down the list of Sections. All six from A to F were there. Eighty-three sound men, plus Tack, Joby and Walk waiting on his words in the darkness.\n\n\" _Morituri te salutant!\"_ he heard his dead father's voice say suddenly and clearly upon the waiting air. _\"Axe, Caesar._ ''With a sudden superstitious horror he clamped his jaw shut and dis-covered it had been himself that was speaking with the exact pure accent and intonation of the older man. For a moment he stood numb and shaken, expecting anything in the way of response and questions from the armed and waiting men before him. But no sound came back; no voice queried. The exhaustion-hazed world settled back toward sanity around him. Perhaps, he thought, there was no one among them who had recognized the ancient salute of the Roman gladiators in its original Latin. _\"Those who are about to die. . ._ \" He shoved the thought from him with almost a physical use of muscle. He cleared his throat.\n\n\"Right, then,\" he said, clearing his throat again. He spoke a little louder. \"You all know how we stand. The truce was up at sunset, according to Division. At dawn, the Lehaunan in that town down there will probably be hitting us, especially since they seem to be getting reinforcements or supplies from some-where underground into that walled power center compound back of town. If we wait until dawn, they've got us. If we hit them now, considering that they don't like to fight at night, maybe it'll be the other way around.\"\n\nHe paused. There was no sound from them.\n\n\"So that's what we're going to do,\" he went on. \"Hit them now. Harness up with hand weapons, fire rifles, only. In five minutes we're moving out in skirmish order of Sections. We'll move in skirmish order right to the edge of die town and when I signal, we go in shooting and fight our way through town and into that compound. That's all. Section Leaders here to me.\"The leaders of the Sections\u2014in some cases they were not even Squad men, so reduced was the Wing's rank and strength\u2014gathered about Cal for their individual orders. As soon as he had disposed of them, Cal went in search of the tech-nurse who had walked in to take care of Runyon. He found her with Runyon in the same anonymous patch of darkness where he had left the wounded Contacts Officer earlier.\n\n\"Nurse?\" he said, peering into the obscurity. \"Lieutenant?\"\n\n\"We're over here, Section Leader,\" said a young woman's voice that had some ring of familiarity to Cal's ears.\n\n\"You know me? Have I met you before, Lieutenant?\" said Cal.\n\n\"You came into Medical HQ about your ambulance liaison last week,\" was the answer. Cal nodded to himself. He remembered her now. An almost tiny little girl with penetrating brown eyes. There had been a shift in ambulance assignments in the field units and she had seen to it that he was put in touch with his new driver.\n\n\"I remember,\" he said. \"Lieutenant, we're moving up. All of us. You'll be left here alone with the Contacts Officer. I can't even spare you a man for the cable phone. But if you sit tight right here, you'll be okay. Division'll have an ambulance out at dawn.\"\n\n\"Cal...\" it was Runyon's voice, weak, but no longer irrational. \"You aren't going to attack that town.\"\n\n\"If you'd like, Nurse, we can move you and Lieutenant Runyon back to the cable phone.\"\n\n\"Cal,\" said Runyon. \"Cal, listen. They don't think the way we do, these Lehaunan. Not like us. I'm positive they think the truce is good until tomorrow, dawn. Don't you see what that means, then, if you hit them tonight? It'll be proof to them that, we make truces and\u2014\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Cal. \"But the outfit is a sitting duck for any sort of morning attack from that town, Lieutenant. Now, Nurse\u2014\"\n\n\"You can't do this!\" cried Runyon feebly. \"It's murder.\"\n\n\"What do you know about it, Gutless Wonder!\" exploded Cal suddenly, as a white flare seemed to burst suddenly in his brain. \"You got a theory for the situation? Well, stuff your theory! Stuff your ethics! Chew on them and use them instead of a backbone, you\u2014\"\n\n\" _Section Leader!\"_ Cal found himself literally being wrestled back by the small invisible figure of the tech-nurse. \"This man is badly wounded! And he's officer rank. And you can't\u2014\"\n\n\"And I'm in command here!\" Cal jerked roughly back out of her grasp. \"Remember that. Both of you. It's a combat area, my Wing, and my responsibility. So do what I tell you and save your breath for the brass back at Headquarters!\"\n\nHe turned and stalked off.\n\n\"Cal!\" It was Runyon's voice behind him, calling. \"Cal!\"\n\n\"Walk?\" said Cal, halting where he judged the men to be lined up. \"Section Leaders?\"\n\n\"Here,\" answered Walk. And the Section Leaders also answered. Over their close, low-pitched voices, he could hear the distant calling of Runyon, struggling against the nurse's attempts to quiet him.\n\n\"All right. Moving out.\" Cal led off up the slope into the darkness and toward the distant, sky-reflected glow of the town.\n\nAnd it was then that his later memory began to fail him.\n\nWhat happened came back to him afterwards as a series of disconnected incidents, like a badly edited film:\n\nThey were spread out in a skirmish line and going down the slope on the far side of the hill. The nighttime city was distant, small and amber-colored before them. The slope was steep and he could hear men losing their footing with the weight of their equipment and the fact that they could not see where their feet were stepping. He could hear them sliding on down through the gravel and weeds for some distance before they could dig in their heels and elbows to stop.\n\n\"Keep close! Keep them together, Sections!\" Cal kept calling.\n\nAnd one desperate voice finally snarled back, \"How can I keep the sonsabitching sonsabitches close when I can't even keep my own sonsabitching self in line?\"\n\nA near-hysterical howl of laughter burst out suddenly at this,off to Cal's right. And then it was cut off again, as suddenly as if the laughter had without warning felt cold hands close about his throat.\n\nThey were spread out still in a skirmish line, moving up through the level ground of cultivated fields to the town's outer ring of illumination, and waiting for Cal to blow the whistle that would signal their attack.\n\n\"Cal?\" It was Walk's voice, suddenly and eerily out of the night almost beside Cal's ear.\n\n\"What? What're you doing up here? You've got the rear to take care of!\" hissed Cal.\n\n\"Yeah. And I'm going back there in just a minute,\" said Walk. \"I just wondered if we still had you ahead of us up here,that's all.\"\n\nCal felt a sick, hot rage rising in his throat. He took a slow breath and spoke carefully.\n\n\"Get back to your position.\"\n\nWalk laughed, and his laugh faded away, going away, behind Cal. Cal walked on at a normal pace. When he was a dozen feet from the outer ring of town lights, he put the whistle to his lips, and blew.\n\nYelling and running, the human soldiers, looking clumsy and unnatural in their harnesses and equipment, burst forward into the glare, black against the hard amber illumination, dodging between the dome-roofed buildings, the fire rifles spitting little pale ghosts of flames from the pinholes of their muzzles, making small, dry noises like the breaking of sticks.\n\nCal found himself yelling, too . . . running, and his rifle was spitting in his hand.\n\nIt had all taken on the air of a carnival, of a pigeon shoot.There was hardly a sputter of opposition. The humans were running between the buildings, calling out to each other. Keeping score. Making bets.\n\nBlack-furred bodies lay between the buildings. Half in and half out of triangular doorways. The barber pole lights had holes shot in them, but continued to shed their usual glow over the scene. The buildings had holes in them.\n\nThey were at the gates, the high, solid, locked gates of the compound. They had shot the locking mechanism to ribbons but the gates themselves refused to open. Some of the men were cheering and rocking one of the taller, thinner barber poles. It teetered. It leaned farther, and then fell. Men scattered, cheering.\n\nIt bounced as it hit, like a great rubber toy. It came down again, knocking over a soldier who had not dodged fast enough.It rolled off one of his legs, leaving it oddly angled below his knee.\n\nThe men howled with laughter. Joby, who was standing over the fallen man, went into a fit of rage.\n\n\"Why don't you look where you're standing?\" he raved at the soldier with the broken leg. The man, who had been laughing with the rest, stopped suddenly and burst into shamefaced tears.Walk yelled at the others to pick up the pole. Twenty of them grabbed it.\n\nIt was light. Cal found himself holding it nearest the front.Holding it like a battering ram, they ran at the gates. The gates shivered and sagged; and the barber pole rebounded so springily they almost dropped it.\n\n\"Again!\" yelled Cal. They ran at the gates again. They burst them open and spilled into the interior of the compound. Inside there were Lehaunan with hand weapons who immediately began firing at them.\n\nThey were past the Lehaunan with the guns. There had only been a handful of them. The humans were swarming over one of the truck-like devices, halted just outside the hole in the hillside. By main strength a cover was tom off the vehicle, revealing inside it a load of jagged rock.\n\n\"Ore!\" shouted somebody. \"Ore cars!\"\n\nThe men howled like disappointed madmen.\n\nCal stared.\n\nUnder his feet there was a feeling suddenly as if the ground there, and all the universe attached to it, slipped without warning and rocked, and he . . .\n\n...He was sitting on one of the protuberances like half-barrels, on one of the open spaces between the rounded, dome-like buildings. Dawn was washing a pale yellow-pink light over his surroundings, and a small, cool wind moved about between the buildings and ruffled the black fur of a Lehaunan adult male, fallen about twenty feet off. It moved on to blow through the sooty body hair of an adult female, dimly seen fallen just inside the triangular entrance to one of the buildings beyond.\n\nA young Lehaunan identical with the one he had cuffed yesterday was tugging and murmuring over the still body just inside the entrance. He caught sight of Cal and for a moment his orange nose projected inquisitively beyond the doorway in Cal's direction. Then it was pulled back inside.\n\nCal sat looking at the wind playing in the fur of the dead one closest to him. He thought of the youngster he had just seen and his fingers twitched about the fire rifle lying across his knees. But that was all. He had the vague notion that he was about to make some important decision, but there was no hurry. He went back to watching the movements caused by the breeze in the fur.\n\nThere was a noise close by him. A voice.\n\nHe looked slowly around. It was the young Lehaunan from the doorway. Close up, he seemed even more familiar. He was holding a grimy piece of paper out to Cal.\n\n\"Burraba. ...\" said the young Lehaunan diffidently.\n\nCal stared at the scarcely recognizable sketch of a long-eared rabbit on the paper.\n\n\"Burr . . . abbut?\" said the young Lehaunan.\n\nThere was a coolness on Cal's face in the blowing wind. He put his fingers to chin and cheek and they came away wet. He was crying.\n\n\"Bunnnrra . . . abbut?\" said the young Lehaunan hopefully.\n\n# Chapter Three\n\nThe next thing was that Cal woke to find himself strapped down in a bed in free fall. Above him was the frame and springs of the bed overhead. Through a maze of such tiers of beds with men in them, he saw a white metal ceiling. He was bandaged high on the left leg and there was a bandage also around his body low on the chest. He lay still for some time in this white world, hearing the little sounds of men heavily but not ideally drugged against pain. An orderly came by with a hypo gun.\n\n\"Where'm I going?\" Cal managed to say huskily, to the orderly.\n\n\"HQ Hospital, back on Earth,\" said the orderly. He had a clean-shaven, uninvolved face. He found Cal's arm under the sheet of the bed and lifted it out into the open.\n\n\"How'm I hit?\"\n\n\"You'll be all right. Leg bum,\" said the orderly, putting the hypo against Cal's upper arm. \"Small scorch on your side. \" His eyes met Cal's unreadably for a moment. \"From a fire rifle, the report says.\" He pressed the trigger of the hypo gun and Cal,straining to sort out the meaning behind these last words and opening his mouth to ask another question, swam off into unconsciousness.\n\nAfter this there was a hazy period in which the leg began to hurt seriously. In between shots from hypo guns, Cal was vaguely conscious of arriving back in Headquarters Hospital outside Denver, Earth, and of some kind of an operation on the leg.\n\nThere was a short period in which he seemed to be out of his head. Suddenly, with no transition from the hospital, he found himself back in his father's bookstore. They were in the semi-private collectors' room, enclosed by shelves full of not microtapes but bound volumes. Cal stood facing his father, seated behind his father's desk. Above the head of the older man was the regency mirror with the gilt frame giving back an image of Cal's seventeen-year-old face. And on the small shelf below it,between the shelves on either side (holding to the left, Spengler; to the right, Churchill) was a small carving of Bellerophon capturing the winged horse Pegasus. The powerfully muscled arm of the young Greek mythological hero was around the proudly arched neck of a great winged creature, forcing it to the earth.The sweeping pinions were spread wide in resistance, the delicately carved head rearing itself to look the conqueror squarely in the face. The strong equine shoulders hunched in unabandoned resistance. Only one front leg, buckling under the strength of the hero, presented its hoof directly toward the viewer in what Cal had always thought was an ugly, crippled fashion.\n\n\"Of course you can stop me,\" Cal heard himself saying, as he had said eight years before. \"I'm not eighteen. You can phone down and say I don't have your permission to enlist.\"\n\nHe looked down at his father, seated in the desk chair with the carved armrest, his father's wide shoulders and upper body showing above the surface of the desk, his sinewy forearms laid out upon the desk's slick top. His father's quiet, long-boned face looked back up at him.\n\n\"Do you want me to phone them?\" his father said.\n\n\"You know what I want,\" said Cal.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Leland Truant, \"you want to go out with a club and beat the universe into submission\u2014\" He checked himself. \"No,\" he said, \"that's unfair. You want to go slaying dragons, that's all.\" He sighed. \"It's not surprising.\"\n\n\"And you\u2014\" Cal looked at himself again in the mirror; his face was white\u2014\"want me to stay here and go to tea parties with your Societic, don't-hurt-anyone friends!\"\n\n\"Now you're being unfair,\" said his father. \"I've never tried to convert you to my way of thinking, deliberately.\"\n\n\"No, that wouldn't be right, would it?\" Cal said, talking quickly to keep his voice from cracking. \"That wouldn't be the non-violent way. It'd be violence of the intellectual kind.\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" said his father.\n\n\"What do you mean, not exactly?\" Cal's voice cracked after all.\n\n\"I mean it simply wouldn't be fair. That's why I've always tried to avoid it with you. A man has too many opportunities to brainwash his own son, unconsciously, without adding a conscious effort to the business.\" Leland looked up at Cal for a moment. \"If you stop to think, you know that's true. All I ever did was try to set you an example. With your mother dead, I didn't trust myself to do anything else.\"\n\n\"But you wanted me to be just like you, didn't you? Didn't you?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said his father. \"Anyone with a son hopes\u2014\"\n\n\"You admit it. You see? You planned\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" said his father. \"I only hoped. I still hope\u2014that when you reach a mature level of judgment you'll find a greater purpose to life than that which involves killing. No matter how justified.\" He sighed and rubbed his eyes with the inescapable gesture of middle age. \"I'll admit I also hoped you'd stay out of the Armed Services and improve your chances of living until you reached that point of mature judgment. But I imagine I was wrong in that. If you believe something, you should follow it.\"\n\n\"You,\" said Cal savagely, \"talk like it was murder. It isn't murder when a soldier kills.\"\n\n\"Isn't it?\" said his father. \"Never? The killing of a soldier is always justified?\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\n\"How can you be so sure?\" said his father. Cal felt his chin lifting defiantly.\n\n\"Because that's what soldiering teaches\u2014responsibility. A responsible being doesn't engage in unjustified killing, in murder. An irresponsible being under our system soon gets weeded out.\" Leland Truant shook his head slowly.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"I can see how iron-clad and complete that all sounds to you.\" He rubbed his eyes again. \"But I think you'll learn that the human being is more complex than you think now. We're all potential murderers, Cal. Pushed, pulled,stampeded, or maneuvered to the proper point, we can all be brought to where murder is possible to us. And not just accidental murder, but cruel, vicious, even wanton, reasonless murder.\"\n\n\"Words!\" cried Cal. \"Words, words, words! That's all you ever give me! What would you have done when mom was alive if some scaly lizard of an Alien had come breaking in here trying to kill her?\"\n\n\"I would have fought, of course,\" said his father. \"I would have grabbed any kind of a weapon I could lay my hands on and done my level best to stop him, to kill him. And if I'd succeeded\"\u2014his voice grew a trifle sardonic\u2014\"I was a good deal younger when your mother was alive\u2014I would have felt first savagely triumphant, then a little awed at what I'd been able to do against an armed intruder, graduating as time went on to a pleasant sense of superiority and a sneaking desire that other people should recognize it.\"\n\n\"Then what's wrong with what I want to do? What?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" said his father. \"You're just young.\" He sighed. \"Besides the fault is mainly mine.\"\n\nCal stared at the older man.\n\n\"Yours?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Leland nodded at the books around them. \"I thought the best way to bring up a boy was to expose him to as much information as possible. I crammed you fall of the books that had brought me understanding and tolerance. I forgot that it's natural for a son to. seek an opposite point of view from his father. Where I saw the dark tragedy of Malory's _Morte d'Ar-thur,_ you saw the bright clash and bang of Round Table knights unhorsing evil opponents. You swallowed Kipling by the yard.You knew verse after verse of 'The Ballad of the Clampherdown,'and 'The Ballad of East and West.' You missed entirely the deeper messages that he sounded in the music of Piet Lichtenberg, and 'The Half-Ballad of Waterval' slid in one ear and out the other with you.\"\n\nHis father leaned forward in his chair, both hands spread out on the surface of the desk. Cal saw the cords stand out on the backs of those hands.\n\n\"I know,\" said his father. \"I know. _Because I did exactly the same thing, when I was your age!_ I needed a faith, too. And I went galloping out looking for a banner under which to enlist myself. And that was good. That was the way it ought to be. But then, having committed myself, I made the mistake of setting my conscience aside. I thought that, having committed myself to a good cause, everything I must do would automatically also be good.\" He gave his son a long look. \"There's nothing wrong with soldiering, Cal, as long as you can keep your ideals about it alive. But God help you, my son, the day you murder them.\"\n\nCal opened his mouth to speak, but his throat felt choked.\n\n\"I don't blame you for being ashamed of me,\" said his father.\"At your age it must be doubly hard to have a parent who not only was convicted and disgraced in his youth for opposing the present veteran-dominated government, but one who is still unrepentant enough to believe in equal voting rights and mankind's duty to search for a better way of getting along with other intelligent races than out killing them.\" His father's hands relaxed suddenly. Suddenly they were the hands of an older and tired man. \"No, I can't tell you what to do. I wouldn't if I could. We have to each follow what we believe in, even if our beliefs take us different ways.\"\n\nThe room seemed to waver and fog about Cal.\n\nHe felt as if he were exploding inwardly. All the pressure of the years swelled up inside him and burst out of his throat in the cruelest words he could find.\n\n\"You always hated them, because they wouldn't have you!\"he cried. \"That's why she was killed. Because of you!\"\n\nHe looked furiously, pointedly, down at his father's clubbed left foot\u2014projecting from underneath the desk at one side toward Cal\u2014in its special boot, hoof like and ugly. He looked backup to his father's face and saw the older man still sitting looking at him. His father's face had not changed. It looked sadly at him. Cal felt his inner fury break and crumble into pain and despair. He had done his worst. He had cut his deepest. And his father still sat, refusing to admit the wrong he had done.\n\n\"Alexander of Macedon,\" said his father, \"and Jesus of Nazareth both founded empires, Cal. Where are the hosts of the Alexandrians today?\"\n\nCal turned and plunged out of the room, unseeing.\n\nThe mists cleared. He was once more in a hospital bed; in along ward now with a row of beds down each side of the room.Wires reached out from the robot nurse by his bedside and held him with metallic lack of doubt.\n\n\"How are you feeling, Section Leader?\" asked the canned voice of the device confidentially.\n\n\"A'right,\" muttered Cal.\n\nA white, translucent plastic tube emerged from the body of the device and nudged his lips.\n\n\"You're doing just fine, Section Leader,\" said the voice. \"Just fine. Drink this, now.\"\n\nHe lifted his heavy lips apart, fumbling at the tube, and a cool mint-tasting fluid flowed between them and eased his dry throat.He closed his eyes, exhausted by that small effort. Consciousness of the hospital dissolved from around him once more.\n\n. . . Walk had been waiting for him that day he had the argument with his father, outside the Recruitment Office. Cal saw him pacing impatiently as Cal came slowly up. At seventeen,Walk was thin as a honed-down butcher's knife. And under his straight black hair and startlingly black brows his eyes had a glint of wildness that was close to something berserk. He was like a hungry man who does not care for consequences.\n\n\"You talk to him?\" Walk said as Cal came up. \"What'd he say?\"\n\n\"It's all right,\" said Cal emptily.\n\n\"You're all set then?\"\n\nCal nodded. He made an effort. \"How about you?\"\n\nWalk laughed.\n\n\"I've been set for months, now. The old man's glad to get rid of me. Almost as glad as _she_ is.\" He was referring to his step-mother, who was ten years older than his father and dominated him as she had failed to dominate Walk himself. \"I'm not even going back home again. You going back?\"\n\nCal shook his head.\n\n\"Then come on,\" said Walk. \"You want to live forever?\" And he turned and led the way into the Recruitment Office. . . .\n\n# Chapter Four\n\nCal began to recover and was transferred to a convalescent section. In charge of the convalescent section was Anita War-road, the small nurse who had come with medication for Run-yon, the Contact Officer. Cal asked after Runyon, and she told him that the other man had died back at base hospital. He was surprised to find that she blamed herself for it, that she thought if she had come faster or arrived sooner, she might have been able to save Runyon. They found themselves talking like old friends. As the days went by, and Cal grew stronger, he found himself being attracted by her as a woman. They could not fraternize in the hospital, since she was an officer, but then, before he was discharged, a field commission came through, making Cal a lieutenant.\n\nWalk\u2014also a lieutenant, now\u2014and Joby came visiting the convalescent section. To celebrate both new commissions, they smuggled in a bottle. They had several surreptitious drinks and left the three-quarters full bottle with Cal. That night, after lights out, he started drinking from it by himself. Almost before he knew it, he had finished it. It had been a one-liter bottle of hundred-and-ten-proof whisky. He was very drunk. He lay on his back, holding on to the nightstand beside the bed to stop the room from turning like a shadowy, seasick merry-go-round. After a while the room slowed down and he passed out or went to sleep.\n\nHe woke up in the later darkness of four in the morning, dry-mouthed and sweating. He drank all the water in the dispenser on his nightstand, and then lay back. He felt dizzy, sick, and hollow with fear and a sense of his own worthlessness. He lay still, wishing for sleep, but all he could do was lie there, reliving the past. Scene after scene came back into unnaturally sharp focus. He relived the final argument with his father. He went through basic training all over again. He remembered the first flogging he had seen...\n\nThe soldier flogged had been a trainee from his own company.The trainee had been seventeen, just as Cal was. The trainee had gotten drunk, for the first time in his life, on his first weekend pass. He had stolen a copter and smashed it up. The military police had got to the scene of the wreck first, and brought him back to the stockade. But the Armed Services refused to surrender him to the civilian authorities. The Combat outfits looked after their own, the trainees were told. The Armed Services made financial reparation, paying for all the damage done. The company was paraded, the trainee given twenty lashes and a dishonorable discharge. The trainee returned to his own home town and another trainee from the same town was able to tell the rest of the company how the discharged boy made out, having the news in letters from home.\n\nThe ex-trainee's father was a veteran of the Combat Services,himself. When the boy got there, he found the door of his home locked against him. An aunt and uncle finally took him in. He got a fairly good job in the repair department of his uncle's general store. The other employees, because his uncle was the owner, did not needle him much about what had happened to him. Nevertheless, some three months later, he hanged himself in the basement of his uncle's home. He would have been eighteen in exactly one week.\n\nCal did not get sick or pass out at the flogging, itself, as some of the other trainees did. Afterwards, however, he lay face down on his cot, staring dry-eyed into the darkness of his pillow. Now that it was over, some of the tougher trainees were beginning to recover and be rather loud-voiced about it. Cal heard them talking, and after a while he heard a voice beside his right ear: \"Hey, Truant! You going to lie there all day?\"\n\n\"So?\" answered the voice of Walk from the cot on the side of Cal's left ear. \"There's some regulation against it, Sturm?\"\n\n\"Well, hell!\" said the voice of Sturm uneasily. After seven weeks all the trainees knew Walk, and none of them wanted trouble with him. He was recognized as a wild man. \"It's not as if it was his brother got the twenty, or anything.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Walk. \"But he saw his dad get it, when he was only six years old.\"\n\n\"His dad?\" said the voice of Sturm. _\"He_ saw? When'd they let kids\u2014\"\n\n\"It wasn't on an Armed Services post,\" said Walk. In the pillow, Cal squeezed his eyes shut desperately. _Don't tell it,_ he willed at Walk, passionately. _Let it go!_ But Sturm was already asking.\n\n\"It wasn't? How come?\"\n\n\"It was back during the Equal Vote riots. They sent an Armored Wing into our town to put down the rioting. The Reserve Captain in command had dreams of glory or something. He rounded up a batch of the rioters and worked them over to find out who the ringleader in the town was. There wasn't any ring-leader, but he finally got the name of the most respected Equal Vote advocate in town. It was Cal's dad.\"\n\n\"Well, hell, if he was one of those\u2014\"\n\n\"One of those!\" sneered Walk. \"Old man Truant hadn't stuck his nose out of doors. His wife was expecting and he was standing by to take her to the hospital at any minute. The captain sent a squad of men to arrest Cal's father. He told his wife it wasn't anything, he'd be right back. But from her upstairs window she could see out into the town park. Fifteen minutes later she saw a crowd with the soldiers tying Cal's old man to a whipping post. She sent Cal ahead to tell them to wait, and she tried to get over there herself. But she fell downstairs, had a miscarriage and bled to death. Now, you got something cute to say to Cal?\"\n\nThere was an uneasy silence.\n\n\"Well, cripes!\" said the voice of Sturm, finally. \"How come the captain had authority to do that to a civilian?\"\n\n\"He didn't,\" said Walk's voice. \"Seems he got kind of carried away. Old man Truant got a letter of apology from the government and an offer of reparations later on, but by that time his wife was planted and the fifty scars on his back were all healed. Besides, he's got the Societic point of view: make your-self a good example unto all men.\"\n\nThere was a moment of silence that stretched out longer and longer; then the sound of Sturm's bootsteps going away. The talk took up again in the far parts of the room, and after a while mess call sounded and the voices and a clatter of boots moved out, leaving silence behind them. In that silence. Walk's voices poke, close to Cal's ear.\n\n\"You're not the Only one that had it not so good. Just remember that.\"\n\nThen the cot creaked and his boots, too, moved out.\n\nSix weeks later, when they graduated from basic and got their first ten-day leave, Cal and Walk went to a hotel room in New Orleans and lived it up. Cal did not go home then or later. A year and a half after that, just after he shipped out at the beginning of the campaign against the Griella, he got word from a cousin that his father was dead. Cal had never answered any of his father's messages since entering the Services. He messaged back, now, that the family lawyer could take care of everything.\n\nThe dawn came finally. After breakfast Cal was told to report to the Examinations Section for his final check over before being okayed for discharge. He had not expected this until next week,and he expected that his hangover would be noted and questions asked. But he passed through the physical without comment by the examining physicians. He found himself finally in the office of the psychiatrics officer.\n\n\"Have a seat, Lieutenant,\" said the psychiatrics officer, a major who was a short, pleasant-faced man with a brown mustache, not much older than Cal. Cal sat down on the chair facing the officer and at one side of the desk. The chair was cold.\n\n\"Let's see now...\" The officer ran through some papers and wave charts from various testing machines. \"How're you feeling, Lieutenant?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" said Cal. \"My leg isn't even stiff, and you can hardly see where the skin graft goes.\"\n\n\"You had a bum on your side, too?\" The officer frowned at the charts.\n\n\"Sort of a small scorch. That was healed up long ago.\"\"Yes. Pretty obviously a fire rifle bum. You don't have any idea how it happened?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" said Cal. \"I was pretty much out on my feet from lack of sleep toward the end, there. Things are pretty hazy after we hit the town.\"\n\n\"So I see,\" said the major, examining one of the wave charts.\"There's a good sixteen-hour hold there in your conscious recall up to the time you came to on the hospital ship. And evidently you got burned somewhere during that period. Hmm\u2014\" he frowned at the chart. \"It wouldn't be a bad idea, Lieutenant, if we went in there with a full exploratory and made sure of the facts for that period. In fact, I'd strongly recommend it.\"\n\nCal felt the coolness of the room like a winding sheet about him. Slowly his stomach began to gather itself up in a tight knot,and he felt an empty fear.\n\n\"Sir,\" he said slowly, \"do I have to agree to that?\"\n\n\"No,\" said the major, looking at him. \"Of course not. You're perfectly free to accept or not, just as you wish. But I'd think you'd want the security of knowing you didn't have anything hidden in that period that might cause trouble later.\" He paused.\"We needn't delay your discharge for it. You can go ahead with that and come back for a three-day psych at your convenience.\"\"I don't think it's worth the trouble, Major.\"\n\n\"Whatever you think, Lieutenant.\" The psychiatrics officer made some marks on the papers before him, wrote a line or two,and signed the papers. \"That's all.\"\n\nCal stood up.\n\n\"Thank you, sir.\"\n\n\"Don't thank me. My job. Good luck, and enjoy yourself.\"\n\n\"I will, sir.\" Cal left.\n\nHe came back to the convalescent section to find Annie War-road on duty. She looked at him oddly, and walked away into the section office. He went after her.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" he said.\n\nShe was standing behind her desk. For answer she opened a drawer and showed him the empty, flat, liter bottle of whisky.\"Well, you know the drill,\" he said. \"Report me.\"\n\n\"You know I won't do that,\" she said, shutting the drawer.\"I'll get it out of here. It's just\u2014\" She broke off suddenly, biting her underlip angrily. He was surprised to see that she looked close to tears.\n\n\"It's that Walk!\" she burst out. \"He's the weak one. But when you're with him, you\u2014\"\n\nShe bit her lip again and turned and went out quickly from the office.\n\n\"Weak!\" he echoed. \"Walk weak?\" He opened his mouth to laugh at the ridiculousness of it, but found suddenly that there was no laughter in him. The hollow fear and worthless feeling of the night came back on him. He walked out of the office, looking for Annie. She was energetically banging equipment together in the Section laboratory; she turned away from him when she saw him staring in at her.\n\nHe went back to his bed and lay down on his back, staring at the white ceiling.\n\n# Chapter Five\n\nIt was a three-day business getting discharged. In the process Annie's upset and his hangover got left behind together. That weekend Annie took a three-day leave and they flew down to Mexico City to paint the town red. But they ended up in the little mountain city of Taxco where the silver and obsidian jewelry comes from, sitting in the mountain sunlight on an open-air terrace through the long mornings with a bottle of wine as an excuse on the table between them, and happily, no great pressure to talk. For the first time that he could remember, a sense of peace seeped into Cal. And he found himself talking more freely to Annie than he had to anyone in his life. Now and then, even,things came to his tongue that surprised even himself. One morning when Annie had voiced the same thought of peace that lay in his own thoughts, he quoted without thinking, and before he could stop himself:\n\n\" _So all the ways\u2014\"_ He checked abruptly. \"Nothing,\" he said to Annie's look of inquiry. \"Just some poetry you made me think of.\" He shook his head. \"I don't know why. It doesn't even fit.\"\n\nBut she wanted to hear it, and so, feeling a little foolish, herepeated two lines of \"The Last Tournament,\" from Tennyson's _Idylls of the King:_\n\n\" _So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,_\n\n_But in the heart of Arthur pain was Lord.\"_\n\nRepeating them, he frowned, trying to think why these, of all poetry, should intrude on him here, between Expeditions, in the healing morning sunlight of Taxco. Looking up again, he caught Annie looking at him oddly.\n\n\"Something the matter?\" he asked.\n\n\"It's just that I've never seen you do much reading,\" she said. \"Particularly of things like poetry.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"That's for people who can't do anything else,\"he said. \"What say we run down to Acapulco later this afternoon for a swim?\"\n\nSo suddenly the three days were over. Annie went back to Headquarters Hospital, near Denver, and Cal began a four-month period in which he did little but kill time and use up his accumulated back pay. He received a Star Cluster to add to his list of decorations. But rumors of a new Expedition brought him back to Expedition Base Headquarters, outside Denver, in March. He went directly to the Recruitment Office there.\n\nA chinook\u2014a warm, dry wind off the slopes of the surrounding mountains\u2014was blowing down the company street on which he stood and melting the last evidences of a late spring snowfall.The moving air felt cool on hands and face, but the sudden rise in windy temperature was making him uncomfortably warm inside his uniform jacket. The jacket felt strange after all these months of civilian clothing.\n\nIsolated in the western sector of the brilliantly blue sky, the clouds had piled high into a great, toppling, white castle shape.But, as Cal glanced at it, the harrying wind ripped among it and tore it to fragments fleeing over the ramparts of the mountaintops. Cal's head was dull with a slight hangover. He touched his fingertips to the row of medal ribbons on his lapel, and went inside.\n\nThe section leader who took his application punched for Cal's records. When they appeared imaged in the film holder on his side of the counter, he looked them over carefully.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Lieutenant,\" he said, at last. \"But I can't sign you yet.\"\n\n\"Yet?\" said Cal.\n\nLooking across the counter, then, he suddenly identified the look he saw in the man's eyes. It was the same look he had noticed on the face of the psychiatrics officer, and before that on the face of the orderly of the hospital ship. He had seen it, he remembered now, on Annie, when he had quoted those two lines of Tennyson to her in Taxco.\n\nNow it looked at him from the polite, strange face of this administrative non-com.\n\n\"Can't sign me yet?\" said Cal again.\n\nAcross the room behind the barrier of the counter, a desk printer began to turn out copies of some manual with a faintly thumping noise, as of something being softly hammered together. The sound echoed in Cal's lightly aching skull.\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir. You haven't been through Psychiatric Exploratory.\"\n\n\"That's not required.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know, sir. But in your case here, the releasing Medical Officer seems to have recommended it as a condition for reservice.\"\n\n\"I was discharged on a leg bum,\" said Cal. \"On a leg bum, that's all.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I see that. But the MO has discretion about conditions of reservice.\"\n\n\"Look,\" said Cal\u2014there was a moment of polite, desperate silence between them\u2014\"there must have been some mistake made on the original records back at the hospital. Could I see your commanding officer here, for a moment, do you suppose?\"\n\n\"I'll see, Lieutenant.\"\n\nThe Section Leader left. A few minutes later he came back and led Cal through the barrier to an office and a seat across the desk from a Colonel Haga Alt, whom Cal remembered as General Harmon's aide in the Lehaunan Expedition.\n\n\"Sorry to bother you, sir,\" said Cal.\n\n\"I was just waiting for General Harmon to finish some business. We're updating equipment. I've got a few minutes, Lieutenant.\" Alt was a dark-haired, wiry man in his early forties, alittle shorter than Cal. \"You were Combat Engineers on Lehaunan?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Cal found his back sensitive to the back of the chair he was sitting in, all the way up. He made an effort to relax. \"Fourth Assault Wing.\"\n\n\"I remember. You got a Star Cluster for taking that power center town in the hills. That was a good job.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Colonel. Not really necessary, taking\u2014\"\n\n\" 'Not necessaries' are usually our main job, Lieutenant. An ex-mulebrain like you ought to know that. Cigaret?\"\n\n\"No thank you, sir.\" Cal watched Alt light up. \"The Section Leader outside there...\"\n\n\"Yes?\" Alt took the cigaret out of his mouth, fanned the smoke aside and leaned forward over the film holder set in his desk. He studied its screen a second. \"Yes.\" He sat back in his chair, which tilted comfortably and creaked in the momentary stillness of the office. \"There's no point in pussyfooting around with you, Lieutenant. Your psychiatrics officer in the Discharge Unit evidently thought you had some possible psychological damage that would rule you out for reservice. It's only a guess on his part, of course. Why don't you run over to Medical Headquarters and have them test you and write you a release on this hold?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Cal carefully. Alt leaned back in his chair, watching. His eyes were neither warm nor cold. Cal was suddenly conscious of the fact that one of his feet, in a heavy uniform boot, was projecting out to one side of the desk where Alt could see it if he looked down. It must look awkward and unnatural out there. Cal pulled it back hastily. His heart began to thump. Alt was still waiting for his answer. The room seemed steamy and blurred.\n\n\"Alexander of Macedon\u2014\" said Cal.\n\n\"What?\" said Alt, frowning.\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir.\" Cal got a firm grip on the arms of his chair,down out of sight-level below Alt's desk top. The room cleared to his vision. \"I guess I'm not too good at explaining something like this. What I mean is ... I understand the digging around in a psych exploratory sometimes triggers off a difficulty that might never have come to life.\"\n\n\"One chance in several hundred,\" said Alt dryly.\n\n\"But if such a thing happened, I'd be permanently unfit for service.\"\n\n\"True enough,\" said Alt. \"But if it doesn't\u2014and the odds are all in your favor. The exploratory will either show there's nothing wrong in this blank period of yours\"on Lehaunan world,or it'll show something the medics can grab while it's fresh and get out. So you end up qualified for reservice either way.\"\"Yes, sir.\" Cal took a deep breath. \"But would you like to bet your career, Colonel, even at those odds, when you knew yourself it wasn't really necessary?\"\n\n\"Lieutenant,\" replied Alt, \"I would not. And what's that got to do with the situation.\"\n\nCal let out the breath he had taken.\n\n\"Nothing, I guess, sir,\" he said numbly. He waited for Alt to dismiss him. But the other man sat instead for a moment,staring across the desk top at him.\n\n\"Hell!\" he said at last, and shoved his half-smoked cigaret down the disposal in his desk. \"Would you like to tell me your version of why you think that psych-hold is on your record?\"\"Yes, sir.\" Cal looked out the window for a moment and saw the unmoving mountains there. The words came easily from him, as if he had rehearsed them. \"I've got an area of amnesia during and following that attack on the town when I was wounded. But by that time I'd been in sole command of the Wing for nearly sixty hours and I hadn't had any sleep for that length of time. The outfit was in an untenable position and under combat pressures. The truth is, I was just out on my feet most of the time. That's why I can't remember.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Alt looked at him for a short additional moment,then got to his feet. \"Wait here a moment, Lieutenant.\" He went out.\n\nCal was left alone in the neat, white-lighted office for some ten minutes. At the end of that time, Alt returned, followed by a tall, spare man of Alt's own age, who strode in on Alt's heels as if to the measure of silent drums. Three small gold stars shone on his jacket collar. Cal got to his feet.\n\n\"Here he is,\" said Alt to the tall man. \"Lieutenant\"\u2014he turned to Cal\u2014\"General Harmon wants to talk to you.\"\"Thank you, sir.\" Cal found himself shaking hands. Deep-set gray eyes looked down into Cal's face as they shook.\n\n\"You earned that Star Cluster of yours, Lieutenant\u2014Truant,isn't it? The Colonel here tells me you want to get back on with your Wing.\"\n\n\"Yes, General.\"\n\nHarmon turned and paced across to the nearest wall of the office. He struck a button there and the surface went transparent to reveal a black background on which a design in white appeared.\n\n\"Recognize that, Lieutenant?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. A space schema. Our territory out towards Orion.\"\"That's right. You've had some command school.\"\n\n\"Not officer yet, sir. N.C.O.\"\n\nHarmon raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"We give Space-and-Tactics now in N.C.O. school, do we?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I . . . looked it up on my own once.\"\n\n\"Very good. Well now, look here.\" Harmon moved a button and a red line leaped from a center point out through the diagram. \"What do you make of that?\"\n\nCal studied it for a second.\n\n\"The pattern of our advance, sir, in that quadrant. Since the beginning; since World Unification, at the end of the Twentieth Century. And as far as we've gotten with the Lehaunan, now.\"\n\n\"And to within forty light years of the nearest star systems in the Orion Group.\" Harmon glanced aside and a little down at Cal. \"Lieutenant, why do you think we might be interested,say\"\u2014his finger indicated one of the Orion stars\u2014\"in Bellatrix, here?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Cal, \"it's just about next on the list.\"\n\n\"List?\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"I said,\" repeated Hannon calmly, \"what list? What list are you referring to?\"\n\nCal straightened slightly inside his uniform. A charge of electricity seemed to have gone through the room. He felt keyed-up, almost feverishly alive.\n\n\"No list, sir,\" he said. \"I meant, Bellatrix would be the next system we'd encounter in our normal expansion into space.\"\n\n\"And if we didn't go on with our normal expansion?\"\n\nCal looked up in sharp surprise. But Harmon merely stood,patiently waiting\"We couldn't afford not to, sir,\" said Cal slowly. \"Population pressures, plus natural instincts\u2014We'd be committing racial suicide if we didn't keep on expanding.\"\n\n\"Really, Lieutenant? Why?\"\n\n\"Why...\" Cal fumbled for words and phrases he had not needed for a long time. \"Halting our natural expansion would leave us . . . with the sort of self-emasculation that ends in racial suicide. We'd outgrow our resources; we'd be sitting ducks for the first more practical minded race that grew in our direction.\"\n\n\"True enough,\" said Harmon. \"But I wasn't asking you for what everybody learns in school nowadays.\" He turned square on to Cal. \"What I'm interested in is your own feelings. You've been a mulebrain. You've seen the Griella and the Lehaunan from the wrong end of their guns. What do _you_ think?\"\n\n\"We've got to keep moving,\" said Cal. He looked up at Harmon and said it again. \"We've got to keep moving.\" He felt suddenly that he was saying too much, but the words came out anyway. \"We have to keep winning and being the strongest.Every time somebody tries to appeal to somebody else's better nature, somebody gets hurt. We had a Contacts Officer with our Wing against the Lehaunan. The truce was on, and he went into their lines to talk to them\u2014just talk to them. He carried a recorder . . . and they cut him\u2014they cut him\u2014\" Cal's voice suddenly began to thin and hoarsen. He broke it off sharply. \"The only safe way is to be on top. Always on top. Then you can make sure nobody gets hurt. You've got to win!\"\n\nHe stopped. There was a strange small silence for a second in the office and then Alt, glancing aside at the space schema on the wall, whistled two odd little sharp notes and raised his eye-brows.\n\nBut Harmon put his hand on Cal's arm.\n\n\"You're a good man, Lieutenant,\" he said. \"I wish half as many men again in Government thought the way you do.\" He let go of Cal's arm. \"Let me show you something,\" he said,turning back to the schema. His fingers stabbed out beyond the furthest point of the red line's advance, at a small and brilliant white dot.\n\n\"Bellatrix,\" he said.\n\nHe looked back at Cal.\n\n\"That's the star where we're going next, Lieutenant. She's got a system with two worlds that we could use. One of them's pretty much available, but the other one's got a race on it called the Paumons. A red-skinned, hairless bunch of bipedal humanoids that're the closest thing to us we've yet run across. They'll be giving us a run for our money and our lives that'll make the Griella and the Lehaunan and all the rest look like members ofan old ladies' Sunday sewing circle. We're setting up the Expedition for there, now. I'm going, the Colonel here is going,and your old Wing will be there when we go in.\" Hannon paused and looked Cal directly in the eyes. \"But I'm sorry, Lieutenant\u2014I'm afraid you won't be listed in the table of organization. \"He paused. Beyond the open door of the office where the three of them stood, somewhere down the corridor outside, Cal heard a door slam and a man's voice call out to someone on a note of brisk and businesslike urgency.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Harmon.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Cal automatically.\n\n\"You see,\" said Harmon, speaking a little more slowly, \"I've no right to risk the men who'd be serving with and under you, by asking the Medical Service to make an exception in your case. \"\n\n\"Yes... I see, sir.\"\n\n\"On the other hand . . .\" said Harmon. He hit the button below the schema with his fist. The pattern winked out into blank wall once more. Harmon turned back to Cal. \"There's that suggestion of mine the Colonel mentioned to you just now.\"\n\n\"Sir?\" Cal was hardly listening.\n\n\"General Walt Scoby, who heads the Contacts Service, as I imagine you know, is coming along in person on this Paumons expedition. He was asking me the other day if I knew of any ex-mulebrains who might be interested in the Contacts Service. \"Harmon smiled a little. \"He's having a mite of trouble getting men of that sort of experience himself. Of course, your psych-hold applies only to the Combat outfits. If you signed with General Scoby, you'd be coming along to the Paumons with the rest of us, even if only in a non-combatant slot.\"\n\n\"Contacts Service?\" Cal lifted his head.\n\n\"I know how you feel, Lieutenant. On the other hand, there's a need for men like you, no matter in what capacity.\" Harmon smiled. \"I don't mind telling you, I myself wouldn't mind seeing someone with your experience and attitude high on General Scoby's staff. You might look at it that way: after a fashion you'd still be working for the good of the Combat Units in bridging the gap between the Contacts Service and them.\" He paused.\"Well, it's entirely up to you, Lieutenant. I wouldn't want to talk you into anything you might regret later.\"\n\nHe extended his hand and Cal found himself shaking it.\n\n\"And good luck, Lieutenant Truant. Calvin Truant, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Good luck, Cal.\"\n\nAnd then he was striding away from Cal, out of the office.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was another day that Cal came across the wide, grassy, parklike mall that separated the Recruitment Office and other Combat Services from the converted hospital buildings that housed the ten-year-old Contacts Service.\n\nHe had taken two weeks to face the fact that any kind of Service, for him, was better than none at all. And now, as he came across the mall, the grass underfoot was beginning to turn richly green from its brown tint of winter, and the shadow of the flag before the Contacts Office flashed in his eye like the shadow of a stooping hawk as it whipped in the light spring breeze.\n\nHe went up the stone steps and inside. Behind the front door, the offices were cluttered and overcrowded, with a fair sprinkling of civilian workers among the uniformed personnel at the desks. Cal found the Information and Directory desk and gave his name to the middle-aged civilian woman working behind it.He had sent in his application in routine fashion the day before,and surprisingly, that same evening, had come word that General Scoby himself would like to talk to him if he had no objection to an appointment at 1400 hours the following day.\n\nCal had no objection. In fact, it seemed to him to make little difference. He came now to keep the appointment with about the same emotion a man might bring to having his hair cut.\n\nThe woman behind the desk kept him waiting only a minute or two and then took him in herself to see General Scoby.\n\nStepping through the. indicated doorway\u2014at the entrance of which she left him\u2014into a sudden glare of sunlight from two tall windows, Cal caught sight simultaneously of an older man at the desk and of a leopard-sized, long-legged feline of a pale, fulvous color. It was black-spotted and wore a light leather harness from which a hoop-shaped leather handle projected stiffly upward at the shoulders. The large cat lay resting in a comer of the room beyond the desk. It raised its head at Cal's entrance,which brought the eyes momentarily in line with Cal's. The yellow, guarding, animal stare caught Cal between one footfall and the next, and in that fraction of a second Cal tensed, then relaxed, and moved on into the office.\n\n\"Good reactions,\" said the man at the desk, lifting his own untidily gray-haired head. \"Sit down, Lieutenant.\"\n\nSeating himself by the desk as the big cat in the comer dropped with boneless gracefulness back into its half-doze against the wall, Cal turned his glance on the man. He saw an aging, slightly overweight three-star general with bushy eyebrows and hair, a pipe in his mouth, and a uniform shirt tieless and open at the throat. Incongruously, the black and white piping of the Ranger Commandos\u2014the Combat Services' crack behind-enemy-lines units\u2014ran along the edge of his shirt epaulets. His voice rasped on what seemed a deliberate and chronic note of exasperation.\n\nHe took the pipe from his mouth and pointed with it at the cat in the comer.\n\n\"Cheetah,\" he said. \"Named Limpari. My seeing-eye friend.\"\n\nCal looked without thinking at the man's eyes, for they were knowing and full of sight.\n\n\"Oh, just periodic blackouts.\" Scoby jerked the pipe stem toward his bushy head of hair. \"I'm a silver-skull. Plate on most of this side. What's your particular purple heart, Lieutenant\"\u2014he frowned at the screen of the filmholder on his desk\u2014\"Truant. Cal. What kind of disability have you got, Cal?\"\n\n\"Sir,\" said Cal, and stopped. He took a careful breath.\"Psych-hold,\" he said shortly.\n\n\"Yeah. That's right,\" muttered Scoby, glancing once more at the filmholder. \"I remember\u2014so many things popping at once here.\" He looked up at Cal. \"In fact, I picked up quite a dossier on you. How come you waited for a battlefield commission?\"\n\n\"Sir?\" said Cal woodenly.\n\n\"Don't give me the treatment. I've been there and back, too,Lieutenant. You know what I'm asking.\" He jabbed the pipe-stem at the film in the filmholder. \"You've had seven years. You got a general aptitude rating way to hell and gone up there. You got a top record and two or three of your medals actually mean something. How come you never tried for a commission before the Lehaunan Expedition?\"\n\nCal looked squarely at the other man.\n\n\"I guess I didn't want the responsibility, General.\"\n\n\"A mulebrain isn't supposed to think. All he's got to do is obey orders. Is that it?\"\n\n\"That's right, sir.\"\n\n\"Commissioned officer might sooner or later have to give orders he didn't like. Might be required to do things he didn't agree with?\"\n\n\"Something like that, General,\" said Cal. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"But a mulebrain's got no choice, so his conscience doesn't have to bother him? That so? Then how come,\" said Scoby, tilting far back in his chair, swinging it around to face Cal and putting the pipe back between his teeth, \"how come you took the battlefield commission when it came through for you? What changed your mind after all these years?\"\n\nCal shrugged. \"I don't know, sir,\" he said.\n\n\"No,\" said Scoby, his teeth chewing on the bit of his pipe and watching Cal. \"No, I guess you don't. Well, I looked up your civilian past, too, here.\" He shuffled about and found some papers on his desk. \"I'd heard of your father, matter of fact. In fact, I was on the review board that checked over the court-martial of that Reserve Captain that fouled up in your home town during the Riots. Later on I read some of your father's writings on the matter of Equal Representation and other things. Interesting.\"\n\n\"We didn't agree,\" said Cal monotonously, between lips that were, in spite of himself, stiff.\n\n\"I gather that. Well,\" said Scoby, leaning back in his chair once more, \"we might as well get down to cases. I need you. I need a man with Combat Service experience. But more than that, I need one man in particular who's been in the ranks as well as up in officer country. I need a man who can get along with mulebrains as well as regular officers, and double the usual job and take what's handed out to him as well as I can myself. \"He stopped and leaned forward toward Cal. \"He'll need faith and brains and guts\u2014not necessarily in that order. You got at least two of them. Want the job?\"\n\n\"Sir,\" said Cal, and he kept his face as still as water on a windless day. His gaze went impersonally past Scoby's shoulder. \"Would the General advise me to take the job?\"\n\n\"Hell, yes!\" exploded Scoby. \"I invented it, and it saved my soul. It might save yours. That's a hell of a favor I'm doing you, Cal!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Cal. He hesitated a moment. \"I'll be glad to take the job, General.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" said Scoby. \"Fine. You can start out by ripping off those.\" He pointed.\n\nCal's hands made a little instinctive move in spite of himself protectively up towards his lieutenant's insignia on his epaulets.\n\n\"My tabs, sir?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" said Scoby sardonically. \"One of the little monkey wrenches thrown in my machinery from time to time happens to be a Government ruling that I can't use rank as an inducement to sign men up. All Contacts Officers, regardless of their qualifications, must be run through the regular training cycle. Guess what that means? You climb back into issue coveralls and go back through Basic all over again.\"\n\nCal stared at the older man.\n\n\"Basic?\" he said.\n\n\"Kind of a kick, isn't it, Lieutenant?\" said Scoby. \"Get you out on the firing range and the obstacle course with all the other wet-eared recruits and teach you how to be a man and a soldier before you go goofing off as a Gudess Wonder. Don't look at me like that. I know there's no sense to it. The Combat Units' General Staff knows there's no sense to it, with a man like your-self. It wasn't shoved into the Regulations to make sense, but to make me trouble. Well, how about it, Cal? You figure you can still square-comer the covers on a bunk? Or do you want to back out?\"\n\nThere was a faint, sharp glitter in Scoby's eyes.\n\n\"No, sir,\" said Cal.\n\n\"Little slow answering there, weren't you?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" said Cal. \"I was merely trying to reconcile this regulation with General Harmon telling me he wouldn't mind seeing someone like me on your staff.\"\n\n\"General Harmon,\" said Scoby. \"Well, you're just a little two-bit Lieutenant, Cal; yours not to question why the ways of generals. Or ask generals questions. But next time you're in the library, you might read up on the siege of Troy.\" He turned back to his desk. \"That's all. You can go, Lieutenant. Come see me after you've been through Contacts School.\"\n\nCal stood up. Scoby was pulling papers toward himself. \"Troy, General?\" he asked.\n\n\"All about a horse,\" grunted Scoby, without looking up. \"Good day, Lieutenant.\"\n\nCal stared for a second longer, but Scoby seemed to have forgotten the very existence of any visitor. He was wrist-deep informs and papers, looking like a seedy bookkeeper, behind in his entries. Over in the comer, the cheetah had fallen asleep and slid down the slope of the wall to lie on its side on the floor,legs stiffly outstretched. It looked like some large, stuffed, toy animal. To Cal, suddenly, the very air in the room seemed stale and artificial.\n\nHe turned around and went back to the outer office. The middle-aged woman who had taken him in to Scoby had hi spapers ready to sign. He signed, and was told to report in five days to be sent out for Basic Training, as a trainee private.\n\nHe left the building. As he came down the steps outside, the sun still shone and the wind was still blowing. Only now, under the hawklike shadow of the flag, a pot-bellied Colonel in office pinks was scattering crumbs to a small horde of clamoring sparrows that fought and squabbled, shrieking, over the larger crusts.\n\n# Chapter Six\n\nFour days later Cal lay once more on the slight slope of the sand of Homos Beach at Acapulco, Mexico, watching Annie swimming out beyond the first crest of breakers. It was late in the morning and they had the beach almost to themselves. Also it was shark season, but the dolphin patrol was guarding the shore waters and Annie was packing a stingaree.\n\nNevertheless, Cal kept his eye out for fins, keeping the dolphin whistle handy. Otherwise, he simply lay and watched Annie.She swam strongly, in a straight line, her white arms flashing against the sun-brilliant blue of the sea, parallel to the beach. _She's got guts,_ thought Cal unexpectedly. _Too much guts for her own good, if trouble comes._ And then he felt that clumsy expression of his feelings about her followed immediately by a sudden terrible stomach-shrinking sense of pain and helplessness and loss. He reached for the dolphin whistle without looking for it, put it to his lips, and blew one long and two short.\n\nOne of the dolphins on patrol curved aside and slid out of sight under the water to rise a second later beside Annie and nudge her toward the beach. Her arms broke their rhythm; she stopped and looked shoreward. He stood up, waved \"no sharks\" and beckoned her in. She turned toward him and her arms began to flash again.\n\nHe lay down once more, the sudden emotion he had felt dying within him. After a few moments she came ashore in a flurry of foam, sliding up on the sand. She got to her feet, splashed her-self clean of the sand, and then, shaking her short dark hair clear of the bathing cap, came up the slope toward him, smiling. A loneliness so deep as to be almost anger moved in him. _To hell with it,_ he thought, _I love you._ He opened his mouth to say it out loud. But she came up to him, and he closed it again without saying anything.\n\nHe stood up. Standing, he could see how small she was.\n\n\"What?\" she said, shaking her hair back, looking up at him.\n\n\"Let's go get a drink\" he said.\n\n\"Two mornings later, after tests and outfitting, Gal took a Services transport with four hundred and sixty-eight other recruit-rated enlistees. The transport was an atmosphere rocket with the same sort of body shell that in a commercial flight would have been rated at a maximum of a hundred and fifty passengers.This one, however, locked on an extra motor and filled its interior with two double-rows of gimbal-hung seats on each side of a narrow aisle. Cal managed a seat by one of the small windows and sat there with his view of Stapleton Field, trying to think of Annie and ignore his surroundings. It would be no trouble going through Basic again, he had told himself. Just a matter of keeping his head down and going through the motions.It made no difference one way or another. He was completely neutral, between the Combat and Contact Services. If everyone left him alone, he would leave them alone. If anyone started to step on his toes, he would know how to take care of it.\n\nHe had told Annie, frankly, of his own contempt for the Contact Service and its personnel, the night before. \"Maybe you'll change your mind?\" she said. \"It won't be easy working with people if you think that way about them.\"\n\n\"You don't know the Service,\" he had answered. \"It's a job to do and so many different bodies and faces to do it with you.\"\n\nFor a moment she had looked as if she would say something more. But she had not.\n\nAnd now Cal sat in his narrow seat, staring out the window waiting for lift-time, surrounded by men in new forest-green uniforms. The sound of their conversation and the heat of their bodies enclosed him in a shell of unfamiliarity within which he was content. What did he have to do with graduations, girls,relatives, sports. . . .\n\n\"Hey, Dad! _Dad!\"_\n\nFor a moment Cal did not connect the name with himself.\"Dad\" was what they had called older men in their middle twenties when he had been in Basic. Then he looked up. A grinning, young, sharp-chinned face was peering down at him from between the two seats ahead and in the tier above him.\n\n\"What?\" said Cal.\n\n\"Got a light?\"\n\nThe transport was still on the ground. The no-smoking sign was lit in the ceiling overhead. But Cal saw no point in wasting his breath after the decision he had made to remain neutral. His lighter was in a side pocket jammed against the wall. He reached into a breast pocket, extracted a self-striking cigaret, and passed it up.\n\n\"Hey, one of the field smokes!\" said the sharp-chinned face. \"Many thanks, Dad.\" Face and cigaret withdrew. A few seconds later smoke filtered down between the seats.\n\nA minute after that there were steps approaching down the aisle. They stopped at the tier of the sharp-chinned recruit.\n\n\"Got a cigaret, soldier?\" said an older voice.\n\n\"Sure, Sec,\" said the voice that had called Cal. \"Not field smokes. But here, help yourself.\"\n\n\"I will. That all you got?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014 _hey!_ What're you doing? That's all I got to last me to the Fort. I thought you only wanted one.\"\n\n\"Don't let it worry you, soldier. As far as you're concerned,you're through smoking for the next three months, until you get out of Basic. And if I were you I wouldn't try bumming from your friends after you get to camp. I'll pass the word along the cadre wires when we get there\u2014maybe your Section Leader can find a little extra something to remind you to believe in signs.\"\n\nThe footsteps went off. Cal tried to go back to his thoughts of Annie.\n\n\"That's kind of extreme, isn't it?\" said a voice in Cal's right ear. Cal turned to look into the face of the trainee beside him;\"a good-looking if rather pale-faced, serious, tall young man in his early twenties. \"On commercial ships most of those no-smoking signs have been disconnected long ago.\"\n\n\"It's regulations,\" said Cal, shortly. But the other went on talking.\n\n\"You're Contacts Service, like me, aren't you?\" he said. \"I noticed the color code on the A3 file you're carrying. I'm Harvey Washun.\"\n\n\"Cal Truant,\" grunted Cal.\n\n\"That's one of the things we'll have to watch out for after we\n\nbecome officers, isn't it? Unreal enforcement of regulations like that, just now? There's a responsibility to the fellow man as well as to the alien\u2014to all living things, in fact.\"\n\n\"That's what I heard,\" said Cal. He pulled his dodgecap down over his eyes, slouched down in his seat and pretended to go to sleep. He heard a creak from the seat belt (also abandoned on commercial ships of the present day) as his seatmate shifted position embarrassedly. But there was no more talk.\n\nForty-eight minutes later they took off, and eighty-three minutes after that they sat down at the field attached to Fort Norman Cota, Missouri. There cadre Section Leaders and Squadmen were waiting for them and ran the whole contingent the full distance back to the Combat Engineers Training Center on the Fort's west side, some four miles away.\n\nIt was a soft May day in the Ozarks. A puff of cloud here and there in the sky showed above the straight shafts of the poplar and pine and reflected in the puddles they splashed through;puddles scattered here and there in the reddish mud and suddenly blue and pure as fragments of tinted glass. The air smelled warm and heavy and sweet. About him, Cal could hear the grunts and gasps of his fellow-trainees, as they puffed against the prolonged heavy work of the run. Cal was breathing deeply and steadily himself, and it occurred to him suddenly that after these past months of hospital and bumming around he was in no better shape than a lot of them. What made the run more bearable to him was his attitude. He saved his breath for running; his emotions for things over which he had no control. The thought of this made him feel a sudden satisfaction with his decision to stay isolated, neutral and apart.\n\n\"Close up! _Close up!\"_ yelled the cadre men, running along-side the stumbling, winded column of men laden with folder-files and dufflebags. \"Keep it in line, butterbellies! Shag it!\"\n\nTheir voices struck off a faint echo in Cal's memory of his own first days in the Service. The wild sweats and alarms mixed with the tremendous excitement of being caught up in something big and vital. It had been hell\u2014but he had been alive. Or so he had told himself all these years. He pushed the tag-end of uncertainty away from him, telling himself that now, for a while,he could be alive again. For a moment, he achieved what he sought: the slow, sweet twinge of a nostalgia lingered for a second in him.\n\nThey were passing the barracks area of some trainees already in the second half of Basic. Tanned a full shade darker than the men of this contingent, they were having a scrub-up of their barracks area. Shouts of \"You'll be sorreee!\" and \"Tell'm where to send the body!\" floated after them. For some reason, this touched off a slight uncomfortableness in Cal; a touch of shame which punctured his nostalgic mood. He settled down to hisrunning and not thinking.\n\nAbout a third of the contingent finally pulled up\u2014having made the complete run without falling behind\u2014gasping and heaving like broken-winded horses in front of the white-painted two-story barrack buildings of the training area.\n\nA sharp-faced man of Cal's age, with the diamond of a Wing Section showing on the tabs of his sharply creased and tailored fatigues, came out of a small Unit Office building and stood on the top of its three steps, looking down at them.\n\n\"You shouldn't ought to bring them in before lunch,\" he told the Cadre Section in charge. \"These muck-faces always make me sick to my stomach.\" Suddenly he roared. \"Atten-SHUN! What's the matter with you? Can't you stand at attention?\"\n\n\"Of course not!\" said the Charge Section. \"They're a bunch from that Denver Recruitment Center.\"\n\n\"Well, keep the suck-apples out of my way,\" said the Wing Section. \"Or I'll send them all off on a run around the mountain. Show them their barracks. And see they don't get them dirty.\"\n\nSilent, detached, Cal saw the men around him introduced to the white-painted buildings, and felt the wave of their exhausted relief at the sight of the mathematically perfect twin rows of bunks on each floor. He watched their feelings change to exasperation as they were put to making up their assigned bunks,storing their bag and files in foot lockers and bunk hooks. And then exasperation turned to silent fury as they were directed to remove their shoes and outer clothing and carefully scrub and wipe every trace of dirt, dust or disarray their incoming had produced. Finally, he saw it all give way to numb shock as they were told to take their ponchos and mess kits out into the open between the buildings, and there were assigned a six-by-three-foot rectangle of earth apiece for their actual living. Because, as their Section's Section Leader (Section Ortman) put it:\n\n\"Those barracks were built for soldiers, not pigs. We leave'm there so you can have the fun of standing official inspection every Saturday morning.\"\n\nThen he drew a line in the air with the swagger stick he carried under his arm and informed them that this was the magic line,ten feet out from the building, and he didn't want to see any of them crossing it, except on a direct order.\n\nOrtman was small and broad and dark. He wore the ribbons of the Lehaunan campaign on his parade jacket, and did not smile as he talked.\n\nCal was thinking of Annie. Consciously thinking of Annie.\n\nSix weeks later\u2014by the time the contingent was ready for Advanced, the second half of Basic Training\u2014the image of Annie had worn thin. So had Cal's memory of his first Basic, seven years before. A new bitterness had taken its place.\n\nFor the first time in his years with the Service, that curious alchemy that draws a soldier close to other men in his own outfit\u2014Wing, Section and Squad\u2014had failed him. He was a man apart. To the rest of the trainees (the facts were in his file; they had not taken long to leak out) he was a veteran. To the cadre-men over the trainees and himself, he was a freak\u2014neither true recruit, nor true soldier\u2014walled off from them by the wall of military discipline. To the other Contacts Cadets putting in their stint, he was an enigma lacking in the proper ideals and theories.\n\nWashun, his seatmate on the ride to the Fort from Denver, had tried to bridge the gap.\n\n\"I've been talking to some of the other cadets in the outfit,\" he said to Cal one day after chow. \"And we'd appreciate it if you'd give us a little talk, sometime, and help us out.\"\n\n\"A talk?\" Cal looked up from polishing his mess kit.\n\n\"On how to be a soldier,\" said Washun. Cal gave him a long stare; but the boy was serious.\n\n\"Go get shot at,\" said Cal, and went back to polishing his mess kit. He heard Washun rise and leave him.\n\nWashun was one of those in Cal's squad who did not fit. Unlike Tommy Maleweski, the sharp-faced nineteen-year-old who had bummed the cigaret from Cal on the transport and was now,after six weeks, practically and effectively broken of the habit, Washun was having it harder rather than easier. Maleweski had threatened to arise from his poncho swinging the first time one of the cadremen woke him with a swagger stick. He had not,and was now a trainee corporal. Washun had worked hard and conscientiously at everything while obviously hating it with a fastidious hatred. But he talked too much about abstract matters like ethics and responsibility and was too thin-skinned for his own happiness. The cracks about \"gutless wonders\" he and other Contacts Cadets\u2014except Cal\u2014were already beginning to get from the other trainees, wounded him deeply. Unlike any of the others, he had already had one fight with a trainee named Liechen from Section A over the term. He had gone into the fight swinging hard and conscientiously, and obviously hating it,and emerged a sort of inconclusive winner. (This, because Ortman and another Section Leader had discovered the fighters and made them keep at it until Liechen dropped, at last, from exhaustion, and could not be made to stand under his own power any longer.)\n\nAs a result of this, however, Washun, after his company punishment with Liechen, had returned to be a sort of minor hero and leader to the Contacts Cadet outcasts. Though he refused all responsibility, they sought him out with their troubles. And this did not make him popular with Ortman, who thought the situation unhealthy.\n\n\"Been holding court again?\" he would ask, as they stood in line for informal inspection\u2014inspection that is, of their outdoor,or actual barracks area, which was required to be as tidy as any indoors. Cal, standing next to Washun, would see out of thecomer of his eye the other man go white, as he invariably did when attacked.\n\n\"Yes, Section!\" Washun would reply, staring straight ahead,suffering, scorning to take refuge in a lie.\n\n\"Washun,\" said Ortman wearily one day, \"do you think you're doing these men a favor? Do you think it's going to _help_ them, letting them go on with the habit of having somebody around to kiss the spot and make it well? Well, answer me\u2014no, don't.\" Ortman sighed wearily. \"I'm not up to listening to Societies philosophy this early in the morning. You men!\" he shouted, looking up and down the four squad rows of the Section. \"Listen to me. This is one damn Section that's going to pretend it's made up of men, even if it's not. From now on if I catch any one of you milk-babies crying on anyone else's shoulder, they both carry double packs on the next night march. And if I see it again, it's triple packs. Get that!\"\n\nHe turned back to Washun.\n\n\"Shine that mess kit!\" he snapped. \"Can't you get a better fit to your fatigues than that? If you've got too much time ony our hands that you've got to listen to belly-achers, let me know.\n\nYou've got a long ways to go to be a soldier, Washun. And that goes for the rest of you.\"\n\nHe stepped on down the line and found himself in front of Cal. For a moment their eyes met. Cal stared as if at a stonewall, his face unmoving.\n\nOrtman stepped on.\n\n\"You, Sterreir, tear up that kit layout and lay it back downright. Jacks, wash those fatigues and re-press them. Maleweski . . .\"\n\nThat evening, after chow, a delegation of the Contacts Cadets,lacking Washun, cornered Cal as he was leaving the mess hall and drew him aside.\n\n\"You've got to do something about it,\" they told him.\n\n\"Me?\" Cal stared at them. \"What am I supposed to do?\"\n\n\"Talk to Ortman. He's picking on Washun,\" said a tall boy with a southern accent and a faint mustache. \"And Washun's doing as well as anybody. That's not right.\"\n\n\"So!\" said Cal. \"Tell Ortman yourself.\"\n\n\"He won't listen to us. But he likes you.\"\n\n\"Likes me?\"\n\n\"He never eats you out like the rest. You don't draw the extra duties. He's all right with you because he knows you've been through it before.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Cal. \"And the fact I do things right's got a little bit to do with it, too. For my money, Ortman's doing just fine with Washun and the rest of you.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said a small cadet with black hair, bitterly. \"You don't want to do anything for us. You like to think you're one of them, buddy-buddy with the cadre.\"\n\nCal looked around the group. They stirred uneasily.\n\n\"Don't get tough with us, Truant,\" said the tall boy nervously. \"We're not afraid of you.\"\n\nCal snorted disgustedly and walked off.\n\nThe first half of Basic had been films, lectures, classes, drill and company small weapons training. With the start of the second half they moved into field and survival training; forced marches, night movements, infiltrations, tactics problems that turned out to be endurance or escape tests. The Section was melted down from its bloated oversize of nearly three hundred men to merely double the size of a regular seventy-five man Section. The drop-outs went not back to civilian life but to the\"housekeeping\" services, such as Supply and Maintenance.Among them went all the Contacts Cadets in Cal's section except Cal, the tall southern-accented boy with the mustache, and Washun. And with the going of these other Cadets, came a problem.\n\nNow that the complainers had gone, Cal was forced to acknowledge that Ortman was, indeed, bearing down unfairly on Washun. Though it had not started out that way, Ortman was only human. But if he had the weapon of legal authority in his possession, Washun had the weapon of martyred superiority. It had come down to a contest between them.\n\nIt was a war of spirit, with each man trying to force the other to admit his way was wrong. And Washun, it now dawned on Cal with gradually increasing shock, was winning. Already he had bent the minds of the other trainees\u2014the other trainees of his own Section, who did not particularly like him\u2014to a feeling that right was on his side. Now he was bending Cal. And one day he would break, if he did not bend, Ortman.\n\nThis was all wrong, Cal told himself. Justice lay with Ortman\u2014it _had_ to lie with Ortman. Ortman was doing his best every day to instill in his Section the knowledge and attitudes that would enable them to survive and conquer in combat. And Washun, with no more authority than that provided to him by a handful of half-baked, wildly impractical theories, was setting himself up to treat that knowledge and those attitudes as something slightly unclean.\n\nCal found himself hating Washun. Washun had broken down Cal's protective isolation. Washun was, as Cal's father had been,one of those who, by an irrational insistence on doing good,caused only tragedy and harm. Cal could almost hear Washun quoting, as Cal's father had quoted:\n\n\" _Societies: a philosophy which states that mankind can continue to exist only by evolution into a condition in which the individual's first responsibility is to a universal code of ethics and only secondarily to the needs of himself as an individual. \"Cal found himself impatient for the day when Ortman would finally lose his temper and rack Washun back for good._\n\nIt was not long before that happened. They had been run through the infiltration course several times before, crawling on their bellies over the rocky ground under full pack and with solid shell and fire rifle jets screaming by a few feet overhead. But the day came on which they were sent through during an after-noon thunderstorm. The trainees, who had started out griping at the weather conditions, discovered that the suddenly greasy mud produced a skating-rink surface on which it was almost a pleasure to wiggle along. Spirits rose. They started larking about and a trainee named Wackell either raised himself incautiously or a bullet dropped, as sometimes happened. He took a wad of steel from a high-powered explosive rifle through his shoulder and thigh. He began to yell and Washun, who was nearby, went to him.\n\n\"All right,\" said Ortman, when they all stood dripping water and mud once more in Section formation in front of their barracks. \"You all heard it; you heard it fifty times. In combat a soldier doesn't stop to pick people up. He keeps going. Have you got anything to say to that, Washun?\"\n\n\"No, Section,\" said Washun, staring straight ahead. Ortman had at least broken him of arguing in ranks.\n\n\"No, come on,\" said Ortman. \"I'm sure you've got something to say. Let's hear it.\"\n\n\"Simply,\" said Washun, whitely, staring at the mess hall opposite, \"that that is to be my duty\u2014Wing Aidman to some unit during the initial stages of an assault. Everyone knows that. I won't be carrying weapons, I'll be picking men like Wackell up.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" said Ortman. \"You pick them up. You pick them up when the time comes. But right now you're training to be a soldier, not a Contacts Cutie. And you're going to learn a soldier doesn't stop to pick anyone up! Maleweski! Jones! Northwest and southwest comers of die barracks to shag this man! Full equipment and all, Washun. Get going. I'm going to run you around the mountain!\"\n\nWashun took one step forward out of ranks, rightfaced and began to trot around the barracks. Maleweski took a cut at him with the peeled wand that served the trainee non-coms for swagger sticks, as Washun lumbered past.\n\n\"Fall out! Shower, chow\u2014and clean equipment!\" barked Ortman at the rest of the section. \"And watch that mud in the barracks!\"\n\nThe orderly ranks disintegrated, as Washun came running heavily around the near side of the barracks. Without looking at him, they poured into the barracks.\n\nTwenty minutes later, cleaned, dressed and chowed, Cal stepped once more out of the mess hall with his fresh-rinsed mess kit in one hand, smoking in the cool sunset air. Across a little space from him, he saw Washun still running around the barracks, although Maleweski and Jones had been relieved by two other trainee non-coms so that they could dress and eat. Washun ran, not fast, weaving only a little; but his eyes were already glazed.\n\nIt was not unusual for a man in good condition to run an hour or more around the mountain before he gave out. There was no compulsion upon him to make speed, but merely to keep going.The punishment was not a physical one, but mental. The barracks were large enough around so that the running man could not become dizzy. But after about a dozen circuits the mind began to lose count of the number of times the same comer had come up. The turning, rocking world out beyond the barracks took on an unreal quality, as if the running man was on a tread-mill. It seemed he had run forever and that there was no end ever coming to the running. It was a small, circular hell in which the mind waited for the superbly conditioned body to give up, to quit, to collapse; and the animal-stupid body, sweating under the heavy harness of equipment, gasping for breath, ran on,struggling to prolong its own sufferings in limbo.\n\nOrtman, of course, could stop it at any time. But he probably would not.\n\nCal watched the running man. He still felt no kindness for Washun and from his point of view there was nothing wrong with running a man around the mountain. What was bothering him, he discovered, was a tricky point rooted in the sense of right and wrong of a professional soldier.\n\nWhat bothered him was the fact that the punishment was misapplied. Running a man around the mountain was a last resort;and it was like a scrub brush shower for a trainee that refused to stay clean. It was used for a man who was a consistent goof-off and whom nothing else, probably, could save.\n\nBut Washun was not a consistent goof-off. Within certain limits he was as good as any other trainee in the Section. And he was not savable, because he was lost already, to the Contacts Service. Nor could his punishment serve the purpose of a good example to the rest of the Section, who did not walk in Washun's ways, in any case.\n\nOrtman, in Cal's eyes, was the Service. In letting himself be forced into going the limit with Washun, without adequate reason, Ortman had acknowledged his inability to conquer the Con-tact Cadet. He had lost. And Washun, weaving blindly now as he ran around the unending white walls of the barracks, had won.\n\n\"Truant!\"\n\nCal turned sharply. It was Ortman, coming up to him from the direction of the orderly room.\n\n\"Get down to the orderly room, on the double,\" said Ortman. \"It's not exactly according to regulations for one of you trainees. But you've got some visitors.\"\n\n# Chapter Seven\n\nThe visitors Cal discovered in the orderly room turned out to be young Tack, Joby Loyt, and Walk Blye from his old outfit. Joby and Tack were wearing Section's tabs, and Walk was now in an officer's gray uniform with the cloth insignia of a Warrant. They had all been drinking and Walk was well on his way to being drunk, although only someone familiar with him would have recognized the fact. The alcohol in him showed only in the fact that he moved a little more swiftly, and there was an added glitter to his eyes which a stranger might have put down to sheer liveliness, but which those who knew him took for a danger signal.\n\n\"How about it, Sec?\" said Walk to the Wing Section in charge of Cal's training unit. The same Wing Section who the first day had threatened them all with what Washun was now enduring on Ortman's order. \"Can we take him off for a little?\"\n\nWalk, as Warrant, was only about a rank and a half above the Wing Section, an officer in privilege rather than authority. It allowed him to be more familiar with the Wing than a fully commissioned officer might. The Wing reciprocated. He thought for a second.\n\n\"He's not supposed to leave the Wing area,\" he answered.\"But there's a gully in those woods across the road there, if you'll have him back before bed check and in good shape.\"\n\n\"Word on it,\" said Walk. And the four of them left the orderly room and strolled across into the woods.\n\nAbout fifty yards back, they found the gully behind a screen of yellow poplar. They made themselves comfortable in it. Thin,flat bottles of bourbon appeared; and Cal learned that his old Wing, along with the original Assault Team were moved in over on the other side of the camp for retraining and shakedown.\n\n\"Drink up!\" said Walk. And Cal drank thirstily, almost angrily. But there was an awkwardness between them that the drink could not bum away; and he could see that Tack and Joby were affected by it as he was. Walk was an enigma. It was impossible to tell how he felt. He sat in the fading twilight of the woods with them, drinking half again as much as anyone else, as they talked about previous Expeditions. He seemed bored.\n\nWhen he ran out of liquor and went off to get another bottle he had stashed nearby rather than carry into the Wing area, Cal commented on him, a little bitterly.\n\n\"You have to talk very hard to get Walk along?\" he asked the other two.\n\n\"Hey, no,\" said Tack. \"It was Walk's idea. I mean, the rest of us never thought they'd let you loose to talk to us. He set up the whole thing.\"\n\nCal shook his head in puzzlement. Walk came back with the other bottle and the light faded swiftly. The sudden-death drinking they were doing straight from the bottle was beginning to take effect on them all. For a moment time faded and it seemed like the old days. Sitting half in shadow in a stony slope of the gully, Walk drank, lowered the bottle, and crooned to himself in a husky voice.\n\n\"\u2014 _I\u2014ain't\u2014got\u2014no\u2014ma\u2014ma.\"_ His slightly hoarse tenor floated low upon their ears. _\"No woman, no baby_ \u2014\"\n\nThey all joined in automatically. It was the Mourn, the Assault Soldier's Mourn, and they had sung it on a hundred drunks be-fore. Half buried among the encroaching shadows they keened their total atonal lament:\n\n\"\u2014 _no love._\n\n_I ain't got no no one._\n\n_Nothing but\u2014the Damnservice!_\n\n_Left my home and I wandered._\n\n_Never thought I'd end up like this._\n\n_Name on a T.O.' listing\u2014_\n\n_Number in\u2014the Damnservice!_\n\n('Table of Organization.)\n\n_I get goofed and lonely,_\n\n_Thinking of those things that I missed._\n\n_Nothing but a Goddam Mulebrain,_\n\n_Mucked up in\u2014the Damnservice!_\n\n_Gonna get rich 2 next Tuesday._\n\n_Wednesday, if the first Drops 3 miss._\n\n_Bury me where they don't find me,_\n\n_To plant me in\u2014the Damnservice!_\n\nThe last of the twilight was almost gone as they finished singing. They had all become to each other indistinct darknesses in the deeper darkness. Cal felt the fog of the alcohol thickening in his brain; and remembered his kit, uncleaned back at the barracks. He got heavily and a little unsteadily to his feet.\n\n\"Got to go,\" he said, with a slightly unmanageable tongue. \"Thanks for everything. See you mules.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" It was Tack's voice. \"We'll get together, you get done with this Basic junk. You come looking for us, Sec. So long.\"\n\n\"So long, Sec,\" said Joby's voice.\n\n\"Sure,\" this was Walk's voice, coming low and clear and hard out of blackness. \"We'll see you, Gutless Wonder!\"\n\nA jarring, icy shock racked suddenly through Cal, checking him as he stood half-turned. He froze, looking back. Above thei rheads the first pale sky of night was showing dimly through the inky branches of the overhanging trees. But down in the gully where they were, all was steeped in black. Far off, a bird twittered sleepily.\n\nFor a moment stark silence hung between them. And then,awkwardly, in a forced manner, Tack began to laugh. And a second later, just as artificially, Joby joined in. A moment later Walk was laughing, too. And then Cal.\n\nBut the laughter was not quite genuine, for all that. Cal found his fingers shaking as he fumbled out a cigaret. Ignoring its self-striking end, he scrabbled a chemical lighter from his pocket. Holding cigaret and match, he took a step toward where he knew Walk must be. He stuck the cigaret in his mouth and snapped the lighter.\n\n2Combat Soldier's Death Benefits, paid to the next of kin.\n\n3Glider and Shoulder Jet Assaults\u2014Personnel.\n\nThe flame, springing suddenly into existence, caught Walk's face hanging apparently in midair, his mouth open, his features contorted with laughter. Then the flame winked out.\n\n\"Got to go,\" said Cal. He turned and stumbled up the wall of the gully and back toward the Wing area. He heard the laughter dwindle and die behind him.\n\nHe made his way back into his own barracks building. The lights were already out, except in the squad room where Ortman slept. The door was open, and as he passed Cal saw the Section Leader working on reports at his desk. Ortman raised his head as Cal passed and for a second the two men looked at each other in silence. Then Cal moved on into the dim forest of double-decker bunks in the big room beyond.\n\nWashun's bunk was empty. In the lower bunk beside it, the tall Cadet with the mustache was reading in the dim light escaping from Ortman's open doorway. His eyes came up from his book to fasten balefully upon Cal, as Cal passed to his own lower bunk, farther down the row. The kit still hung uncleaned on the end of the bunk. Cal ignored it. He stripped to his Service shorts and T-shirt and crawled drunkenly under the covers. He closed his eyes and Walk's face, as he had seen it in that moment's illumination of the lighter, came rushing at him.\n\nHe had had to see Walk's face in that moment. And he had seen what he had expected. The whatever it was in Walk that must always cause him to try to push things just one step further,had been at operation upon him. Walk had known that if he kept it up, one day he must push too far, must say the unforgivable to Cal. But, like an addict, he had been not able to help himself.\n\nThey had been as close as men and soldiers get in service.But they were now openly friends no more. They would have to avoid each other as much as possible, or someday they would be trapped into a situation in which they would have to try to kill each other. Walk had done it. He had done it all on his own,brought it about himself\u2014not because he was drunk, but because of that inner devil of his which drove him to always dare the precipice one inch further.\n\nHe had done so, knowing what he was doing. But in the sudden flare of the lighter when Cal had looked, above the wild and laughing mouth, under the officer's cap canted drunkenly over the wide, tanned brow, Walk's darkly glittering eyes had been crazy with loneliness and grief.\n\n# Chapter Eight\n\nThree weeks later, Cal graduated from Basic. With Washun and the Contacts Service trainee with the mustache, and some forty others from other training contingents, they were shipped to Contacts School, back in Denver. At Contacts School, they drew officer's gray uniforms with Warrant tabs such as Walk had worn when Cal had last seen him, and were addressed as \"Mister\" by enlisted men and officers alike. The first day of Contacts School found them seated in the half-moon of seats of a steeply sloped classroom-amphitheater, facing, across a low section of floor, a raised lecture platform that would place their instructor standing behind a high desk and about on a level with the middle row of classroom seats.\n\nA door behind the platform opened, and a small man wearing an officer's uniform with the insignia of a Colonel limped out with some papers in his hand and laid the papers on the desk.\n\n\"Ten-SHUN!\" yelled someone. The class rose. The Colonel looked out at them, nodded, and went back to his papers. They stood. Apparently he had forgotten to tell them to sit. When his papers were in order he leaned both elbows on the desk and looked out at them. It was then that they became aware that the look on his face was not that of the weary, little, old, retired officer they had imagined him to be.\n\n\"I hope,\" he said, with a sort of quiet relish, \"that none of you considered Basic was tough. Because, you see, we're really tough here.\"\n\nHe ran his eye over their ranks.\n\n\"Some of you perhaps discovered that the body responds by adapting to the kind of physical training you received in Basic Training,\" he said. \"It becomes harder and more fit to endure.Our job here is going to be to make harder and more enduring a different part of you than your bodies. During the next ten weeks, we will attempt to do our best, while staying mostly within the letter of the military regulations applying to officer ranks, to break your spirits.\" He paused, slowly opened a slot in the desk, took out a glass of water and sipped from it. He put it back and closed the slot. \"From past experience I may tell you that we will succeed with nine out of ten of you. And most of those nine will be made up of those who make the initial mistake of believing we aren't serious about this.\"\n\nHe paused and looked them over again.\n\n\"And of course,\" he said, \"while this is going on, you will be studying simultaneously the three training courses required to fit a Contacts Officer for his triple duties. These are\"\u2014he held up three fingers as he spoke, one after the other\u2014\"Wing and Company aidman during initial assaults and landings; interpreter, translator, and prisoner-of-war administrator, during and immediately following the campaign; and Contacts Administrator with the responsibility of making friends with the beings whose relatives we have just killed, and whose homes we have just destroyed, and whose pride we have just humbled.\"\n\nHe stopped. He beamed at them in satanically gentle fashion.\"And if you achieve these things and graduate, you will be put to work doing them in actual practice. _**And,**_ if you do them responsibly in actual practice, you will find that those of the conquered who do not despise and hate you will distrust you;that the enlisted man in general will resent you as someone who appears to try to curry favor with non-humans by bribing them with what the enlisted man has just bought from them at the heavy price of his own blood; and the officer ranks in general will regard you as a spy system and hindrance upon them.\"\n\nHe straightened up.\n\n\"Under these conditions, it is taken for granted that you will carry on your duties with a high degree of efficiency, ignore all insults and intrigues against you, and while remaining calm,controlled and pleasant at all times, never allow yourself to lose an argument, or close your eyes to a situation that needs your attention. If you do all this successfully\u2014I say, if\"\u2014the Colonel paused to beam again at them\u2014\"why, we will no doubt find more for you to do the next time.\"\n\nHe shuffled his papers together and picked them up. They had evidently been some sort of prop, for he had not referred to them once.\n\n\"That's all, then,\" he said gently. \"That concludes the lecture for this hour. You might all stand there for the rest of the hour and think it over. Those who wish to drop out will find the School Orderly Room open at all hours. For the ten percent of you who will make it through the course\"\u2014he stepped back from the desk so that his small figure with the stiff leg stood in view of them all, and raised his handful of papers with a small flourish\u2014\"I salute you, Gutless Wonders!\"\n\nHe turned and went out by the same door, leaving them standing.\n\nIt was, Cal discovered, known as hazing. And it had been practiced by many organizations and cultures since time immemorial, and always with the same purpose: to find out if the individual had an inherent resiliency, an ability to take it, which might be required later on. The only difference here was that it was completely nonphysical. But that, Cal began to recognize, was because it took up where Basic had left off. It was, Cal discovered, as the small Colonel with the game leg had said the first day. They were really tough here.\n\nThey were tough in all the unfair ways. There was the matter of the ringers.\n\nThe second day's lecture in the classroom-amphitheater (they were allowed to sit, this time) the small Colonel informed them,not without some apparent relish, that there were an unstated number of fake Cadets among them. The function of each of these fake Cadets was to pick out one or more of the true Cadets and try every possible means to make him wash out of the course.\n\n\"Their job,\" said the Colonel, \"will be to muck you up\u2014\" He broke off suddenly, cocking his eye like an interested sparrow at a Cadet in the front row. \"Does my language bother you?\" the Colonel inquired, and he immediately began to swear at the Cadet in a calm, penetrating voice with every air of enjoyment. The rest of the Class, craning to look at the Cadet, saw him stiffen, and go pale, then red-faced. The Colonel ran down after a minute or so.\n\n\"Nor a word from him, either,\" said the Colonel, turning to the class and beaming. \"But then, I didn't expect it. I've just been looking at his personal file. His family, when he was just about seven years old . . .'' He commenced reciting in a pleasantly gossiping tone, a catalogue of perversions, cruelties and disgraces dealing with the Cadet's immediate family, whom the Colonel referred to by their first name. \". . . now his older sister Myra\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly the Cadet was on his feet and screaming back at the Colonel. The Colonel stopped and leaned his elbow on the desk in front of him and listened interestedly until the Cadet, suddenly breaking off, turned and bolted from the room.\n\n\"Well, well,\" said the Colonel briskly, \"there's at least one gotten rid of for today.\" He made a mark on the papers in front of him. As he did so, his eye caught Cal's, whose seat was in the front row. \"Thin-skinned, wasn't he?\" he said confidentially to Cal.\n\n\"Sir?\" said Cal, keeping his expression perfectly blank.\n\n\"Ah,\" said the Colonel, winking at the class. \"Here's one of those stone-wall characters. Pays no attention. Words-can-never-hurt-me type.\" He smiled slowly. \"Of course he's had practice ignoring the opinions of others. I've been through his files, too, just as I have with the rest of you. This man's father was once given fifty lashes in his town park for getting some young men of his town in trouble. Isn't that true?\" he said to Cal. And then his voice lashed out suddenly. \"Answer yes or no!\"\n\n\"Sir\u2014\" said Cal.\n\n\" _Answer yes or no!\"_\n\nA whiteness, like interior lightning, washed Cal's mind blind for a second. Then a molten inner anger came to sustain him.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" he said, with no change of tone.\n\n\"You see?\" said the Colonel to the class. \"He admits it. And you can see it doesn't bother him much. If I were the rest of you, I'd keep a fairly respectable distance from him. He looks to me as if he might have picked up his father's\u2014ah\u2014tastes. \"Someone else in the audience seemed to catch the Colonel's eyes. \"You don't approve of my instruction methods?\" he asked someone over Cal's head. Cal turned to look as a voice answered.\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\nIt was Washun, Cal saw. Washun was as pale as Cal had ever seen him when facing Ortman. But the sound of his voice was as determined.\n\n\"Please, suggest an alternative,\" said the Colonel.\n\n\"I haven't an alternative immediately in mind, sir.\" Washun went even paler. \"But someday something better should bew orked out.\"\n\n\"That's enough,\" interrupted the Colonel. \"Your objection is what we call an empty protest and has no practical value whatsoever.\" He picked up a pencil and poised it over one of his sheets of paper on the desk before him. \"I'll give you one chance, and one chance only, to withdraw it. Do you withdraw it?\"\n\nWashun hesitated for a fractionary moment.\n\n\"No, sir,\" he said with effort. \"You asked me, and\u2014\"\n\n\"That's enough. Stand up,\" said the Colonel. He made a mark on the paper as Washun rose to his feet. \"You have the distinction of having gained the first credit point I've given out in this class. All of you remember that. You are _supposed_ to speak out and stick by our guns, whether it does any immediate good or not. However, Mr. Washun, since the exercise of virtue in actual existence usually leads not to an immediate reward, but to additional punishment, you will remain standing for the rest of the hour, as an example to yourself as well as others.\"\n\nWith that he turned his attention away from Washun and began to torture a Cadet in the second row who had a particularly youthful face. By the time the hour was over he had reduced the class roster by two more candidates.\n\n\"Not a good day,\" he informed the class as they rose to march out. \"And not bad. So-so.\"\n\nWhen he reached the next class, Cal discovered someone had stolen his notes from the classes of the day before.\n\nThere was the matter of living conditions. The candidates were bunked four to a room, with study facilities, and ate in a central mess hall. The food and beds were apparently good. But things went wrong with them; first one thing, and then another. The bedding they drew from the Supply Room turned cut to be too short for the bunks. The Section Leader in charge of the Supply Room claimed he had no authority to exchange it for bedding of it he proper size. Sometimes a meal would be unaccountably delayed, or badly served. Solid foods were undercooked, liquid ones, which should have been hot, were ice cold.\n\nThere was the matter of uncooperative enlisted personnel. The enlisted men connected with the school were studiedly insulting to the candidates. This was bad enough. What was worse was that whenever they could get away with being unhelpful or outright harmful to a Cadet's requirements or record, they did so. Gradually, the candidates came to understand that there was no single right way of getting through the Contacts School. There was only the least possible wrong way.\n\nThere was the matter of individual antagonism from the commissioned instructors. It appeared almost as if the moment a candidate began to acquire credit points as Washun had the first day, a competition was instituted among the instructors to see who would be the first to push him to the breaking point. Verbal abuse and mis-scored tests were among the milder weapons employed by the instructors. Cal, with Washun and a half dozen others, was singled out early for this sort of competition.\n\nBut Cal, if he did not have the philosophical armor that he saw in Washun, found a deep and native stubbornness in himself that refused to give ground. As he had told himself, sitting in the rocket that had been about to carry him off to Basic Training all over again, he told himself now that it was simply a matter of putting his head down, pushing ahead, and letting them do their damnedest.\n\nSo he did. But as the weeks piled up, the pressure got worse and worse, until he began to feel that he would explode after all; that the moment would come when the upper, sensible, directing part of his mind would no longer be able to hold back the emotion boiling beneath. And the night came finally when he knew that the next day would be his last.\n\nLying on his back in the darkness, staring at the underside of the mattress of the bunk overhead, a grim solution came to him. Quietly, in the dark, he got up, slipped out of the room bare-footed, in his shorts and undershirt, and slipped down the hall of their barracks and out onto the small balcony, to the outside metal fire-escape. Six floors below, invisible in the night, was the concrete surface of the area where the Cadets stood their parade formations.\n\nIf the worst comes to the worst, he thought, a quiet tumble off the railing here while smoking a cigaret after light-out would leave them forever lacking a positive knowledge that they had broken him. A savage, angry joy rose in him at the thought. He would not yield. No matter what happened, he could always wait until the end of the day, until night. And the night he could not face another day he would bring his cigarets here after lights-out...\n\nAnd suddenly, without warning, sanity came washing over him. He woke suddenly to the irrationality of his thoughts. It was as if a stained and distorted window through which he looked out on the world had suddenly been wiped clean so that he saw everything clearly, without distortion and in its proper perspective. The wild thought of suicide as an alternative to submission thinned away and vanished like a mist on the window glass fhad made it perfectly opaque before. The pressures the School had been putting on him shrank into the common crowd of pressures that any living would make upon him. Suddenly he saw how helpless such methods were.\n\nWhy, he thought with something like wonder, there's nothing they can do to me; there's nothing anyone can do to me. Death was the brittle final ultimate of any weapon; and death shattered pointlessly upon the spirit of anyone who paid out his life in honest coin up to the moment of death. For the first time Cal felt a little of the great strength that moves men of faith, no matter what that faith may be. And for the first time he thought of the millions, that eight percent of the Earth's adult population, that believed as his father had believed. A touch of awe at what their true power might be touched him. He went soberly back to his bed.\n\nThe next day he woke clear-headed. And when he went about the day's classes, he discovered a strange sort of minor miracle had happened. Before, he had pretended that none of the pressures, the words and actions aimed to trip him up, had been able to touch him. All at once, he found that this had actually come to pass. The attacks upon him had become shadow weapons,wielded by shadows. His gaze looked through them to the more important meanings and things in which they had their roots.\n\nOnce, filing in line past the glass doors leading to the dining room at a time of day when that room was dark, he caught a glimpse of his shadowy reflection in the dusk-backed glass. He was smiling.\n\n# Chapter Nine\n\nAt the end of the ten weeks Cal graduated from Contacts School along with Washun and the rest of the predicted ten per-cent of the entering class. The rest took their new Lieutenant's tabs off on an eight-day leave. Cal made an appointment to see General Scoby the following day.\n\nThe thin, clear sun of September was cutting squarely across?the papers on the desk in Scoby's office as Cal stepped into it this second time. The year had turned the part of the planet around Denver into mountain autumn, since they had first met;and the point of that meeting lay many millions of miles back along the Earth's path through that space which is also time. Scoby sat as he had sat before, but the cheetah, Limpari, this time lay alongside the desk, at desk-top level, forelegs stretched out so that the light-colored puffs of her paws rested barely against the sleeve of Scoby's shirt, feline head laid upon those forelegs. Her animal eyes turned to Cal as he entered, but nothing else about her moved. Scoby looked up.\n\n\"Well, Lieutenant,\" he said. \"Sit down.\"\n\nCal sat.\n\n\"You said to come see you, General,\" he said, \"after I got through Contacts School.\"\n\n\"That's right.\" Scoby reached for his pipe and began to fill it, considering Cal coolly. \"So you got through all right.\" Something about the question operated against the relative peace of mind Cal had discovered during the later days at the Contacts School. An old defensiveness came back, an old, sharp edge unsheathed itself in him:\n\n\"The General didn't expect me to?\"\n\n\"Now there,\" said Scoby, striking a light to his pipe and puffing on it, \"is why I want you for the job I have in mind and I'm afraid of you at the same time.\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"You're management training material,\" said Scoby. \"I want you as high up in my organization as you can climb. But I don't want you coming along faster than you're ready to. Tell me about the Paumons. What'd you learn about them at Contacts School?\"' Cal frowned.\n\n\"Very humanlike,\" he said. \"Human enough to get by in a crowd of us, almost. Stripped, of course, you'd notice differences. But with clothes, they'd look sort of like eskimos with sunburns.\"\n\n\"Ah...\" Scoby closed his eyes. \"What's the name for them?\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"The mulebrains and anybody else who knows about them. What're they calling these Paumons people?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Cal. \"Progs.\"\n\n\"Standing for what? What d'you call them?\"\n\n\"Standing for what?\" echoed Cal. \"I don't know, sir. Myself, sometimes I call them Progs. Or Paumons. Depends on who I'm talking to.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Scoby. \"You got a ways to go yet. What about their culture?\"\n\n\"Industrial. They get their power from volcanic taps.\"\n\n\"Art? Philosophy?\"\n\nCal stared at the older man.\n\n\"Art?\" he said slowly. \"Philosophy? School didn't give us anything on that.\"\n\n\"And of course you didn't go look it up on your own. What's the job the Contacts Service is supposed to do? Can you tell me that?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" answered Cal. \"Just as the Armed Services' job is to subdue the enemies of the human race, the Contacts Service's job is to lay a basis for future peaceful co-existence with those former enemies. \"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Scoby, \"but you're a great little quoter, Lieutenant. Now tell me how you're going to do it.\"\n\n\"Establish workable relationships with Paumons leaders and enlist their cooperation in working out future patterns of co-existence.\"\n\n\"Damn you!\" shouted Scoby, suddenly slamming the desktop with one hand. The cheetah's head came up like a striking cobra's. \"I didn't ask you for chapter and verse! I asked you what you're going to _do!\"_\n\n\"My job,\" said Cal, staring into the other man's eyes. \"What I'm told to do.\"\n\n\"And I tell you,\" snarled Scoby, leaning toward him, \"that nobody's going to tell you what to do. You're going to do what,you have to do, what you think you ought to do. You're going to have to work it all out for yourself!\" He glared at Cal. \"You know why there's nothing about philosophy or art in the Paumons course: Because I told them there wasn't to be any. You want to find out about these people, you go find out about them for yourself. Far as the Assault Team's concerned, you're a god-dam aidman, and a goddam interpreter and a goddam headache. Far as _I'm_ concerned, you're a goddam substitute working Christ and I expect you to produce!\"\n\nHe sat glaring at Cal for a long second. Cal looked back without moving his head.\n\n\"All right,\" said Scoby more calmly\u2014Limpari put her head down again. \"As I say, I expect something more of you than I do of what I ordinarily get for help. I've got a special assignment for you. Contacts Officer\u2014with your old outfit.\"\n\nCal felt a soundless shock. It was something like the feeling that had followed Walk's last words three months before.\n\n\"Want to back out?\" jeered Scoby, staring at him closely.\n\n\"No, sir,\" said Cal.\n\n\"Then take off.\" Scoby went unceremoniously back to the papers on his desk. Cal rose and left.\n\nHe had been due for a several-week course with the Medics to fit him for his aidman duties. He had planned to meet Annie that evening when she came off shift at the Service Hospital. He had even sourly made up his mind to get to the library and do some extracurricular reading on the Paumons, in line with, what Scoby had said. None of these things took place.\n\nThat afternoon, even as he was walking out of Scoby's office,things were \"breaking,\" as the News Services said, with the Paumons situation. The Cabinet on Earth was being called into emergency meeting. Six hours later he was collected by military patrol and confined to base with all other uniformed personnel on a general muster order. Seventy-eight hours later, he and the rest connected with the Paumons Expedition Assault Force were spaceborne.\n\nQuarters on their ship, as on all ships of the Assault Force,were close; and all experienced Service people were on thei rbest behavior with each other. Cal met the other officers of his Wing. Walk, as the only former member of the unit, was Section Commander of Section A of the Wing, and executive officer under Wing Captain Anders Kaluba, who now headed the outfit. Kaluba was a pleasant, dark-skinned man, who had been a lieu-tenant with the Seventy-second Combat Engineers against the Lehaunans. He did not seem unduly prejudiced against Contacts Officers. And Walk, when he met Cal, was almost subdued. He said little. Joby Loyt was Section Leader under Walk. Tack had been promoted to Wing Section for the outfit, and talked and acted older than before.\n\nThe Assault Force was on the jump for nine days\u2014and four-teen hours out of destination. An order was posted for an orientation address by General Harmon, the Force Commander, to all officers and men on all ships at X minus 1200 hours. On Cal's ship they took down the hammocks in the main room and everybody crowded in, sitting cross-legged in ranks upon the cold metal flooring. At the far end of the room there was a viewing platform.\n\nAt 1200 hours precisely, the platform lit up with a three-dimensional representation of the Force Commander's office on the flagship. It showed a desk, a wall representation of the Paumons world, and a door. At a couple of minutes past twelve, the door opened, and the image of Harmon strode out before the audience. He was wearing combat coveralls with a field dress jacket over them and a light-weapons harness with, however, no weapons clipped to it. He nodded into the pickup; a warming current ran through the audience in Cal's ship. Hannon looked slightly tired, but confident.\n\n\"I won't keep you,\" he said. \"I want you all to turn in as soon as I'm through and get as much rest as you can.\"\n\nHe picked up a pointer from the desk and turned to the wall representation of the Paumons.\n\n\"Here,\" he said, indicating a squarish-looking continent spreading south and west from the planet's equator, \"is the high central plateau area which Intelligence had decided would be the most promising location for our initial drops. The weather is uniformly clear and good at this time of year. The terrain is both highly defensible because of its ruggedness, and adapted to our overland transport. It also overlooks the industrial centers of this key continent. You'll all be getting full details from your individual Commanders.\"\n\nHe laid the pointer aside and came to stand looking out over the desk at them all. There was a moment of silence in the main room of Cal's ship. Across the room, somebody coughed, and a couple of other barks answered from nearby.\n\n\"Fort Cota hack,\" muttered a voice behind Cal. He shifted his haunches on the hard metal plates. Around him the room was filled with the smell of still air heavy with the odors ofc lothing and other men's bodies. Jump boots squeaked on the flooring and coveralls rustled as those about him fidgeted and shifted.\n\nHarmon cleared his throat.\n\n\"The alien enemy we will be facing in a few hours is tough.We might as well face that fact. But, being an alien, the alien is not as tough as we are: The Prog is going to find out that he's bitten off something he can't chew at all.\"\n\nHarmon clasped his hands behind him and stood out from behind the desk.\n\n\"When a human being fights, he knows what he's fighting for.That's one reason we've got it all over the alien, the alien is not as tough as we are. The Prog is different. He doesn't know. All he knows is some other alien got him stirred up, or some sort of alien sacred cow got trampled on, or it just looks like a good opportunity for him to grab something. But it's a human being's right and duty to know what he's about. And so I'm just going to take a minute or two out here, and bring you officers and men up to date on the events that require us to be here.\"\n\nCal's underneath foot was going to sleep. He quietly un-crossed his legs, bringing the numb one on top.\n\n\"As you all know,\" Harmon was saying, \"ours is an expanding culture and requires us to be continually on the lookout for additional living room. Three years ago, we made contact with the Bellatrix solar system and set down token bases on two of the empty, less habitable planets. At the same time we contacted the Progs to explain we were only interested in what they did not have, and didn't intend to bother them in any way.\"\"Move, will you!\" hissed a man in the row behind Cal and off to his right. \"You're crowding my goddam knee.\"\n\n\"Shove your knee!\" retorted another whisper. \"I haven't got any more room to move than you have.\"\n\n\"However, they withheld official acceptance of our presence in their solar system,\" Harmon's voice was continuing. \"And shortly after that, less than six months ago, presented us with an official complaint against what they termed an offensive build-up of military equipment and personnel in these areas. We attempted to negotiate, but a month ago we were given what amounted to an ultimatum to pull out of the Bellatrix system.Ten days ago, the Prog attacked without warning and took over both our peoples and our property. Twelve hours from now, he's going to have to answer for that to us.\"\n\nHarmon's glance swept from left to right in front of him.\n\n\"That's it, Assault Soldiers. Turn in now and get some rest\u2014and tomorrow we give 'em hell!\"\n\nHe threw a slight wave of his hand, turned about, strode back through the imaged door, and out. The stage winked blank and bare. The seated men rose, grunting and stretching, and the room was suddenly overcrowded. By orderly masses, they moved back along narrow corridors to their individual unit rooms, where the thick-hung hammocks drooped like white foliage from the low ceilings.\n\nPushing between the hammocks and the men climbing into them Cal heard his name called by Wing Captain Kaluba. He went toward the comer of the room that was Kaluba's.\n\nKaluba, because of the necessities imposed by rank and his duties, did Hot have a hammock, but a cot and a small folding desk. He was sitting on the cot behind the desk as Cal shoved past two filled hammocks to come into view.\n\n\"Yes, sir?\" said Cal.\n\nKaluba was stacking reports in a neat pile. He looked up.\"Oh, yes. Lieutenant, you're not to go down with the outfit on the drop. You can come later with the medics.\"\n\nCal frowned.\n\n\"Sir?\" he said. \"I'm supposed to be aidman for this Wing.\"\"I know,\" said Kaluba. \"I've picked a couple of the older men to fill in that duty.\" There was an awkward pause.\n\n\"Can I ask why, Captain?\" said Cal.\n\n\"I suppose so,\" said Kaluba. His dark face looked tired.\"You're an ex-mulebrain. And it's my commission if you take an active action in combat\u2014you know the regulations. I think it'd be better all around if you weren't in on the drop.\"\n\n\"The Captain,\" said Call, \"doesn't trust me?\"\n\n\"I don't trust your reflexes.\" Kaluba lowered his voice. \"Fifteen hours from now, or less, some of these men will be badly hurt, and others will be dying. Are you dead sure you can just stand around and watch that happening?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" said Cal.\n\n\"Well, I'm not.\"\n\n\"Captain,\" said Cal, \"I think you may have just talked your-self into something. I'm aidman for this outfit, and you're going to need me on this drop.\" He kept his eyes steadily on Kaluba.\"You're going to need every man on the list.\"\n\nKaluba chewed his lower lip angrily.\n\n\"I'm trained and I'm experienced,\" said Cal. \"You leave me back up here and I'll write a letter, of complaint to the Service accusing you of a personal bias against me. I don't think the reviewing board will think your reasons strong enough.\" Kaluba's eyes flickered up at him. Then he looked down at the reports and swore.\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"Get some sleep.\"\n\nCal went back to his hammock and climbed in. Beside him, Wajeck, the Lieutenant officering B Section, was lying on his back on his hammock, gazing at the ceiling ten inches away.\n\nHis hairy-backed hands were gripping the edges of his hammock.\n\n\"Think of six beautiful women,\" Cal said to him.\n\n\"I'm all right,\" said Wajeck, not taking his eyes off the ceiling. \"I'm just not sleepy.\"\n\nThey made their first wave landing thirteen hours later, the assault glider that carried Cal along with A and B Sections screaming in at five hundred feet of altitude to eject them right and left like tossed popcorn. Cal cut wide in his shoulder jets with a short burst and slid in to earth under a tree so like a terran cottonwood it was hard to tell the difference. The trees on windy hillsides on Lehaunan had been warped and strangely-twisted like high-mountain conifers. On the world of the Griella, there had been no true trees. Only a sort of large bush. But here the trees were like trees and the cut-up rocky country all around and between them greened with a heavy moss that almost resembled grass.\n\nCal jettisoned his jets and checked his wrist scope. All the men of the two sections were down without trouble and already moving in on the red dot which marked the location of the senior Section Commander. That would be Walk. Cal took a bearing and moved, too.\n\nHe was two-thirds of the way to the twenty-foot-high cluster of rock where the red dot showed, when the first Paumons seeker torp came over the small hill at his left. It flashed black for a moment in his vision like a gnat flying right into his eye. And then the rocks he was headed for went up in a graceful, vase-shaped gout of brown earth and debris.\n\n\"Spread out! Spread out!\" yelled Cal automatically. \"Torps.\"\n\nHe had gone down without thinking at the black flicker in his vision. Now he rose and ran, changing direction, for the rocks. When he got there, he found a crater, five dead men, a boy with one leg blown off, and Lieutenant Wajeck. Wajeck was sitting up against a rock, apparently unhurt, but hugging himself as if he were cold.\n\n\"You all right?\" said Cal to Wajeck. He got no answer. Cal turned to the boy with his leg off and got a shot into him and a tourniquet around the pressure point just inside the midthigh. He set the tourniquet to loosen at fifteen minute intervals\u2014the boy was out cold\u2014and turned to Wajeck.\n\n\"What's wrong with you?\" he said, and pulled at the folded arms.\n\n\"Oh, God,\" said Wajeck, \"I knew it. Right in the middle. I knew it, I knew it.\"\n\nCal got the arms apart and there was blood soaking through all over the stomach area of Wajeck's coveralls. There was a slit in the cloth like a torp fragment might make. Cal put his fingers in it, tore it wide, and looked inside. It was a bad hole. He got a patch on it and gave the other man a shot, but Wajeck's face was already beginning to go pinched and strange. Another torp came suddenly over the hills and Cal jerked Wajeck down with him to the ground, as the explosion went off not fifty yards from them.\n\n\"Oh, God,\" said Wajeck, quite plainly and clearly in Cal's ear as they lay on the ground together. \"I knew it. I was sure. I knew it.\"\n\n\"Where's Walk?\" said Cal. Another torp went off to their right.\n\n\"They switched him to Kaluba's glider. Last minute. He didn't come down with us. Oh, God...\"\n\n\"Where're your Section Leaders?\"\n\n\"There. There. Squad men, too\u2014\" Wajeck twitched a hand and wrist toward the hole the torp had left and the dead bodies in and about it. \"I told them to close when we ejected. So we'd come down ready to organize.\"\n\nCal stared along six inches of dirt at Wajeck's profile, staring up at the cloudless sky.\n\n\"Didn't you learn\u2014\" Cal broke off. \"Somebody's got to get these men out of here. You must have a non-com somewhere still out there.\"\n\n\"No one. No one,\" said Wajeck's lips to the sky. They stopped suddenly. Jerkily his head turned sideways. He looked along the ground into Cal's eyes.\n\n\"You,\" he said. \"You know what to do. Take over, for God's sake. You got to take over, Cal. Right now.\"\n\nThere was a shriek and a roar. A torp exploded so close to them it brought dirt raining down about them. The boy with the leg off had just come to, and he was hit again. He began screaming.\n\n# Chapter Ten\n\nThe men were dying, and someone was weeping. Looking around under the thunder and ground shake of the nearby exploding torps, Cal saw the one who wept was the boy with his leg off. He was lying on his back looking at the sky and tears were running out of the comers of his eyes, back into the blond sideburns in front of his ears. Cal looked back at Wajeck, who was trying to get the command scope off his wrist. But his fingers were already too weak to stretch the expansion band over his hand and the scope kept slipping back to his wrist.\n\n\"You got to!\"\n\n\"I can't,\" said Cal. \"Kaluba wasn't going to let me come on this drop because he figured I'd do something like that. It's my orders.\"\n\n\"You gut,\" said Wajeck, Still fumbling like a baby with the expansion band. \"You don't care about these men; you only care about keeping your uniform. Nobody lives by orders all the way,you know that.\" He was still fumbling with the scope band.\"I'm going to make you do it, you lousy gut.\"\n\n\"Quit wearing yourself out,\" said Cal. He pulled the arm with the scope out of Wajeck's weak grasp of the other hand,and lifted arm, scope and all to his lips. He pressed the talk button. \"All right, men,\" he said into it, \"this is Lieutenant Truant. Lieutenant Wajeck is out of action, and so are all the non-coms. I'm a Contacts Officer and you know I can't takeover. You need somebody in here to take over the command scope. I'll help all I can once one of you gets here. But that's my limit. Those torps'll have us all in another ten minutes, unless one of you forgets all he ever learned about not volunteering. Somebody better make up his mind and get in here fast.\"\n\nFor a moment there were no explosions. In the unusual silence that suddenly seemed all wrong, Cal looked about him. There were two or three large holes in the open space around him, but it looked like very little damage, just by itself. He had to re-member that the seeker mechanism on the torps would almost certainly have found at least one man where every hole was now.\n\nAn assault soldier dodged out from behind a tree about eighty yards away and began running towards the rocks where Cal lay. Another broke cover off to the left about the same time, but, seeing the first ahead of him, dodged back again.\n\nCal counted the seconds, watching the man come on. But nothing happened. Only, the second after the man threw himself down beside Cal and Wajeck, a torp flitted over the hilltop and exploded to their left.\n\nThe man was in his thirties, small, with a sort of hazelnut-shaped face. Cal searched his memory.\n\n\"Mahauni?\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Mahauni. \"What do I do?\"\n\n\"What you think you ought to do,\" said Cal. \"It's your show.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. What would you do?\"\n\n\"Get the men on the move. Keep them at least fifty feet apart.\" Cal pointed at the command scope on Wajeck's wrist. In a larger circle around the unit dots were the battalion signals,clustered now to their west. The two Sections under Wajeck had come down in this little area with a low, open hill to their east, scattered trees and, to the west, rising clusters of trees to a wooden horizon. Beyond that, about eight miles off, was battalion command.\n\n\"Perimeter's about five miles,\" said Cal. \"When I was a soldier they had anti-torp defenses along battalion perimeters. I'll take the Lieutenant. You take the kid, there.\"\n\n\"Right.\" said Mahauni. He moved like an old hand, stripping the command scope off Wajeck's wrist and talking into it. He gave commands as if he might have been a Section Leader once. Or better.\n\n\"Ready to move,\" he said to Cal finally, the command scope now on his own thin, brown wrist.\n\nThey moved. The rest of it was simply horribly hard work,running and climbing with a wounded man apiece on their backs,shouting commands at the rest of the two Sections of men, and being lucky when the torps came over. They made it over the hill and safely at last within battalion defenses, with fifty-three men left out of a hundred and eighty-one that had been dropped.\n\nBy the evening of the day of the first drops, waves one, two and three of the Initial Assault Team were down on the Paumons ground, and regrouped. They formed a curving, staggered line of battalion fronts, arching around three Paumons cities and several hundred small settlements. The settlements were essentially housing centers, the cities essentially factory complexes for Paumons' heavy industry, which here was supplied by power from volcanic taps.\n\nCal, having checked in with Kaluba, had received permission to leave for a few hours and make contact with his own Contacts Service Command, for instructions. His supplementary and unannounced reason was to tell his story of the drop to someone like Scoby (who was in Contacts Service Command, along on the Expedition) before any other version of it should reach him.He had no idea where C.S. Command Headquarters was so he hunted up Expedition Command, where he would be able to get directions. He found it just a little before sunset\u2014a camouflaged cluster of domes in a little clearing surrounded by tall trees of a cottonwood-like variety.\n\n\"Contacts Service HQ?\" he asked a Wing Section who was passing between the domes.\n\n\"Check with the liaison desk, Command HQ, Dome Eight,\" said the Wing Section, brusquely, looking only at the Command Service patch on Cal's breast pocket and not at Cal's face. He pulled away and hurried off.\n\nCal found Dome Eight. He stepped through the vibration screen at its entrance and found himself in an outer office with several empty desks and chairs. A door in a thin partition led to an inner office from which the sound of a conversation came. It occurred to Cal belatedly that this would be the time for evening chow. The people belonging to the outer office, including the Liaison Desk Officer, would be off eating. He moved toward the inner office, then checked as he recognized one of the conversing voices as General Harmon's, the other as Colonel Alt's. It would hardly do to use the Commanding General of the Expedition and his aide as an information service. Cal took a seat beside the partition to wait for the return of the Liaison Desk Officer.\n\n\"\u2014bismuth,\" Harmon's voice sounded thinly through the partition. \"Their communications system depends on those thermopiles. We seal off this manufacturing area and they've got to come to us. Then we can make other drops. Here, hit them here, Zone Five. Zone Three. Around the planet here, in this mountainous section\u2014Zone Eleven. By the way, we'll have to watch that spot for mop-up toward the end, Hag. It's natural country for a regular hornet's-nest of guerrillas. Put a strong-point outside the mountains under somebody fitted for the work. But don't overload him with men...\"\n\nCal dismissed the voices and let his thoughts drift off to the subject of Annie. She would be with the Medics main unit, and that, too, would be locatable through the Liaison Desk. But he would not have time after finding Contacts Service HQ and telling his story. . .\n\n\". . . 4th Assault Wing, 91st Combat Engineers,\" Alt was saying. Cal came alert with a jerk, hearing his own outfit mentioned. \"A couple of sections, I understand.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Harmon's voice. \"But outside of a couple of incidents like that, it was a near-perfect drop. Almost too perfect. We've got a fifty-year advantage in weapons on these Paumons, and it's making for too much complacency on our side.\"\n\n\"The men'll stiffen up as they get more action,\" said Alt.\n\n\"No doubt. But will it be soon enough? Soldiers aren't supposed to regard the enemy with good-humored contempt.They're supposed to hate 'em, and have a healthy fear of them. Anything else results in a lot of throats being cut the first dark night.\"\n\n\"I'll write up a general order.\"\n\n\"No good, Hag. Half the trouble's with the Progs. They're treating us as if we're halfway civilized, and we're treating them as if they were. Everybody forgets their fighting force outnumbers ours six hundred to one from a mathematical standpoint. One of these days we'll wake up to find we've half-civilized ourselves into being completely surrounded and defeated.\" Harmon broke off suddenly. \"I've got it.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"We've got about five hundred prisoners down below Headquarters here, haven't we?\"\n\n\"That's right, General.\"\n\n\"Pick a town behind our front here\u2014say, this place here. What's its Prog name? Manaha? Get a good, stiff man and have him march those prisoners there, wounded and all. You understand, Hag?\"\n\nThere was a slight pause. Cal suddenly sat bolt upright, listening.\n\n\"I think so, sir,\" came Alt's voice.\n\n\"I'm not going to give any orders. Don't you, either. Just pick the right man.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I think I know who I can get.\"\n\n\"Handle that march right, and the word'll get out fast enough. It'll stiffen up the Paumons, and the Paumons'll take care of stiffening up our own boys. That's what\u2014\"\n\nQuickly and quietly, Cal got up and out of the dome. He was in the new darkness of early night among the trees surrounding the Headquarters area, headed downhill, before he slowed. The little breeze among the trees felt abruptly cool on his forehead.\n\nHe kept going. The business of telling his story of the drop to Contacts HQ would have to wait, now. He stopped abruptly.He had headed off without thinking of direction. He would have to return at least to the edge of the HQ area to get his bearings.But he did not want to come back into the area by Dome Eight. He turned to his left and began to circle around the base of the hill on which the area was located.\n\nA few moments later he came up against a steel fence. He turned and went down along it. A little ways further on he came out of the trees and saw Paumons standing behind the wire mesh of the fence. These must be the prisoners Harmon had been talking about. They stood silently in little clumps. The sun, Bellatrix, was down, but the western sky was still light. In the dusk what little light there was left glimmered here and there on light patches about the prisoners. The patches were bondages that they had put on the wounded by tearing up their own uniforms\u2014dark green on the outside, and light green on the inside\u2014and using them inside out. They stood silently, but he saw them watching him as he passed. In the dusk their figures were outlines, indistinct. They could have been Lehaunan\u2014or human. He walked on.\n\n\"Bunnyrabbit!\" said a voice.\n\nThe world rocked suddenly. One quick movement. Then it stopped and everything was just the same as it had been a moment before. Cal found he had stopped dead, and his hands were up at his chest, reaching to a harness that was not there. A great chill flowed over him. He turned sharply around.\n\nThe dim figures were still there. They did not seem to have moved. A single figure was standing closest to him, back a half a dozen steps, just on the other side of the wire. He went back and looked through the mesh at it. It was a Paumons with a large bandage all over one half of his face. It looked as if he had been badly wounded in the cheek and jaw. He saw the light-colored parts of the Paumons' eyes glitter at him in the gloom.\n\nThe Paumons said something. Cal had been taught the language. If what the Paumans had said had been understandable,he would have understood it. But it was not understandable. The other's jaw or tongue must have been damaged to the point of producing incomprehensibility. It was a mangled, bawling sound that made no sense. But it was directed at Cal, and there was a feeling behind it that matched the glitter of the eyes. Cal's ears had metamorphosed it into the recognizable human word.\n\nCal turned and walked off. After a moment, he stopped, turned and went back, but the prisoner who had spoken to him was no longer at the wire. He looked for a moment at the other motionless shapes, then turned for a final time and went up the slope in the darkness.\n\nThe outer office of Dome Eight was still empty, for which he was grateful. Harmon and Alt were still talking behind the partition. He walked up to the door in the partition, and knocked.\n\nThere was a pause inside.\n\n\"Who's that? Come in!\" said Alt. Cal opened the door and stepped a half-step into the inner room. There was a desk at which Harmon was sitting, and Alt was standing half-turned toward the door, in front of the desk. There was a further door and, on the walls, maps and schematics.\n\n\"Lieutenant Truant, sir,\" said Cal. \"Contacts Service. I thought I'd better speak to the Colonel. It's about the Paumons prisoners.\"\n\nAlt turned his head a little bit and looked at Cal more directly.\n\n\"Prisoners?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"What about the prisoners?\"\n\n\"I happened to pass the compound where they're being held,sir.\" said Cal. \"And some of them spoke to me. You know they gave Contacts trainees the language.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" said Alt. \"What about the prisoners?\"\n\n\"I thought I'd speak to you, Colonel,\" said Cal. He looked directly into Alt's face. \"The prisoners seem to think something's going to be done with them; they're going to be done away with, or something like that. I thought, as part of elementary Contacts, I might have the Colonel's permission to speak to them on his behalf and assure them they've got nothing to worry about; that they're going to be well treated.\"\n\nAlt stared at him for a moment.\n\n\"You did, did you?\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nFrom behind the desk, Cal could see Harmon also looking at him. The General was tilted a little backwards in his chair, and he had been gazing at Cal all this time with no expression on his face except a sort of steady interest.\n\n\"Tell me, Lieutenant,\" said Alt. \"Did you just come in to the outer office, there?\"\n\n\"Well, yes sir,\" said Cal. \"I did. There was no one out front,so I took a chance and knocked on your door. I didn't realize you were busy with the General.\"\n\n\"That's quite all right,\" said Harmon. Cal turned his head toward the seated man. \"Tell me, aren't you the officer I sent over to see Genera! Scoby, back in Denver?\"\n\n\"That's right, General.\"\n\n\"I thought so,\" said Harmon. \"I've got quite a good memory for certain things.\" He sat up straight and businesslike. \"Well, Colonel, I think the Lieutenant here should do what he suggests, don't you? We want to make an early start on good Contacts with the Paumons. Wait outside, will you, Lieutenant? The Colonel will have some more specific orders for you as soon as we're done here. \"\n\nCal went out into the outer office and took a chair well away from the partition. He heard the conversation begin again between Harmon and Alt, but the voices were not so loud now and it was not possible to make out the words. After some minutes, the officers and men belonging to the outer office began to come in.\n\n\"Did you want to see me, Lieutenant?\" asked the Captain at the Liaison Desk\u2014a tall young man with blond hair already veering back at the temples\u2014as he sat down.\n\n\"I wanted to locate Contacts HQ,\" said Cal. \"But Colonel Alt asked me to wait on another matter.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said the Captain. \"Well, Contacts is about three miles west by the Medics, at Grid four-five-seven-zero. I imagine Colonel Alt will be calling you shortly.\"\n\nThe lights were all turned up in the outer office, now, and the four enlisted men and three officers were all busily at work. Over.the noise of their occupation, Cal heard a door close beyond the^partition wall. A minute or so later, Alt put his head out of the partition door.\n\n\"Truant,\" he said.\n\nCal got up and went into the inner office. Alt faced him inside,his legs a little spread apart, his shoulders hunched.\n\n\"Lieutenant,\" Alt said. \"We're going to get some orders cut for you. You won't have to go back to your assigned outfit. Those Paumons prisoners you saw are going to be walked to a Prisoner of War center we're setting up about forty miles from here at a town called Manaha. General Harmon suggested, and I agree, that since POWs generally are handled as a part of Contacts Service business, you might be the very man to manage moving them there. The General wants them there by tomorrow night.We'll give you four armed enlisted men. You can move out at dawn.\"\n\n# Chapter Eleven\n\nNothing happened in a hurry, of course. Cal's outfit had to be notified, and the Contacts Service HQ, and then his orders had to be printed up. It took several hours and as they were just getting into it, the Liaison Desk Captain, who did not seem to share the popular prejudice against Contacts people, suggested Cal see about food and billeting for the night, sending him over to Officers Quarters. Cal got himself allotted a bunk and served some field rations and coffee. The Duty Officer, a young Lieu-tenant, came in and sat down and had a cup of coffee with him in the empty mess room.\n\n\"We'll roll these Progs up in three months,\" said the Duty Officer. \"They've never been hit like this before. It stuns them;and they just give up. I saw them bringing them in all day today.\"\n\nThe Lieutenant was wearing the patch of the Administrative Service.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Cal. \"Can I get some more coffee?\"\n\n\"Urn's over there. Help yourself,\" said the Lieutenant.\n\n\"Of course, they're aliens. They can't help it. But it may well be practically a bloodless conquest.\"\n\nAs soon as he had his printed orders, Cal went back down to the compound where the prisoners were. He showed the orders to the Section Leader in charge of guarding them.\n\n\"I want to talk to their leader,\" said Cal. The Section unlocked the gate and let him in. There was no illumination inside the fence, but they had set up searchlights outside, and the harsh glare of these cast back a sort of bare stage-lighting over the Paumons standing around in little groups inside, Now that it was illuminated, Cal could see the extent of the compound, which was about five hundred feet on the square. The only structures inside it were a sanitation dome, and a small office dome.\n\n\"I want to talk to your ranking officer,\" said Cal in Paumons, to the figures nearest to him. Without waiting for an answer, he went on into the office dome, which had a table and a few chairs, and sat down behind the table.\n\nAfter a few minutes the door opened and two unwounded Paumons came in and stood before the desk. At first glance they looked alike as all the others did. But Cal, searching hard for differences, saw that the one facing him on the right was a little taller and stood straighter. The one on the left, without any particular identifiable sign of it, gave an impression of greater age. They both wore the piping on their trousers and jacket battle dress that identified them as officers.\n\n\"Sit down,\" said Cal in Paumons, indicating two chairs he had arranged on the other side of the desk.\n\n\"No,\" said the one on the right. \"I am General Commander Wantaki. This is my aide, Leader Ola Tain.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Cal. \"I'm the officer who is going to be responsible for moving everybody in this compound to more permanent quarters tomorrow. We will move out at dawn.\"\n\n\"Everyone?\" said Wantaki. \"A good quarter of the men here are walking wounded, and there are close to seven sixes of men who cannot walk.\"\n\n\"That's why I am talking to you tonight,\" said Cal. \"It is a very long day's march to where we are going, even for your well people. But I have my orders and I must carry them out. I will do what I can, but you must all travel. So I tell you now.\"\n\n\"What good does that do?\" said Wantaki harshly.\n\n\"Listen,\" cautioned his companion, Ola Tain, who had not spoken up until now.\n\n\"I suggest you make preparations,\" said Cal. \"Rig litters and assign those who are well to help the walking wounded. I have already arranged to have litter poles and fabric for the litters and for bandages to be given you.\"\n\n\"You show an unusual amount of courage to come in here without at least a sidearm,\" said Wantaki. \"Some of my people, and I do not exclude myself, might not be able to resist the temptation.\"\n\n\"I belong to a branch of the human army known as the Contacts Service,\" said Cal. \"The Contacts Service never bears arms or joins in the fighting.\"\n\n\"They would be well advised to change their ways in the seasons to come,\" said Wantaki. \"If you supply us with poles and fabric, we will use them. Is that all?\"\n\n\"That is all,\" said Cal. They went out. He himself went out and returned to the gate. The Section Leader of the Guard let him out.\n\n\"I've made arrangements with Quatermaster to have some litter materials and stuff delivered to the prisoners,\" Cal told him. \"Let it through to them when it comes.\"\n\nHe went back to Officers Quarters and turned in to his assigned bunk. He went off to sleep immediately, but several hours later he was awakened by the Duty Officer.\n\n\"What's up?\" said Cal thickly. Ugly dark half-remembered shapes were still thronging the back of his brain.\n\n\"You were yelling,\" said the Duty Officer. \"Some kind of a nightmare or something, about rabbits.\"\n\nIn the pale light of predawn, near the fence, Cal could see the four armed men he had been given to control the five-hundred-odd prisoners on the march. He imagined Alt had personally selected them. Two were youngsters. One had his hair cropped to a stubble and a thin, wide, sharp-looking mouth in a thin face. The other was small and large-eyed. One was of the same type and age as Mahauni, the mulebrain who had taken over command of the outfit under the torps. These were all buck soldiers. There was a non-com, too, a Squadman. He was lanky, black-haired, and tall. He did not call the men to attention as Cal came up, but stayed lounging against the fence above the other three seated on the grass. They were all wearing full harness and weapons.\n\n\"You the prisoner guard?\" said Cal as he came up.\n\n\"That's us,\" drawled the non-com, not moving, glancing at Cal's Contacts Service patch.\n\n\"What's your name?\" Cal asked him.\n\n\"My friends call me Buck,\" said the Squadman. Cal waited. \"Allen,\" said the Squadman.\n\n\"All right, Allen,\" said Cal, in the same tone of voice. \"You report back to your outfit and tell them to send me somebody else. Tell them you impressed me as being sloppy, unreliable and insubordinate, and that I said I couldn't use you.\"\n\nAllen straightened up with a jerk.\n\n\"Hey, wait a minute\u2014\" he began. But Cal was turning to the other three.\n\n\"On your feet,\" he said. They scrambled up. Behind him, Cal heard the Squadman talking.\n\n\". . . senior man of the Combat Services gives the orders in the field. You don't tell me\u2014\"\n\nCal looked around. \"I thought I gave you an order,\" he said.\n\n\"Listen, Lieutenant, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Get in there,\" said Cal, turning back to the three others. \"Start counting the prisoners, and see that all the wounded who can't walk have litters.\" They went off.\n\nCal watched them go down the fence, in through the gate and out of earshot. The Squadman was still talking. He stopped when he saw Cal's face.\n\n\"Listen,\" said Cal, holding his voice down. He could feel his arms beginning to shake from the tensed muscles in them. \"Listen, soldier. Get one thing clear in that head of yours. You're here to do what I tell you, and exactly what I tell you in getting these prisoners to Manaha. You can just forget anything else.Never mind rule books or the kind of Contacts Officers you, maybe ran into in the past. Just remember that on the official papers it's just you and me, all alone on this trip. And if you think your two stripes can play games with these\u2014Cal jabbed a rod-stiff finger at his Lieutenant's tabs\u2014\"just you try it. And I'll hang your hind end, boy. Remember that. No matter what happens to me, when the dust settles you're going to find yourself in front of a long table with five officers of the rank of major or above behind it.\"\n\nCal quit talking. He was shaking all over now. He knew Allen could see it, but he didn't give a damn.\n\n\"Well?\" he said. Allen was not moving. He stood stiff and stared straight ahead. His face was pale. \"All right,\" said Cal, almost in a whisper. \"I'm going to take you along and you're going to see that you and those other three do the job they're supposed to do. Now, get in there and get them organized.\" Allen turned and went. Cal watched him go, and gradually the case of shakes he had picked up began to leak out of him.\n\nThey actually got the Paumons prisoners moving by half an hour after sunrise, which was even better than Cal had hoped. He had figured it would take a full hour to get the march actually on the road. What helped was the authority of Wantaki and Ola Tain. They had taken over internal command of the march; and Cal wisely let them be.\n\nHe and his four soldiers wore jump belts; and he had a man pogo-sticking along on each side of die column, one at the rear and Allen up front. He jumped back and forth from tail to rear of the marching column, himself.\n\nIt was a good-weather day; there was that much in its favor. They were in the southern latitudes of the northern hemisphere and high up. The air was dry. To begin with, the column made nearly three miles an hour, but that could not last, Cal thought. He moved back and forth along one side of the column, then in the opposite direction along the other. The Paumons prisoners marched steadily, in a rough column of fours, two whole individuals on each side of a wounded, two frequently changed on each litter. Their eyebrowless, dish-shaped faces seemed to show no expression. They talked little among themselves. He found himself getting curious about them.\n\nThere was an atmosphere of numbness about them, a leaden quality. They marched like people in a dream, or about some dreary, routine task. Only up at the head of the column were exceptions to this to be found. There, Wantaki strode with heavy, jarring footfalls, staring straight ahead like a thwarted wrestler. Beside him, Ola Tain paced soberly, but apparently calmly.\n\nNow that Cal had time to study the two leaders, he found himself puzzled by Ola Tain. Wantaki he could understand to a certain extent. The Paumons Commander had the ring of the military about him. But Ola Tain did not seem to belong at all. He was almost like a priest.\n\nThey had been stopping at Cal's order ten minutes out of every hour. They also stopped at noon. Nobody had known anything about rations for the prisoners, or even what the Paumons ate, when Cal had asked about it back at HQ before leaving. So the column was without food. They did not complain about it, but sat quietly in the brilliant, high-altitude sunlight from small,bright Bellatrix, like a white coin in the sky. Glanced at for just a fraction of a second, it left a black after-image burning against the closed eyelid, floating about with the hidden movements of the eyeballs.\n\nWhen the order came to move on, they took up their march again. But they were definitely slowing. It was the wounded who were holding the rest back. They went through several small towns, but the white, low buildings on either side of the narrow,winding streets were locked up tight and no Paumons civilians showed themselves. By mid-afternoon, Cal was forced to call another halt and the prisoners, particularly the litter-bearers,went down where they stood as if they had been so much grain cut by a scythe.\n\nCal sat on a little rise of ground at the side of the road and let them lie. After about twenty minutes, Allen came up to him.\n\n\"How long we going to leave them here, Lieutenant?\" the Squadman asked. Cal looked up at the man without answering,and Allen wet his lips and went away.\n\nIt occurred to Cal that he had no idea how much endurance the Paumons might have. It might be less, or more, than humans in the same position. He got up and went up to the head of the column. Wantaki was there, sitting on a roadside boulder, looking back over the column of men. One muddy, rust-colored hand was on his knee, curled up into a fist. His face was as hard and washed clean as a stone seen under running water in a mountain stream fed by glaciers. He sat alone. Ola Tain was a little ways off, also alone, lying on a hillside. Cal turned and went toward Tain.\n\nThey had come to a wide open area of the plateau now, with only an occasional clump of the cottonwood trees. In between the heaved up rock, in the stony soil, the green moss was everywhere. There was a faint, sweet odor to it, like lavender.\n\nThe moss deadened the sound of Cal's footsteps, and Ola Tain evidently did not hear him approaching. The Paumons aide was lying on one elbow, the forefinger of the hand belonging to that elbow tracing out the small, feathery stems of the moss-plant directly underneath it. His face was absorbed. Cal's steps slowed as he watched the other. For the first time, now, he saw that there were tiny yellow blossoms hidden among the cone-shaped leaves of each miniature stem, and that Ola Tain's finger was counting these.\n\nCal felt a constriction in his guts and his throat tightened.There came to him suddenly a strong and desperate longing to know what sort of feelings moved inside the breathing, living being just a few feet from him; a sort of terrible loneliness. He opened his mouth to speak, but all that happened was that he made a sound in his throat. Ola Tain looked up.\n\n\"I need some information,\" said Cal, in Paumons. \"I did not think now would be a good time to ask the General Commander.\"\n\nOla Tain's glance slid past Cal to Wantaki, and back to Cal again.\n\n\"No,\" he said.\n\n\"I want to know,\" said Cal, \"how your people are standing up to the march. We have still over half the distance to go.\"\n\n\"You see,\" said Ola Tain, nodding toward the column. \"Can you tell us what our destination is?\"\n\n\"Manaha. I have no means to take care of stragglers.\"\n\n\"I had noticed that.\" Ola Tain looked at him for a moment. \"You are doing the best you can for us within your orders?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I had thought so, myself. I will help as I can.\"\n\n\"If we take until tomorrow dawn, will all make it?\"\n\n\"We will pray so.\"\n\nCal lingered, looking down at him.\n\n\"You pray?\" he said.\n\n\"Sometimes,\" said Ola Tain. \"I am praying today.\"\n\n\"What to?\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\" said Ola Tain.\n\n\"I guess not.\" Cal looked back over the column, then down at Ola Tain again. \"You're a strange sort of soldier.\"\n\n\"I am not really a soldier. I teach\u2014\" the term he gave did not translate well. Something between philosophy and anthropology, in the Paumons sense.\n\n\" _He_ is a soldier,\" Cal nodded toward Wantaki. \"He hates us, doesn't he?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Ola Tain.\n\n\"Do you hate us?\"\n\n\"I try not to. Hate gets in the way of clear thinking. But...\" Ola Tain hesitated. \"Yes, I hate you, too.\" He looked back down at the flowers of the moss.\n\n\"Well,\" said Cal, after a second, \"we're only ensuring the safety of our bases and our people, you know.\"\n\n\"Please.\" Ola Tain did not look up. \"Do not make it harder for me to try not to hate you.\"\n\nCal went back to the column, and to Squadman Allen.\n\n\"Get 'em moving,\" he said.\n\nWith the declining of the sun, the air cooled quickly. At first that seemed to have a good effect on the prisoners and revived the column. But as Bellatrix sought the horizon, what had been merely a pleasant coolness now began to approach a chilliness.With the long night ahead of him, Cal faced the fact that the only way to keep the most of his prisoners moving was to get some food and drink into them.\n\nHe took Ola Tain and went ahead up to the next town. Together and alone, they came on the small place by surprise.There were lights in the windows and female Paumons and children moving about the streets. They stared for a moment at the sight of Cal, then scattered to their buildings. Ola Tain left him and went on into the heart of the town, alone.\n\nHe was some little time getting back. When he returned, he was followed by a female driving a civilian balloon-tired transport carrying food and drink of the Paumons variety.\n\n\"Well, you got it,\" said Cal to Ola Tain, as they headed back toward the column with the truck going ahead.\n\n\"With your people attacking, they did not want to spare it,\"said Ola Tain, looking ahead to the truck. \"It is not easy.\" After a moment, he said, \"I had to threaten them with you.\"\n\nThey got back to the column, which had built fires. After the prisoners had eaten, they appeared stronger. But at the next halt,Allen came up to Cal.\n\n\"There's five of them dead,\" he said. \"They've been carrying them all this time in the litters so we'd think they were wounded.\"\n\n\"If they can keep up, let them,\" said Cal.\n\nBut during the long night, the column began to straggle. Cal ordered the dead left behind, and in the process found that there were now twelve corpses in the column. They left them behind and went on, the exhausted, four to a litter now, carrying the near-dead, the staggering wounded helping each other. Cal increased his halts to one every half-hour.\n\nDawn found them straggling through another small town. Word of their movement had gone ahead of them over the civilian Paumons communications system, which was still operating. With Manaha, their destination, only a little over two miles off,the civilians had grown bolder and more in sympathy with the prisoners. They said nothing, but they peered from windows and rooftops, and dodged up side streets out of the way, as the column reeled forward.\n\nAs they emerged from the last village before Manaha, they found the road ahead lined with the old, the female and the young. They moved back from the road as Allen, leading the column, came toward them, but they waved in again toward the plodding prisoners as he passed. Looking ahead now, along the semi-open country ahead, Cal could see the distant glint of sun on windows that would be Manaha. He looked back at the reeling column; at the civilian Paumons, leaning in toward it as if over some invisible barrier rope. Wantaki and Ola Tain still moved ahead of the rest.\n\nThere was a slight bend in the road, and, as Allen reached it, the crowd of Paumons children there shrank back. But as he passed on, they bulged forward. There was a sudden flurry in their ranks, and a small, male youngster darted toward Ola Tain, who was closest.\n\nThe thin young soldier with the wide mouth snapped up his machine pistol.\n\n\"Hold it!\" shouted Cal, as the youngster darted back again into the safety of the crowd, leaving Ola Tain holding a green and leafy branch from one of the cottonwood-type trees. For along moment Ola Tain looked at it in his hands; and then, holding it upright before him, took up the march again.\n\nA moment later, another child, a little older this time, darted out with a branch for Wantaki.\n\nSoon, branches were being delivered to prisoners, all along the column. Allen came back to Cal.\n\n\"Sir?\" he said, looking at Cal.\n\n\"Leave them alone,\" said Cal harshly.\n\nAllen went back to the head of the column. Soon all the prisoners had branches. Each carried his own upright before him,their shoulders straightened, and stepping out. As they came into Manaha at last, they looked like a forest on the move. And they were marching like soldiers.\n\n# Chapter Twelve\n\nCal rejoined his outfit after that, and for the next six months he worked with Battalion as Interpreter, questioning prisoners.\n\nThe Expedition made large advances, conquering most of theplanet. It went as Harmon had predicted. The Paumons had to come to the Expedition on the plateau, and the Expedition made large-scale drops of fighting forces elsewhere around the world.\n\nBut it was not a bloodless conquest. It took the Paumons sometime to learn not to fight head-on battles against the vastly superior equipment of the Expedition, that whenever they did they suffered heartbreaking losses. The Expedition also suffered losses. At the end of six months they had received three sets of replacements for the Combat Services; their casualties were over seventy-five thousand. Estimates of the Paumons casualties put those at over two million dead and wounded. Cal was promoted twice, to First Lieutenant and then to Captain, and was brought back to take charge of the big new Prisoner-of-War center next to Expedition Headquarters and Expedition Main Hospital at Manaha. This gave him a chance to be with Annie, who was stationed at Main Hospital. He heard occasionally of Walk, who was making a name for himself as commander of a newly formed guerilla-hunting group. Promotions had been faster in the Com-bat Services, and Walk had made major.\n\nOne day Annie called Cal from over at Hospital Receiving to say they had just brought Walk in with multiple wounds of the arm and leg from a Paumons mortar. Cal juggled his schedule for the day and went over to the hospital. He found Walk had already been put into a room by himself. In the anteroom outside were Annie, who was charting up the readings of the preliminary checkover the Medical Officer had given Walk, and a Public Relations Officer from Administrative, who was there to write him up for a news release back on Earth.\n\n\"Can I go in and see him?\" Cal asked Annie.\n\n\"In a minute,\" she said, coding up results of the checkover, with her fingers hopping over the machine keys. \"I'll take you in. I asked to be his nurse.\"\n\n\"Are you a buddy of his?\" asked the PR Officer, a neat First Lieutenant with a mustache. \"The officers and men of his outfit idolize him, I hear. And to the Paumons he's almost a legend they tell to frighten their children into being good. Maybe we can get some pictures of the two of you together. His story is one Tong string of heroic exploits after another. They say even the aliens respect him.\"\n\n\"You can come in now,\" said Annie to Cal. They went in together. Walk was lying in a hospital bed, under a light top sheet only. He was so tanned and thin he looked like a sun-blackened corpse against the white sheets. His eyes focused crazily on Cal as he came up to the side of the bed.\n\n\"Cal . . .\" he muttered. \"What're you doing here? Get out . . . Get back to base...\"\n\n\"He's out of his head,\" said Annie. She folded Walk's arm up and put a hypodermic syringe gun against the side of it. After a moment his eyes began to clear. He recognized Cal sensibly, and his lips twisted in a hard line.\n\n\"Captain Truant,\" he said.\n\n\"How're you feeling?\" asked Cal.\n\n\"Like a million,\" said Walk. \"Just like a million.\" He made an effort to pull himself up on his pillow. \"Nurse\u2014\" He recognized Annie. \"Annie, they got any liquor around here for the casualties?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Annie, \"but they've got to do some operating on you.\"\n\n\". . . them,\" said Walk. His tongue was beginning to thicken. Annie had evidently given him some fast-acting sedation. \". . .you, too. All of you . . . The universe. That's all it's good for. . .\"\n\nHis eyes closed and he passed out. Annie put a gentle hand on Cal's arm.\n\n\"That's all right,\" said Cal. \"It doesn't matter. I was figuring he'd be like this.\"\n\nHe went back to his office at the POW compound. There was a message that General Scoby wanted to see him, but Ola Tain had been waiting in his outer office for half an hour. In the large Manaha POW Center that now held over eighty thousand Paumons, Ola Tain was Cal's most valuable connection. It was as Scoby had implied in his talk with Cal after Cal had graduated from Contacts School, back in Denver. There were no rules for building a basis for co-existence with those you had conquered. You could only feel your way.\n\nCal felt it mainly through Ola Tain. Wantaki had escaped early. He and five of his officers had broken out and got clean away the second week of their internment at Manaha. Cal was convinced that Ola Tain could have gone at that time, also, if he had wanted to. But he had chosen to stay and speak for the other prisoners. The other prisoners seemed to respect him, but not absorb him. It was as if he was alien to them, too. Cal had asked once if he was never lonely.\n\n\"No,\" said Ola Tain. \"One can only be lonely within walls. And I have never built any.\"\n\nNow Cal stopped in the outer office to explain that he would have to get over and see Scoby.\n\n\"There's no hurry about my business,\" said Ola Tain. \"I have only promised to ask again that the recreation area be enlarged.\"\n\n\"I'll ask General Scoby about it,\" said Cal.\n\nHe went on over to Contacts Service HQ. Scoby, busy at his desk as Cal came in, looked as if he, his office, and Limpari the cheetah had been transported all in a package from Denver, without even disturbing the papers piled on the desk. Cal repeated Ola Tain's request.\n\n\"No,\" replied Scoby. He leaned back in his chair and stared at Cal, seated opposite him. \"They don't really want more space. They just want to find out if the rumor's true.\"\n\n\"What rumor?\"\n\n\"That if peace is signed next month, they'll all be released.\"\n\n\"I hadn't heard that.\"\n\n\"It's circulating,\" said Scoby. \"What do you think we ought to do about it?\"\n\n\"Do?\" said Cal.\n\n\"That's what I said.\"\n\n\"Nothing. The whole thing's crazy. In the first place we're a lot more than a month from signing peace, anyway. Wantaki's still back in those mountains of Zone Eleven with better than thirty thousand men.\"\n\n\"Thirty thousand isn't much,\" said Scoby with one of his sudden spasms of mildness. \"They can be ignored. The main civilian Paumons representatives are ready to ignore him and sign.\"\n\n\"You mean they'd leave him in the position of an outlaw\u2014the Commander that fought harder for them than anyone else? Him and thirty thousand men, to say nothing of all the other guerrilla groups around the world?\"\n\n\"They're a lot like us,\" said Scoby. \"Or hadn't you noticed?\"\n\n\"I noticed,\" said Cal bitterly.\n\nScoby gazed at him for a moment.\n\n\"Trouble with you, Cal,\" he said, \"is you're still expecting miracles from people\u2014and I mean people of all sorts, Lehaunan, Griella, Paumons, as well as human. That's the trouble with most of us. We quit expecting the worst from people, so fight away we've got to swing over and start expecting nothing but the best.\"\n\n\"If the General will forgive me,\" said Cal. \"I'll try to do better next time.\"\n\n\"And don't get sarcastic. You've learned a lot this last year but I still know a few things more than you do. One of them is how particularly important this particular race is to us. Or can you tell me that too?\"\n\nCal thought a moment.\n\n\"No,\" he said, finally, \"I guess not.\"\n\n\"They're important just because they are so damn much like us,\" said Scoby. \"Long as the races we were knocking over were covered with fur, or had prehensile noses, we could go on calling them Pelties or Anteaters. We could shut our eyes to the fact that they had about as much brains, or probably about as much soul as we had. But an alien we got to call 'Prog,' now\u2014that's getting a little like 'God' or 'Nigger.' You're sort of straining to point up the difference. \"And yet it stood to reason if we were going to bump into other thinking races out among the stars, sooner or later one of them was bound to be pretty human.\"\n\nHe stopped. He looked at Cal for a reaction.\n\n\"I guess you're right,\" said Cal.\n\n\"Of course,\" said Scoby, \"I'm using the word _human_ in only its finest sense.\"\n\n\"I guessed you were,\" said Cal. \"So being like us is what makes the Paumons so important?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" said Scoby. \"what would you do if you were a Paumons and this was Earth, and you had eighty thousand 'Humies' out behind that wire when peace was signed? Would you want to turn them loose?\"\n\nCal straightened up in his chair.\n\n\"Hell, no!\" he said. \"I see what you mean.\"\n\n\"Not unless you wanted to start the conquest all over again, that right?\" said Scoby. \"How far would you say these people are from being re-educated into living side by side with us?\"\n\n\"Twenty years,\" said Cal. \"Do something with the next generation maybe.\"\n\n\"Don't kid yourself. Five generations'll have a hard time wiping out the fact we started things out by coming in and trompling them.\"\n\n\"Can you talk General Harmon out of releasing them?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then we're helpless,\" said Cal. \"We're just giving them back an army. This and the other POW camps\u2014they'll have three-quarters of a million men under arms again in half a year. And we can't do a thing.\"\n\n\"Not quite,\" said Scoby. \"Once peace is signed, Contacts Service Head can interdict any step taken by Combat Services Commander, if Contacts Head thinks it'll lead to a breach of the peace.\"\n\n\"Ouch,\" said Cal. \"But you wouldn't want to do that to Harmon.\"\n\n\"No. But then I won't have to,\" said Scoby. \"You will.\"\n\nCal sat up straighter suddenly. He stared at Scoby, but Scoby was not smiling.\n\n\"Me?\" Cal said.\n\n\"I told you I'd been grooming you,\" said Scoby. \"I've got men here who've been with me sixteen years. But you've got the Combat experience, and you've got the guts. You've got something else, too.\"\n\n\"But me\u2014\" said Cal, and stopped.\n\n\"Every Expedition the mulebrains in the field talk about how they should all hang together and go back as a unit to straighten out the ex-mulies in Government. The man on the spot always thinks he knows best. Rubs Government the wrong way. It's happening now\u2014politics, boy. Now's the time for me to get things from Government. I've got to go back to Earth and fight for our team.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I can do that,\" said Cal slowly.\n\n\"I'm sure for you,\" said Scoby. \"I'm having orders cut now,giving you a double jump to Lieutenant Colonel. You'll have as much authority here as I would\u2014just not the reputation to back it up. That you've got to make yourself.\" Scoby grinned. \"Be happy, boy. You're going up in the world.\"\n\n# Chapter Thirteen\n\nCal saw Scoby off from the Headquarters field just outside Manaha. The field had been leveled and poured only six months before. But the green moss could grow anywhere, and where it was not burnt away daily by the ascending ships, it had flung long arms across the concrete. It was destroyed by a puff of heat,the touch of a human foot. But it grew again overnight. Standing with Scoby, waiting for boarding orders to be announced on the slim, small courier ship that would take the older man home, Cal could see, less than forty yards away, the great tower of the Expedition's flagship black against the morning sky. It had not moved since landing on this spot eleven days, local time, after the first drops in which Cal had come down with Wajeck and the others. It carried the sheathed sword of nuclear explosives under its armor, that could potentially devastate the world it stood on for half a thousand miles in every direction from where it stood. It could wound a planet; and from four hundred and twenty-six feet above Cal and Scoby, in the observation room,the single caretaker soldier aboard it could be looking down on them all. From the main screen he could be seeing the lesser ships below him, and the field, and Manaha, with all the mains trength of the Expedition laid out like a toy scale model below.And even on this lord of space and war, the moss at its base was already beginning to lay its tender, green relentless fingers.\n\nThe hooter sounded, announcing boarding orders.\n\n\"Hold hard, Cal,\" said Scoby, one fist clutching the handle of Limpari's harness. He put his hand out blindly, and Cal took it. In title last moment one of his blackouts had taken him and he could not see. They shook. \"Now, girl,\" he muttered to Linipari. And smoothly and powerfully, she led him away from Cal and onto the ship.\n\nCal went back to Contacts HQ and a work day that in the several months following stretched to better than ten hours as a routine matter. He had little time even to see Annie. He had come to depend on her heavily, but when she suggested that they might get married\u2014he had never mentioned it\u2014the violence of his reaction startled even him.\n\n\"No!\" he had shouted at her. \"Not now! Can't you see that? Not now!\"\n\nHe had turned and flung himself three angry strides away from her, from the hospital desk where she was sitting on duty, at the moment she had mentioned it. Down the hall, an ambulatory patient had turned, surprised, to stare. Ashamed suddenly, he came back to the desk, but muttering under his breath, still, \"Not now. Now's not the time, Annie. Can't you see that?\"\n\nShe did not press him.\n\nThe peace was signed. Wantaki was now an outlaw in Zone Eleven, with now nearly twenty thousand Paumons. Walk, recovered, was also back in Zone Eleven, harrying the Paumons leader from a series of strong posts encircling the base of the mountains. Harmon signed the order releasing all Paumons prisoners of war, and Cal stood at his office window and watched as the waves of prisoners celebrating their release literally tore the gates from their hinges and ripped half the compound to shreds along with it. For a day and a night, riot threatened in and around Manaha. Three mechanized battalions were ordered in to patrol the area. Subdued, the Paumons ex-prisoners melted away to their own home area. Five days later, Cal looked out at the tom and empty shells of the buildings in the compound as rain began to fall.\n\nThe initial drops of the Expedition had been timed to come at the earliest possible date after the winter season on this plateau.Now a new winter season\u2014a time of rain\u2014was upon the high,arid country about. Day in and day out, the gray curtains of the rain obscured the landscape as Cal went back and forth between Contacts HQ, Expeditions HQ, the Medical Center, and his own quarters.\n\nFor two months the rainy season continued. Meanwhile, elsewhere about the planet, the yeast of the returned Paumons fighting men was beginning to ferment. The Paumons civilian authorities made apparently honest attempts to comply with the plan for reorganization and re-education of their people. But the whole planet now was beginning to quake and gasp from unexpected fumaroles, like cooking oatmeal before it comes to an active boil. The Paumons people were tom, divided and violent. On the one hand there were outlaw resistance groups even in the large cities, haunted by human soldiery and their own police as well. On the other hand, in Zone Eleven, Walk commanded one whole fighting unit made up of Paumons enlistees and ex-soldiers. Ugly stories began to emerge from Zone Eleven, and from the activities of resistance groups elsewhere. Prisoners were not taken so often; and those who were taken by both sides were liable to turn up later as corpses in not-so-pretty condition.\n\nCal, trapped in a snarl of paperwork and tripped up on every hand by inefficiency or petty resentment on the part of Contacts Officers over whose heads Scoby had promoted him by putting him in Paumons authority, saw a crisis approaching. He messaged Scoby back on Earth, saying that the greater authority of the older man was badly needed with the Expedition. Scoby sent back word that he could not possibly come before six weeks.Talk to Harmon, he advised. Cal made an attempt to do so, but his appointments with the Commander of the Expedition had away of being canceled at the last moment. Harmon messaged that he would have his office set up time for a talk with Cal at the first opportunity. Time slipped by.\n\nThe six weeks came and went. Harmon remained incommunicative. Scoby had not come, or sent word he was coming. Cal,working alone in his office early one evening\u2014he understood better now why Scoby's desk had always been loaded with papers\u2014at endless reports and explanations of reports, heard the single snap of a fire rifle close under his window. And then two more snaps.\n\nThere was a commotion in his outer office. His door burst open, and a Paumons whom he suddenly recognized as Ola Tain half-fell inside. There was a babble of voices beyond in the outer office as Cal jumped up and helped the other into a chair. Ola Tain was burnt clear through the body twice. He could not live.The office door banged open again, and Cal, looking up, saw a hard-faced and shoulder-scorched man in the entrance whom he did not recognize\u2014and then with a sudden shock did recognize.He had looked a little like Walk, but he was Washun, the Contacts Cadet who had shared Cal's second tour of Basic at Fort Cota. The Contacts shoulder patch on his jacket now was stained and ancient.\n\n\"It's Walker Blye, in Zone Eleven,\" said Washun. \"He's planning a massacre.\"\n\n# Chapter Fourteen\n\nThe two-man atmosphere ship fled westward at forty thousand feet of altitude. It caught up with the retreating sunset, passed it and came down half a world away in late afternoon at Garrison Number Three of Zone Eleven\u2014Walk's Headquarters.\n\nThe garrison was drained empty of men. The senior man was a non-com, a Wing Section. It was Tack. He and Cal looked at each other like close relatives that have been raised at far distances from each other, and to different customs, as Cal questioned him.\n\n\"He left six hours since,\" said Tack. \"He took twenty-eight hundred men and all equipment back in the hills. To that place they call the Valley of die Three Towns\u2014how did you know?\"\n\n\"A Paumons named Ola Tain,\" said Cal. \"Wantaki knows about Walk's plan. Was he crazy? He could be court-martialed for this.\"\n\n\"He _is_ crazy,\" said Tack, lowering his voice, and glancing at Washun, who had made the trip with Cal, and now stood at the long end of the Headquarters Office, out of earshot. \"He doesn't care\u2014about anything. And he's always drunk, now. But you say Wantaki's laying for him?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Cal. His body felt heavy and tired and old. \"Tain came to your own Contacts man in this area\"\u2014he gestured at Washun\u2014\"to try and stop the whole thing. But your tame Paumons caught him and shot him up. Washun rescued him and got him to me. But he couldn't even talk by that time.\" Cal felt bitter inside. \"He was shot again outside my office by some fool.\"\n\n\"Can you get to Walk in time?\"\n\n\"Give me a combat-ground car. I'll try.\"\n\nThe sunset caught up with Cal once more as he shoved the little round car, alone, along an unpaved roadway back into the jagged, tree-covered young mountains of Zone Eleven. In the darkness, the trees looked even more like Earthly trees, the dirt road like some back-country trail of home. The combat car,fleeing a few inches above the pounded dirt of the road on the soft, shushing noise of its countless tiny jets, seemed to be pouring itself into the pit of the quickly falling darkness. And there came on Cal suddenly one of those seconds of strange emotion he had been used to calling \"inside-out\" moments when he was a boy\u2014while his mother was still alive. For the first time he recognized that he had never had them after her death. But now one was with him once again and he saw himself with a strange,still, twilight clarity, as if from a little distance, a different viewpoint just outside his body. And what he saw had a sadly comical lack of sense and yet a sharp understanding.\n\nWhat, he wondered suddenly, was he doing here in this heavy, adult body? In a complicated vehicle, on this strange world, upon this alien soil? To what dangerous explosion of things were the steel bars of events channeling him? He was bound to save some lives, to avert some kind of disaster. But was that really the purpose, was that really the meaning? For a moment he found himself storm-tossed on a sea of endless mystery. And then the road curved suddenly and his own automatic hands,jerking the combat car into the turn, snapped things sharply into pitilessly clear and unambiguous focus in his mind.\n\nIt was not any faceless duty that he was facing here, but the sharp spectre of his own guilt. It was not the Paumons villages,but Walk he was rushing to save, so that he might still save himself.\n\nFor it was Walk, his dark twin; Walk, his other self, for whom he was responsible and had always been responsible. Annie had seen it, when she had burst out in the hospital back on Earth after the Lehaunan expedition, that Walk was the weak one.Weak he was not, in the ordinary sense. But when they had gravitated together instinctively as boys\u2014two motherless half-orphans\u2014Walk had been the One with greater need and less initiative of imagination. Cal had taken the Services' side in revenge against his father for his mother's death. But Walk,following Cal's greater imagination into the glory-land of a military life which Cal had fashioned as a club against Cal's father, had had ho buried knowledge of its unreality outside Cal's mind. Walk had believed. He had followed the sound of the trumpet\u2014expecting to-find-the-home and the kin he lacked behind it. And Cal, who had known his lie for what it was from the beginning,deep inside, had escaped his own mirage\u2014but left Walk behind with it, stumbling in the desert.\n\nWalk had pursued the mirage of love, and, not finding it, had grown more savage and murderous. He would _force_ the mirage to be real. He would _force_ his cause to be just, his fighting noble, his life, when it came to an end, to be a worthy price paid on a purchase of value. And all the time he was doing this,the undeniable realization grew stronger and stronger in him that his god was an empty shell, his purposes false, and he faced no final dedication, but the closed-in grave of a brain-mad wolf.\n\nBut the sin in this, it came home to Cal now, was on Cal's head. For whatever small credit, he might try to count work he had done with the Paumons prisoners of war. For whatever Paumons soldiers he had saved on that march to Manaha, or eased in better conditions of prison camps, or protected during questioning by Combat officers; for whatever he might count to his benefit from this\u2014he must also count his share in the Paumons whom Walk had harried to an exhausted end, to those prisoners who had died from indifference or cruelty while in his hands, to those he had slain outright, or killed for no necessary reason. If Walk massacred tonight, Cal massacred also.\n\nCal's hands were wet with sweat on the wheel. Night had completely fallen. As recklessly as Walk himself might have done, Cal flung the combat car into the turns and twists of the unknown and narrow road, toward its destination.\n\nThrough the darkness, with only the narrow beam of his head-lights, he fled. Finally, he nosed upward over a little rise and saw abruptly down into a valley where lights glowed and clustered about three main areas. He swooped down upon them. But as he entered the first of these, he found the lights came from the broken windows of damaged homes. There was rubble in the streets, but no movement of living beings. But when he stopped in the little open space at the center of the town area where he was, dark bodies moved in around his car.\n\nHe got out. They were all Paumons laden with weapons.\n\n\"Come,\" said one of them. Cal followed him. They walked across the open space, and Cal's guide stood aside at a door to a low building. Cal pushed open the door and stepped inside.He found himself in a low-roofed room with a dirt floor. There was a wooden table, two cots, some plain chairs, and several heavy, square wooden timbers holding up the roof. Wantaki stood beside the table, and between two of the pillars, slumped with the cords about his wrists only holding him upright, his shirt torn off, was Walk.\n\n\"Ola Tain?\" said Wantaki. Cal, who had started to go to Walk, stopped. He had thought Walk unconscious when he first stepped in, but he saw now that although Walk's head slumped between his bare shoulders, his eyes were open and watching.His body showed a bad wound low on the left side.\n\n\"Dead,\" said Cal. \"He died reaching me.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Wantaki. He did not say anything more for a moment. \"I would have saved him, but . . . that is the way it goes for people like him.\"\n\nCal came up to the table. Wantaki looked squarely at him.\n\n\"I have no good word to say for you,\" said Wantaki. \"People like you are\u2014\" the Paumons expression he used was untranslatable. \"With him\"\u2014he used the verb form that made it clear he was referring to Walk, the only other person in the room\u2014\"it is different. He is as good as a man any day. If you had been all like that, you might even have eaten us up the way you have tried to. But you were not. I would not even have him tied up like that, but many of my soldiers hate him, and something had to be done.\"\n\nHe waited. Cal waited also, saying nothing.\n\n\"I am a military man,\" said Wantaki. \"This is the beginning.For a while your weapons gave you an advantage; but we have stolen some of them and made more. Today was the beginning.We are going to rise all over the world. We will wipe out your Expedition. And then we will go hunting you in your own home planet.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Cal. \"Any uprising will fail. The Expedition has weapons it has not used.\"\n\n\"I do not believe you,\" said Wantaki. He stared at Cal for along moment. \"Besides it does not matter. Weapons can eventually be duplicated. If we fail this time, we will not fail next. The Paumons spirit will never endure to be a tame beast. And right is on our side.\"\n\n\"That can only end in a stalemate,\" said Cal.\n\n\"How can it end in a stalemate when we are superior to you?\"said Wantaki. \"Given equal weapons, our spirit will conquer\u2014I do not know why I talk to you.\"\n\n\"I do,\" said Cal. \"You're thinking of all the Paumons that must die before you win your victory.\" He stepped to the edge of the table. \"If the humans would negotiate with you, face to face, as equals, and not as conquerors talking to conquered,would you hold off your rising?\"\n\nWantaki said nothing.\n\n\"If you could walk into Expedition Headquarters with sufficient force to feel safe, and there talk, would you?\"\n\n\"You cannot do this,\" said Wantaki.\n\n\"I can. Give me three days.\" Cal looked over at Walk. \"And him.\"\n\n\"He is dying.\"\n\n\"Still.\"\n\nWantaki stepped away from the table and then stepped back again.\n\n\"I have a responsibility to save lives, as you say,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't believe you... but it's a bargain.\" He went to the door. \"When you are ready to go, you may go.\"\n\nHe went out. Cal turned quickly to Walk and untied the rope on one side. Walk came heavily down into his arms. Holding him, Cal got the other rope untied and laid Walk on one of the cots. Walk's eyelids fluttered and he looked up into Cal's face.\n\nWalk's lips moved. He did not seem to be saying anything.Then Cal realized he was whispering. Cal bent his ear down close to the lips.\n\n\"Cal,\" Walk was whispering. \". . . lucky . . . lucky, go out. . . in . . . time.\"\n\n\"You're going to be all right,\" said Cal. Then he realized from the shadow of a look on Walk's face that he had misunderstood. It was not the present moment Walk was talking about.\n\n\". . . lies,\" whispered Walk. \". . . trumpets . . . drums. Liars .. .\"\n\n\"Lie quiet,\" said Cal. \"Rest a bit. Then I'm taking you east to the Hospital.\"\n\nWalk sighed and closed his eyes and lay still. Cal sat quietly beside him for perhaps half an hour. Then he realized Walk had opened his eyes and was looking at him again.\n\n\"What?\" said Cal. He bent down to hear. Walk's faint breath tickled his ear.\n\n\"Annie...\" whispered Walk, \". . . hates me?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Cal. \"Hell, no! Annie likes you. We both like you a lot. So does Tack. So does everybody.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Walk whispered. \". . . know . . . somebody. You. . . never . . . ?\"\n\n\"Hell, no!\"\n\n\"Promised me . . . good . . . feeling. Noble . . . Liars. Feel lousy . . . dying. Nothing but . . . damnservice. . .\"\n\n\"Hey, boy,\" said Cal. His throat hurt. He reached out and took hold of Walk's hand. \"You got nothing but family. Annie and me and everybody. What're you talking about?\"\n\n\"Lousy . . . Knew . . . liars, long . . . time ago, Didn't get out. . . time.\" He closed his eyes once more and lay still.\n\nCal continued to sit. About an hour later, Walk spoke once more.\n\n\"Don't . . . mind . . . being killed,\" Cal was barely able to make out with his ear right at the pale lips. \"Just . . . don't want. . . to die. . .\"\n\nA little while later, when Cal lifted an eyelid, the eye beneath stared straight and unmoving and fixed.\n\n# Chapter Fifteen\n\nCal brought the body of Walk into Hospital Receiving, back at the Hospital at Expedition Headquarters.\n\n\"But the man's dead, Colonel!\" said the First Lieutenant in Receiving. \"What do you want us to do with him?\"\n\n\"Give him a Services funeral,\" said Cal. He went in search of Annie.\n\n\"I'm going to see Harmon,\" he said. \"I want you to get off duty here, now, and do something for me. Can you do that?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"What is it, Cal?\"\n\n\"Get a ground car and follow me over. Wait until I go in to Headquarters, then park it around by the side entrance to the Files Office. Leave the motor running and clear out. Can you do that?\"\n\n\"Yes, Cal, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not telling you any more,\" said Cal. \"If you have to ask questions, don't do it.\"\n\n\"All right,\" she said. \"Give me a minute to get somebody up here to take over the ward desk.\"\n\nCal drove a ground car of his own to Expedition HQ. In the scope he could see Annie's car following. He pulled into the official parking lot, and went in.\n\n\"Colonel?\" said the Wing Section behind the small wooden fence that separated staff from visitors in the outer office.\n\n\"Contacts Service,\" said Cal. \"Colonel Truant. I'm to talk to General Harmon.\" And without waiting for an answer, he pushed open the small gate in the fence and strode past.\n\n\"But Colonel, just a minute. _Colonel!\"_\n\nHe heard steps behind him but kept going. He passed through another door into another, smaller office, where a Captain looked up, startled, from a wide desk.\n\n\"Colonel Truant!\" said Cal. He kept traveling. The farther door in this second office was closed. He opened it and stepped through.\n\nHarmon and Colonel Alt were standing together by a desk, within.\n\nThey both turned as the Captain from the outer office and other staff members reached the door behind Cal.\n\n\"General,\" said Cal. \"I think it's time for your talk with the Contacts Service.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir,\" said the Captain, from behind Cal's shoulder. \"He just walked by\u2014\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" said Harmon. \"Close the door.\" Cal heard them leave and the door close behind him.\n\n\"Alone,\" said Cal.\n\nColonel Haga Alt came around the desk, walking on his toes like a boxer.\n\n\"Truant,\" he said, \"I've waited one hell of a long time for\u2014\"\n\n\"Hag,\" said Harmon. Alt stopped. He looked back at Harmon. \"It's all right, Hag,\" said Harmon gently. \"You can leave us.\"\n\nAlt's nostrils spread. \"All right, sir,\" he said. He walked on, looking squarely into Cal's face, passed him, and Cal heard the door shut a second time behind him.\n\n\"All right, Truant,\" said Harmon, in the same gentle voice. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"The Paumons are rising.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Harmon.\n\n\"I know you know,\" said Cal. \"I know you planned it this way. There was a time when I thought you just didn't know any better. But I found out different.\"\n\nHarmon walked around the desk himself and stood in front of it. They were only a few feet apart. Harmon put his hands together behind him, like a lecturer.\n\n\"Back in Denver,\" he said, \"I sent you to General Scoby because I was under the impression that whatever had happened to you with the Lehaunan, you were a soldier.\"\n\n\"I was,\" said Cal. \"I was one of the prettiest.\"\n\n\"But you aren't any more?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Cal. \"I'm a soldier. I'm a hell of a soldier. But maybe you wouldn't recognize the kind I am.\"\n\n\"No,\" Harmon said. \"You're wrong. I would recognize what kind you are. In fact, I do. That's why I'm talking to you, instead of having you thrown out.\" He sat down on the edge of the desk. \"You're the best kind, Cal. That's why I sent you over to Scoby in the first place. Because you're the kind that has to fight out of a sense of conviction. Men like that are too valuable to lose.\"\n\n\"Only, I am wrong.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Harmon. \"You got in among people like General Scoby who talk about fine things like peace and understanding and no more war. It impressed you. I think you may have forgotten that those sort of things don't come about naturally. They have to be imposed by a strong hand from the outside.\" He looked at Cal, and his voice was almost pleading. \"I want you to understand. Damn it, you're the sort of man who _ought_ to understand.\"\n\n\"I should, should I?\" said Cal.\n\n\"Yes. Because you've seen both sides of it. You're not like these half-baked glory-preachers that think we're going to have Heaven next Tuesday. I tell you, Cal, I've got more use for a Prog like Wantaki, than I have for these Societics-Contacts choirboys.\"\n\n\"It's mutual, no doubt,\" said Cal. \"You're both generals.\" Harmon frowned at him.\n\n\"Something in particular seems to be eating on you,\" he said.\n\n\"Major Blye's dead\u2014you know, Zone Eleven. I brought his body back with me.\"\n\n\"I didn't know. That's too bad,\" said Harmon. \"There's a man who was a soldier clear through. I'll bet he died like one.\"\n\n\"He sure did,\" said Cal.\n\n\"I want to hear how it happened. But the point right now is something different: You, not Major Blye, good man though he was. I'm fighting for your soul, Cal. Do you believe I'm an honest man? Tell me.\" '\n\n\"Yes,\" said Cal. \"I believe you're honest. I believe you believe every word you say.\"\n\n\"Then believe me when I say nobody wants peace more than I. That I agree with Scoby one hundred per cent about these Paumons being the nearest thing to human we've ever run across, with brains and soul and pain-reactions to match. He's told you that? I see he has. But from that point he gets idealistic, and I get practical. He thinks this qualifies them to be great friends. I know it qualifies them to be great enemies. It's one thing to make a pet out of a dog; but don't try to make one out of a wolf.\"\n\n\"Or a cheetah?\" said Cal.\n\nHarmon stopped talking. The whites of his eyes showed a little.\n\n\"I'm talking seriously,\" he said.\n\n\"So am I,\" said Cal. \"Don't you know why that cheetah does things for Scoby?\"\n\n\"I don't know and I don't care,\" said Harmon. \"I'm concerned with the future of two races, not with a brainless animal.I'm concerned with making you see that just because these Paumons are what they are\u2014because they're so much like us\u2014that we can't ever trust them. We've started something and we can't stop now. Now we've got to break them; teach them with a bloodbath that they'll remember to the ultimate generations, that the human is master. We can't stop now.\"\n\n\"Why'd we start in the first place?\"\n\n\"History,\" said Harmon, \"forced our hand. We're an expanding people.\" He stood up. \"Cal,\" he said, \"can't you see that what I've arranged for isn't only the right thing, it's the most humanitarian thing? We treated the Paumons humanly in the original conquest. Because of that they took the enough rope we gave them and now they're going to hang themselves. They, themselves, are insisting on being taught a lesson. And, like a good surgeon, I save lives by cutting now instead of later, when a more extensive operation would be necessary. I save human lives. You might say, I even save Paumons lives. Because, if they grew to a real threat to us, we might have to exterminate them completely.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Cal.\n\n\"You understand, then,\" said Harmon. \"Believe me, Cal. You were one of the ones I had hoped could understand.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Cal. \"Put me down with Scoby. No, put me down a notch below Scoby, because I'm still ready to fight and kill if have to, in spite of this shoulder patch. I just don't have to pretend there's anything right or noble about it.\"\n\nHarmon sighed. He shook his head slowly.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Cal,\" he said.\n\n\"So am I,\" said Cal. \"I just finished talking to Wantaki. I told him he could come in here with sufficient force to protect himself. Then he could talk over this Paumons situation\u2014not as Conquered talking to conquerer, but as a couple of equals meeting face to face, with the object of avoiding any more fighting. I gave him my promise.\"\n\n\"That was foolish,\" said Harmon. \"It was even a little ridiculous.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Cal. \"Because as Contacts Service Head on this planet, I'm interdicting any military action by the Expedition during the time of the talk.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Harmon. He stood for a moment, then turned to the desk behind him and pressed a button. Holding it down,he spoke to the desk. \"Will you send in a couple of Military Police?\" he said. He let up the button and turned back to Cal. \"As I say,\" he said. \"I'm sorry. I would rather have made an ally of you than arrested you.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Cal.\n\nHe hit Harmon suddenly in the stomach, and, as the other man fell toward him, hit him again behind the ear with the side of his hand. Harmon fell to the floor and lay there quietly. Cal went out through the back door of the office, down a flight of stairs and into another office banked with the metal cases of microfiles.\n\n\"Sit still, sit still,\" he said to the startled workers there. \"Just taking the short way to my car.\"\n\nHe went out a further door onto the street. The car Annie had been driving was parked across from him. He sprinted for it. Ashe dived inside behind the control stick, he heard someone shout from the door he had just come through.\n\nHe floored the throttle and the car jumped away from the Headquarters Building. He shot down the street, out onto the road to the Expedition Landing field and pulled up at the base of the towering flagship. Thirty feet up the service ramp, the rear port was open to the ventilation of the warming day. He was through the hatch and throwing over the hand control to close and lock the port when he heard somebody breathing hard behind him.\n\nHe turned. It was Annie.\n\n\"You crazy fool!\" he said.\n\nThe port slammed shut and locked with a clang. A second later the inner door closed also.\n\n# Chapter Sixteen\n\n\"You've got to get out of here,\" said Cal. \"You don't know what you're in to.\"\n\n\"I won't,\" said Annie. \"I know very well. And I won't. You can't put me out bodily, either, without leaving the controls here. And you can't risk that.\"\n\n\"I'll manage it.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Annie. She was quite pale. \"I won't let you. I can fight that hard.\"\n\nThey were up in the observation room, where the standby controls of the ship were. The duty caretaker was locked in the projection room behind the wall chart. Cal had the standby power on. It did not take an engineer to do that much; and the housekeeping energy flow it gave him was all he needed. Outside,above the entry ports at three levels, the red lights were glowing to warn anyone back beyond a hundred-yard circle. From the outside screen Cal could see the field below, and the other ships like models, the little buildings of the field, and Headquarters, the hospital, and beyond those buildings the limits of Manaha. Beyond this he could see the green and open hills, with here and there the darker green of trees.\n\nThe ground phone buzzed. Cal answered, and the screen lit up with the face of Colonel Alt.\n\n\"Truant,\" he said. \"Come out of that ship before I send in MP's to haul you out.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't try that if I were you,\" said Cal. \"I'm prepared to blow this ship and half the plateau if I have to.\"\n\nAlt hesitated. He looked aside for a moment, then back into the screen.\n\n\"You'd do better to cooperate,\" he said. \"I'd be justified in having you shot on sight. You killed General Harmon when you hit him.\"\n\n\"Don't lie to me, Colonel,\" said Cal. \"I know when I kill a man. Tell the General I want to talk to him as soon as he's up to it.\"\n\nHe cut the connection. He sat down in the operator's chair by the little desk below the screens. His head swam; his body felt several gravities heavy. He put his head down for a second on his arms and immediately felt Annie shaking him.\n\n\"Lie down,\" she was saying. \"There's an off-watch cot in the Communications Room. Here...\" She was tugging him to his feet. \"You've got to rest. When did you sleep last?\"\n\n\"No\u2014\" he said. And all the time, he felt his will-less, stupid body being steered by Annie toward the cot. \"Harmon'll call back. . .\"\n\n\"Let him call. I'll answer.\"\n\n\"No. You get out...\" The words were thick on his tongue. The edge of the cot struck under his knees, and he fell into it. The world made a sort of half-turn around him, as if he were very drunk. And then it suddenly winked out.\n\nHis head hurt. It was the amber light from the barber poles, street lights of the Lehaunan town, that was dazzling his eyes and giving him a headache. And he had never been so tired. He wandered through the town with his fire rifle in his hands, letting his feet take him among the dome-shaped buildings. Now and then he shot perfunctorily at what might be Lehaunans. He was so tired that he could not think exactly what he was doing there.Something had not worked out, and he had decided to do something else. But just at the moment he could not remember what that was. He was tired and looking for a place to sit down.\n\nHe came at last to a little open space between the buildings,and there was one of the small protuberances like a half-barrel sticking up out of the pavement. He sat down on it and rested his fire rifle across his knees.\n\nThere was a building a little to his right and another a little farther off, up ahead of him and to his left. Almost directly ahead, about thirty yards away, was a third building. A barber pole by the building to his right spread its crackling light impartially over the scene.\n\nHe sat, not thinking of anything, and after a little while, a Lehaunan ran across the open space before him, saw him, hesitated, and then ran on. A little later, he saw another one run between two houses farther off that could be seen dimly beyond the building to his left.\n\nHe did not move. He felt a sort of numb oneness with his surroundings, as if he had grown to be part of the object he was sitting on. The thought that was in his head, like a title on a movie screen frozen in position, was that if he rested for a little while he would remember what he was to do next. He sat still.\n\nSome little time later, a family of three came out of the building directly before him, out of its triangular-shaped entrance.They were evidently an adult male, a female adult a little smaller, and a small young one. He sat so still that they were only about a dozen feet from him when they saw him, and stopped short. They were carrying some small packages.\n\nHe and they remained motionless, staring at each other.\n\n_It's quite all right,_ he said inside his head, in normal human speech, _go ahead. I won't bother you._ It was too much effort to say the words aloud. So, having said them mentally, he merely continued to sit there.\n\nThe female adult made a small noise and pushed slightly at the young one. The youngster hesitated; she pushed again. Reluctantly the young one ran off, past Cal and out of sight. The two adults stayed facing him.\n\n_That's all right, he said in his head. You go, too. You're obviously civilians. Besides, I have taken your town. I've got no need to shoot you._\n\nThey did not move for a moment. Then, as if they had heard his thoughts, they began to back cautiously away from him.\n\n_There, you see?_ he thought. _You're quite safe. I'm not going to do anything._ They were like ants, he thought; afraid of being stepped on. He watched them back away. They were quite handsome in their black fur. He must look like a monster to them.An incomprehensible monster that killed or did not kill for no sane reason.\n\nStill holding their packages, they were backing away from him, back toward the house from which they had come. Sudden pity flooded him.\n\n_Go in peace_ , he thought. _Go in safety._\n\nThey were almost halfway across the open space between him and the house, now. The male turned and, turning the female,urged her in front of him. They broke suddenly into a run fort heir own doorway.\n\nThey're getting away, thought Cal suddenly.\n\nHe raised his rifle and shot the male, who fell immediately. The female dropped her packages and put on speed. His second shot dropped her just inside the doorway. He could see her lying there.\n\nThe packages lay scattered about in the open. He wondered,idly, what sort of valuables might be in them. They should be saved, he thought, so the young one could claim them at some future date...\n\nAnnie was shaking him. It was a terribly hard thing to wake up. He struggled into a sitting position on the side of the cot,but he had come to with only half his mind. The other half was still back in the circumstances he had been reliving in the dream.\n\n\". . . General Harmon,\" Annie was saying. \"He wants to talk to you. I didn't want to wake you, but you've been sleeping there almost nine hours.\"\n\n\"Nine hours!\" He staggered to his feet and lurched into the observation room. Annie made to help him to the ground phone,but he shook his head. \"He can wait.\" He laid sleep-numbed hands on the controls of the outside screen. It was late afternoon now and on the far hills, the light of Bellatrix had turned the covering moss to chartreuse color, and the clumped trees to a deeper green. He ran the magnification up to the limits of the scale and saw, as from a dozen or so yards away, armed Paumons soldiers standing under the trees.\n\n\"Wantaki,\" he said. \"He made it.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Annie.\n\nHe did not answer, swinging across the room to the ground phone. He punched the receive button, and the image of General Harmon sprang to life on the screen. He was standing half-turned away from Cal. The call buzzer at the other end must have sounded then, for Harmon turned back and approached the screen. He looked as calm and unharmed as ever.\n\n\"Colonel Truant,\" he said quietly, \"I'm ordering you to come out of that ship.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Cal. His legs were still weak from sleep. He sat down in front of the screen. \"I'm staying here until you commit yourself to a meeting with Wantaki, by letting him into the Headquarters area with enough men to match your Headquarters forces.\"\n\n\"I'm not the kind of man you can blackmail, Colonel,\" said Harmon.\n\n\"I'm not blackmailing you,\" said Cal. \"I'm holding you up with a loaded gun at your head. If I blow this ship, you, Wantaki and everything goes. If it goes, there's nothing left of the Expedition on this world but a lot of small scattered garrisons.\n\nThey wouldn't last twenty-four hours with the real power of the outfit destroyed here.\"\n\n\"Rather a strange way to go about saving lives, isn't it?\" said Harmon gently, \"Have you counted the people that'll die\u2014the Paumons, as well\u2014if you blow up that ship and its armaments?\"\n\n\"You don't understand me,\" said Cal. \"I told you I wasn't up on General Scoby's level. I know what I am, if I blow this ship. But if I have to blow it the Paumons'll come out of it better than if I hadn't. The only way I can get you to meet with them properly is to threaten to blow it. And I can't threaten it without meaning it. And I mean it, General!\" Cal looked into the imaged eyes of Harmon, but what he saw was a small black-furred figure tugging and murmuring at a larger, black-furred figure fallen still in a triangular doorway. \"You better believe I mean it.\"\n\n\"I'll give you thirty minutes,\" said Harmon. \"If you haven't started to come out thirty minutes from now, I'll order the other ships on the field here to open fire on you.\"\n\n\"You know,\" said Cal, \"you can't destroy this ship before I can blow it. And you're just as liable to blow it yourself trying to destroy it. I'll give you until sunset, about two hours. If Wantaki and his men aren't entering the Headquarters area by sunset, I'll blow the ship.\"\n\n\"Thirty minutes,\" said Harmon.\n\n\"Good-by,\" said Cal. He cut the connection. He stood up, turned, and saw Annie standing a little across the room from him.\n\n\"Annie,\" he said, \"there's an escape pod in the nose of this ship that'll kick itself fifty miles up and six hundred miles out. You get in it and get out of here.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Annie. \"I told you I wouldn't.\"\n\n\"I am too dead to argue with you. Don't you understand? Two hours from now, I'm going to press the arming connection and destroy every living thing for five hundred miles. Can't you get that through your head? I'm going to have to do it!\"\n\n\"The General will give in.\"\n\n\"No,\"he won't,\" said Cal. He looked grimly at the blank screen of the ground phone. \"He can't. Not while there's a chance I might not press the button. And by the time he knows for sure there's no chance, it'll be too late.\"\n\n\"I'll wait till the last minute,\" said Annie. \"But I won't go a second before.\"\n\nCal felt suddenly weak all over. He realized suddenly he had been standing with every muscle tensed to the limit, as if he had crossed his fingers with all the strength in his body, against the possibility that she would refuse to go and he could not get her out before the end.\n\nHe let out his breath suddenly and sat down in the chair. \"Good,\" he said. \"Good.\"\n\nShe came quickly over to him.\n\n\"Cal,\" she said, \"are you all right?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he said. \"Fine.\" She had her arms around him. He grinned a little shakily and reached up and patted one of the arms that held him. \"It's just that I love you.\" The words came out quite easily. He had never been able to say them before. He said them again. \"I love you.\"\n\nShe held on to him. They did not say much. After a little while she excused herself and was gone for a few moments. And then she came back and they sat together, watching the sun moving toward the horizon.\n\nWhen it touched the tops of the hills, he felt a strange, cold,feeling thrill suddenly all the way through him. He turned to her.\n\n\"It's time,\" he said.\n\nShe did not move.\n\n\"You've got to go now,\" he said.\n\n\"I lied to you,\" she said. \"I never planned to go. When I went out just now, I went up to the pod and smashed the control board. I couldn't leave if I wanted to.\"\n\nHe could only stare at her.\n\n\"Don't you see?\" she said, almost composedly, \"I _want_ to stay with you.\"\n\nHe said, through stiff lips:\n\n\"I can't blow it with you here.\"\n\n\"Yes, you can,\" she said. Her voice was very quiet, very certain. It was as if she had moved into a shell of peace from which nothing would be able to take her, neither death nor sorrow. \"I know you can.\"\n\nHe got heavily to his feet, and looked once more to the hills.The light of the sun was now resting on them and it made the whole horizon seem ablaze with horizontal rays shooting all at him. He walked slowly over to the arming button. He looked at her again and put his finger on it.\n\n\"All right, Cal,\" said a voice from somewhere above his head. \"You win. \"\n\nIt was the voice of Harmon. Cal stared foolishly around, fora second he half-expected the General to walk into the observation room.\n\n\"We've been listening to you,\" said Harmon. \"We fired a contact mike into the skin of your ship eight hours ago. If you'd left that room for five minutes, we'd have had you. Look out to the hills, there. I've had Alt standing by to pass the word to Wantaki. You can see the Progs already starting to come in.\"\n\nCal looked. Against the glare of the sun he had to shield his eyes. But when he did he made out dark masses moving in, close to Manaha. They were already in below the range of Headquarters' heavy ground weapons.\n\n\"All right,\" said Cal. \"I'll come down.\"\n\nHe waited until the approaching Paumons forces were actually into the city. Then he went down in the ship, with Annie beside him. When they stepped out onto the ramp and started to the ground, he saw that there was quite a gathering waiting for them.There were Military Police, both male and female, Colonel Harry Adom of the Military Police, and Cal's own Contacts Service aide, Major Kai. Major Kai was fifteen years older than Cal and looked like a bank clerk. He represented the old guard over whose head Scoby had put Cal in charge. Kai was looking embarrassed and unhappy, but Cal was glad to see him there.\n\n\"Major,\" he said. \"You take over Contacts until orders can be got out from General Scoby. He'll want\u2014\"\n\n\"He's here, himself,\" interrupted Kai. \"Or rather, he's coming in right now.\" He pointed off to their left and upward. Cal,glancing in that direction, saw the sudden flash of a pinpoint of reflecting surface, high enough up to still catch the sunlight.\n\n\"When did he send word he was coming?\" said Cal.\n\n\"Yesterday,\" said Kai unhappily. \"The message came in. We couldn't get hold of you.\"\n\nCal had reached the bottom of the ramp now. The MP's waiting there closed about him. He saw the female MP's moving in on Annie.\n\n\"Wait a minute!\" he called. \"She didn't have anything to do with this. I\u2014\"\n\nThey paid no attention to him. The MP's were searching him for weapons.\n\n\"All clean,\" said one.\n\nAcross the field, the courier ship bearing Scoby was now down and landed. There was quite a crowd around it, and as the hatch opened and the small figure preceded by a small cheetah came out, another small figure walking like Harmon stepped forward to shake hands.\n\n\"Cal,\" said Annie's voice.\n\nHe looked over at her, as the cold metal of handcuffs closed around his wrists. They were doing the same thing to her. Fora second, they could look at each other. Then the MP's closed around Cal once more and he and she were led off in different directions.\n\n# Chapter Seventeen\n\nThe Military Police took Cal to the Stockade and locked him in a cell by himself in an unoccupied section of the building. It was so quiet and isolated that it was almost as if he were in a hospital instead of a prison. At the end of four days they took him in a closed car to the field and put him on a ship for Earth. It was impossible to tell what had happened since he had been arrested. Fighting might even have been going on without his being able to know it. And they made it a point to tell him nothing. Scoby did not come to see him.\n\nBack at Earth, he was taken to the Fort Shuttleworth Military Prison outside Denver and housed in separate quarters that were a little better than a cell\u2014a room and a half. It was like a small,compact apartment, and through the bars of a fairly wide window Cal could see a section of perfectly kept green lawn, some tall, pyramidal pine trees, and beyond that the white top of a mountain. He thought that it was Longs Peak, but he could not be sure and a small, irrational stubbornness kept him from asking anyone, so he never did establish its identity from that window for certain.\n\nShortly after he was placed there, a Captain from the Adjutant General's department came to see him with a folder of papers. The Captain identified himself as Cal's legal representative. He explained something to the effect that they were pondering charges against Cal. It would probably be treason and lesser crimes, but nothing was established yet. For some reason it was a matter of jurisdiction. The Captain took himself and his work very seriously, and most of what he had to say Cal found fairly unintelligible. The Captain wanted an account in Cal's own words of what had led up to Cal's arrest, and took it down in recorder and on paper. He and Cal were pretty well up against it as far as the book went, he told Cal. They would find it hard to deny the statements of prosecution. Their best bet, considering the Lehaunan background, might be to make their claim one of temporary insanity.\n\nCal was uncooperative on that point. He would not claim temporary insanity. Otherwise, he paid only slight attention to the Captain's flow of words. He was more interested in pumping the other man for news. Annie, said the Captain, was under arrest elsewhere. He did not know exactly where. He, himself, was not representing her. About the Paumons, he had very little information. The human and native Alien forces there were certainly at peace at the present moment, though the situation was touchy, as always. Yes, he believed the Paumons authorities had had some sort of official talk with the human Command, but there had been no more than a mention of it in the news services and he had heard nothing from official sources.\n\n\"It's a long ways off, there around Bellatrix, you know,\" he said to Cal.\n\nAfter the Captain's visit, they began to allow Cal the news services and he got a sudden supply of backed-up mail. There was nothing from Scoby and only a handful of letters from Annie\u2014and these had been censored almost into unintelligibility. Cal wrote her back, but with no great hopes that his letters would not be treated the same way.\n\nIt was July on Earth. There were seldom clouds on the mountain peak Cal could see from his window. He read a good deal and thought and walked around his locked quarters. The Captain came occasionally with papers for him to fill out or sign. July went into August and August drifted into September. He felt the leaking away of the valuable days of his life. He had found again the serenity that had come to him in the later days of Contacts School, and he did not worry too wholeheartedly over what would eventually happen to him. It was a curious thing that while the death penalty was not now imposed by a civilian court, the Armed Services had retained it for certain crimes. For himself,his conscience was clear and it was no worse an end than Walk's had been. But he worried about what would be done to Annie.\n\nThen, the third week in September, his Captain was able to tell him that Annie had been released without charges. He felt a great relief and even hoped that she might manage to visit him after that. But she did not come, and even her letters stopped coming. He told himself that this was good, that she was well out of it.\n\nHe was able to face the fact that he loved her now, and understand why he had been unable to tell her so before. He had been shackled by the old fear of a reenactment of his mother's death, with Annie in his mother's role, and he in his father's.Just so, he had been able to face the fact that he had always wanted to be the sort of man his father was, but had gone against him because he had blamed his father for his mother's death.Looking at his father through the stripped eyes of a child, he had taken his father's refusal to be vindictive against the Armed Services and the officer indirectly responsible for his wife's death,as a sign his father did not really _care._ Now that his father was dead, it came to Cal that his father must have cared very much.\n\nNot only cared, but loved!\u2014and been right about many things. He had been right about the uncertainty of that thin line that marks off the soldier from the murderer, that thin line that is also the edge of the precipice over which the spirit of a man falls to its final destruction. Cal could face this, too, now, as he could face the fact that with the Lehaunan in that village he himself had crossed the line and fallen. A man, he told himself now, can kill and go on living. But if he murders, he erects a barrier between himself and life; a barrier behind which he dies alone.\n\nAnd a man begins, thought Cal, to murder when he begins to tell himself that it is all right to kill; that there are practical or moral justifications for it. Because there are none. Sometimes it happens and things afterwards are better than they were before.But it is never good, it is always bad. There was always a better way if someone had had the wit to find it.\n\nI suppose, thought Cal, leaning against his window and looking out through the bars at the grass and the pines swayed by the wind that seemed to be always blowing, and the far-off mountain peak with a small white cloud near it\u2014I suppose it should be pushed right to the point of holding insects and microbes sacred, to hold water. But that's a trap, too. To say, if I can't be perfect there's no point in my being good at all. I didn't have any qualms back there on the Paumons about blowing up Harmon\u2014no, of course I did. But the point is: how much more readily I would have put my own head on the block to pull Walkout. And Harmon by his own standards is an upright and honorable man, while Walk was something to frighten Paumons babies with and better off dead.\n\nNo, Cal corrected himself again, I'm wrong about that. Nobody is better off dead, not in that sense. No. There are always miracles. There is always hope. If you deny miracles and hope, you're playing God\u2014and that's the insects and microbes bit allover again. If I can't shoot par, I won't pick up a golf club. Wrong. You stick by what you believe, and go on doing what you can in your own clumsy, imperfect way, trying to hack out Heaven by next Tuesday, even though practical people like Harmon are sure it can't be done. And damned if you don't make some progress now and then.\n\nChrist, yes, thought Cal! Otherwise we might as well have stayed in little family ape-bands, wandering around and trying to tear out the throat of every other living thing that stood up to us. The thing is not to kid yourself. Just because cutting a man open to get out his ruptured appendix has a way of saving his life doesn't mean that it's a good thing to cut a man open. It's a very bad thing, a destructive, immoral wrong being done to the living body. And you must never lose sight of that fact, either through long custom or need to justify your own emotional reactions to the cutting. And one day you may be moved to the point of finding some way to save the man's life without cutting him open.\n\nAnd it's that way with us, thought Cal. We mustn't lose sight of the fact that it's wrong to go up against each new race we meet with all guns blazing. The only right way in the end is to go naked to the stars. Without weapons, because we don't need them. You never find a way until you try. And you don't try as long as you kid yourself that it's okay to\u2014\n\nThe sound of a door opening behind him broke off Cal's train of thought. It was one of his guards with the noon meal on a tray.\n\n\"No mail today either,\" said the guard, as he put the tray down. \"They seem to be losing your address these last few weeks.\"\n\nTwo weeks later, Cal was taken from his cell to the office of the Director of the Prison, where an Administrative Services Captain told him he was released. There was no explanation. He was given a small plastic container in which to carry his possessions, a sealed manila envelope, and escorted to the gate of the Prison.\n\nAs he walked to the gate, he opened the envelope and drew out a sheet of paper inside. It was his release from the Services. He was discharged, he read, without honor but with prejudice,and not recommended for reservice. The gate opened before him and he stepped out into the wide parking lot beyond.\n\nHe had to look twice to believe what he saw. It was Annie, and Scoby with the cheetah, and beyond them a convertible flyer. Annie ran and put her arms around him, but Scoby stood impatiently with one foot on the step to the open door of the flyer.\n\n\"Oh, Cal!\" said Annie, holding tightly to him. \"Cal, will you ever forgive us? We couldn't. We just couldn't!\"\n\n\"Come on, come on!\" said Scoby.\n\nThey got into the flyer and Scoby sat down at the controls with Annie and Cal on the curved seat behind him. Annie would not let go of Cal; she sat pressed close against him.\n\n\"Oh, Cal!\" she said. She was trying not to cry and it was making her nose red.\n\nScoby touched the controls and the flyer went straight up about nine thousand feet, then made a half-turn and streaked eastward. Cal caught one last glimpse of the mountain peak to the north of his prison window. It apparently had put aside all clouds in honor of the occasion. It stood sharp and white against the perfect blue of the sky.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" asked Cal.\n\n\"Washington,\" grunted Scoby.\n\n\"Darling,\" said Annie. \"We couldn't even write. We had to make them think you weren't at all important, that we'd forgotten all about you.\"\n\nCal shook his head. The whole thing had happened so quickly everything had an unnatural feel to it, as if it was a trick of some sort.\n\n\"But what happened?\" he said.\n\n\"Politics,\" said Scoby, not turning his head. Limpari swung cat's eyes about from where she sat staring out the window, and then yawned at Scoby.\n\n\"He had to wait. I had to wait, too. Until it looked as if nobody cared what happened to you any more. That's why I stopped writing you. Only I didn't stop writing, Cal. I wrote anyway. I just didn't mail the letters. I've got them all for you.\"\n\nThe flyer had been continuing to climb and to increase its speed as it did so. They were now at a hundred thousand feet with the sky black overhead. Their speed would be about two thousand miles an hour, Cal noted automatically from the instruments before Scoby. After sitting still for so many weeks it was an odd sensation to have sprouted wings and be hurtling to some distant destination. Below him, he could see the line of the sunset, flowing toward them across the earth below. He felt the beginnings of a slow return from numbness, like a leg that has gone to sleep and is just now beginning to wake up.\n\n\"I thought you were well out of it,\" he said to Annie.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" she said. \"You knew I'd never just give you up. You knew Walt would never abandon you, either!\"\n\n\"Walt?\" he said. And then he remembered that this was Scoby's first name. It was a small shock, after all this, to realize Scoby had a first name. \"I don't understand. I don't understand it,\" Cal said. \"That Captain assigned to my case said the charge was probably going to be treason.\" He looked at Scoby. \"And here I am.\"\n\n\"Matter of jurisdiction,\" said Scoby. The ship had leveled off now. He put it on automatic pilot and swiveled his chair around,pulling out his pipe. \"That's what I went back about. The time was just right for squeezing on the home front. I squeezed.\" He got the pipe going. \"I got the Contacts Service made a separate civilian branch. Not under Armed Services any more.\"\n\n\"So you were really acting under civilian authority when you interdicted Harmon and tried to make him talk with Wantaki,\" said Annie. \"Even if you didn't know it, or Harmon didn't.\" Cal looked from one to the other.\n\n\"What difference did that make?\" he said.\n\n\"Just one,\" answered Scoby, uttering rich puffs of smoke from his pipe. \"Harmon didn't have the authority to order you arrested. On paper, since a peace had been signed with the Paumons, you as head of the Contacts _Department,_ were his superior, not he yours.\"\n\nScoby leaned back around to the automatic pilot and set the speed-and-distance clock.\n\n\"Of course,\" he said, swinging back to face them, \"he had a case to make. The fact orders hadn't arrived; and you threatened human as well as Paumons lives, and so forth. So what I did was wait and let things cool, until it wasn't worth the Combat Services' while to make an issue out of you. Early this week I tacked your release onto a list of little minor demands I was dealing with from the Services. And here you are.\"\n\nCal sighed. He felt abruptly small, and insignificant.\n\n\"No fuss,\" said Scoby. \"Or wasn't that what you were thinking?\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" said Cal. He looked ahead out the window of the flyer. They were almost to their meeting with the sunset line moving toward them over the relief map of the earth below, and beyond that edge of light he saw only darkness. \"I was thinking it's all over, now.\"\n\n\"Over?\" said Scoby.\n\n\"Finished! Wound up,\" said Cal.\n\n\"Finished!\" said Scoby. \"What d'you mean _finished?_ You think you brought eternal peace to the Paumons by having Wantaki and Harmon hating each other's guts?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Cal, \"they admire each other.\"\n\n\"Hating each other's guts and admiring each other, what the hell's the difference,\" said Scoby. \"But just the two of them sitting down across a table from each other? You think the Lehaunan're all set up, now, or there's no rebuilding to be done with the Griella? That what you think?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Cal. There was a slow, heavy weariness creeping into him. He was looking out the window now at the rapidly approaching darkness\u2014and remembering. It seemed there was always a darkness for him. It had been dark on the Lehaunan hillside before they had gone in to take the town. It had been in darkness that Walk had called him a Gutless Wonder; and in the Paumons darkness, Walk had died. Night had been falling as he reached for the arming button on the flagship, that meant the end for everyone there; and darkness was falling again, here, now.\n\n\"Don't you think there's work to be done?\" Scoby was saying. \"Why do you think I worked so hard to get you loose? This is what I've been after from the start. My own Department,independent, where I can get the kind of men I want and train them the way they ought to be trained, instead of having to let good people go by the board because they couldn't pass Services' physical, or couldn't make it over an obstacle course!\" He glared at Cal.\n\n\"What do you think I've been driving at all this time, but an army of my own\u2014a Contacts army which'll go on growing and getting more effective until the Combat Services can't do without us? Until we get so good at last, that the day comes they let us go in _first,_ to see if we can't make it without fighting at all. _That's_ what I've been working for all these years. _That's_ when I'm going to need the sort of men this race of ours has only written philosophies about before. _That's_ why I want you\u2014for my right hand man, to take over for me when the time comes\u2014just as I planned it from the first time I discovered you.\"\n\nThe twilight line was under and past them, now. It was all a dark world ahead.\n\n\"It's no use,\" said Cal. He leaned forward and passed his manila envelope to Scoby. \"I'm discharged with prejudice. Not recommended for reservice.\"\n\nScoby slammed the envelope to the floor of the flyer. \"Bonehead!\" he snarled. _\"Department,_ I said. Not Service! You had so many coats of varnish you think that if the Services turn you down, the Civilian Departments can't hire you either?\" Cal lifted his head, startled.\n\n\"I thought\u2014Government\u2014\" he began, and got stuck.\n\n\"Oh, the personnel don't like hiring Service bad cases. They don't _like_ hiring ex-cons or reformed alcoholics, either. But I'm in charge of my Department. And _I_ say you're hired. And you're hired!\"\n\nCal sat, letting some of the sense of it sink in.\n\n\"I want men!\" Scoby was muttering furiously. \"Men, not recommendations on paper! \" He was simply blowing off the last of his head of steam. As proof of the fact, he was glaring not at Cal, but ahead out the windscreen of the flyer. \"Christ! it's hard enough to handle things as it is. It's hard enough to do the job I have to do\u2014and that's double the job I ought to be doing at my age\u2014with the sort of men I want, anyway. Let alone...\"Cal looked ahead out of the flyer's windscreen, himself. Annie was sitting close beside him and had slipped an arm through his left arm. He felt the living and continual warmth of her body,close. A sort of hope stirred in him. The thrumming vibrations of the flyer hummed through him down to the furthest tips of his fingers. He could feel the lift of the ship's wide wings, spread now at this altitude to their greatest, hawk-like, soaring dimensions, bearing him up. On those wings they here in this ship sailed against the night, at speeds of which no flint-axed caveman had ever dreamed.\n\nFar up ahead, on the darkened horizon, a sprinkling of lights rose into view around the curve of the world. They rose and multiplied as the flyer dropped toward them, until they looked like jewels of all colors scattered more and more thickly upon a cloth of black velvet. Together, the spectrum of their many-colored rays made up the white light of a city. It was the city toward which he and Annie and Scoby\u2014all of them together in the flyer\u2014were now heading above the primitive darkness, as to an inevitable destination.\n\nAnd to that city, now, they stooped.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}} +{"text":" \nThe Victorian City\nJudith Flanders, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham, is the author of the bestselling _The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed_ (2003); the critically acclaimed _Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain_ (2006); _A Circle of Sisters_ (2001), which was nominated for the _Guardian_ First Book Award; and, most recently, _The Invention of Murder_ (2011). She lives in London.\n\nALSO BY JUDITH FLANDERS\n\n_The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed_\n\n_Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain_\n\n_A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin_\n\n_The Invention of Murder_\n\nFirst published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books,\n\nan imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Judith Flanders, 2012\n\nThe moral right of Judith Flanders to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.\n\n1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9\n\nA CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.\n\nHardback ISBN: 978-1-84887-795-5\n\nE-book ISBN: 978-0-85789-881-4\n\nDesigned and typeset in Adobe Garamond by Lindsay Nash\n\nPrinted in Great Britain\n\nAtlantic Books\n\nAn imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd\n\nOrmond House\n\n26\u201327 Boswell Street\n\nLondon\n\nWC1N 3JZ\n\nwww.atlantic-books.co.uk\n_For Ravi_\n\n_With thanks_\nOne may easily sail round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But not the most enthusiastic geographer...ever memorised a map of London...For England is a small island, the world is infinitesimal amongst the planets. But London is illimitable.\n\nFORD MADOX FORD, _The Soul of London_\n\nCityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piled up bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that. Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets his notice to quit...Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves. Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt...built of breeze. Shelter for the night.\n\nNo one is anything.\n\nJAMES JOYCE, _Ulysses_\nCONTENTS\n\n_Acknowledgements_\n\n_A Note on Currency_\n\n_Maps_\n\n_List of Illustrations_\n\n_Introduction_\n\nPART ONE: THE CITY WAKES\n\n_1810: The Berners Street Hoax_\n\n1. Early to Rise\n\n2. On the Road\n\n3. Travelling (Mostly) Hopefully\n\n4. In and Out of London\n\nPART TWO: STAYING ALIVE\n\n_1861: The Tooley Street Fire_\n\n5. The World's Market\n\n6. Selling the Streets\n\n7. Slumming\n\n8. The Waters of Death\n\nPART THREE: ENJOYING LIFE\n\n_1867: The Regent's Park Skating Disaster_\n\n9. Street Performance\n\n10. Leisure for All\n\n11. Feeding the Streets\n\n12. Street Theatre\n\nPART FOUR: SLEEPING AND AWAKE\n\n_1852: The Funeral of the Duke of Wellington_\n\n13. Night Entertainment\n\n14. Street Violence\n\n15. The Red-Lit Streets to Death\n\nAppendix: Dickens' Publications by Period\n\n_Notes_\n\n_Bibliography_\n\n_Index_\nACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nThis book is the product of a lifetime of London-loving and Dickens-loving, and I must first and foremost thank those great London and Dickens scholars who have enriched my reading: Peter Ackroyd, Philip Collins, John Drew, Madeline House, Susan Shatto, Michael Slater, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson.\n\nAs always, I am indebted to the members of the Victoria 19th-century British Culture and Society mailbase for their tolerance of my seemingly random queries, and for their vast stores of knowledge. And to Patrick Leary, list-master _extraordinaire_ , go not merely my thanks for creating such a congenial environment, but also for pointing me towards the Regent's Park skating disaster.\n\nI am grateful to my agent Bill Hamilton for his skill, and for his patience and tolerance.\n\nI thank, too, all those at Atlantic Books, past and present: Alan Craig, Karen Duffy, Lauren Finger, Richard Milbank, Sarah Norman, Bunmi Oke, Sarah Pocklington, Orlando Whitfield and Corinna Zifko. My thanks too to Jeff Edwards, Douglas Matthews, Lindsay Nash, Leo Nickolls and Tamsin Shelton. The wonderful pictures were found by Josine Meijer, while Celia Levett, with her sensitive and rigorous copy-editing, improved every sentence of the text.\n\nFinally, I owe my career to Ravi Mirchandani, now my publisher but, before I became a writer, my friend. 'Stop talking about it,' he told me then. 'Write it.' So I have. This book is for him.\nA NOTE ON CURRENCY\n\nPounds, shillings and pence were the divisions of the currency. One shilling is made up of twelve pence; one pound of twenty shillings, i.e. 240 pence. Pounds are represented by the \u00a3 symbol, shillings as 's', and pence as 'd' (from the Latin, _denarius_ ). 'One pound, one shilling and one penny' is written as \u00a31 1s 1d. 'One shilling and sixpence', referred to in speech as 'one and six', is written as 1s 6d, or '1\/6'.\n\nA guinea was a coin to the value of \u00a31 1 0. (The actual coin was not circulated after 1813, although the term remained and tended to be reserved for luxury goods.) A sovereign was a twenty-shilling coin, a half-sovereign a tenshilling coin. A crown was five shillings, half a crown 2\/6, and the remaining coins were a florin (two shillings), sixpence, a groat (four pence), a threepenny bit (pronounced 'thrup'ny'), twopence (pronounced tuppence), a penny, a halfpenny (pronounced hayp'ny), a farthing (a quarter of a penny) and a half a farthing (an eighth of a penny).\n\nRelative values have altered so substantially that attempts to convert nineteenth-century prices into contemporary ones are usually futile. However, the website http:\/\/www.ex.ac.uk\/~RDavies\/arian\/current\/howmuch.html is a gateway to this complicated subject.\n\nLIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS\n\n Street traders, sketches by George Scharf, 1841 (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n Two drawings of wooden street paving by George Scharf, 1838 and 1840 respectively (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n Anonymous photo of the Kennington turnpike gate, _c_.1865 (London Metropolitan Archives)\n\n Figures with water carts at a pump in Bloomsbury Square. Drawing by George Scharf, 1828 (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n Construction of the Holborn Viaduct. Anonymous engraving, 1867 (\u00a9 Illustrated London News\/ Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n Departure of the Army Works Corp from London for the Crimea. Anonymous engraving, 1855 (\u00a9 Illustrated London News\/ Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n _The Omnibus brutes...which are they?_ By George Cruikshank, 1835 (\u00a9 Look and Learn\/ Peter Jackson Collection)\n\n Anonymous photo of hansom cabs in Whitehall Place, Westminster, 1870\u20131900 (\u00a9 English Heritage. NMR)\n\n _Royal Mail Coaches leaving The Swan with Two Necks Inn, Lad Lane_. Engraving by F. Rosenberg after James Pollard, 1831 (Guildhall Library, City of London\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n _Station Commotion_. Engraving by W. Shearer after a drawing by William McConnell, 1860 (Getty Images)\n\n _Parliamentary Train: Interior of the Third Class Carriage_. Undated lithograph by William McConnell from 'Twice Around the Clock' (\u00a9 Look and Learn\/ Peter Jackson Collection\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n Plan of Buildings destroyed at Chamberlain's Wharf, Cotton's Wharf and Hay's Wharf. Lithograph by James Thomas Loveday, 1861 (\u00a9 Guildhall Library, City of London\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n The funeral procession of James Braidwood. Anonymous engraving, 1861 (\u00a9 London Fire Brigade)\n\n The construction of Hungerford Market. Drawing by George Scharf, 1832 (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n Anonymous photo of a London match seller in Greenwich, 1884 (Francis Frith Collection\/ Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n _The Fleet Prison_ , watercolour by George Shepherd, 1814 (Greater London Council Print Collection)\n\n Interior of a lodging house. Anonymous engraving, 1853 (\u00a9 Illustrated London News\/ Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n View from Jacob's Island of old houses in London Street, Dockhead. Anonymous engraving, 1810 (Wellcome Library, London)\n\n The water supply in Frying Pan Alley, Clerkenwell. Anonymous engraving, 1864 (Private Collection\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n The Chelsea Embankment looking East. Photo by James Hedderly, c. 1873 (Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries)\n\n Street musicians. Sketches by George Scharf, 1833 (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n Joseph Johnson with his _Nelson_ hat. Engraving by John Thomas Smith, 1815. (From: John Thomas Smith, 'Vagabondiana', Chatto & Windus, London 1874)\n\n Northumberland House. Anonymous, undated engraving (\u00a9 Museum of London)\n\n Hot-potato seller. Sketch by George Scharf, 1820\u20131830 (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n _Dinner Time, Sunday One O'Clock_. Sketches by George Scharf, 1841 (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n _The City Chop House_. Print by Thomas Rowlandson, 1810\u20131815 (\u00a9 Museum of London)\n\n Crowds watching the house of Robert Peel. Anonymous engraving, 1850 (\u00a9 Illustrated London News\/ Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n _Episode During a Brief Visit to London_. Anonymous engraving, 1885 (Private Collection\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n Anonymous photo of the nineteenth century Willesden Fire Brigade (\u00a9 London Fire Brigade)\n\n Scene in a London street on a Sunday morning. Anonymous engraving, 1850 (\u00a9 Museum of London)\n\n _The Coal Hole_ , undated watercolour by Thomas Rowlandson (Blackburn Museums and Art Galleries\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n Peace illuminations in Pall Mall at the end of the Crimean War. Anonymous engraving, 1856 (\u00a9 Illustrated London News\/ Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n Scaffold outside Newgate Prison. Anonymous print, 1846 (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n Capture of the Cato Street Conspirators. Engraving after a drawing by George Cruikshank, 1820 (Peter Higginbotham Collection\/ Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n Haymarket prostitutes. Anonymous engraving, _c_.1860 (Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park arrested for wearing women's clothes. Anonymous engraving, 1870 (Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n Illustration to Thomas Hood's poem 'The Bridge of Sighs' by Gustave Dor\u00e9 (From: Thomas Hood, _Hood's Poetical Works_ , 1888)\n\nColour Plates\n\n1. Benjamin Robert Haydon, _Punch, or May Day_ , 1829. Oil on canvas. Tate Gallery, London (\u00a9 Tate, London 2012)\n\n2. Eug\u00e8ne Louis Lami, _Ludgate Circus_ , 1850. Watercolour drawing. Victoria & Albert Museum, London (\u00a9 Victoria & Albert Museum, London)\n\n3. William Parrott, _Pool of London from London Bridge_ , 1841. Lithograph (Guildhall Library, City of London\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n4. George Scharf, _Betwen 6 and Seven O'Clock morning, Sumer_ , undated. Drawing. British Museum (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n5. Thomas Rowlandson, _A Peep at the Gas Lights in Pall Mall_ , undated. (Guildhall Library, City of London\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n6. George Cruikshank, _Foggy Weather_ , 1819. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n7. Anonymous lithograph, _The Tooley Street Fire_ , 1861. Museum of London (\u00a9 Museum of London)\n\n8. Frederick Christian Lewis, _Covent Garden Market_ , _c_.1829. Oil on canvas. (Reproduced by kind permission of His Grace the Duke of Bedford and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates, and that copyright remains with His Grace the Duke of Bedford and the Trustees of the Bedford Estates)\n\n9. George Shepherd, _Hungerford Stairs_ , 1810. Watercolour. (Guildhall Library, City of London\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n10. E. H. Dixon, _The Great Dust-Heap_ , 1837. Watercolour. (Wellcome Library, London)\n\n11. Fox Talbot, _Nelson's Column Under Construction_ , _c_.1841. Photograph. (Stapleton Collection\/ Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n12. George Scharf, _Building the New Fleet Sewer_ , undated. Drawing. British Museum (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n13. George Scharf, _Workmen on London Bridge_ , 1830. Drawing. The British Library. (\u00a9 The British Library Board)\n\n14. George Scharf, _Old Murphy_ , 1830. Watercolour. The British Library. (\u00a9 The British Library Board)\n\n15. George Scharf, _Chimney Sweeps Dancing on Mayday_ , undated. Watercolour. British Museum. (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n16. George Scharf, _The Strand from Villiers Street_ , 1824. Watercolour. British Museum (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n17. Henry Alken, _Funeral Car of the Duke of Wellington_ , 1853. Coloured engraving. (Victoria & Albert Museum, London\/Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n18. William Heath, _Greedy Old Nickford Eating Oysters_ , late 1820s. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum. (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\n\n19. Henry Alken, _Bear Baiting_ , 1821. Coloured engraving. (Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n20. Rowlandson & Pugin, _Charing Cross Pillory_ , 1809. Aquatint. (Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n21. George Cruikshank, _Acting Magistrates Committing Themselves being Their First Appearance on this Stage as Performed at the National Theatre Covent Garden_ , 1809. Hand-coloured etching. British Museum. (\u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum)\nINTRODUCTION\n\n'A Dickensian scandal for the 21st century' blares one newspaper headline. 'No one should have to live in such Dickensian conditions,' says another. Today 'Dickensian' means squalor, it means wretched living conditions, oppression and darkness.\n\nYet Dickens finished his first novel with a glance at the sunny Mr Pickwick and his friends: 'There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.' The brief sunshine of the world blazed out in full in Dickens' work and, early in his career in particular, that was the way his contemporaries saw it. For them, 'Dickensian' meant comic; for others, it meant convivial good cheer. It was not until the twentieth century, as social conditions began to improve, that 'Dickensian' took on its dark tinge. In Dickens' own time, the way that people lived was not Dickensian, merely life.\n\nThe greatest recorder the London streets has ever known \u2013 through whose eyes those streets have become Dickensian \u2013 was not born in London at all, but in Portsmouth, on 7 February 1812, where his father, a clerk in the navy pay office, was working. Apart from a brief foray to the capital as a toddler, Dickens moved to the city that gave meaning to his life and his fiction only when he was ten, arriving from Chatham, where his father had been posted, on the Commodore stagecoach, 'packed, like game \u2013 and forwarded, carriage paid', at the coaching inn in the heart of Cheapside, in the City of London. In 1815, he and his family had lodged in Norfolk Street, near Tottenham Court Road, just steps away from the grim-faced Cleveland Street Workhouse. On their return to London in 1822, they moved to the newly developing, lower-middle-class district of Camden Town slightly to the north. Bayham Street was still rural enough for grass to grow down the centre of the road, and the houses that lined the street were new. This is not to say the Dickenses lived lavishly. Dickens' parents, five children, a servant and the stepson of Mrs Dickens' deceased sister were all crammed into the little two-storey, yellow-brick house. Dickens' authorized biographer and lifelong friend, John Forster, called Camden Town 'about the poorest part of the London suburbs' and described the house as a 'mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court'. (The word 'court' in nineteenth-century London always meant a dead-end alley that housed slum lodgings.) Yet the residents listed by one of Dickens' childhood neighbours \u2013 small shopkeepers; the local building contractor \u2013 do not bear this out, nor does the rent of \u00a322 per annum \u2013 well beyond the reach of the washerwoman Forster claimed was their nearest neighbour. It seems as if, unconsciously, 'Dickensian', meaning the dark without the light, was retrospectively being imposed on Dickens himself.\n\nThe dark came soon enough. In December 1823, the Dickens family moved to Gower Street North, to a house double the size of the one in Bayham Street. Mrs Dickens was hoping to start a school for young ladies to supplement John Dickens' income. While not poor, the Dickenses had by now an even larger family \u2013 seven children \u2013 and could never manage to live within their income. In the quasi-autobiographical _David Copperfield_ , Mr Micawber \u2013 a surprisingly affectionate portrait of John Dickens from an author more usually exasperated or enraged by his feckless father \u2013 famously pronounced, 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.' And despite the comically pompous tone, the Dickenses' lives were indeed made miserable, particularly young Charles's. As the debts mounted, Mrs Dickens' step-nephew offered to help. He was the new office manager of Warren's Blacking Factory, near the Strand, which manufactured shoe polish and the blackleading applied to fire grates and kitchen ranges.\n\nAnd so, sometime around his twelfth birthday, Charles was taken out of school and sent to work in a factory for 6s a week. Less than a month later, his father was arrested for debt, and by April 1824 the household in North Gower Street was broken up. The novice child-worker lived alone in lodgings in Little College Street in Camden Town, while, to save money, the rest of the family moved into the Marshalsea prison nearly four miles away, where John Dickens was already incarcerated. David Copperfield once more speaks for the boy Charles, abandoned as he appeared to be: 'I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became, at ten years old, a little labouring hind.'\n\nThe labouring hind had no idea when, or even if, this purgatory, his being 'thrown away', was ever to end. There was every possibility that he would be a factory-hand for the rest of his life. At some point in his life Dickens attempted to write an autobiography. It was never finished, but he handed what he had written to John Forster, to be used in his friend's biography of him after his death. In this fragment, in his novels and, most likely, in his own mind, Dickens backdated the episode so that it occurred not when he was twelve, but when he was ten, making him more pathetically defenceless still. The trauma to the child endured. That terrible year, 1824, is the central date not only of the child labour episode in _David Copperfield_ , but also of key sections of _Little Dorrit_ and _Great Expectations_. For Dickens, until the old market at Hungerford, where Warren's was located, had been rebuilt (see Plate 14), until 'the very nature of the ground changed, I never had the courage to go back to the place where my servitude began...For many years, when I came near...I crossed over to the opposite side of the way', while the route past the Marshalsea 'made me cry' long into adulthood. It may be that the confusion over the status of Bayham Street can be attributed to this long-lasting distress. When the Dickens family lived there, it was a respectable lower-middle-class street; by the time John Forster saw it, it had become a slum. Dickens knew that it had been different in his childhood, but the worse it was perceived, the more he had achieved: the squalor of the area was a mark of how far he had come.\n\nBy 1825, John Dickens had been released from prison and the family was once more in decent lodgings in north London, with Charles back at school. But within two years John Dickens was in financial difficulties again, and the young Dickens, still only fifteen, left school for the final time. This time, his prospects were more hopeful. Mrs Dickens' family was again called on, and her aunt's lodger, a young solicitor named Blackmore, hired the boy as a clerk. Now his fierce determination to fput the blacking factory behind him had an outlet. After leaving the Navy Office, John Dickens had found work as a parliamentary reporter, and in 1828 Charles followed suit, becoming successful enough in less than a year to leave clerking behind and set up as a freelance shorthand-writer. In 1833, when he was just twenty-one, his first story, 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk', was published in the _Monthly Magazine_. The would-be author had sent it in anonymously, and when he found it printed, 'I walked down to Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride.' Soon he was producing newspaper and magazine sketches regularly, under the pseudonym Boz. (Boz, pronounced today with a short 'o', was probably pronounced by Dickens as 'Boze'. He had given his youngest brother the nickname Moses, which the toddler then mangled as 'Boses', and soon the family shortened it to Boz.)\n\nIn 1834, at the age of twenty-two, Dickens started work at the _Morning Chronicle_ , ultimately earning five guineas a week, or \u00a3273 per annum, a decent middle-class salary. In 1836, his first novel, a series of comic sketches about the doings of Mr Pickwick and his friends, was published. The additional \u00a314 a month that it brought in gave him the security he needed to marry Catherine Hogarth, the daughter of the editor of the _Evening Chronicle_ , who was publishing his 'Sketches of London' (later expanded into _Sketches by Boz_ ). By June 1836, the serial had become an unprecedented triumph: each issue, which had initially sold 400 copies monthly, was now selling 40,000. In July, Boz was revealed to be Charles Dickens and, as Byron had done before him, he awoke to find himself famous.\n\nDickens now did something extraordinary. Nine months before he finished _Pickwick Papers_ , this man of prodigious energy, only twenty-five years old, began to write _Oliver Twist_ , one of the world's most famous novels, whose 'Please, sir, I want some more' is familiar even to the millions who have never read it. And then, five months after he completed _Pickwick_ , he started his third novel, _Nicholas Nickleby_ , before _Oliver Twist_ , his second, had reached its halfway point.\n\nThis energy, this amazing outpouring of imaginative literature, suited the age. _Oliver Twist_ was being read while William IV was still on the throne, for Dickens, contrary to our easy assumptions, was not a Victorian, or not solely a Victorian. He was born in the reign of George II, although by 1836 the old king was permanently mad, as well as deaf and blind: the Regency had been declared the previous year, and the Prince Regent set the rackety and louche tone of the upper reaches of society. In 1820, when Dickens was still a boy in Chatham, the Prince Regent inherited the throne as George IV; Dickens was nineteen when the old stone London Bridge, a symbol of London for 600 years, was replaced. Even as his writing career took off, the new era had not properly begun: as Bill Sikes is hunted down at the end of _Oliver Twist_ , his pursuers demand that a door be opened 'in the king's name'. By the time the eighteen-year-old Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Dickens was twenty-five, an established author, a magazine editor and a married man with a family. And when he died in 1870, the Victorian age still had thirty years to run. But although he was therefore not purely Victorian, Dickens' life \u2013 and Dickens' London \u2013 form a perfect optic through which to see the city's transformation. His was the London of dubious beginnings, of Regency grandiosity, as well as of early Victorian earnestness and endeavour, expansionism and technological advancement.\n\nDickens would describe all these qualities as though no one had ever seen them before. And after he described them, no one would be able to see them again except through his eyes. Throughout his life, peripatetic residentially as well as psychologically \u2013 living at over two dozen London addresses in a half-century \u2013 Dickens covered the whole of London, from the East End and the City, north to Camden, through Westminster and west to Hammersmith, south along the shores of the river. Even when he was officially settled, he frequently maintained several addresses at once, some known to his friends and family, others more or less kept hidden. In the 1850s, the Dickens family home was in Bloomsbury, with a country house in Kent. Dickens was proprietor and editor of the magazines _Household Words_ from 1850 to 1859, and of _All the Year Round_ from 1859 to his death in 1870. Both magazines had offices in Covent Garden with rooms where he stayed overnight; and Ellen Ternan, his secret mistress, lived at first close to his early childhood home in Camden Town, then in the suburbs south of the river. Dickens could be different people at different times in different places, changing en route as he strode from one to another.\n\nDickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer. In 1853, Dickens published an essay, 'Gone Astray', in which the narrator tells of a day when, as 'a very small boy indeed', he is taken to see St Giles' Church, lying between Covent Garden and the present-day Charing Cross Road, then on the edge of the fearsome slum of St Giles. From there his adult companion takes him to Northumberland House, which closed off the south side of what became Trafalgar Square, in a 'narrow, crowded, inconvenient street'. There the boy-narrator loses his accompanying adult and is off on his own, walking along the Strand, down Fleet Street, past Temple Bar \u2013 the Wren-designed stone gateway where the Strand and Fleet Street meet, which was the formal demarcation line between the West End and the City \u2013 seeing from there the great dome of St Paul's. He wanders through the City, past the Royal Exchange, then the Mansion House, home of the City's Lord Mayor, and finally reaches Whitechapel: 'This is literally and exactly how I went astray.' It also, 'literally and exactly', covers the heart of Dickens' London, the streets he walked compulsively, obsessively, before transforming them into art until his death at only fifty-eight. One journalist, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Dickens, described how the author regularly appeared like the pantomime demon, popping up anywhere and everywhere: 'A hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at Brompton, and there he was, striding out, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo [pub]. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even tenor of his way up to the Vauxhall-bridge-road.'\n\nThe younger man found Dickens' appearance as he walked the streets 'decidedly \"odd\"', delighting as he did in bright colours and clothes cut with dramatic flair. This was frequently commented on later in the nineteenth century by younger men who were unaware that Dickens had retained to the end of his life the Regency's love of bright colours and dandified attitudes. (He shared this trait with another colourful dresser, Disraeli, eight years his senior.) As he walked along, this small, fine-boned man presented himself with a 'slight flavour of the whipper-snapper', a dashing air, and 'remarkably upright' carriage. Over the years, the impression he made on the street shifted from that of a 'pretty-boy-looking sort of figure' to 'A man of sanguine complexion, deeply lined & scantily bearded...countenance alert and observant, scornful somewhat and sour'; yet even then, when he was ageing, he kept his 'light step and jaunty air'. With a 'brand new hat airily cocked on one side', he continued to march along at breakneck pace through the city streets well into his final years.\n\nThese walks were in part a way of processing his work, thinking out his fiction with his feet. In Switzerland, he lamented to John Forster, 'The absence of any accessible streets continues to worry me...at night I want them beyond description. I don't seem able to get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds.' The narrator who opens _The Old Curiosity Shop_ has much in common with his author: 'Night is generally my time for walking...it affords me greater opportunity of speculating on the characters and occupations of those who fill the streets...a glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight.'\n\nBut other types of walks had other purposes. There was the 'straight on end to a definite goal at a round pace' walk, and the 'objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond' walk: walking to get places, and walking for the fun of it, for looking, and for being looked at. Many people did both, but it may be that Dickens wrote more about walking and wandering than anyone else. 'Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy \u2013 walking up one street and down another, and staring into shop windows, and gazing about as if, instead of being on intimate terms with every shop and house...the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.' According to his contemporaries, he was 'on intimate terms' with almost every district. A man who had worked with him when he had been an adolescent solicitor's clerk said, 'He knew it all from Bow to Brentford.' Four decades later, at the end of his life, they were saying the same: give Dickens the name of almost any street and he could 'tell you all that is in it, what each shop was, what the grocer's name was, [and] how many scraps of orange-peel there were on the pavement'. His London, in the words of a reviewer, was described 'with the accuracy of a cabman'.\n\nWalking kept the author himself anchored to the great city. In his youth, Dickens described 'lounging one evening, down Oxford-street'; later, as a magazine editor, he recommended to his journalists that they actively choose their subjects in the city that he still found a daily novelty: 'Suggest to him Saturday night in London, or London Markets...the most extraordinary men...the most extraordinary things...the strangest Shows \u2013 and the wildest'. In the decade before his death, he assumed the guise of 'The Uncommercial Traveller' (a 'traveller' being a travelling salesman), 'always on the road...I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers...I am always wandering here and there...seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others.'\n\nPrevious essays about London, by authors such as Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt, had been filled with history, with learned asides, with a great panoply of education. Dickens, from the first, with _Sketches by Boz_ , truly did sketch what he saw: the people of the streets and the world that these people lived in. _Pickwick Papers_ had originally been planned as a series of vignettes 'illustrative of manners and life in the country', as the Londoner Mr Pickwick makes tours into different parts of the country. In the fourth instalment the cockney servant Sam Weller appeared at the White Hart Inn, in the Borough, south of the river. His knowledge of London was much like that of his creator, 'extensive and peculiar', and with him Dickens found his subject and his audience \u2013 for it was with this issue that sales took off and success was assured.\n\nFor the rest of his career, Dickens continued to find his subjects in the streets, or in journalistic descriptions of the streets. In _Dombey and Son_ , Rob the Grinder is a working-class boy sent to a school through a charity that obliged him to wear a specific old-fashioned uniform. The _Illustrated London News_ printed engravings of these outfits four years before the novel was begun. In _Our Mutual Friend_ , Gaffer Hexam, who dredges corpses out of the river, the dustmen who collect household waste and Betty Higden, the itinerant pedlar, all have their street equivalents in Henry Mayhew's great compendium of the London street workers, _London Labour and the_ _London Poor_. And in _Household Words_ Dickens remembered a woman who had roamed Berners Street in his childhood, and who was said to have lost her mind when abandoned by her fianc\u00e9, wearing her wedding dress ever after \u2013 the inspiration for Miss Havisham in _Great Expectations_ , found on the London streets.\n\nThese streets that Dickens drew on his whole life were a hive of activity, a route for commuters, a passage from home to work and from work to home. But they were also a place of work itself, as well as one of leisure and amusement. The streets had purpose to them; they were a destination as well as a means of reaching a destination.\n\n'The streets' were not, however, a stable entity throughout the century. They, like London, were undergoing an unprecedented transformation: they were old, with much of London dating to its reconstruction after the Great Fire of 1666; and they were new, as modernity gathered pace and changed the face of the city, bringing railways, street lighting and other innovations; they were constantly renewing \u2013 London was, for most of the century, one never-ending building site. In 1800, London was already the largest city ever known, double the size of Paris with more than 1 million inhabitants, living in 136,000 houses; by 1851 nearly 3 million people occupied 306,000 houses; at the end of the century, that figure had more than doubled again, to 6.5 million people, and 6 million houses had gone up over the previous seventy-five years. These statistics omit the new roads that had been constructed, the shops that had been built, the offices, the railway and underground stations, the sewers, the water mains and all the other infrastructure of modernity that had been added to the essentially seventeenth-century city that London had been in 1800.\n\nAnd within the single entity called London, many Londons existed simultaneously. At two in the morning at a street vendor's coffee stall, young men on a night out might look for prostitutes, among the milliners' drudges returning home after another sixteen-hour day, who themselves had passed street children sleeping on doorsteps and under the railway arches. They, in their turn, foraged for their breakfast at four in the morning among market refuse, nimbly avoiding the carriages of the wealthy, who were returning home from assemblies and balls. These vehicles crossed the paths of the watercress sellers heading for the markets before dawn, so that they could be on their suburban selling routes by six, to supply breakfast greens to the households of the now-sleeping young men. Similarly London could be measured in time as well as space, physically and metaphorically. Covent Garden was the location of the market and the thriving vice trade; it was the centre that fed the populace and the location of two of London's most important theatres. Drury Lane, behind the market, was a byword for poverty and filth, while the Lowther Arcade, a few hundred yards away, was the haunt of the wealthy who lounged their days away shopping for luxury goods.\n\nThe economist and journalist Walter Bagehot encapsulated Dickens' encyclopaedic embrace of the city in a neat metaphor: 'London is like a newspaper. Everything is there, and everything is disconnected...As we change from the broad leader to the squalid police report, we pass a corner and we are in a changed world.' Dickens' critics complain that his characters are caricatures, with mannerisms and tics substituting for personality and emotion. But Dickens was capturing actual people as they flitted along the streets, their phrases overheard, their characters snatched on the hoof as they passed each other in London's hurly-burly. He created, he said, a 'fanciful photograph in my mind'. 'I couldn't help,' he wrote, 'looking upon my mind...as a sort of capitally prepared and highly sensitive [photographic] plate. And I said, without the least conceit...\"it really is a pleasure to work with you, you receive the impression so nicely\".'\n\nWhilst these impressions were real, they were also radically reworked by Dickens' imagination to create new realities, well recognized by his fellow artists. Henry James described Dickens' type of fiction, with its real places and real street names, as having the 'solidity of specification'; Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of Dickens' 'London tracts'. So real were these tracts that when the American historian Francis Parkman arrived in London, 'I thought I had been there before. There, in flesh and blood, was the whole host of characters that figured' in Dickens \u2013 the people, the traffic: everything, he marvelled.\n\nDetails that Londoners didn't even notice they were noticing were given a place in the sharp-eyed author's books. Like foreigners, Dickens noted the native customs: he reproduced them faithfully for the locals, just as the visitors reported them to their audiences at home. In _\u00c0 Rebours_ (1884), by the French decadent novelist J.-K. Huysmans, the hero drifts into a daydream in an English bar in Paris, peopling the Parisian cellar with customers culled from his favourite Dickens novels. 'He settled down comfortably in this London of the imagination...believing for a moment that the dismal hootings of the tugs behind the Tuileries were coming from boats on the Thames.' As Walter Benjamin quoted half a century later, 'Dickens did not stamp these places on his mind; he stamped his mind on these places.' Dickens created London as much as London created Dickens.\n\nAs the city changed, what was imagination and what reportage has blurred and become hard to distinguish. Jokes that Dickens' readers understood, dry asides on the streets that he and they walked so regularly, for us lie deeply buried. This book is an attempt to bring these details to the surface once more, to look at the streets of London as Dickens and his fellow Londoners saw it, to examine its workings, to take a walk, in effect, through the city as it appeared in Dickens' lifetime, from 1812 to 1870.\n\nMr Micawber, the young David Copperfield's feckless but faithful friend, offered his services on David's first day in London: 'Under the impression...that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon...in short...that you might lose yourself \u2013 I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.'\n\nThe arcana of the modern Babylon: like Mr Micawber, Dickens reveals to his readers the occult secrets of London, installing in us, his readers, the knowledge of the nearest, and best, way. The least we can do is follow him.\nPART ONE\n\nThe City Wakes\n\n_1810: The Berners Street Hoax_\n\nEarly one morning in November 1810, long before breakfast, a chimney sweep knocked at the basement door of a respectable house in Berners Street, just north of Oxford Street. He had been sent for, he said. Mystified, the residents said they had no need of a sweep and closed the door. That was the last moment of peace they had that day, for soon the house was besieged by sweeps, all claiming they had been summoned. They were swiftly followed by dozens of wagons bringing coal that the drivers said had been ordered, and by legions of fishmongers with the day's catch, also apparently required by the house's mistress, one Mrs Tottenham.\n\nSoon came 'piano-fortes by dozens, and coal-waggons by scores \u2013 two thousand five hundred raspberry tarts from half a hundred pastry-cooks \u2013 a squad of surgeons \u2013 a battalion of physicians, and a legion of apothecaries \u2013 lovers to see sweethearts; ladies to find lovers \u2013 upholsterers to furnish houses, and architects to build them \u2013 gigs, dog-carts, and glass-coaches, enough to convey half the free-holders of Middlesex to Brentford'. Before this horde had retreated, on came an endless stream of tradespeople:\n\nInvitations and orders were sent in her name,\n\n(In truth, I must own, 'twas a scandalous shame)\n\nTo milliners, wine-merchants, lawyers, musicians,\n\nOculists, coal-merchants, barbers, opticians,\n\nMen of fashion, men cooks, surgeons, sweeps, undertakers,\n\nConfectioners, fishmongers, innkeepers, bakers,\n\nMen-midwives \u2013 the man who exhibits a bear,\n\nAnd, O worse than all! to his _lordship the mayor_.\n\nAll were earnestly begged to be at her door\n\nPrecisely at _two_ , or a little before,\n\nThe surgeons first, armed with catheters, arrive\n\nAnd impatiently ask is the patient alive.\n\nThe man servant stares \u2013 now ten midwives appear,\n\n'Pray, sir, does the lady in labor [sic] live here?'\n\n'Here's a shell,' cries a man, 'for the lady that's dead,\n\n'My master's behind with the coffin of lead.'\n\nNext a waggon, with furniture loaded approaches,\n\nThen a hearse all be-plumed and six mourning coaches,\n\nSix baskets of groceries \u2013 sugars, teas, figs;\n\nTen drays full of beer \u2013 twenty boxes of wigs.\n\nFifty hampers of wine, twenty dozen French rolls,\n\nFifteen huge waggon loads of best Newcastle coals \u2013\n\nBut the best joke of all was to see the fine coach\n\nOf his worship the mayor, all bedizen'd, approach;\n\nAs it pass'd up the street the mob shouted aloud,\n\nHis lordship was pleased, and most affably bow'd,\n\nSupposing, poor man, he was _cheered_ by the crowd...\n\nThese were followed by rows of carriages bearing the city's grandees, all invited to a party. Then came the chairman of the East India Company and the Governor of the Bank of England, both of whom had been promised information on supposed frauds on their companies; even royalty was summoned, in the person of the Duke of Gloucester, who arrived to hear the deathbed confession of an aged family retainer.\n\nThe street now teemed with people, their anger at having their time and money wasted dissipating as tradesmen who had been turned away stayed to watch the next batch of hopefuls arrive, to shouts of laughter. But the Lord Mayor was not amused, driving off to the Marlborough Street Police Office to lay a complaint before the magistrates.\n\n... his lordship, it seems, is no friend to such jokes...\n\nIn sooth 'twas a shame (not withstanding 'twas witty)\n\nTo make such a fool of the _lord of the city_...\n\nAway drove his lordship, by thousands attended,\n\nThe people dispersed, and thus the hoax ended...\n\nThe magistrates ordered their officers out to disperse the crowds, but by then even more had arrived, this time great numbers of servants who had received letters offering them positions. It was long after dark before Mrs Tottenham was left in peace.\n\nThose in the know had, almost from the first, suspected that this was a trick perpetrated by Theodore Hook, a composer, farceur and man about town. Today his main claim to fame is that one of his plays was mocked by Byron in _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ , but at the time the author of _Teleki_ was famous in his own right, for pranks and practical jokes as much as his writing. Rumour immediately attributed this hoax to Hook, claiming that he had sent out hundreds \u2013 some said thousands \u2013 of letters ordering goods and services, answering advertisements for lost or found items, and directing all to 54 Berners Street, before hiring rooms in the house across the road so he and his friends might watch the fun in comfort.\n\nNancy Mathews \u2013 the wife of the actor Charles Mathews and a great friend of Hook \u2013 claimed after his death, that it was not he who had perpetrated this hoax at all: it had been, she said, 'designed and executed by a young gentleman, now a high, and one of the most rigid Churchmen in the kingdom'. (The reality of an unnamed person is always slightly suspect, but it is worth noting that Hook's brother, also conveniently deceased by this time, had been Dean of Worcester, and the dean's son was a High Churchman with decidedly Tory leanings.) Mrs Mathews' chief point was that this famous hoax was not the original. Hook, she said, had not been the perpetrator of the Berners Street Hoax, but had instead been responsible for an earlier hoax, which she said occurred in Bedford Street. For weeks, she claimed, he had assiduously replied to classified advertisements in the newspapers: 'everything _lost_ had been found by Mr. \u2014 of Bedford Street. Every thing found had been lost by Mr. \u2014 of Bedford Street. Every servant wanting a place, was sure to find an excellent one in the family of Mr. \u2014 of Bedford Street. If money was to be _borrowed_ , it would be lent on the most liberal terms, by Mr. \u2014 of Bedford Street. If money was to be _lent_ , it would be borrowed, on most advantageous interest, by Mr. \u2014 of Bedford Street.'\n\nAnd sure enough,\n\non the following day, punctual as a lover, came... _honest men_ leading the animals they had _found_ , expecting their reward...and disconsolate owners 20 The Victorian City of missing pets, hoping to regain the favourites they had lost. Men and maids...eager for ' _sitiwations_ ', \u2013 congregated in such numbers, that there was not a place left...by and bye came carts, with large teams...with many a cauldron of coal, labouring up the narrow slanting street, followed by pianoforte carriages \u2013 crates of china and glass...rolls of carpeting \u2013 potatoes and firewood...trays of turtle \u2013 bags of flour \u2013 packages of flannel and linen \u2013 packing cases and trunks of every dimension \u2013 chariots and horses \u2013 asses \u2013 dogs \u2013 brewers' drays and butchers' trays \u2013 confectionery and books \u2013 wheel-barrows, surgeons' instruments and mangles \u2013 sides of bacon \u2013 boots and shoes \u2013 bows and arrows \u2013 guns and pistols, &c. &c.\n\nAs with Berners Street later, when the hoax was discovered at first everyone was enraged, until a change of mood overcame the crowd, and each person hoaxed remained for the sheer amusement of seeing their successors being imposed upon in turn: 'on each arrival a loud huzza from the assembled crowd proclaimed \" _a brother won!_ \"'\n\nWhether the site was Bedford Street, or Berners Street, the hoax took place in public, to be enjoyed by the public, not by a discerning, selfselecting group, such as would buy a book, or a newspaper, or go to a play, but by the indiscriminate pedestrian, the random passer-by. The perpetrator of the hoax, whether Hook or the high and rigid churchman, saw the streets not as a place to pass through on the way from one building to another, but as a place worth being in. Two months later, an epilogue to a play staged at the Lyceum included a mention of a ' _Hoax_ ' that had 'set London in a grin' for the pleasure of giving 'gazing mobs a treat'. The enjoyment was not for the perpetrators but for the participants: those in the street.\n\nThe streets of London in the nineteenth century were, in many cases, the same ones we walk today. But not only did they look different, their purpose was different; they were used differently. It is that use, that idea of purpose, that needs to be recaptured.\n\n#### 1.\n\n#### EARLY TO RISE\n\nIt is 2.30 in the morning. It is still night, but it is also 'tomorrow'. By this hour at Covent Garden market, in the centre of London, the streets are alive. Long lines of carts and vans and costermongers' barrows are forming in the surrounding streets. Lights are being lit 'in the upper windows of public houses \u2013 not the inhabitants retiring to rest, but of active proprietors preparing...for the new day...The roadway is already blocked up, and the by-streets are rapidly filling.'\n\nBy dawn, the streets leading into London were regularly filled with carriages, with carts laden with goods, and with long lines of men and women (mostly women), plodding down Piccadilly, along Green Park, on their way to Covent Garden, carrying heavy baskets of fruit on their heads as they walked from the market gardens in Fulham several miles away. More approached Covent Garden from the south, from the market gardens that lined the south-west side of the river.\n\nInterspersed with these suppliers and produce sellers were many more who made their living around and in the markets. The coffee-stall keepers appeared carrying cans of coffee from yokes on their shoulders, the little smudge-pot charcoal fires already lit underneath, winking in the diminishing darkness. Then 'a butcher's light chaise-cart rattled past...with the men huddled in the bottom of the vehicle, behind the driver...dozing as they drove along', followed by 'some tall and stalwart brewer's drayman...(for these men are among the first in the streets), in his dirty, drab, flushing jacket, red night-cap, and leathern leggings'.\n\nThe lithographer George Scharf sketched street traders and market porters in 1841, showing the many different ways they transported their wares.\n\nThese early risers had woken long before daybreak with the aide of various stratagems. Alarm clocks had not yet been invented (wind-up alarm clocks did not appear until 1876), and even clocks were beyond the reach of most workers. In the first three decades of the century, the watch patrolled the streets nightly, dressed in long, drab greatcoats and slouch hats, carrying rattles and calling out the half-hours. For a small fee, these men stopped at houses along their routes, to waken anyone who needed to be up at a specific time. Later this job of knocking up, as it became known, was taken on by the police \u2013 a useful way to earn a little extra cash, as well as an aid to good community relations. As the constables walked their beats, they tapped on the window with a long stick, or banged the knocker as they passed, waiting for an 'All right!' to be shouted from indoors in acknowledgement. The very poor, who could not afford the requisite penny or two a week, paid a halfpenny or so to an equally poor fellow worker who woke his friends on his way home from nightwork.\n\nAmong the first people out on the street each morning were the coffee-stall keepers. Today, eating out is more expensive than cooking at home, but in the nineteenth century the situation was reversed. Most of the working class lived in rooms, not houses. They might have had access to a communal kitchen, but more often they cooked in their own fireplace: to boil a kettle before going to work, leaving the fire to burn when there was no one home, was costly, time-consuming and wasteful. Water was a rare and precious commodity in working-class housing, which did not begin to see piped water (usually just to the basement kitchens) until late in the century. The nearest running water might be a street pump, which functioned for just a few hours a week. Several factors \u2013 the lack of storage space, routine infestations of vermin and being able, because of the cost, to buy food only in tiny quantities \u2013 meant that storing any foodstuff, even tea, overnight was unusual. Workers therefore expected to purchase their breakfast on their way to work.\n\nAfter getting up in the dark and the cold, wrote Thomas Wright, an ex-labouring man, 'the gleam from the hot-coffee stall comes like a guiding star...H ere you get warmth to your hands on the outside of the cup, and for the inner man from the liquid, which you get piping hot, for the proprietors of the stalls are aware that that quality is regarded by their morning customers before strength or sweetness.' These stalls mostly appeared at the edges of the city and in the centre, with fewer in the suburbs: in Camberwell, in the late 1850s, one memoirist says that there were 'street refreshment stalls at night in some localities, but I never saw one'. On the major routes, however, these stalls were everywhere, ranging from the simplest makeshifts to elaborate structures. Some consisted of a board laid over a pair of sawhorses, a can of coffee kept hot by a charcoal burner, and a few plates of bread and butter; if the owner could manage a blanket over a clothes horse to protect a bench from the wind, all the better. Others were more robust. The journalist George Augustus Sala described one Covent Garden stall as 'something between a gipsy's tent and a watchman's box'. At Islington, a regular coffee stall by a pub was erected nightly: out of a hand-barrow came benches, a table and 'a great bright tin boiler with a brass tap', heated by a coke fire, and all enclosed in a cosy canvas tent. A lamp was lit, the table was covered with a cloth and laid with cups, saucers, a loaf and a cake, and in fifteen minutes a snug little booth was ready for customers.\n\nWho the customers were, and which the busy times, varied by location and cost. A cup of coffee and 'two thin' \u2013 two thin pieces of bread and butter \u2013 was a penny in the West End and City; around the docks, where the customers were entirely working class, it was half that. Street sellers of food, walking to the markets to get their supplies for the day from about 3 a.m., were early visitors; later the night-workers heading home crossed with the day-workers, and at working-class stalls there was generally 'some thinly clad, delicate-looking factory boy or girl' standing by hopefully. The 'popular belief among working men', said Wright, is that 'a fellow is never any poorer' for buying something hot for those even worse off than themselves.\n\nThe journalist James Greenwood spent a night with a coffee-stall holder in Islington, watching the customers come and go. The stall was set up at 11.30, just as the tavern near by was closing. In the first hour there were only two paying customers, a night cabman and 'an unfortnight' (unfortunate \u2013 the standard polite term for a prostitute), plus a beggar. Then came a blind boy who sang in pubs and his father, four street-sweepers and three 'tipsy gents'. From 1.30 to 2.30 a.m., a number of men dropped by to sober up; then the 'very worst sort of customers' appeared: those who had nowhere to sleep, and eked out halfpenny cups of coffee by the charcoal fire for as long as they could; others did not even have the halfpence, but were allowed by the soft-hearted stall-keeper to sit by the fire all the same. Between 2.30 and 3.30, three more unfortunates stopped by, and two labourers asking the way to the Uxbridge road: they had, they said, been three days searching for work, and were returning home, having had no luck. One of the unfortunates made the offer: 'pitch into the bread and butter and coffee; I'll pay,' and, the stall-keeper reported, 'I'm proud to say that they used her like honest chaps, eating a tidy lot, certainly, but not half, no, nor a quarter as much' as they obviously wanted to, after which they thanked her politely and refused the 6d she tried to give them. They were followed by a cabman with a drunken passenger. By 3.30 the cattle-drovers began to arrive, filling the space with their dogs, 'which makes it uncomfortable', said the stall-keeper, but he knew that if he remonstrated they would upend his trestle-boards and destroy his livelihood: 'I'm thankful I only have their company two mornings in the week.' From then it was more prostitutes until around five, when the daily workers arrived. From this the stallholder earned around \u00a330 a year for an eight- or nine-hour workday, six days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year: about average for a street seller.\n\nAn hour or so after the workmen set out in the morning, it was the turn of the office workers. Every morning it was the same, a thick black line, stretching from the suburbs into the heart of the City; every evening the black line reversed, dispersing back to its myriad points of origin, as hundreds of thousands of men tramped steadily to and from work, the 'clerk population of Somers and Camden towns, Islington, and Pentonville...pouring into the city, or directing their steps towards Chancery-lane and the Inns of Court. Middle-aged men...plod steadily along...knowing by sight almost everybody they meet or overtake, for they have seen them every morning (Sunday excepted) during the last twenty years, but speaking to no one.' Thus wrote the young journalist Charles Dickens.\n\nThese middle-aged clerks were sober in white neckcloths and black coats, although their neckcloths were often yellow with age, while the black dye of their coats had turned rusty brown. The secret ambition of the clerk Reginald Wilfer in _Our Mutual Friend_ was to be able to afford an entirely new suit of clothes all at once. There were also younger, unmarried clerks, 'dashing young parties who purchase the pea-green, the orange, and the rose-pink gloves; the crimson braces, the kaleidoscopic shirt-studs, the shirts embroidered with dahlias, deaths' heads, racehorses, sun-flowers, and ballet-girls...the shiniest of hats, the knobbiest of sticks'. In _Bleak House_ , when Mr Guppy proposes to Esther, he puts on a new suit, 'a shining hat, lilac-kid gloves, a neckerchief of a variety of colours, a large hot-house flower in his button-hole, and a thick gold ring on his little finger'.\n\nOf whatever type, 'each separate street, pours out its tide of young men into the City. From the east and the west, the north and the south, on it comes...clerks of all ages, clerks of all sizes, clerks from all quarters, walking slowly, walking fast, trotting, running, hurrying'. This implies variety, but in reality these commuters moved in an extraordinarily regimented way. In an age when traffic was not constrained by any regulations \u2013 with no rules about which side of the street to drive on; no one-way streets \u2013 walking was, by contrast, 'reduced to a system', with everyone walking on the right. One worker living south of the river bought the _Morning Star_ every day at a tavern near his house, and 'So orderly was the traffic throughout that route that I could, by keeping to the right, read my paper the whole way' as he walked the three miles to the City.\n\nThe scale made it a sight, but walking was the most common form of locomotion throughout the nineteenth century. By mid-century it was estimated that 200,000 people walked daily to the City; by 1866 that figure had increased to nearly three-quarters of a million. These were numbers worth catering to. By seven, or even six o'clock, depending on the trade, many shops had taken down their shutters. Bakers were among the first to open, supplying servants and children sent to fetch breakfast bread and rolls, as well as the passing lines of walkers, serving them with breakfast on the hoof, just as earlier the labourers had bought theirs from the coffee stalls. The poet Robert Southey early in the century asked a pastry-cook-shop owner why all their windows were kept open, even in the rain. 'She told me, that were she to close it, her receipts would be lessened [by] forty or fifty shillings a day' as commuters reached in to buy a loaf or a bun as they passed \u2013 40s equating to 480 penny loaves, or around 500 customers buying a daily walking breakfast from that one shop alone.\n\nIt was not only the working classes and the clerks who travelled on foot, however. In our time of public and private mass transport, the walkability of London has almost been forgotten. But in the nineteenth century, Londoners walked, without much differentiation between economic groups. In 1833, the children of a middle-class musician living in Kensington walked home from a concert in the City. Two decades later, Leonard Wyon, a prosperous civil servant, and his wife shopped in Regent Street, then walked home to Little Venice. In 1856, the wealthy Maria Cust returned from her honeymoon, walking with her husband from Paddington to Eaton Square. And according to Dickens (in a letter he may have coloured somewhat for comic effect), a child who got lost at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park was found by the police in Hammersmith, 'going round and round the Turnpikes \u2013 which he still supposed to be a part of the Exhibition'. All except the first journey are, to the modern eye, surprisingly short, less than three miles. Even the longest, to Kensington from St Paul's, is only four and a half miles.\n\nPut in this context, the amount of walking done by the characters in Dickens' novels is not as unusual as it appears today. In _Bleak House_ , Peepy, a small child living in Thavies Inn, near Gray's Inn Road, is 'lost for an hour and a half, and brought home from Newgate market', a mile away, having most likely walked through the slum of Saffron Hill. The more prosperous characters in the novel also walk across London, the women alone at night sometimes taking hackneys, but not always even then. The Jarndyce cousins go to the theatre by fly (rented coach) when they are staying in lodgings in Oxford Street, but in the daytime they walk to Holborn, to Westminster Hall and, on 'a sombre day', with 'drops of chilly rain', to Chancery Lane. Mr Tulkinghorn walks from the Dedlocks' house, probably in Mayfair (this is the one place in the novel not given a specific location), to his own chambers in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and even Lady Dedlock follows him there and back on foot. Even at 4 a.m., Esther and Mr Bucket walk from Cursitor Street to Drury Lane, which probably takes them less than a quarter of an hour, but much of their route is through Clare market and Drury Lane slums. The lower-middle-class or working-class characters walk even further afield. Prince Turveydrop, a dancing master, walks from Soho to Kensington; Mr George from Mount Pleasant, in Clerkenwell, over Waterloo Bridge, then to the Westminster Bridge Road; he returns, again on foot, to Leicester Square. What is today even more unexpected is the number of middle-class women walking alone in Dickens' novels. In _Our Mutual Friend_ , Bella Wilfer walks from Holloway to Cavendish Square without comment; people look at her only when she reaches the City, where few women were to be seen on the streets. In _Little Dorrit_ , Amy Dorrit, at this point in the novel wealthy, walks from the Marshalsea prison, south of the river, to Brook Street in the West End. None of these walks is commented on as unusual \u2013 there is no mention that the women concerned tried and failed to find a coach, or that a carriage was not available. Walking was the norm.\n\nMany of those walking long distances then worked twelve-, fourteenor sixteen-hour days, at the end of which they then walked home again. The great journalist of working-class London, Henry Mayhew, noted in passing what he considered 'the ordinary hours' of employment: from six to six. At Murdstone and Grinby's wine warehouse, the eight-year-old David Copperfield works until 8 p.m., walking to and from his lodgings in Camden Town. Many people worked much longer hours. Shifts for drivers of hackney cabs were always long: the shorter shifts lasted eleven or twelve hours, the long shifts from fourteen to sixteen hours, sometimes more. (The horses could work nothing like these hours: two or three horses were needed for a twelve-hour shift.) Even worse were the hours of many omnibus employees: frequently drivers and conductors (known as 'cads', probably from 'cadet', that is, the junior partner of the team) worked twenty hours at a stretch, beginning at 4 a.m. and ending at midnight, with an hour and a half off during that time. The industry average, however, was fifteen hours: 7 a.m. to midnight, with seven minutes for dinner, and ten minutes between journeys at the termini.\n\nShop assistants worked equally long hours. One linen draper told his fellows at the Metropolitan Drapers' Association that he had started to close his shop at 7 p.m. instead of 10 \u2013 thus working an eleven-hour day \u2013 and had found it saved money: 'so cheerful and assiduous' were the staff made by these short hours that he could manage with fewer employees. Henry Vizetelly, later a publisher, worked his apprenticeship as a wood-engraver, walking ten miles daily from Brixton to Judd Street in Bloomsbury and back, leaving his lodgings at about six and arriving home again around ten. And, he pointed out in his memoirs, he was lucky: City hours were longer. The description of the Cheeryble brothers' City firm in _Nicholas Nickleby_ accords with his recollection. Their manager opens up the office six days a week at 9 a.m. and locks up again after the last employee goes home at 10.30 p.m., 'except on Foreign Post nights', when the letters abroad go late, to catch the last post; then the office closes at 12.20 a.m. The Cheeryble employees thus work an eighty-five-hour week. Yet their business is presented to the reader as the epitome of benevolence and good employment practices.\n\n#### 2.\n\n#### ON THE ROAD\n\nWhen Nancy decides to betray Fagin and Bill Sikes, so that Oliver Twist can be rescued to live a better \u2013 a middle-class \u2013 life, she rushes from Bill Sikes's room in Bethnal Green, in the east of London. It is a quarter to ten at night, yet as 'She tore along the narrow pavement' she found herself 'elbowing the passengers from side to side; and darting almost under the horses' heads, cross[ing] crowded streets, where clusters of persons were eagerly watching their opportunity to do the like'. It is only when she reaches the West End that the streets become less crowded, and even then there are plenty of people about who turn to watch this frantic woman running along.\n\nThat the London streets were always busy, always teeming with humanity, is a regular feature of travellers' accounts of the city. In 1852, Max Schlesinger, a German journalist who spent much of his life in London, said 'there is not a single hour in the four and twenty' when the main streets were empty. When Charlotte and Anne Bront\u00eb had planned their first visit to London 'in the quiet of Haworth Parsonage', they had expected to walk from their lodgings at the Chapter Coffee House in Paternoster Row, near St Paul's, to their publisher in Cornhill, a few hundred yards away. But once in London, 'they became so dismayed by the crowded streets, and the impeded crossings, that they stood still repeatedly, in complete despair', the journey taking them the best part of an hour. Locals were as overwhelmed as strangers. Henry Mayhew, born and bred in London, compared the sound of the city to the 'awful magnificence of the great Torrent of Niagara...if the roar of the precipitated waters bewilders and affrights the mind, assuredly the riot and tumult of the traffic of London at once stun and terrify'. It was that continuous sound that struck most people \u2013 the 'uninterrupted and crashing roar'.\n\nThis roar made it difficult, sometimes impossible, to hear, often indoors as well as out of doors. An American clergyman in the early 1820s attended a service at St Clement Danes, sitting near the pulpit, but even so found the sermon inaudible because 'The church...is most unfortunately situated for hearing, being placed in the middle of the Strand.' Suburban householders suffered too. In 1834, Jane Carlyle, wife of the historian Thomas Carlyle, wrote from her new home, in a side street in Chelsea: 'I...have an everlasting sound in my ears, of men, women, children, omnibuses, carriages, glass coaches, street coaches, waggons, carts, dog-carts, steeple bells, door bells.' The noise was, if anything, worse in a coach. When the characters in Dickens' novels want to have an important conversation, they 'stop...the driver...that we might the better hear each other'.\n\nDickens commented on the noise directly from time to time, but more often it runs under the surface of his novels. Again and again when his characters walk through the city, they stop and turn onto side streets to talk. In particular, this noise is notable when they are near Holborn. In this heart of legal London, and the heart of Dickens-land, they frequently veer off into one of the Inns of Court as a refuge from the sound. The Inns of Court \u2013 Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, and Inner and Middle Temple \u2013 were where barristers trained, lived and practised. Traditionally, each Inn comprised a cluster of buildings, with a dining hall, a chapel or church, a library and chambers, laid out around private gardens, and each represented a legal society, as did the Inns of Chancery \u2013 Furnival's Inn, Lyon's Inn, Clement's, Thavies', Barnard's, Staple's, Symond's, Clifford's and New Inn \u2013 for solicitors. (Only the Inns of Court survive as functioning entities today, although a small section of Staple's Inn still stands.) The importance of the Inns had declined as training and accreditation was taken over by the Law Society from 1825, and so many of their chambers were let out in lodgings. These buildings were densely populated by Dickens' fictional characters, as well as by Dickens himself, who lived for nearly four years in Furnival's Inn. (The massive late-Victorian Prudential Building stands on the site in Holborn today.)\n\nOn Holborn, one of the largest east\u2013west routes, the Inns were oases of quiet. After leaving Ellis and Blackmore, Dickens began work as a shorthand parliamentary reporter. For this he took a room in Doctors' Commons, off St Paul's Churchyard, where 'Before we had taken many paces down the street...the noise of the city seemed to melt, as if by magic, into a softened distance.' This magicking away of the clamour was a repeated refrain in his works. In the early 1840s, in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , Tom Pinch passes 'from the roar and rattle of the streets into the quiet court-yards of the Temple'. In the 1860s, in _Our Mutual Friend_ , Mr Boffin is accosted by Mr Rokesmith outside the Temple: 'Would you object to turn aside into this place \u2013 I think it is called Clifford's Inn \u2013 where we can hear one another better than in the roaring street?' And in Dickens' final work, _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ , left unfinished at his death in 1870, Staple's Inn 'is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots'.\n\nThe roar of the city was not a single noise, but was made up of a multiplicity of noises. In 1807, Robert Southey published a series of letters in the voice of a visiting Spanish nobleman, who on his arrival in the capital wonders that a watchman, calling loudly, goes past his house every half-hour the whole night long: 'A strange custom this, to pay men for telling them what the weather is every hour during the night, till they get so accustomed to the noise, that they sleep on and cannot hear what is said.' But a single voice was not going to make much difference to the tumult of London, with its street sellers, sweeps and dustmen, its street musicians, its 'hundred churches...chim[ing] the hour...in a hundred different tones'. And each area created its own industrial sounds as well. At the docks, 'the clicking of the capstan-palls, the chains of the cranes, loosed of their weight, rattle as they fly up again; the ropes splash in the water; some captain shouts his orders through his hands; a goat bleats from a ship...and empty casks roll along the stones with a hollow drum-like sound'. Behind everything lay 'the rumbling of the wagons and carts in the street...and the panting and throbbing of the passing river steamers...together with the shrill scream of the railway whistle'. For it was, above all, transport that created noise, 'the steady flow' that 'rises and falls, swells and sinks, but never ceases day nor night'.\n\nThis was no exaggeration. In 1816, a French visitor, Louis Simond, wrote that between six and eight in the evenings the volume of the carriages shook the pavements and even the houses, worsening after ten, when 'a sort of uniform grinding and shaking, like...a great mill with fifty pair of stones' began, continuing until after midnight, when it finally faded before beginning again with the dawn. The main ingredient in the din was traffic, and the reason was basic mechanics. One factor was the horses' hooves and the iron wheels on granite paving stones; another was 'the boxes of the wheels striking the arms of the axeltrees' of the carts and carriages. The chief problem was that for much of the century the majority of streets were either paved poorly or not at all.\n\nRetrospectively, we assume that one of two surfaces were used: cobblestones, a word rarely used at the time, or macadam. But there was in fact a plethora of choices: asphalt, granite setts (the contemporary term for cobblestones), flint and gravel, wood, even cast iron were all tried out. The aim was to produce a surface that horses did not slip on, that was not too hard on their legs at a trot, that was easily cleaned and that did not turn into a swamp in the rain \u2013 yet each set of circumstances required a different solution.\n\nMacadam began to be laid in the 1820s, and the first macadamized road in London was in St James's Square, one of the most exclusive locations of the aristocratic West End. The surface then spread to St George's parish, around Hanover Square, equally exclusive, before Piccadilly too was macadamized. Officially, macadam was a mix of tiny (less than two-inch) granite stones, spread over a prepared surface and then rammed home by 'huge iron or stone cylinders painfully hauled by ten or a dozen big navvies' or labourers (a name originally given to the men, the 'navigators', who dug the canals), after which 'Stone blocks or sets were driven home by files of men wielding great wooden rammers which they lifted and let fall in unison.'\n\nWhen the surface was properly laid, the roads were good. The problems came when corners were cut. Some contractors used bigger stones, which failed to cohere into the necessary smooth surface. Some created an initially smooth surface by placing sand and gravel on top of the stones, which quickly deteriorated under traffic and poor weather. Others failed to ram or roll the foundations adequately, leaving the traffic to press the stones sideways, creating ruts and forcing the horses to work harder to pull their loads on the unstable surfaces. And even on well-laid macadam, quantities of surface dirt formed when the streets were warmed by the sun and the friction of traffic: 'the mud becomes sticky, the carriage wheels draw the stones out, and the road becomes broken up.' When it rained, the 'macadamized streets, mixed into a sickening decoction, formed vast quagmires' of a glutinous mud known as 'licky'. (Less often, but no less importantly, the licky streets provided ammunition for 'the mob to revenge themselves on the police' in times of unrest.)\n\nGranite roads were the main competition to macadam. In the 1820s, Thomas Telford, the engineer, recommended that the major arteries be paved with granite setts between eleven and thirteen inches long, half as wide and nine inches deep, set tight over a level of ballast. But again, what was recommended and what was actually done were different things: many contractors used poorly shaped stones and filled in the gaps with mud, which soon left an irregular surface on which horses routinely stumbled and fell; others used stones only a quarter of the recommended size, while less important streets were paved with the offcuts, or the discarded, worn stones from the main streets. Even when the setts were in good condition, granite was difficult for horses, being extremely slippery; grit had to be spread for their hooves to grip, but in its turn grit reproduced all the problems of macadamized surfaces.\n\nOn London Bridge, remembered the engineer Alfred Rosling Bennett of his childhood in the 1850s, it was necessary to have navvies periodically hammer away at the road with mallets and chisels, to roughen the surface for the horses. In snow even this was not enough and, to gain purchase on the roads, riding horses had 'Four sound large-headed nails' driven into their hooves, while wagon- and carriage-horses had their hooves 'calk[ed] at heel and toe'. (Another danger from the macadam and granite roads apparently occurred only in sensationalist fiction. Wilkie Collins, Dickens' younger contemporary and friend, killed off one of his characters in his first novel, _Basil_ (1852), using the new street surface: 'As I dug my feet into the ground to steady myself, I heard the crunching of stones \u2013 the road had been newly mended with granite. Instantly, a savage purpose goaded into fury the deadly resolution by which I was possessed. I shifted my hold to the back of his neck, and the collar of his coat; and hurled him, with the whole impetus of the raging strength that possessed me, face downwards, on to the stones.' The man's body is later found, having 'fallen on a part of the road which had been recently macadamised; and his face, we are informed, is frightfully mutilated by contact with the granite'.)\n\nWooden road-surfacing seemed to solve many of the more mundane problems. Blocks were dowelled together in factories and then assembled on site like parquet, which made them quick to lay and ensured a uniform quality. The surfaces were grooved, which in dry weather gave the horses a good grip, but the main selling point of wood was that it muffled the noise of the hooves and the wheels. Residents and businesses in busy parts of the city clamoured to have their streets resurfaced in wood, and parts of Holborn, Regent Street and Oxford Street were all wood paved by the early 1840s: 'The shopkeepers state that they can now hear and speak to their customers,' even, some noted in wonder, when their windows were open.\n\nRoad surfacing in 1838 and 1842: _top_ , the men are paving a road with granite setts; _above_ , wooden paving is being assembled on site.\n\nWithin a year, doubts were widespread. The blocks degenerated with fatal speed: three years was the average. By 1843, the City magistrates had already asked for a police report on the number of accidents on one stretch of wooden road in the City, and discovered that nineteen horses had fallen there in four days. Frost also made wooden roads impassable for horses, and furthermore wood could not be used at all on hilly streets. By 1846, wood pavements were being replaced by granite across London; even Cheapside, where the shopkeepers and residents had petitioned to have wood put down just four years earlier, had had to be resurfaced. Soon only a few locations where noise abatement was essential were still wood paved: outside the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey, and a few churches and public buildings. (Nevertheless, there was a revival in wood paving post-1870, with the surface surviving on some roads into the twentieth century.)\n\nWhile many locals complained about the roads, visitors were generally impressed. In the early 1830s, a New Yorker thought the London streets were 'incomparably superior' to those of Paris, 'being broad, dry, clean, and extremely well paved'. The guidebooks proudly echoed this, one stating flatly that 'All the streets in London are paved with great regularity.' The London of tourists and guidebooks, however, bore little relation to most of the metropolis. New Oxford Street, the continuation of Oxford Street that had been driven through the slum of St Giles to create a major artery between the West End and Holborn, was opened to traffic in 1846; yet it was not until 1849 that it 'is [now] being paved'. If a main road could be considered finished three years before it was paved, the slums, the small courts, alleys and passageways of the poor districts were certainly not paved 'with great regularity', or even paved at all.\n\nIn 1848, Hector Gavin, surgeon to the Bethnal Green Workhouse and a lecturer in public hygiene, drew up an alley-by-alley record of the sanitary failings of Bethnal Green. He listed 397 streets in the parish, of which 40 per cent were paved: a long way from 'all'. This was true of the more prosperous districts too, not only of the slums. One middle-class writer lived 'on the western outskirts' of London, 'where they were building on what had been still largely pleasant fields' around mid-century. Five minutes from his house was a new road connecting two main roads where both roads and pavements were 'of coarse gravel', that is, unpaved. This type of half-built suburban development was common. In Anthony Trollope's 1860 novel, _Castle Richmond_ , he describes 'a street of small new tenements, built, as yet, only on one side of the way, with the pavement only one third finished, and the stones in the road as yet unbroken and untrodden. Of such streets there are thousands now round London...in every suburb.'\n\nTrollope uses 'pavement' to mean the road, not the area designated for pedestrians. By the time he was writing, the segregation of the two areas was complete, but it was a relatively recent innovation. In 1800, a memoirist recalled how in the previous century 'the broad flagging on each side of the streets was not universally adopted, and stone posts were in fashion to prevent the annoyance of the carriages.' Within a decade Louis Simond, freshly arrived from America, noticed 'The elevated pavement on each side of the streets full of walkers', keeping them 'out of the reach of carriages', the phrasing suggesting that the idea was new to him. The reports of other visitors agree that at this early stage segregated spaces for pedestrians may have been unusual even in London. In 1824, the American clergyman Nathaniel Wheaton described coaches pulling up 'in the throng of foot passengers', the drivers giving warning to pedestrians by an 'accustomed _heigh!_ in a tone so sharp, as to put the most heedless on their guard'. Even in 1835 a guidebook still felt the need to explain to its readers that streets were 'divided into a carriage-way and a foot-path...finished with a kirb [sic] raised a few inches above the carriage-way'. Separate provision for pedestrians arrived fully only with macadam. Earlier paving methods had created kennels, or gutters, down the centre of each street, leaving the dry areas on either side to be used by all. Macadam roads were impermeable, and were therefore built with a camber from the centre for the rainwater to run off into gutters on either side, creating, inadvertently, borders that divided those mounted from those on foot. The terminology was not yet set, however: 'pavement' frequently meant the road, that is, the paved area, while 'footpath' indicated the flagstoned section given over to pedestrians. Dickens used 'pavement' to mean sometimes one, sometimes the other, throughout his life.\n\nBy mid-century, the intensity of traffic had made pedestrian areas necessary in the busiest streets. These were demarcated by posts, or, as one visitor understood them, 'a circle of upright cannon, where a person can take refuge'. Max Schlesinger gave them a more modern name, visualizing them as 'an island of the streets'. The watery metaphor appealed to many: a visitor from Salem, Massachusetts, compared the view from the top of a bus along Fleet Street or the Strand to 'the breaking up of one of our great rivers in the spring by some sudden flood...here moving in a swift torrent, there circling in some rapid eddy, and presenting only a picture of indescribable confusion, and yet all hastening on, with a steady and certain progress'.\n\nAt the beginning of the century, the land on the northern edge of the city, still mostly tenanted by market gardeners, was eyed by its owner, the Crown, as ripe for redevelopment. In order to make this viable it was essential, wrote John Fordyce, the Crown surveyor, to build a road to connect the new suburb with the fashionable West End. 'Distance is best computed by time,' he advised, 'and if means could be found to lessen the time of going from Marybone [sic] to the Houses of Parliament, the value of the ground for building would be thereby proportionately increased.' In London distance was more a matter of traffic than of horsepower, for the city's streets were unbearably congested. In _Little Dorrit_ , set in the 1820s, Mr Dorrit's coachman travels from the City to the West End not in a direct line \u2013 which would have taken him along Fleet Street and the Strand, two of the most heavily used streets in London \u2013 but instead by crossing the river at London Bridge, driving along the south bank to Waterloo, and recrossing the river: the trip is nearly double the distance, but still faster.\n\nMany factors contributed to the traffic problem. From 1830 to 1850, the population of London grew by nearly 1 million. The number of stagecoaches increased by 50 per cent, while the number of hackney carriages more than doubled. The arrival of the railways from the 1840s further increased road usage, as goods, instead of being manufactured and sold in one place, now underwent different manufacturing stages in different locations, being transported by rail but beginning and ending their journeys by cart. One of the biggest \u2013 and most intractable \u2013 causes of traffic obstructions was an official one: the toll gates. In the eighteenth century, many of Britain's main roads had been built by groups of businessmen who advanced the capital to build the roads; in return for their investment, they were permitted by Parliament to levy tolls on all road users. The main arteries in and out of London that Dickens knew as a young man were all toll roads, with turnpike gates blocking access to the west in Knightsbridge, at Hyde Park Corner; in Kensington, at the corner of the Earls Court Road; at Marble Arch, at Oxford Street; and in Notting Hill (the toll was the 'Gate' in Notting Hill Gate, just as it was the 'bar' in Temple Bar). On the northern side of the city there was one at King's Cross; on the eastern side, at the City Road near Old Street, and at Shoreditch, in the Commercial Road. On the south side of London there were three turnpike gates in the Old Kent Road; another at the Obelisk at the Surrey Theatre, where Lambeth Road and St George's Road meet; with another at Kennington Church, then Kennington Gate.\n\nThese toll gates were substantial blockages. The one at Old Brompton, by the Gloucester Road, consisted of a 'house-shed on one side of the road, a pillar on the other', with a heavy pole running between them. In the 1820s, the Oxford Street turnpike, then still known as the Tyburn turnpike, was sited on the corner of Oxford Street and the Edgware Road where the gallows stood until 1783, at what is now the north-east corner of Hyde Park. At right angles to the Tyburn gate was another one that closed off the Edgware Road, and one man operated both, standing in the centre between the two, dressed in a white apron 'with pockets in the front of it, one for halfpence and one for tickets'.\n\nThe ticket was important. One payment gave each vehicle access through that gate for twenty-four hours (except for vehicles carrying goods for sale, in which case every individual load required a fresh toll to be paid). As midnight struck, the next day's ticket came into operation, and everyone had to pay again. The keepers slept in little lodges built beside each bar and were always on duty, required to rise at shouts of 'Gate, gate!' Many couldn't be bothered and left the bar open all night. Others kept late-night travellers, who had already paid that day, waiting at the gate until midnight, so that they could be charged again, the toll keeper skimming off some of the day's proceeds. This was so common that one man at least took his revenge. He paid again, then walked his horse up and down the road near by until he judged the keeper had gone back to sleep. At this point he returned, shouting 'Gate!' to rouse the keeper, before showing his new ticket. Then he idled up and down on the other side of the gate once more, before returning to rouse the keeper. This procedure was repeated again and again until the keeper admitted defeat and returned the money.\n\nFrom the 1830s, turnstiles began to be fitted with clockwork mechanisms, inaccessible to the keepers, recording how many times the gate was lifted. (According to Dickens, the machine had been invented by the prop-master of the Drury Lane theatre.) Other toll keepers, long after the mechanisms were the norm, continued to cheat somehow. One told Dickens in the 1850s that, when poor people asked to cross but didn't have the requisite penny, 'If they are really tired and poor we give 'em [a penny ourselves] and let 'em through. Other people will leave things \u2013 pocket handkerchiefs mostly. I _have_ taken cravats and gloves, pocket knives, toothpicks, studs, shirt pins, rings (generally from young men, early in the morning), but handkerchiefs is the general thing.' It is unclear whether the goods were left as a pledge against returning with the penny, or whether this was an informal system of pawning: the men who had lost all their money gambling handed over their handkerchiefs, which the toll keepers then pawned, paying the penny toll from the proceeds and keeping the rest themselves.\n\nIf there were annoyances and delays in passing through just one gate, the system became cumbersome and ferociously expensive when undertaking a drive of any distance:\n\nA man...starts from Bishopsgate Street for Kilburn. The day is cold and rainy...H e has to pull up in the middle of the street in Shoreditch, and pay a toll; \u2013 he means to return, therefore he takes a ticket, letter A. On reaching Shoreditch Church, he turns into the Curtain-road, pulls up again, drags off his wet glove with his teeth, his other hand being fully occupied in holding up the reins and the whip; pays again; gets another ticket, number 482; drags on his glove; buttons up his coats, and rattles away into Old-Street-road; another gate, more pulling and poking, and unbuttoning and squeezing. He pays, and takes another ticket, letter L...he reaches Goswell-Street-road; here he performs all the ceremonies...a fourth time, and gets a fourth ticket, 732, which is to clear him through the gates in the New-road, as far as the bottom of Pentonville; \u2013 arrived there, he performs one more of the same evolutions, and procures a fifth ticket, letter X, which...is to carry him clear to the Paddingtonroad...[He] reaches Paddington Gate, where he pays afresh, and obtains a ticket, 691, with which he proceeds swimmingly until stopped again at Kilburn...where he pays, for the seventh time, and where he obtains a seventh ticket, letter G.\n\nIf he were planning to return, the driver had not only to keep all these tickets, but to find the right one to present at each gate in turn. In _Oliver Twist_ , when Noah Claypole is disguised as a waggoner by Fagin, in addition to the usual smock and the leggings, he is given 'a felt hat well garnished with turnpike tickets' for that final touch of verisimilitude.\n\nToll gates therefore constricted trade as well as slowing down traffic, and in 1829 an Act was passed to transfer the costs of upkeep from the turnpike trusts to the local parishes. On 1 January 1830, a few (very few) turnpikes were abolished: Oxford Street, Edgware Road, the New Road, Old Street and Gray's Inn Lane all became toll free. By the 1850s, there was one toll gate left in Westminster and none in the City. But most of the surrounding areas, and the roads leading into and out of London, kept theirs: there were 178 toll bars charging between 1d and 2s 6d in the surrounding suburbs and on the bridges. This cost had to be taken into account by traders, individual sellers and big companies alike, and had to be included even in the cost of a night's entertainment. One of the reasons Vauxhall pleasure gardens declined in popularity was the expense: not just the 2s 6d for admission, nor even the price of a cab to get there, but the cost of 'the bridge-toll and a turnpike \u2013 together ninepence'. Yet the campaign to abolish all the turnpikes had still not achieved its goal. A deputation of MPs noted tartly that a Select Committee had recommended that the number of gates be reduced; instead it had increased, from 70 to 117 around London. '(Laughter.)' The prime minister, Palmerston, as is the way of all politicians, ordered another inquiry. In 1857, 6,000 people turned out at a 'Great Open-air Demonstration' to object to the toll that was being imposed on the bridge about to open between Chelsea and Battersea. The toll, they protested, would prevent the working classes having free access to Battersea Park \u2013 a park that had recently been created at public expense precisely to provide a recreation space for the people who were suddenly being priced out of it. The government ministers whipped into action: they set up another committee. It was not until 1864 that the last eighty-one toll gates within fifty miles of London on the Middlesex (northern) side of the river were abolished.\n\nThe Kennington turnpike gate, just before it was abolished in 1865, at the corner of Brixton Road ( _left_ ) and Clapham Road ( _right_ ). The left-hand gate has been propped open, and the turnpike keeper may be standing in the foreground.\n\nFour months later, Southwark Bridge, underwritten by the City of London, began an experiment in going toll free. This was the bridge that in _Little Dorrit_ is called the 'Iron Bridge'. Little Dorrit prefers it to London Bridge, precisely because the penny toll ensures that it is quieter, while Arthur Clennam uses it when he finds 'The crowd in the street jostling the crowd in his mind'. Dickens had a fondness for the old toll bridges: when night walking, he liked to go to Waterloo Bridge 'to have a halfpenny worth of excuse for saying \"Good-night\" to the toll-keeper...his brisk wakefulness was excellent company when he rattled the change of halfpence down upon that metal table of his, like a man who defied the night'.\n\nThe toll gates were a major traffic obstacle, but not the only one. For much of the century there were, legally, no rules for traffic in most streets. In the 1840s, buses were equipped with two straps that ran along the roof and ended in two rings hooked to the driver's arms. When passengers wanted to get down on the left side of the road, they pulled the left strap, for the right, the right strap, and the buses veered across the roads to stop as requested. Some streets had informal traffic arrangements. The newsagents, booksellers and publishers who comprised most of the shopkeepers in Paternoster Row mailed out their new magazines and books on a set day each month \u2013 'Magazine Day' \u2013 and on that day, 'the carts and vehicles...enter the Row from the western end, and draw up with horses' heads towards Cheapside'. Even there, from time to time a carter 'hired for the single job, and ignorant of the etiquette...will obstinately persist in crushing his way on the contrary direction'. It was 'etiquette', not law, that made Paternoster Row into a one-way system one day a month. In 1852, the police first issued a notice that, because of severe traffic problems at Marble Arch, on the northeast side of Hyde Park, 'Metropolitan stage-carriages are to keep to the left, or proper side, according to the direction in which they are going, and must set down their company on that side. No metropolitan stage-carriage, can be allowed to cross the street or road to take up or set down passengers.' The word 'proper' still suggested etiquette, but the involvement of the police was new: the press carried furious debates on this intrusion into what had up to now been an entirely private matter.\n\nAs late as 1860, traffic was still segregated in a variety of ways, different for each road, with no overarching rules. When the new Westminster Bridge opened in 1860, 'Light vehicles are to cross the bridge each way, on the western side; omnibuses, waggons, &., on the two tramways, on the eastern side', while the old bridge was reserved for 'foot-passengers, saddle horses, trucks [hand-carts], &c'. There was still no separation for traffic moving in opposite directions. (It is interesting to see that riding horses were categorized with pedestrians, not with wheeled vehicles.) In 1868, a lamp was erected near Parliament Square that 'will usually present to view a green light, which will serve to foot passengers by way of caution, and at the same time remind drivers of vehicles and equestrians that they ought at this point to slacken their speed': a proto-traffic light. (It exploded and wounded a policeman, which put an end to that experiment for the time being; a plaque marks the spot.) The following year the police first took on the duty of directing traffic, even though the public continued to query whether they had the legal authority to enforce drivers to act in certain ways. The author of an 1871 treatise on how to improve traffic referred to the 'rule of the road', where vehicles were expected to stay 'as close to the \" _near_ side\" as possible', but then went on to say that no one actually complied: traffic converged naturally on the best part of the road, the central line. In some countries, he added, it was part of the duty of the police 'to chastise any driver they might see transgressing, or fine him', but in England there would be 'objections...against such power being given to the police'.\n\nThe nature of horse transport meant that some slowdowns were inevitable. The logistics of horses and carts required endless patience. Even important streets, such as Bucklersbury in the City, were too narrow for many carts to be able to turn, and their horses had to back out after making deliveries. Railway vans, transporting goods to and from stations, weighed two tons, their loads another thirteen; brewers' vans carried twenty-five barrels of beer weighing a total of five tons; the carts that watered the streets held tanks of water weighing just under two tons. Manoeuvring these great weights, and the large teams of horses needed to pull them, required time as well as skill, as did the ability to handle a number of animals. Brewers habitually used three enormous dray horses harnessed abreast, while other carters with heavy loads might use six harnessed in line one in front of the other. Extraordinary events required even more: in 1842, the granite for Nelson's Column was shipped by water to Westminster and was then transported up to Trafalgar Square in a van pulled by twenty-two horses. Even when not conveying these vast loads, drivers of heavily laden carts often needed to harness an extra horse to deal with London's many hills. Some bus and haulage companies kept additional horses at notoriously steep spots, such as Ludgate Hill, the precipitous side of the Fleet Valley. But otherwise individuals went to the aid of their fellow drivers on an ad hoc basis. A carter seeing another carter in difficulty would stop, unharness one or two of his horses and lend them to the passing stranger, who yoked up the animals to his cart, then stopped at the top of the hill to unharness them and return them to their owner, who was presumably blocking traffic while he waited. Tolls and turnpikes caused more delays \u2013 particularly where goods for sale were brought into the city, as their tolls were calculated by weight, and carts had to stop at each weighing machine.\n\nRoad layouts were also a major cause of delays, especially as the roads themselves were narrow. Temple Bar, that divider between the West End and the City, was just over twenty feet across, while almost all carriages were more than six feet wide, and carts often much more. In other streets, centuries of building accretions did not help. Until the early 1840s, the Half-way House stood in the middle of Kensington Road, the main route into London from the west, narrowing it to two alleys on either side, while Middle Row in Holborn was just that: a double-row sixty yards long of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses occupying the middle of the street. (Dr Johnson was said to have lodged there briefly in 1748.) This row of shops, lawyers' offices and pubs narrowed one of London's busiest roads at the junction of Gray's Inn Lane (now Gray's Inn Road) to just ten yards. The caption to an 1820s engraving of Holborn at Middle Row reads, 'The part here exhibited is perhaps the widest and best of the whole line of street.' One can imagine what the rest of it looked like. Middle Row was demolished only in 1867, widening the street to nearly twenty-five yards.\n\nThe main problem for traffic, however, was a historic one. London had developed on an east\u2013west axis, following the river, with just three main routes: one that ran from Pall Mall via the Strand and Fleet Street to St Paul's; one from Oxford Street along High Holborn; and the New Road (now the Euston Road). Yet none ran clear and straight. Along the Holborn route, the slum of St Giles necessitated a detour before New Oxford Street was opened at the end of the 1840s. A few hundred yards further on lay the obstacle of Middle Row, and 500 yards beyond that was the bottleneck of the Fleet Valley, whose steep slopes slowed traffic until Holborn Viaduct was built across it in 1869. The Strand had its own problems: the western end, until Trafalgar Square was developed in the 1830s, was a maze of small courts and lanes, while at its eastern end Temple Bar slowed traffic to a crawl, as did the street narrowing at Ludgate Hill. It must be remembered that these were the good, wide, east\u2013west routes. North\u2013south routes could not be described as bad, because they didn't exist. Regent Street opened in sections from 1820, and the development known as the West Strand Improvements began to widen St Martin's Lane and clear a north\u2013south route at what would become Trafalgar Square. But otherwise there was no Charing Cross Road nor Shaftesbury Avenue (both of which had to wait until the end of the century); there was no single route through Bloomsbury, as the private estate of the Duke of Bedford was still being developed; there was no Kingsway (which was built in the twentieth century); and what is today the Aldwych was until the twentieth century a warren of medieval lanes, many housing a thriving pornography industry.\n\nPlans for improvements were made. And remade. And then remade again. The Fleet market was cleared away in 1826 to prepare the ground for what would ultimately become the Farringdon Road; the Fleet prison too was pulled down; but still nothing happened. A decade later only one section, from Ludgate Circus to Holborn Viaduct, had been constructed. Similarly, in 1864 the _Illustrated London News_ mourned that, after decades of complaints, narrow little Park Lane still had not been widened: 'The discovery of a practicable north-west passage from Piccadilly to Paddington is an object quite as important as that north-west passage from Baffin's Bay to Behring's [sic] Strait...The painful strangulation of metropolitan traffic in the small neck of this unhappy street...is one of the most absurd sights that a Londoner can show to his country cousins.' Even the river blocked the north\u2013south routes: the tolls on Southwark and Waterloo Bridges ensured that the three toll-free bridges \u2013 London, Blackfriars and Westminster \u2013 were permanently blocked by traffic.\n\nAlmost any state or society occasion caused gridlock. As early as the 1820s, when the king held a drawing room \u2013 a regular event at which he received the upper classes in a quasi-social setting \u2013 carriages were routinely stuck in a solid line from Cavendish Square north of Oxford Street, all the way down St James's to Buckingham Palace, a mile and a half away. 'The scene was amusing enough' to one passer-by, looking in at the open carriage windows and discovering that the elaborately dressed courtiers were 'devouring biscuits', having come prepared for what was then known as a 'traffic-lock' of several hours' duration.\n\nEveryday traffic was every bit as bad. One tourist reported a lock made up of a number of display advertising vehicles (see pp. 246\u20137), a bus, hackney coaches, donkey carts, and a cat's-meat man (who sold horsemeat for household pets from a handcart), whose dogs got caught up in the chaos. All was in an uproar until a policeman came along, who 'very quietly took the pony by the head, and drew pony, gig, and gentleman high and dry upon the side-walk. He then caused our omnibus to advance to the left, and made room for a clamorous drayman to pass', who did so with a glare at the bus and a shake of his whip. Dickens was dubious about such actions, maintaining that policemen rarely did anything except add to the confusion, 'rush[ing] about, and seiz[ing] hold of horses' bridles, and back[ing] them into shop-windows'.\n\nWorse than these situations were the locks caused by accidents, usually a fallen horse. Max Schlesinger watched the combined efforts of two policemen, 'a _posse_ of idle cabmen and sporting amateurs, and a couple of ragged urchins' needed to get one horse back on its feet. Frequently the fallen horse was beyond help, and licensed slaughterhouses kept carts ready to dash out, deliver the _coup de gr\u00e2ce_ and remove the animal's body. People, too, were often badly injured, or killed, in these locks and on the streets more generally: between three and four deaths a week was average. More commonly, though, Schlesinger observed, 'Some madcap of a boy attempts the perilous passage from one side of the street to the other; he jumps over carts, creeps under the bellies of horses, and, in spite of the manifold dangers...gains the opposite pavements.' It took a foreigner to notice this, for hundreds of boys earned their livings by spending hours every day actually in the streets: the crossing-sweepers.\n\nOne of Dickens' most compelling characters is Jo, the crossing-sweeper in _Bleak House_ , who lives in a fictional slum called Tom-all-Alone's, which has been variously sited. An accompanying illustration shows the Wren church of St Andrew's, Holborn (destroyed in 1941 in the Blitz); but there are suggestions in the novel itself that it might be located in the slum behind Drury Lane, or even in St Giles. These seem to be more likely, as Jo eats his breakfast on the steps of the nearby Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts before taking up his post at his crossing 'among the mud and wheels, the horses, whips, and umbrellas'.\n\nJo and his kind were necessary. In the rain even a major artery 'resembled a by-street in Venice, with a canal of mud...flowing through it. And as often as [the crossing-sweeper] swept a passage, the bulwarks of mud rolled slowly over it again until they met.' The crossing-sweepers were performing an essential service, confining the mud to the sides of the roads, clearing away the dung, the refuse and the licky mac, making a central route for people to cross. All day, every day, this was the task of the old, the infirm and the young, all coatless, hatless and barefoot. Most busy corners had a regular sweeper, who held his position as of right; he was known by sight and even by name to many who passed daily, as the mysterious Nemo in _Bleak House_ knows Jo. Residents relied on their sweeper to run errands and do small chores, and in turn gave him cast-off clothes or food. There were also morning-sweepers who stood at the dirtiest sections of the main roads, sometimes half a dozen or more over a mile, to sweep for the benefit of the rows of clerks walking into work, enabling them to arrive at their offices with clean boots and trousers. By ten o'clock the morning-sweepers had dispersed, going to other jobs. Sweepers were often approved by the police, either outright \u2013 sometimes sweepers checked at the local stations before they took up a pitch \u2013 or if the local beat-constable saw a sweeper was honest and helpful, he made sure that he kept his pitch, seeing off rivals for a good corner. Some large companies paid a boy or elderly man to act as their own sweeper, both to ensure that their clerks arrived looking respectable as well as to provide the same service for their customers.\n\nApart from these individuals, there were also civic attempts to keep the roads clean. A Parliamentary Select Committee in the 1840s recorded that three cartloads of 'dirt', almost all of it animal manure, were swept up daily between Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus alone \u2013 20,000 tons of dung annually in less than half a mile. In addition to this, every day more refuse was cleared, most of which had fallen from the open carts constantly trundling by: coal dust, ash, sand, grit, vegetable matter, all ground to dust by the horses' hooves and the carts' iron wheels. In wet weather, it was shovelled to the sides of the roads before being loaded on to carts by scavengers employed by the parishes, with the busiest, most traffic-laden streets cleared first, before the shops opened, when traffic made the task more difficult. Dustmen also appeared on every street, ringing a bell to warn householders to close their windows as they drew near. Traditionally they wore fantail hats, which resembled American baseball caps worn backwards, with a greatly enlarged leather or cloth bill, the back flap protecting their necks and shoulders. Wearing short white jackets and, early in the century, brown breeches or, later, like Sloppy in _Our Mutual Friend_ , red or brown cotton trousers, they carried huge wicker baskets and a ladder that allowed them to climb up the side of their carts and deposit their loads. (See Plate 1, where fantail, red trousers and bell are all shown.)\n\nThere were attempts throughout the period to mechanize the street-cleaning process. In 1837, a footman named William Tayler, who lived in Marylebone, wrote in his diary: 'saw a new machine for scrapeing the roads and streets. It's a very long kind of how [sic]...One man draws it from one side of the street to the other, taking a whole sweep of mud with him at once...There are two wheels, so, by pressing on the handles, he can wheel the thing back everytime he goes across the street for a hoefull.' By 1850, the streets were 'swept every morning before sunrise, by a machine with a revolving broom which whisks the dirt into a kind of scuttle or trough'.\n\nWith so many unpaved roads, and as many poorly paved ones, dust was as much a problem in dry weather as mud was in wet. When David Copperfield walked from the Borough, in south London, all the way to Dover, he arrived 'From head to foot...powdered almost...white with chalk and dust'. Because all the roads surrounding London were as dusty in hot weather, when heading for the Derby, 'Every gentleman had put on a green veil' while the women 'covered themselves up with net': 'The brims and crowns of hats were smothered with dust, as if nutmegs had been grated over them'; and without the veils the dust combined with the men's hair-grease, turning it 'to a kind of paint'. Street dust also spoilt the clothes of pedestrians, and could even insinuate itself indoors, damaging shopkeepers' stock and furniture in private households.\n\nWater not only kept down the dust in dry weather but also helped prolong the life of macadam surfaces, so by the end of the 1820s most parishes maintained one or more water carts, filled from pumps at street corners. The pumps were over six feet high, with great spouts that swung out over the wooden water troughs on the carts. By the 1850s, the rumbling of 'tank-like watering-carts' marked the arrival of spring as they rolled out across the city. When the driver pressed a lever with his foot, it opened a valve in the water trough, and the water squirted out of a perforated pipe at the back of his cart as he slowly drove along, 'playing their hundred threads of water upon a dusty roadway'.\n\nStreets were watered daily to keep down the dust. Here a water cart is being filled at a street pump in Bloomsbury. On the cart on the left a lever is being pulled, and the water squirts out behind.\n\nThat is, he drove along if driving were possible. Traffic was not the only problem. For much of the century, London was one large building site. On a street-by-street basis, the creation of the infrastructure of modernity meant that the roads were constantly being dug up and relaid, sometimes for paving but more often for what we would call utilities, but then didn't even have a name.\n\nResponsibility for street lighting, originally a private matter, had devolved over the centuries to the parishes and finally to the civic body. In the early 1700s, parish rates were used to pay for a tallow light to be lit in front of every tenth building between 6 p.m. and midnight, from Michaelmas to Lady Day (29 September to 25 March). But these created little more than an ambient glow, and the more prosperous called on what was, in effect, mobile lighting: linkmen who carried burning pitch torches and who, for a fee, lit the way for individual pedestrians. Even this was not ideal. By the late eighteenth century the poet and playwright John Gay expressed a common fear:\n\nThough thou art tempted by the link-man's call,\n\nYet trust him not along the lonely wall;\n\nIn the mid-way he'll quench the flaming brand,\n\nAnd share the booty with the pilf'ring band.\n\nIn the same vein a print from 1819 (Plate 6) shows three linkboys, where the one on the right is picking a pocket. Gay therefore recommended, 'keep [to] the public streets, where oily rays, \/ Shoot from the crystal lamp, o'erspread the ways'. These 'oily rays' were oil lamps, which, in winter and when there was no full moon, householders hung on the front of their buildings, to be tended by a parish-paid lamplighter. Even when the number of lamps in the City had risen five-fold, the amount of light they gave depended, as _The Pickwick Papers_ recorded, on 'the violence of the wind'. And when the lamps were alight, grumbled Louis Simond, the West End streets were nothing more than 'two long lines of little brightish dots, indicative of light'.\n\nBut change was coming, and quickly. In 1805, Frederick Winsor demonstrated a new method of lighting, fuelled by gas, outside Carlton House \u2013 the residence of the Prince of Wales, later the Prince Regent \u2013 between Pall Mall and St James's Park (at what later became the south end of Regent Street). For the birthday of George II he created a display of coloured gas-burners, including four shaped like the Prince of Wales feathers, and an illuminated motto. (For more on illuminations, see pp. 363\u20139.) By 1807, thirteen lamp-posts had been erected along Pall Mall, with three gaslights in each, for a three-month experiment. Awed visitors filled the street every night to gaze at the sight of one gas lamp-post giving more light than twenty oil lamps. The caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson drew a cartoon of the wondering citizens (Plate 5): a comic foreigner overcome by the marvels of modernity in London, a preacher who warns of ignoring religion's 'inward light' in favour of this outward show, and a prostitute worrying that, with no dark corners left, 'We may as well shut up shop.' (Her customer shares her concern.)\n\nWhitbread's brewery in the City, which had installed its own gas plant in the same year as Winsor's first exhibition, offered to light part of nearby Golden Lane and Beech Street. These eleven lamps gave a light 'so great that the single row of lamps fully illuminate both sides of the lane' \u2013 which is a telling insight into the feebleness of oil lamps, unable to shed their light across a narrow passage. By 1812, there was gas lighting in Parliament Square and four of the surrounding streets, and in 1813 Westminster Bridge was lit by gas. These new lights also made it possible to establish more firmly the separation between pedestrians and wheeled transport: 'it has been proposed...[that] to mark the distinction between the two pavements, lamps should be placed on stone pedestals.' (Iron was substituted for stone for practicality, so the pipes could be accessed.)\n\nIn the days of oil, the lamplighters filled their small barrels at oilmen's shops before hoisting them on their backs and, carrying a small ladder and a jug (to transfer the oil from barrel to lamp), jogging swiftly along to complete their route in the brief period between dusk and darkness, then doing the same in reverse to extinguish the lamps in the mornings. To light each lamp they placed their ladders against the iron arms of the lamp-posts, ran up, lifted off the top, which for convenience's sake they temporarily balanced on their heads, trimmed the wick with a pair of scissors they carried in their aprons, refilled the reservoir, lit the wick, replaced the top and ran on to the next post. With the arrival of gas the job became easier. No longer was it necessary to carry heavy oil barrels, nor to refill each lamp; instead they just ran up their ladders, turned a stopcock and lit the gas with their own lamp.\n\nCentral London and the main routes in and out of the city swiftly became brightly lit: by the 1820s, 40,000 gas lamps were spread over 200 miles of road. As early as 1823, the Revd Nathaniel Wheaton described arriving in London by stagecoach from Hammersmith to Kensington, 'all the way for miles brilliant with gas-light'. But the brightness was confined to the capital. The stage before Hammersmith was Turnham Green, where 'we could neither see nor feel any thing but pavements' \u2013 it was still entirely unlit. And in the late 1830s, the sexual predator Walter roamed the roads 'between London and our suburb' on the western side of the city, perhaps Isleworth. As the roads there were 'only lighted feebly by oil-lamps', prostitutes frequented 'the darkest parts, or they used to walk there with those who met them where the roads were lighter'.\n\nThe new technology, however, came at the price of long-term civic discomfort. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ dates the first use of the term the roads being 'up' \u2013 to mean the road surface having been removed for work to be carried out \u2013 to 1894, but as early as the 1850s Sala wrote that in his private opinion the paving commissioners enjoyed repeatedly taking the 'street up'. When the gas mains were laid in Parliament Square, sewer pipes were also renewed, and the water companies took the opportunity to exchange their antique wooden pipes for iron \u2013 for MPs, at least, everything was done at once. For most of the population it was a different matter. In the thriving south London suburb of Camberwell, the first gas company was established in 1831; three years later, twenty miles of street had been torn up to receive new mains. Over the next two decades, competition between the local gas companies meant that 'occasionally as many as ten sets of pipes would be laid in one street'. This became a chronic problem. In 1846, Fleet Street was closed for five weeks for repaving, the previous road having been partially destroyed when a new sewer was laid; immediately afterwards the road was once more reduced to single file while first gas mains and then water pipes were replaced. Until 1855, each parish looked after its own streets, or, even worse, this was the responsibility of each district within a parish, sometimes with different commissions to deal with paving, lighting, water and soon telegraph too, so roads were endlessly being taken up and resurfaced. In 1858, 150 shopworkers and residents of the Strand petitioned the London Gasworks company, complaining that the entire street had been closed to traffic at the peak season. They also noted, bitterly, 'the short hours at which the men have for the most part worked' and the poor quality of the resurfacing once they had finished.\n\nThis particular incident did not occur in isolation: street construction elsewhere was an ongoing process. From the very earliest part of the century, when Regent Street was created to connect St James's Park with the new Regent's Park a mile and a half to the north (see pp. 264\u20136), new roads, road widening and 'improvements' in general were part of the never-ending shape-shifting that London was prone to. The new centre of London, Trafalgar Square, was itself constructed out of a site of mews, stables, a workhouse and an inn. Trafalgar Square and Regent Street were both the fruit of great municipal plans. Far more of London was constructed, designed, reconstructed and redesigned by private individuals, whether large landowners or small contractors. Because so much building was private, the construction process might be especially quick, or it might drag on for decades, speeding up as money became available and the possibility of profitable returns increased, or slowing down when hard times hit. In Bloomsbury, Gordon Square took three decades to complete, while Fitzroy Square, begun in the eighteenth century, was nearly five decades in construction.\n\nFor the first half of the century, road widening was planned by major landlords, or was something local businesses and residents agreed on together and then carried out. In one example of many, in 1850 the residents and shopkeepers around Chancery Lane felt so strongly that widening the north end of the street would improve their lives and businesses that they were willing to pay for it themselves. Several benchers (senior members) from Gray's Inn offered to contribute, as did Pickford's moving company, 'whose great traffic was seriously impeded by the present confined thoroughfares'. Within two weeks, discussions had been held with the parish paving board, and approval had been received for a house to be purchased and knocked down at the Holborn end of the street.\n\nOther projects were the responsibility of the civic authorities, whether the Corporation of the City of London, or the Commissioner for Woods and Forests (the Crown Estate, used as a loose synonym for the government). London Bridge had stood in one form or another since 1209, but half a millennium later it was not just replaced by a new structure, but re-sited upriver, and nine streets, a Wren church and 318 houses were razed to build the new approach street to the bridge. Other demolitions were managed on a parish-by-parish basis, as when in 1842 it was decided that seven large warehouses that projected into Upper Thames Street, narrowing the carriageway by about twenty feet and producing a bottleneck where two carriages could not pass, needed to be demolished. Some similar projects never came to pass because various parishes were at odds. The plans for widening Piccadilly were endlessly postponed because of arguments between the parishes of St Martin-in-the-Fields and St George's Hanover Square as to who was to pay for the upkeep.\n\nBy mid-century this patchwork planning was no longer viable. 'The Wants of London', said the _Illustrated London_ News, were fourfold: London lacked sewers and drains; it lacked sufficient river crossings; it lacked sufficient major thoroughfares for traffic; and, most importantly, it lacked a unifying plan to achieve all that was needed. In 1855, Parliament created the Metropolitan Board of Works to deal with building or widening, paving and maintaining the streets. The Metropolitan Board of Works was also in charge of rationalizing the numbering and naming of streets. In the first decades of the century, many buildings were unnumbered, and even streets were often unnamed except to locals. Addresses were descriptive: 'opposite the King's Head Public House in a Street leading out of Winfell Street being the first turning from the Black Hell Flash House there' or 'at a Potatoe Warehouse next door to a Barley Sugar Shop about 30 Houses from the beginning of Cow Cross [Street]'. Dickens described how in the 1820s he had walked from the blacking factory to his lodgings next to the Marshalsea via 'that turning in the Blackfriars-road which has Rowland Hill's chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop door on the other'. What today sounds like a piece of descriptive writing was the contemporary way of giving an address. By the 1850s, although all the streets were named, the names were rarely indicated on signs. In 1853, the parish of St Mary's, Islington, was commended for painting a street name on every corner: 'a course which would be a great accommodation to strangers, if generally adopted'.\n\nEven if the name of the street was known, that was not always a help. In 1853, London had twenty-five Albert and twenty-five Victoria Streets, thirty-seven King and twenty-seven Queen Streets, twenty-two Princes, seventeen Dukes, thirty-four Yorks and twenty-three Gloucesters \u2013 and that was without counting the similarly named Places, Roads, Squares, Courts, Alleys or Mews, or even the many synonyms that designated squalid backcourts: Rents, Rows, Gardens, Places, Buildings, Lanes, Yards and Walks. One parish alone had half a dozen George Streets. Once the Metropolitan Board of Works got into its stride, orders were given for parishes to rename duplicates, or even merge many small sections of a single stretch of a road, each of which had had its own name. Charlotte Street, Plumtree Street and one side of Bedford Square were subsumed into Bloomsbury Street; Maiden Lane, Talbot Road, York Road and 'several terraces, villas, and places' all became Brecknock Road. Thirty-six street names were lost to create the East India Road, while 'The name of Victoria-road being so numerous...the Metropolitan Board of Works proposes to abolish...the one at Pimlico, and to call the whole line of thoroughfare, from Buckingham Palace to Ebury Bridge, Pimlico-road.' As these roads were renamed, a wholesale renumbering of the buildings also took place.\n\nLondon was, to many, a great map that mapped out the impossibility of mapping. There had been many maps of the city, but it was only at this time of renaming that the first official map of London was produced. That was precipitated not by the Metropolitan Board of Works' desire for regimentation, but by a cholera epidemic. In 1848, the need to improve the sanitation of London was no longer a matter for debate (for more on sanitation, see pp. 194\u20136; on cholera, pp. 216\u20138), but the most basic element, the knowledge of the locations of the sewers, was entirely lacking, and so the army was called in to map out all the city streets for planning purposes. Today the 'ordnance' in the Ordnance Survey maps has become detached from its meaning, but it was the army's ordnance division, the sappers and miners of the engineering corps, who covered Westminster Abbey with scaffolding, from which they surveyed London in a radius of twelve miles around St Paul's, at twelve inches to the mile. The results were published in 1850, in an unhelpful 847 sheets, reinforcing the sense of London's mammoth unknowability.\n\nThe size of the city impressed itself on its residents \u2013 Byron thought it 'A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping...as wide as eye \/ Could reach'. But far more did the size impose itself on strangers. A visitor from Philadelphia, not itself a small town, walked to the West End from St Paul's in 1852. By the time he reached the relative quiet of Pall Mall, he was, he wrote, 'tired of omnibuses, and hacks, and drays, and cabriolets...without number, and the ceaseless din and interminable crowd, that kept increasing as we went', for 'No matter where [a man] goes, or how far he walks, he cannot get beyond the crowd.' In this he was one of many. In the decade following, a visitor from Russia spent a week in London, a city he thought was 'as immense as the sea', feeling dazed and overwhelmed by 'the screeching and howling of machines...that seeming disorder...that polluted Thames; that air saturated with coal dust; those magnificent public gardens and parks; those dreadful sections of the city like Whitechapel, with its half-naked, savage, and hungry population' \u2013 a surprisingly restrained description, perhaps, from Fyodor Dostoyevsky.\n\nMany others, repulsed by the city's great size and consequent anonymity, equated it with alienation. The German poet Heinrich Heine, in 1827, found himself on Waterloo Bridge, so 'sick in spirit that the hot drops sprang forcibly out of my eyes. They fell down into the Thames...which has already swallowed up such floods of human tears without giving them a thought.' Certainly the essayist Thomas de Quincey would have understood: 'No man ever was left to himself for the first time in the streets...of London, but he must have been saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, by the sense of desertion, and utter loneliness, which belongs to his situation. No loneliness can be like that which weighs upon the heart in the centre of faces never-ending, without voice or utterance for him; eyes innumerable...and hurrying figures of men weaving to and fro...seeming like a mask of maniacs, or oftentimes, like a pageant of phantoms.'\n\nDickens saw the unknowability of London differently. For much of his life he was excited by it, and one of his earliest eulogists, the political commentator Walter Bagehot, got to the core of that excitement: the size and variety, and therefore the scope, were 'advantageous to Mr. Dickens's genius. His memory is full of instances of old buildings and curious people...He describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.' This was what his contemporaries saw as they looked around a city that was expanding in speeded-up motion, even if they couldn't report, or write, like Dickens. The old sat cheek-by-jowl with the new; yet around the corner, something that had stood for hundreds of years had vanished overnight. By the 1840s, vast civic construction was a routine sight. In that decade alone, 1,652 new streets were constructed, covering 200 miles. In 1869, the Metropolitan Board of Works announced proudly that it had approved an average of 100 new streets a year since its formation, but the number was accelerating: 202 new streets had been approved in the previous twelve months. Queen Victoria Street had been created, ploughing through smaller neighbourhoods; Cannon Street, Farringdon Street, Garrick Street, New Oxford Street and Clerkenwell Road were all being built. The consequent loss of variety and individuality can be seen in one small area of Westminster. A hive of government buildings \u2013 the Foreign, India, Home and Colonial Offices, erected from 1873 \u2013 stand on what was once a warren of tiny streets. Bridge Street, underneath the Treasury, originally contained Ginger's Family Hotel and Denton's Hotel, as well as a pub. King Street, once running between Downing Street and Great George Street, had a baker, a bootmaker, a cheesemonger and the Britannia Coffee-room. Until 1839, Downing Street was the home of 'A dirty public-house [and]...a row of third-rate lodging houses', as well as the prime minister.\n\nThe greatest changes, however, were driven by the arrival of the railways. In 1836, London's first station opened at Spa Road, not far from London Bridge, with a line running to Deptford. By 1837, trains ran from Chalk Farm to Harrow, Watford and Boxmoor; and the following year the line was extended to Euston station, the second railway station to be built in London. This development had personal resonance for Dickens. He had lived near by as a child, and now Wellington House Academy in Hampstead Road, the school he had attended after leaving the blacking factory, was obliterated: 'the Railway had cut it up root and branch. A great trunk-line had swallowed the play-ground, [and] sliced away the schoolroom.' The fictional upheaval in _Dombey and Son_ was even greater, as Staggs's Gardens stood in for the very real Somers Town neighbourhood that had been eaten up by the London\u2013Birmingham line: 'Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up...Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing.' This fictional construction work accurately represented the reality, indicated by the startling statistic that by the 1860s more than 10 per cent of the adult male population of London was employed in the building trade.\n\nThese huge enterprises didn't just alter the appearance of the city. At a geographical level they fundamentally changed the topography of London. There had once been a hill between Half-Moon Street and Dover Street in Piccadilly, which was flattened out in the mid-1840s. The 150 yards of Oxford Street that lay between Bond Street and South Molton Street ran at 'a rapid decline', steep enough to trouble horses, which was similarly filled in. More ambitiously, 'a series of quicksands, mudbanks, and old peat-bogs' was drained from the old Grosvenor Basin behind Buckingham Palace, later to become Victoria. The land had long been considered too marshy for building, but the railways made the substantial and expensive investment worthwhile for the private Grosvenor Estate.\n\nBut it was principally via the Metropolitan Board of Works that great swathes of London were changed from the ground up. One of its first ventures, nearly a decade in the making, was building a bridge across the Fleet Valley. This, the Holborn Viaduct, was one of the biggest engineering projects in a century of big engineering projects. In January 1864, Arthur Munby took the train between the new Charing Cross station on the day it opened ('Temporary stairs, a temporary platform: the great building in the Strand...yet unroofed,' he groused) and the 'miserable makeshift station' at London Bridge, before walking back, 'passing on my way another tremendous excavation on each side of Ludgate Hill'. The _Daily News_ bitterly reported that Holborn had been turned into 'a waste and howling wilderness' of hoarding, with, behind it, 'ruin and desolation' for 500 yards. For more than three years, Holborn, one of the busiest roads in the city, was reduced to a single lane for both traffic and pedestrians. 'The remainder of the roadway...is in the same condition as that of so many other parts of London at the present time \u2013 a place given up to contractors, diggers, and builders, to navvies and bricklayers, to carts and wheelbarrows, to piles of materials for masonry, and huge frames of timber.'\n\nThe coming of modernity was obtrusively visible: the construction of Holborn Viaduct, for example, reduced one of London's busiest streets to a single lane for traffic and pedestrians for three years.\n\nLondon was taking on the lineaments of modernity before its inhabitants' eyes, although sometimes it had been hard to discern while it was happening.\n\n#### 3.\n\n#### TRAVELLING (MOSTLY) HOPEFULLY\n\nThe technicalities of the creation of the roads, and their maintenance, were of less interest to most Londoners than how to navigate the city, and by what means. The ways to cross London evolved as rapidly as the roads had done. At the top of the tree, those with good jobs went on horseback. This required the feeding and stabling of a horse at home and also near the place of work. Only Dickens' most prosperous characters, like the merchant prince Mr Dombey, and Carker, his second-in-command, ride to work. The playwright and journalist Edmund Yates worked for twenty-five years in the post office. As a young clerk he walked from St John's Wood to his office behind St Paul's: later, as he rose in the hierarchy, the combination of his increased salary, his income from playwriting, and also the fact that he was living with his mother, enabled him 'in the summer, [to] come on horseback through the parks'. Even then, he didn't ride all the way, paying exorbitant City livery rates. Instead he left his horse in Westminster and continued on into the City by boat.\n\nFor centuries, the Thames had been the 'silent highway', the major artery into London and the principal east\u2013west transport route from one side of London to the other. At the start of the nineteenth century, it was possible to cross the river within London at only three fixed points: by London Bridge (where a crossing in some form or another had existed since Roman times), by Blackfriars Bridge (built 1769) and by Westminster Bridge (1750). There were also two wooden bridges over the river at Battersea (1771\u20132) and Kew (1784\u20139), but both were then on the very edges of London. By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837, five new bridges had opened \u2013 Vauxhall (1816), Waterloo (1817), Southwark (1819), Hammersmith (1827, the first suspension bridge in London) and the new London Bridge (1831, sixty yards upriver from the old location). These were later followed by Hungerford (1845), Chelsea (1851\u20138), Lambeth (1862), Albert and Wandsworth Bridges (both 1873) and Tower Bridge (1894), trebling the number of crossings between one end of the century and the other.\n\nBecause of the lack of crossings at the start of the nineteenth century, about 3,000 wherries and small boats were regularly available for hire to carry passengers across the river. Even in the 1830s the shore was still lined with watermen calling out, 'Sculls, sir! Sculls!' In _Sketches by Boz_ , Mr Percy Noakes, who lives in Gray's Inn Square, plans to 'walk leisurely to Strandlane, and have a boat to the Custom-house', while as late as 1840, the evil Quilp in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ is rowed from where he lives at Tower Hill to his wharf on the south side of the river.\n\nFrom 1815, when the _Margery_ , the first Thames steamer, ran from Wapping Old Stairs to Gravesend, steamers had been used for excursion travel, and to take passengers downriver. By the early 1830s, the steamers had also become commuting boats within London, ferrying passengers between the Old Swan Pier at London Bridge and Westminster Pier in the West End, stopping along the south bank of the river at the bridges as well as at some of the many private wharves, quays and river stairs in between. (One map in 1827 showed sixty-seven sets of river stairs in the nine miles between Battersea and Chelsea in the west, and the Isle of Dogs in the east.)\n\nOld Swan Stairs or the Old Swan Pier (the name varied; it was roughly where Cannon Street railway bridge is now) was one of the busiest landing places, the embarkation point for steamers to France and Belgium as well as the river steamers. Yet for decades it was just a rickety under-dock, reached by wooden stairs so steep they were almost ladders. Even in the 1840s, by which time it had been renamed the London Bridge Steam Wharf and had a high dock made of stone, its wooden gangway still led down to a small floating dock. Old London Bridge had been a notoriously dangerous spot on the river. The eighteen piers under the bridge, widened over the centuries to support the ageing and increasingly heavy structure, had become so large that they held back the tidal flow and created a five-foot difference in water levels between the two sides. Passengers disembarked at the Old Swan Stairs and walked the few hundred yards to Billingsgate Stairs before re-embarking, leaving the boatmen to shoot the rapids without them. After the new London Bridge opened in 1831, for many years the steamers' routes continued to mimic the old pattern: three steamer companies ran services above-bridge, to the west of London Bridge, and two below-bridge, to the east, with the change made at the Old Swan Stairs. In _Our Mutual Friend_ , set in the 1850s, the waterman Rogue Riderhood's boat is run down by a 'B'low-Bridge steamer'. Long after the new bridge removed the danger, 'steamers...dance up and down on the waves...[and] hundreds of men, women, and children, [still] run...from one boat to another'.\n\nHungerford Stairs was typical. Passengers walked down a narrow passage lined with advertisements 'celebrat[ing] the merits of \"DOWN'S HATS\" and \"COOPER'S MAGIC PORTRAITS\"...We hurry along the bridge, with its pagoda-like piers...and turn down a flight of winding steps.' On the floating pier, 'The words \"PAY HERE\" [are]...inscribed over little wooden houses, that remind one of the retreats generally found at the end of suburban gardens', and tickets were purchased 'amid cries of \"Now then, mum, this way for _Cree_ morne!\" \"Oo's for Ungerford?\" \"Any one for Lambeth or Chelsea?\" and [you] have just time to set foot on the boat before it shoots through the bridge.' In _David Copperfield_ , Murdstone and Grinby's wine warehouse stood in for Warren's blacking factory, which, until it was razed for the building of Hungerford market, had been 'the last house at the bottom of a narrow street [at Hungerford Stairs], curving down hill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where people took boat'.\n\nThe Old Swan Stairs at London Bridge, the embarkation point for steamers to Europe, was for decades nothing more than a rickety wooden flight of stairs leading to an equally rickety under-dock.\n\nBy 1837, small steamers owned by the London and Westminster Steam Boat Company shuttled between London and Westminster Bridges every day between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., with sometimes an extension loop out to Putney in the western suburbs. Their boats, the _Azalea_ , the _Bluebell_ , the _Rose_ , _Camellia_ , _Lotus_ and other floral tributes, departed every fifteen minutes, for journeys that lasted up to thirty minutes, depending on the number of intermediary stops. All but the smallest boats had hinged funnels, which folded back as they passed under the bridges. The boats were only about ten feet wide, with 18-horsepower engines and crews of five, and the boilers and the engines occupied most of the space. The skipper, wearing a top hat, stood on the bridge if there was one, or on the paddlebox itself. A call boy, 'Quick of eye, sharp in mind, and distressingly loud in voice', stood at the engine-room hatch and transmitted the skipper's hand signals to the engineer below 'with a shrillness which is a trifle less piercing than that of a steam-whistle': 'Sto-paw!' ('Stop her'), 'E-saw!' ('Ease her'), 'Half-a-turn astern!' Because of this method of communication, signs everywhere on board warned, 'Do not speak to the man at the wheel.'\n\nAt first it looked as though the arrival of the railways from the late 1830s would destroy this new transportation system almost before it had begun, but for the next decade the competition instead drove frequency up and fares down. By the 1840s, at least one steamer ran from London and Westminster Bridges every four minutes. The river had become 'the leading highway of personal communication between the City and the West-end', with thirty-two trips an hour, 320 a day, carrying more than 13,000 passengers daily: this ' _silent highway_ is now as busy as the Strand itself '. The London and Westminster Steam Boat Company reduced its 4d price to 2d for a return ticket between London Bridge and St Paul's, and soon penny steamers were the norm. Competition was guided solely by price, for the boats were neither luxurious nor even pleasant. There was barely any seating and no shelter on board; in the rain passengers huddled in the lee of the wheelhouse, holding up 'mats, boards, great coats, and umbrellas' for protection. The boats were, in addition, 'diminutive ungainly shelterless boats...rickety, crank little conveyances' and 'filthy to a degree'.\n\nAt the same time, the number of companies proliferated. Operating above-bridge, in addition to the London and Westminster Steamboat Company, were the Iron Boat (which named its steamers for City companies: the _Fishmonger_ , _Haberdasher_ , _Spectacle-maker_ ), the Citizen (which used letters: _Citizen A_ , _Citizen B_ ), and the Penny Companies. Below-bridge operators included the Diamond Funnel (the largest company, with twenty steamers, its biggest called the _Sea Swallow_ , _Gannet_ and _Petrel_ ; the medium-sized the _Elfin_ and _Metis_ ; and the smallest, which were still larger than any above-bridge boats, the _Nymph_ , _Fairy_ , _Sylph_ and _Sybil_ ), the Waterman (named for birds: the _Penguin_ , _Falcon_ , _Swift_ , _Teal_ ) and the General Steam Navigation Company (its _Eagle_ was known as 'the husbands' boat', since it ran to the seaside resorts of Margate and Ramsgate on Fridays).\n\nIn 1846, two halfpenny steamers, the _Ant_ and the _Bee_ , began to run from Adelphi Pier (between present-day Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridge) to Dyers' Hall Wharf, west of the Swan Stairs: with no intermediary stops, and double-ended boats which had no need to turn around for the return trip, the journey time as well as the price was halved. They were, rejoiced one user, 'cheaper than shoe-leather'. But cheapness and speed had a fatal price. A year later, the _Cricket_ , the company's third boat, was berthed at the Adelphi Pier with about a hundred passengers on board. Without warning 'a sudden report' was heard, followed immediately by a huge explosion: such was its force that pieces of the _Cricket_ 's boiler were found 300 yards away, and tremors were felt in houses at 450 yards' distance. Immediately 'skiffs, wherries and boats of all kinds' put out to rescue the passengers, who had been hurled into the river. Six died, twelve were seriously injured and many more had minor injuries. It was later revealed that the engineer had tied down the boat's safety valves so they couldn't cut off the build-up of steam while he went for an illicit break. When the boiler overheated, there was nothing to prevent the devastating explosion. (The engineer was convicted of manslaughter.)\n\nThis was a shocking accident, but in the period between 1835 and 1838, when steamers were at their peak, twelve were involved in serious collisions in which forty-three people drowned: nearly one fatality a month. In _Our Mutual Friend_ , the owner of a riverside pub hears shouting and is told, 'It's summut run down in the fog, ma'am...There's ever so many people in the river...It's a steamer,' to which a world-weary voice replies, 'It always IS a steamer.' It was not just on the water itself that danger lay. The piers were built by the steamer companies, or by the owners of the private wharves, at a time when there were no building or safety regulations, nor requirements for crowd control. One pier, at Blackfriars, gave way in 1844 when a large number of people crushed onto it in order to watch a boat race. Thirty fell into the river, of whom four may have died.\n\nShortly after Max Schlesinger moved to London in 1852, he already understood that 'Among the middle classes...the omnibus stands immediately after [fresh] air, tea, and flannel, in the list of necessaries of life.' Omnibuses by that date appeared to have always been part of the life of the city, but they were an innovation of only two decades' standing. Until the mid-1830s, the short-stagecoach, often referred to as the short-stage, had been the main method of transportation between suburbs and centre. These coaches were similar to the stagecoaches that made longer journeys across country (see pp. 90\u2013101), but tended to be the older, smaller and less comfortable models. By 1825, London had 418 short-stagecoaches making over a thousand journeys daily, transporting the residents of Kilburn, or Bayswater, or Paddington, to and from the centre. Dickens' fiction teems with characters using the short-stage: in _Pickwick Papers_ , set in the late 1820s, Mrs Bardell and her friends go from Pentonville 'in quest of a Hampstead stage' in order to take tea at the famous Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath. In _David Copperfield_ , Agnes takes the stage from Highgate to Putney, and then from Putney to Covent Garden. In _Great Expectations_ , Pip takes the stage to Hammersmith from Barnard's Inn, where he was lodging in Holborn; Estella travels to Richmond by the City short-stage.\n\nThe short-stages were notoriously unreliable. In Dickens' very first published short story, 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk', Mr Minns gets into a coach 'on the solemn assurance...that the vehicle would start in three minutes'. After a quarter of an hour, Mr Minns leans out the window and asks when they are going to start: '\"Di-rectly, sir,\" said the coachman, with his hands in his pockets, looking as much unlike a man in a hurry as possible.' Dickens' readers must have laughed ruefully. Twenty years earlier, Louis Simond had lamented his experience on the short-stage from Richmond to the West End: 'We stopped more than twenty times on the road' and it took two hours to cover seven or eight miles.\n\nYet they also offered a convenient and personal service. After dinner at Mr Minns' friend's house, 'as it was a very wet night' the nine o'clock stage comes by to see if anybody wanted to go to town. This was no fictional device. In the 1820s, the driver of the short-stage for a neighbourhood such as Peckham proceeded along his route each morning, house by house, picking up his regulars, and if they were not ready he waited. (Mr Minns, not being a regular, does not get the same courtesy and the coachman drives off, saying Mr Minns can 'run round' and meet him at the inn.) When the coaches arrived at their destinations, passengers told the coachman whether or not he should wait for them on his return trip in the afternoon. The short-stage, starting late in the mornings and returning early to the suburbs, was of no use to working men, but suited their employers, whose office hours were much shorter; the class of passenger was reflected in the price, with many suburban journeys costing 2s.\n\nIn 1828, a mourning-coachbuilder named George Shillibeer saw omnibuses on a visit to Paris and thought they might work in London. He shipped one over and had it running by December, but it was the following summer before there was a regular service, which ran from Paddington Green to the Bank, pulled by three horses harnessed abreast, and carrying twenty-two passengers. (It was no coincidence that this first bus route was along the New Road, one of the earliest of the arteries to free itself from the turnpikes.) The buses were an immediate success: they averaged six miles an hour and the fare for the route swiftly dropped from 1s to 6d, a quarter of the cost of the short-stage. The original French three-horse buses were too wide and too clumsy for London \u2013 two could not pass each other at Temple Bar, while at St Paul's nothing could pass a bus, not even the narrowest cab \u2013 and they were quickly replaced by smaller buses, pulled by two horses. All the buses had names: some, like the Bayswater, were known by their destinations, but most were named for the famous, or the legendary \u2013 the Nelson, for example, or the Waterloo, or the Atlas \u2013 while a few were named for their owners. The _Times_ omnibus was owned by the newspaper, and the Bardell belonged to the Bardell omnibus company.\n\nInside, there were twelve seats, with another two beside the coachman (a few models had four, but this was rare). These box seats were for favoured regulars, who tipped the driver to ensure that places were kept for them. When they arrived, depending on which seat was empty, the cad shouted 'near side' or 'off side', and the driver offered the passenger the end of a leather strap. Grasping it with one hand, and a handle on the side of the bus with the other, the passenger put his foot on the wheel and then swung himself up, using a single step halfway between the wheel and the driver's footboard to mount the box. When the box passengers were ready to dismount, the driver banged with his whip on the board behind his head to alert the cad, who collected the fares from the passengers as they left.\n\nFrom 1849, there was also seating on top of the bus, reached by a set of iron rungs at the back, which led to a knifeboard, a T-shaped bench where passengers sat back-to-back, facing outwards (see Plate 2). The outside was the preserve of men: no woman in skirts could have managed the ascent to the seat beside the driver, and even if their clothing had permitted them to climb the iron rungs to the top \u2013 and there was no rail to hold on to on the way up, only a leather strap \u2013 once they were aloft there were no panels along the side, so their legs would have been exposed to passers-by below. The inside was low-roofed, and so narrow 'that the knees of the passengers, near the door, almost effectually prevent their comrades from entering and departing'. Straw was laid on the floor, to keep out the damp and cold, but it was ineffective, and usually filthy. In the 1850s, the ladders were replaced by a little iron staircase and what were called decency boards were placed along the length of the roof. After that, said one Frenchman appalled by the 'narrow, rickety, jolting, dusty and extremely dirty' interiors, no one rode inside 'if there is an inch of space unoccupied outside; women, children, even old people, fight to gain access to the top'.\n\nThe driver surveyed the world from his perch, wearing a white top hat, 'a blue, white-spotted cravat, with a corresponding display of very clean shirt-collar, coat of dark green cloth...his boots well polished...There is...an easy familiar carelessness...a strange mixture of _hauteur_ and condescension, as much as to say: \"You may keep your hats on, gentlemen.\"' According to Alfred Bennett, at least in the 1850s, the drivers always wore a rose in their buttonholes, too. In the rain, they shared with the box-seat passengers a leather covering that went over their laps, while the remaining 'outsides', as the passengers on the top deck were known, took shelter under their own umbrellas.\n\nThe buses devastated the short-stage business. By 1834, the number of short-stagecoaches had fallen by a quarter, to 293, matched by 232 buses. By 1849, buses ran from London Bridge to Paddington, and from the old coaching inn, the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly, to Fulham; the New Conveyance Office in Paddington had an hourly bus service leaving from coaching inns on the New Road and Oxford Street, and from the Bank via Oxford Street among others. At first they were no more for the working classes than the short-stages had been, as none ran first thing in the morning: until the early 1850s, no bus reached the City before 9.30. They were, said the _Penny Magazine_ in 1837, for those 'whose incomes vary from \u00a3150 to \u00a3400 or \u00a3600 and whose business does not require their presence till nine or ten in the mornings, and who can leave it at five or six in the evening'. But soon their popularity meant that routes from the suburbs started earlier and ran later, as well as more frequently. In 1856\u20137 the London General Omnibus Company, an amalgam of many of the early companies, carried 37.5 million passengers, and Gracechurch Street, equidistant between the Bank and London Bridge in the City, had become a hub for buses running south of the river to the suburbs.\n\nThe stops were then, as they had been for the stagecoaches before them, at a series of inns. In their sometimes days-long journeys, stagecoaches had stopped at coaching inns and public houses for their passengers' comfort. When short-stages appeared, they continued to wait at inns and taverns, in great part because of the availability of stabling for the horses and, to a lesser degree, for the convenience of the drivers and conductors; by the time buses arrived, it simply seemed to be the order of things that public transport stops were near hostelries.\n\nWhile no one knew any longer how they had managed without this splendid system of transportation, they found plenty to complain about nonetheless. The bus conductor, in top hat and with a flower in his buttonhole, stood one-footed on a tiny step beside the door at the rear, raised about a third of the way up the bus so that he could see whether seats were vacant on top, and could tell new passengers which side to climb up. He also leant over, when crinolines were in fashion, to hold down the women's hoops as they squeezed through the narrow doorway. Otherwise he swayed in place, holding on to a leather strap hanging by his shoulder and taking fares from departing passengers, his eyes always darting to find the next, as passengers hailed the buses anywhere along their routes.\n\nInitially, there were no tickets and thus no check on the takings, apart from the word of the cad and the driver; they both therefore had a great incentive to stop for as many passengers as possible while admitting to the bare minimum at the end of the day. Wits claimed that perfectly innocent pedestrians were virtually kidnapped by the cads: they could, said a character in _Sketches by Boz_ , 'chuck an old gen'lm'n into the buss, shut him in, and rattle off, afore he knows where it's a-going to'. For the same reason, no cads ever admitted to being full up: 'Plenty o' room, sir,' they cried jovially, shouting 'All right,' and thumping on the roof to signal the driver to move off so the passenger couldn't jump down when he saw that he would more or less have to sit on someone's lap. Or, as Sophia Beale, a doctor's young daughter from Kensington, wrote in 1850, 'he...shouts \"Kilburne, Kilburne, come along mam, sixpence all the way\" then he stops and runs back and pulls the lady along and stuffs her in and slams the door and begins to shout again \"Kilburne, sixpence all the way\".' That is, he did so until it rained, and then he charged passengers extra, from which he creamed off the surplus. A snowfall made matters even worse: an extra horse was needed for each bus, and that, together with the increased feed and hay prices in bad weather, sent fares up to 9d.\n\nThe drivers also competed for fares. An 'old gentleman elevates his cane in the air, and runs with all his might towards our omnibus; we watch his progress with great interest', Dickens had a passenger report in _Sketches by Boz_ ; 'the door is opened to receive him, he suddenly disappears \u2013 he has been spirited away by the opposition.' This was comedy, but court records indicate that many drivers raced along the streets to get ahead of the other buses and increase their chance of finding passengers: reckless driving was a regular charge. In 1844, two drivers were sentenced to a month's hard labour after a policeman testified to seeing them galloping down Regent Street; when they reached Pall Mall, one forced the other on to the pavement, where, nothing daunted, he continued at speed 'for some time'. However, once a system of tickets was instituted, the complaints were the reverse: that the drivers dawdled along, while the cads became wilfully blind, 'indifferent to shouts, threats, and entreaties of those who hail them from the road', since they made no profit from the increased work.\n\nAt places like Holborn Hill, before the Viaduct was built across the steep Fleet Valley, bus companies stabled extra horses to harness on to each bus before it began the ascent. Mud, ice, rain and snow all made accidents more likely.\n\nEven when drivers behaved responsibly, the streets of London, the weather and technology all made driving perilous. Holborn Hill, with its steep gradient across the Fleet Valley, was a well-known black spot for horses: extra horses were stabled at the bottom of the hill, to be harnessed on to each bus before it attempted the ascent. The bus companies also had men stationed at the top of the hill to thrust skids under the wheels of the buses as they started back down, slowing the motion of the wheels, both as a brake and to prevent the vehicle crashing against the horses' heels. (As it was, bus drivers were strapped to a post behind their seat, which allowed them to throw their full weight on to the drag as they went downhill.) At the bottom of Holborn Hill more men were posted to dart into the road to remove the skids as the buses passed. And everywhere the rain and the mud routinely caused problems, making 'horses sink slowly on their sides or knees, amid the greasy mud, and, having sunk, make fruitless endeavours to rise'. Accidents to the vehicles were so common that people wrote casually of an entire bus tipping over, as a matter of course. When there was a hard frost, no horse-drawn vehicles could go out at all (although small boys rejoiced, as they skated along the suddenly emptied roads).\n\nEven with these drawbacks, buses were one of London's great conveniences. In the early days, they, like the short-stages, gave personal service. In _Nicholas Nickleby_ , the omnibus calls for Miss La Creevy, who is visiting friends in Bow. She makes a protracted farewell, 'during which proceedings, \"the omnibus\", as Miss La Creevy protested, \"swore so dreadfully, that it was quite awful to hear it\"' \u2013 but still it waits. For prosperous men with a workday routine, the bus went even further. The journalist Charles Manby Smith described a typical suburban street in the late 1840s, where at 8.30 and 9.30 every morning, two buses appeared to collect their regular passengers. After that the street saw no more buses until they returned in the evening: it was not a regular route, and 'the vehicles diverge from their...course in order to pick them up at their own doors'.\n\nMethods of inner-city mass transit were increasing at a furious rate: after the steamers and the buses came the underground, confusingly also called the 'railway'. It was long in the planning. In 1830, the first part of a new major north\u2013south road, from Ludgate Circus to Holborn Viaduct, had been completed, and in 1838 the City Corporation obtained powers to extend this new Farringdon Street further, up to Clerkenwell Green. Partly it was to improve the flow of traffic across the Holborn area. More importantly, the aim was to clear the slum district of Clerkenwell, Saffron Hill and around the Fleet prison. (For more on slum clearance, see pp. 188\u201392.) A Clerkenwell Improvement Commission was established in 1840, which oversaw the relocation of the Fleet market and the demolition of the prison in 1848, but did nothing further, with the result that for decades the north end of what was to become Farringdon Road lay in a pockmarked, rubble-strewn landscape. Fresh impetus came in 1850 with the arrival of the Great Northern Railway at Euston. The following year, plans were presented to widen the road, finish it off and have a railway running underneath, from Farringdon Street to King's Cross. Just when it appeared the project might actually move ahead, the Crimean War made its financing impossible. (All railways then were private enterprises.) It was not until, in despair, the Corporation of the City of London bought \u00a3200,000-worth of shares that building could begin in 1859.\n\nAlthough people had become used to the wasteland of Farringdon Road over the decades, the construction that followed proved even worse. One newspaper asserted that the word 'underground' implied an air of 'mole-like secrecy', but 'Those who have had the misfortune to live, or whose business has called them frequently along the line of its operations, know too well that this is a great mistake. No railway works were ever more painfully plain...For the best part of three years a great public thoroughfare has been turned into a builders' yard...Many long patches of what was once a broad open roadway were enclosed with boarding; filled with mountains of gravel, brick, and stone...temporary wooden footways, greasy with wet clay, were erected across echoing caverns.' This was no exaggeration. A photograph of later excavations for the District Railway in Parliament Square shows what resembles a bomb site, London during the Blitz, perhaps, or some hideous natural disaster.\n\nEnough disasters, natural and man-made, did occur during the construction. In November 1860, a locomotive exploded, killing two people; in May 1861, there was a landslide; and in 1862, the River Fleet \u2013 long filled with sewage, covered over as the Fleet Ditch, and known as the 'Black River of North London' \u2013 ruptured. By this time, the work on the underground alongside the new Fleet sewer was moving into its final stages, with the train tunnel being laid parallel to it (see Plate 10). The first intimation of looming catastrophe came when water was discovered seeping into the cellars of houses in Clerkenwell; three days later when a rush of water was spotted beside the sewer, it became clear that the Fleet Ditch was going to burst. Most of the workmen were evacuated; several others were lowered in baskets on ropes, to breach the brickwork to allow the water to escape. But even as they descended, they saw the foundations give way. They were hauled to safety minutes before the wall supporting the western embankment of the railway, a massive brick structure over eight feet thick, 'rose bodily from its foundations as the water [from the Fleet] forced its way beneath...breaking up into fragments' and scattering down 'scaffolding, roadway, lamps, pavement and \"plant\" of every description'. A hundred feet of wall was swept away, and through the next twelve hours the water rushed north and west to King's Cross and Paddington, a distance of two and a half miles. The water also poured into a mausoleum that had been created to take the human remains from the churchyards that had been destroyed in the construction of Farringdon Road, washing the bodies out into the excavation. It was to be another ten days before the engineers, damming the railway tunnel and creating a trench to divert the water, regained control.\n\nNonetheless, the Metropolitan Railway \u2013 the first line of the tube \u2013 opened on 10 January 1863, running between Paddington and Farringdon Street, with six intermediary stations. The previous day, a group of grandees had been transported along the track in open wagons, although Palmerston, the seventy-nine-year-old prime minister, had refused to go, on the grounds that at his age it was advisable to stay above ground as long as possible (or so it was said). A photograph of this preliminary voyage, with Gladstone sitting prominently at the front, is today often captioned to suggest these were the first-class passenger vehicles. In reality, the first-class carriages were 'luxuriously fitted up', with six compartments each seating ten. Even second- and third-class compartments were lit with gas stored 'in long india-rubber bags, within wooden boxes' that were located on top of the carriages. Fares were 6d, 4d and 3d. The first day 30,000 people took the opportunity to travel underground. That evening 'the crush at the Farringdon-street station was as great at the doors of a theatre on the first night', and in the following week another 200,000 passengers ventured underground.\n\nSuch was the line's success that extensions were planned westward and eastward, to South Kensington and to Blackfriars. Work on the Hammersmith and City line began in 1864, starting from Green Line (now Westbourne Park), travelling through Porto Bello (sic), Notting Barn (also sic) and ultimately to Hammersmith Broadway. The Circle line began excavations in 1868, the District line the following year (it used part of the old Kensington Canal as its tunnel). By the 1870s, the Metropolitan line alone was carrying 48 million passengers annually.\n\nNot that it was always, or even often, an enjoyable experience. An American visitor was at first disappointed with the reality of travelling under the surface of the earth: 'It was to be nothing but going through a tunnel,' he wrote. But soon he realized that, between the smoke and the lack of ventilation, travelling by underground 'was more disagreeable than the longest tunnel the writer had ever passed through...With a taste of sulphur on his lips, a weight upon his chest, a difficulty of breathing as he climbed out of the station at which he stopped, and with a firm determination to encounter ten [traffic] jams on Ludgate Hill, rather than make another trip on the underground rail of London, the writer got into the open air, and found the smoky atmosphere of London equal by comparison to that of Interlachen.' Yet such was the convenience that soon everyone was travelling that way. In 1875, in Trollope's _The Way We Live Now_ , even Hetta Carbury, an upper-class girl, 'trusted herself all alone to the mysteries of the Marylebone underground railway, and emerged with accuracy at King's Cross'.\n\nSuch were the numbers of new lines and stations, and the complexities of changing, that even local residents got lost: 'How many Kensington stations there may be...I do not know; but I know...that the officials always send you to the wrong one...All very well to say that we should look at the map at home and ascertain our route: firstly, there is no map.' (After that 'firstly', surely the writer needed no other objections.) Even the station staff were bewildered: 'The folk at the booking-offices are not...uncivil; but...I f they do attempt to advise you, take some other ticket than the one recommended, and the chances against you are reduced.'\n\nFor those who could afford it, the century had brought with it a new form of city transport that was neither entirely public nor completely private: the cab. Hackney coaches had operated in the early decades of the century. These were four-wheeled carriages, usually second-hand private carriages repurposed as hackneys, with the driver's seat moved to a little outcropping on the side, beside the passengers' seats. Only 1,100 were licensed until the monopoly was broken in 1832. The fare in the 1820s was 1s a mile per passenger, and the carriages seated four with a squeeze. From 1836, four-wheeled broughams appeared too, which could carry 'a large quantity of luggage on the roof, besides six persons'.\n\nIt is hard to overstate how poor the hackneys' reputation was. An American tourist in 1832 was appalled at the condition of his hackney: 'all tattered and torn \u2013 dirty straw...[on the floor]...amidst greased and filthy rags of lining within, and broken panels, broken springs, and broken pole...for horses, two miserably jaded beasts...every limb presenting a skeleton of bone, with the skin here and there rubbed off'. The coaches were also difficult to get into and out of, because of the peculiar, add-on configuration of the driver. It was easy, Dickens joked: 'One bound, and you are on the first step; turn your body lightly round to the right, and you are on the second; bend gracefully beneath the reins, working round to the left at the same time, and you are in the cab.' And as to getting out, it is 'rather more complicated in theory, and a shade more difficult in its execution'. But, he added as consolation, there was no point worrying about how to get out, because in all likelihood the cab would overturn and the passengers would be pitched into the street. In Holborn and Fleet Street, he solemnly declared, one saw 'a hat-box, a portmanteau, and a carpet-bag, strewed around' every few yards and, on asking if anybody was hurt, one would be given the reassuring response, 'O'ny the fare, sir.' Even without accidents, the experience was generally miserable. If the passenger wanted the window open, it was invariably stuck shut; if the passenger wanted it closed, the glass was broken; the doors refused either to close or to open; the check-string, used to tell the driver to stop, never worked, which meant that to do so the passenger had to lean out of the window instead, whereupon the driver was so close that if he 'had been indulging in liquor, onions, tobacco, &c., you had the full benefit'. The carriages were known as growlers, for the bad temper of the drivers.\n\nBut it was the coaches' lack of speed that most irritated passengers. 'If the horse is wanted, it is sure to be eating; if the cabby is wanted, he is equally sure to be drinking,' grumbled Max Schlesinger. When one arrived at a cabstand, it was necessary 'to bawl with might and main' to locate the waterman and wake the driver. In theory residents could open their front doors and shout 'Coach!' whereupon the waterman led the horses over and called for the coachman. But in either situation the horses had to be woken, or their feedbags removed; the steps had to be lowered and the waterman paid. The standard joke response to a cabman soliciting by asking 'Coach, sir?' was, 'No, thank you: I'm in a hurry.'\n\nIn 1823, a new type of conveyance, a two-wheeled, one-horse cab, appeared on the street. ('Cab' was short for _cabriolet_ , French for a little leap, describing the vehicle's bouncing motion.) These carried two people, with the driver up front; by 1830 there were 165 of them in London, charging 8d a mile instead of the hackney coaches' 1s. Then, after a few experiments with form, came the 'Hansom patent safety cab', the invention of Joseph Hansom, an architect. The 'safety' element was the larger wheels and an axle and body nearer to the ground, giving a lower centre of gravity, which made the vehicle less likely to overturn. After a few modifications on the original design, the driver sat perched up high to the rear of the roof of the cab, with passengers behind half-doors and a little window. For the first time, passengers could see where they were going while remaining under cover, and the primary sensation was of being cocooned: the passenger 'is in the midst of the roar and the conflict, but he is safe and quiet'. However, perhaps because the cabs were lighter and the journeys therefore faster, cab drivers were proverbial for their recklessness: 'he's a havin' two mile o' danger at eight-pence,' says Sam Weller of Mr Pickwick when he is 'cabbin' it'. Although the cabs turned over less than the coaches, accidents were still common, especially to the horses. The Illustrated London News even set out instructions on what to do when a cab horse fell: 'The first measure...ought to be to release the horse from the shafts and draw the vehicle quite away...so that he may sweep the ground freely with both hind-feet, and gain a space...to plant them upon as he endeavours to lift his body,' it began. Even so, the cabs' convenience was undeniable, and their numbers soared: by the early 1830s there were 1,265 cabs in London; a decade after that, 2,500; by 1863 this figure had risen to 6,800, or roughly 1 for every 413 residents. (This is not far different from today, when London's black cabs number approximately 1 per 300 residents.)\n\nCabs, cabstands, cab drivers and watermen were sources of constant complaints, bitter jokes and fear. The cabstand itself was hard to miss. Horses, cabs, the pump for the horses' water and the equipment to service men, horses and cabs: all took up far more space than the equivalent taxi stands do today and, as Dickens noted in 1851, cabstands might hold as many as fifteen cabs at a time. But the real complaint of Dickens and many others was the condition of the stands, where horse manure was churned into the fallen oats, chaff and hay, and the whole made wet and swilly by water from the pump in the summer, or in winter was piled up around the pump to insulate it from frost. Straw, too, was used as insulation, both for the pump and for the horses themselves, who stood all day in the cold and the rain. Piles of, theoretically, fresh and dry straw helped keep the animals minimally warm, but the straw was usually as damp and dirty as they were, while the buckets for watering the horses rolled across the road and the pavement, a danger to traffic and pedestrians alike. (Many suburban watermen kept chickens on their stands too, to add to the noise and dirt.)\n\nThe watermen were poorly dressed, in 'a sackcloth coat, and apron of the same', and their tickets \u2013 their licences \u2013 around their necks; the watermen's ankles, said Dickens, were 'curiously enveloped by hay-bands', a reference to the men's sheepskin gaiters, worn for warmth. While hackney drivers were also considered to be stereotypically shabby, hansom-cab drivers were generally represented as smartly dressed. A print in 1850 showed a driver in a snappy brown coat instead of the coachman's heavy multiple-caped outfit, pale green striped trousers, short boots and top hat, the reins held daintily in his gloved hands. Both cab and coach drivers wore top hats, but cabbies of a sporting bent later switched to bowlers, and in summer donned bright checked outfits.\n\nWhile providing a useful service, cab ranks also were an annoyance: cabs and horses took up a great deal of space, and the ever-present swilly mix of dropped feed, water and manure underfoot was a constant hazard to pedestrians.\n\nSome stands were said to be better than others, the term 'better' implying they were cleaner and less intrusive into the neighbourhood, but mainly referring to the quality of the drivers and the watermen. Of the 200 authorized stands in London in the 1850s, the ones outside the theatres, or south of the river, and in Westminster, were considered to be the worst, while those outside railway stations \u2013 where the drivers were fined by the railways if passengers complained of 'insolence' or overcharging, or were banned outright for repeated offences \u2013 were 'the top post in the trade'. At a properly run large cabstand, such as that outside Euston, there were two watermen on duty on the fifteen-hour day-shift, two on the nine-hour night-shift, taken week by week in turn, while smaller stands had one man on each shift. The water on better stands was provided free by the water companies, but on smaller or less reputable stands the waterman was responsible for paying the fee to the water company, which could be up to \u00a34 annually, or 2\u00bdd a day. Many watermen needed other forms of income as well, running errands for nearby residents, or cleaning pots or boots or drawing water for the local pubs, where they spent a lot of their time anyway. Even for sober watermen, pubs were good places to wait out of the cold and wet. More often, watermen were drivers who had lost their licences, usually for drunkenness, and they naturally gravitated to the pubs.\n\n'Bucks', or drivers who had lost their licences but continued to drive illegally, were ubiquitous: many were drunks, with no family or settled life, sleeping in the cabs at night, and dozing in pubs and coffee rooms during the day. Their ability to find employment is unsurprising, for the economics of cabs were harsh. A hansom cost up to \u00a350 to purchase, a horse up to \u00a320 and a harness perhaps \u00a35, while a cab licence was \u00a35 a year. Duty was payable at a rate of 10s a week and the driver's licence cost another 5s a year. This meant a capital outlay of \u00a375 and ongoing payments of 12s a week, not including maintenance costs for the cab, or the horse's feed, stabling and medical bills. A horse, furthermore, could work for only half a shift at a time, so two per shift were the minimum. Over a single shift a cab driver averaged 9s a day in fares in the off-season, and up to 14s during the season. If the drivers were not owners, but leased their cab from a master, as most did, they were, by the 1860s, obliged to hand over 15s of their earnings daily for the long-day shift, with night cabs paying 9s. If they failed to earn the agreed sum, they had to make up the difference themselves. A night driver took home, at best, 18s a week, or \u00a346 a year.\n\nTo boost their income, licence-holders sublet their cabs to bucks, who gave the driver 1s for every 1s 6d or 2s he earned. Fares were set down by law: so much per mile. But at the end of each journey, how many miles a journey had taken was easily disputed, and many drivers expected to bully and threaten their way to a higher fare. Dickens and his _Household Words_ colleagues fantasized about a world in which 'eightpence were understood to mean not more than a shilling, and three-quarters of a mile not more than a mile', but until that happy day arrived, bucks could in effect extort what they liked. If the passenger complained to the police and had the driver brought up before the magistrates, as did happen with some regularity, when the licence-holder arrived the passenger would have to acknowledge that this was not the man who had driven him. From 1853, legislation was enacted to regulate the situation: the driver had to display a table of fares, with the legal distances between specific points.\n\nYet the question of fares remained ugly. In snow, when cabs had to be drawn by both the driver's horses at once, passengers were charged vastly inflated sums \u2013 legitimately, the drivers thought, as the horses tired more quickly, and they had no extra horses to continue with when the pair tired, forcing them to work a short day. For many passengers, the problem was nothing more than an irritant. Max Schlesinger shrugged it off: the simplest solution was 'to pay and have done' with it, but, he added, even those who knew London intimately would at some point in their lives have to 'appeal to the intervention of a policeman' to deal with cabbies. In his fiction Dickens portrayed the very real fears of, particularly, women travelling alone when confronted with these aggressive and often drunken men. Genteel Miss Tox, in _Dombey and Son_ , makes 'systematic' arrangements before entering a cab, loudly requesting the footman of the grand house she is leaving to note down the cab's number, before instructing, 'He's to drive to the [address on the] card, and is to understand that he will not on any account have more than the shilling...Mention to the man...that the lady's uncle is a magistrate.'\n\nEven with these problems, cabs quickly became popular as a speedy, efficient and relatively inexpensive means of transport for the middle classes. They were now necessities, even if they were necessities that had to be rationed. In Trollope's _Phineas Redux_ (1873), the middle-class but not rich Mr Maule had to make choices. When the weather is fine he walks to save money, but when it is wet, or at night, 'A cab...was a necessity; \u2013 but his income would not stand two or three cabs a day. Consequently he never went north of Oxford Street, or east of the theatres, or beyond Eccleston Square towards the river': that is, he confined himself to the fashionable West End, Mayfair and Belgravia.\n\nMost people could not imagine ever owning a private carriage. It was not just the cost of the carriage itself, or the horse and its accoutrements \u2013 harnesses and so on \u2013 but the running costs: the feed and care of the horse, the stabling, as well as the taxes that were imposed on carriages throughout the century. If a carriage were needed regularly, or the family was large, more than one horse might be required. The needs of the animals constrained people's movements. In _Our Mutual Friend_ , when Mr Veneering campaigns for a parliamentary seat, his friends dash about in their carriages to spread the word, but after a certain amount of time 'pails of water must be brought from the nearest baiting-place' to cool the horses before they can set off again. Dickens used this for comic effect, but other novels simply reported these requirements as a natural event. In _London by Night_ , a racy novel of about 1862 concerned with fallen women, two prostitutes go out in their brougham in the evening, to drink in a saloon and pick up men. Six hours later, when they are ready to return home, one says, 'I sent the [coachman] home to change his horse, but it must have returned some time [ago]' \u2013 horses could not stand about for hours, and visits, even to saloons brimming with loose women, had to be planned. By mid-century there were only 10,000 private carriages in London \u2013 1 for every 260 people, and this number included jobbing carriages, which were actually commercial vehicles, hired out by the day or hour. So low did the number sink that by the 1860s builders no longer routinely built mews behind even prosperous streets, for their owners were unlikely to need stables.\n\nA major component in the cost was the staff needed to service a carriage: the coachman and possibly a tiger, or groom. Footmen stood on the back step, ready to jump down to help the passengers into and out of the carriage. Footmen were also known for the flamboyant manner in which they knocked on doors while their masters waited in the carriages. When Tom Pinch first arrives in London in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , no one answers his polite little rap at a door, at which Tom concludes, 'I am afraid that's not a London knock.' Foreigners were amazed to discover that there was a recognized, if unspoken, hierarchy of doorknocks in the city. The German journalist Max Schlesinger viewed the knocker as\n\nthe most difficult of all musical instruments. It requires a good ear and a skilful hand...The postman gives two loud raps in quick succession; and for the visitor a gentle but peremptory _tremolo_ is _de rigueur_. The master of the house gives a _tremolo crescendo_ , and the servant who announces his master, turns the knocker into a battering ram...Tradesmen, on the other hand...are not allowed to touch the knockers \u2013 they ring a bell which communicates with the kitchen. All this is very easy in theory but very difficult in practice. Bold, and otherwise inexperienced, strangers believe that they assert their dignity, if they move the knocker with conscious energy...They are mistaken for footmen. Modest people [who knock softly], on the contrary, are treated as mendicants.\n\nAs well as their salaries and their keep, all of these servants were liveried, that is, they wore a uniform, each household having its own distinctive colours to identify their servants. Livery for footmen was essentially court-dress of the 1770s frozen in time: knee-length coats with metal buttons and braid, long striped waistcoats, breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. Coachmen too wore breeches, waistcoats and coats with parti-coloured collars, facings and cuffs. Tigers, usually boys, wore tight, jockey-like outfits, and their name derived from their striped livery. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , Bailey the tiger wears white cord breeches, big top-boots, and 'A grass-green frock-coat...bound with gold! And a cockade in your hat!'\n\nThe technology of carriages advanced out of all measure from the 1820s: they became safer, more comfortable and easier to drive. As with cabs, the wheels were larger and the body set lower, making them less likely to overturn, as well as rendering the interior accessible by a double step, instead of the three-fold ladder steps that had previously been needed. Better springs gave a smoother ride, while a strengthened undercarriage improved safety. Different types of carriages had their own strengths and weaknesses, and were liked or disliked for their perceived stylishness or indications of status and income, as cars are today. Broughams were either singles \u2013 with one seat holding two people, and a space for a footman behind, pulled by one or two horses \u2013 or doubles, always pulled by two horses, with two facing seats \u2013 although the one facing backwards was small \u2013 accommodating three passengers, plus the footman. Victorias were more 'modern and stylish': also four-wheeled, they carried two, with a fold-down leather hood at the back, and were open at the front. Four-wheeled carriages were difficult to turn, unlike the two-wheeled cabriolets, which became more common from the late 1830s. Cabriolets also carried two people, with a boy behind if wanted, and were generally considered more stylish, less bourgeois. They were also less expensive to run, as one of the passengers drove from inside the cab, doing away with the need for a coachman, a footman or even a boy. However, cabriolets were not particularly easy to drive, and the ride was very rough; as the carriages were heavy to pull, the quality and strength of the horses was crucial. The Tilbury was promoted as easier on the horses, because it was lighter, but it was badly hung, giving a bumpy ride, which in turn made it hard to control the horse.\n\nAnother drawback was that, unlike coaches, the cabriolets did not make much noise. This today seems to be a positive, not a negative, but it was the noise that alerted drivers to an oncoming vehicle after dark. By mid-century the London streets were lit by gas street lamps on average just over 200 feet apart: closer on Oxford Street, further apart on secondary roads, and entirely absent on small streets or in impoverished districts. Before this, there were even fewer, so travelling in the dark at a rate of up to ten miles an hour (horses' top speed when being ridden: less when pulling a carriage) was hazardous. Drivers on the roads into London relied on the ambient light from the numbers of mailcoaches entering and leaving the city, many having five or six lamps, and the guard, 'especially on thick [foggy] nights', making 'free use of his horn to avoid collisions'. In town, by mid-century, the hansoms helped light up the streets, having 'a bright speck of light fixed in front of the hood'.\n\nOtherwise carriage lighting developed slowly. In the 1820s, carriage lamps consisted of a candle in a glazed container with a spring at the bottom to push the candle up as it burnt, keeping the flame level; behind it were mirrored reflectors to direct the light outwards, around the carriage, to warn oncoming traffic. These lights were placed below and slightly behind the driver, so that he had relatively little light spilt on him: it was important to keep his eyes adapted to the dark. By the late 1830s, the household Argand lamp had been adapted for carriage driving, its main benefit being a clear glass funnel that did not become blackened with soot as the wick burnt. It is indicative of how dirty the older style of glass must have been that in the opinion of one journalist these new lights made coaches look as if they were carrying 'two harvest moons'. Yet by today's standards, the lighting was exiguous. In 1855, an engraving of Queen Victoria in a long procession at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris showed her own carriage as the only one with a light.\n\nLights were not always seen as a positive addition on the roads. Many horses were spooked by these ghostly moving lights, and to make matters worse, 'The presence of a number of coaches carrying powerful lights...[has] the tendency of throwing small carriages without lamps into the shade...making it more difficult to see them.' Smaller vehicles, such as donkey carts, pushcarts and all other manner of barrows, were easily overlooked and ridden down. The minor streets in London could be as dangerous as the major roads leading to the metropolis with their much greater traffic. Steamers, omnibuses, tubes, cabs and carriages represented the triumph of mass transport in London itself. Getting into and out of London required something altogether different.\n\n#### 4.\n\n#### IN AND OUT OF LONDON\n\nOne of the more idiosyncratic sights of London was by Smithfield market and Newgate prison, in the centre of the City, where the coachyard of the Saracen's Head Inn boasted a 'portal guarded by two Saracens' heads and shoulders...frowning upon you from each side of the gateway'. Another Saracen's head frowned down from the top of the inn's yard. On the boots of all the red coaches waiting there, more miniature Saracens' heads similarly glared away.\n\nOne of these red stagecoaches was the daily 8 a.m. Yorkshire coach, ready to take Nicholas Nickleby to the dreaded Dotheboys Hall school. When Dickens travelled north in 1838 to look at schools as source material for the novel, he took the 'Express' coach, which was not actually an express at all, but a slow or heavy coach. The heavy left the Saracen's Head an hour later than the stage, at 9 a.m. every day, travelling first to the Peacock in Islington (today marked by a plaque on a very drab building across from the Angel tube station), then continuing to Bedfordshire, sixty miles on. There it stopped to light its lamps, for by then it was nearly evening, and it would be another full day before the heavy reached its destination at Greta Bridge in County Durham. Dickens travelled in leisurely fashion, taking several overnight breaks, unlike Nicholas and his poor freezing companions, who travelled as outsides on the top of the coach for thirty-two hours straight.\n\nThe stage and the heavy were just two of the many regular coaches. The most old-fashioned method as the century began was the post-chaise, which was a smaller, lighter carriage than a stagecoach, usually with four wheels (some had two), pulled by two or four horses harnessed in pairs and with the lead horse ridden by a postboy, or postilion. When real speed was needed, each pair had its own postilion. The two-wheeled post-chaise carried two passengers, while a four-wheeled chaise held one extra passenger in a dickey or rumble, an open back seat at the rear. A post-chaise was always hired privately, to the passenger's own schedule, but the chaise, horses, driver and postboys all belonged to the coaching inn or a local proprietor. Travelling post was expensive and, as the stagecoach network grew, it declined in popularity. In 1819, a guidebook needed two pages, with sixty-nine entries, to list the London stables and inns that hired out post-chaises; the 1839 edition listed none. In 1827, when Mr Pickwick and his friends chase after the eloping Miss Wardle, they take their host's gig to the local inn, where they rush in shouting, 'Chaise and four directly! \u2013 out with 'em!' and Wardle roars out that there will be a reward if the driver covers the next seven-mile stage in less than half an hour. (Mr Pickwick, more cautious by temperament, frets about moving at that rate in the dark: 'Pretty situations...strange horses \u2013 fifteen miles an hour \u2013 and [at] twelve o'clock at night!')\n\nThere were less expensive ways to travel into and out of London. A system of mailcoaches had been running since 1785: these were stagecoaches that carried the post to guaranteed schedules, and which also had space for a limited number of passengers. The mailcoaches were painted brown or mauve below, with black above and on the boot at the rear; the wheels and the undercarriage were all bright red, with the royal arms on the doors, gilt initials on the front boot and the number of the coach on the rear. The driver and an armed guard, who sat behind, were resplendent in royal livery, as carriers of the royal mails: this meant gold-braided scarlet coats for both with, later, blue lapels, linings and waistcoats, and gold braid on the guards' hatbands. The guard was responsible for ensuring the bags reached their destination and were not pillaged, as well as for keeping the coach to schedule and taking the fares from passengers who joined on the road; if the coach broke down, it was his job to keep the mail moving.\n\nThe mailcoaches were expected to travel at a steady ten miles an hour. One minute was scheduled for the tired horses to be taken out of harness and replaced by fresh ones at coaching inns along the way, although some ostlers prided themselves on achieving the feat in even less. The American visitor Alexander MacKenzie described the change over on the Dover\u2013London mail in the 1830s. When the bugle of the guard was heard, the barmaid automatically drew a drink, usually a 'heavy wet', or malt, for the coachmen. As the wheels sounded in the yard, out ran the 'inn-keeper, bar-maid, stable-boys, mischievous urchins, and all the idlers of the neighbourhood. The horses were pulled back upon their haunches, and stopped as if shot; the reins were thrown down on either side; the whip given unceremoniously to the envied occupant of the box-seat; and the coachman descended, with a princely air of condescension.' If the coach was full, a third pair of horses, with a postilion, was harnessed at every hill. Even this 'occasioned no delay; each horse had its attendant hostler...and the business of changing was managed with admirable despatch. A wooden block...was thrust under the hind wheel the instant we drew up...the coachman would nobly toss off the foaming tankard presented to him...and ere a minute had flown by, the guard would say \"All right!\" as he ascended the back of the coach, the block be withdrawn, and the horses...dart[ed] away at a gallop.'\n\nFor outward journeys from London until 1828, passengers booked seats and began their journey at the inn where the horses were stabled, travelling on to the main post office at Lombard Street, where the mailbags were collected and locked in the boots as the coaches clogged up the street, drawn up in double ranks. From 1829, the new, very large main post office at St Martin's-le-Grand became the starting point, and from there the coaches roared out. Crowds stood by to watch their departure every evening, one of the sights of London. Their speed was proverbial, both a marvel and a worry. In _Little Dorrit_ , a man is knocked down by a mailcoach, and all the bystanders agree: '\"They ought to be prosecuted and fined, them Mails. They come a racing out of Lad Lane [now Gresham Street] and Wood Street at twelve or fourteen mile a hour, them Mails do. The only wonder is, that people ain't killed oftener by them Mails\"... \" _I_ see one on 'em pull up within half a inch of a boy, last night\"...\" _I_ see one on 'em go over a cat, sir \u2013 and it might have been your own mother.\"' But it was precisely because of this speed that fares were higher than for a regular stagecoach: from 4\u00bdd to 5d per mile outside, or 8d to 10d per mile inside.\n\nThe mails became woven into the fabric of life, not merely as a symbol of modernity, nor even later of nostalgia, though they were both at different times, but also as a symbol of national pride. The essayist Thomas de Quincey described how during the French wars, from the battles of Trafalgar (1805) to Waterloo (1815), it was primarily the mails that broke the news of each victory. Traditionally, boards had been affixed to the sides of the mails, announcing events of national importance, such as the death of a monarch, to those towns and villages through which they passed without stopping. But during the decade of allied victories in Europe, it was considered a privilege to ride on top of a coach that was carrying the glad tidings. On such a night the 'horses, men, carriages, all are dressed in laurels and flowers, oak-leaves and ribbons'. The streets around the post office filled with even more excited spectators than usual, who shouted 'continual hurrahs' as the mails moved out: 'what a thundering of wheels! \u2013 what a trampling of hoofs!\u2013 what a sounding of trumpets! \u2013 what farewell cheers \u2013 what redoubling peals of brotherly congratulations, connecting the name of the particular mail \u2013 \"Liverpool for ever!\" \u2013 with the name of the particular victory \u2013 \"Badajoz for ever!\" or \"Salamanca for ever!\"...all night long, and all the next day...many of these mails, like fire racing along a trail of gunpowder, will be kindling at every instant new successions of burning joy.'\n\nAs they passed through the towns and countryside, everyone who saw the coach understood the symbolism of the oak leaves and ribbons, while 'rolling volleys of sympathising cheers run along us, behind us, and before us'. As private carriages approached the mails, passengers could see comprehension dawning: 'See, see!' the oncomers seemed to be saying, 'Look at their laurels!' The box-seat passenger on these victory runs was always supplied with a stack of the London papers, each one carefully folded so that the headline \u2013 'GLORIOUS VICTORY' \u2013 was uppermost as he tossed a copy into each carriage as it passed in the opposite direction.\n\nNot every run could be this thrilling, although even the regular stagecoaches had a glamour of their own. The drivers, unlike the drivers of the mails, were not in livery but usually wore white coats with, over them, great travelling cloaks, often with several capes attached. Tony Weller, the stagecoach driver in _Pickwick Papers_ , wore 'a crimson travelling shawl...over this he mounted a long waistcoat of broad pink striped pattern, and over that again a wide-skirted green coat, ornamented with large brass buttons...His legs were encased in knee-cord breeches and painted top boots and a copper-watch-chain...dangled from his capacious waistband.' Unlike the mails, the stage was not legally compelled to travel as fast as ten miles an hour, although that was still the aim, and some even 'push their speed to twelve miles'. (This was proudly contrasted to Dutch or French diligences, which were said \u2013 although possibly only by the British \u2013 to travel at less than half that rate.) The coaches were named to reflect their speed: the Quicksilver, the Comet, the Rocket, the Greyhound, Lightning, Express and Hirondelle all became commonplace. It was not just speed, but scheduling, and keeping to those schedules, that were the stages' selling points. In the 1830s, a coachman on the Cambridge\u2013London route kept a brass clock on his box to ensure that he did his daily hundred-mile round-trip in eleven hours precisely. On the highly competitive London\u2013Brighton run, with two or three proprietors running twenty or so coaches between them every day, several owners promised to refund fares if the coaches were late.\n\nThe heavy-stage, or night-stage, was less expensive than the ordinary stage. The heavy was usually an older stage demoted to night duty, so it was also less comfortable, and it stopped more frequently. It was also used by locals outside London as a short-stagecoach, as well as carrying passengers to and from London at reduced fares. When Dickens took the heavy to Yorkshire he was a successful author, but not yet a rich one, and he had a growing family. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , Pecksniff and his daughters travel to London by the heavy stage: either he is less prosperous than he suggests to the world, or he is miserly, making his daughters travel in some discomfort as, unlike Dickens, they made no overnight stops. The young David Copperfield, too, after his mother's death, is sent away to school 'not by the mail, but by the heavy night-coach, which was called the Farmer'. (What a difference between a coach called the Farmer and one called the Flyer!)\n\nAs with the mails, crowds, especially boys, regularly gathered to watch the arrival and departure of the stages at the main coaching inns in London. Thomas Trollope, the brother of the novelist, remembered in his 1820s childhood going to the White Horse Cellars in Piccadilly (originally on the south side, where the Ritz Hotel now stands next to Green Park; later in the century it was on the north) to watch the arrivals and departures: 'I knew all their names, and their supposed comparative speeds.' This too was where Esther Summerson in _Bleak House_ first arrives in London, having been sent, by arrangement of a lawyer, 'forded, carriage free'. Like the Saracen's Head near Newgate, the White Horse was tavern, hotel and inn combined, providing services to visitors who were staying for some time, to those passing through and to locals.\n\nThe fa\u00e7ades of the coaching inns were deceptively modest for the size of the businesses behind them. Often the only indication of an inn was a large archway to the street. The main focus of the inns were the great courtyards at the rear, where coaches were loaded, and the one important element on the street side was the travellers' room, which from early days had large windows, so passengers could keep an eye out for their coach. Memories tinged with nostalgia recalled these rooms as wonderfully welcoming places, but in reality, claimed Dickens, they were 'mouldy-looking'; in the _Pickwick Papers_ , the White Horse Cellar's travellers' room 'is of course uncomfortable; it would be no travellers' room if it were not', while at the Blue Boar even the poker was removed 'to preclude the possibility of the fire being stirred'.\n\nThe great coaching yard of the Swan with Two Necks on Lad Lane was one starting point for the great procession of mailcoaches setting off daily. (Note the royal arms on the coach's door, indicating the Royal Mail.)\n\nGuidebooks in the 1820s set out the system for coaching. The fare was approximately 2\u00bdd to 3d per mile outside, or 4d to 5d inside. Seats were booked on payment of half the fare at the inn where the coach started, or at any of the inns where the horses were changed en route, with the balance of the fare payable at the beginning of the journey; alternatively a traveller could wait at a crossroads and flag down a passing stage. Outsides were expected to tip the coachman and the guard 1s each, with 3d to the porter at the inn where they set off; the tip for insides was 2s, to the outrage of many tourists. The stages carried four passengers inside, and ten or twelve outside, who perched up on benches on the roof. This was more than the mails could accommodate, as they didn't have to make space for the postbags, which by the 1820s were heaped four or five layers high on the roof. One lucky outside passenger got the box seat beside the coachman. This was the most desirable outside seat, and dashing young men tipped the booking clerk well to reserve it for them. Theoretically, the stage was more comfortable than the mailcoaches, with cushioned outside seats, while the mailcoaches offered only bare boards.\n\nSeating, inside and out, was on a first come, first served basis, so passengers generally arrived a little before departure time to reserve a particular seat. Once that seat had been taken, no matter how many changes and rest stops there were, etiquette required that each passenger always returned to the same place. Trunks and boxes were then handed over; it was advisable for passengers to ensure that they were stowed on the right coach, or were not left sitting in the coaching yard. Likewise at any stops on long trips when the coach was changed, seasoned travellers watched out for their bags at the transfer point. If passengers arrived at the inn to find that the stage had left early, a not infrequent occurrence, they were entitled to order a post-chaise to chase down the slower-moving vehicle. It was stipulated that 'the Proprietors pay the Expense of your Ride'.\n\nThere were many little habits and routines specific to the stages. The Revd Heman Humphrey from the United States observed that when two coachmen passed on the road, without fail 'they exchange salutations, very significantly, by raising the elbow to a horizontal position, at a sharp angle, and turning it out toward the other'. Dickens concurred that there was a greeting 'strictly confined to the freemasonry of the craft', but he described it differently: it was more 'a jerking round of the right wrist, and a tossing of the little finger into the air at the same time'.\n\nWhile this freemasonry did not extend to the passengers, they too fell into recognizable patterns of behaviour. In _The Pickwick Papers_ , 'The outsides did as outsides always do. They were very cheerful and talkative at the beginning of every stage, and very dismal and sleepy in the middle, and very bright and wakeful again towards the end.' There was always one young man who smoked endlessly; another who pretended to be an expert on cattle, while another was the real thing. These were interspersed by locals, familiar to the guard and 'invited to have a \"lift\"'. And, most familiarly, 'there was a dinner which would have been cheap at half-a-crown a mouth, if any moderate number of mouths could have eaten it in the time,' for there were constant sardonic jokes about the lack of time to eat at stops along the route. Many passengers suspected collusion between the inns and the coachmen, the former bribing the latter to cut the stops short, so that they could serve up several times in the course of a day the same meal that no one had had time to eat.\n\nDespite all its drawbacks, coaching was regarded as glamorous. Fashionable men dressed in caped greatcoats in imitation of the coachmen, 'ornamented with enormous mother-o'-pearl buttons as big as crown-pieces, with pictures on them of mail-coaches going full speed'. Some upper-class young men even paid coachmen to let them drive on their routes. The playwright Edmund Yates remembered 'my astonishment at my father shaking hands with the coachman' of the Brighton coach, until it was revealed that he was in fact a titled gentleman. One upper-class man recounted how, when he was passing the White Horse Cellar, 'a coachman had familiarly tapped him on the shoulder with his whip'. He had been enraged by this insolence from a working-class man, until he looked more closely at the supposed driver and recognized his own nephew.\n\nSimilarly, the author of _Old Coachman's Chatter_ , a nostalgic look at coaching days, described seeing, in 1837 or 1838, the 'Taglioni' leave the White Horse Cellars: it was painted blue, with a red undercarriage, the family colours of Lord Chesterfield, who together with Count d'Orsay and Prince Bathyani paid for the privilege, and supplied their own horses. The aristocratic 'coachman' wore a scarf in the same colours, with 'Taglioni' embroidered on it 'by the Countess's own hands'. This reality had fictional antecedents: in the 1821 novel _Real Life in London_ , Bob Tallyho drives 'about twice a week' on the Windsor\u2013London stage, 'tipping coachy a crown for the indulgence', acquitting himself well, apart from 'two overturns only...and...the trifling accident of an old lady being killed, a shoulder or two dislocated, and about half a dozen legs and arms broken, belonging to people who were not at all known in high life': 'nothing worthy of notice', the author concludes with a wink to the reader.\n\nSuch satires apart, coaching was dangerous. When it was not dangerous it was uncomfortable, so much so that its discomforts became proverbial: it was said that the painter Constable, known for his sunny good nature, could manage to remain 'a gentleman even on a coach journey'. Sitting facing the rear caused queasiness in many, but insides in front-facing seats were at the mercy of the wind and rain unless the window was kept closed, in which case the queasy insides complained, or even let their 'Stick or...Umbrella fall (accidentally) against one of the Windows'. Many passsengers considered paying for a breakage preferable to hours in an increasingly fetid atmosphere, but if it rained the insides became nearly as wet and muddy as the outsides. Straw was scattered on the floor for insulation against the cold although, as with the omnibuses, it was usually dirty and wet. Some coaching inns supplied a ' _Calefacient_ ', a pewter container that could be refilled with hot water at each stop, to put under the feet and mitigate the cold.\n\nAnd yet, inside was a considerable improvement on outside. _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ (1857) described a ride on the Tally-ho stage with 'your feet dangling six inches from the floor. Then you knew what cold was, and what it was to be without legs, for not a bit of feeling had you in them after the first half hour.' Tom rides on a fairly empty stage, and the guard helps him pack his feet in straw for warmth, as well as giving him a piece of sacking to cover himself with. A queasy passenger complained that on his first stagecoach ride, in 1835, the choices were sitting facing the horses, 'but without anything against my back (for the iron bar...four inches above the seat, can hardly be called a resting-place)', or facing backwards, 'but secured from falling over...and breaking my neck'. In either case, all that protected him from the bare boards was a cushion, which 'is, alas, soaking from the previous day'. This misery was replicated in fiction. When Mr Pickwick and his friends take a stage to Birmingham, Bob Sawyer ends up with rain 'streaming from his neck, elbows, cuffs, skirts, and knees...his whole apparel shone so with the wet, that it might have been mistaken for a full suit of prepared oilskin'.\n\nWhilst a wetting was miserable enough, Dickens' novels are filled with much more serious stagecoach accidents. in _Nicholas Nickleby_ , the London\u2013Yorkshire stage overturns, with the result that 'the lady inside had broken her lamp, and the gentleman his head...the two front outsides had escaped with black eyes, the box [passenger] with a bloody nose, the coachman with a contusion on the temple, Mr Squeers with a portmanteau bruise on his back'. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , a storm made the horses uneasy even before they set off; once on the road, 'they gradually became less and less capable of control; until, taking a sudden fright at something by the roadside, they dashed off wildly down a steep hill, flung the driver from his saddle, drew the carriage to the brink of a ditch, stumbled headlong down, and threw it crashing over,' while a boy is 'thrown sheer over the hedge...and was lying in the neighbouring field, to all appearance dead'.\n\nDickens had extensive experience to draw on, for his career as a journalist for the _Morning Chronicle_ , from 1834 to 1835, had been in the surprisingly short golden age of coaching, from the spread of macadamized roads in the mid-1830s to that of the railways in the early 1840s. In 1841, in Scotland, he found himself in a coach with a broken drag, forcing the passengers to get out 'every now and then' and hang on to 'the back of the carriage to prevent its rolling down too fast'. It was, naturally, also raining, even before the carriage broke a spring, and was 'in a ditch and out again, and [having] lost a horse's shoe. And all this time it never once left off raining.'\n\nOther natural hazards included fog. In 1840, one coaching enthusiast remembered 'seven or eight Mails following one after the other' in a particularly dense fog: the guard on the first coach held up a flare at the rear of his coach, which could just be seen by the driver of the next, whose guard in turn held up his own flare, 'and so on till the last'. In this manner one ten-mile stretch took three hours, instead of the more usual one, and even then one coach ended up in a ditch, where its wheelers \u2013 the pair of horses nearest the stage's wheels \u2013 drowned, while the outsides were 'thrown into the meadow beyond', and the insides 'extricated with some difficulty'.\n\nEven without fog, writers listed an array of accidents: from obstructions on the road that could not be seen by the driver; to horses that ran up a bank, upsetting the coach into the road; broken reins; a broken pole, which tipped the coach over; horses that jammed together and, with their heads turned the wrong way, could no longer be controlled by the coachman; a lead horse falling, and the wheelers in turn stumbling over it; a driver hitting his head on an overhanging branch and falling off, upon which the horses then bolted; a driver being jounced off the coach by a rut or an obstacle; outsides falling off regularly ('It's like helping an outside passenger up ven he's been pitched off a coach,' says Tony Weller in _Pickwick_ aphoristically); or horses shying and running off. All of which makes Dickens \u2013 'I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known...I have been...belated on miry by-roads...in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys' \u2013 seem positively understated.\n\nThe romance nonetheless survived. In 1860, Dickens recalled his childhood: 'The coach that had carried me [to London as a child], was melodiously called Timpson's Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street; [while] the locomotive engine that had brought me back [as an adult] was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S. E. R. [the South-Eastern Railway], and was spitting ashes and hot-water over the blighted ground.' Dickens never quite made up his mind about trains. He used them frequently, travelling to seaside holidays, to the continent, to his house in Kent; and then relentlessly once he started his famous reading tours, repeatedly criss-crossing the country. Yet long before he was in a terrible train crash in 1865 \u2013 in which ten people died just outside Staplehurst, in Kent, and which left him with a fear of train travel that lasted the rest of his life \u2013 long before this, while he welcomed the railways as a convenience and a sign of modernity, he also regretted them as symbols of a time that was passing, or past.\n\nThackeray, his elder by a year, wrote elegiacally: 'what a gulf between now and then! _Then_ was the old world. Stagecoaches...riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions...all these belong to the old period...But your railroad starts the new era and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one.' Looking both backwards and forwards from the start of his career as an author, writing in 1836\u20137, Dickens set his first novel, _Pickwick Papers_ , a decade earlier, opening in 1827, before the arrival of the railways, but one chapter was nevertheless entitled 'Strongly illustrative of the Position, that the Course of True love is not a Railway'. Ten years later in _Dombey and Son_ , he was still looking both ways: he described the savage destruction that the building of the railways caused, but he also saw that 'The miserable waste ground, where the refuse-matter had been heaped of yore, was swallowed up and gone; and in its frowsy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and costly merchandise...the new streets...formed towns within themselves, originating wholesome comforts and conveniences...Bridges that had led to nothing, led to villas, gardens, churches, healthy public walks.' Even so, he finishes: 'But Staggs's Gardens had been cut up root and branch. Oh woe the day when \"not a rood of English ground\" \u2013 laid out in Staggs's Gardens \u2013 is secure!'\n\nIn some ways, the arrival of the railways didn't shrink London, but made it appear to be expanding at the seams. Trains made areas seem suburban that had previously been rural, while suburbs became part of the city; Dickens wrote in 1847, 'places far apart are brought together, to the present convenience and advantage of the Public'. At a time when an exasperated commuter claimed that it was quicker to walk the two and a half miles from London Bridge to Trafalgar Square than to take a bus, Max Schlesinger praised the marvels of the suburban line, 'a miraculous railway' that ran from Blackwall and Greenwich in the east and over the northern section of the City to north-west London: every quarter of an hour, 'from early morn till late at night', the ten-mile journey took twenty minutes. Schlesinger was not alone in his attitude. Within a quarter of a century, 160 million journeys a year were made by rail within London itself. Many places that had recently been quiet suburbs were heavily visited. After the Great Exhibition in 1851, the Crystal Palace was relocated to Sydenham and, with new, elaborately laid out gardens, it opened to the public in 1854. At first trippers had to take the train to the suburb of Penge and walk up a hill, but such was the volume of visitors that the Crystal Palace company set up its own railway branch line. This was so successful that it was soon taken over by the London and Brighton Railway, which built a substantial station, linked to Crystal Palace 'by long glass corridors embellished with flowers and climbing plants'. By the 1860s, Crystal Palace afternoon concerts were drawing audiences brought by special express trains from Kensington, over twelve miles away.\n\nThe railways also transformed people's notion of what could be considered a commuting distance. Until 1844, trains were too expensive, even in third-class, to be used by the working classes for their daily commute. In that year, however, the government, in exchange for lifting a tax on third-class carriages, laid down that all railway companies had to run at least one train daily with fares of no more than 1d per mile. Even so, average fares still mounted up to \u00a31 weekly, the entire weekly income of many skilled, well-employed artisans. But slowly workers did begin to move out of the city centre, as these so-called parliamentary trains (also known as working-men's trains) gradually made it possible for them to live in slightly more salubrious conditions for the price of an inner-city slum rent, or perhaps even less, funds that could then be reallocated to travel. Even so, these working-men's trains were not attractive in and of themselves. Officially they were required to travel at a minimum of twelve miles per hour, but they were notorious for being regularly shunted on to sidings to give priority to trains carrying first- and second-class passengers. The companies initially saw these working-men's trains as a political gesture and did not expect them to make a profit. The day's single parliamentary train was usually scheduled to arrive at the London stations well before dawn, to get the legal requirement out of the way, with the service from Ludgate Hill to Victoria, for example, departing at 4.55 a.m. and arriving at Victoria at six.\n\nBy mid-century a day out and the railways were inseparable. Here holiday crowds leave the Crystal Palace in Sydenham.\n\nFor the privilege of being shunted aside, until the 1850s the passengers in the third-class carriages stood in cars without benches or even roofs, exposed to rain, sleet and snow as well as the soot and smoke from the engine. There were no doors either, but as in cattle-cars a flap on one side of the carriage folded down to provide access. (The conditions gave rise to a series of jokes along the lines of 'A man was seen yesterday buying a third-class ticket...The state of his mind is being inquired into.') These carriages were more dangerous than the trains in general \u2013 in 1841, eight labourers from the building site at the new Houses of Parliament were thrown out of their open wagon and killed when the train they were travelling on ran into a landslide. Some passengers actively enjoyed this form of travel: 'the jolly part was coming down in the train we were in an open carrage the thurd class...but some times the sparks flu about and one woman got a hole burnt in her shawl. there was no lid to our carrage like some of them.' However, the author of this paean was Sophia Beale, aged eight, to which she added the proviso, 'I should not like to go in these carrages in winter.' Second-class was little better, with bare benches holding five a side facing each other. Ventilation came via a small square of wooden louvres on the door, sometimes, but not always, covered by a pane of glass. 'Smoking, snuff-taking, tobacco-chewing are all allowed,' said one visitor sourly. Despite these habits, he added, only the 'nobility and the wealthy' travelled first class, as it was so expensive. In 1856, a ticket from Liverpool to London on the accommodation train \u2013 that is, a stopping train, not an express \u2013 cost 37s, or nearly a week's salary for a well-paid clerk. Even the best-selling novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe declared, 'first-class cars are beyond all praise, but also beyond all price,' although she conceded, 'their second-class are comfortless, cushionless, and uninviting.' In first class, the passengers sat in 'luxuriously upholstered' seats in 'nicely carpeted' compartments, with plate-glass windows to let in the daylight, while after dark these carriages were lit first by rape-oil lamps, later with gas.\n\nUntil the 1850s, third-class passengers had no seating at all; after that wooden benches were provided, although there were no other comforts. The windows were simply openings, with wooden shutters to keep out bad weather: the choice was darkness and lack of air, or rain and cold.\n\nOmnibus travel and mailcoaches had increased the average speed of travel to nearly six miles an hour; with the railway this figure rose to over twelve, sometimes double that. By the late 1840s, therefore, areas that had traditionally been on the edges of London now housed commuters: Bow, Greenwich, Blackheath, Croydon, Woolwich, Gravesend and Charlton. By 1856, a town known as 'Kingston on Railway' made its priorities clear. (It later changed its name to Surbiton.) In 1851, there were 120 trains daily carrying commuters to and from Greenwich alone. Early railway lines, built to transport freight from Camden to the East and West India Docks, were soon transformed into commuter lines and promoted an east\u2013west spread, via Canonbury, Kingsland, Homerton and out to Bow. By 1851, this North London Railway transported 3.5 million commuters annually, half of whom were City commuters.\n\nThe first London station opened on the south side of London Bridge, and its twelve-minute trip to Greenwich replaced a one-hour coach journey. In 1837, Euston station opened, followed by a series of others: in 1838, Paddington and Nine Elms; in 1840, the Shoreditch\/Bishopsgate terminus, which carried passengers to Romford, in Essex; in 1841, the station at Fenchurch Street in the City. In 1846, one contemporary estimated that, at the height of railway fever, if every company that had wanted to run a railway line into London had been given permission, over 30 per cent of the city would have been excavated for the purpose. To prevent even a fraction of this, in 1848 a Royal Commission on Metropolitan Termini drew a circle around the inner city, past which no railway would be permitted to run. In a shorthand description, it ran: Euston Road, City Road, Borough Road, Kennington Lane, Vauxhall Bridge Road, and Park Lane up to the Euston Road again. This boundary was breached almost immediately by a line from Nine Elms, at Battersea, to York Road (which became Waterloo) in 1848, but this was south of the river, and so somehow, mystically, to the West End and City men, it didn't quite count. And despite two further breaches \u2013 Charing Cross (1864) and Liverpool Street (1874) \u2013 that line has held for 165 years: instead of lines coming into the city, as in most other European centres, London is ringed by railways. (The underground, too, silently conforms to this loop.)\n\nInitially, money was lavished on the construction of the railway lines, not on the stations. While many of London's railway stations today have some Victorian elements remaining, they are all from the later part of the century. In the 1830s and 1840s, the stations started off very humbly indeed. Euston in 1838 had two platforms: the 'arrival stage' and the 'departure stage' (note the coaching word), from which three outward and three inward trains arrived and departed daily. ('Inward' and 'outward' were quickly superseded by 'up' and 'down' trains, meaning to and from London respectively, terms that survived until sometime after World War II.) In 1850, the Great Northern Railway's station at Maiden Lane (the street is now York Way, while the station has become King's Cross) was a temporary structure with two wooden platforms on the down side, between a gasworks and the tunnel for the new line. London Bridge in the 1860s had three stations: the Brighton station, the South-Eastern station and the Greenwich Railway station, the latter 'a mean structure'.\n\nAs trains became more heavily used, attention turned to the stations. In 1849, Euston opened its Great Hall, a concourse and a waiting room, all poorly designed, because when they were planned no one quite knew how a railway functioned, nor what needs had to be served. (Most stations, for example, found space for stands on which were chained large Bibles, 'for the use of the passengers while waiting for the train'.) At Euston, the new hall was vast \u2013 125 by 61 feet, and 62 feet high \u2013 but the booking office was tucked into a cramped corner, with a secondary booking hall separated from the main concourse by the parcels office. Initially tickets could not be purchased on the train, and in some stations the booking office opened for just fifteen minutes before each train's departure, causing great bottlenecks. At Euston a large area was given over to the Queen's Apartments, a lounge for the use of the royal family should they be happening to pass through. It was rarely used and soon came down in the world with a bump, to become the 'additional parcels office'.\n\nPassengers too needed to learn how the system operated. Guides instructed them that, once they were on the train, 'A glove, a book, or anything left on a seat denotes that [a seat] is taken'. Luggage, it was explained, was placed on the roof of each carriage (it was not until the early 1860s that specially designated luggage vans appeared). Until the 1880s, each carriage had doors opening only on to the platforms, with no connection from one carriage to the next. As a result all trains halted somewhere along the line to permit the conductor to walk along the track from carriage to carriage to check tickets. On the trains coming into Waterloo, the pause was made 'on the high viaduct over the Westminster Bridge Road'; by Euston 'outside the engine-house' (the Roundhouse at Camden); while outside London Bridge they stopped 'close to the parapet of the 20-feet-high viaduct' in Bermondsey. The Frenchman Francis Wey, in the 1850s, complained that his train was stopped while the tickets of nearly 2,000 passengers were checked: in third-class carriages, which were still mostly open-sided carts ('in a country where it rains perpetually', he wailed), the passengers were forced to wait 'unprotected in the broiling sun between a rock and a brick wall'.\n\nNo matter how uncomfortable and inconvenient railways were, however, they were synonymous with modernity: by 1852, Dickens referred to the world he was living in as 'the moving age'. Even a more prosaic man that same year acknowledged that he was 'work[ing] at a railroad pace' \u2013 that is, like a steam engine. For life was moving faster and faster, and even leisure was speeding up.\nPART TWO\n\nStaying Alive\n\n_1861: The Tooley Street Fire_\n\nBy five o'clock on the evening of Saturday, 22 June 1861, the workmen in a row of warehouses were preparing for the Sunday shutdown in the repositories for the many goods traded in the City, sitting snugly along the river by London Bridge, near where the Borough High Street met Tooley Street. Scovell's Warehouse was filled with hemp, saltpetre, tallow, cotton, rice, sugar and tea, and spices including ginger, pepper, cochineal and cayenne. Next to it stood Cotton's Warehouse, then, further along the row of wharves, Hay's Wharf, then Chamberlain's Wharf, which traded in sulphur, tallow, saltpetre, jute, oils and paint.\n\nAlmost everyone had left for the Sunday shutdown when a fire began, no one knew how, in the counting house at Scovell's Warehouse. In minutes it had spread to four nearby buildings, quickly igniting the next four: 'owing to the great quantity of tallow on the premises' it raced through those too. Without pause, the flames then leapt the walls, reaching Cotton's Warehouse and engulfing Hay's Wharf. At last it set alight Chamberlain's Wharf, with its lethal combination of wares.\n\nThere was fire north, south, east, and west, fire everywhere; red lurid flames in dense masses, not like the thin tongues which leap themselves picturesquely round the devoted building, but broad, glaring, gleaming masses, which rose and floated like clouds of fire over the doomed wharves. From whatever point of view it was seen the spectacle...was grand and terrible \u2013 a mighty element in the full tide of its power, defying all the puny efforts of man. From the opposite side of the river it appeared like some volcano, throwing up its flames, reddening the sky, and illuminating all public buildings with the shade of an unnatural-looking autumnal sunset...the masts and flags and rigging of the ships in the river glowed as though they were in a red heat; the water reflected the towering flames of the burning ships, till the very Thames itself seemed on fire.\n\nIn truth, the very Thames itself not only seemed, but actually was, on fire. The tallow and oil from the burst barrels in the warehouses had poured out into the river, and the surface of the water was burning fiercely. Mr Hodges, the owner of a distillery near by, took it upon himself to act as fire-marshal until the arrival of the professionals of the London Fire Engine Establishment under their famous superintendent, James Braidwood. (For more on fires, see pp. 325\u201332.) Distilleries were dangerous places and often maintained their own private fire brigade, as did other manufacturers dealing with flammable goods, such as Price's Candles (the company is still in Vauxhall today). Hodges brought out his two engines and was soon joined by another handful of private brigades. When the official fire brigade arrived, the groups worked together under Braidwood, as was customary. The London Fire Engine Establishment's floating river-engine soon appeared, but it was almost low tide, and the water was not sufficiently deep for its pumps to operate. On the street side, too, the firefighters were hampered. The same tallow and oil stores that had flowed into the river had also escaped into the street, where they were burning ankle deep. The firemen were forced back even further as the spice warehouses caught fire, the pepper-smoke blowing towards them in blinding clouds.\n\nThe vast extent of river-frontage destroyed by the Tooley Street fire can be seen here, running from the road next to St Olave's Church on the left, to Hay's Wharf on the right \u2013 eleven acres in total.\n\nFifteen miles away, Arthur Munby was on a train between Epsom and Cheam when he saw from the window 'A pyramid of red flame on the horizon, sending up a column of smoke that rose high in the air & then spread...At New Cross [four miles away] the reflection of the firelight on houses & walls began to be visible; & as we drove along the arched way into town, the whole of Bermondsey was in a blaze of light.'\n\nBy now the warehouses of eight companies were ablaze, and clearly beyond rescue. The firemen went to work instead on drenching the surrounding streets and buildings, to prevent the fire spreading \u2013 but in vain. Their new engine, which pumped more strongly, via steam power rather than manual labour, was being repaired at a works in Blackfriars Road. Hodges went to retrieve it, returning with the steam engine and extra hose. Supervising this himself, he managed temporarily to prevent the fire from leaping to the next range of warehouses, as his men and the fire brigade were joined by members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Life from Fire, bringing their own engines.\n\nStill the fire roared on. The floating engine on the river was almost engulfed: 'the flames were so great, the explosions so frequent, the surface of the river being at the same period covered...with ignited tallow, and the flames rising 27 feet over the floating engine' that it was forced to retreat to the Customs House Stairs on the far side of the river. For several hundred yards, the south bank of the Thames was on fire: burning barges floated across on burning water as the oil and tallow poured 'in cascades' from the wharfs.\n\nBraidwood, the great hero, the man who had professionalized the service, was everywhere at once, advising, controlling, encouraging his brigade. At 7.30 he was seen by the wall of a warehouse behind Tooley Street, working out a plan and giving his exhausted men rations of brandy. Suddenly from behind the wall came a huge explosion of saltpetre. The wall burst outwards, and the last anyone saw of James Braidwood was as fifteen feet of burning brickwork rained down on him and four or five others, burying them completely. 'Any attempt to rescue, or even recover the body, or what might remain of it, was quite impossible.' Instead, his men carried on as he had trained them.\n\nSometime after eleven o'clock that evening, the houses fronting Tooley Street caught fire. The fear was that a warehouse behind Cotton's Warehouse would be engulfed: it was said to contain 'several thousand barrels of tar'. By this time, 'thousands' of gallons of oil were on fire and pouring out in 'liquid flames'. Each building that contained some form of fuel or fat \u2013 and there were many \u2013 was quickly set alight: 'the flames rose high...in all sorts of colours \u2013 first there was a brilliant vermilion hue, which seemed to tip the pinnacles of the Tower of London, and the water side of the Custom-house' across the river, then 'the fire changed to a bright blue, and, at the same time, immense volumes of white and black smoke rolled over the house tops'.\n\nThe fire rapidly jumped over to granaries close to St Olave's Church, near London Bridge. Behind the church, on the river, were moored 'several schooners filled with barrels of oil, tar, and tallow'. Efforts had been made to tow them out to the middle of the river, but the steam tugs attempting this operation at low tide had themselves caught fire, 'and in a short space of time were burnt down to the water's edge', while the cargoes of the schooners drifted 'out blazing into the river...the blazing barrels of tar floating in a line along the banks of the river about a quarter of a mile in length and one hundred yards across...forming as it were a complete firing of flame twenty feet high'. At this point the wind shifted eastward, towards more tallow warehouses. By one in the morning the warehouses and shops in Tooley Street were given up for lost.\n\nIt was not until three o'clock, ten hours after the fire began, that it was finally contained in one area, although within that section buildings still burnt fiercely, punctuated by explosions as caches of saltpetre, gunpowder or sulphur were ignited. From St Olave's Church to Battle Bridge Stairs, just under 1,000 feet from east to west, and from the Thames extending another 1,000 feet inland, to Tooley Street, the fire continued to burn: over eleven acres were completely razed.\n\nAnd throughout these long hours, as the men, exhausted, grimy, choking, their leader dead, continued their struggle, sightseers arrived en masse. Only hours after the first flames had been seen, when it had become clear that this was a major fire, sellers of beer, ginger-beer, fruit, cakes and coffee crowded the streets, hoping to pick up extra trade when the pubs closed, although many pubs, seeing the number of spectators, stayed open all night.\n\nAs Munby's train neared London, 'Every head was thrust out of window,' and at London Bridge he found 'The station yard, which was as light as day, was crammed with people: railings, lamp posts, every high spot, was alive with climbers. Against the dark sky...the fa\u00e7ade of S. Thomas's Hospital and the tower of S. Saviour's...both were fringed atop with lookers on.' A few omnibuses were still waiting for passengers, and men fought for places, 'offering three & four times the fare', not to get away from the danger zone, but 'for standing room on the roofs, to cross London Bridge' and watch the fire. Munby was among them, 'and we moved off towards the Bridge...with the greatest difficulty. The roadway was blocked up with omnibuses, whose passengers stood on the roofs in crowds; with cabs and hansoms, also loaded _outside_ ; with waggons pleasure vans & carts, brought out for the occasion and full of people; and amongst all these, struggling screaming & fighting for a view, was a dense illimitable crowd.' Across the river, 'every window and roof and tower top and standing space on ground or above, every vessel that hugged the Middlesex shore for fear of being burnt, & every inch of room on London Bridge was crowded with thousands upon thousands of excited faces, lit up by the heat. The river too, which shone like molten gold...was covered with little boats full of spectators, rowing up & down in the overwhelming light', as watermen at the Customs House Stairs charged 1s to take people along the river, despite the great chunks of burning tallow choking the surface of the water.\n\nIt took Munby's bus half an hour to inch its way across London Bridge. From nine in the evening until nearly dawn, 'London-bridge and the approaches thereto presented all the appearance of the Epsom road on Derby day. Cabs were plying backwards and forwards on the bridge, carrying an unlimited number of passengers on the roof, at 6d per head. Omnibuses, licensed to carry 14 outside, were conveying double that number,' while the railway stations were so full of sightseers that passengers could neither reach nor leave their trains. On the north side of the Thames, 'the Custom-house quay, Billingsgate Market, the various private quays, the Monument, the roof of the Coal Exchange, and every available place from which a sight could be had, was filled with people, and the strong reflection from the burning mass on the opposite side of the river on their eager and upturned faces, presented a most singular appearance to the spectator at a distance'. At 3 a.m., many 'thousands...were still congregated on the bridge and in its neighbourhood'. The police had arrived to keep the crowds back, but as the numbers increased, they needed reinforcing with army regiments. Not only London Bridge, but also Waterloo and Westminster Bridges \u2013 in fact, any bridge from which even a glimpse of the fire could be caught \u2013 were thick with spectators.\n\nTwo hundred police continued on duty the next morning, as did the entire fire brigade. For days the fire continued to burst out at various points, walls still threatened to topple and explosions were constant as the heat of the smouldering fires found new barrels of explosives. On the 26th, four days after the fire began, 'an immense body of fire suddenly shot up' and took two hours to control. On the night of the 30th, engines were needed to pump water on new outbreaks. On 2 July, a full ten days after Scovell's Warehouse first caught fire, leaseholders and owners were still stripping the surrounding buildings of goods and fittings, for fear that flare-ups might engulf them too. It was to be another ten days, one day short of three weeks, before the fire was finally judged to be contained, although even then large areas continued to smoulder.\n\nMeanwhile, many were taking advantage of the fire's largesse. Munby watched as 'all the women and girls of the neighbourhood turned out with the boys and men, to gather the fat which floated in vast cakes down the river...For days and weeks it went on...many women & girls waded up to their necks in mud and water...Some too went up the great sewers hereabouts for the same purpose.' Boat-owners were also busy collecting the valuable fats. 'For days afterwards, as far afield as Erith', twelve miles downriver, the 'banks and mud flats were coated with grease' assiduously gathered by 'hordes of men, women and children'.\n\nFor months, the courts were bursting with people charged with stealing the salvaged fats, which, in the view of the magistrates, continued to belong to their original owners, despite having been dissipated along the river and down the sewers. One second-hand dealer was accused of buying more than a ton of this stolen fat. The fat's legal owners, however, were more pragmatic, arranging salvage sales at knock-down prices for the mounds of tallow that blocked up the roads around Tooley Street: 'the conditions of sale being an immediate clearance'.\n\nMeanwhile, tourists continued to gather, from all levels of society. Two days after the outbreak of fire, 'The burning ruins have been visited by the Earl of Stamford and lady, the Lord Mayor, and many other eminent gentlemen and their ladies,' followed the next day by the Duke of Buccleuch, the Earl and Countess of Cardigan, Earl Spencer, Lord Alfred Paget and Lady Gower. Disraeli and his wife were initially barred when the policeman on duty failed to recognize him. It was a week before things began to return to normal. The gawpers on London Bridge thinned, forming a single line of spectators gazing at the devastated site, while the traffic once more ran smoothly as crowds no longer blocked the way, with no extra buses or cabs now driving back and forth at a walking pace to give the best views. Watermen, too, no longer found sightseers wanting to be rowed out, and the quays on the opposite shore were 'comparatively free from intruders'.\n\nThe first concern, the day after the fire was brought under control, was to recover the body of James Braidwood. It was known where he had been standing when the wall collapsed, but such was the devastation that it was to be three days before his body was located. When it was, 'The crowds of persons who blocked up every avenue leading to the ruins manifested the greatest eagerness to catch a glimpse of the spot where the unfortunate gentleman fell, and when it was known that his body had been disinterred the excitement became very great...almost every person within the barriers flock[ing] to the fatal spot.' More touchingly, Fire Engineer Tozer, who was in charge of Tooley Street station and had previously worked directly under Braidwood as his chief clerk, cut off Braidwood's epaulettes and buttons from his uniform, giving them to the foremen of the fire service as a memento of their great chief.\n\nBraidwood's funeral became a civic mark of appreciation of the man who had modernized the fire service, who had, in that age of chimney fires and dangerous workshops, done so much to keep the city safe. The fire service planned an elaborate public procession, but even they were taken by surprise by the public response. On 29 June, crowds of bystanders staked out positions long before the procession formed at Watling Street, in the City. Shops had closed; shutters and blinds were drawn as a sign of respect. Every bell in every City church rang a funeral peal (apart from St Paul's, which was reserved for funerals of the royal family, or the serving Lord Mayor). 'No one had anticipated that the ceremony of burying the lamented chief of the Fire-Brigade would excite an almost unprecedented degree of public interest. The police seemed bewildered to know how to manage the vast host that lined the thoroughfares...From the very first step a difficulty was experienced in obtaining a clear passage for the _cort\u00e8ge_ , and although vehicles were turned into bye-streets, and the roadways stopped up against fresh comers, yet the struggle was incessant, and the long line was compelled to halt many times during the afternoon.'\n\nThe funeral of the London Fire Engine Establishment's superintendent, James Braidwood, killed while fighting the Tooley Street fire. So great were the crowds that lined the streets to pay their respects that it took the procession three hours to travel four miles.\n\n_The Times_ gave the order of the funeral procession as it left Watling Street for Abney Park Cemetery, in Stoke Newington:\n\nA body of the City Police.\n\nThe London Rifle Brigade, with its band...\n\nto the number of about 700.\n\nThe 7th Tower Hamlets...with various other\n\nVolunteer Rifle Corps, to the number of about 400.\n\nFriends of the deceased in mourning.\n\nMetropolitan Police.\n\nSuperintendents.\n\nInspectors.\n\nConstables of the various divisions, to the number of about\n\n1,000 (four abreast).\n\nCity Police.\n\nInspectors.\n\nConstables of the various divisions, 350 (four abreast).\n\nThe Waterworks Companies.\n\nSuperintendents.\n\nInspectors.\n\nBand of the Society for the Protection of Life from Fire.\n\nThe Secretary, Mr. Low, Sen.\n\nFire Escape Conductors (four abreast).\n\nCharles Henry Firth,\n\nCaptain of the West Yorkshire Fire Brigade Guard Volunteers,\n\naccompanied by two privates and a deputation from the\n\nLancashire and Yorkshire Fire Brigades.\n\nPrivate Fire Brigades: \u2013\n\nMr. Hodges's, Lambeth,\n\nMr. Burnet's, Lambeth,\n\nMessrs. Price's, Vauxhall,\n\nMessrs. Beaufoy's, Vauxhall,\n\nMessrs. Lennox and Co.'s, Millwall.\n\nLocal Brigades: \u2013\n\nHackney. West Ham.\n\nShoreditch. Crystal Palaces.\n\nIslington. Whitechapel.\n\nBow. Wapping.\n\nStratford. Greenwich.\n\nSuperintendent White, of the Gravesend Police and\n\nFire Brigade and others.\n\nPensioners and Friends\n\nLondon Fire Engine Establishment.\n\nJunior Firemen.\n\nSenior Firemen.\n\nSub Engineers.\n\nEngineers (two abreast).\n\nThe Ward Beadle of Cordwainers' Ward.\n\nThe Undertaker.\n\nTwo Mutes.\n\nThe Pallbearers:\n\nMr. Swanton, engineer.\n\nMr. Fogo, foreman.\n\nMr. Bridges, foreman.\n\nMr. Gerrard, engineer.\n\nMr. Henderson, foreman.\n\nMr Staples, foreman.\n\nA plume of feathers.\n\n**THE HEARSE.**\n\nThe Chief Mourners:\n\nMr. James F. Braidwood\n\nMr. Frank Braidwood\n\nMr. Lithgow Braidwood\n\nMr. Charles Jackson\n\nFifteen Mourning Coaches\n\nContaining the relatives, friends, and committees of the\n\nLondon fire engine establishments.\n\nPrivate carriage of the Duke of Sutherland.\n\nPrivate carriage of the Earl of Caithness.\n\nPrivate carriage of Dr. Cumming [the officiating clergyman].\n\nAnd other private carriages.\n\nMost unusually, in an age when sending an empty carriage was considered to be a significant mark of respect, the Duke of Sutherland and the Earl of Caithness were actually present.\n\nThe procession moved slowly through an 'immense multitude' that had gathered in homage to Braidwood; 'in the front of the Royal Exchange, and all round this space the roofs and windows were thronged. As the procession slowly approached, the troops with arms reversed, and the bands slowly pealing forth the Dead March, the mass of spectators, as if by an involuntary movement, all uncovered [their heads], and along the rest of the route this silent token of respect was everywhere observed.' The crowd was so thick that, despite an escort of mounted police, the cort\u00e8ge took three hours to cover the four miles to the cemetery in Stoke Newington, with thousands of silent onlookers lining the route the entire way.\n\nAt Abney Park, the body of James Braidwood, aged sixty-one, was laid to rest beside his stepson, also a fireman, who had died on duty six years earlier. Braidwood Street, off Tooley Street, today continues to commemorate both the worst fire London had seen since the Great Fire of 1666, and the heroic service rendered the city by the founder of the modern fire brigade.\n\n#### 5.\n\n#### THE WORLD'S MARKET\n\nSaturdays were Covent Garden market's biggest day, when the costermongers stocked up with produce to sell over the coming week, up to 5,000 of them heading for the market with donkey carts, with shallow trays or with head-baskets. By the 1850s, London's main produce market had long overspilled its bounds, covering not just the Piazza it was designed to occupy, but spreading over an area 'From Long Acre to the Strand...from Bow-street to Bedford-street', for several hundred yards in either direction: 'along each approach to the market...nothing is to be seen, on all sides, but vegetables; the pavement is covered with heaps of them waiting to be carted; the flagstones are stained green with the leaves trodden underfoot...sacks full of apples and potatoes, and bundles of brocoli [sic] and rhubarb are left...upon almost every doorstep; the steps of Covent Garden Theatre are covered with fruit and vegetables; the road is blocked up with mountains of cabbages and turnips.'\n\nThis description came a quarter of a century after the new market had first been planned. In 1678, the Dukes of Bedford, who owned the land, had been granted a 250-year lease for a market, and for nearly two centuries what had been called a market had been merely a collection of wooden sheds and stalls. In the early 1820s, with the lease due to expire, the Bedford Estate received permission to build permanent structures in the centre of the Piazza, expanding beyond the original square itself, and soon sellers operated in a landscape of half-built premises. By 1858, there was a central structure of wrought iron. The old Piazza Hotel, which had backed on to Covent Garden theatre, and had long served as the entrance to the pit and box seats in the theatre, had been demolished. In its stead Floral Hall, a building to house the flower sellers, was being constructed in the style of the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace. (In a neatly circular fashion, Floral Hall once again serves not the market but the theatre, providing the Royal Opera House's box office and refreshment bars. One section of the Piazza's central structure was rescued when the market was demolished in the 1970s, and in the early twenty-first century was re-erected in the Borough market.)\n\nBefore dawn the traffic converged on the streets surrounding the main markets. The waggoners were recognizable by their countrymen's smocks, with velveteen breeches and leggings, or their gaiters, made of canvas, linen, wool or leather, tied below the knee and again at the ankle, or buttoned or buckled on, all designed to prevent the roads' endless mud from making a pair of stockings unwearable after a single outing (see Plate 1, top row right, and bottom row third from right). Carts were an ongoing problem: slow to arrive, cumbersome to turn, difficult to leave while their drivers took their goods into the market. As a result queues up to a mile long were not unusual. In the late 1840s, one enterprising boy carved out a job for himself by offering a solution. Like many homeless street children, Bob had haunted the market, running errands and fetching and carrying for stallholders in return for food, or a penny. Winning their trust, he promoted himself to the self-created position of 'market-groom': now when the carts had been driven as close to the market as possible, the waggoners were met by Bob, who held their whips as a sign of authority and then kept watch, preventing the donkeys and horses from wandering off, or straggling into the roadway, or entangling themselves with other carts. He also stopped the street children from pilfering from the carts, as well as ensuring that the animals themselves didn't pilfer, by munching the produce of the cart in front of them.\n\nBusiness, in summer, started before three o'clock, when 'the crowd, the bustle, the hum' of the morning really began. There were three official market days at Covent Garden \u2013 Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays \u2013 but for most of the century the market was in operation every morning. The market traders who walked in from the country wore smocks covered by a thick blue or green apron; if their job were of a particularly messy or unpleasant type \u2013 skinning rabbits, for example \u2013 this apron was in turn covered by a piece of sacking tied on top. In the main square were the flower, fruit and vegetable sellers. Potatoes and 'coarser produce' were on one side, with more delicate fruit and vegetables set apart, and potted plants also given their own section. Cut flowers were displayed separately, where 'walls' (wallflowers), daffodils, roses, pinks, carnations and more could be found in season. The size of the market and the variety of colour were dazzling. When Tom Pinch and his sister come up from the country in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , they stroll through the market in a daze, 'snuffing up the perfume of the fruits and flowers, wondering at the magnificence of the pineapples and melons; catching glimpses down side avenues, of rows and rows of old women, seated on inverted baskets, shelling peas; looking...at the fat bundles of asparagus with which the dainty shops were fortified as with a breastwork'.\n\nFruit and vegetables were the main focus, while around the sides subsidiary sellers set up, selling to other traders: horse-chestnut leaves to put under exotic fruit displays; ribbons and paper to make up bouquets; or tissue paper 'for the tops of strawberry-pottles', those conical wicker baskets shaped like witches' hats, without which, it appeared, no strawberry could be sold. (See illustration on p. 22: the couple at top right carry two pottles.) On the railings at the edge of the Piazza hung many more baskets for sale, usually watched over by Irishwomen 'smoking short pipes' and calling out, 'Want a baskit, yer honour?' In the 1840s, these women wore loose gowns looped and pinned up out of the dirt, showing their thick underskirts and boots; on their heads were velveteen or straw bonnets, with net caps underneath. Men and women alike wore luridly coloured silk 'kingsman' kerchiefs around their necks.\n\nMany other sellers had no fixed pitches, but walked around selling from trays or baskets: 'One has seedcake [for birds], another...combs, others old caps, or pig's feet.' Dodging among them, essential to keep the goods moving in and equally essential to purchasers to get the goods back out, were the market porters, identifiable by their porters' knots: a piece of fabric strapped across the forehead and hanging down over the nape of the neck, ending in a knot that secured the edge of their baskets or crates as they carried them on their backs, to distribute the weight. Some modified the fantail hats worn by workers in particularly dirty occupations, padding the fantails to provide a two-for-the-price-of-one porters' knot and dust protection.\n\nCovent Garden was known for its luxury imports. Other markets had their own specialities. Like Covent Garden, Billingsgate fish market on the riverside, between London Bridge and the Tower, had first been established in the seventeenth century, although fish had been sold less formally on the site even earlier. Yet, unlike Covent Garden, at mid-century Billingsgate was still nothing but a 'collection of sheds and stalls \u2013 like a dilapidated railway station', and even the sheds were a fairly recent addition. Despite being the world's largest fish market, Billingsgate had been held in the open street for the previous two centuries, moving indoors only in 1849.\n\nIn the early part of the century, the market sold the local catch: in 1810, 400 boats fished the river between Deptford and London Bridge, providing Thames roach, plaice, smelts, flounder, salmon, eel, dace and dab. But by 1828, the run-off from the new gasworks near by, combined with ever more factory effluent, had destroyed the fisheries, and instead fishing boats from downriver or from coastal waters were pulled up the Thames by tugboats, with particularly delicate fish, such as turbot, brought in alive in tanks on deck. Rowboats then ferried the fish from the boats to the market. By 1850, Dutch fishing boats supplied the market with eels, while other vessels continued to bring catches from the North Sea, but the system had otherwise been modernized. The fishing boats stayed in their home waters, discharging their catch on to the faster clippers, which brought them upriver. Fish that went off quickly, like mackerel, were dropped off at the railway stations, to be put on the mail trains; having arrived by 6 a.m., they could be processed through the market to reach the fishmongers' shops within sixteen hours of being caught.\n\nBy 4 a.m. daily the Billingsgate workers had assembled. Here the porters wore jerseys, old-fashioned breeches, porters' fantails and thigh-high boots as they prepared for the auctions. The auctioneers themselves wore frock coats and waistcoats, street clothes, to indicate they were middle class \u2013 Dickens called them 'almost fashionable' \u2013 but, as a nod to practicality, over their coats they tied heavy aprons. For much of the century these were made of flannel or coarse wool, usually serge \u2013 in _Our Mutual Friend_ , set in the 1850s, the fishmonger's men 'cleanse their fingers on their woollen aprons'. It was only later that canvas replaced wool, while many at Billingsgate switched to oilskin.\n\nMany of the auctioneers met at the start of the day at Billingsgate's most famous tavern, the Darkhouse, to compare notes on quality and discuss prices over coffee or 'the favourite morning beverage...gin mingled with milk'. At five the bell rang to announce the opening of the market, when buyers immediately headed towards their favourite stalls. Now everything was a blur of action: 'Baskets full of turbot...skim through the air...Stand on one side! a shoal of fresh herrings will swallow you up else.' Crowds gathered by each auctioneer as the porter set out plaice, sole, haddock, skate, cod, ling and 'maids' (ray) in doubles \u2013 oblong baskets 'tapering at the bottom, and containing from three to four dozen of fish' each \u2013 while sprats were sold by the tindal \u2013 a thousand bushes \u2013 or in offals, which held 'mostly small and broken' fish, to be sold off cheaply. No examination was permitted, the porter hefting each double on to his shoulder as all over the market bidding began by Dutch auction, with the auctioneer setting a high opening price, then dropping down by increments until someone made an offer. Each type of fish was sold first to the 'high' salesmen, who bought in bulk and then sold on to middlemen, known as bummarees, at whose stands the doubles and tindals were broken up and the contents sold off in smaller quantities to individual shopkeepers or to costermongers.\n\nThe other great market, Smithfield, was, for the first half of the century, a running sore in the City. Dickens could hardly bear it, but neither could he bear to leave it alone. This market appears again and again in his journalism, and in his novels. On market mornings, he wrote, 'The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire...the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices...the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market...rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.'\n\nSmithfield cattle market had been held in the heart of the City since 1638. For five or six centuries even before that, a horse and livestock market had convened on the same spot, half a mile north-east of St Paul's and a few hundred yards from the old redoubt of the City, the Barbican. By mid-century over 2,500 cattle and nearly 15,500 sheep traversed the traffic-choked streets twice weekly, before their purchasers drove them back out once more; on Friday, horses were sold; and three times a week there was a hay market. The streets leading to all the City markets were narrow and difficult to navigate: Newgate market near by had only two access roads, one just ten feet wide, one slightly less. Add the animals to the traffic and the streets became chaotic. One American resident in London said he avoided the spot on market days, because he loathed the 'fiendish brutality of their drivers', with calves 'piled into a cart...and transported twenty or thirty miles, \u2013 their heads being suffered to hang out of the cart at each end, and to beat against the frame at every jolt of the vehicle'.\n\nSmithfield itself was merely a city square measuring three acres. (In 1824, Thomas Carlyle, seeing it for the first time, was so overwhelmed by the heaving mass of animals, stench and noise that he estimated the ground it covered was ten times its actual size.) Owing to the large number of animals to be compressed into this small space, extreme cruelty was routine. 'To get the bullocks into their allotted stands, an incessant punishing and torturing of the miserable animals [occurs] \u2013 a sticking of prongs into the tender part of their feet, and a twisting of their tails to make the whole spine teem with pain.' All around were animals bellowing in agony as drovers 'raved, shouted, screamed, swore, whooped, whistled, danced like savages; and, brandishing their cudgels, laid about them most remorselessly...in a deep red glare of burning torches...and to the smell of singeing and burning'. Cattle were tied to the rails 'so tightly, the swelled tongue protruded', before being hocked: 'tremendous blows were inflicted on its hind legs till it was completely hobbled'. For lack of space many more were pressed into ring-droves, circles where they stood nose to nose, wedged against the next ring-drove, driven into this unnatural formation, and kept there, by sharp goads. The goads were used so freely, were so savagely stuck into the animals, that good tanners rejected hides from Smithfield cattle, referring to them contemptuously as 'Smithfield Cullanders', that is, colanders, or sieves.\n\nBy the time Dickens wrote this, it was news to no one: there had been parliamentary inquiries about the horrors of Smithfield in 1828, in 1849 and in 1850, but nothing could move the obdurate Corporation of the City of London. Smithfield made a lot of money for the City, on average \u00a310,000 per annum in fees from the sellers. As the obvious solution to the problem was to move the market to a less crowded part of London, which meant outside the City, they stalled as long as possible.\n\nThe population at large, however, could not close its eyes to the problem simply by avoiding Smithfield. The animals were driven in and out of the market through city streets clogged with 'coaches, carts, waggons, omnibuses, gigs, chaises, phaetons, cabs, trucks, dogs, boys, whooping, roarings, and ten thousand other distractions'. By the time they were sold, they had been twenty-four hours without water or food, and it was scarcely surprising that the beasts ran amok regularly.\n\nIn _Dombey and Son_ , small Florence Dombey and her nurse are walking towards the City Road on a market day when 'a thundering alarm of \"Mad Bull!\"' was heard, causing 'a wild confusion...of people running up and down, and shouting, and wheels running over them, and boys fighting, and mad bulls coming up'. That was Dickens in fiction. A decade later, in the 1850s, he watched in reality when, in St John Street, in Clerkenwell, the same shout of 'Mad bull! mad bull!' was heard: 'Women were screaming and rushing into shops, children scrambling out of the road, men hiding themselves in doorways, boys in ecstasies of rapture, drovers as mad as the bull tearing after him, sheep getting under the wheels of hackney-coaches, dogs half choking themselves with worrying the wool off their backs, pigs obstinately connecting themselves with a hearse and funeral, other oxen looking into public-houses.' The owner pelted along behind the animal until he finally found his bull in 'a back parlour...into which he had violently intruded through a tripe-shop'. This sounds more like fiction than the fiction itself, but similar reports routinely appeared in the journals.\n\nNon-cattle-market days were no quieter. Friday afternoons were costermongers' day at Smithfield, when the costers purchased the tools of their trade: 200 donkeys were sold on a concourse about eighty feet long while a smaller area held ponies. Barrows and carts were offered for sale, as were spare parts \u2013 wheels, springs, axles, seats, trays, or just old iron for running repairs. Harnesses, bridles and saddles were hung from posts or spread on sacking on the ground, as were smaller necessities, such as whips, lamps, curry-combs and feed-bags. Even at this much smaller market, Smithfield was ill suited for the number of people who attended. The concourse itself was paved, but the surrounding selling areas became so churned up and mixed with animal dung that the policemen on duty habitually wore thigh-high fishermen's or sewermen's boots; the costers accepted that their trousers would be 'black and sodden with wet dirt'.\n\nFinally, in 1852, the Smithfield Removal Bill was passed in Parliament, and the live meat market was closed in 1855, moving to Copenhagen Fields in Islington. In 1868, the old Smithfield ground, now called West Smithfield, was re-established, this time as a dead-meat market \u2013 that is, for butchered meat, not live animals \u2013 complete with an underground station to bring in the goods for sale. (The hay market survived at Smithfield because officials had forgotten to allow space for it in the new market in Islington; it continued until 1914, when the rise of the car made it redundant.) No longer would the cry of 'Mad bull!' run through the City. The new market was iron-roofed, gaslit, with wooden stalls: the epitome of modern trade elegance, complete with restaurants and drinking establishments, and rooms for dining, meeting, or reading the newspaper. Other markets had to wait longer for renovation. Leadenhall had been the largest market in Europe, selling dead meat, skin and leather; herbs and 'green'-market goods; pigs, and poultry, in three separate yards, from 1400. Gradually poultry became its main item (in _Dombey and Son_ , Captain Cuttle hires 'the daughter of an elderly lady who usually sat under a blue umbrella in Leadenhall Market, selling poultry'), and in 1871 an Act was passed to prevent the old market from continuing to sell hides or meat.\n\nThese specialist markets serving the whole of London were the exception. Many neighbourhoods supported a small market of one sort or another, and most had several. In the streets around Oxford Street, for example, there were Carnaby market, 'now but a small provision market'; Oxford market, near Portland Street, which sold vegetables and meat; Portman market, for hay, straw, butter, poultry, meat and 'other provisions'; St George's market, at the western end of Oxford Street, primarily for meat, but with many nearby vegetable stalls; Mortimer market, 'a very obscure market'; and Shepherd's market, on the south side of Curzon Street, for provisions generally, 'a convenience for this genteel neighbourhood, and...not a nuisance'. (It is notable that only in this very exclusive district does the compiler of this list consider that a market might be a 'nuisance'.)\n\nAround the Strand and Covent Garden was Hungerford market (underneath what is now Charing Cross station), which sold fish, fruit, vegetables and dead meat. It also had a number of poulterers' shops, with live cockerels and hens, their black beady eyes peeping through the wicker baskets. Beside these basics, according to one author mid-century, the market was also known for its penny ices, advertised as 'the best in England'. Hungerford had been covered over since the seventeenth century, but in 1830 it was expanded and rebuilt on three levels, with a fish market below and fruit and vegetables above. Dickens was spotted here one day in 1834, behind a coal-heaver carrying a child who peeked shyly over his father's shoulder at the young journalist. Dickens promptly bought a bag of cherries and, walking along, posted them one by one into the child's mouth without his father being aware, 'quite as much pleased as the child'.\n\nThere had been a market at Hungerford Stairs (where Charing Cross station now stands) for 200 years, but in 1830 a modern three-storey market was built. It was only after this, when 'the very nature of the ground changed', that the adult Charles Dickens felt able to revisit the spot where the blacking factory had once stood.\n\nNearby was Lumber Court market, in Seven Dials, selling fish, and some vegetables and meat. Newport market, off Great Newport Street, west of Long Acre, sold butchers' meat, and also had a large number of slaughter-men: around 400 bullocks, up to 700 sheep and 100 calves were slaughtered there weekly. In 1837, one author noted that most butchers slaughtered the animals in their cellars, tipping the blood down the drains \u2013 perhaps as much as 12,000 barrels of blood annually. Things altered little: thirty years later James Greenwood, a journalist of London's underbelly, claimed that one firm slaughtered 1,000 sheep weekly behind its market stall, in a shed 'no larger than a drawing-room, in which were eight men gory to the elbows'.\n\nClare market, between the Strand and Lincoln's Inn Fields (where the Aldwych is today), sold butchers' meat, vegetables, tripe, dogs'- and cats'-meat. Although smaller than many markets it was still 'a nuisance', owing to its twenty-six butchers, who between them weekly slaughtered 400 sheep, up to 200 bullocks and an unknown number of calves, 'in the market, or in the stalls behind, and in cellars'. On Saturday nights, therefore, the market-goers found themselves 'tramping about in...a rich compost of dead rats, sickening offal, and decaying vegetable matter, which changes its colour only where the red stream from the shops has formed into stagnant pools, offending the sight as terribly as the surrounding nastiness annoys the nostrils'. In the late 1850s, one street there housed six slaughterhouses within a few yards of each other, as well as a tripe boiler and a livery stables, all next door to three small houses, in which lived four families of five to six people.\n\nThese small-scale slaughterhouses situated cheek-by-jowl with private houses were a fact of life, and for the most part they were unquestioned. In Farringdon, one William Waight was prosecuted in 1847, not because he slaughtered sheep and cattle on his premises, but because he allowed the resulting 'dung and filth' to sit in his yard for three years. A cease and desist order was handed down, but Waight, who failed to show up for the hearing, 'continues to slaughter as heretofore'. Even Dickens' magazine, usually so compelling in its outrage over the squalid living conditions of the poor, commented apropos of the slum of St Giles, not far from Clare market, that 'There are no trades in the district that affect in a remarkable degree the health of its inhabitants; there is nothing worse than the fifteen not ill-managed slaughterhouses.' This was not the way Dickens himself wrote. Earlier, in a polemic against Smithfield cattle market, he broke off to inquire satirically why there should be any reason not to have 'cattle-driving, cattle-slaughtering, bone-crushing, blood-boiling, trotter-scraping, tripe-dressing, paunch-cleaning, gut-spinning, hide-preparing, tallow-melting...in the midst of hospitals, church-yards, workhouses, schools, infirmaries, refuges, dwellings, provision-shops, nurseries, sick-beds, every stage and baiting-place in the journey from birth to death'?\n\nThis was the reality, for markets also sustained subsidiary industries that were deeply offensive, such as the licensed slaughterhouse in Smithfield, where animals unfit for human consumption ended up. To those venturing into the yard, 'the sense of smell is not only assailed, but taken by storm, with a most horrible, warm, moist, effluvium'. Much worse lay next door, where 'you will find the largest sausage manufactory in London', owned by the 'brothers, we believe' of the slaughterhouse owner. The best of the diseased animals were quietly slipped over to the sausage machine, 'to be advantageously mixed with the choppings of horse-flesh' and 'sold to the poor, in small lots by gas-light, on Saturday nights, or in the form of soup; and to the rich, in the disguise of a well-seasoned English German-sausage'. It was well known that the retail markets sold diseased meat; Newgate market was more corrupt only in that it sold it wholesale.\n\nFor most of the century, and for most of the population, it was the smaller, unmodernized markets that were their primary shopping locations. There were dozens of working-class markets, many if not most held on a Saturday night and again on Sunday mornings. Wages were paid at the end of the working day on Saturdays, and a family's main purchases were made that evening, after six or seven, with the markets lit up dazzlingly. By the 1850s, a variety of lighting was used on the stalls, from 'the new self-generating gas-lamp' through the 'old-fashioned grease lamp' down to various makeshifts: a candle stuck in a bundle of sticks, or even in a turnip, or just a wick wrapped in a piece of brown paper, which flared up nicely before burning down. The shops themselves relied on gas, 'Great jets...flaming and roaring far out into the thoroughfare, stretching like some fiery sword across the pavement, waving to and fro at each gust of wind'. In larger markets, such as Whitechapel, 'The gas...flaring from primitive tubes, lights up a long vista of beef, mutton, and veal. Legs, shoulders, loins, ribs, hearts, livers, kidneys, gleam in all the gaudy panoply of scarlet and white on every side.' Outside on the pavement was an informal set of pitches and itinerant sellers, almost another market as pedestrians navigated the 'trucks, barrows, baskets, and boards on tressels [sic], laden with...O ysters, vegetables, fruit, combs...ballads, cakes, sweetstuff, fried fish, artificial flowers...chairs, brushes and brooms, soap, candles, crockery-ware, ironmongery, cheese, walking-sticks, looking-glasses, frying-pans, bibles, waste-paper, toys, nuts, and fire-wood'.\n\nThe glare was matched by the noise. Each seller had his own cry, and called out regularly, enticing shoppers by the goodness or the cheapness of his wares. In the working-class market of St Luke's, Clerkenwell, one butcher shouted, 'Hi-hi! weigh away \u2013 weigh away! the rosy meat at three-and-half! Hi-hi!' The cries of Bethnal Green market, behind Shoreditch Church in east London, ran the gamut: 'Who'll buy a cock?' 'Almond nuts!' 'Hay'penny a lot, whelks; toss or buy!' And in the New Cut, in Bermondsey,\n\nthe thousand different cries of the eager dealers, all shouting at the top of their voices...'So-old again'...'Chestnuts all 'ot, a penny a score'...'An 'aypenny a skin, blacking'...'Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy \u2013 bu-u-uy!' cries the butcher. 'Half-quire of paper for a penny,' bellows the street stationer...'Twopence a pound grapes.' 'Three a penny Yarmouth bloaters.' 'Who'll buy a bonnet for fourpence?' 'Pick 'em out cheap here! three pair for a halfpenny, bootlaces.' 'Now's your time! beautiful whelks, a penny a lot.' 'Here's ha'p'orths,' shouts the perambulating confectioner. 'Come and look at 'em! here's toasters!' bellows one with a Yarmouth bloater stuck on a toasting-fork. 'Penny a lot, fine russets'...'Fine warnuts! sixteen a penny, fine war-r-nuts'...a double 'handful of fine parsley for a penny'...'Ho! ho! hi-i-i! What do you think of this here? A penny a bunch \u2013 hurrah for free trade! _Here's_ your turnips!'\n\nThe purchasers moved slowly along amid the noise and dazzle, while the sellers shouted enticements and encouragement. The main pathways were thronged with women with large market baskets, although some of them allowed their husbands to follow along 'as basket-bearers and light porters generally'. The first item to be purchased by the comfortably-off artisan's wife was the Sunday-dinner joint, and so the butchers' shops were slowly surveyed. A butcher offered his beef at 'three-and-six, that's under eightpence a-pound!', but any housewife worth her salt at this stage made a feint of leaving, allowing herself to be persuaded back, only to shift her attention to a joint of mutton. It too was, naturally, 'as good a bit as ever you had a knife in, I'll go bail...I t ought to be nine-and-a-half [pence per pound], but, as I want to make a regular customer of you, we'll say nine.' The housewife made another sortie. 'Well, now, come, what _will_ you give?' asked the butcher in reply; her counter-offer of 8d a pound was rejected, before 8\u00bdd was finally agreed \u2013 if, the frugal shopper added in triumph, the butcher would throw in some suet as well. The butcher accepted, 'resignedly'. Then on to the butterman, where 'after smelling, tasting, and otherwise testing a large variety of samples', the housewife beat down the price once more, agreeing to buy all her butter, cheese and bacon from him for a discount. And so on, until around nine o'clock, when the major purchases had been made, and the housewives headed for home, their husbands trailing behind.\n\nSunday markets were considered less respectable, especially by the middle classes, who thought that decent people should be in church, not shopping for food. (The fact that most of the working classes finished work at 10 p.m. or later on Saturdays, and were not paid until then, leaving no time at all to shop, was skated over by the Sabbatarians.) One such market among many was in Brill Place, behind Euston station. In the 1850s, it was so crowded on Sunday mornings that the road became 'almost impassable'. The shoppers were for the most part very poor: many of the women couldn't even afford bags, but carried their purchases in their aprons, by gathering the corners together. Mayhew said that the men generally stood around and talked, while the women went from butcher to coal seller to baker, between stalls selling anything from 'Walnuts, blacking, apples, onions, braces, combs' to 'turnips, herrings, pens and corn-plaster'. When the church bells began to ring, the tempo speeded up to a frantic pace, to get everything bought in that last half-hour before the legally enforced closure during the hours of church services. Once the bells stopped, the only shops that remained open were the cookshops, which baked the meat and vegetables brought to them in their owners' dishes; these would be ready for collection when the other shops reopened after church. Whitecross Street market, another Sunday market, was much larger. Near Old Street, towards the Barbican, it opened at 7 a.m. on Sundays, with sellers including butchers, bakers, grocers, provision dealers, linen drapers, hosiers, milliners, furniture brokers, ironmongers, hardware and trinket shops, leather sellers and curriers. The working poor arrived first, but by nine the market was filling with the 'hungry, meagre, and unwashed'.\n\nMany men spruced themselves up while their wives shopped. 'Sunday morning is always an exceedingly busy time in a barber's shop in a working-class neighbourhood,' as men had their weekly shave, or the 'swells' who were going out for the day came in 'to have their hair brushed and \"done up\"'. In _Nicholas Nickleby_ , the barber in Soho is considered 'a highly genteel establishment \u2013 quite first-rate in fact', and yet the accompanying illustration makes plain that the 'shop' was nothing more than the front room of an ordinary house, as so many still were. But the main occupation there was local gossip, exchange of news and a look at the Sunday papers, as well as 'various cunningly concocted \"revivers\", which are euphemistically styled medicine', and were sold circumspectly to customers the barber knew personally, as they were in reality alcohol to cure Saturday-night heads.\n\nThere were also dozens of thriving second-hand clothes markets, the best known of which was in the East End of London, spread around Houndsditch and in Petticoat Lane. This was Rag Fair, the centre of the old-clothes market, which was said to be entirely run by Jews. The Exchange in Houndsditch was originally held on about an acre of ground, enclosed by wooden hoardings. Inside, there were four double rows of benches, where the sellers sat back to back with their wares laid out on the ground in front of them. Soon the selling area spread to encompass the neighbouring streets, and two distinct markets arose. The first had about ninety stalls by the late 1840s, where second-hand clothes were sold wholesale, for resale or renewing. These items appeared to have no use or value at all: some 'old tea-coloured stays, and bundles of wooden busks [the supports in corsets], and little bits of whalebone'; or boots with no soles; or just the ribs of umbrellas. But buyers were looking for goods for breaking, or taking apart, using the materials to produce other items; or for turning, making new versions of whatever they had been before. Goods that were past both these stages still had value, being sold for shoddy, a fabric made from old wool rewoven with new; worn-out shoddy was broken down for manure, or bleached and sold to paper mills.\n\nThe second area of the market, about a third smaller, was where renovated clothing was sold to second-hand dealers stocking their shops. Shopkeepers from as far afield as Marylebone Lane, Holywell Street, Monmouth Street, Drury Lane, Saffron Hill, the Waterloo Road and Shoreditch itself, all poor districts, bought from the Exchange. In the 1840s and 1850s, admission to both areas was \u00bdd for buyers and sellers. A third area, with no admission charge, operated as a retail market in the afternoons. There sellers displayed their stock, purchased from unredeemed pledges from pawnbrokers' shops, or overstocks from military suppliers.\n\nBoots were sold separately, in an area centred on Rosemary Lane (from 1850 renamed Old Mint Street), near the Tower, and around Monmouth Street in Covent Garden. Boots, pre-mechanization, were expensive. Those that had worn out were refronted and sold to clerks and others who needed to look respectable for work. Boots that were too worn out for that were translated': resoled, refronted once more and the leather painted to look (briefly) new. These were sold to the very poor. Mayhew counted 800 shops selling translated boots, but this was probably a vast underestimate, as many boots were sent to Ireland to be translated and then returned to London for sale in the cheapest shops.\n\nIn some ways, these markets were no more salubrious than the meat markets. The smell of the old clothes, the old shoes, 'together with, in the season, half-putrid hare skins, is almost overpowering': a 'peculiar sour smell blended with the mildewy'. For any smell to have overpowered Londoners, it must have been truly noxious, for the city was filled with stenches. Horses produced their own smells. Omnibuses at their peak utilized 40,000 horses in London, and each horse ate nearly twenty-one pounds of oats and hay daily, so the quantity of manure left behind on the streets can be imagined \u2013 and this was without taking into account the dray horses, carthorses, carriage horses, riding horses, or costermongers' donkeys and ponies, much less the cattle and sheep driven through the streets. Pickford's Removals, a moving company, alone kept 1,500 horses to pull its vans in 1870, and that same year 18 million tons of coal were delivered for domestic use, almost all by horse-drawn cart. No one knows how many horses there were in London before the twentieth century: they were so ubiquitous that no one ever thought to count them, but there can have been no district that did not smell of horses and manure.\n\nHorses in the afterlife caused further, and vastly worse, smells. In the 1820s, it was estimated that 400 horses a week were slaughtered via licensed horse-butchers (more commonly known as knackers' yards); by mid-century the number had risen to 1,000 horses weekly, and knackers' yards dotted the poorer districts \u2013 more prosperous neighbourhoods wouldn't dream of housing such a place as the 'sickening stench', said Mayhew, came 'leaking in through every crevice'. At Holborn Hill in Islington, Bermondsey, Whitechapel and Wandsworth, there were more than twenty all told. Smaller yards processed up to sixty horses weekly; the larger yards around 150. Live horses as well as dead arrived, and the biggest yards had contracts with brewers, coal merchants and omnibus companies, who used, and used up, horses at a great rate.\n\nThe yards boiled up the flesh in great vats, by law at night, so as to cause the least possible nuisance from the dreadful smell, and also because the cats'-meat men started their rounds first thing in the morning. In theory, horsemeat was not sold for human consumption, but most people were sure that it was. The tongues were also sold, in the guise of ox tongues, the hearts and kidneys masquerading as ox hearts and kidneys. The rest was not discarded, either: manes and tails were sold to upholsterers for horsehair upholstery; hooves went to glue-makers; shoes and nails were sold back to blacksmiths and ironmongers for reuse. Early in the century bones went to button manufacturers and, when mechanization later made that uneconomic, they were processed to make manure, while the fat was skimmed off and sold as harness oil and axle grease. The skins went to tanners, which were mostly situated in Bermondsey, and provided another stench, giving the district literally its own air.\n\n#### 6.\n\n#### SELLING THE STREETS\n\nThe streets were a place to go to, not to go through, in the nineteenth century. There was a thriving shop trade, but for many people, purchases were made on the streets, both central and suburban. The sellers were rather like the horses: so ubiquitous that counting them was an afterthought. Mayhew estimated in the late 1840s and early 1850s that there were 30,000 adults, and an uncounted number of children, who sold goods and services on the streets. The census, by contrast, lists fewer than 3,700 street sellers in 1851. The reality, no doubt, is somewhere between the two. Even taking a halfway-house figure suggests that one out of every 150 people in London was selling something outdoors.\n\nStreet selling was, at best, a subsistence-level job. Mayhew suggested that averaged together, a street seller earned 10s weekly over the entire year: on \u00a326 a year, no one was doing more than surviving. Earnings might rise to 30s a week in the summer, but winter was hard for almost all street sellers. Many of them lost entire days of income in the rain: this included most street entertainers; those who provided services on the streets \u2013 knife-grinders, tinkers who mended pots and pans, people who recaned chairs; or those reliant on the whims of passers-by \u2013 children selling lavender, or violet sellers, or those offering fruit and sweets. Rain drove ballad and broadsheet sellers under cover, too, as their entire stock could be wiped out by a sudden shower. Yet others prospered during bad weather. Those who sold staples such as vegetables and fish did well: housewives and servants were pleased to stay indoors and have their dinners walk past them. Umbrella pedlars, too, appeared when it rained, heading for theatres and pleasure gardens, or the pubs or doorways, where those who had unwisely set out unprotected were sheltering. In summer, and in good weather, these 'mush-fakers' (mush from mushroom, for the shape of the umbrella) switched from selling to buying, walking the poorer districts and calling, 'Sixpence for any old humbrellar,' and then in the better-off residential districts, arriving with a bag of supplies, calling, 'Humrellars to mend!'\n\nAt the poorest end of the food trade were the watercress sellers. Watercress was a fresh green that many bought daily in penny bundles at breakfast or teatime. There was little profit in it, and the start-up costs were correspondingly small: for a penny outlay a buyer got 'a full market hand, or as much as I can take hold of at one time without spilling; for threepence you should have a lap full enough to earn about a shilling off'. Cress sellers were therefore the very young or the very old. Girls started to sell cresses when they were about seven, moving after a few years into more profitable lines. Yet the work was not easy. Cresses were sold in bulk at Farringdon, Waterloo and Hackney markets. Farringdon and Waterloo were closer for the central London sellers, but Hackney was near the cress beds, and, for those who could manage the extra two- or three-mile walk in each direction, it was worth it: by cutting out the middleman at the city markets, they could earn an extra 3d to 4d a day.\n\nThe girls arrived at the markets daily by 4 a.m. Buying in the dark, by candlelight or gas, was a skilled job: it was not easy to see whether the produce was fresh, or whether the suppliers were passing off the previous day's wilted remainders. In winter, the damp produce froze solid on the walk back to town and could no longer be separated into penny bunches, so the new cresses had to be washed under the market pump, before being carefully mixed with the tired cresses left from the day before. The girls then walked back, either to stand in a favoured spot where commuters passed by, or headed for the residential districts, following a regular route, carrying the families' breakfast greens in a flat, shallow basket on their heads, while the very poorest used a tin tray suspended from their necks by a string. They sold until about 8.30 in the morning, before returning to their lodgings for a breakfast of tea and bread; or, if their parents were themselves already out selling, which was likely, the girls continued with their route until they had made the penny profit needed to buy coffee and bread and butter from a coffee stall. Then they started again, selling through the streets for the teatime and then the late-supper market, until about 10 p.m., at which point, having walked up to fifteen miles daily, they returned home to bed, to get up the next morning at three once more.\n\nHenry Mayhew claimed that in 1850 he had walked forty-six miles of 'the principal thoroughfares' in London, and found on average fourteen stalls to the mile, of which a dozen sold fish or fruit. The main purveyors were the costermongers. Some were prosperous, with a pony or donkey, and a cart with a rail at the back to hold a tray of vegetables, and the rest of the stock in the cart; others had a cart with sides, front and back, that folded down to display the produce. Still others had a barrow with cords tied to the handle, pulled by a donkey; for the less successful, there was the handbarrow, some of which had rails, all sloping from back to front, with the goods placed on top on a wooden tray and sometimes marked by small, brightly coloured flags at the four corners. The least prosperous stood with a basket on the streets. One woman in the 1860s had a pitch in the gutter outside a pub in Lamb's Conduit Street in Bloomsbury. This had the advantage that, under the pub's flaring gaslight, she was visible to customers on their way home. (It probably also threw off a little residual heat, which she no doubt welcomed.) Her produce was routinely just a few lettuces and onions.\n\nMany of the more successful costermongers employed a boy, aged between ten and sixteen, who, for 2d or 3d a day and his food, called the goods, his piping voice carrying further over the street noise. (The poor diet of the working classes delayed puberty; many sixteen-year-olds had voices that had not yet broken.) Costermongers and their boys started for the markets at four o'clock in the summer, six in the winter. Once their produce was prepared, they set off to sell it. If a coster had regular customers, he might finish his rounds by noon, after which he sent the boy out on his own, letting him keep any money he earned over a set sum, while he took up another line to sell. Most costermongers expected to start before dawn, sell 'greens of a morning, and go...round to the public [houses] with nuts of an evening, till about ten o'clock at night'.\n\nPubs were a popular selling site. Many sellers stocked food to be eaten with the drinks the customers had bought, and publicans welcomed those with 'relishes', whose sharp and salty tastes encouraged drinking. But many other sellers offered items that were quite independent of the setting. In the late 1840s, Henry Mayhew sat and watched the sellers in one pub: in seventy-five minutes he saw four selling sheep's trotters, three with shrimp, pickled whelks and periwinkles, two baked-potato men, eight with ballads and song-sheets, eight more selling matches and three selling braces. According to Mayhew, while he watched 'Not one of these effected a sale,' yet it is unlikely that so many sellers would return so frequently without some result.\n\nSuburban dwellers marked the passing of the seasons by the variation of street sellers, not only of seasonal food, but of manufactured goods and of services. In autumn, red-flannel draught excluders were sold; in summer the men selling flypaper reappeared. The latter wore top hats encircled with strips of the paper dotted with dead flies, to show how well it worked, and they shouted, 'Catch 'em alive-o!' (Often they were trailed by small boys lobbing dead insects at their hats, to see if they could get them to stick.) In spring came the first of the root sellers, as they were called, women who sold potted plants, as well as children with bunches of sweetbriar or violets. Indeed, flowers were suddenly everywhere: 'The signs of spring-time that come to the Londoner's ear' included the women's 'shrill cry of \"Two bunches a-penny \u2013 sweet wa-a-ll-flowers!\"' The Londoner's eye was greeted by the sight of wagons, 'the tops of which are a bright canary-yellow, with their hundred roots of blooming primroses', while the barrow-men shouted, 'All a-blowing! All a-growing!' Equally springlike were the women crying, 'Any o-ornaments for your fire stove!', selling paper cut-outs and coloured shavings to fill the empty grates once the warm weather arrived. In summer came the gravellers, a man and a boy with a horse and cart: 'wherever he sees that the walks are grown dingy or moss-grown, he knocks boldly at the door, and demands to be set to work.' Householders might as well say yes at once, shrugged one resigned suburban resident, for otherwise the men would keep coming back until they 'bore[d] you into consenting'. In winter the same men reappeared to sweep snow off the paths and pavements, while costers and greengrocers turned themselves into ice sellers when there was a hard frost, going up to ponds on common land and chipping off enough to fill a basket or cart to sell around the neighbourhood. In late December, many costermongers went 'Christmasing', cutting holly, ivy, evergreen boughs and mistletoe on common land and selling it to the cry of 'Holly! Holly!! Holly-o!!! Christmas Holly oh!' In April they sold lilac, in May, hawthorn blossom, and on the Saturday before Palm Sunday there were palm fronds in their carts.\n\nSome suburban sellers had permanent pitches and a clearly understood arrangement with the local residents. Americans renting a house near Hyde Park were told that it was their house's responsibility to send out 'a cup of tea and a bit of something to eat' twice a day to an elderly apple-woman who sat outside their house. In exchange, these sellers did small jobs and ran errands for the householders, as the ballad seller Silas Wegg's sign offered in _Our Mutual Friend_ :\n\nErrands gone\n\nOn with fi\n\nDelity By\n\nLadies and Gentlemen\n\nI remain\n\nYour humble Servt:\n\nSilas Wegg.\n\n(In Silas's case, his services were not called on 'half a dozen times in a year' by the owners of the house he regarded as 'his'.)\n\nMost sellers, however, walked the rounds of the streets on a regular daily or weekly schedule, at set times, days or seasons. First every morning came the sweeps, calling, 'Sweep-o! Sw-e-e-e-p!', followed by the dustman, ringing his bell and crying, 'Dust-ho!' as he arrived to collect the ashes that had been swept out of fireplaces. The sweeps needed to do their work before the fires were lit for the morning hot water. Large houses with many fires that were kept up all day sometimes called the sweep in once a month; more often, for most of the middle classes, it was once a quarter; while the working classes tried to get by with once a year \u2013 chimney fires were a sign that the sweep had not been recently enough. It cost up to 1s 6d to have the chimneys swept in an ordinary terraced house and, as a perk, the sweep kept the soot, which he sold on to market gardeners, as fertilizer.\n\nSweeps and dustmen were followed by the milkmen and -maids. In the 1840s, one writer said that milkmaids were usually from Wales 'and did, until of late' wear national dress. More commonly, both men and women wore country smocks, usually white; the men had glazed pot-hats; the women white stockings, straw bonnets with white caps underneath, and woollen shawls. Men and women alike carried heavy wooden yokes over their shoulders, supporting milk-pails holding forty-eight quarts of milk, with a dozen or more supplementary cans hooked on the edges of the pails, ranging down from a quart size. The yokes were sometimes painted with the name of the dairy \u2013 'Sims, 122 Jermyn Street' \u2013 and the names of an aristocratic customer as advertising. Arthur Munby, in Mayfair early one summer morning, noted one yoke boasting, 'Wreathall, milkman to His Grace the Duke of Northumberland', although another topped that with, 'Stevens, By appointment to the Queen'. As they walked, the milkmaids called, 'Milk-o,' or just 'Mi-o,' contractions of 'Milk, below,' their warning to those in basement kitchens that supplies were coming down. For households with few servants or none, whose inhabitants could not stop work for every tradesman or woman, the milkmaid had a length of string with a hook at the end that she attached to one of her smaller cans and lowered it through the railings. (The milkmaid in Plate 1 is doing exactly this.) The can in which she had delivered the previous day's milk was left hitched on to the area railings ready for collection. After the morning round, milkmaids walked the streets selling to passers-by, before returning for teatime and supper trades. One walked four miles to and from her dairy: after a 5.30 start she trudged her routes until 7 p.m., earning 9s a week and her meals.\n\nThe next sellers were the watercress girls, followed by the costermongers, then the fishmongers', the butchers' and the bakers' boys to take the daily orders. The cress girls and the costers wore the standard street-dress of the working poor. Early in the century, for the men, this was breeches, thereafter replaced by cord trousers, with shirts and waistcoats or smocks, sometimes a jacket, a cloth cap and always a silk kingsman neckerchief \u2013 a coster had to be very hard up not to have one. The girls wore cotton dresses, usually pinned up out of the mud, frequently with two aprons, a coloured one covered by a white one, with a shawl, a silk neckerchief if it was affordable, and a black velvet or straw bonnet, or, if they carried their goods on their heads, a folded handkerchief. Delivery boys all wore clothing that denoted their trade: bakers' boys in white, with aprons; the butchers' boys in light-blue smocks and dark-blue aprons (which matched the bright-blue ink with which butchers wrote out the orders), and all wearing caps.\n\nAfter that, the day really began, with a procession that, daily or weekly, included the cats'-meat man, wearing a shiny black hat and waistcoat, with black sleeves, blue apron and corduroy trousers, and always with a blue-and- white spotted handkerchief tied around his neck, selling his horsemeat by the pound, or in small pieces on skewers for a farthing. Other goods regularly available from itinerant sellers in the suburbs included: footstools; embroidery frames; clothes horses, clothes-pegs and clothes line; sponges, chamois leathers, brushes and brooms; kitchen skewers, toasting-forks and other tinware; razors and penknives; trays, keyrings and small items of jewellery; candlesticks, tools, trivets, pots and pans; bandboxes and hatboxes; blackleading for kitchen ranges and grates, matches and glue; china ornaments and crockery; sheets, shirts, laces, thread, ribbons, artificial flowers, buttons, studs, handkerchiefs; pipes, tobacco, snuff, cigars; spectacles, hats, combs and hairbrushes; firewood and sawdust. The hearthstone-brick men (before detergent, abrasives were needed to clean floors and cooking utensils) also purchased old bottles and bones for resale.\n\nFor it was not a one-way trade, from the streets to the houses. Many of the traders were buying from, not selling to, the households. Sometimes, as with the hearthstone men, the trade was in both directions. Crockery sellers exchanged their wares for old clothes, trading a tea service for a suit of clothes, a hat and boots 'in decent condition'; an old coat might be exchanged for a sugar basin; a pair of wellington boots for a glass. One crockery seller started with crockery worth 15s and, on a good day, ended with 1s in cash, plus two or three old shirts, a couple of coats, a suit of livery, a dress, a pair of boots or two, and a waistcoat, carrying them all on his back, with his crockery balanced on his head, 'and werry probably a humberella or two under my arm, and five or six old hats in my hand'. Thus laden, he tramped up to twenty-five miles a day.\n\nAs with their colleagues in the second-hand clothes market, old-clothes men were said to be Jewish and were usually elderly. They carried a bag for the clothes, while whatever hats they had bought that day were perched on top of their own. Traditionally they made themselves known by carrying a small clock under one arm, the striker of which they twanged as they walked along, calling, 'Old clo'!' Many middle-class housewives considered selling clothes to be not quite respectable, and so the old-clothes men prided themselves on their discretion: 'A form, half-concealed by a curtain, appears at a window...a finger is hastily raised, and then the figure as hastily retires. It is enough; the Jew saunters across the road, glances with apparent carelessness around, and slips quietly into the house, of which the door is conveniently ajar, and the whole business is managed with that secrecy so greatly desired by penurious but highly respectable householders.'\n\nOther purchasers were equally stealthy, not to save the face of the householders, but because the sellers were disposing of goods they didn't technically own. The least honest servants sold the family's food. In _Great Expectations_ , the cook to the chaotic Pocket household is found lying 'insensibly drunk', with a packet of butter ready to sell beside her. Other servants saw various forms of recycling as their perquisites. Well-regulated households, according to advice books, produced no food waste: everything was reused in leftovers or transformed into other dishes, with the residue going to feed dogs, cats or chickens, or to fertilize the garden. But many servants sold on the waste, called wash, to dealers who purchased it as pig-feed (hence the word 'hogwash'). Some bought wash to feed their own pigs, kept in market gardens around the edges of the city or even in many inner-city slums (see p. 208); others were middlemen, buying wash in bulk from coffee houses, eating houses and cookshops. Dealers sold the wash for 4d to 6d per bucket, hiring boys to go door to door, for 2s a week plus their meals, or sometimes for as little as 1d a bucket. Cooks sold hare and rabbit skins after they had cut up the meat for cooking: at mid-century hare skins were worth up to 2s 2d each. There was even a trade in used tea leaves. In most households, after the tea had been made, the leaves were rinsed, dried and sprinkled on the carpets before sweeping, to help collect the dust. Once this had been done, some charwomen sold the leaves to unscrupulous dealers who mixed them with new tea leaves, selling the tea at bargain prices. It was these very women and their kind who were most likely to purchase the lowest-priced tea, and who were drinking what they had lately swept up.\n\nOther street sellers offered not goods, but services. Tinkers routinely trawled the streets, calling, 'Pots and Kettles to Mend! \u2013 Copper or Brass to Mend', as they pushed a cart with a small fire-pot, over which they soldered items for repair. 'Chairs to mend' men carried a supply of canes and rushes, fixing broken rush-bottomed or cane seats on doorsteps and front gardens. 'Knives to Grind' men carried a grinder powered by a small foot-treadle in their carts. With this they sharpened scissors and knives for housewives (3s for a dozen table-knives, or carving knives at 4d each in 1827), honed cleavers at markets, and even whetted penknives for office workers in the days before steel-nibbed pens were common. Until the invention of stainless steel in the twentieth century, knives could not be immersed in water, as the pin holding the blade to the handle rusted and the knife fell apart. By the 1850s, men walked the streets with patent knife-cleaning machines: the knives were inserted blade first into a box and when a handle was turned the blades were buffed by emery paper. Other new services in the 1850s were less high-tech: the Ragged School \u2013 a charity that aimed to get children off the streets, educating them and finding them trades \u2013 organized for its little girls to 'attend the dwelling-houses of the neighbourhood every morning, and brush and wash the steps for 1d a door'.\n\nThus suburban streets, so quiet in the twenty-first century, were in Dickens' time a hubbub of noise from dawn until well past dusk, so much so that the never-ending din was a staple of comic writing. In _Punch_ in 1857, 'Edwin the poet' is in the throes of inspiration:\n\nEdwin (composing). Where the sparkling fountain never ceases \u2013\n\n_Female Demon. 'Wa-ter-creece-ses!'_\n\nEdwin. And liquid music on the marble floor tinkles \u2013\n\n_Male Demon. 'Buy my perriwinkles!'_\n\nEdwin. Where the sad Oread oft retires to weep \u2013\n\n_Black Demon. 'Sweep! Sweep!! Sweep!!!'_\n\nEdwin. And tears that comfort not must ever flow \u2013\n\n_Demon from Palestine. 'Clo! Clo! Old Clo!'_\n\nEdwin. There let me linger beneath the trees \u2013\n\n_Italian Demon. 'Buy, Im-magees!'_\n\nEdwin. And weave long grasses into lovers' knots \u2013\n\n_Demon in a white apron. 'Pots! Pots!! Pots!!!'_\n\nEdwin. Oh! what vagrant dreams the fancy hatches \u2013\n\n_Ragged Old Demon. 'Matches! Buy Matches!'_\n\nEdwin. She opes her treasure-cells, like Portia's caskets \u2013\n\n_Demon with Cart. 'Baskets, any Baskets!'_\n\nEdwin. Spangles the air with thousand-coloured silks \u2013\n\n_Old Demon. 'Buy my Wilks! Wilks! Wilks!'_\n\nEdwin. Garments which the fairies might make habits \u2013\n\n_Lame Demon. 'Rabbits, Hampshire Rabbits!'_\n\nEdwin. Visions like those the Interpreter of Bunyan's \u2013\n\n_Demon with a Stick. 'Onions, a Rope of Onions!'_\n\nEdwin. And give glowing utterances to their kin \u2013\n\n_Dirty Demon. 'Hare's skin or Rabbit skin!'_\n\nEdwin. In thoughts so bright the aching senses blind \u2013\n\n_Demon with Wheel. 'Any knives or sissors [sic] to grind!'_\n\nEdwin. Though gone, the Deities that long ago \u2013\n\n_Grim Demon. 'Dust-Ho! Dust-Ho!!'_\n\nEdwin. Yet, from her radient bow [sic] no Iris settles \u2013\n\n_Swarthy Demon. 'Mend your Pots and Kettles!'_\n\nEdwin. And sad and silent is the ancient seat \u2013\n\n_Demon with Skewers. 'Cat's M-e-a-t!'..._\n\nHERE \u2013 EDWIN GOES MAD.\n\nIn the 1820s, Rowlandson drew a street with a woman selling cucumbers from a wheelbarrow (the phallic implications of her vegetable also being clearly much on his mind); a man selling roasting jacks for kitchen fires; a seller of doormats, with his wares hanging from a long pole; and a man with teapots, flowerpots and chamber pots all laid out on the pavement. He carefully depicted each seller with his or her own specific method of transporting and displaying goods. Stationery, soap and remedy sellers carried boxes suspended from their necks by leather straps; rabbits and hares were sometimes transported in baskets or were more usually tied together and slung over a pole on the sellers' shoulders, as were bonnet- and hatboxes; mats, brushes, brooms, clothesline and rope, fire-irons and skewers were all carried on the sellers' shoulders. Knife-cleaners and grinders used barrows, as did men selling hearthstone and whiting, as well as cats'-meat men, whose carts were equipped with a little shelf in the front, used for chopping the meat to order. Shallow willow baskets with a strap at the waist were used by fruit women, while oval baskets with a handle were characteristically used by onion- or apple-sellers; 'prickles', narrow willow baskets, contained walnuts, holding about a gallon at a time, or were used by the wine trade for empties. The poorest sellers had old rusty tea trays: shoeblack boys kept their brushes and paste on these trays, while match sellers tied them around their necks with string. Even delivery boys had specialized containers: telegraph boys carried a 'despatch-box'; doctors' boys a 'little double-flapped market-basket'; milliners' boys baskets covered in oiled silk, to protect the contents from the damp. Vendors of every article or service under the sun passed through the centre of town. In Holborn in the early 1850s, Max Schlesinger saw within a short space of time a man selling coconuts and dates, a woman selling oranges, a man with dog collars 'which he had formed in a chain round his neck', a man offering to mark linen indelibly, another selling razor strops, as well as miscellaneous sellers of notebooks, cutlery, prints, caricatures and more: 'it seemed as if the world were on sale at a penny a bit.'\n\nStreet sellers and shopkeepers coexisted, supported each other and were at war, all at the same time. Streets that were renowned as luxury shopping destinations, such as Regent Street, also drew their fair share of street sellers. Three in the afternoon was the fashionable shopping hour, and it was therefore the time that the street sellers crowded from Piccadilly Circus to St Martin's Lane (that is, eastwards, away from the most fashionable section of the street). Not unnaturally the shopkeepers and the street sellers chafed on each other. In 1845, in one case out of many, a fruit-woman was arrested by a policeman at the behest of the shopkeepers in Shepherdess Walk, City Road, on the basis that they suffered 'serious injury...by the competition of cheap itinerant traders'. From 1839, the Police Act had entitled \u2013 although not obliged \u2013 police to keep the roads and pavements clear of goods and blockages. The shopkeepers interpreted this to mean that the street sellers should be moved on, but the magistrate threw the case out. There was no law forbidding street trading, he said, and 'If poor creatures like this are to be seized...merely because they use praiseworthy exertions to support themselves', then the parish would have to support them, which would benefit neither the traders nor the shopkeepers, whose rates as a consequence would go up. The battles continued, while street sellers went on finding new locations for their trade. When the underground opened in 1863, they colonized this new space too, soon making it seem a natural place to be selling goods: 'Let anyone wanting their Noise and Rubbish,' snorted _Punch_ , 'go Underground for it.'\n\nSome sellers concentrated on specific locations. Around the Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres in the 1830s, when the playhouses stood in the midst of slums, visitors 'were assailed by needy wretches' running beside the coaches and selling programmes for the plays. Some sellers concentrated on becoming known as _the_ purveyor of an item. Rhubarb, used as a drug because of its laxative properties, supposedly came from what was vaguely thought of as 'the East'. In the late 1850s, a seller in Clare market dressed as 'a genuine Turk', carrying a sign declaring that 'Hafiz Khan was made prisoner by the Russians [in the Crimean War, just ended]; and...after undergoing many barbarities by the cruel order of the Emperor, succeeded in escaping to England, and is now reduced to the dreadful alternative of selling rhubarb (received direct from Turkey), in the public streets.'\n\nOften selling appeared more random. In _Sketches by Boz_ , Dickens reported that stagecoach offices were well known for their miscellaneous sellers: 'Heaven knows why', it is considered 'quite impossible any man can mount a coach without requiring at least sixpenny-worth of oranges, a penknife, a pocket-book, a last year's annual, a pencil-case, a piece of sponge, and a small series of caricatures'. Later, with the coming of the railways, at least one item of street-selling became more directly linked to the voyage itself. Now one of the prerequisites for setting out on a journey was a penknife: newspapers and books all had uncut edges, and in every train compartment passengers had to be busy with their knives before they could settle down to read. In _Dombey and Son_ the very wealthy Mr Dombey's office, off Leadenhall Street in the City, is situated in a court 'where perambulating merchants' sold 'slippers, pocket-books, sponges, dogs' collars, and Windsor soap; and sometimes a pointer or an oil-painting'.\n\nJewellery was sold on the streets from cases, as well as in pubs by sellers showing off a few chains held at arm's length or sticking a few pins decoratively in their own clothes \u2013 sailors treating their girls tended to be good customers. (The illustration on p. 358 shows a woman selling goods from a tub on the right.) Pubs were also good places for pedlars to persuade listeners of the efficacy of their magic potions: medicines for people and animals; salves to knit broken bones, heal cuts and bruises; or pastes to remove stains and soot. The pedlar in _Oliver Twist_ sells one such product that removes 'rust, dirt, mildew, spick, speck, spot, or spatter, from silk, satin, linen, cambric, cloth, crape, stuff, carpet, merino, muslin, bombazeen, or woollen stuff. Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains, paint-stains, pitch-stains, any stains...One penny a square!' Items of every kind were on offer: malacca canes, or the smallest Bible in the world, or a Punch and Judy squeaker, or a bird-warbler.\n\nIn the 1840s, a type of proto water pistol \u2013 flexible metal tubes filled with scented water, which young boys enjoyed squirting at passers-by \u2013 became such a nuisance that legislation was passed to prevent its sale by hawkers. However, this toy was probably not as annoying, if only because it was not as common, as a toy sold at Greenwich Fair, known as 'All the Fun of the Fair': 'a mischievous little wooden instrument, with a rasp or toothed wheel', which, when run down someone's back, made a noise that sounded like fabric being torn. 'These are for sale by thousands at every fair...Mr. B\u2014 and myself got scraped a dozen times the other day by the girls in the crowds as we passed along...You are obliged to take it with good humor, but I cannot say that I think it a very refined amusement.' Refined or not, the writer nonetheless soon found himself buying one, whereupon 'a couple of girls came up, and...wanted to know if I was not ashamed to be getting one, thinking, as well they might, that I was a little too gray and too bald to be amusing myself in that way; but if the jades had not fled in no time, I certainly would have scraped them in return.'\n\nOn a more sober and necessary note, ready and waiting on the streets leading into the City that were tramped every morning by ranks of City workers, were rows of shoeblacks: in the days before routine street paving, every respectable worker needed to have his shoes cleaned after walking to work. In the early part of the century, blacking, or shoe polish, came in liquid form, and boys equipped themselves with paintbrushes, enquiring, 'Japan your shoes, your honour?' Blacking paste became available in cake form from the 1820s. Dickens is irrevocably linked to this new product after his ordeal at Warren's Blacking Factory, at 30 Hungerford Old Stairs. It was so easy to use that shoeblacks vanished from the streets, but in 1851 the Ragged School set up a Shoeblack Society, and soon their red-coated shoeblacks were seen throughout the city at fixed pitches. The charge was 1d for brushing a gentleman's shoes and trousers, from which the boys earned about 10s a week in summer but in the winter only half that. (This is surprising: one would have expected the wet season to require more shoe-cleaning, not less.) Of this, the boys kept 6d a day, about a third of their earnings; a third went to the Society for its overheads, while the remaining third was put into a savings account for each boy. Boys of good conduct were transferred from the lowest-earning pitch to more valuable ones. Because they were moved regularly, the value of each pitch was known, and the boys had to report their earnings honestly. In the first year, despite the Society having taken in twenty-seven boys with criminal records, only two had to be discharged for dishonesty. Five were given the fares to emigrate; five got good jobs; one was 'restored to his friends'; three left of their own accord; four were sacked for misconduct and two for incompetence; while the rest continued as shoeblacks. Twenty-five of these boys supported their parents on their earnings.\n\nChildren, especially boys, made up a large segment of the street-selling world, and the founder of the Shoeblack Society described the 'two currents' that ran along every street, one 'five or six feet above the pavement, one two feet below that', the boys creating the lower one. On this lower level, equally ubiquitous, were the newsboys, who permeated every street in the West End and the City. By 1829, London was served by seven morning papers and six evening ones. At mid-century, one newsboy described his day. It began three hours before dawn, when he left his home to walk to the alley off Fleet Street where the morning papers were printed. There he and the other newsboys collected the papers that his employer, a newsagent, had ordered, folding, packing and bundling up the regular country orders to despatch by the first morning post, then carrying them to the main post office at St Martin's-le-Grand, a few hundred yards away. After that they waited outside their masters' shops; when the owners arrived to open up, they took down the big wooden shutters, bundled up more papers and set off on their rounds.\n\nSome people ordered a newspaper every morning; others, for a reduced charge, rented a paper for a set number of hours, at a cost ranging from 6d to 1s a week, depending on the length of time it was kept, and the more or less popular hours. To purchase _The Times_ at mid-century cost 6d a day, or \u00a38 per annum, while rental was as little as \u00a31 6s a year. If that was still too expensive, it was possible to rent the previous day's paper by the hour, at half the price of the current day's paper. All these orders had to be organized, and collections and redeliveries made for the rentals. At about nine the boys stopped for breakfast before returning to the shop to collect more papers to sell in the streets or at railway stations: ' _Times_ , _Times_ \u2013 to-day's _Times_! _Morning Chronicle_! _Post_! _Advertiser_! _Illustrated News_! Who's for to-day's paper? Paper, gentlemen! News, news! Paper, paper, paper!' At one they stopped for dinner, going home to their mothers if they lived near by. Many women performed piecework at home, either sewing for subcontractors, making matches or artificial flowers (both notoriously poorly paid), or sewing sacks and bags for the corn trade, the wool trade or other commercial uses. But many of the boys had mothers who were out at work all day, as charwomen, laundresses, market porters, street sellers or fishwomen; many more had no mother living. For these boys, lunch was a penny loaf eaten on the street, or perhaps bread and coffee at a stall, maybe even a pie if they were in funds.\n\nAfter lunch they returned to their pitches, then it was back to the shop to prepare the afternoon papers for the evening mails. The rented newspapers had to be collected and reallocated, and \u2013 as any newspapers remaining unsold at the end of the day lost half their value and, after two days, all value \u2013 the boys ran an informal exchange programme. They met between four and five every afternoon on Catherine Street and at St Martin's-le-Grand and the calls began: ' _Ad._ for _Chron._ ', ' _Post_ for _Times'_ , ' _Herald_ for _Ad._ ' But the trades were not always simple. Six o'clock was the hour that the last post left from the main post office, to reach the country that same afternoon. As posting time grew ever closer, the negotiations became more complex, with some chains involving three, four, or even as many as eight or ten papers. But timing was key. After the boys had amassed as many papers as they had orders for, and traded away as many as their employers no longer needed, they returned to their shops to make up the bags once more before heading to the post office. Policemen were always on duty outside the entrance to St Martin's-le-Grand, keeping the way clear for the last-minute rush \u2013 this was a known sight of the city, with guidebooks recommending it to visitors. (The painter George Elgar Hicks' _The General Post-Office, One Minute to Six_ was a huge success when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1860.) Newsboys who were old hands at the game sometimes made a great show, waiting down the road until the clock began to strike six \u2013 on the sixth stroke, the gate closed for the day \u2013 dashing up in fine style on the penultimate stroke, to the cheers of the crowd. With the final stroke, their day was over, until three hours before dawn the next morning.\n\nMany boys, however, did not have an employer. They worked for themselves, standing outside offices, clubs and, especially, coaching inns or, later, railway stations and bus stops, selling a wide variety of items. Other children sold services. Much casual labour had to do with horses, in stables or on the streets. Boys hung about livery stables, where they helped the stable-hands for a few pennies, or for food. Dickens' fiction teems with boys like Kit Nubbles in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ who goes out to 'see if I can find a horse to hold' so he can 'buy something nice'; another character in the same novel hands his pony and phaeton to a man 'lingering hard by in expectation of the job', while in _Dombey and Son_ Mr Carker calls 'a man at a neighbouring way to hold his horse'. All these men and boys expected to earn a penny for standing with a horse for up to half an hour. (Any longer than that and the horse needed to be taken to a stable.) One boy, in fiction, was a bit more entrepreneurial. In the 1821 comic novel _Real Life in London_ , man leaves his horse with a boy while he visits his club. On his return he finds the boy hiring out his horse in penny rides to other street boys and this was, supposedly, his ' _fifteenth_ trip' \u2013 which, to work as comedy, must at least have held the possibility of truth.\n\nMore usual was the boy who was given some bread and butter for helping a shopboy to polish the brass on the door of a chemist's shop; or those who stood by the restaurants and saloons in the Haymarket late at night, hoping for pennies for opening cab doors 'and putting their ragged coat-tails against the muddy wheels to protect the dresses of those alighting'. A woman who sold sheep's trotters had a crippled son who cleaned knives for a family; although not paid, he was fed, which alone was enough to make a difference in mother and son's weekly accounts. During a frost, when pipes froze, boys knocked on doors in residential districts, offering to wait in line at the standpipe for the householders; or they marched along the streets calling, 'Water \u2013 water! any water wanted?' and for 2d filled the householders' buckets.\n\nBoys haunted railway stations, carrying bags or helping porters push carts. Some were cab runners, waiting near the cabstands at stations, then running behind any cab that left loaded with luggage. When the cab reached the passenger's destination, the boy got the luggage down and (unless prevented by the passenger's own servants) carried it into the house, for which he was then tipped. Attitudes to these porters varied widely. One journalist claimed that the runners shouted abuse if they weren't permitted to take the luggage, preying in particular on women and servants; an American tourist, on the contrary, reported them waiting 'very humbly' for 'Anything y'r honor pleases'.\n\nRunning porters performed the same service for omnibus passengers, waiting at stops by the railway stations and following buses when passengers got on with luggage. A journalist in the 1850s watched as a group of six boys, ranging in age from about seventeen to twelve or thirteen, ran behind his bus from Paddington to the Bank, in the City. At each stop, when a passenger with luggage got out, one boy peeled off to carry the bag home for a tip. The final boy, aged about fourteen, had to fight off 'a half-drunken porter of forty' who was standing at the Bank omnibus stop, also waiting for passengers with luggage. These older men, frequently unemployable alcoholics, were one of the reasons the boys ran in packs. The boy who won this job earned a penny or two for carrying a bag half a mile, having already run five miles from the station, but as the boys took it in turn to serve the first passenger, some of their journeys were shorter. Altogether, the journalist was told, the boy averaged three trips a day, on a good day earning 1s 3d, on a bad one 8d or 9d. His lodgings cost him 6d a week, and his food consumed the rest: like the crossing-sweepers, he worked barefoot, unable to afford the wear and tear on his boots.\n\nA grown-up version of these boy porters, and slightly better paid, were the ticket porters of the City, one of whom, the stalwart and faithful Trotty Veck, was created by Dickens in a Christmas story, _The Chimes_. Ticket porters \u2013 recognizable by their ticket, their badge of office, which had to be worn, and by their white aprons \u2013 were licensed by the City to function as letter carriers and messengers: when in _Bleak House_ Esther needs to send an urgent message to her guardian, she writes it at a coffee house, and sends it by ticket porter. They were also licensed to carry goods weighing up to three hundredweight (136 pounds) within a radius of three miles. Across the City there were wooden pitching places, upright blocks on which parcels could be balanced while porters got their breath back. Despite these loads, the porters were stereotypically considered lazy. 'Trotty' was an exception, as his name suggests, but in _David Copperfield_ Dickens presented the general view, as David watches a ticket porter dawdling along with a letter. 'He was taking his time about his errand, then; but when he saw me...he swung into a trot, and came up panting as if he had run himself into a state of exhaustion.'\n\nTrotty's income is minuscule. Even when children lived with their parents, even for those earning well in their trade, and with a family all contributing to a group income, there was no give in the budget: one illness, or one week of bad weather, could destroy them all. If there was no money for rent, then the entire structure on which the family had built their life quickly disintegrated. Some, who were far worse off, were always in view as a warning, on the same streets, also selling. The really indigent were reduced to peddling matches.\n\nMatches were paradoxical, being both cheap and highly valued in an age of fires, candles and gas. By the end of the eighteenth century, brimstone, or sulphur-tipped, matches were in use. These could be made by the vendors in their rooms: the cheap deal wood was split with a knife, a pennyworth of brimstone was heated over a fire to make it liquid, and the match tips were dipped in it. (If no fire was available, then sham matches could be made by dipping the wood in powdered sulphur, which looked the same but did not ignite; by the time the buyer found out it was too late.) Brimstone matches were lit by holding them to a candle or fire. In the absence of an open flame, a tinderbox was needed: a small wooden box divided in two, with a flint, a steel, the matches and some old linen rags on one side. The flint and steel were struck over the rags, creating sparks, which caused the rags to catch fire. The match was lit and held to a candle, to light whatever else was wanted, while the damper, a loose block that nestled into the other side of the box, was used to tamp out the rags.\n\nTinderboxes were overtaken in the 1810s by phosphorus bottles and matches dipped in chlorate of potash; when a light was needed, the match was dipped into the phosphorus and then rubbed against a cork until it ignited. By the 1830s, the congreve or 'congry' match appeared, which lit by friction when struck on any surface, making it easy to light, but causing many accidents by accidental friction. The names congreve and lucifer were used interchangeably, although the lucifer, also dipped in sulphur, was treated so that it ignited only when rubbed against sandpaper, leading to the matchboxes with sandpaper strips along the sides. Although lucifers smelt as foul as the brimstones, and were still dangerous, they were a great improvement on the old tinderbox method: 'the box we could never find when we wanted it; the tinder that wouldn't light; the flint and steel that wouldn't...strike a light till we had exhausted our patience'. This farrago had 'gone now; and, in its place, we have sinister-looking splints, made from chopped-up coffins; which, being rubbed on sand-paper, send forth a diabolical glare, and a suffocating smoke. But they do not fail, like the flint and steel, and light with magical rapidity.'\n\nThe constant presence of open flames in the nineteenth century meant that matches were not always necessary. In 1843, there was a gas explosion in Rosamond Street, Clerkenwell, when a man lit his cigar with a paper spill, or twist of paper, which he had held to a gaslight outside a shop. He tossed the spill away and it blew down a sewer grating: 'an instantaneous explosion of gas took place, resembling a discharge of artillery...about ten houses only have sustained injury, and these not to any great extent.' With less drama, this use of spills was routine. A novel of the 1850s depicts street children waiting in the Haymarket to run errands or fetch cabs for the men about town, and carrying paper 'to accommodate gentlemen whose cigars had gone out...if any such...chanced to approach, instantly the \"spills\" were lighted at the convenient jets at the caf\u00e9 door'.\n\nCongreves quickly became the standard match sold by street sellers, who offered two, sometimes even three, boxes for a penny, substantially undercutting the cigar shops, which sold penny boxes. The street sellers sometimes made a penny profit on a dozen or simply sold them at cost, which is why match sellers were classed not as street sellers, but as beggars.\n\nMatch selling was a byword for poverty. Most pictures of match sellers show either very small children or the very elderly \u2013 always an indication that there was little, if any, profit in a trade \u2013 and they are almost always depicted barefoot. The link between age, physical debility and matches occurs again and again. One journalist in the 1840s outside a gin palace reported seeing 'aged women selling ballads and matches, cripples, little beggar-boys and girls' \u2013 that is, those who physically could not earn a living. The architect, magazine editor and housing reformer George Godwin counted the residents of a slum court near Whitechapel Church in 1854, where sixteen rooms were home to 300 people. It was unsurprising to read that in one room lived a family of five match sellers, while the room above was occupied by a family of four whose wares were lucifers and onions.\n\nIn the first decades of the century, there was another, even more impoverished, group, 'the lowest classes to gain a livelihood'. It is noticeable that for them, all interaction with the more prosperous classes, even by begging, was entirely absent. Mostly these people collected and resold waste that even the impoverished thought had no value. There were women who scavenged in Thames Street, known as the place where 'Lisbon merchants' sold imported citrus fruit, salvaging the squeezed lemon skins from the gutters and selling them to manufacturers who extracted the last vestiges of juice to make cheap lemon-drops. There were bone-pickers, who fought the dogs on the streets for discarded bones, which they sold to second-rate bone burners at 2s a bushel. Grubbers searched the cobblestones for bits of nails or other metal, which they sold to marine-stores dealers (see p. 239), while finders walked up to ten miles a day collecting the same sorts of metal, as well as rags and bottles. Grubbers earned on average between 2d and 3d a day, while finders, if the weather was wet, earned even less, as muddy rags had to be washed and dried before they could be sold. By mid-century, however, the modernization of manufacturing processes had made these ways of earning a living unviable.\n\nSelling matches was the last resort of the ill, the very old and the very young. This photograph from the 1880s shows a fairly successful-looking seller: although the child is barefoot, he wears a cap, a sign of respectability.\n\nThese people were one accident or illness away from the fate of the man on whom an inquest was held in Walthamstow in that decade of economic depression, the Hungry Forties. The inquest jury heard that this man, 'name unknown, aged 52', had been out of work for weeks, but had managed to scrape a living selling congreves, until the police had threatened to arrest him as a beggar. Too frightened to go out selling in the streets again, he bartered his remaining stock of congreves for stale crusts and the dregs of tea, as well as a place to sleep on the floor in a room. Then he vanished for four days, until he was found crouched outside: he said he had moved out because he had nothing left to barter. His 'landlord' helped him in and gave him some gruel and ale, but he died the next day. Verdict: 'That the deceased died from want of the common necessaries of life and exposure to the cold.'\n\nMany who were selling in the streets were doing so as a temporary measure to avoid precisely this fate. They were neither begging nor stealing, just tiding themselves and their families over a bad patch by making something from (almost) nothing. Early in the century one unemployed labourer and his son in Watford wove willow branches around pebbles to create children's rattles; they made a sackful of them and then walked the nearly twenty miles to St Paul's Churchyard to sell them at 6d each on that busy commercial thoroughfare. Groundsel and chickweed, to feed songbirds, were gathered freely from common land, and thus the sale of it was the preserve of the young or the very old: one old brush seller became a chickweed seller when rheumatism prevented his plying the more lucrative trade. He was known for having no cry and instead merely standing outside his regular houses, where the caged songbirds recognized him and began to cheep. Another man skimmed the weed off a pond in Battersea to sell to those who kept ducks in the slums, where residents raised fowl for sale. Simplers foraged in the woods on the edge of the city, gathering simples \u2013 medicinal herbs, mushrooms, dandelion greens and nettles \u2013 which they sold in markets, or collecting snails, leeches or vipers for simpling shops or herbalists. (Snails were recommended for consumptives, but vipers, says one writer in 1839, 'of late years...are so little called for that not above one in a month is sold in Covent Garden Market'.) Boys cut grasses and reeds growing around the ponds on Hampstead Heath or in ditches near drains and sewers, selling it to costermongers as fodder for their donkeys.\n\nThe equation of street selling with poverty was complete, with it being generally understood as 'honest' or 'decent' poverty, in which people worked hard to support themselves. Yet by the 1850s, Mayhew, interviewing hundreds of street sellers, found a consistent belief among them that things had been easier decades earlier. No longer did housewives wait at home to hear a cry of 'Pretty pins, pretty women?' but instead went to the drapers; likewise, the men carrying barrels on their backs, with measures and funnels, and calling 'Fine writing-ink', had also lost business to the shops. Steadily modernity was changing the nature of the streets. The new office buildings in the City, the increase in bus (and soon underground) transport, the increasing size of London: all were making street selling less practicable, and necessitating more shifts to produce a bare living.\n\nStreet sellers were not alone in this. Most workers did not have a single job that sustained them, much less their family. Instead they patched together a series of jobs, either ones they held regularly, or seasonal work, to pay for basic sustenance and a room, or part of a room, to sleep in. A guidebook on London in 1852 contained a section entitled 'Banking'; in addition to information on the Bank of England, private banks, joint-stock banks and so on, it listed loan societies run by pubs for the poor, tallymen (pedlars who sold on instalment), and even pawnbrokers, who regularly lent money on the same goods, pawned and redeemed week after week as a family struggled from payday to payday. According to the guidebook, these makeshifts of the working classes were an integral part of the financial system.\n\nMuch of the battle to get work was visible on the streets. Many labourers, both skilled and unskilled, were hired by the day, or at best by the job. Skilled workers such as tailors and cobblers used pubs as trade clubs, a 'house of call', where 'the masters applied when they wanted workmen'. But in the earlier half of the century in particular, the hiring of unskilled labour took place out in the street: 'chairmen, paviers, bricklayers'-labourers, potato-gatherers, and basket-men' stood daily 'at their usual stands for hire' around the city: in Whitechapel, in Cheapside, on Oxford Street and at Tottenham Court Road among others.\n\nThe dockyards, some of the largest employers in London, used similar hiring practices. Skilled labourers such as coopers, rope-makers and carpenters held permanent jobs; until the 1850s, when the shipbuilding industries moved out of London, so did men working in iron foundries, sail yards and block-and-tackle shops. But two-thirds of the dockworkers were unskilled and were hired by the day. At 7.30 every morning a ragtag army a thousand or more strong stood waiting for a few hundred jobs, pushing and jostling for their favourite spots, where they thought the calling foreman looked most frequently. Once the foreman came out, 'Then begins the scuffling and scrambling, and stretching forth of countless hands high in the air, to catch the eye of him whose nod can give them work...some men jump up on the back of others, so as to lift themselves high above the rest and attract his notice. All are shouting.' After the foreman had filled his quota, many hung around in the waiting yard, in case a ship arrived late on the tide: a hundred or so men competing to be one of the half-dozen who might possibly be needed, to earn 4d an hour.\n\nEven at the docks, weather affected the work \u2013 a prevailing easterly wind meant no incoming shipping; the seasons dictated the volume of ships arriving and leaving. Away from the docks, these factors affected many other kinds of labourers. Bricklayers, house painters, slaters, fishermen and watermen all suffered loss of earnings on rainy days, while pipe layers, sewer builders and some smaller building firms could not function when the ground was frozen. Luxury goods and services suffered badly when the social season ended and the rich shifted to their country houses. Even clerks, on the edge of the middle class, suffered then, as those who serviced the legal world had to survive the long summer vacation when the courts rose: 'it is starvation to the Scribe; it means the workhouse for many.' It was here that the true precariousness of life, and status, were made clear, where these men, hanging grimly on to the fringe of the lower middle classes, were forced to join the working classes, 'earning a scanty livelihood...picking hops' in Surrey and Kent. In Farringdon the Ragged School Dormitory for the indigent and homeless employed a night officer, whose job it was to sit on a dais every night from 9.30 p.m. to 6 a.m., to prevent assaults, thefts or other antisocial behaviour. The holder of this position in the early 1850s was a clerk by day, who put in another eight and a half hours through the night for the extra \u00a31 it brought each week \u2013 and he had beaten 200 applicants to the post.\n\nThose from the working classes whose trades slowed or ceased in summer found similar work, hop picking, or in market gardens. Pea picking was ideal for women with small children, as they could operate in rotation: families working together could sometimes make 4s a day in the ten-week season. Some had to juggle jobs not from month to month but from week to week. A stick seller offering whips, crops and walking sticks did a brisk trade in the parks and near excursion sites on Sundays in summer, but for the rest of the time needed to find another commodity more in demand.\n\nMany more spent their lives 'on the tramp', a sort of forced moving on, as if in parody of the upper-class life of moving from home to home around the country. Trampers generally spent the summer and autumn in the countryside or suburbs, working as builders' labourers, brickmakers, navvies or agricultural labourers. In the winter, when no building work was done outside the capital, they headed back to London where they could find work, if not on building sites, then in subsidiary industries such as brickmaking, or in gasworks, which required more labourers in the cold months, or in breweries after the hop harvest, or as chimney sweeps, who also had more work in winter. Showmen left London between March and April to tour the Easter fairs, returning to the city in October for the London fair season.\n\nA shoemaker around 1810 walked daily from his half-room, as he called it (that is, the section of the room he rented from its primary tenant), to the Barbican, across Smithfield and onwards, going 'occasioning', where he went into each shoemaker's he passed, asking if any of them had occasion to hire him to do a day's work. William Lovett, originally a Cornish rope maker, in 1821 came to London to find work, lodging with other Cornishmen by the docks and becoming an itinerant labourer. He and a friend got up at five every morning 'and walked about enquiring at different shops and buildings till about nine'; they paused to share a penny loaf before looking for work again until four or five in the afternoon, 'when we finished our day's work with another divided loaf'. After a fortnight three Cornish carpenters offered to find him work on a building site for a fee of 2s 6d. This was not avarice, just recognition that everyone was living at subsistence level, and a few pennies made a difference. Such trade-offs were not uncommon. At mid-century the sack- and bag-making trade was entirely supplied by women who collected canvas from the warehouses in Bermondsey by the river, carrying the bundles home on their heads to make up the bags as piecework. One woman earned a useful 6d a day by this trade, but being small and slightly built, 'she can't carry the sacks home as other gals do; so a strong young woman...carries them home for her, and charges her twopence for it'.\n\nTrampers had a variety of places to stay, either overnight, weekly or for the season. Many were in the well-known slum areas: St Giles, Tothill Fields near Parliament, the Mint, south of the river; some lay in the suburbs, near the market gardens and other work areas. Notting Dale (later gentrified as Notting Hill) was one of the first tramp sites, settled by pig-keepers who had been driven out of Tyburn (later Marble Arch) as it moved upmarket. Lodging houses for trampers cost up to 3d a day at mid-century, 6d a day in later years, and were for those in skilled trades and regular employment. Many trampers slept outdoors, by the brickfields if possible (the kilns stayed warm all night); others haunted the markets, where could be found late-night coffee stalls, the chance of odd jobs or, at worst, shelter under a trestle after the market closed. One alternative was the 'Dry Arch Hotels', the vaults under the bridges and later the railway viaducts: the Great Eastern Railway's arches at Spitalfields regularly sheltered sixty men every night; while the 500 arches under the line from Rotherhithe along the south-east corner of London offered a refuge to almost a whole town's population.\n\nEven people in employment lived in such places, for sometimes it was seen as an improvement on what they might find in one of London's great slums.\n\n#### 7.\n\n#### SLUMMING\n\nAt the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word 'slum' was unknown. Instead, 'rookery' was the usual word for overcrowded living conditions \u2013 as many rooks build their nests in a single tree, so a court 'is known by the name of the \"Rookery\", (from there being a humble family in each room)'. That 'to rook' had long meant to cheat added a moralistic note: rookeries were where the dishonest and disreputable lived. The word 'slum' emerged gradually during the late 1820s, gathering pace as did the growth of slums themselves.\n\nThis growth was driven by the rapidly increasing numbers of London's inhabitants. Between 1800 and 1850 the population of England doubled. At the same time, agricultural work was giving way to advancing industrialization and factory labour. In 1801, 70 per cent of the population lived in the country; fifty years later, this figure had been reduced to just 49 per cent. Migration, particularly from Ireland during the Famine years towards the middle of the century, resulted in the eighteenth-century infrastructure of London being swamped by the huge mass of its nineteenth-century residents. Transport, sanitation, food distribution, housing: none could cope with the numbers pouring into the capital every day.\n\nThe changing attitude to the poor, and the consequent creation of the harsh new Poor Laws in the 1830s, must be seen against this background. At the beginning of the century, there was a general acceptance of the poor \u2013 some were good, some were bad, some lazy, some worked hard: just as with the wealthy. In a series of views of London, which Rowlandson illustrated between 1808 and 1810, the caption to a picture of the Westminster Workhouse, with its happy, well-fed paupers, reads: 'The establishment of a permanent and certain provision for the aged and the helpless, not of occasional bounty, but of uncontrovertible [sic] right, and the anxious care which has watched...over every abuse or neglect in the execution of them, may be placed in competition with the greatest of our national achievements.' Workhouses were shelter for the very aged or the ill; the healthy and working poor who could not make ends meet received 'outdoor relief' of both money and food, supplemented sometimes by clothes, shoes and assistance in finding apprenticeships for their children. By the 1830s, however, increasing urbanism, population and inequality of income, creaking infrastructure and the rise in evangelical morality helped to create a view that the poor were poor not because of misfortune, or because wages were too low, but because they were drunken and lazy, probably immoral and dissolute, and no doubt rogues and thieves to boot. Even those who were generously inclined, who did not believe that being poor by definition made a person bad, used language that suggested they saw the poor as different from themselves in essential ways. _Oliver Twist_ was an outraged response to the new Poor Laws; even so, Dickens used the words 'wild' and 'voracious' \u2013 as of an animal \u2013 to describe the workhouse children. Mayhew, a decade later, in the equally sympathetic _London Labour and the London Poor_ , saw the poor as a 'tribe', that is, a group that was distinct from both the author and his readers.\n\nDickens and Mayhew were representative of many, possibly most, of the middle classes in this feeling of them and us. Those who were far less sympathetic objected to the growing number of workers receiving money under the old Poor Laws, which, through cash payments linked to the price of bread, had long enabled employers to pay their workers less than a living wage. In response, the 1824 Vagrancy Act criminalized the state of being indigent: begging and sleeping out without visible means of support were made criminal acts. (Thus, in _Oliver Twist_ , when Oliver runs away, he is breaking the law by being on the road with no money.) In 1832, a Royal Commission was established, heavily weighted towards the Utilitarian philosophy that was hostile to the notion of the state subsidizing employers in this fashion. Two years later the Poor Law Amendment Act established a system in which outdoor relief was first reduced, then ultimately abolished almost entirely. In Southwark and the East End, before 1830 each pauper received 3s a week; by the mid-1860s, those who had some other form of income received less than 1s a week. A poor person who was entirely dependent on the parish was forced into the workhouse.\n\nThe problems inherent in the new arrangements soon became obvious. The Poor Law Guardians, who oversaw the system, were elected by ratepayers who had a vested interest in keeping expenditure down. Initially, the workhouses were meant to create an orderly life \u2013 no alcohol nor tobacco, early to work and early to rise, but with nourishing food and decent living conditions \u2013 in which the impoverished worker would learn the habits of gainful employment. But it was feared that if the workhouses were warm and well lit, the paupers well fed and well clothed, then there would be no incentive to work. Thus the notion of making the workhouses less 'eligible', or desirable, became central, with workhouses rendered 'as prison-like as possible'. Families were separated: men lived on one side, women on the other, with school for the children and work for all \u2013 preferably grinding, repetitive, meaningless work to discourage people from entering the workhouse until they were _in extremis_. The paupers were allowed no personal possessions; they were dressed in deliberately unattractive uniforms; their hair was cut unbecomingly (they were, said Dickens, 'pollarded'); they had to ask permission to leave the premises; their food was insufficient, and of the coarsest kind. The entire aim was to make them unhappy, and to make the better-off despise them. For many, these aims were achieved. In _Little Dorrit_ , Old Nandy is forced into the workhouse at the end of his life. 'It was Old Nandy's birthday, and they let him out. He said nothing about its being his birthday, or they might have kept him in; for such old men should not be born.' When Little Dorrit accompanies the old man in his workhouse clothes, she is berated by her sister for 'coming along the open streets, in the broad light of day, with a Pauper!'\n\nThe Master of a workhouse was expected to ensure that the workhouse functioned, that the paupers were diligent and disciplined, that the staff kept order, that the accounts balanced and no more was spent than was necessary. The ratepayers' primary demand on him was to keep costs down, and cutting staff in quality and quantity was the easiest way. Workhouses were therefore run by people who could not get better jobs, and the fact that cruelty abounded was hardly a surprise. Yet the very existence of the workhouses was used by many, as Dickens noted so savagely, as an excuse to do nothing for the most wretched in society. In _A Christmas Carol_ , when some philanthropic men approach Scrooge for a contribution to help the 'Many thousands [who] are in want of common necessaries', Scrooge refuses: 'those who are badly off,' he declares, should take themselves off to the workhouse.\n\nDickens returned again and again to the attitudes that had permitted the creation of this injustice. Written three years after the passing of the new Poor Laws, _Oliver Twist_ , with its depiction of the ravenous children in the workhouse, is today the most famous description of the horrors of this penal system disguised as charity. Dickens as a young man had lived in lodgings in Norfolk Street, now 22 Cleveland Street, steps away from the huge Cleveland Street Workhouse (still surviving today almost intact). In 1843, in _A Christmas Carol_ , he made this tale of the miser Scrooge's reform another enraged commentary on the Poor Laws; he wrote memorably on the same subject in _Little Dorrit_ in the mid-1850s. In _Our Mutual Friend_ in 1865, five years before his death, he created Betty Higden, the poor woman who in old age becomes an itinerant pedlar to avoid being taken to the workhouse: 'Kill me sooner than take me there. Throw this pretty child under cart-horses' feet and a loaded waggon, sooner than take him there...D o I never read in the newspapers...how [the paupers] are grudged, grudged, grudged, the shelter, or the doctor, or the drop of physic, or the bit of bread?...Johnny, my pretty...You pray that your Granny may have strength enough left her at the last...to get up from her bed and run and hide herself...sooner than fall into the hands of those...that...worry and weary, and scorn and shame, the decent poor.' 'It is,' Dickens added savagely, 'a remarkable Christian improvement, to have made a pursuing Fury of the Good Samaritan.' From his second to his penultimate novel, the evils of the workhouse ran through everything he wrote. He was not alone in his views. Even that bastion of middle-class rectitude, _The Times_ , condemned the laws as an 'appalling machine...for wringing the hearts of forlorn widowhood, for refusing the crust to famished age, for imprisoning the orphan in workhouse dungeons, and for driving to prostitution the friendless and unprotected'.\n\nBut many dismissed these views, claiming that all beggars were thieves living at the expense of the hard-working. In Pierce Egan's _Life in London_ , early as 1821, a crossing-sweeper, arrested for abusing a woman who refused to give him a tip, asks, 'Who would _work hard_ for a few shillings...when, with only a broom...a _broom_...a _polite bow_ and a _genteel appearance_...the _ladies_ could be _gammoned_ [fooled] out of pounds per week.' Instead of the bare living that the work in actuality provided, Egan's novel presents his sweeper as earning \u00a31 a day regularly \u2013 the income of a small tradesman. Many people wanted to believe these myths for economic reasons. A journalist touring the slums of Bermondsey in the mid-1860s was told that the poor positively 'liked dirt, and wouldn't use water not if it was tapped and messed into every room of the place'. His guide finished triumphantly by saying there was no point complaining to the parish, because the vestrymen who determined how much could be spent on poor relief were also the owners of these slum dwellings.\n\nThe reality of nineteenth-century poverty, however, was such that many things had value that today we cannot imagine buying, selling or even giving away. Near the basin where glasses were washed in pubs was a 'saveall', a small ledge of pierced pewter-work, in which the dregs from the glasses were deposited, to be sold to 'the poorer customers' or (as an afterthought), 'given away in charity'. In _Dombey and Son_ a woman attempts to snatch Florence Dombey on the street, to steal her clothes for resale. Dickens may have read of a case that occurred in 1843, three years before _Dombey and Son_ began to appear. A woman applied to a workhouse for relief. The workhouse surgeon thought the three-year-old boy with her was in some way 'superior'. So puzzling did the child appear that he was, ultimately, interviewed by the Lord Mayor in his home, where the toddler recognized a piano and a watch-guard, notably middle-class objects. He said he had one mother in the country who was kind to him and called him Henry, as well as this woman, whom he called his strawyard mother (a strawyard was a night refuge for the indigent; see pp. 198\u20139), who had taken away his clothes, which he itemized, and which were the clothes worn by middle-class children. This was the oddest, but not the only, instance of children being stolen for their clothes. Many workhouses marked even their ugly clothes: in the 1840s, the Camberwell Workhouse had 'Camberwell parish' and 'Stop It' painted across their uniforms, while lodging houses sometimes had 'STOP THIEF!' marked on their sheets. There were many incidents that indicated the poor's utter desperation. Children broke windows or street lights to get themselves arrested: in gaol, they would be warm and fed, and could sleep indoors. In 1868, when a man was sentenced to seven days' prison for breaking lights, he begged for fourteen, 'but the magistrate was inflexible': seven was all he would give him.\n\nSince it was far more comfortable for many to believe in Egan's rich beggars, the conditions in workhouses grew worse and worse. In 1842, a Select Committee heard from a man who had applied for relief and was punished for his temerity by being confined for forty-eight hours with five others 'in a miserable dungeon called the Refractory-room, or Black-hole', a room with no windows. 'The weather then (August) being exceedingly warm...they complained...and...as a punishment, a board was nailed over the small air-hole.'\n\nThere was little difference between the workhouses and the prisons. There was no sense that prisons were places that should be tucked away: they were physically as well as mentally integrated into the fabric of London. Tothill prison, in what is today Victoria (it was demolished in 1854 to build Westminster Cathedral), was visible from fashionable Piccadilly, where it could be mistaken for a wing of Buckingham Palace, while from Belgravia it looked as if it were set in 'a very enviable grove of trees'. The Fleet prison, by the nineteenth century almost entirely used for debtors, even had a street number posted on the front entrance: those who did not want to admit to being incarcerated could have their letters sent to 9 Fleet Market and hope that the sender would be none the wiser.\n\nIn 1800, there were nineteen prisons in London, which by 1820 had increased to twenty-one, and they were regarded, by those outside the walls, as just one more of the city's many sights. In _Great Expectations_ , when Pip arrives from the country: 'I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul's bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison.' While he declines to purchase a seat at a trial, one of the gaol's officials nevertheless shows him the gallows, the whipping post and 'the Debtors' Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged'. Sightseers gained entrance easily. In 1843, the splendidly named American visitor Thurlow Weed sent in his card to the governor at Newgate and was immediately given a tour around the entire prison. In the list of 'Exhibitions, Amusements, &c.' in _Routledge's Popular Guide to London_ , Newgate prison is listed after the National Portrait Gallery and before the 'Polygraphic Hall (Entertainment by Mr. W. S. Woodin)'. In the mainstream _Illustrated London News_ , a regular feature entitled 'Public Improvements of the Metropolis' highlighted buildings of which a new and modern city should be proud: the Sun Fire-Office's office was one, Pentonville prison another. There was no difference in the magazine's attitude, both being considered as bringing the benefits of modernity.\n\nThe prisons of London could not be ignored, embedded as they were in the very centre of the city. The Fleet prison, almost entirely a debtors' gaol by the nineteenth century, had an opening, _right_ , where until the 1820s prisoners took turns to stand, rattling a tin and beseeching, 'Remember the poor debtors.' The money collected paid for their food and clothing.\n\nConvict prisons remain with us, but debtors' prisons vanished in the nineteenth century. For much of the first half of the century, however, those who could not pay what they owed were imprisoned until their debts were met. When the debtor's creditors decided that they had no option but the law, a writ of execution was put in and the debtor was arrested. He or she was usually first taken to a sponging house (sometimes spunging house), so-called for its ability to squeeze money out of debtors, 'where, like a spunge, they soon begin, you \/ Find, to suck out whatever you've got in you!' There the debtor was held under the supervision of the bailiffs while, with luck, he might come to an arrangement with his creditors. These houses were commercial propositions run by private individuals, and living costs were charged just as they were in regular lodgings. According to one novel a small room cost 5s a day, while another claimed a fire was an additional 5s. Dickens priced the more luxurious front drawing room at 'a couple of guineas a day'. To survive decently as a debtor, one had to have money.\n\nOne of the best-known houses was Abraham Sloman's, at 4 Cursitor Street, off Chancery Lane. In Disraeli's novel _Henrietta Temple_ , published in 1837, it was described as 'a large but gloomy dwelling', providing 'a Hebrew Bible and the Racing Calendar' for the 'literary amusement' of its inhabitants. In Thackeray's _Vanity Fair_ (1847\u20138), Colonel Crawley is a regular visitor, passing through at least three times; his 'old bed', when he returns, has just been vacated by a captain of the Dragoons, whose mother left him to languish there for a fortnight before paying off his creditors, 'jest to punish him'. Dickens knew Sloman's in reality, not simply in literature. In 1834, three years before Disraeli's novel, John Dickens was arrested yet again for debt, and was taken to Sloman's to wait for his journalist son, now gainfully employed, to extricate him; that same son re-created the house the following year, as Solomon Jacob's, also on Cursitor Street, in one of his earliest short stories, 'A Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle', as well as, two decades later, more touchingly as Coavinses' Castle, in _Bleak House_.\n\nIf no one came forward to pay what the debtors owed, the prisoners were taken from the sponging house to a debtors' prison, where they were kept until the debts were paid \u2013 potentially for ever if the debtor had no means of settling. Like Mr Dorrit in _Little Dorrit_ , a handful of prisoners were unable to untangle their affairs and spent the bulk of their lives in these institutions: when the Fleet closed in 1842, one prisoner had been there since 1814; another, still in the Queen's Bench prison in 1856, had been arrested for debt in 1812. Although there were nine debtors' prisons in London at the beginning of the century, the ones we know best today are the Fleet and the Marshalsea, mostly thanks to Dickens' depictions of Mr Pickwick in the Fleet and Mr Dorrit in the Marshalsea. These two, with King's Bench, in Southwark, and Whitecross Street, in the City, held most of London's debtors.\n\nDespite being places for people who were penniless, debtors' prisons required cash, and rather a lot of it. In the Fleet those who had money to spend lived on one side, where basic services were provided for a fee. In contrast, 'The poor side of a debtor's prison is, as its name imports, that in which the most miserable and abject class of debtors are confined.' Until the 1820s, the latter received the barest minimum of food and were expected to beg in order to supplement their rations. Dickens described the opening on to the street, where prisoners stood in turns behind a grille, 'rattl[ing] a money-box, and exclaim[ing] in a mournful voice, \"Pray, remember the poor debtors; pray remember the poor debtors.\"' But, Dickens added, 'Although this custom has [since] been abolished, and the cage is now boarded up, the miserable and destitute condition of these unhappy persons remains the same.' After that date, each prisoner with funds was charged 'footing' on entry, to provide food for the destitute inmates. For a 'chummage' fee to the chum-master \u2013 the prison officer in charge of lodgings \u2013 the prisoner was given a room, which, because of habitual overcrowding, always had at least one occupant already. Good chum-masters ensured that a prosperous debtor was quartered with an indigent one, whereupon the prosperous new arrival paid a weekly fee to the poorer to go and sleep elsewhere. The destitute prisoner in turn paid a portion of that fee to an even poorer prisoner for space in the corner of his cell, leaving a few shillings a week for food and other necessities. For the better-off, turnkeys let out furniture for a further sum. Food was brought into the prison by family members, or ordered from a local eating house for another sum; drink was similarly available. In a parody of university life, prisoners also 'subscribed', as 'collegians', to the cost of the fire in the taproom and the provision of hot water. As Mr Pickwick discovered very rapidly, 'money was, in the Fleet, just what money was out of it; that it would instantly procure him almost anything he desired'. The same held true in prisons for criminals: in Newgate, when the Artful Dodger is awaiting trial for pickpocketing, Fagin promises, 'He shall be kept in the Stone Jug...like a gentleman...With his beer every day, and money in his pocket.'\n\nTradesmen routinely conducted business in the prisons too, as they did outside. When Pip visits Newgate \u2013 a holding prison for those awaiting trial, as well as for convicted prisoners awaiting transportation or death \u2013 he sees 'a potman...going his round with beer' as such sellers did on the streets (see pp. 287\u20138; p. 292, top row, centre, shows a picture of one). Debtors were not necessarily kept off the streets altogether anyway. Around most of the debtors' prisons there was a designated area where, on payment of yet another fee to the prison officials, prisoners could work and even live within what were known as 'the rules'. They comprised, Dickens wrote in _Nicholas Nickleby_ , 'some dozen streets in which debtors who can raise money to pay large fees, from which their creditors do NOT derive any benefit, are permitted to reside by the wise provisions of the same enlightened laws which leave the debtor who can raise no money to starve in jail'. One memoir claimed that the rules were so little policed that one prisoner deputed for the stagecoachman on the London\u2013Birmingham route for an entire month without the prison officers being any the wiser. Many prisoners still worked at their old trades: in the 1830s, the cabinet-maker William Lovett was employed by a man who ended up in the Fleet, continuing to work for him in a workshop in the rules. Those in the Queen's Bench didn't even need to go outside the prison walls to resume their trades. On the ground floor of the gaol a number of indebted tradesmen turned their rooms into shops: butchers, greengrocers, a barber, tailors and so on. This group rather looked down on the row of rooms at the back of the building, where the poorer prisoners lived, and where 'there are shops of an humbler class': sausage seller, knife- and boot-cleaner and a pie seller.\n\nWhen Dickens placed the Dorrit family in the Marshalsea prison off the Borough High Street, south of the river, he made it world famous, although at the time readers were unaware of his own intimate childhood experiences within its walls. By the time he began _Little Dorrit_ in 1855, most of the debtors' prisons had been closed down \u2013 the Marshalsea was emptied in 1842 \u2013 and there were only 413 debtors imprisoned in London. It is not surprising, given the author's youthful scarring, that the novel was set during the years that the Dickens family too had suffered. William Dorrit enters the Marshalsea in about 1805, but most of the scenes there take place when he has already been imprisoned for two decades, almost exactly coinciding with the date when John Dickens was there \u2013 1824.\n\nThe prison, wrote his son, was 'an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid houses standing back to back...environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at [the] top'. But the novel barely scratched the surface of the reality that was the Marshalsea. Just over a decade after his father's imprisonment, Dickens, in _The Pickwick Papers_ , had been more passionate about the conditions in the Fleet: 'poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems...to impart...a squalid and sickly hue.' Even this was an understatement. The prisoners' lodgings in the Marshalsea consisted of fifty-six rooms measuring ten feet, ten inches square, each of which comfortably held one bed, although each routinely housed three prisoners. The narrow paved yard that Dickens mentions was really an alley, five yards wide at the widest point. There was, for the 150-odd prisoners and any additional family members who moved in for lack of funds to live elsewhere \u2013 as Mrs Dickens and their younger children had been forced to do \u2013 a single water pump, a single cistern to hold the drinking and washing water, and two privies. The yard was flooded with waste water, the open drains were 'choked and offensive', the dusthole, where rubbish and fire ashes were thrown, smelt, although not as badly as the privies: they were emptied only once every two months, and their stench carried to the kitchen.\n\n_Little Dorrit_ presents a rather orderly, domestic image of the prison, where families lived according to middle-class norms as best they could. But the rules of the prison suggest otherwise: there were fines for taking other people's property; for throwing urine or faeces out of the windows or into other people's rooms; for making noise after midnight; for cursing, fighting, dirtying the privy seat, urinating in the yard, stealing from the taproom and singing obscene songs. Rules, by their prohibitions, tell us what people really do, as there is no need to create rules for things people do not do. The Marshalsea was clearly not a pleasant place to live.\n\nEarly in the century, like the Fleet and the King's Bench, inmates could live within the rules outside the Marshalsea, in an area a later writer on prison reform referred to as covering 'nearly half the south side of London'. The Marshalsea also had a system of 'liberty tickets', whereby the indebted prisoner, for sums ranging from 4s 2d to 11s 10d, purchased between one and three days' leave from the prison entirely. This, however, was abolished once the Marshalsea moved to its new site, and there living conditions mirrored those of any slum.\n\nThroughout the century there were ongoing attempts to improve conditions. Pentonville, a prison for convicts and for those awaiting transportation, opened in 1842 as a 'model' prison. Cells were generously sized, ventilated 'on the newest scientific principle' and heated by 'warm air', while inmates were supplied with good bedding and food. But others, such as Millbank, also for convicts, remained a blot on the landscape, no matter how good the intentions. Millbank was the largest prison in England, made up of six buildings spread over sixteen acres. (Tate Britain now stands on the site.) The ground in this historically poor district was marshy and considered to promote fevers. One journalist claimed that 'Here the cholera first appears'. Although cholera had first reached London via the docks (see pp. 216), Pimlico somehow had that feel about it as Dickens describes in _David Copperfield_ :\n\nThe neighbourhood was a dreary one...as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London...A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses...rotted away...Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair...led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place\n\nEven more blighted, and just as intermingled in the life of the streets, were the prison hulks, which had been established during the American Revolution, when criminals could no longer be shipped off to the colonies. Here prisoners were held in decommissioned ships berthed at Woolwich and other navy yards, in theory on a temporary basis during wartime. But long after transportation to Australia had replaced transportation to the former colonies, the hulks continued to be used. Sometimes prisoners were held on the hulks while awaiting transportation, as was the case with Magwitch in _Great Expectations_. All the prisoners on those in London worked in the navy yards alongside regular employees, providing free labour that the government found invaluable, loading and unloading ships, hauling coal and doing whatever heavy unskilled work was necessary in tandem with paid workers.\n\nThus prisons and slums were equated in people's minds: the prisons housed the criminally poor; the slums the merely poor. Throughout the century, as many journalists toured the slums as the prisons, describing for their readers what they saw. While these generally middle-class accounts are reports from outsiders looking in, they are with few exceptions all we have\n\nFor poor children, like Oliver Twist, it was often but a short step from poverty to crime, with the punishment being prison, transportation or worse. Accounts of the homeless \u2013 particularly homeless children \u2013 pervade Dickens' work, fiction and non-fiction alike. Partly this was to do with his own feeling of having been, as he later called it, 'thrown away' as a child, when, 'but for the mercy of God, I might easily have [become], for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond'. There is little difference between this response and that of the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield. When David finally finds his aunt after having been thrown away himself, he says, 'I thought of all the solitary places under the night sky where I had slept, and...I prayed that I never might be houseless any more, and never might forget the houseless.' The great nineteenth-century creator of the idea of 'home' was driven by this childhood sense of homelessness.\n\nDickens' horror at the destitution he saw all about him appears over and over in his accounts of his long night walks, barely changing over the decades. On one evening, in 1856, in a piece he carefully entitled 'A Nightly Scene in London', he spotted five 'bundles of rags' sleeping on the pavement in the rain outside the Whitechapel Workhouse. Being Dickens, he of course went to question the Master and, being Dickens, he also received a truthful answer: 'Why, Lord bless my soul, what am I to do? What can I do? The place is full. The place is always full \u2013 every night. I must give the preference to women with children, mustn't I?' One of the women outside said she hadn't eaten all day, apart from refuse picked up off the ground at the market. Dickens gave her and her companions 1s each to buy some food and get a few nights' lodging. A crowd of starving collected around him as he did this, but 'the spectators...let us pass; and not one of them, by word, or look, or gesture, begged of us...there was a feeling among them all, that their necessities were not to be placed by the side of such a spectacle; and they opened a way for us in profound silence, and let us go.'\n\nOn another night, this respect, or perhaps resignation, was absent:\n\nI overturned a wretched little creature, who, clutching at the rags of a pair of trousers with one of its claws, and at its ragged hair with the other, pattered with bare feet over the muddy stones. I stopped to raise and succour this poor weeping wretch, and fifty like it...were about me in a moment, begging, tumbling, fighting, clamouring, yelling, shivering in their nakedness and hunger. The piece of money I had put into the claw of the child I had over-turned was clawed out of it, and was again clawed out of that wolfish grip, and again out of that, and soon I had no notion in what part of the obscene scuffle in the mud, of rags and legs and arms and dirt, the money might be.\n\nThe visceral response that is so close to the surface is not just born of his sympathy for these people 'thrown away', but derives from the knowledge that, had life turned out only a little differently, he might have been one of them.\n\nMuch of the middle-class disdain for the poor was the result of incomprehension, owing to the increasing separation of the classes. Previously, the rich and poor had lived in the same districts: the rich in the main streets, the poor in the service streets behind. As London expanded, to meet the needs of the growing numbers of workers and residents in the City and the West End the houses of the poor were demolished (up to 25 per cent vanished between 1830 and 1850 alone). Their residents were forced into areas that were already slums, or would soon become so through overcrowding, while the prosperous, in turn, moved out of the city centre to the new suburbs.\n\nSlums developed for a range of reasons. In some areas, where speculative building had failed \u2013 huge houses were built in Notting Dale for the prosperous who never came, put off by the nearby piggeries and brickfields \u2013 the houses were divided up into lodgings for the poor. Some areas failed to attract the affluent for reasons no one quite understood. Portland Town, on the north-east corner of Regent's Park, never had the cachet of St John's Wood next door; Pimlico, on the edge of Belgravia, should have been a desirable location for the middle classes, but was not, perhaps because of its marshy ground; Chelsea, despite being near the country and with good roads into town, was low-lying and prone to flooding. Other areas degenerated as employment patterns changed: in Spitalfields, as the weaving industry was destroyed by industrialization and the abolition of import duties on foreign textiles, the once-prosperous workers' houses were subdivided among multiple tenants. By 1851, Hampstead housed 5.3 people per acre and Kensington 16.2 per acre, while Chelsea accommodated 65.4, Westminster 71.5, St Martin-in-the-Fields 80.8, Marylebone 104.5, St Giles 221.2 and the Strand 255.5. The poor had become an alien race.\n\nAt the beginning of the century, there were a dozen or so large slum districts. In the centre of town, St Giles \u2013 sometimes known as the Holy Land, possibly for its large number of Irish residents \u2013 ran south from Tottenham Court Road and Bloomsbury, with Soho on its western edge, down to Seven Dials on the east; St Martin-in-the-Fields ran westwards from the church to Swallow Street, off Piccadilly; the Devil's Acre, around Tothill Fields, and Old and New Pye Streets, clustered near Parliament. Heading east, Clare Market ran from High Holborn to the Strand; Saffron Hill or Field Lane were two names for one slum, in Clerkenwell, bordering the Fleet Ditch. Smithfield held more tenements and back-courts, as did the area around Golden Lane and Whitecross Street. Further east still, around Shoreditch, Old Nichol was a slum district, as were increasing areas of Bethnal Green. In Spitalfields, Rose Lane, Flower Street, Dean Street and Petticoat Lane were the centre of another slum; in Whitechapel, the slum areas developed around Rosemary Lane. South of the river, the slums of Old Mint lay in Bermondsey, as did Jacob's Island, which was not an island at all but a swampy area where the River Neckinger met the Thames.\n\nSeveral of these districts were used in _Oliver Twist_ : Fagin's 'ken' is 'in the filthiest part of Little Saffron-Hill', and his second hideout is 'in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel', while Sikes lives in Bethnal Green, possibly in Old Nichol Street itself, while his final hideout was Jacob's Island. The tone was set for readers when Oliver first walks into London: the route he follows is 'across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley-in-the-hole', which many would have then recognized as a district in _The Beggar's Opera_ , that eighteenth-century celebration of rogues and thieves.\n\nThese areas were presented to middle-class readers as a voyage into the unknown, with myriad references to the confusion created by the mazes of courts and alleys. In _Sketches by Boz_ , a stranger in Seven Dials is faced with alleys that 'dart in all directions' before they vanish into an 'unwholesome vapour', like a ship at sea moving into the foggy distance. Anyone even attempting to navigate the courts, warned Sala, was liable to become 'irretrievably lost'; despite living in Great St Andrew Street (roughly where Charing Cross Road is today), he wrote: 'I declare that I never yet knew the exact way, in or out of that seven-fold mystery.' And the way itself was always presented as dangerous. Donald Shaw, a sporting upper-class gent with a military background, described going to the 'dens of infamy' in the 1860s, where he enjoyed himself enormously by imagining that the 'motley groups' of drunken sailors he passed all had 'deadly knives at every girdle', watched by 'constables in pairs' \u2013 that is, these were supposedly places where constables were not able to patrol singly because of the danger. He and his friends were taken to an East End pub said to be 'the most dangerous of all the dens', and he was thrilled to be told, 'We've got a mangy lot here tonight; they won't cotton to the gents. If they ask any of their women to dance it will be taken as an affront, and if they don't ask them it will be taken as an affront.' Yet the leader of his clique, the Marquess of Hastings, had only to shout out, 'What cheer...my hearties,' and everyone settled down amicably to drink together. (Shaw appears not to notice that this rather invalidates his shivery thrill at the danger.) More realistic was Dickens, mocking that sort of fearful gloating when he wrote to a friend: 'I...mean to take a great, London, back-slums kind of walk tonight, seeking adventures in knight errant style.'\n\nField Lane was renowned as being 'occupied entirely by receivers of stolen goods, which...are openly spread out for sale. Here you may _re_ -purchase your own hat, boots, or umbrella.' Thomas Trollope claimed that in 1818, aged eight, he had visited the notorious street, drawn by adult stories of its wickedness. It is notable that, if his story is true, an eight-year-old child could venture there without hindrance, much less violence. Dickens was sharp on the notion of no-go areas. Even in failing health, in the year before he died, he routinely visited these districts with no trouble at all: 'How often...have I been forced to swallow, in police-reports, the intolerable stereotyped pill of nonsense, how that the police-constable informed the worthy magistrate how that the associates of the prisoner did...dwell in a street or court which no man dared go down.' He was aware, however, that both the public and many magistrates believed such stories.\n\nDickens walked at night for journalistic purposes, and in his sympathetic portrait of a night-walking doctor in _Bleak House_ \u2013 'he often pauses and looks about him, up and down the miserable by-ways. Nor is he merely curious, for in his bright dark eye there is compassionate interest; and as he looks here and there, he seems to understand such wretchedness and to have studied it before' \u2013 it is hard not to see a portrait of the night-walking author. In _Household Words_ the previous year, he had described going to St Giles to see a tramps' lodging house, where, as the door opens, the visitor is 'stricken back by the pestilent breath that issues from within': 'Ten, twenty, thirty \u2013 who can count them! Men, women, children, for the most part naked, heaped upon the floor like maggots in a cheese!' These lodging houses were different from 'lodgings'. Many of the comfortably middle class, and even rich, lived in lodgings, or rooms rented in a house, while lodgings for working people were single rooms converted for a whole family, perhaps several families. In _Nicholas Nickleby_ , in the poor clerk Newman Noggs' lodgings, 'the first-floor lodgers, being flush of furniture, kept an old mahogany table \u2013 real mahogany \u2013 on the landing-place...On the second storey, the spare furniture dwindled down to a couple of old deal chairs...The storey above, boasted no greater excess than a worm-eaten wash-tub; and the garret landing-place displayed no costlier articles than two crippled pitchers, and some broken blacking-bottles.' (The blacking bottles were Dickens' own secret poverty indicator, a reminder of his days in the blacking factory.)\n\nLodging houses, by contrast, provided beds that were rented by the night, each room having several beds occupied by people who were strangers to each other. In _The Pickwick Papers_ , written in 1836, Sam Weller told of a 'twopenny rope' in some lodging houses where the beds were made of coarse sacking, stretched across ropes: 'At six o'clock every mornin' they let's go the ropes at one end, and down falls the lodgers.' While I have found no mention of this outside fiction, many lodging houses were brutally basic in their amenities, as well as desperately overcrowded.\n\nOften, lodging houses were regular small terraced houses, letting out beds in a few rooms. In the 1840s, one lodging house comprised a shop in its front room; a parlour behind, which the lodgers used as a communal kitchen; two rooms with two beds at 6d each for married couples; and two rooms for single people, housing altogether twenty-four lodgers (plus children, uncounted, sleeping on the floors). Another small house offered six rooms, for men only: two rooms with six double beds, sleeping three each, at 2d per person, and four rooms sleeping ten each, at 3d. Most people in lodging houses were transients. For their nightly 3d-worth in a vast, hundred-bed house in Holborn, lodgers received a rushlight in a piece of broken crockery to light them up to their rooms (or the first forty did: the remainder presumably had to make do with reflected light, as there were only forty available). They had the use of a communal kitchen, as well as access to the fire, a pot, a gridiron and a toasting-fork, plates, benches, and two or three deal tables; in the yard behind was a shed with water and a sink.\n\nIn 1868, Arthur Munby went to see what was called the Thieves' Kitchen, in Fulwood's Rents, also off Holborn: 'Up an alley...through an iron gate, down a narrow passage, down a rude old stair, across a rude lobby; and opening a door, we entered at the dark end of a large long antique cellar.' There he found a dozen men and boys, while upstairs he counted 180 beds, with one bedroom containing eleven beds and nothing else. As late as the 1870s, even after legislation had been passed regulating the number of people per room, in Flower and Dean Streets in the East End, thirty-one lodging houses were occupied by 902 lodgers paying 4d a night, or 2s a week, two to a bed. Of these, sixty-eight, or one out of every dozen residents, were aged under fourteen, living there without a parent.\n\nThe words 'rents' or 'courts' were enough to identify a slum in nineteenth-century London, meaning as they did housing built behind other buildings, using the passageway that had originally been designed to give access to stabling, 'a covered alley, not wider than an ordinary doorway', or even half that, compelling visitors 'to walk in sideways'. The entrance to Frying-pan Alley, one of Field Lane's nearly three dozen courts, measured two feet six inches across \u2013 not wide enough to get a coffin through, exclaimed a scandalized reporter. Twenty feet long, the court nevertheless contained twenty houses, with more courts beyond. Around these dead-end courtyards stood 'black and crumbling hovels, forming three sides of a miserable little square', built against three walls, and so having windows on just one side. Sometimes behind these courts more buildings were thrown up, in what had been the yards of the houses opposite: buildings, therefore, with no windows at all. Having windows that received some ambient light after dark was a luxury. In _Bleak House_ , when the orphaned twelve-year-old Charley locks her baby brother and sister in their room while she is at work, she notes with pride, 'When it comes on dark, the lamps are lighted down in the court, and they show up here quite bright \u2013 almost quite bright.' The fact of its being 'almost quite bright' made their room a desirable one and not a slum at all, but ordinary working people's lodgings.\n\nThe very worst lodgings offered nothing more than patches of floor space. Children often lived together, as protection. In the 1870s, in two streets in the East End, one in every dozen lodgers was an abandoned or orphaned child.\n\nBy the time Dickens wrote this, the separation of many of the middle and upper classes from the lives, and locations, of the working poor, was complete. When in _Bleak House_ the lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn tells Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock of the death of the pseudonymous Nemo in his barren lodgings (not a lodging house, but a respectable lodging for those with steady if small incomes, like Charley), Sir Leicester's response is that even to mention 'this sort of squalor among the upper classes is really \u2013 really \u2013 ', while Lady Dedlock asks whether the man's name had not been known to whoever had 'attended on him'. Sir Leicester wants to reject all knowledge of even honest poverty; Lady Dedlock cannot imagine a world where a person has no one to 'attend' on them \u2013 that is, no servant. The Dedlocks live in a fashionable but unnamed location, probably Mayfair, but little that happens in the novel occurs more than half a mile or so away. Nemo's rat-infested graveyard is a matter of steps from the austere beauty of Lincoln's Inn Hall, which in turn is around the corner from the home of Mr Tulkinghorn, lawyer to the grandest families, which itself is hard by the slum of Tom-all-Alone's, and Charley's and Nemo's lodgings off Holborn.\n\nThe quarantining of the poor soon became more consciously planned. Two words were used regularly to describe the destruction of neighbourhoods where the poor predominated: 'improvements' and 'ventilation'. Both involved the building of wide new streets through a poor district, to allow the prosperous access to better areas on either side and, more specifically, to drive the poor out. As early as 1826, the author of _Metropolitan Improvements_ boasted that 'Among the glories of this age, the historian will have to record the conversion of dirty alleys, dingy courts and squalid dens of misery...into stately streets...to palaces and mansions, to elegant private dwellings,' and forty years later the _Times_ ' leader writer still took the view that 'As we cut...roads through our forests, so it should be our policy to divide these thick jungles of crime and misery.' He could not, he said, understand why the poor chose to live in such squalid conditions and locations: it must be the 'attraction of misery to misery'.\n\nLike the _Times_ writer, few considered where the poor were to go once they were pushed out of these newly tidied-up areas. There was no expectation that mixed neighbourhoods would develop: indeed, the purpose of the 'improvements' was to separate even further the prosperous from the poor. At best, the hope was that by 'ventilating' the slums, by running new roads through previously tiny back-courts, according to the Select Committee on Metropolis Improvement in 1840, these once-hidden areas would be opened to inspection by their social superiors, which through their judicious oversight would lead to improvements. In 1845, the route of the new Victoria Street in Westminster was approved to take 'the channel of communication in a direction further south [than was originally suggested], into a more imperfectly drained, a more densely peopled, and consequently a more objectionable portion of the district', obliterating much of the slum around Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament known as the Devil's Acre.\n\nOnce an area 'improved', however, its original residents were priced out, and the problem was simply moved elsewhere. Without inexpensive public transport, workers were forced to live within walking distance of 'their bread': if labourers were not near their work, they were not in work. As late as 1900, 40 per cent of Westminster residents were costers, hawkers and cleaners living near their employment. Clearances simply increased crowding in nearby neighbourhoods, turning them into slums in turn, or worsening their conditions if they were slums already. In 1841, in Church Lane, near the Pye Street slum, 655 people were crammed into twenty-seven houses; six years later, after Victoria Street had been built, the same number of houses were occupied by 1,095 people. And throughout the city the pattern was repeated. Between 1838 and 1856, the first major incursion into the slums \u2013 New Oxford Street, to ventilate St Giles \u2013 saw up to 5,000 people left homeless. Victoria Street encompassed the destruction of 200 houses, displacing nearly 2,500 people. Commercial Street, to ventilate Spitalfields market and Whitechapel, caused 250 houses to be razed; and Farringdon Road, Queen Victoria Street and Cannon Street, to ventilate City slums, laid to waste hundreds more. Dickens raised the issue in _Household Words_ : 'What must be the results of these London improvements, when the roofs of a hundred wretched people are pulled down to make room for perhaps ten who are more prosperous'? His answer came with Jo the crossing-sweeper in _Bleak House_ , which was written at the culmination of this destruction:\n\n'This boy,' says the constable, 'although he's repeatedly told to, won't move on \u2013 '\n\n'I'm always a-moving on, sar,' cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. 'I've always been a-moving and a-moving on, ever since I was born. Where can I possibly move to, sir'...\n\n'He's as obstinate a young gonoph as I know. He WON'T move on'...\n\n'Well! Really, constable, you know,' says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and doubt, 'really, that does seem a question. Where, you know?'\n\n'My instructions don't go to that,' replies the constable.\n\nFor 'we make our New Oxford Streets, and our other new streets', Dickens had written, 'never heeding, never asking, where the wretches whom we clear out crowd.' Jo, and the many thousands like him, were driven as were the cattle at Smithfield, which, 'over-goaded, over-driven...plunge, red-eyed and foaming, at stone walls, and often sorely hurt the innocent and often sorely hurt themselves. Very like Jo and his order, very like.'\n\nSome, like _Our Mutual Friend_ 's Mr Podsnap, refused to believe that anyone was starving. When 'a stray personage of a meek demeanour' makes a\n\nreference to the circumstance that some half-dozen people had lately died in the streets...It was clearly ill-timed after dinner...It was not in good taste.\n\n'I don't believe it,' said Mr Podsnap, putting it behind him.\n\nThe meek man was afraid we must take it as proved, because there were the Inquests and the Registrar's returns.\n\n'Then it was their own fault,' said Mr Podsnap...\n\nThe man of meek demeanour intimated that truly it would seem from the facts, as if starvation had been forced upon the culprits in question \u2013 as if, in their wretched manner, they had made their weak protests against it \u2013 as if they would have taken the liberty of staving it off if they could \u2013 as if they would rather not have been starved upon the whole, if perfectly agreeable to all parties.\n\nPodsnap was considered by many to be a portrait of Dickens' friend, John Forster (who was, happily, apparently entirely unaware of the resemblance). But perhaps Dickens was also having a little fun at the expense of Sir Peter Laurie, a magistrate and once Lord Mayor, who had claimed that Jacob's Island, which Dickens had described in _Oliver Twist_ , 'only existed in a work of fiction, written by Mr. Charles Dickens'. In _Oliver Twist_ , he had painted it as a place of 'Crazy wooden galleries...with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched...rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter...dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations'. But Jacob's Island, that spit of land in Bermondsey, truly existed: in the same year that Sir Peter rejected its existence, Henry Mayhew visited and found 'The water of the huge ditch in front of the houses is covered with a scum...and prismatic with grease. In it float large masses of green rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction. Along the banks are heaps of indescribable filth...In some parts the fluid is almost as red as blood, from the colouring matter that pours into it from the reeking leather-dressers close by...the air has literally the smell of a graveyard.'\n\nThe slum district of Jacob's Island, where Bill Sikes made his last stand in _Oliver Twist_ , was a warren of 'crazy wooden galleries' hanging over a slimy, stagnant ditch filled with dead animals and effluent from the nearby tanneries. The residents, for lack of alternatives, used the ditch to dispose of their waste \u2013 as well as for their drinking water.\n\n_Oliver Twist_ was concluded in 1839; Mayhew reported in the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1849; both descriptions were very much part of the political discussion. In 1847, the Town Improvements Clauses Act gave parishes the right to demolish any buildings they judged to be insanitary, and further Acts provided ways of using taxpayers' money to do so. St Giles, in the centre of the West End, was one of the first areas where an attempt was made to eradicate a slum district entirely. The area covered sixty-eight acres, with 90 per cent of the population living in multiple-occupancy housing. And that housing was poor: particularly around Drury Lane, many of the buildings were over a hundred years old, some dating back to before the Great Fire in 1666, possibly even to the sixteenth century.\n\nHere the young Dickens walked along 'streets of dirty, straggling houses, with now and then an unexpected court composed of buildings as ill-proportioned and deformed as the half-naked children that wallow in the kennels'. This was no journalist's exaggeration \u2013 or if it was, it afflicted all journalists in the same way. In the previous decade, Flora Tristan had seen children in St Giles 'without a stitch of clothing...nursing mothers with no shoes...wearing only a tattered shift which barely covered their naked bodies...young men in tatters...dismayingly thin, debilitated, sickly'. Yet, as Dickens reported, the inhabitants might not conform to the usual expectations. In one house a shopkeeper's family lived in the shop and the back parlour, with an Irish labourer and his family in the back kitchen, and a 'jobbing man \u2013 carpet-beater and so forth' and his family in the front kitchen. 'In the 'front one-pair' lived another family, and, in the back one-pair 'a young 'oman as takes in tambour-work [embroidery], and dresses quite genteel'; another family occupied the front attic, and 'a shabby-genteel man' in the back attic. Every single one of them was in employment. They were not, by any means, the type of people that most writers, and most readers, thought of when they heard the word 'slums': the unnuanced idea of a seething population consisting entirely of layabouts, drunkards and thieves.\n\nA look at a small slum in Kensington at mid-century affirms what Dickens found in St Giles. In Jennings' Buildings \u2013 made up of eighty-three two-storey late-eighteenth-century houses built around five small courts off Kensington High Street \u2013 1,000 residents lived with no running water, no drains and forty-nine privies between them. The inhabitants were mostly Irish: the men seasonal labourers, the women laundresses and other daily workers. Despite being unskilled, many were long-term employees, not casual labour, and the courts supported social clubs, pubs and a savings club. The residents resorted to the magistrates to bring cases against neighbours who were behaving in a manner considered unacceptable \u2013 that is, they saw themselves not as the middle class saw them, as an unruly and potentially dangerous underclass, but as part of the law-abiding majority. There was almost no record of arrests for prostitution connected with these residents; children were baptized and couples married at the local Catholic church. Nevertheless the density of overcrowding was appalling, and there was no running water of any sort until 1867 (when a cholera epidemic finally compelled the vestry to provide outdoor standpipes). But slum conditions did not necessarily mean criminality, except, perhaps, to journalists.\n\nEven among the gainfully and regularly employed poor, thirty or more people might live in six or eight rooms, and as their jobs waxed and waned, they too might occasionally have to take in lodgers. In Bemerton Street, off the Caledonian Road, in King's Cross, at mid-century there lived in one eight-room house: in the basement, an old man and his wife in the front room, with two lodgers at the back; in the two rooms on the ground floor, a couple and their eight children; on the first floor in the front room, a couple and their baby, plus their lodgers: in the back, two sisters and sometimes their mother, two women and their three children; on the second floor, in the front, a couple, their two adult sons, a baby 'and a brood of rabbits', with two women and two boys in the back. The cellars were generally the worst, being at best both damp and dark; in particularly bad lodgings, the liquids from the cesspools seeped up into them. In a court in Nichol Street, in Whitechapel, a cellar had a single opening for a window, measuring three feet by 4.5 inches. The mildewed walls ran with water; the ceiling, six feet high, was half fallen-in. This was home to nine, who between them paid rent of 3s a week. A Covent Garden porter lodging near by earned 3s a week in a good week: a fraction of a room was all he could ever hope to afford, and that only for as long as he was strong enough to work.\n\nEven for those not in cellars, sanitation was an insuperable problem. In _Oliver Twist_ , Oliver washes himself 'and made everything tidy by emptying the basin out of the window', as directed by Fagin. This no doubt raised a smile in middle-class readers, but what else was Fagin to do in his Clerkenwell slum? Few houses had any drainage, water supplies ranged from scarce to non-existent, and there were few privies. It was not what the residents wanted, but what the landlords supplied, and most inhabitants made efforts to keep their living quarters as clean as possible, given their meagre resources. Sometimes landlords let an elderly or infirm person have a bed (rarely a room) rent-free in return for washing down the privy daily. When the landlord made no such provision, the residents arranged for the most impoverished of them to take on the task and as payment 'the people what lives there _gives her their cinders_ ' \u2013 the broken bits of leftover coal. No matter how clean the inhabitants may have wanted to be, it was a losing battle. In one alley behind Farringdon Street as late as the 1860s, there was one privy for a court with 400 residents. Landlords who thought 400 people needed only one privy were not going to pay to have it emptied regularly. In 1849, a letter signed by fifty-four people appeared in _The Times_ :\n\nSur, \u2013 May we beg and beseach your proteckshion and power, We are Sur, as it may be, livin in a Willderniss, so far as the rest of London knows anything of us, or as the rich and great people care about. We live in muck and filthe. We aint got no priviz, no dust bins, no drains, no water-splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place. The Suer Company, in Greek St., Soho Square, all great, rich and powerfool men, take no notice watso-medever of our cumplaints. The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We all of us suffur, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us.\n\nSome gentlemans comed yesterday, and we thought they was comishoners from the Suer Company, but they was complaining of the noosance and stenche our lanes and corts was to them in New Oxforde Street. They was much suprized to see the seller in No. 12, Carrier St., in our lane...and would not beleave that Sixty persons sleep in it every night...but theare are greate many sich...Sur, we hope you will let us have our cumplaints put into your hinfluenshall paper, and make these landlords of our houses and these comishoners...make our houses decent for Christions to live in.\n\nPreaye Sir com and see us, for we are living like piggs, and it aint faire we shoulde be so ill treted.\n\nWe are your repeckfull servents in Church Lane, Carrier St., and the other corts.\n\nThis particular court lay in St Giles, just steps away from Tottenham Court Road, and the letter was written after the area had been 'improved' \u2013 in fact, the courts' single privy had been removed to make way for the improvements. _The Times_ followed up this letter and recorded, in one room, a child naked but for a sack, eaten up with fever, watched helplessly by his parents, and lying next to a woman with cholera. 'A strange boy' was also sleeping in the room; no one knew where he had come from, or what his name was: 'He had had nothing to eat for two days except a crust of bread given him by a woman who pitied him, though she could ill-spare the morsel.' It is hard to imagine that Dickens, with his confirmed interest in slums and living conditions, did not see this _Times_ article; _Bleak House_ , with its picture of the slum of Tom-all-Alone's, and the fever-racked Jo helped by the brickmakers' wives who can ill spare him food, springs obviously to mind.\n\nPopulation growth, the Famine, the Hungry Forties: all contributed to this state of affairs, with the result that the poor lived 'like piggs'. But the precipitating factor was the slum clearances themselves. Most people failed, or refused, to make the connection. _The Illustrated London News_ , antipathetic to the Poor Laws and sympathetic to the poor, nevertheless strongly approved of the 'improvements' (always their word), even as they condemned the increasing misery they saw in the streets. In one week in February 1847, they reported that up to 4,000 starving people had arrived nightly at just three Asylums for the Houseless Poor. The following week, the magazine noted with exasperated relief that 'finally' the work to eradicate the Devil's Acre slum was about to begin.\n\nFrom the 1840s, the railways drove these clearances at an ever faster pace. St Giles and Saffron Hill were no longer the worst parts of London; the new slums had all been created by the railways. Property owners and long lease-holders were compensated if their buildings were destroyed, but those who rented day to day, or even week to week, received nothing. They simply had to shift for themselves, finding new lodgings, which were likely to become more expensive as nearby cheap rooms became scarcer. In 1846, a Parliamentary Select Committee heard that 'the rents of the wretched hovels of the poor increased 10, 15, 20 and 25 per cent in all the surrounding districts where these improvements have taken place.' Behind Farringdon Street station, a resident of an alley claimed that 'a thousand houses have been pulled down for the railway within half a mile', and those residents had all moved into his street, 'because there's nowhere else'.\n\nOther 'improvements' were created as London was transformed from an eighteenth-century city to a modern one. In the 1860s, 500 people were displaced from Ship Yard, off the Strand, with more from the surrounding courts, as the area was cleared for the preliminary groundwork for the building of the new Royal Courts of Justice (which still stand). Four months later, another 4,000 were evicted. Ultimately eight acres were completely razed: thirty-three streets, 343 houses, 170 or so stables, plus numerous warehouses and shops. The newly homeless, crowding in with their neighbours, were no doubt unmoved that the Courts, when they were completed fifteen years later, were impressive, as were the buildings lining the many new wide roads that had displaced the homes of the poor. The slums continued to exist but were just better hidden and broken up by streets that the respectable were happy to walk down.\n\nBy the 1860s, the harsh times of the Hungry Forties had returned once more. Newspapers reported on the hundreds of starving in the street, even of instances when 'thousands' broke into bakers or eating houses, not to rampage, but to get bread to keep them alive. The Poor Law had 23,000 paid officers and produced 12,000 annual reports, but whatever relief the system had once offered, had now broken down entirely. As a result, 'Dorcas societies, soup-kitchens, ragged-schools, asylums, refuges' and other benevolent societies were 'strained to the utmost', attempting to ameliorate the very worst conditions.\n\nCharities such as the Ragged School concentrated on trying to educate the poor so that they could support themselves. The first Ragged School had originally been a single schoolroom in a back-court in Saffron Hill in 1841; a decade later there were 110 schools, where nearly 2,000 children were taught trades, and dormitories were available to those who attended school regularly. Here around 200 boys and men slept together, in 'narrow pathways' that had been 'partitioned off into wooden troughs, or shallow boxes without lids'. Similar accommodation was offered by the privately endowed Asylums for the Houseless Poor, sometimes also known as the Refuges for the Destitute. These were set up in 1820, with branches near Blackfriars, Smithfield and Marylebone. In the early 1850s, on winter nights 'a large crowd of houseless poor [are] gathered about the asylum at dusk, waiting for the first opening of the doors...with their blue, shoeless feet, ulcerous with the cold, from long exposure to the snow and ice in the street...To hear the cries of the hungry, shivery children, and the wrangling of the...men assembled there to obtain shelter for the night, and a pound of dry bread, is a thing to haunt one for life.'\n\nThen there were Night Refuges, privately supported and open only in winter, where residents could stay for up to a month, coming and going as they pleased. Casual Wards, or strawyards, were subsidiaries of the workhouses, and just two nights' stay was allowed at one time. By the 1850s, these Casual Wards had become a matter for journalistic examination. Mayhew visited one and listed one night's residents, by age. The youngest was six, with another twenty-four boys and girls under fourteen; altogether, there were 152 children, half of whom had no parents. In 1865, the journalist James Greenwood, possibly the first journalist to go undercover, visited a Casual Ward in Princes Road, Lambeth, in the guise of a labourer out of work. He and his fellow indigents had their clothes taken away, and, dressed only in their shirts, were sent out to a yard where thirty men were given bags of hay to sleep on, in a shed closed in on only three sides. He was too late to get dinner, but one boy told him he had missed a treat: 'There's skilly [gruel, or thin porridge], nights as well as mornin's now...and spoons to eat it with, what's more.' There was a single pail of drinking water (and if there was another to serve as a chamber pot, Greenwood was too reticent to tell his readers). At seven in the morning they were roused to wash and dress in their own clothes, before waiting in the yard for a breakfast of bread and skilly. Then, before they were permitted to leave, they were forced to take turns cranking a flour mill. This was make-work, intended to inculcate the indigent in middle-class ways of industry, for the flour that resulted was too poor in quality to be used. The idle did as little as they could get away with, while the men who truly wanted to look for work were prevented from doing so: by the time they were released, the day-workers had all been chosen at the casual hiring stands.\n\nGreenwood's report caused a sensation, even toned down as it had been by the _Pall Mall Gazette_ 's editor, 'to avoid suspicion of exaggeration'. Much of the discussion focused on the institutionalized contempt shown to the inmates, the sham work forced upon them, the cruelty through regimentation, such as making men stand barefoot and in nightshirts outdoors. But these men had at least managed to gain admittance, and were fed.\n\nThe conditions in the 1860s for many were no better than when Oliver asked for 'more' in 1838. In the 1840s, the _Illustrated London News_ reported numerous inquests on those who had died after being refused relief by the parish. Twenty years later, over a third of the children at the Great Ormond Street Hospital suffered from that disease of malnutrition, rickets. Dickens saw these walking dead and, through the decades of his writing life, made sure his readers saw them too. In 1852, at a Ragged School dormitory, an elderly alcoholic printer was dying of starvation and next to him 'was an orphan boy with burning cheeks and great gaunt eager eyes, who was in pressing peril of death too'. Both were taken to the workhouse to die. Or, as Dickens addressed the authorities directly, after Jo dies in _Bleak House_ of a similar fever: 'Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen...Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.'\n\n#### 8.\n\n#### THE WATERS OF DEATH\n\nDeath from lack of food was ever-present for the majority of London's population. However, death from water was even more likely, and not by drowning in it, but by drinking it. The rivers of London have so far vanished from sight that today it is hard to remember how much they defined London's shape and history. In 1810, a labouring man visiting London for the first time went to see 'the metropolitan curiosities...a glimpse of the public buildings, the river, and the shipping; together with the docks and their warehouses', before walking up to Hampstead to view 'the noble river, with its \"forest of masts\"', and then rowing out to see Greenwich Hospital from the river. For him, the sights of London revolved around the Thames, as Dickens' fiction emphasizes: three out of his fifteen novels \u2013 _Bleak House_ , _Great Expectations_ and _Our Mutual Friend_ \u2013 begin with a scene on the river.\n\nHad the visiting labourer but known, in going to Hampstead from his lodgings he was crossing even more rivers, for London, built on a flood plain, is saturated with rivers that debouch into the Thames. By the nineteenth century most of them had been built over and made invisible. On the north side of the river, from west to east, Stamford Brook runs from Wormwood Scrubs to Chiswick; Counters Creek covers the same districts; the Westbourne runs from Hampstead to Chelsea; the Tyburn, along part of its route renamed the Aye, from Hampstead to Westminster; the Fleet, from Highgate and Hampstead to the City; the Walbrook, from Islington to Cannon Street; the Black Ditch, from Stepney to Poplar; and Hackney Brook from Hornsey to the River Lea. South of the river, from west to east, Beverley Brook runs from Wimbledon to Barnes; the Wandle, from Merton to Wandsworth; the Falconbrook, from Tooting to Battersea; the Effra, from Norwood to Vauxhall; the Peck, joined by Earl's Sluice to the Neckinger, from East Dulwich to Bermondsey and Rotherhithe; and the Ravensbourne from Bromley to Deptford.\n\nMost of these rivers have entirely disappeared, both from our sight and from our consciousness, except for small breaks where from time to time one briefly surfaces, or when perhaps the name of a street or district reminds us of what lies underneath. For in London, these names are legion, evidence that the ground beneath our feet is rarely as solid as we think. Many roads or districts are named for the rivers they are built over or beside: Fleet Street, Place and Road, Effra Road, Neckinger Street, the districts of Wandsworth ('Wandle-worth') and Peckham. There is also more generic naming, such as Angler's Lane, Creek Road, Pont Street, and Brook Street, Brook Green and Brook Drive. Conduit Street, Mews, Place, Drive and Way all mark river culverting. Then there are Bayswater and Coldbath Fields, and all the 'bournes' and 'burns': Bourne Street, Marylebone (a corruption of Mary-le-bourne), Kilburn, Holborn, Langbourne, Westbourne Grove. There are 'bridge' names: the generic Bridge Street, Place, Road and Lane, and Knightsbridge, Uxbridge and Stamford Bridge (originally Stanbridge, or 'stone bridge', it became Sandford, indicating the ford in the river, then Stamford); as well as all the 'fords', too: Hungerford, Dartford, Deptford, Romford and Brentford. Dozens of springs are marked by their surface eruption as wells: Wells Street, Way and Terrace Mews; Chadwell Street, Amwell Street, Sadler's Wells, Bagnigge Wells, Shadwell, Camberwell, Stockwell, Clerkenwell, Bridewell, Muswell Hill.\n\nMuch of London's physical topography too was created by rivers, which carved out great valleys that were still visible in the nineteenth century but are less so today as infill has been used to minimize the difficulties created by the steep gradients. The main one in London was the Fleet Valley, 'once almost a ravine'. Although the ground level has risen over thirteen feet since the nineteenth century, part of the hill from King's Cross still has a gradient of 1 in 17. 'Fleet', deriving from the Anglo-Saxon for 'inlet', indicates that this river was originally large enough to be navigable at its mouth. The Fleet has two sources: the ponds on the west side of Hampstead Heath (today's mixed-bathing ponds), from where it runs down Fleet Road to Camden Town; and the ponds in the grounds of Kenwood and those on the east side of the Heath (today's men's and women's bathing), whose waters run down Highgate Road. The two sources meet north of Camden, at Kentish Town Road \u2013 and such is the volume of water here, that when the Fleet flooded it created a pool sixty feet across. The river then runs under the Regent's Canal, past St Pancras Church, to Battle Bridge (now King's Cross), where it was channelled into a brick conduit, to become the Fleet sewer. This runs almost exactly parallel to Farringdon Road, which was built at the same time as the sewer, and then along the valley that bears its name, spanned by Holborn Viaduct, before it ultimately reaches the Thames as a tidal inlet at Blackfriars.\n\nThe Tyburn runs from Hampstead, too, from Shepherd's Well, through Swiss Cottage and down to Regent's Park, where it meets a tributary running from Belsize Park. It is carried by aqueduct at Regent's Canal and then reappears as the boating lake on the southern side of the park. Marylebone Lane was originally the left bank of the stream, which explains its meandering path. After the Tyburn crosses Oxford Street, it runs under Grosvenor and Berkeley Squares, under Piccadilly and then towards Green Park, where it gets lost on the marshy lands heading for the river. (Tyburn, now Marble Arch, was not actually near the River Tyburn at all; it was built beside a tributary of the Westbourne known as Tyburn Brook, the brook taking its name in this instance from the gallows it ran past.)\n\nOnly slightly smaller than the Fleet, the River Westbourne also rises up on Hampstead Heath but then heads south-west, meeting more tributaries near Kilburn and running towards Bayswater Road, into Hyde Park, where it bubbles up into Londoners' consciousness as the Serpentine, where the river had been dammed in the previous century. After that, it leaves the park via Knightsbridge and can be seen in outline once again at Sloane Square tube station, where a metal culvert carrying the river runs over the District and Circle line platforms. From there it is diverted to a reservoir for the Chelsea Waterworks and debouches as the Ranelagh Sewer, which as late as the 1960s was still visible in the Thames at low tide. Until 1834, the Ranelagh sewer discharged its effluent into the Westbourne. At that point a collateral sewer was built to divert the waste away from the Serpentine, but 'a communication' was left between the two. By the mid-1840s, the 'effluvia from under the arches' of the Serpentine's bridge 'were so offensive' that they had to be closed off, while the Serpentine itself was said to be 'nine feet of mud' under a mere 'eighteen inches of water', and 'not mud of an ordinary description, but a compound of decayed animal and vegetable refuse' \u2013 that is, sewage. 'The Serpentine has been, in fact, transformed into a vast metropolitan laboratory of cholera.' Despite this, as late as the end of the 1840s the Serpentine was piped as drinking water to many Londoners, including the inhabitants of Kensington Barracks, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.\n\nOne of the effects of the watery nature of the capital was frequently visible, as well as oppressive. There had always been fogs in London, but as the population increased and coal fires spread, so a pall of dark smoke, by the early 1830s estimated at nearly thirty miles across, regularly hung over the city. By the 1860s, the 2 million residents, the animals, the gasworks, the industry and the home fires combined to make London two to three degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. We take it for granted today that this is what happens in dense population centres; then it was a new phenomenon.\n\nThe fogs were seasonal, arriving in late autumn, persisting through the worst of the winter and lifting somewhat in the spring. But most contemporary accounts portray them as omnipresent, and the fogs became a part of almost every description of London, by visitor or resident, from the start of the century. As early as 1805, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon saw London's 'smoke' as a 'sublime canopy that shrouds the City of the world', but he also wrote that it 'drifted', so it appears that at this date it remained a relatively gentle component of the weather. By the 1820s, it was permanent enough for Byron to think of it as architectural: a 'huge, dun Cupola'. A visitor in the same decade confirms this: London, he wrote, was covered with a dense cloud of smoke 'as usual'.\n\nYet the fog was still not the smothering menace of later years. Dickens may have backdated his memories in some of his fiction. _A Christmas Carol_ , set in the 1820s, was written in 1843, and in Scrooge's counting house 'it had not been light all day...The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense...that...the houses opposite were mere phantoms.' In _Bleak House_ , which Dickens started to write in 1852 but which was set during the 1830s, fog also epitomizes the city. When Esther arrives in London from Reading, she asks 'whether there was a great fire anywhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.' But no, she is told, it is just 'a London particular'.\n\nThe fog in turn created a city of black buildings. The Portland stone fa\u00e7ade of St Paul's was not well suited to the London atmosphere, but then, 'it is difficult to conceive of _any_ colour except black, which can long preserve its identity, in an atmosphere perpetually charged with coal-smoke, which would speedily tarnish a palace of gold.' Dickens described the cause as well as the effect of this blackening, as he watched 'Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes \u2013 gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.'\n\nFrom the late 1830s, it was the colour of the fog rather than the buildings that fascinated and disturbed. It was most commonly the same shade as coal smoke, and smelt of coal smoke too, but then suddenly it changed, becoming bottle-green, or 'a dilution of yellow peas-pudding'. In _Our Mutual Friend_ , in the 1860s, Dickens was even more precise: in the countryside the fog was grey, at the edges of the suburbs it became dark yellow, 'and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City...it was rusty black'. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, however, described it as 'very black indeed, more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the ghost of mud, \u2013 the spiritualized medium of departed mud, through which the dead citizens of London probably tread'. In 1858, Dickens took an Italian friend to the Crystal Palace: 'I asked him to try to imagine the Sun shining down through the glass, and making broad lights and shadows. He said he tried very hard, but he couldn't imagine the sun shining within fifty miles of London under any circumstances.'\n\nEven after gas lighting arrived in the streets (see pp. 53-55), the fog physically swallowed up most of the illumination, by depleting the oxygen and causing the gas to 'burn on dim, yellow and sulkily', while candles gave 'a haggard and unwilling' light. The smothering lack of oxygen, too, made breathing difficult, and many more deaths among those with respiratory illnesses were registered during periods of extreme fog. Even the young and healthy found it troublesome: 'Dear me, you're choking!' says Mr Grewgious to Edwin Drood in the novel of the same name: 'It's this fog...it makes my eyes smart, like Cayenne pepper.'\n\nFor those like the comfortably-off Mr Grewgious, who stayed at home and had his supper delivered to his chambers, the fog was a nuisance, no more. The real problem was for those who had to navigate the streets, whether commuting to work, or working in the streets themselves. In _Bleak House_ , Dickens described 'Implacable November weather' with 'Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners'. As the fog thickened, street conditions worsened: 'You step gingerly along, feeling your way beside the walls, windows, and doors, whatever you can, until at least you tumble headlong into some cellar,' or run against some 'respectable old gentleman, with whom you have a roll or two in the gutter, thankful that you did not fall on the other side, and stave in the shop-front...Porters with heavy burdens, women and men with fish, watercresses, &c., you run against every few minutes...As for your watch...you saw the fellow's arm that dragged it out of your pocket, and that was all; it was a jerk amid the deep fog...you might as well hunt for a needle in a bottle of hay, as attempt to follow the thief in that dusky, woolly, and deceptive light.' Meanwhile, on the river, the boats could not run, while 'Many lives have been lost through foot-passengers mistaking the steps at the foot of some of the bridges for the...bridge itself, and...rolling head-foremost into the river.' Ultimately, there was nothing to be done but make a joke of it: many Londoners swore that in a fog the quickest way of getting to Temple Bar from Charing Cross, a twenty-minute walk eastwards in normal circumstances, was to set off due south and 'walk...without once turning your head. In three hours or so, 'you would be pretty sure of reaching the point aimed at, should you not be run over'.\n\nAs the quality of air deteriorated through the century, so did the water, a process that began at the beginning of the century, from a combination of factory waste, contamination from gasworks, the dockyards releasing 'copper and other ingredients', and dozens of other industries flushing out their own chemical brews into the Thames. As early as 1821, an inquiry presided over by the Lord Mayor looked at river water near the gasworks. Live fish were put into buckets of locally collected water: the flounders died within a minute of immersion, while eels lasted four minutes.\n\nThe problem of industrial waste was dwarfed by the problem of human waste. Too many people living in one place were all discharging their effluent into the Thames. By 1828, nearly 150 sewers were disgorging into the Thames between Vauxhall Bridge and Limehouse alone, and by the 1850s the city's central sixty sewers daily flushed 260 tons of raw sewage directly into the river. And because the Thames is tidal, this pollution was being washed right back twice a day: as the tide ebbed, shorelines of 'mud' 125 yards wide were revealed, 'mud' that was raw sewage.\n\nSummoning the political will to deal with the problem took decades, long after the increase in population had overwhelmed the civic infrastructure. The Bill of Sewers legislation \u2013 defining sewers purely as conduits for rainwater and entirely prohibiting their connection to house drains \u2013 had passed three centuries earlier and was still in force. According to the law, cesspools, not sewers, were for sewage. For centuries, therefore, cesspools under houses had been where all human waste was disposed. Even if cesspools were cleaned regularly, in densely populated districts they were still offensive; when they were not cleaned regularly, they were almost beyond imagining. The latter was often the norm: cesspools were expensive to clean and the process was unpleasant. To minimize the disruption, by the middle of the century emptying cesspools was confined to the hours between midnight and 5 a.m. Five night-men were usually required to clean one cesspool. A holeman descended to fill the tubs lowered by the ropeman; two tubmen then carried the tubs back and forth out to the street, where the fifth man emptied the loads into an open cart. (In most London houses, few of which had rear access, these tubs were carried one by one through the interior.) Until 1848, this waste was taken to nightsoil yards, where it was mixed with exhausted (used) hops, bought cheaply from the breweries, and spread out to dry, wafting its scent across the neighbourhood until it was in a condition to be sold as fertilizer.\n\nThose with less money, or those in rental properties whose landlords wanted to scrimp, had their cesspools cleaned infrequently; the poor, or those with bad landlords (which was often the same thing), never had them cleaned at all. By the late 1840s, there were so many cesspools under even the most expensive housing in the West End, that the walls between them frequently collapsed, and so fashionable London was perched on top of what one sanitary reformer called not cesspools but 'cess-lakes'. These noxious lakes filled up and overflowed, the liquids soaking into the ground and ultimately contaminating the water, while the solids slowly seeped into neighbouring cellars and streets, oozing up through the bricks every time it rained. In St Giles, 'whole areas of the cellars were full of nightsoil to the depth of three feet' and yards were 'covered in nightsoil...to the depth of nearly six inches'.\n\nThe number of animals in the city added to the filth. Many city dairies kept cows, often in cellars, where they were fed through hatches, with their waste removed the same way. In 1829, the student H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan Bey went to look at lodgings in Parliament Street: on finding that half the courtyard was given over to four dairy cows he declined, but such arrangements were not unusual. By 1837, a guidebook suggested there might have been as many as 10,000 cows in London dairies, fed not on hay but on spent mash from the breweries. A decade later, this figure had doubled; many animals were kept under the newly built railway arches by the Thames, forty or fifty cows per arch, and fed on market sweepings. At mid-century, Westminster, near one of the slums around St James's, was home to '14 cow-sheds, 2 slaughter houses, 3 boiling houses [most likely boiling horses for glue], 7 bone stores, [and] 1 zincing establishment'.\n\nAnimals were found throughout the city. At Millbank prison, once surrounded by a moat, a cow was kept in the 1850s to crop the ditch's grass; Westminster Abbey and Green and Hyde Parks all had sheep and cattle to keep the grass down. (Hyde Park leased its grazing rights to butchers, and the odd goat, too, was to be found there.) Throughout both town and suburbs, many people kept chickens and other fowl. As well as those owned by the watermen on cabstands, fowl routinely pecked and scratched outside the Old Bailey on Sundays, when there was less traffic, while Thomas Carlyle in Chelsea was tormented by the night-time crowing of a cockerel next door. Dickens placed chickens outside the fictional Newman Noggs' Soho lodgings in _Nicholas Nickleby_ , and David Copperfield's aunt suspects all London chickens to be cellar-reared and exercised at the local hackney stands.\n\nAt least those who owned chickens annoyed their neighbours with nothing more than droppings with a powerful smell of ammonia. Many of the working-class population also raised pigs at their lodgings. Notting Dale was notorious for the smell of piggeries, while Jacob's Island was just notorious for the smell. Here there was no way of dispersing the waste from the pigs, or even from the humans, for the privies were built over a huge ditch, 'the colour of strong green tea', into which the waste dropped, and from which the residents then drew their drinking water. They had begged the landlords for piped water, but for more than two decades the reply was that the lease was about to expire, so it wasn't worth the expenditure.\n\nFlush lavatories, which had at first appeared to be the solution for the problem of human, if not animal, waste, in actuality worsened the situation. By adding water to the waste as it was flushed, cesspools filled up 'twenty or more times as fast', and with liquids rather than solids, which made them more difficult to clean. In 1844, the Metropolitan Buildings Act reversed the prohibition on house drains being connected to the sewers: now such a connection was mandatory, to wash the waste from the city into the river, and from there out to sea. But all that happened was that 'The Thames is now made a great cesspool instead of each person having one of his own.' To compound the problem, by mid-century urban sprawl had pushed the market gardens that took the waste-turned-fertilizer ever further away and the economic returns of transporting it were diminishing. When in 1847, guano, concentrated bird excrement, began to be imported as fertilizer, the market for normal waste collapsed, with prices halving. Soon farmers found they could refuse to pay for waste entirely, the nightsoil men being pleased to find anyone at all to take it.\n\nBefore flush lavatories could become commonplace, one thing was needed: running water. Until the 1870s, after Dickens' death, a household's water supply was a private contract, rather than a civic right. In 1847, of 270,000 houses in the City, 70,000 had no piped water. In less prosperous and more rural Fulham, in 1856, of 1,009 houses, only 147 paid for company water to be pumped into their houses. By then the Waterworks Clauses Act had been in force for a decade. It laid down that constant piped water had to be supplied to all dwellings in London, but that meant only that mains had to pass near by; it was up to individuals to connect their house to those mains. 'Constant', even for the mains supply, was a matter of interpretation: there was no mechanism for enforcing the legal requirement, so the water companies did as they pleased. In 1874, 0.3 per cent of Chelsea houses had running water twenty-four hours a day, and the average across the city was 10.3 per cent. It was not until the twentieth century that a citywide figure of 100 per cent was reached.\n\nThroughout the century, therefore, street pumps were ubiquitous. In 1860, behind fashionable Bond Street, in Savile Row \u2013 then the location of prosperous doctors, as Harley Street is today \u2013 Dickens watched outside Albany, a stylish set of chambers, as the doctors' menservants pumped up supplies for the maidservants of local tradesmen. In less prosperous neighbourhoods, those without servants to pump up water at the street pumps or collect it from the standpipes had to do it themselves. In 1854, one shopkeeper was found to have stolen his neighbours' water. The mains passed through his shop, and he had bored a small hole in the pipe so that he no longer had to join the crowds 'struggling and fighting' for access to the pump in those hours when the water was running: 'there being so many of them, and so little water'.\n\nThose with no alternatives had good reason to struggle and fight. Some companies, like the East London Water Company, provided what was considered to be a good supply: two hours, three times a week. Standpipes were placed in better streets every three or four houses, but in the courts and alleys they were to be found 'every 8, 12, 20, or even 30 houses'. In such places the standpipes tended to have no taps: when the water company turned on the water for the requisite hours, the water gushed out until it was turned off at the mains again. In paved streets this ensured the paving was regularly washed, but in the unpaved courts two hours of running water created lagoons of mud, which ran into the nearby privies and in turn swilled the waste back out.\n\nEven the best water companies supplied water for only a couple of hours a day, two to three times a week. Middle-class houses had cisterns to store supplies, but for the working classes in lodgings, every household receptacle needed to be utilized during those precious few hours to provide enough water to keep them going until the taps were turned on again.\n\nAs the water ran at fixed hours, if the householders were out at work at the time, then they had to do without. Even if they were at home, they needed to have enough utensils to hold a forty-eight-hour supply of water. Many courts shared a single communal cask that filled up when the mains water ran, but these were generally uncovered and, for lack of any other space, were situated near the privies. They also had no taps: all the residents dipped in their own, necessarily unwashed, receptacles to collect their share. For one house in Rose Street, Covent Garden, with forty inhabitants, their 110-gallon cask was filled three times a week, meaning each resident had a ration of just under three gallons of water a day, for washing themselves, their clothes, their houses and their privies, for cooking and for drinking. They were, they said, better off than most. Water companies were obliged by law to turn on the water if there was a fire, for the fire engines. The sanitary reformer George Godwin said that in one backstreet slum 'while he was talking to a woman, an alarm of a house on fire resounded through the street. She exclaimed suddenly with pious gratitude, \"Thank God...We will soon get some water.\"'\n\nPublic baths, which began to appear in the 1840s and often included laundry facilities, were a partial solution for some. In the previous decade, prosperous men had enjoyed their own luxury version (without the laundry facilities), where they indulged in cold plunges, warm baths, sea-water baths, 'tepid swimming-baths', 'medicated vapour', 'warm, cold, shower and chalybeate' (medicinal spring-water) baths \u2013 ranging in price from 1s to an astronomical 7s 6d. Some baths listed additional enticements including 'shampooing', or massage. In the 1860s, the Jermyn Street Baths were the latest in opulence, with cushions on the floor, 'divans, sofas, and all sorts of luxurious seats', an 'oblong marble tank filled with clear water', around which bathers lay sleeping; a hot and a very hot room, a sluice room for post-massage, a cool room and a plunge pool. After all the massaging, sweating and sluicing, visitors were dressed '\u00e0 la Turque', complete with turban, before finishing off the visit with a pipe and a cup of coffee.\n\nBaths for gentlemen, of greater or lesser opulence, were to be found across London: south of the river in Camberwell, north in Albany Place, York Road, near Regent's Park, and particularly in areas around the clubs: in Suffolk Place, Pall Mall East and at Mivart's Hotel (later renamed Claridge's). These baths were sometimes called 'hummums', or 'hammams'. The Hummums, with a capital H, referred to an establishment in Russell Street, Covent Garden, which had started off as a baths, but had transformed itself into a hotel, although one where irregular hours were the norm, 'chiefly for bachelors'; Pip in _Great Expectations_ knows that 'a bed was always to be got there at any hour of the night'.\n\nThe poor were not regaled with Turkish costumes and coffee, but baths provided welcome help. In 1845, the first baths for the destitute of the East End were opened in Glasshouse Yard; more opened in 1846 near Euston Square. Here alone, within the first two years, 111,788 baths had been taken and 246,760 laundry-washes done. The following year an establishment designed by sanitation experts opened in Goulston Square, Whitechapel, with first-class and second-class facilities: cold and warm second-class baths for 1d and 2d, or cold and warm first-class baths for 3d and 6d. In the same year the Baths and Washhouses Act permitted parishes to set aside funds for building bathhouses, some of which opened their laundries 'Gratuitously to the very Poor during the prevalence of the Epidemic'.\n\nFor the bathhouses were above all a health measure. In 1830, when Dickens turned eighteen, the average life expectancy of an upper-middle-class professional man was forty-four; for a tradesman or a clerk (the class in which Dickens was born), it was twenty-five; and for a labourer, twenty-two. Of course, by the time a clerk like Dickens was eighteen, he no longer expected to die at twenty-five. Life expectancy was so starkly foreshortened because of infant and child mortality rates: 150 out of every 1,000 children died before the age of five. Once people reached sixteen, in the 1840s their life expectancy went up to fifty-eight years (which was the age at which Dickens died); and when they reached twenty-five, their life expectancy rose to sixty-one. The mortality returns in 1869 gave a fairly standard range of deaths in one winter week: 40 per cent of them were among children under five, of everything from childhood illnesses \u2013 measles, whooping cough and so on \u2013 to typhus and fevers, to specific infant ailments such as diarrhoea, or the mother's lack of breast milk and premature birth. Of the adults, the deaths were listed as being from infectious diseases, as well as many lung problems, cancer, kidney disease, diabetes and childbirth. Just 5 per cent died of old age.\n\nMany of these illnesses were exacerbated by overcrowding. In 1858, in the industrial cities, men of all ages died at a rate of 12.4 per 1,000; in the general population it was 9.2 per 1,000; in the countryside, only 7.7 per 1,000. For the soldiers of the Foot Guards living in barracks a decade later, the rate was 20.4 per 1,000. The _Illustrated London News_ pooh-poohed the notion that the increasing numbers of deaths in army living quarters were 'supposed' to be caused by overcrowding and poor ventilation. As the men had no 'healthy stimulus to exertion; their minds prey on their bodies', and this was why, it reasoned triumphantly, the Dragoons and the Cavalry had lower death rates than the Foot Guards: in looking after horses they have 'cheerful occupation' and 'escape...some of the killing ennui'.\n\nIt was not yet understood how fevers and infections were transmitted, and it took decades of work by campaigners to convince the government that social care was an important aspect of public health. When the first cholera epidemic arrived in Britain in 1831, the government's response was neither scientific nor medical, but the declaration of a Day of Fasting and Humiliation, to pray for a remission of the fever. It was not until the Vaccination Act of 1840, enforcing the vaccination of infants, that the government accepted it had a role in maintaining the health of its citizens. As Sir John Simon, from 1848 the original Medical Officer to the City of London, later remembered, before that Act, 'the statute book contained no general laws of sanitary intention. The central government had nothing to say in regard to the public health and local authorities had but the most indefinite relation to it.'\n\nEdwin Chadwick, a non-practising barrister and formerly secretary to the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was in 1834 made Secretary to the Poor Law Commissioners. From this position he argued for sanitary reform, stressing that it would pay for itself, since epidemics increased the amount of poor relief that needed to be paid from the rates. In 1842, his hugely influential _Report into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain_ linked insanitary conditions to disease, showing how much it cost the country. He wrote, 'The sewerage of the Metropolis...will be found to be a vast monument of defective administration, of lavish expenditure and extremely defective execution.' It was not long before the General Board of Health was established.\n\nIn 1846, the Diseases Prevention Act authorized sanitary improvements under the General Board of Health's auspices. In 1848, the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers Act and the City, with its own parallel Act, gave parishes responsibility for sanitation, drainage and water supplies; this permitted them to appoint health officials and inspectors, as well as to condemn and close houses and entire civic spaces, such as cemeteries (see below). Very soon Chadwick was universally loathed: the poor hated him because their houses were condemned and they were evicted; the Poor Law Guardians and civic authorities detested him for the increased burden on rates; and everyone agreed that he was quarrelsome, vindictive, arrogant and entirely lacking in collegial abilities. Chadwick was sacked and in 1858 the General Board of Health was dissolved, to be replaced by a governmental Board of Health. However, his legacy remained: the involvement of local and state government in the health of the nation.\n\nEveryone knew what the problems were. They could hardly help but know. Even the new Houses of Parliament, the pride of modern London, were in 1848 found to have defective sewers. The main sewer had been run under the length of the building, so digging it up again was a major undertaking. Then, when it was opened, the released air was so foul that it extinguished all the lamps. Finally, it was discovered that the pipes had not been laid on an incline, so the sewage had failed to drain away: the new Parliament was sitting over a single enormous cesspool. This was, in microcosm, the predicament faced by the whole city. And solutions were excessively complicated. In 1848, the rector of Christchurch, Regent's Park, had asked the Board of Health what could be done about sewage issues in his parish. The answer was that there were sixteen paving Boards in St Pancras parish alone, operating under twenty-nine Acts of Parliament, and all would have to be consulted before 'an opinion could be pronounced' on what the possibilities were \u2013 a decision on what was to be done would take much longer. Although the government knew action needed to be taken, the vested interests in both Westminster and the City vigorously protected their own powers. This was the golden age of localism, and by 1855 London was governed by 300 separate legislative bodies, operating under 250 Acts.\n\nWhat finally changed attitudes were the successive waves of epidemics: two influenza epidemics between 1831 and 1833; the first cholera epidemic in 1831, which killed 52,000 across the country; scarlet fever in 1834, which killed another 50,000; then more influenza. In 1837, the footman William Tayler reported, 'There were to of [sic] been fifty persons buried at St John's Wood bureying ground in one day this week,' and the following month, 'every day the streets are regularly crowded with funerals and mourning coaches, herses and such like...The undertakers in London are [usually] very particular in having all black horses to attend funerals but now there are so many wanted they are glad to get any colour.' This epidemic was in turn followed by waves of smallpox, typhus and typhoid, before 1846 saw the return of cholera, together with more typhus and typhoid.\n\nMedical orthodoxy held that many diseases were caused by fermenting particles of decomposed matter that were spread through the air in a miasma, or poisonous vapour, identifiable by its foul smell. This miasma theory, as it was known, triggered the Building Act of 1844, obligating houses to be connected to the city sewers: by flushing the decaying matter away from the houses and into the river, it was thought that disease would also be flushed away. Many City aldermen were landlords of extremely profitable slum buildings, however, and they saw no need for expensive sewerage in these properties. The City, protested one official response, already had 'complete house-drainage, with sewerage and all necessary provisions'. But the Health of Towns Association, on whose board sat the indefatigable John Simon, the City's Medical Officer, countered that, on the contrary, the City sewers and drains were 'in fact and effect, nothing but elongated cesspools'. He added for good measure that an extra 58,961 children under five had died in the City, owing to its crowded, insanitary state, compared to the population of Lewisham. As a final riposte, he reminded them that in his testimony to the Health of Towns Association, the City Surveyor to the Commissioners had confessed: 'I am a very incompetent witness on this subject, for I cannot smell.'\n\nWhile this was being fought out, the epidemics continued their deadly work. In Spitalfields Workhouse, which held 1,500 inmates, even before cholera arrived in 1831, 'eight and ten persons were often placed, head to feet, in one bed'. One man with a fever was put in a bed from which another man, who had died of fever, had just been removed, without the bedding being changed. When a formal complaint was made to the police, the police inspector sent the Master a note telling him to deny everything. (Unfortunately for the Master, he mistakenly sent the policeman's note to the complainant, who then handed it over to the crusading editor of the medical journal _The Lancet_.) The practice of bed-sharing was little different from what went on in the homes of most labouring families, who through the century lived and died together. In one case of many, which took place in the Minories, in the City, in 1847, the body of a man who had died in a fever hospital was returned to his family for burial. For lack of any other place, it remained in the single room in which they all slept and ate for eight days, until the funeral could be arranged. The dead man's mother, wife and child all died soon after, as did the doctor who treated the poor in the area. Deaths of this kind confirmed the notion of a miasma of infection: slums smelt and more people died there; the better areas did not smell and fewer people died there.\n\nThese were cases of general fevers, but in 1831 a new terror had appeared: cholera. The medical community had been warning of its coming for more than a decade, after an outbreak of 'Asiatic cholera' in Lower Bengal in 1817. But it was another six years before it reached Europe, when 144 deaths were recorded in Astrakhan. In 1829, in Russia, 1,000 died before the disease again resurfaced in Astrakhan, and this time 25,000 may have died. By 1831, the disease had spread to the Baltic ports, and then it was only months before it reached Britain via the shipping routes: in October, the first British death from cholera was recorded in Sunderland. A medical officer who had worked in India recognized the symptoms and warned the authorities, but the local doctors refused to accept the fact, recording the death as 'English cholera'. Another 201 deaths did little to change their minds or to prepare the rest of the country. The Westminster Medical Society continued to 'vehemently contest' the diagnoses, even as by 1832 the first cases reached London, spreading along the river, from St Anne, Limehouse, to Rotherhithe, Whitechapel, with its dock workers and sailors, then away from the Thames' path, to Clerkenwell and the City, to Marylebone, St Pancras, St Giles and Bermondsey. In four months there were over 9,000 cases, of which 4,266 ended in death. By December 11,020 cases in London had been diagnosed in the previous six months and 5,275 died. The poor, as always, suffered most. In the epidemics of 1832, of 1848\u20139 and 1853\u20134, the districts south of the river, consistently poorer than those to the north, were worst affected.\n\nHow people viewed the outbreaks was in great measure dictated by the political climate during the first epidemic, which occurred against the background of political agitation for the Reform Bill. The large number of arrests of working men following the Chartist uprisings and protests for reform meant that gaols were more than usually overcrowded: in that first cholera year, 12,543 men were committed to Coldbath Field prison, which had a capacity of 1,200. When cholera hit, prison conditions were almost designed to spread the disease, and 15 per cent of the inmates were affected. (The impact was such that prisoners who volunteered to work in the infirmary had their sentences remitted and were even given cash payouts.) Then cholera broke out on board the hulks, the prison ships moored in the Thames. Even by prison standards, conditions in the hulks were repellent. As late as the second epidemic a decade later, the _Warrior_ , theoretically a hospital ship, had no regular supply of clean linen; the majority of prisoners were verminous and on average were given a change of clothes only every five weeks; no one could say when the bedding had last been washed; there were no towels or combs, and not enough sheets; the privies were 'imperfect and neglected', and the smell 'almost insupportable'. Of the 638 convicts on board, 400 were stricken with cholera. Little more care was accorded the convicts after death. Their chaplain refused to conduct a funeral service until the dead numbered at least half a dozen, and even then he declined to accompany the bodies on their last journey, reading the burial service to himself on board and signalling to the burial party onshore when he reached 'dust to dust' by dropping his handkerchief.\n\nThe 1854\u20135 outbreak was the one in which John Snow, a Soho doctor, famously disabled the Broad Street pump and in so doing stopped the spread of cholera in that district. (Broad Street has become Broadwick Street, and a pub, the John Snow, marks the location of the pump.) This was not a sudden insight. During the previous epidemic, in 1849, Snow had already indicated the disease might be water-borne. Contradicting Chadwick and other proponents of the miasma theory, he suggested that the new lavatories flushing sewage into the river were facilitating the transmission of the disease. Few were persuaded, even as late as 1855, when in Soho 'The gutters were flowing with a thick liquid, partly water and partly chloride of lime...\"front parlours\" were taken by dozens in every old and stuffy street for the preparations of coffins that could not be supplied fast enough, and the peculiar sharp tap of the undertaker's hammer could be heard above the muffled sound of voices.'\n\nThe number of burials from the epidemics was bringing to crisis point a problem that had been growing throughout the century: what to do with the dead. In 1860, Dickens wrote, 'It was a solemn consideration what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old great city, and how, if they were raised...there would not be the space of a pin's point in all the streets and ways...the vast armies of dead would overflow the hills and valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away all round it.' His summation came three decades after he and the rest of the city were forcibly made aware of how the dead were encroaching on the space of the living. As early as the late 1830s, Dickens was already voicing his concern. In _Oliver Twist_ he described a pauper burial in a graveyard so full that each grave contained multiple coffins, and 'the uppermost coffin was within a few feet of the surface'. This was based on a graveyard he had seen near Chatham, but the overcrowding of the dead in London preoccupied him as much as the overcrowding of the living, and he returned to the subject within the year. In _Nicholas Nickleby_ , Ralph Nickleby walks past a City burial ground, 'a dismal place, raised a few feet above the level of the street', where the dead 'lay, parted from the living by a little earth and a board or two...no deeper down than the feet of the throng that passed there every day, and piled high as their throats'. This was a reality for Londoners. In Drury Lane and Russell Court, churchyards belonging to St Martin-in-the-Fields and St Mary-le-Strand had originally been sunken patches of ground: by the date of _Nicholas Nickleby_ (1838\u20139) they reached their neighbours' first-floor windows.\n\nMost cemeteries in London had been over capacity for years, if not decades, but they continued to function for the same reason Smithfield market did: they made money for their owners. Furthermore, there were no regulations, no supervision and no fear of repercussions. And, like the markets and the prisons, the graveyards were right in the centre of the city, beside virtually every London church. Dr George Walker, whose practice was in the capital's heartland of Drury Lane, determined to change things, gathering evidence from gravediggers as well as from those who lived next to the graveyards. In 1842, an ex-gravedigger for St Ann's burial ground, in Soho, testified to a Parliamentary Select Committee, telling them that when new bodies arrived for burial, the old ones were dug up, the coffins chopped up for firewood and the bodies, if they were too recent to have decomposed, were broken up with spades. The coffin nails and plates were sold to second-hand shops; the old bones piled in corners or burnt, or sometimes sold off, presumably to those who bought animal bones for fertilizer.\n\nInside many churches, the situation was no better. On the Strand, in St Clement Danes' vault, the air was so putrid that there was not enough oxygen for candles to stay alight. The crypt needed to be aired for days before each burial, to make it safe for the mourners. (Perhaps not coincidentally, at the same period the well on the eastern side of the church had to be blocked off owing to the quality of its water.) Dickens was mild in his comment: the City, he wrote, smelt of 'rot and mildew and dead citizens'.\n\nAs Walker saw it, it was a straightforward mathematical equation. New Bunhill Fields burial grounds, in the City, covered two-thirds of an acre and on average just over 1,500 bodies a year were interred there; in the epidemic year of 1842, that figure had risen to 21,000. Similarly the burying ground at St Martin-in-the-Fields had operated from at least the sixteenth century, and over 300 funerals a year were conducted there. Having heard the stories, the family of a Mr Foster, of Chapel-court, Long Acre, went to supervise his interment personally. When they arrived, the proposed grave was only two and a half feet deep, which they said was not acceptable. The gravediggers, not remotely perturbed, took their pickaxes to the coffin underneath, lifting out the corpse, breaking it up and shovelling it away, before assuring Mr Foster's friends that if the grave were still too shallow, the two coffins remaining could be removed in the same fashion. These corpses had sometimes been interred just a few years earlier, sometimes a matter of months or even weeks.\n\nThe gravedigger for the Portugal Street burial ground, by Clare market (now underneath the London School of Economics), testified that frequently the corpses were fresh enough that the gender of the dead could still be determined; but they were nonetheless 'chopped and cut up', and placed under the boards on which the mourners of that day's funeral service stood, to 'be thrown into the recent grave' again after they left. When Scrooge is shown his own grave in a City churchyard in Dickens' 1843 _A Christmas Carol_ , the area is typically 'choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite', which sounds very much like the Portugal Street churchyard walls, which seeped a 'reeking' fluid.\n\nUndertakers and church officials all agreed that nothing of the sort could possibly have occurred under their supervision. One undertaker protested that he visited the cemeteries once, sometimes even twice, a week and would have noticed such improper practices. One of these graveyards, as Walker dryly annotated, had records stating that, while that same undertaker had been in business, 9,500 burials had taken place in a space that could comfortably accommodate 900. But nothing anyone said could cover up the Enon Chapel scandal. Enon Chapel was not far from the Portugal Street burying grounds, halfway along the west side of Clement's Lane, a turning off the Strand (now under the Royal Courts of Justice). It opened as a chapel in 1823, with a burial vault underneath measuring fifty-nine by twenty-nine feet. Over the next sixteen years, up to 12,000 bodies were buried there, with nothing but a wooden floor between them and the worshippers in the chapel above. The children in its Sunday school became accustomed to seeing what they called 'body bugs', the flies that hatched in the decomposing corpses. When the scandal finally broke, in 1844, a dustman testified that he had removed sixty loads of 'waste'. After the chapel's forced closure, the speculators who bought the building advertised: 'Dancing on the Dead \u2013 Admission Threepence. No lady or gentleman admitted unless wearing shoes and stockings.' In 1847, the owner opened up the vault to the public, charging them for the privilege.\n\nEnon Chapel was at least closed down; few of the civic authorities had legal powers to close graveyards. In 1845, when a pawnbroker complained that his Exmouth Street premises were virtually uninhabitable because of the 'continual stench' from the 1,500 people buried annually in the neighbouring workhouse burial ground, he was told that he would have to petition the Poor Law Guardians, who had control of the two-acre site. If they refused to act, then he could go to the Poor Law Commissioners; after that, there was nothing for it but to petition the Secretary of State: no one else could oblige them to cease using the grounds.\n\nTo deal with this impasse, in 1850 the Metropolitan Interments Act was passed, enabling the Board of Health to supervise new cemeteries, to close churchyards that were full and to purchase private cemeteries if necessary. In June 1850, a parody in _Household Words_ , 'Address from an Undertaker to the Trade', satirized the undertakers' hostile response to this bill. It was science that was to blame, they protested, for showing people 'that they are drinking their dead neighbours'. In case the message was lost, six months later the journal published a poem on the churchyards' 'half-unburied dead':\n\nI saw from out the earth peep forth\n\nThe white and glistening bones,\n\nWith jagged ends of coffin-planks,\n\nThat e'en the worm disowns;\n\nAnd once a smooth round skull rolled on,\n\nLike a football, on the stones...\n\nIn 1853, Dickens preserved for ever St Mary-le-Strand's churchyard in Drury Lane, by burying Nemo there in _Bleak House_ , in 'a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene...a beastly scrap of ground'. As in reality, in the novel Jo watches as 'They was obliged to stamp upon [Nemo's coffin] to git it in.' In the year _Bleak House_ was published, this churchyard was formally closed, but readers would have been aware that Dickens was describing an ongoing problem, and he returned to it a decade later, in _Our Mutual Friend_ , when Lizzie and her brother Charlie meet in a City churchyard, with its 'raised bank of earth about breast high...Here, conveniently and healthfully elevated above the level of the living, were the dead.'\n\nIn an attempt to take the pressure off the city centre, new suburban cemeteries were authorized from the 1830s. Kensal Green cemetery became the first 'garden' cemetery, opening during the first cholera epidemic. It was here in 1837 that Charles and Catherine Dickens arranged for the burial of Mary Hogarth, Catherine's seventeen-year-old sister, whose sudden death so traumatized the author that an instalment of _Oliver Twist_ had to be delayed. The previous year, an Act had been passed 'for establishing cemeteries for the Interment of the Dead, Northward, Southward, and Eastward of the Metropolis by a Company to be called The London Cemetery Company'. In 1837, the South Metropolitan Cemetery in Norwood opened, with Highgate Cemetery following in 1839, and Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington and Brompton Cemetery in 1840. (The land for Brompton Cemetery included part of the Kensington Canal, and the original plan was for water-borne coffins.)\n\nThe return of cholera in 1853\u20134, this time in the West End, led to the Metropolis Land Management Act, which in turn created the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was given statutory powers to remove any civic 'nuisances', be they street pumps or graveyards. Yet even then Parliament failed to endow the Board with the one thing it needed \u2013 the authority to create a London-wide system of sewers, to drain the city that was almost a single cesspool of waste. That took the Great Stink of 1858.\n\nIn an essay in _Household Words_ in 1850, a narrator imagines he tours the river with Father Thames: 'may I inquire,' he says, 'what that black, sluggish stream may be which I see pouring into you from a wide, bricked archway'? Replies a proud Father Thames, 'that's one of my sewers...and a fine, generous, open fellow, he is...[there is] one generally near every bridge.' He indicates the different-coloured currents swirling about: 'That one belongs to a soap-boiler...next to it, is from a slaughter-house...[others] are from gas-factories, brewhouses, shot-factories, coal-wharfs, cow-houses, tan-pits, gut-spinners, fish-markets, and other[s].' He benevolently advises his interviewer not to be confused by the 'scum derived from barges, and limeworks, and colliers, and the shipping...and bone-grinders, and tar-works, and dredging-machines, and steamers...and floating remains of creatures from knackers' yards'. Or, as Dickens put it more succinctly in _Little Dorrit_ , 'Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine, fresh river.'\n\nIn 1857, the same year that novel was finished, the stench from the Thames had become so overwhelming that the government authorized quantities of chloride of lime to be dumped in the river in an attempt to mitigate the smell. An unusually dry, hot summer the following year rendered even that measure useless. The water was its usual black mass, and now the shrunken river revealed a bed of rotting, putrescent waste, which soon began to ferment in the sun. By 19 June conditions were, said Dickens, 'head-and-stomach distracting'. Despite the ninety-degree heat, every window of every building overlooking the Thames remained closed, 'and, as the smell rushes up the streets that lead from the river to the Strand, passers-by utter maledictions on the Government, the City authorities, the Central Board, and all who can or are supposed to be able to interfere'. By the end of the month, all were pointing a single finger of blame: 'The causes of the nuisance are perfectly clear, so are the means of cure; but...no Minister has the courage to demand [what it will cost]. If it were a question of arming ships, or embarking soldiers, there would not be a day's hesitation in asking for ten times the sum \u2013 it is so much better to spend money in killing our neighbours than in keeping ourselves alive and well.' 'Nobody knows what is to be done,' wrote Dickens; 'at least everybody knows a plan, and everybody else knows it won't do.'\n\nBut he was wrong: nothing makes funds available more quickly than the discomfort of the ruling class, and the Houses of Parliament sit directly on the river. One hot day there was a 'sudden rush' of MPs, all dashing from a committee room: Disraeli, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had 'papers in one hand and...his pocket handkerchief clutched in the other', holding it 'closely to his nose, with body half bent' as he fled, followed by Gladstone and his colleagues, all choking, their eyes streaming. Twelve days later Disraeli sponsored a bill to give the Metropolitan Board of Works the funds and, for the first time, the legal authority to undertake a city-wide, sewage-building project. The Metropolis Local Management Act for the Purification of the Thames and the Main Drainage of the Metropolis was passed one day short of a month after parliamentarians were forced to flee their own offices. 'Parliament,' said _The Times_ , 'was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench.'\n\nThe Metropolitan Board of Works and its engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, had long been attempting to get approval for their plans to build intercepting sewers to run along the bank of the Thames, collecting waste from the street sewers and shipping it off to four pumping stations, then to great outfall sewers at Beckton and Crossness, near Abbey Wood, where at high tides it would be released to be swept out to sea. And this was what happened: only five years after the Great Stink, intercepting sewers were taking much of London's waste as far as Barking Creek; in 1865, the Crossness pumping station was opened by the Prince of Wales. And in 1866, with eighty miles of sewering laid, the benefits were visible to all: a fourth epidemic of cholera arrived in London, but this time only the East End, not yet connected to the great new sewage system, was affected. Once the Abbey Mills station was opened in 1868, there were no further cholera outbreaks in London.\n\nSewers and sewerage became a subject of fascination to the reading public. In 1861, _All the Year Round_ took readers along the sewers from Finchley Road in north London to Vauxhall Bridge, showing the different types of waste: blood sewers under the meat markets, where 'you could wade in the vital fluid of sheep and oxen'; 'boiling-sewers' near sugar bakers, where the effluent was always hot; 'open rural sewers that were fruitful in watercresses, and closed town sewers whose roofs are thickly clustered with edible fungi'; and 'sewers of different degrees of repulsiveness' near chemical works and factories. (Informed that he was underneath Buckingham Palace, the reporter's 'loyalty was at once excited, and, taking off my fan-tailed cap, I led the way with the National Anthem, insisting that my guides should join in the chorus'. The sewer workers' response is not recorded.) By 1866, the sewers were so much part of daily London life that they had almost ceased to seem dirty. In _The Wild Boys of London_ , an 1866 adventure story for boys, a gang of orphans and outcasts live in a sewer that somehow has no smell and no waste: 'It's nothing when you get used to it. We gets wet, and we gets dry again; the mud makes us dirty, and the water makes us clean.'\n\nThere was one single delay. Parliament had deliberately closed its eyes to the fact that the Thames would have to be embanked for Bazalgette's plan to function in full, and not until 1862 did the government accept that the money would have to be found for this too. Another couple of years elapsed before the various plots of land along the river were purchased. The Duke of Buccleuch, for example, had a newly built house on land leading down to the river, and his case for compensation took eight years to grind its way through the courts. There was more delay as elaborate plans were developed to utilize the opportunity to create a new road, as well as a mass of underground support systems, including what became the District and Circle lines of the tube, water and gas pipes, and service access tunnels. This slowed things down, but everyone understood that it was worth doing properly.\n\nThe idea of embanking the river, building out into the Thames to create additional shore, was not new: the Adelphi Terrace to the west of Waterloo Bridge, and Somerset House to the east, had both built on embankments in the eighteenth century. Waterloo Bridge in the early nineteenth century had banked in the area underneath the new span to link up these two pieces of land. There were also embankments where the Temple gardens stood; by Blackfriars Bridge, created in 1769, when the bridge was built; and at Chelsea Hospital, the remains of an older, failed embankment. The new Houses of Parliament, which were built between 1837 and 1852, had created an 850-foot embankment, its buildings jutting out into what had previously been the river. So the new Embankment was new only in scale; the entire length of the river, running for five miles, on the north side of the river from Chelsea to Blackfriars, was embanked. On the south side the land by Lambeth was embanked to prevent the regular floods that the low-lying south bank had always been subject to, creating the reclaimed land on which St Thomas's Hospital was built.\n\nFor many Londoners, the building of the Embankment was an ordeal to be survived. The city had become the site of what was in effect a military campaign, in which 'a series of fortifications, mostly surmounted by huge scaffolds...arose in our chief thoroughfares'. Arthur Munby felt the full force of this campaign. He lived in Fig Tree Court, Inner Temple, and the buildings on the south side of his courtyard were all demolished for the work, as he noted dismally in his diary:\n\nAPRIL 1864: 'On my way home, went to look at the great mound of earth, now an acre in extent, which carts are outpouring...at the foot of Norfolk Street, for the Embankment.'\n\nMAY 1864: The embankment seen from Middle Temple garden is now 'outlined by the scaffold beams and dredging engines ranged far out in the river opposite'.\n\nSEPTEMBER 1864: 'The embankment grown a more horrible chaos than ever.'\n\nAnd so it went on for him, year by dreary year:\n\nAPRIL 1866: 'The walls of the Embankment begin to appear: piles for new bridges block up the Thames everywhere.'\n\nBefore the Thames was embanked, low-lying areas of London flooded regularly. Here, with the new Chelsea Embankment nearing completion in 1874, and plans under way for the Embankment Gardens, residents could look forward to drier and more pleasant living conditions after years of building work.\n\nUnlike Munby, Dickens did not live by the river, and so he saw less the devastation of the present than hope for the future. In 1861, he wrote, 'I thought I would walk on by Mill Bank, to see the river. I walked straight on _for three miles_ on a splendid broad esplanade overhanging the Thames...When I was a rower on that river it was all broken ground and ditch, with here and there a public-house or two, an old mill, and a tall chimney. I had never seen it in any stage of transition.'\n\nFinally, in 1869, the Embankment opened, and even Munby was awed:\n\nJanuary 1869: 'The bright morning sun shone on the broad bright river, and the white walls of the Embankment, which stretch away in a noble curve to Westminster, under the dark contrasting masses of the bridges. There is silence, except for the tread of passersby; there is life and movement, almost noiseless, on the water...What a change from the vulgar riot of the Strand! Here is stateliness and quiet, and beauty of form and colour.'\n\nToday the gardens that covered much of the reclaimed land are gone, or are cut off by a four-lane road of whizzing cars, somehow becoming invisible. One historian suggests that this is because we view the Embankment from the wrong viewpoint: it was designed by people who still thought the entrance to London was by water, whereas we approach it from land. This part of London would benefit from a return to stateliness, quiet, and beauty of form and colour.\nPART THREE\n\nEnjoying Life\n\n_1867: The Regent's Park Skating Disaster_\n\nIn the _Pickwick Papers_ , Sam Weller and the fat boy 'cut out a slide' on the ice, and 'all' go sliding \u2013 Wardle, Pickwick, Sam, Winkle, Bob Sawyer, the fat boy and Snodgrass. Mr Pickwick in particular slides over and over, enjoying himself enormously. But when 'The sport was at its height...a sharp smart crack was heard. There was a quick rush towards the bank, and a wild scream from the ladies' \u2013 who are not skating, but watching admiringly \u2013 as 'A large mass of ice disappeared, the water bubbled over it, Mr Pickwick's hat, gloves, and handkerchief were floating on the surface, and this was all of Mr Pickwick that anybody could see.' This being a comic novel, nothing worse happens than Mr Pickwick getting a ducking and rushing indoors for a hot bath and his bed to ward off a cold.\n\nAnd that too was how the vast numbers of men who skated regularly on the frozen waters of the London parks regarded the hazards, although this was hardly a risk-free pastime. On one day in 1844 over 5,000 people were counted on the Serpentine, even after 'the icemen of the Royal Humane Society' had warned that the ice was dangerously thin; another 2,500 were counted on Long Water, the area north of the Serpentine Bridge, while 1,500 skated on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. The Humane Society, established for 'the recovery of persons apparently drowned or dead', had set up its first receiving house in 1794 beside the Serpentine, where bathers were taken in summer, skaters in winter. In that one afternoon, by four o'clock the ice had broken under at least ten people on the Serpentine. At St James's Park, the iceman working for the Humane Society went to the aid of seven or eight skaters who went through the ice there, saving five, while another fifteen got a ducking at the Buckingham Palace end of the water.\n\nThe risks slowed few down. In 1855, at St James's Park, 'the Express Train came off': between 300 and 400 men formed a line, each holding on to the coat of the man in front, starting off with 'some whistling the railway overture, and others making a noise resembling the blowing off of the steam of a locomotive'. Some of the Foot Guards joined in and soon they 'glided over the ice at the rate of three-quarters of a mile per minute'. In Regent's Park, 'hundreds' of men skated along the canal tunnel between Aberdeen Place and Maida Hill, racing through 'in imitation of express trains, with appropriate noises and whistlings'. One weekend there were so many wanting to go through the tunnel that the police barred the entrance; but the next day 'the trains' were permitted to go through the tunnel 'as usual'.\n\nOn 6 January 1867, the Serpentine's ice 'was about three inches thick, and, with the exception of a small portion at the eastern end, perfectly safe'. A large number of skaters were out, and only five people went through the ice, of whom four were not seriously hurt; the final man 'was rescued after considerable difficulty' and put into a warm bath in the Humane Society's receiving house. St James's Park, by contrast, warned its skaters of the 'irregular' ice, and 'several immersions' needed the Humane Society's assistance. Other parks reported no problems: Kensington Gardens, Clapham Park, Hampstead Ponds 'and the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway Company's ponds at Brixton' were all 'crowded with sliders and skaters. Several accidents occurred, but not of a serious nature.'\n\nThe same could not be said of Regent's Park. The lake in the park was partially fed by the Tyburn, and there were dangerous currents. Between three and four o'clock a man, possibly employed by the Humane Society, told one spectator the ice was 'in a very unsafe condition, and that there would be a terrible accident very soon'; she watched as park employees broke up the ice by the Long Island. After the event no one knew why this had been done: an iceman from the Humane Society said he had done so because 'It has been done ever since I was a boy.' The park superintendent claimed that the ice was being broken only by the islands, to protect the vegetation and the birds, and no one, he said, had ever suggested it was dangerous. This was contradicted by the Secretary to the Humane Society, who replied that it was very clearly dangerous. The Society's men had asked the police to keep people away, but were told they had no such powers: it might have been dangerous to go on the ice, but it was not illegal.\n\nThe ice was 'tessellated', cracked in squares a yard or more across, with water oozing up between the cracks. Suddenly, near the island, the water abruptly rose up in 'spurts'. This prompted a sudden rush as everyone headed for the banks, but many were cut off by the quickly cracking surface. Ladders were pushed out along the ice, but some people fell off and disappeared through the ice. Panic ensued, as 'they skated back towards the centre of the ice, and as they did so they fell, and the whole surface suddenly gave way, and all of them went into the water'.\n\nA huge sheet of ice had broken off, plunging about 250 people into the lake, with hundreds more scrambling to safety. The water, dropping away to the natural bed of the river, was up to twelve feet deep in places and without a firm bottom. Some who were tipped off the ice became trapped underneath. Others lay flat on the surface, clinging to isolated pieces of ice, screaming for help, as the thousand or so spectators on the banks began to scream too. The ten Humane Society icemen did their best. They had 'the usual appliances': ropes, wicker ice-boats, a sledge, ladders, drags, boathooks, ice axes and cork belts. But the ice was not firm enough for the Humane Society's sledges to be launched; the boats were blocked by the large chunks of floating ice; the ropes that were thrown out saved some, but others snapped. And all the while, women and girls stood on the shore, watching as their husbands, sons and brothers, dressed in sodden, woollen, three-piece suits and overcoats, held on to smaller and smaller pieces of ice, finally letting go and sinking, frozen, as the fragments disintegrated. Several men onshore grabbed ropes and jumped in, attempting to rescue their children, brothers or fathers, or complete strangers.\n\nIn January, darkness falls by four o'clock, and although flares were lit and placed around the water, it was too dark to continue the search, which had to be given up for the night. By this time nearly 200 men and boys had managed to reach the shore, or were dragged out by hooks and ropes before they drowned, or died of cold. Two surgeons were regularly on call near by for the Humane Society. More doctors and surgeons from the surrounding area rushed to the spot and, in makeshift premises, in the Humane Society's receiving house and on the open ground, they worked to revive those who had been pulled from the water, while bodies beyond rescue were carried past.\n\nNone of those who died in the water that afternoon had any identification on them whatsoever. Almost every one of them was in their teens or twenties; five were children and only two were older men. The bodies were all taken to the nearby Marylebone Workhouse, where they were laid out for relatives and friends to identify. Small objects that might help \u2013 a hat with the maker's name, a letter beginning 'Dear Richard' \u2013 were placed beside them.\n\nShirley Brooks, a journalist, and later editor of _Punch_ , who lived in Kent Terrace, in the ring of houses surrounding the park, wrote in his diary:\n\nDay of the hideous disaster in the Regents Park...I had gone to the Garrick [Club] to meet [the musician] German Reed. I walked, on my way, about 2.15 through the 'Ornamental' [Garden, near the water], & great numbers were skating. It was a fine day. I had half decided on hiring skates, & trying whether I had forgotten the work \u2013 I could skate fast in old days; but I thought my shoes were unsuitable, & I went on. Reed was late, & when I left him to walk home it was 5.10. At the Clarence gate I saw several cabs & carriages, & some groups, but it was dark, & being in a hurry, I asked no questions. On getting into the hall Reginald rushed out[.] 'O papa, there has been a dreadful accident, the ice broke, & at least 30 are drowned.' Then I had the details from poor Emily, who had been fearfully frightened. The boys had gone to see the skating in the Botanic [Garden, on the other side of the park], & at their prayers, she had at last relaxed the order not to go on the ice. Mrs. Linton called, & while they were talking...Hawkins rushed in \u2013 'the ice had broken, where were the boys.'...Of course she dashed out with Mrs L. & hurried among the crowds, saw the frightful scene, heard the women shrieking & wailing, & witnessed many agonies \u2013 and though told by several that her boys were all right, was convinced that no one really knew. She went into the Humane Tent, where was a boy, in bed, but a moment told her he was not hers, & she went out again. At last she met them, strolling leisurely up to the scene. She was soon crying over them by her fireside. I returned to hear all this...After [dinner]...went into...the tent. That work was over \u2013 all who were in that lake were dead \u2013 but eight or ten bodies had been taken out...Rego cried \u2013 Cecil was silent, he would not eat, & scarcely slept. That night Emily & I thanked God for the children.\n\nThe next morning, volunteers arrived to break up the ice, to try to find the bodies under the surface; they were watched by as many as 3,000 on the shore. Even as the light faded once more, 1,000 still kept watch, Shirley Brooks and his wife among them: 'We saw the cutting, the dragging, & the bringing out a body, a man, in black, his arms extended & bent \u2013 they brought him across the island, to our very feet. The crowds were great. Four bodies have been got out today up to the time I write (12). _Two boys_ in Hanover Terrace, next to us, are _dead_...'\n\nThree days later, bodies were still being taken from the water, and forty men were hired at 2s a day to help. On the following Monday, another 104 were employed, and still another 207 on the Tuesday, a full week later, as the search continued. And still the spectators stood on the banks, even if their numbers were 'considerably less' than the week before. It was not until 22 January, seven days after the accident, that the list of the forty dead could be compiled:\n\nFrederick Beer, 21, paper-hanger\n\nR. Born, 13, the stepson of a publican\n\nJohn Broadbridge, aged 10\n\nJohn Bryant, 29, costermonger\n\nThomas Chadwick, 22, porter\n\nJames Crawley, 28, coach-joiner\n\nWilliam Davies, 22, medical student\n\nHenry Gamble, aged 14\n\nHarold Giles, 15, schoolboy\n\nFrank Glanfield, 15, son of a butcher\n\nJames Griffin, 28, orange-seller\n\nHenry Hardiman, 17, cabinetmaker\n\nRichard Harnack, aged 10\n\nThomas Harries, 29, gentleman\n\nThomas Harvey, 17, medical student\n\nJames Justice, 21, corn-chandler\n\nJames Jobson, 35, painter\n\nCharles Jukes, 9, the son of a carpenter\n\nC. E. Luckman, 24, warehouseman\n\nDonald Macintyre, aged 26, silk-merchant\n\nJames Mitchell, 26, organ-builder\n\nDavid North, aged 13\n\nSamuel Olley, 20, wood-turner\n\nWilliam Parkinson, 18, organ pipe-maker\n\nEdward Pullan, 25, commercial traveller\n\nGeorge Rhodes, 20, paper-hanger\n\nWilliam Robertson, 33, dentist\n\nRobert Edwin Scott, 29, clerk\n\nCharles Smith, 13, son of a coachman\n\nThomas Wilson Spencer, 25, solicitor\n\nArthur Reginald Stevens, 16, the son of an army officer\n\nEdward Thurley, 30, butler\n\nJohn Vincent, aged 10\n\nJoseph Waite, 22, clerk\n\nCharles William Wake, 20, law student\n\nJohn Thomas Whatley, 14, schoolboy\n\nH. Woodhouse, 16, son of a colonial broker\n\nJohn Spencer Woods, 18, upholsterer\n\nunnamed, aged 13\n\nunnamed, 20, gas-fitter\n\n#### 9.\n\n#### STREET PERFORMANCE\n\nIn the 1830s, a building running between Oxford Street and Regent Street was turned into a 'bazaar', a warren of small luxury-goods shops. The Pantheon, as it was named, boasted vestibules filled with sculptures, a hall, a series of galleries, 'a species of atrium', a conservatory eighty-eight feet long 'in the Moorish style', complete with 'stands for parroquets', a fountain and goldfish. Those who wanted to shop could do so, but the Pantheon was primarily used as a place to meet, walk, chat and watch the world, especially when it was raining. For there was a type of lounging about the fashionable streets, watching the world go by, that was the prerogative of the man about town. According to Thackeray, 'now a _stroll_ , then a _look-in_ [to a shop], then a _ramble_ , and presently a _strut_ ' was the right way for a gent to occupy his day.\n\nWhen the day was fine, the fashionable crowds came to Regent Street at the fashionable hours, between two and five o'clock, peaking around four. What today we call window-shopping was part of the life of the street, a performance participated in by those who could afford actually to go in and buy, as well as by those who could not. Thus window-shopping, and shopping itself, were different: one was part of the performance of street life, the other consumption. The former included the 'carriages...in groups in front of Swan and Edgars silk shop...gentlemen [on horseback] wishing to pay their respects to the ladies...The pavements...swarming with pedestrians, idlers, or shoppers bent on a visit to the gunmaker, the haberdasher's or the jeweller's.' The Regent Street shop windows were considered to be the most glamorous, displaying, wrote Dickens in the late 1830s, 'sparkling jewellery, silks and velvets of the richest colours, the most inviting delicacies, and the most sumptuous articles of luxurious ornament'. In the first half of the century, the street encompassed a wide range of shops, not merely those selling luxury goods, and their displays were enjoyed by all. In Regent Street alone, Sala itemized 'a delightful bird-stuffer's shop...with birds of paradise, parrots, and hummingbirds...[a] funeral monument shop, with the mural tablets, the obelisks, the broken columns, the extinguished torches, and the draped urns in the window', an 'Italian statuary shop' and a 'filter shop, with the astonishing machines for converting foul and muddy water...into a sparkling, crystal stream', in between bakers, staymakers, stationers, a grocer and an optician with a model of a steam engine in his window. Two decades later, the luxury trade had taken over, and the street was the home of 'Fancy watchmakers, haberdashers, and photographers; fancy stationers, fancy hosiers, and fancy staymakers; music shops, shawl shops, jewellers, French glove shops, perfumery, and point lace shops, confectioners and milliners'.\n\nAll this glamour was seasonal for the upper classes and depended on the parliamentary calendar, around which all social occasions were scheduled. When Parliament sat, towards the end of January or in February, the wealthy returned from country to town, although the more sporting did not appear until March, when the hunting season ended; the Royal Academy summer exhibition in April or May was the signal for entertainment to get under way at full tilt. In August, Parliament rose and, together with the partridge-shooting season, caused the main exodus back to the country. Many of the gentry and landed classes did not return to London until January, but professionals and businessmen took as holiday just the single month of August. The shops that supplied them, therefore, frequently closed for August too. In 1853, Dickens complained that 'The West End of London is entirely deserted...I went to three shops this morning...Blackmore the tailor was at Brighton. Butler the tailor was...in the bosom of his family. Only two subordinates were in attendance at Beale's the hosier's, and they were playing at draughts'. Shops that were open were staffed by temporary employees 'who are imperfectly acquainted with the prices of the goods, and contemplate them with unsophisticated delight'. The milkwomen didn't even bother to water down their milk they had so few customers. All the luxury trades were affected, even prostitutes, whose clients also vanished.\n\nThere were many shopping streets that were not as fashionable as Regent Street, and therefore did not suffer in the same way, even in the same fashionable West End districts, and yet the street life they promoted was every bit as lively. 'In secluded corners' near by, Dickens noted, there were many little shops 'withdrawn from public curiosity', shops that traded with servants, both selling them goods and buying their perquisites: the cook sold offcuts of food, the butler got rid of empty wine bottles, the valets and the lady's maids the second-hand clothes they had been given.\n\nThere were several types of second-hand shop, whose names supposedly indicated what they bought, although the names could be misleading and the goods in which they dealt often overlapped. Marine stores sold and bought nothing nautical, but stocked pretty much the same thing as the rag-and-bone shops. In _Bleak House_ , Krook, who calls his shop a 'Rag and Bottle Warehouse', says he is also a dealer in 'Marine Stores', and he buys old furniture, paper, rags, bones, kitchen equipment and 'kitchen-stuff' (food waste), fire-irons, iron, old clothes, bottles, old books, pictures, tools and bits of metal. The paper was sold to tradesmen for wrapping goods; the dirty rags for breaking down for fertilizer, clean ones to paper mills; bones for soap or fertilizer; kitchen stuff to the pig-keepers; grease to tallow makers; old iron to manufacturers. Dripping and old clothes were sold either directly to the poor, or to wholesalers who resold them through the Rag Fair market.\n\nA step above these were the pawnshops. In rich districts, pawnshops looked like ordinary jewellers, and only the notice at the door, announcing that money was advanced on goods and advertising a 'fireproof safe' in which to keep them, indicated their real function. Inside, instead of an open counter, as Martin Chuzzlewit discovered, many pawnshops were fitted with 'a series of little closets, or private boxes', so that each customer could remain hidden from his or her neighbour. Items pawned in the West End might include decorative household objects such as drawings, vases, statuettes, or personal items like jewellery and cashmere shawls; in St Giles, by contrast, the pawned items were more likely to be petticoats, shirts and workmen's tools. Here the same items were pawned every week, 'not because the man is a drunkard or an idler', wrote Dickens sympathetically in _Household Words_ , 'but because he is a poor jobbing carpenter, without a penny of monied capital: who, when he has a small job in hand, and has done the sawing part of it and wants [to purchase] the nails and glue to finish it, pawns the saw to provide them, until he is paid and can redeem it'. By 1850, there were more than 400 official pawnbrokers in London (and probably thousands more of the unofficial sort: see below).\n\nOn pawning a watch valued at, say, \u00a32, its owner was given \u00a32 and a pawn ticket. The watch could be redeemed any time over the next year by paying back the \u00a32, plus interest, which usually ran to 15 or 20 per cent a year. If it were not redeemed within fifteen months, the pawnbroker was allowed to sell it. But there were many tricks of the trade. Unscrupulous pawnbrokers made customers take two tickets each for half the value of an item, since the interest was calculated from a base rate, and this way the value for an inexpensive item could be doubled. Some sewed a farthing into the lining of a coat: when customers making a purchase felt it, they chose that coat over others of better quality, imagining that someone had secreted a high-value coin there for safety and then forgotten about it. Other pawnbrokers were sympathetic to their clientele and accommodated their needs, whether it was routinely accepting carpenters' tools at a pawnshop by the dockyards, or in the West End allowing their regular customers, prostitutes, to take their jewellery out of hock for a night 'for a consideration'.\n\nMany marine stores, Krook's included, hung a small black-faced doll in the window, to indicate they were dolly shops, that is, unlicensed pawnbrokers that offered money on goods considered too contemptible to be accepted by a regular pawnbroker. Dolly shops, said Dickens, took on the air of their neighbourhood by the accumulation of goods that were pawned. Around Drury Lane, the stock leant towards 'faded articles of dramatic finery, such as three or four pairs of soiled buff boots...worn by a \"fourth robber\", or \"fifth mob\"', while around the Marshalsea the clothes were of better quality than usual, having been pawned by formerly well-heeled debtors as money grew scarcer; near the docks, the main items were sailors' clothes. Below the dolly shops in the hierarchy came leaving shops, for items that even the dolly shops wouldn't take: a single knife or fork, or a baking dish to be redeemed on Saturday, payday, for the Sunday meal. This is the type of shop run by Pleasant Riderhood in _Our Mutual Friend_. She has other income \u2013 she lets rooms, and her father earns his own living \u2013 which makes the contents of her fictional shop slightly superior to a real one in a Southwark slum in 1858, kept by a paralysed ex-sewerman and his wife. Pleasant's window contains a couple of handkerchiefs, a coat, some 'valueless' watches, tobacco, pipes, sweets and a bottle of walnut ketchup. The sewerman's shop contained, as its entire stock, 'a handful of sugar candy, a few brandy-balls, four sugar-plums contained in pickle-bottles, three herrings and a half, five dip candles and a half...a quart of parched peas, in a broken plate'.\n\nJust as Regent Street was _the_ place for luxury goods, other streets had reputations as the places to go for specific items, even if on a less elegant scale. Cranbourne Alley, running between Leicester Square and St Martin's Lane, had nothing but bonnet shops, 'at the doors of which stood women, slatternly in appearance, but desperate and accomplished touters', according to one point of view. (Other writers said the women were not slatternly at all but 'of decent appearance'.) 'Man, woman, or child, it was all the same to them; if they had made up their minds that you were to buy a bonnet, buy one you were obliged to...Piteous stories were told of feeble-minded old gentlemen emerging from the \"courts\", half-fainting, laden with bonnet-boxes, and minus their cash, watches, and jewellery'. These touters were known as 'She-Barkers', as though they worked in fairs, and such was their fame that even children knew of their practices. Young Sophia Beale thought that the omnibus cads calling their route were like 'the milliners in Cranbourne alley who run at people passing and hold up bonnets and shout \"buy, buy, only 5 shillings\"'.\n\nEven without a barker, or without the great plate-glass windows that the most expensive, modern stores could afford, smaller shops in the less fashionable districts had their own means of advertising their wares to the streets' passers-by. Many kept their street signs from the eighteenth century much longer than did the glossy Regent Street emporiums. In the 1820s, such signs were an everyday sight: 'The Pawnbroker decorates his door with three gold balls \u2013 the Barber...hangs out a long pole \u2013 the Gold-beater, an arm with a hammer in the act of striking \u2013 the Chemist, a head of Glauber, or Esculapius \u2013 the Tobacconist, a roll of tobacco, and of late it has become customary for these venders [sic] of...snuff, to station a wooden figure of a Highlander, in the act of taking a pinch.' In _Little Dorrit_ , the Chiverys' tobacco shop by the Marshalsea prison has its little Highlander. At Captain Cuttle's, in _Dombey and Son_ , a wooden midshipman is affixed outside to indicate he is a ship's-instrument maker, and in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , written in the early 1840s, while not mentioned by Dickens, an illustration shows a pie shop with a massive pie sign.\n\nAs these fictional references suggest, sometimes the signs were painted boards, as the old ones had been and as pub signs are today; sometimes they were in the shape of the object they represented; and sometimes there were also wooden models, increasing in size as the century progressed. Pubs went in for elaborate renditions of their names: the Elephant and Castle Tavern used a vast model elephant bearing a howdah; the Swan Tavern in the same south London location 'had a large and well-proportioned bird' over its board. Smaller businesses also thought size mattered. One bootmaker's model boot was 'large enough for the Colossus of Rhodes', while in the same row of shops a gigantic dustpan indicated a tin-man's shop, a vast cigar a cigar divan (see p. 295) and a huge stick of sealing wax a stationer. Some traders stuck with elaborate painted images. Fishmongers went in for seascapes, while small grocers favoured pictures of tea parties 'of staid British matrons, assembled round the singing kettle', or 'a party of Bedouins in the Desert' sitting around a Staffordshire-ware tea service. The 'humbler sorts of coffee-shops and eating houses' favoured a picture of a loaf of bread, some butter, a piece of cheese and some bacon on a blue-and-white plate, beside a cup of coffee. If they were teetotal, there would be nothing further; otherwise they would include a glass of ale or a tankard of porter, 'with a foaming top like a cauliflower...and perhaps a red herring, eloquent of a relish. Sometimes there are a couple of mice delineated in the act of nibbling the cheese.'\n\nAside from shop signs, painted exhortations to buy had begun to appear in the early 1830s. 'Warren's Blacking, 30, Strand' (the main firm, not Dickens' employers) was painted up 'in letters from six to eighteen inches long, on the brick walls along the public roads': coach passengers saw the reminders from miles away, over and over again. In one fictional treatment nearly two decades later, these painted signs on the road to London were 'great white invitations to \"TRY WARREN'S\", or, \"DAY AND MARTIN'S BLACKING \", loom[ing] through the darkness of the dead walls'. Sometimes Warren's even painted 'WARREN'S IS THE BEST' on the pavements.\n\nThese signs were insignificant in quantity when compared to the ever-present 'bills': sheets posted, or stuck up, on almost every flat surface, whether static or ambulant. Many Regency engravings show every temporary hoarding covered in bills, and through the century technology altered only their size and colours, 'a fresh supply of artistical gems' being posted anew every day. These included playbills, which were the most common, the contents lists from weekly magazines, or images of items with addresses where they could be purchased, whether pens, spectacles, dresses or men's suits. The bill-sticker was a regular sight, in 'fustian jackets with immense pockets', his tins of paste attached by a strap, with great bags holding the bills and long extendable sticks with a crossbar at the end, which made it possible for him to post the bills at any height.\n\nDickens wrote about these men in 1851, although unusually his report doesn't sound particularly authentic. The 'King of the Bill-Stickers' told him his father had also been a bill-sticker eighty years before, which in terms of life expectancy sounds unlikely in itself, while his statement that he himself earned 30s a week, 'including paste', defies belief. In _Bleak House_ , the legal clerk Mr Guppy presents his salary of 40s a week as pushing him into the middle classes, and Mayhew's street sellers averaged 10s a week. The 'King' also tells Dickens he was 'the first that ever stuck a bill under a bridge!', although Max Schlesinger in the same year wrote that the bridges, running with damp, never had bills posted on them, but were instead painted: 'there is not an arch in a London bridge but has its advertisements painted on it.' He adds that, in 1851, every one of them was for the steamer companies. The question, however, must remain open. In 1858, the painter Augustus Egg in his triptych _Past and Present_ showed the Adelphi arches papered with playbills as well as excursion advertisements.\n\nThese bills were all advertising well-established companies. Smaller businesses relied on another eighteenth-century survival, the handbill. These were given to customers in shops, and wrapped around purchases, but most often they were handed out in the street. By Temple Bar, wrote Southey, posing as a visiting Spaniard in 1807, 'I had a paper thrust into my hand [and] Before I reached home I had a dozen.' Just over a decade later, the fictional _Life in London_ claimed handbills were so common 'that a man scarcely opens a coal-shed, or a potatoe-stall' without distributing handbills to all and sundry, 'frequently with great success'. Such handbills might advertise exhibitions, patent medicines, whisky, linen drapers' or giraffes at the zoo. Many handbills printed their advertising jingles in verse. In _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , Mr Slum writes the text for handbills, with 'pathetic effusions' for goods purchased by 'private houses and tradespeople', parodies for pubs and lawyers' clerks, while he couched advertisements directed at girls' schools in moral educational verses. By the 1850s, bills were handed out by 'seedy personages' who could not earn a living in any other way.\n\nEarly in the century the hander-out was as much a part of the advertisement, and the street entertainment, as the handbill. Often such men wielded poles with banners, or some other noticeable ornament, as they took up their position in the street. In the early 1830s, by Regent Street, a man stood dressed in a red coat with epaulettes, 'having on his head a cocked hat, surmounted by the panache of a field-marshal. At his back and before him were suspended, so as to balance each other, a couple of boards, with printed placards...\"Gentlemen should instruct their servants to use Brown's blacking!\"' The awkward phrasing of this description makes it clear that the idea of a sandwich-board was new. Dickens was the first to create an edible metaphor, referring two years later to 'an animated sandwich, composed of a boy between two boards', and soon these 'Peripatetic placards' became 'a piece of human flesh between two slices of pasteboard'. When the _Illustrated London News_ began publishing in 1842, it hired 200 sandwich-board men to promenade the streets, also publishing an engraving of this event that suggests they marched in one single long line, to make a bigger impression.\n\nIn the 1830s, odd costumes designed to attract attention became a feature of street life. Two men between them wore 'one huge garment of green moreen', with long, flowing, green sleeves, and just one hole for the face, 'surmounted by a dunce's cap'. For some inexplicable reason this two-for-one was advertising 'a new cure for the itch'. By the 1850s, strange clothing or pasteboard signs were no longer enough, being replaced by large papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 representations of the product in question. One man wore a giant scarlet boot on his head; underneath it he 'was wrapped in a garment entirely composed of cardboard soles', while also somehow managing to carry a flag with a bootmaker's name and address. Even something as simple as a tradesman's moving premises received elaborate treatment. On Holborn, twelve men walked up and down carrying a huge table on which was painted 'MR. FALCON REMOVED' and the address of the new shop. As its sole purpose was to notify Mr Falcon's regular customers, the procession covered only a dozen yards of pavement, 'continually, silently, without ever stopping for rest...for many days and even weeks'.\n\nOther forms of advertisements seem more natural today. By the 1830s, omnibuses were already carrying advertisements. By 1837, some bore portraits of Boz himself, as the author of _The Pickwick Papers_. (It is nice to think that perhaps the Bardell omnibus, whose name Dickens possibly borrowed for Mr Pickwick's landlady, carried advertisements for the very novel in which Mrs Bardell appeared.) From these, it was a short step to entire carts being dedicated to advertising, which were on the roads at about the same time, presenting complex scenarios to promote the excellence of various products. One cart carried a huge tub of water while behind it walked men bearing an enormous wellington boot suspended from a pole, repeatedly submerging it in the tub to prove its waterproof qualities. Carts might be seen with 'huge skeleton houses covered with handbills' or be disguised as imitation steamboats. One cart bore a giant hat, 'a hybrid between an Egyptian obelisk...and an English country-gentleman's gate', which advertised washable wigs; another displayed arched gothic windows in which dresses endlessly revolved on clockwork stands. In the 1850s, when such things were at their peak, a cart advertising a panorama was made up of 'three immense wooden pyramids', complete with hieroglyphics (thoughtfully translated into English), together with portraits of Isis and Osiris. Max Schlesinger, who watched this spectacle trundling down the street, noted that it was followed by another cart got up to look like a mosque, complete with cupola, and driven by a fair boy whose face had been artistically adorned with soot, to promote 'a most marvellous Arabian medicine, warranted to cure the bite of mad dogs and venomous reptiles generally'. Behind it, to promote Vauxhall Gardens, came 'a dark green chariot of fantastic make, in shape like a half-opened shell, and tastefully ornamented with gilding and pictures'.\n\nOther advertisements required less capital and were of a more transient nature. Auctions of household goods were advertised by 'a breadth of stair-carpet' hanging out of a first-floor window, together with a printed notice on the door or gate. Barber's shops regularly posted similar printed notices announcing that they were selling ' _on oath_ , the pure grease of a fine large bear' as pomade for men's hair, and from time to time, to promote the freshness of their grease, the sign declared, 'We kill a bear this week,' frequently accompanied by a live bear itself, muzzled and tied up in the little area by the shop's basement. It was cynically assumed that the same bear was handed round from barber to barber, each one in turn displaying it while advertising its imminent demise, then sending it on to a colleague. The joke was so common that in _Nicholas Nickleby_ , when a stagecoach is overturned and the passengers pass the time by telling stories, one concerns a German count who killed his own bear to grease 'his whiskers with him afterwards'.\n\nApart from greasing whiskers, shops, pubs and other public places offered wide-ranging street services. Shops were constant scenes of coming and going, and it was only in the backstreets that shabbiest little ones had bells on the doors; the more prosperous shops always had at least one member of staff present, more often several, to provide goods and services. Tailors made running repairs to torn or damaged clothing, lending their customers something to wear while they sat and waited. In _Pickwick Papers_ , Sam Weller buys from a stationer 'a sheet of the best gilt-edged letter-paper and a hard-nibbed pen', taking them to an inn, where he orders brandy 'and the inkstand'. Coffee rooms and taverns also acted as postal drops, taking letters and passing them on; personal newspaper advertisements gave these addresses as a _poste restante_. In _Great Expectations_ , pubs also supply services that to us seem even more unexpected. When Magwitch is captured by the police on the river, he and Pip are taken to a nearby pub, where Pip purchases a full set of clothes, so that Magwitch won't have to go to gaol in his wet things.\n\nEvery shop delivered, whether they were expensive establishments with their own emblazoned carriage, or small local ones that despatched the goods by an errand boy in a small top hat and a big suit with shiny buttons. Even _The Pickwick Papers_ ' hard-up medical student Bob Sawyer, buying spirits in the unprosperous Borough for a little evening party, gets the alcohol delivered from the wine vaults, the glasses from the pub and oysters from the oyster shop: he carries nothing home himself. Refreshment rooms routinely stocked newspapers for their customers (see p. 301) and many also sent them out: in the late 1830s and early 1840s, a retired actor in Kentish Town had the _Morning Advertiser_ delivered every day 'with the early dinner-beer'.\n\nFor those who couldn't afford that, there was still plenty of opportunity to read the news on the street. In part, the news was a constant street noise, as the newsboys cried out the latest headlines. But newspaper offices also pinned up copies of each edition outside their offices, where extraordinary events drew huge crowds, whether it was the 1848 revolutions in Europe or the Derby winners. The _London Gazette_ , which printed the official list of bankruptcies, as well as army promotions and retirements and other official notices, also produced 'an _Extraordinary Gazette_ ' during the Crimean War, giving the official casualty lists. These were sent on to all the newspapers for reprinting, but since the _Gazette_ had them first, crowds stood outside daily, waiting for the first copies to be pinned to the _Gazette_ office wall in St Martin's Lane.\n\nAll of these buyers, sellers, touters and hawkers contributed to the many voices of the street, voices which in Dickens' fiction become fixed and create a sense that we know what these people sounded like. The most famous of them all was that of the cockney servant, Sam Weller: 'Vy didn't you say so before...For all I know'd he was one o' the regular threepennies...If he's anything of a gen'l'm'n, he's vurth a shillin' a day.' Or Sam describes his hat: ''Tain't a wery good 'un to look at...but it's an astonishin' 'un to wear; and afore the brim went, it was a wery handsome tile. Hows'ever it's lighter without it, that's one thing, and every hole lets in some air, that's another \u2013 wentilation gossamer I calls it.' It's almost all there \u2013 the Ws and Vs switching places, the irregular past tenses of verbs, the dropped Gs. Later, when Dickens created Jo in _Bleak House_ , 'in course' instead of 'of course' appears; the addition of the 'g' ending on words like 'sovereign' joins the missing 'g' of Sam's 'astonishin'' and the final 'k' on 'nothink'. The Hs are added to words that begin with a vowel and are missing from words that begin with 'h', while the 'i' sound replaces 'oi' in words like 'spoil' \u2013 'spile'.\n\nMany have since claimed that Dickens invented the W\/V slippage, but _Real Life in London_ , published in 1821, when Dickens was just nine, claimed that Billingsgate fishmongers said, ' _vat slippy valking...all the vay to Vapping Vall._ ' This had disappeared by the 1850s: Alfred Bennett, writing of his childhood in that decade, claimed not to have heard it, but he agreed that Dickens' irregular past and present tenses \u2013 'come' for 'came'; 'seed' for 'saw' \u2013 were a constant, as were double negatives \u2013 'we ain't got no', 'without no'. By the end of Dickens' life the voices that one might today think he had imagined out of the ether had found their way on to the very real streets, as the bus conductors shouted out the destinations \u2013 'Benk', 'Charin' Krauss', 'Pic'dilly'. People headed for Emma Smith [Hammersmith], Glawster Rowd [to rhyme with 'loud'], I [Hay] Street, Nottin Ill Gite, Bizewater, Peddingten, Biker Street, Oldersgit Street, Ol'git, and Menshun Ouse.\n\nThe cockney voice was the most characteristic of the London accents, but it was not the only one. Other classes had their own idiosyncratic patterns. Dickens was particularly fond of lower-middle-class genteelisms. A lodging-house keeper in Bloomsbury shows her 'front parlior' to potential lodgers: 'the back parlior being what I cling to and never part with...Unless your mind is prepared for the stairs, it will lead to inevitable disapintmink.' Moving up the social scale, an 'affected Metropolitan Miss' created as many syllables as she could: she 'loves the ble-ue ske-i' and delights in being 'key-ind' to the poor. So snarled Mayhew in the 1850s, while noting similar pretensions among the upper classes: 'Your London exquisite, for instance, talks of taking \u2013 aw, his afternoon's _w_ ide \u2013 aw \u2013 in _W_ otton _W_ o \u2013 aw \u2013 aw \u2013 or of going to the Ope _w_ a \u2013 aw \u2013 or else of _w_ unning down \u2013 aw \u2013 to the _W_ aces \u2013 aw \u2013 aw.' (The stuttering vanished in perhaps the 1920s, although it has been suggested the R\/W substitution still survives more among the upper than the working classes.) Not only did pronunciation vary between classes, but through the years changes occurred within each social group. Thomas Trollope, the son of a barrister and the grandson of a baronet, remembered that when he was a child in the 1810s older people pronounced Rome, 'Room', James, 'Jeames' and gold, 'goold', while 'oblige' was given the French pronunciation, 'obleege', a beef steak was a 'beef-steek', and the 'a' in words such as danger and stranger was pronounced as the 'a' in 'man'. Seventy years later, these pronuncitations had all vanished.\n\nEven more than pronunciation, slang separated the various socio-economic groups, making each one as distinct on the street as their clothes did. 'The fast [cash-strapped] young gentleman positively _must_ speak to his governor [father], and get the old brick [decent chap] to fork out [give] some more tin [cash], for positively he can hardly afford himself a weed [cigar] of an evening \u2013 besides he wants a more nobby crib [better lodgings], as the one he hangs out in now...really isn't the Stilton [done thing].' (The last phrase sounds remarkably like P. G. Wodehouse, born two decades after this was written.) Costermongers specialized in backslang, although it was 1860 before that word began to be used to describe their private language. Long before it had a name, however, Mayhew supplied examples: a penny was a yenep, twopence owt-yenep, threepence erth-yenep and so on (except eight, which was 'teaich'). Backslang also gave 'on' for no, 'say' for yes, as well as 'cool the esclop', 'cool the namesclop' and 'cool ta the dillo nemo' \u2013 look at the police\/policeman, the old woman. Other elements from various sources were mixed in: 'Vom-us! I'm going to do the tightener [have my dinner].' 'Vom-us' is from the (to us) familiar 'vamoose', which is in turn from the Spanish ' _vamos_ ', 'let's go', while 'tightener' is not foreign, just colourful \u2013 when you eat well your clothes get tight.\n\nMost of this has long vanished. What has survived is rhyming slang. Some attributed this new slang to thieves, others to ballad sellers and cheapjacks, the travelling hawkers who used it in their sales patter. By the late 1850s, it was prevalent enough that mainstream middle-class publications gave their readers tasters, although they didn't yet have a name for it, but had to laboriously explain the method. It was, said Mayhew, 'arranged on the principle of using words that are similar in sound to the ordinary expressions for the same idea...the...cant words are mere nonsensical terms, rhyming with the vernacular ones'. He offered as an example a 'shallow cove' from St Giles who says, 'S'pose now...I wanted to ask a _codger_ to come and have a _glass_ of _rum_ with me, and smoke a _pipe_ of _baccer_ over a game of _cards_ with some _blokes_ at _home_ \u2013 I should say, _Splodger_ , will you have a Jack-sur _pass_ of finger-and- _thumb_ , and blow your yard of _tripe_ of nosey-me- _knacker_ , while we have a touch of the _boards_ with some other heaps of _coke_ at my _drum_?' Other examples were Jimmy Skinner, dinner; Battle of the Nile, tile (a top hat); elephant's trunk, drunk; Epsom races, braces; over the stile, sent for trial. Although not using rhyming slang himself, Dickens unexpectedly gets a look-in when in a novel of 1858 a character says, 'leave the kid alone, or I'll put out my Chalk Farm (arm) and give you a rap with my Oliver Twist (fist).'\n\nMayhew realized that a great deal of the coster and more general working-class slang came from foreign languages. According to him, 'carser', for 'house', came from 'the organ boys', that is, from Italian ( _casa_ ), while 'ogle' originated from ' _oogelijn_ ' or 'little eye', brought to London, he suggested, by 'the Hollanders on board the Billingsgate eel-boats' (it does derive from Dutch, but dates back two centuries earlier). 'Fogle', a handkerchief, he supposed came from from _vogel_ , German for bird. ( _Foglia_ , Italian for pocket, seems more likely, as a fogle-hunter was a pickpocket: Oliver Twist was a 'young fogle-hunter' before he was rescued.) Dickens may have picked up some of these newly acculturated words. In _Oliver Twist_ the undertaker Mr Sowerberry utters 'Gadso!' as an oath, although Dickens probably did not realize that it derived from _cazzo_ , or 'prick' in Italian. Far more working-class slang came from Romany, although it was rarely recognized as the source. The most basic word, _bona_ , good, Mayhew says comes from 'the old dancing dog men'. He believed that what he called 'thieves' slang was 'made up, in a great degree, of the mediaeval Latin', and he translated, 'Can you roker Romany' as 'Can you speak cant', without elaborating on the word Romany at all, or translating 'roker' as Romany for 'speak'.\n\nMore commonly heard on the street were the everyday expressions that boys shouted at each other or at passers-by, the catchphrases of a lively street life. Some \u2013 such as the phrase 'I believe you, my bo-o-o-y!', derived from a popular play \u2013 were the currency of professional entertainers, but no one knew where most of these sayings came from before the arrival of music hall, when snatches of a song or a comic's routine spread widely. But nonetheless, in the 1830s, 'One's ears were incessantly assailed with such cries as \"What a shocking bad hat!\" \"There he goes with his eye out!\" \"How are you off for soap?\" \"Flare up! and join the union,\" \"Does your mother know you're out?\" or \"It's all very fine, Mr. Fergusson, but you don't lodge here.\"' When the army Volunteer Corps was formed in 1859, mostly drawn from the ranks of the middle classes, their lack of professionalism provoked the sneer that all the Volunteers had ever managed to shoot were their own dogs; for years street boys shouted, 'Who shot the dog?' at any man in uniform. By the 1860s, there were more generic challenges to young men who were either excessively (in the boys' opinions) well dressed or merely out with a young woman: 'Who's your hatter?' or even 'How's your poor feet?'\n\nSome expressions indicated disbelief \u2013 'All my eye and Betty Martin' \u2013 while 'Do you see any green in my eye, as you pull down the lid?' meant, do you take me for a fool. The longest-surviving, and one of Dickens' favourites, was 'Hookey Walker!', sometimes shortened to 'Walker!' and often drawled out \u2013 'Waa\u2014alker!' This was the equivalent of the twentieth century's 'Pull the other one, it's got bells on.' In _A Christmas Carol_ , when the newly reformed Scrooge leans out his window and tells a street boy to go and buy the biggest turkey at the poultryman's shop, the boy replies, 'Walk-ER!', Scrooge responds, 'No, no...I am in earnest.' In _David Copperfield_ , little Miss Mowcher, also to express disbelief, says, 'Do you know what my great-grandfather's name was?...It was Walker, my pet...and he came from a long line of Walkers, that I inherit all the Hookey estates from.'\n\nEven when they weren't shouting out these phrases, people found ways of indicating contempt. In _Pickwick Papers_ , when the legal clerk for the shyster lawyer thinks Mr Pickwick is trying to pump him for information, he 'smiled once more upon the company, and, applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand, thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was familiarly denominated \"taking a grinder\"'. A few years later, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , another lower-middle-class notary's clerk gestures at a street boy 'with that peculiar form of recognition which is called \"taking a sight\"', that is, he put his thumb up to his nose and wiggled his fingers in what was later called cocking a snook.\n\nGestures and catcalls might seem like entertainment enough for passers-by and residents alike, but the streets were also the place for a whole raft of professional entertainers: Punch and Judy men, animal acts, peep-shows and tumblers were only the start. The most numerous were the street musicians. In Mayhew's view there were two types, 'the skilful and the blind', that is, those with abilities and those who were begging. Bands were classed either as 'English' or 'German'. The English players might be English and played in groups of up to twenty-five, usually made up of men who couldn't read music and therefore couldn't get jobs in theatres. The German bands were not necessarily German, or even foreign; 'German' indicated they were either brass bands or groups playing highlights from the operatic repertory. Then there were the instrumentalists: fiddlers, harpers, clarionet [sic] players and pipers, often accompanied by a dancing-girl.\n\nThe main street instrument, however, was the organ, and the nineteenth-century passion for classification categorized these in the mid-century. Hand organists were usually 'French', which sometimes just meant foreign; if the performers were any good they had regular rounds and pitches, but most weren't, and didn't. Monkey organists were generally Swiss or Tyrolese boys, on the top of whose organs perched a monkey or marmoset dressed in a red jacket and cap; if possible the animal played the organ and the boy danced, but sometimes it was the other way round. Those who couldn't afford a monkey had white mice, or a doll on a plank that 'danced' as they jerked a string tied to their knees.\n\nHandbarrow organists were jeered at as 'some lazy Irishman' or 'sickly Savoyard' because they wheeled their instruments in a barrow. Because they couldn't grind and walk at the same time, they waited for a group of children or a crowd to collect and then made such a din that in effect they were paid to go away. The handcart organists were more enterprising, travelling in twos, threes or fours, with a complicated organ plus 'bells, drums, triangles, gongs, and cymbals'. Set out in front was 'a stage about five or six feet in width, four in height, and perhaps eighteen inches or two feet in depth', on which danced automaton figures, just over a foot tall, 'gorgeously arrayed in crimson, purple, emerald-green, blue, and orange draperies, and loaded with gold and tinsel, and sparkling stones and spangles'. They performed little stories: Daniel in the lion's den, a Grand Turk threatening a slave, Nebuchadnezzar eating painted grass 'with a huge gold crown on his head, which he bobs...every other bar'. At the front were figures of Napoleon, Tipu Sultan and his sons, and the Queen and Prince Albert. Napoleon, Tipu and Victoria 'dance a three-handed reel, to the admiration of Prince Albert and a group of lords and ladies...who nod their heads approvingly' until 'the fiend in the corner rushes forth from his lair with a portentous howl. Away, neck or nothing, flies Napoleon, and Tippoo [sic] scampers after him, followed by the terrified attendants; but lo! at the precise nick of time, Queen Victoria draws a long sword from beneath her stays, while up jumps the devouring beast [from Daniel in the lion's den]...and like a true British lion...flies at the throat of the fiend,' just as the collection is made.\n\nGeorge Scharf sketched dozens of London's street musicians \u2013 a sailor, a man with a baby, and a blind violinist among them \u2013 as well as a kerb-side letter-writer.\n\nRanking lower on the scale of attraction and approbation were the horse-and-cart organists, whose vast machines needed a cart drawn by two horses, crammed with 'every known mechanical contrivance for the production of ear-stunning noises'. The most numerous of all organs on the street were the ordinary piano grinders, which at least had the benefit of not being too loud. Many of their practitioners were Italians living in Leather Lane: they carried the instrument on their backs, holding a staff as they walked that later doubled as a support to the instrument when they played. Flageolet organists and pianists were 'the _\u00e9lite_ of the profession', usually to be found in the West End 'and on summer evenings...in the neighbourhood of some of the Inns of Court'. Hurdy-gurdy players came in two classes: 'little hopping, skipping, jumping, reeling, Savoyard or Swiss urchins, who dance and sing and grind and play...and men with sallow complexions, large dark eyes, and silver earrings, who stand erect and tranquil'. These men also played at 'extempore \"hop[s]\" at the door of a suburban public house on a summer night', or at some other form of working-class entertainment. Most bands settled around pubs and other entertainment venues, and were known to the locals: Dickens wrote that 'Stabbers's Band' performed every Monday morning outside a Camden pub. Women players existed but were few and far between. Arthur Munby saw a female cornet player in Westminster, but that was extremely unusual.\n\nThere were also singers, as individuals or in groups. Many singers performed because they had no skills, no tools of a trade, no choices. In the 1830s, Dickens saw near the Old Vic theatre a woman carrying a baby, 'round whose meagre form the remnant of her own scanty shawl is carefully wrapped', who warbled a popular ballad 'in the hope of wringing a few pence from the compassionate passer-by' \u2013 but failing. Munby watched the dancing and singing of five 'Ethiopian Serenaders' in Scotland Yard one day, the women with their 'hair decked with network and rolls of scarlet cloth: they wore pink calico jackets, petticoats of spangled blue, ending a little below the knee: and red stockings and red boots'. When he spoke to them, he realized they were English, blacked-up. They may have been inspired by Joseph Johnson, a black sailor in the early part of the century, who had been wounded during the French wars. He built a model of the _Nelson_ , which he wore on his head and, by dipping and swaying, made it 'sail' as he sang. He was well known, walking as far afield as Staines, Romford and St Albans on his rounds. In the 1840s, another singer wore a similar ship on his head while carrying a baby on his back: one observer noted that he had seen him perform thus over a full decade, ' _the Child being always the same_ '. Other wounded sailors, usually dressed in a uniform, sang sea shanties and theatre songs of heroic tars. (Alfred Bennett added that as far as he could remember he had never seen a soldier in such circumstances.)\n\nMost householders professed to be driven mad by the constant jumble of music cranked out on the streets. It is unsurprising therefore to find the magistrates courts filled with cases where residents attempted to have the musicians banned, with the musicians in turn applying to the courts for loss of earnings. An early cartoon by Robert Seymour, the original illustrator of _The Pickwick Papers_ , showed a street musician refusing to be moved on for less than 6d: 'd'ye think I does n't know the walley o'peace and quietness?' The cartoonist John Leech, before his death, commented, 'Rather...than continue to be tormented in this way, I would prefer to go to the grave where there is no noise.' And even Dickens, otherwise so passionately absorbed in street theatre, dismissed these 'brazen performers on brazen instruments'.\n\nThere were, however, some who enjoyed the music. Since children adored performers of all sorts, many of the shows were geared towards them. Punch and Judy shows were generally elaborate street performances, requiring at least two men: one to work the puppets, one to play the drum and mouth-organ beforehand, and to collect the money during the action. In the 1840s, Mayhew spoke to one man whose first Punch and Judy show had consisted of 'twelve figures...Punch, Judy, Child, Beadle, Scaramouch, Nobody, Jack Ketch, the Grand Senoor, the Doctor, the Devil (there was no Ghost used then), Merry Andrew and the Blind Man...The heads...was all carved in wood...A set of new figures, dressed and all, would come to about fifteen pounds...A good show at the present time will cost three pounds odd for the stand alone...including the baize, the frontispiece, the back scene, the cottage, and the letter cloth.' Given this outlay, Punch and Judy shows stuck to the more prosperous areas. Dickens wrote that in Camden in his childhood, 'they knew better to do anything but squeak and drum...unless a collection was made in advance \u2013 which never succeeded'. Many did what they called 'dwelling on horders' (orders): performing outside a family's house by request, with the children watching from a window. If there were no orders they performed a 'long-pitch', or thirty-minute show, at a busy junction. Because it was a rich man's toy, in the summer 'Punch mostly goes down to the seaside with the quality.'\n\nJoseph Johnson, a sailor injured in the French wars, made his living as a street musician. As he sang, he dipped and swayed his head to make his model of the _Nelson_ 'sail' in time to the music.\n\nThere were other kinds of puppet shows as well, including fantoccini, which were marionettes similar in size to Punch and Judy, wheeled about on a cart. Various types of dancing puppets also appeared, such as sailors doing a hornpipe, or a skeleton that came apart as it danced, until only the skull was left, 'footing it...merrily'. Most popular, with adults as well as children, were raree-, or peep-shows. The father of George Sanger (later 'Lord' George Sanger, the self-ennobled owner of one of the largest circuses in Europe) was an itinerant showman with a small peep-show: 'a large box carried on the back, containing some movable and very gaudy pictures, and having six peep-holes fitted with fairly strong lenses. When a pitch was made the box was placed on a folding trestle and the public were invited to walk up' and look at the various scenes depicted within. 'My father...could \"patter\" in the most approved style, especially about the battle of Trafalgar [he had served on the _Victory_ with Nelson]...In his white smock-frock, beaver hat, knee-breeches, with worsted stockings and low-buckled shoes', he travelled the fairs in season and worked as a costermonger in the winter. By 1833, he had bought a much larger box, with twenty-six holes in the side, for twenty-six simultaneous viewers, 'the pictures being pulled up and down by strings'; at night they were lit by candles inside the box. The most popular scenes for these raree-shows were battles, famous (or local) murders, the death of William IV, Napoleon's return from Elba, or at Waterloo, the death of Nelson and 'The Queen embarking to start for Scotland, from the Dockyard at Voolich', as well as famous scenes from popular melodramas and Christmas pantomimes.\n\nAnimal shows were also in demand. In the 1820s, there had been a famous dancing-bear and monkey team: the monkey, dressed as a soldier, danced on the bear's head, and the bear tumbled and danced. But this was unusual, and generally the animals used were more domestic. In the mid-1830s, George Sanger himself began to work, aged about eleven, buying canaries, redpoles and white mice, which he taught to do tricks: the birds drew and fired a cannon, rode in a miniature coach, walked a tightrope and danced; the mice climbed poles, fetched flags 'and other tiny tricks'. A few carts housed 'Happy Families', a number of unlikely animals living happily together in one cage: dogs, cats, monkeys, various types of bird, rats, guinea pigs and so on, which performed tricks. One Happy Family exhibitor even claimed to have been invited to show his 'Family' to Queen Victoria.\n\nSome shows needed less money to set up. Street conjurors and acrobats travelled in pairs, dressed in overcoats, one carrying a drum, the other a ladder. If a crowd gathered, they put down the drum and rolled out a mat; then the conjuror brought out 'cards, cups and balls'. Their coats came off to display a red-and-white motley for the clown and 'a loose pair of white tights, garnished with strips of red and green tape' for the conjuror. They did a comic cross-talk act \u2013 Conjuror: 'Beat the drum.' Clown: 'Beat the donkey?' \u2013 after which the conjuror juggled, balanced balls, swords and sticks, and did card tricks, all the while keeping up his comic dialogue with the clown, who meanwhile had the important role of taking up the collection in the crowd. After ten or fifteen minutes, they picked up their mat, put on their coats and headed for a new pitch. Sometimes the group was larger, comprising a strong man, a juggler, 'a snake, sword, and knife-swallower' or a contortionist; sometimes the clown was dressed as a soldier, and his comic business consisted of riddles, jokes, songs and, 'where the halfpence are very plentiful', a funny dance.\n\nAs with the singers, many performers were street entertainers because they had no other way of earning a living. A showman's child in the 1830s did a 'Cackler Dance', skipping blindfolded between twenty eggs. Sala remembered a man who stood outside St Martin's-le-Grand with a piece of paper, shaping and reshaping it, calling out, 'It forms...now it forms a jockey-cap, now a church-door, a fan, a mat, the paddle-boxes of a steamer', hoping for a few coins. Profile cutters created paper silhouettes. Pavement chalkers were obviously beyond all possibility of work: one who had a pitch in the New Kent Road had been an usher (a junior teacher) until he had a stroke. Children danced, sang or turned cartwheels. Many congregated by the riverside pubs, hoping that sporting gentlemen sitting on balconies would throw pennies into the river for the amusement of watching the children dive for them. In the 1850s, children also stood under the viaduct at Bermondsey, where the Greenwich excursion train stopped for ticket inspection, shouting, 'Throw down your mouldy coppers!' Cheery and slightly drunk, the day-trippers obeyed.\n\nThe leisure industry and the street world intersected here informally, but more often the two worlds met in more planned ways.\n\n#### 10.\n\n#### LEISURE FOR ALL\n\nA morning walk in the park: what could be more ordinary? But London, today considered to be one of the world's cities most generously provisioned with public parks, did not historically have this largesse available to all. Its nineteenth-century development can be seen, in some ways, as a narrative of how green spaces were gradually made accessible to the masses. As late as 1855, in Trollope's _The Warden_ , the Revd Mr Harding spends a day in London being constantly harried from place to place: there were few locations where one might sit without paying for the privilege by buying something to drink or eat. Gentlemen might walk in the park, but sitting on a bench was not respectable. Both St James's Park and Green Park were officially private Crown land, where access could be arbitrarily withdrawn. In reality, even though their gates were locked nightly at ten, by the seventeenth century there were over 6,500 keys to the gates of St James's alone, and the walls were easily scaled, too. When George II lived at Kensington Palace in the eighteenth century, Kensington Gardens was open to the public only at weekends. After the court moved elsewhere, the public hours were increased, but regulations, enforced by park-keepers, were designed to keep the masses out.\n\nSimilarly, London's unique green spaces \u2013 its squares, so prominent a part of the city today \u2013 were either not open to the public or were not planned to be green. In the seventeenth century Inigo Jones designed the first London square, Covent Garden Piazza, in the Italianate style: as a paved space. After the Restoration, more paved squares were built, such as Lincoln's Inn and Leicester Fields (where, in 1760, George II, as he was soon to be, lived in Savile House; he was proclaimed king in the square itself ). But throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the paving gave way to grass as a vogue for planted squares spread: first in Soho Square, St James's Square and Panton Square, all in Westminster; in Bridgewater Square, near the Barbican; and in Queen Square in Bloomsbury. By the start of the nineteenth century, there were about fifty squares in London; forty years later there were 200; by 1928 the figure had risen to 461.\n\nAt the time, London's garden squares were an urban oddity, following the European tradition of a public space in a city centre, usually containing a church or civic buildings, but miniaturizing it and making it private. Even as the squares were being built, there was uncertainty as to their purpose, or indeed whether they even had a purpose. In 1819, _Leigh's New Picture of London_ opined, 'they add so essentially to the healthful and pleasing appearance of so many parts of London'. By 1839, the same book had changed its mind: now the squares were valued for their history and 'peculiar beauty'. It is too easy to forget that not only were these squares created without a single overriding aim, but that there is an inevitable gap between how we see them and how they were viewed by their contemporaries. One contemporary garden historian suggests the squares of Bloomsbury are linked both by their ground-landlord (the Bedford Estate) and by colour, via their trees, visible from one square the next. So they are, in the present day. But at the time, as engravings show, the trees, newly planted, were completely invisible over the rooftops: the secret green spaces we know today are the unplanned by-product of nearly two centuries of growth.\n\nWhile the idea of squares was taken up across the city, they were created by a wide range of builders and therefore in a wide range of styles. Great swathes of land were owned by wealthy landlords and either were developed directly in a unified style, or were leased out in parcels to be developed by builders, who either created entire districts themselves or subcontracted to smaller companies. The landowners were, in effect, in the building business, sometimes contracting out the work to the great builders of the day, as the Bedford Estate did in Bloomsbury from the late 1770s to about 1840, hiring first James Burton, then Thomas Cubitt to build to their own specifications, dictating street plans, building type, density and even the details of the fa\u00e7ades, developing a series of squares on Georgian grid patterns, 'all comely, and some elegant, but all modern and middle class'.\n\nAs this guidebook quote suggests, the uniformity produced by these estates gave various neighbourhoods different socio-economic profiles, while leading contemporary observers to impose on them almost human characteristics. One book outlined its own readings. The West End squares were 'fashionable', so much was obvious, but the northern ones were 'genteel': a nice distinction. Holborn and Oxford Street on the south side were 'obsolete and antiquated spots', while on the north side Portman Square was considered 'as imposing' as that pinnacle of Mayfair-dom, Grosvenor Square. Moving down in the world were 'the respectable and genteel squares' in Bloomsbury and north of Oxford Street. After these come the City squares, 'old and desolate', which could be compared with the 'obsolete, or \"used up\" old Squares...which have mostly passed from fashionable residences into mere quadrangles, full of shops, or hotels, or exhibitions, or chambers', referring to Soho, Leicester and Golden Squares, Lincoln's Inn and Covent Garden. Finally, almost shame-facedly, came 'the pretentious _parvenu_ -like suburban squares' in Chelsea, Kensington, Islington, Stepney and south of the river, neatly describing a ring around central London.\n\nA closer examination shows that none of the squares was all, or only, one thing. Leicester Square was for most of the century a byword for raffishness, for slightly dodgy goings-on, or just for disrepair. In 1860, a conman at the Thames Police Court was referred to as 'a Leicester-square adventurer'. No evidence was presented to indicate that this was where he lived or operated; the term simply defined his shady activities. In _Bleak House_ , when Dickens placed Mr George's shooting gallery (a place where men went to practise target shooting) in 'that curious region lying about the Haymarket and Leicester Square', he was giving his readers a hint that perhaps Mr George was not what he seemed. It has been suggested that the shooting gallery was in Panton Square (on the west side of Leicester Square, demolished in 1868). The streets around Panton and Leicester Squares certainly are mentioned more than regularly in the memoirs of that erotomaniac 'Walter' as a site of brothels and accommodation houses. In 1853, an attempt was made to blackmail Gladstone simply for being seen here, talking to a woman alone on the streets. But at the beginning of the century, Leicester Square was mostly made up of private houses set around their own enclosed garden. The land was owned by one family, who leased it out to developers, and only slowly did it stop being residential: the house of the painter Joshua Reynolds, on the west side, became a bookseller's auction rooms; the house Hogarth had lived in on the opposite side became the Sabloniere Hotel. Savile House, long vacated by nobility, was turned into Lever's Museum, containing, among other items, Miss Linwood's Gallery of Needlework Pictures, in which famous works of art were reproduced in embroidery. The square became 'unlike the other squares of London', filled with 'hotels with foreign names', with 'Polish exiles, Italian supernumeraries of the opera, French figurantes of the inferior grades, German musicians, teachers and translators of languages, and keepers of low gaming-houses'. Then in 1865 a gas explosion destroyed all the buildings along one side of the square. Instead of being an opportunity for a fresh start, the decaying ruins and rubble were simply left. To add insult to injury, pranksters topped the statue of George I in the middle of the square with a dunce's cap before painting red spots all over his horse.\n\nEven the great aristocratic redoubts of Belgrave and Berkeley Squares, routinely presented as solely the homes of the gentry and the moneyed, were not homogeneous. An 1844 guidebook stated flatly that Belgrave Square was entirely made up of detached villas, surrounded by gardens, even as its own engravings show a solid row of terraces all along the north and west sides (the south and west sides may have been occcupied by villas, but the engravings claimed to show the most exclusive housing). Neither mentioned in the guidebook nor revealed in the engravings was the fact that Belgrave Square was also the location of the Pantechnicon, 'a vast establishment, uniting a bazaar, exhibition-rooms, wine-stores, and carriage-repository', as well as a huge storage facility for furniture. Berkeley Square did indeed house some of the richest and the most aristocratic families in the country, but it was also the site of a row of shops, a hotel and Gunter's, a confectioner and caterer to the upper classes. In season the square was filled with delivery vans and carts, with 'thousands of white paper parcels' coming and going to the sounds of 'clatterings of china and glass, [and] cross porters swearing under their great trays'.\n\nThese squares \u2013 which were less unified architectural objects and more mixed environments in permanent flux \u2013 are useful reminders when studying the development of Regent's Park, for it too was a private commercial development by a landowning estate, in this case the Crown. 'The main object of the Crown, I conceive it to be,' wrote John Nash, the Prince Regent's architect, was 'the improvement of their own Estate.' Just as with the squares on the Bedford Estate in Bloomsbury, or the Grosvenor Estate in Belgravia, the main aim of the Regent's Park development was not to create a green oasis for public use, nor an area of beauty, but to maximize the landowner's revenue.\n\nMost of the land in Marylebone had been leased out to farmers, market gardeners and other smallholders. As the leases expired in 1811, John Fordyce, the Crown surveyor, presented a plan to entice the prosperous classes to the area by creating, in a single scheme, a modern infrastructure. It would include churches, shops, sewers, lighting and, most important, a major thoroughfare to connect the residents to the sites of government and consumption in the West End. Regent Street was to run from the home of the Prince Regent \u2013 Carlton House, set at the end of what is now Lower Regent Street, between Pall Mall and the Mall \u2013 up to what was to become the new pleasure and recreation ground of Regent's Park, where the prince was to have a rustic summer pavilion surrounded by his friends' villas in a _rus in urbe_ setting.\n\nJohn Nash modified the original Georgian grid-plan by adding two circuses (in effect, round squares), plus crescents and avenues, to create a more countrified feel. Fordyce had imagined Regent Street as a straight line, ploughed through the slum and working-class districts that were Soho, but Nash moved the street eastwards, edging it around the slum in Swallow Street, neatly creating a border between the homes of the upper classes and the 'meaner', working-class districts. Piccadilly Circus and the beautiful swoop of Regent Street were the creation of social rather than aesthetic engineering. Within these constraints, Nash planned the street itself as one cohesive piece of architecture, giving the Quadrant, the swoop, a columned, arcaded walkway on both sides, lit from above by long skylights, to create an area for prosperous loungers and window-shoppers. Where Regent Street and Portland Place meet, before the straight run up to the Park, there is a kink in the road, caused by the refusal of a landowner to sell. Nash solved the problem by creating the little round All Soul's Church, its shape echoing his two circuses \u2013 the Regent's Circus (today's Piccadilly Circus) and Oxford Circus \u2013 along the new street.\n\nMarylebone Gardens was then redeveloped into Regent's Park. From the beginning, the Crown's plan \u2013 to create a countrified retreat for the Prince Regent's aristocratic friends, with middle-class housing in terraces surrounding the park \u2013 caused outrage. In Parliament, Lord Brougham denounced the Crown for 'trenching on the comfort of the poor for the accommodation of the rich'. Both Nash and the Surveyor General of the Crown Lands were shareholders in the company that was constructing the Regent's Canal, and both parties stood to make a profit from the enclosure of land to which the public had previously had access. Popular disgust forced the Crown to throw open 510 acres of land to the public, rather than constructing houses on it to be sold for its own profit. After peace with France was declared in 1815, a slump in the market led to the number of houses planned in the park diminishing from forty to twenty-six, then to eight, while the number of terraces around the park similarly dwindled; the prince's pavilion was never even begun, and one of the two barracks planned was replaced by a zoo. At the same time plans for the great ceremonial route at the south end of Regent Street began to go awry. Nash had expected the full-stop there to be Carlton House, with the spire of St Margaret's and Westminster Hall in the distance: royal, ecclesiastical and governmental power seen in a single glance. But in 1820 the Prince Regent became George IV and moved to Buckingham Palace, previously the residence of Queen Charlotte, the wife of George II, who had died in 1818, the year before her husband. Carlton House was demolished and Nash created on its site Carlton Gardens and Carlton House Terrace, and, from these streets a set of stairs leading down to the Mall and to St James's Park.\n\nIt took time before Nash's great creation was appreciated, much less admired. In the 1820s, an American tourist thought that 'Never, perhaps, was there so much bad taste displayed' as in Regent Street: 'everyone' agreed the buildings were 'preposterous'. Henry Vizetelly, the journalist and publisher, remembered the verses that had gone around in his childhood, when Nash's white stucco-fronted buildings were still startlingly new:\n\nAugustus at Rome was for building renowned,\n\nAnd of marble he left what of brick he had found.\n\nBut is not our Nash, too, a very great master? \u2013\n\nHe finds us all brick and he leaves us all plaster!\n\nYet only a decade later, Regent Street was proclaimed 'one of the great routes' of the world, with 'an air of great magnificence'.\n\nThe discussion over access to Regent's Park was the first of the century, and it set in motion what in 1833 became a Parliamentary Select Committee, inquiring 'into the means of providing Open Spaces in the vicinity of populous towns as public walks and Places of Exercise'. North of Regent's Park, the open land at Primrose Hill was under threat from developers; the Select Committee recommended that fifty-eight acres be acquired for public recreation, to become the only public green space between Regent's Park and the East End. There was one park in Lambeth, south of the river, apart from Kennington Common, which was still unenclosed; north of the Thames the committee recommended that Copenhagen Fields be purchased (it later became Hackney Downs). But change came about slowly. It was not until 1846 that Victoria Park was created: the first royal park established specifically for the public. Kennington Common was finally enclosed in 1852; Battersea Fields was purchased in 1846, although it was nearly a decade before the park opened, and Finsbury Park had to wait until 1857.\n\nHaving access to parks for recreation was seen as desirable for all. Victoria Park, in the East End, was, unusually, designed for the working classes as well as in part by them: they had had some say in what facilities would be on offer, ensuring that a bathing pond was provided so that working men could cool off on their way home from work. In the more westerly, more fashionable parks, different provisions were made. The prosperous liked a ride or a carriage drive on this stylish route: slowly along Regent Street to see who was out; then up to the zoo, before heading for Hyde Park, where 'they join the press of carriages and riders crowding in hundreds about Kensington Gardens'. For those who kept neither horses nor carriages, walking in parks and green spaces was a regular feature of a happy bourgeois life. Leonard Wyon, engraver to the Royal Mint, recorded in his diary his quiet suburban life's many variations on this theme: 'walked through Regents Park to town', 'Walked for sometime...in Ladbroke Square Gardens', 'a short walk on the Kensall [sic] Green in the evening', 'walk to Hampstead Fields'. For many like Wyon, Sundays in the parks were enlivened by bands playing, and the numbers of those who went to listen are astonishing: on one Sunday in September 1855, 48,841 people were counted in Kensington Gardens, even though a heavy rain shower had stopped the performance; the previous week it had been 60,000. At the last concert of the summer season in 1856 in Regent's Park, 200,000 were said to have attended.\n\nIn the first decades of the century, the emphasis had been on ceremonial spaces. A subsidiary project, however, beginning as the humbly named 'West Strand Improvements', unexpectedly created a new focus to London altogether, eclipsing St Paul's as the ceremonial and mapping centre point of the city: Trafalgar Square. Before the railway arrived, Charing Cross had for centuries been the entry to Whitehall and thus to court and government, marked by a sculpture of Charles I on horseback. Nash's original 1812 report had expressed the hope that, one day, 'Every length of street would be terminated by a fa\u00e7ade of beautiful architecture.' 'To add to the beauty of the approach from Westminster', he suggested that either 'a Square or Crescent...might be built round the Equestrian Statue', to give 'a magnificent and beautiful termination of the street from Westminster'.\n\nInitially, only modest changes were outlined. The King's Mews, the stable that served the royal household, had been on the site in some form for five centuries (Chaucer had once been employed there as a clerk of the works). It sprawled massively, from Charing Cross up to the south side of Leicester Square. Other buildings occupying the site included the Golden Cross Hotel, the coaching inn from which Mr Pickwick set out on his adventures; a workhouse, a barracks and a cemetery. In addition, fronting a narrow and rather squalid lane, lay the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields and, behind it, a desperate warren of courts and lanes. The entire south side of the Strand was taken up by Northumberland House, the great Tudor palace belonging to the Duke of Northumberland, its gardens extending all the way to the river. Over its entrance was one of the landmarks of the city, a lion with its tail stiffly raised to the breeze, like 'the pigtail of an old sailor'. (When Northumberland House was demolished in 1874, the lion was moved to Syon House in Chiswick, where it lurks over the back elevation, a sad comedown from the days when an entire city passed beneath its gaze.) North of what is now the Admiralty building lay shops and exhibition spaces, a chapel and several large private houses, including Gun House, named for the two cannon, trophies from the battle of Salamanca, that sat on the front lawn.\n\nBy 1800, most of the leases were due to expire, and the king was planning a new stables in Pimlico; like the Regent Street development, it appeared the perfect opportunity for some civic improvements. The earliest plans sought to widen the Strand here, to create 'a more convenient communication between East and West ends of town'. But Nash never thought small, and he hoped to create 'a large splendid quadrangle...the West side of which would be formed by the College of Physicians and the Union Club House; the East side would correspond with that already existing; namely the grand portico of St. Martin's Church; and on the Northern side a new line of buildings would be erected'. He was of the view that a building to house the Royal Academy might sit nicely in the centre of the square, but others wanted an open piazza.\n\nNorthumberland House, the last great Jacobean palace in London, filled the south side of the Strand until its demolition in 1874. The lion over the entrance was one of the city's landmarks long before Nelson's Column was erected almost directly opposite.\n\nWhile this was being discussed, in 1826 the southernmost section of St Martin's Lane, which ran down to Northumberland House, was demolished, opening up space in front of the church. The graveyard was moved out of the district, and a new street, named Duncannon (after the soon-to-be Chief Commissioner of the Office of Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Works and Public Buildings), was pushed through at an angle between St Martin's Lane and the Strand. This had the effect of clearing a small section of the larger slum, as well as creating an exit route for carriages. At the same time, a new road, Pall Mall East, was built to give a vista from Pall Mall to St Martin-in-the-Fields.\n\nThree years later, the houses all along the north side of the Strand, from Charing Cross to Exeter Change, together with a gallery of shops and a menagerie, were razed, while the south side of the Strand remained a jumble of old buildings. That area (under what is now the Savoy hotel, Shell-Mex House and the surrounding buildings) had once been the grounds of a palace, then successively a charitable hospital under Henry VII, a barracks and, finally, a prison for deserters. It was hedged around with coal wharves and a few private houses, all blighted by a curious legal anomaly. In the thirteenth century, the Duchy of Lancaster had been made an independent Palatinate. As a result the landowner, the Duke of Lancaster, rather than the British government, was the ruler of this little patch, where the laws of the United Kingdom did not apply. This created an 'Alsatia' (after Alsace, that ambiguous borderland ruled alternately by France and Germany), a refuge for criminals who could not be arrested because British law had no remit there. In 1816, the hospital, long closed, was demolished, leaving as its only trace a 'triple flight of steps (Savoy-steps)' down to the river, and its chapel, which burnt down in 1864. Between the Savoy and the Temple Gardens stood what David Copperfield referred to as 'an old Roman bath...in which I have had many a cold plunge'.\n\nAs the north side of the Strand was being 'improved', Nash was demolishing the King's Mews and some 'vile houses' near by in order to create a vista up Whitehall to what was agreed would become the National Gallery's new home (at the time it was still located in the founder-donor's house in Pall Mall). Nash proposed a design for that building, but was passed over in favour of the architect William Wilkins, who had already built the University Club House on the north-west corner of what was to be Trafalgar Square. His National Gallery was finished in 1838, to much derision at the time and ever since. It was not helped by a thrifty piece of governmental recycling, which forced Wilkins to reuse the columns from the recently demolished Carlton House. The front elevation of the Gallery, however, is seen from a low viewpoint, as the south side of Trafalgar Square drops away quite sharply, while the vantage point for viewing Carlton House was from rising ground. Wilkins had planned to raise the south side of the square, but Charles Barry, who completed the work after Wilkins' death, failed to incorporate this part of his scheme.\n\nAlthough by 1835 it had been agreed that the new square was to be named 'Trafalgar' in commemoration of the 1805 naval victory, it was not until 1837 that it was agreed that this was the right place for the 'Nelson Testimonial', and even then no one could decide what form the tribute was to take. The Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel headed a committee to look at the proposals: one suggested a ninety-foot trident; another had Nelson balanced on a thirty-foot-high globe, surrounded by the figures of Fame, Neptune, Victory and Britannia. Another presented the idea of a cenotaph, with Nelson's gaze fixed on three mermaids who, in the words of two contemporary historians, were 'apparently playing water-polo'. The vast scale of the square made any statue based on human proportions virtually invisible, while a larger monument would block the view up Whitehall. So the tall thin colonnade by William Railton, an architect who was otherwise best known for designing vicarages, was chosen \u2013 and immediately decried: the column was too small for the statue, according to some; columns were to hold up buildings, not manikins, claimed others; it destroyed the vista, and so on. Even Nelson's bicorne hat was condemned: the public, it was said, had an image of the man 'as most frequently we see him [in engravings], bare-headed'.\n\nToday Nelson's hat is his most characteristic feature, in part because head coverings have now vanished so completely that those of other times are more noticeable. It is difficult to bear in mind the importance of hats as not only markers of class and income, but also as indicators of respectability. Sala commented that 'every' man throughout the history of the world 'must, necessarily and habitually, wear some kind of covering to his head'. Postmen wore hats, small children wore hats, field labourers and market gardeners wore hats, cricketers, skaters \u2013 all sportsmen \u2013 wore hats. It was, self-evidently, impossible to go outdoors without one. When Jonas Chuzzlewit slips out of the house in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , in order to commit murder, 'he had purposely left his own [hat] up-stairs': if his hat was in the house, it indicated he must be too \u2013 alibi by hat. Those in professional occupations wore pot hats, as did clerks and all those with pretensions to middle-class status. Even doctors' delivery boys wore battered hand-me-down pot hats: 'the nap rusty, the band a mournful strip of tarnished lace; but still a Hat', which 'stamps him as being associated, in however slender a manner, with a learned profession'. Cloth caps were for labourers, for costers and for boys. One journalist in the 1880s, watching some men being released from prison, observed 'A big bullet-headed fellow' lurking until a friend in the crowd threw him a cap, which he carefully put on before he acknowledged his waiting family. Artisans wore caps made out of paper, which they folded themselves and so could easily replace as they became dirty. Dickens frequently passes social comments by indicating the condition of a cap. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , a drunken, violent artisan wears a 'tarnished' paper cap, revealing his character, as he hasn't even bothered to make himself a clean one.\n\nWork in Trafalgar Square continued for decades. The fountains were installed in the 1840s, after artesian wells were bored in Hemmings Row (now Orange Street, behind the National Gallery), which supplied the fountains themselves, as well as the Houses of Parliament, the government offices, Buckingham Palace and St James's Palace. (By the following decade the fountains had become, according to one novel, the street urchins' bathing spot, despite a 'film of soot and grease floating on the surface of the water'.) In 1843, the statue of Nelson, seventeen feet high, arrived at Charing Cross, and 100,000 people were said to have come to have a look at it before it was installed on its pedestal. Ten years later, however, the reliefs around the base of the column had still not been completed and, with the fiftieth anniversary of Nelson's death on the horizon, the newspapers were scathing. Had they but known, ten years later Landseer's lions would not be in position either, with the Commissioner of Public Works forced to admit 'he was sorry to say that he could not tell what Sir Edwin Landseer was about'.\n\nFinally, in January 1867, Arthur Munby, walking past, 'saw the first pair of Landseer's lions...One of them had arrived yesterday, & was already in its place: the other had just come...Both were cased all over in white Calico, tightly wrapt; through which their proportions showed visibly grand and massive.' That was about as much of an arrival ceremony as they received. Everyone was so tired of the subject that the only people who gathered there for the unveiling were Lord John Manners, as Commissioner of Works, Landseer himself, Baron Marochetti, who had cast the sculptures, and a few unnamed 'other gentlemen'. Manners twitched the covers off, the sculptures were inspected and that was that.\n\nWhile the reality \u2013 the physical construction \u2013 had become a boring, endless story, the _idea_ of Trafalgar Square now epitomized London, and the Nelson Column epitomized the square. When the playwright Dion Boucicault wanted to create a single image to stand for 'London' in _The Streets of London_ , it was Trafalgar Square he chose: 'with its lighted lamps, its Nelson Column, its gleaming windows of Northumberland House'. This great street space had become part of everyone's outdoor sitting room.\n\nOne of the most popular ways to spend one's leisure hours was in a tea garden attached to a pub or tavern. In the 1830s, Dickens described the many tea gardens spread across London, and their mostly lower-middle-class customers: 'Gentlemen, in alarming waistcoats, and steel watch-guards, promenading about, three abreast...[and] ladies, with great, long, white pocket-handkerchiefs like small table-cloths, in their hands, chasing one another on the grass'. They drank ginger beer and tea, ate winkles and shrimps, and had a fine time. The Eagle pub on the City Road offered 'beautifully gravelled and planted' walks, outdoor wooden 'refreshment-boxes', or booths, and was brightly lit in the evenings for dancing to 'a Moorish band playing at one end of the gardens \u2013 and an opposition military band playing away at the other'. Highbury Barn could even boast that customers danced on a 'crystal platform'. In _Little Dorrit_ , Old Nandy, the workhouse resident, dreams that when his ship comes in he will 'take a noble lodging' in a tea garden for his entire family, living happily 'all the rest of their lives, attended on by the waiter'.\n\nSimilar social groups patronized public houses in what had recently been outlying villages but were soon reached first by the short-stage, later by omnibuses or railway for weekend outings. Mrs Bardell \u2013 Mr Pickwick's landlady, who lives in Goswell Road, in Islington \u2013 goes on jaunts to Hampstead Heath; Hornsey Wood was another favourite place for a walk, for picnics, or a visit to a pub or an eel-pie house. Those with access to 'vans, coaches, carts, &c., &c.' might go to Epping 'and enjoy their beer and long pipes at High Beech or the Roebuck' pubs. By mid-century, 'The vehicular movement is prodigious...Four-wheelers, out for the day, abound. Here it is the comfortable tradesman who has been drudging all week...who on Sunday...takes his wife and children to Hampton Court or Beulah Spa'. It might equally be 'the greengrocer' who 'drives his Missus out in the spring cart which during the week...fetch[ed] the homely cabbage...from Covent Garden Market', while 'A group of clerks hires a dog-cart to drive down to Staines'. With more visitors being transported by rail, the Old Welsh Harp in Hendon, on the Brent Reservoir, became accessible to day-trippers and was renovated in 1856, complete with the gardens, dancing and concerts that were now expected, plus fishing, pigeon shooting and more countrified pastimes. Such was its customer base that the Midland Railway found it economically sensible to open a nearby station, also named the Welsh Harp, for the area's main attraction.\n\nAll along the river, from Rotherhithe to Deptford and then on to Greenwich, 'a whole riverside full of tea-gardens' could be found flourishing. 'Here come, emphatically, the public; the working, toiling, sweating, patient' people with their families, out for a day's river excursion.\n\nThe river had long provided amusement. In _Great Expectations_ , set in the 1820s, once Pip becomes prosperous he takes up sculling as a suitably gentlemanly pastime, something Dickens himself had done as a young man when he could afford it. Those with less cash went to riverside pubs such as the Dolphin and Swan taverns, both at Hungerford market, where customers 'used to drink and smoke, and pick periwinkles', sitting on the roof terraces and tossing pennies to mudlarks. Numerous regattas were held; occasionally there might be swimming matches (one, from London Bridge to Greenwich, in a week when 678 Londoners died of cholera). More commonly, rowing competitions, often for professional watermen, offered prizes by 'the ladies and gentlemen' of the neighbourhood. In the 1840s, a Thames Watermen's Royal Regatta was a two-day event, while even after the Great Stink of 1858 two single scullers raced for the 'championship of the Thames' between Putney and Mortlake, watched by passengers from a dozen steamers, as well as from the banks, 'the trees being almost borne down by their living weight'. In addition there were the one-off events. In 1844, a clown from Astley's theatre announced he would make his voyage downriver from Vauxhall to Westminster Bridge in a washing-tub pulled by four geese. The crowd that turned out to watch 'was very great', lining the road past the new Houses of Parliament down Millbank, while across the river wharves and barges were filled with spectators. More followed his progress from boats that accompanied the clown, in full clown-suit, as he travelled downriver (having scheduled his trip so that he was more or less floated along by the tide).\n\nMany amusements were to be found on the banks of the river. Middle-class men had long been accustomed to jaunts to Greenwich to eat fish dinners, the Trafalgar Tavern being the most famous destination. The arrival of steamers made that treat available to greater numbers, so that by the 1850s various river suburbs vied for custom. In Blackwall, Lovegrove's, the Brunswick or the Artichoke were the places to go. Other favoured establishments were the Star and Garter in Richmond, or inns at Hampton Court, Mortlake, Staines, Ouseley, Chertsey or Gravesend. Edmund Yates remembered that, in the 1850s on a Sunday, 'a serried phalanx of fifty or sixty...carriages, drags, barouches, cabriolets, broughams and hansoms' stood waiting outside the numerous hotels that specialized in these dinners. The type of transport is an indication of the diners' considerable financial resources.\n\nFish dinners were often organized by professional men to forge professional bonds, as well as pass a pleasant evening. Twenty pupils and assistants of the architect Sir Charles Barry gave such a dinner in 1850, with Sir Charles as the guest of honour, 'on the occasion of their forming a society or club among themselves for the purpose of continuing or increasing the[ir] friendship...and to evince their appreciation of the high talent of Mr. Barry'. The importance the participants placed on the gatherings can be seen from the fact that in 1854, during the Crimean War, cabinet ministers Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, Lord Canning, Lord Stanley and even Sidney Herbert, then the Secretary at War, still turned out for their annual fish dinner at Greenwich.\n\nIn 1842, a dinner was given for Dickens at the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich, to mark his return from America. The dinner took very much the standard form, in which over two dozen men ate turtle soup and whitebait, with Frederick Marryat (author of _Mr Midshipman Easy_ and _The Children of the New Forest_ ) in the chair, and the journalist William Jerdan his vice-chair. They sang in chorus and then each man did a solo turn, whether a comic skit, an impression, a recitation or a song. They toasted 'the Boz', who returned his thanks with a speech. The Revd Richard Barham (author of _The Ingoldsby Legends_ ) and the illustrator George Cruikshank then sang again. 'Mrs Boz', who was of course not present, was toasted, followed by more songs and more toasts, before all shook hands in friendship. This was an event involving the upper middle classes, taking place in private; but publicly Dickens also sent his financially stretched lower-middle-class characters for riverside dinners on special occasions. In _Our Mutual Friend_ , Bella Wilfer and her father, a poor clerk, sneak away for a day out to Greenwich, where they eat 'dishes of fish'; when she marries the ostensibly poor John Rokesmith, this is where they return for the wedding breakfast.\n\nOnce steamer fares dropped, the trip itself became the focus of the day for many. Steamers ran from London Bridge (sometimes Westminster) to Gravesend, or nearby Rosherville, or Greenwich. In the late 1860s, the journalist James Ritchie described a jaunt to Sheerness and back in the _Princess Alice_. They left London Bridge at 10.30, and, as they went downriver, everyone had 'a good dinner on board, well served and at a very moderate price', supplemented by tea and shrimps later. Ritchie (who had a temperance streak) disapproved of the 'unnecessary demand for beer' and judged that 'smoking may be carried to excess', but added patronizingly that it was, after all, only a 'little wildness'. The 700 or 800 excursionists then spent an hour and a half in Sheerness before the return journey, with a band and dancing on board, before reaching London Bridge again at 9 p.m. Dickens himself chartered a steamer as late as 1860, going from Blackwall to Southend and back with a group of friends for a day on the river.\n\nBut throughout the period, the main destination remained Greenwich. In the summer, people went there for the fish dinners, or the park, or the Observatory, or the many taverns, or simply for pleasant walks. At Easter, however, it was Greenwich Fair that drew the masses. Fairs declined through the first half of the century and in many cases ceased to exist as major civic events. In 1819, _Leigh's New Picture of London_ listed eighty-six fair-days in nearly thirty locations around London. '[E]stablishments so popular, and so productive of honest joy,' it foresaw, 'will never be discountenanced by a wise legislature.' By the 1839 edition of the same guidebook, the sole surviving fair in central London was Bartholomew Fair, and 'this antique nuisance' was, the author shrugged in disdain, now a display of 'flagrant evils'.\n\nBartholomew Fair was held in Smithfield, with the market space 'entirely parcelled out in booths and standings'. In the centre were sellers of oysters and sausages, surrounded by rows of exhibitions; on the pavements behind were sellers of gilt gingerbread, a Barts speciality, and toys. At the beginning of the century, a number of major shows returned annually: Wombwell's Wild Beast Show, and his competitor Atkins, Ballard's Menagerie, Astley's and Clark's Equestrian Shows and Abraham Saunders' theatre troupe (as a child Edmund Kean was said to have appeared with Saunders, but this was probably a myth). Richardson's, Gyngell's and Scowton's theatres also mounted yearly productions, plus 'the usual variety of conjurors, wire-dancers, giants, dwarfs, fat children, learned pigs'. The stalls that housed these shows were vast \u2013 some twenty-five feet long, and all at least seven feet high \u2013 and they lined the streets for hundreds of yards around the square. But although the fair continued to be accorded prime status \u2013 it was opened by the City's Lord Mayor each year \u2013 by 1848 there were only three gingerbread stalls, 'a few beggarly stalls for the sale of oysters and fruit', and nothing else.\n\nWith the help of the steamers, Greenwich Fair maintained its status for longer. In 1838, when Bartholomew's Fair still drew 100,000 visitors, Greenwich attracted only half the number, dispersed over a much larger space, with the park covering more than two miles. Yet Bartholomew Fair's visitors eventually vanished, while Greenwich's returned every year. From the landing stage to the park gates, the 'road is bordered on either side with stalls, games, and hand-waggons, containing goods or refreshments'. In 1838, about forty stalls alone offered a variety of amusements, such as 'the holes and the sticks' game, in which a prize (a penknife, a snuffbox) was balanced on a staff, and for a penny participants got three sticks to try to knock them down. If that didn't appeal, there were sellers of 'Waterloo crackers and detonating balls...percussion guns, to shoot with at targets for nuts', or sellers of those rattles known as 'All the Fun of the Fair' (see p. 153). At the upper park gates were fortune-tellers and donkey rides, leading to a thoroughfare of orange stalls, food stalls, toy stalls and, to the puzzlement of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, a large number of weighing machines, leading him to speculate that perhaps Englishmen wanted to know 'how solid and physically ponderous they are'. There were also roundabouts and swings, waxworks, peep-shows, freak-shows and shows with learned animals that counted, or knew the alphabet. Then came a row of theatre booths, with drummer boys, or 'brawny fighting-men', or jugglers, or 'posture-makers' (contortionists and acrobats), performing outside to draw the crowds.\n\nMany other Greenwich amusements were both self-generated and free: the young and 'even staid men and women' rolled down One Tree Hill 'in giggling avalanches'; oranges were thrown at passers-by and were in 'nowise to be resented, except by returning the salute'. The favourite pastime was Kiss in the Ring: 'A ring is formed...into the centre of which steps an adventurous youth', who leads a girl to the centre, where he 'salutes her on the lips, and retires', while the girl then does the same with another boy, and so on. Sometimes a girl threw a handkerchief into the ring, and the boy who caught it was permitted to kiss her, 'always politely raising his hat at the critical instant'. At dusk the bands started to play, and by ten o'clock the dancing booths were filled to bursting.\n\nBoth day and night, people danced, and ate, and drank. The road to the fair was lined with booths selling gingerbread, brandy snaps, shellfish, eels \u2013 'pickled, stewed, and in pies' \u2013 puddings, cold fried fish and oysters ('in June!' shuddered one fastidious reporter). Outdoor eating, eating in the streets, was, after all, what most people did, most of the time.\n\n#### 11.\n\n#### FEEDING THE STREETS\n\nThe eight-year-old David Copperfield, alone and adrift in London, buys his meals as most other working men, women and children did: on the street. He has a penny loaf and a pennyworth of milk for breakfast; with supper another penny loaf 'and a modicum of cheese'. On his way to work he passes 'the stale pastry put out for sale at half-price at the pastrycooks' doors', which he finds difficult to resist, even though it makes a large dent in 'the money I should have kept for my dinner'. If he succumbs, he either goes without his dinner, or reduces it to a roll or a slice of pudding (a suet and flour savoury dish, which survives as Yorkshire pudding, rather than today's sweet dishes). 'I remember two pudding shops, between which I was divided, according to my finances.' One puts currants in its puddings, and therefore charges double the price of the ordinary pudding, which is 'stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby'. Nonetheless, 'many a day did I dine off it'. On days when he rejects the allurements of the stale pastry, he has enough to dine 'handsomely' on a saveloy, or cold sausage \u2013 salami \u2013 and another penny loaf, or 'a fourpenny plate of red beef from a cook's shop; or a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house opposite our place of business...Once, I remember carrying my own bread (which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped in a piece of paper...to a famous alamode beef-house [see p. 296] near Drury Lane, and ordering a \"small plate\" of that delicacy to eat with it.' When in funds, David buys coffee and bread and butter from a coffee stall for his tea; otherwise he makes do with looking at the butchers' shops and the markets. 'I know,' he says simply, 'if a shilling were given me...I spent it in a dinner or a tea.'\n\nEven for street urchins, therefore, the range of street food was wide and merged imperceptibly into indoor dining \u2013 taking one's own food to places where other items were prepared, or buying food outdoors that was then taken indoors to be eaten. A fair-sized section of the street-selling population devoted itself to prepared food, and much of it was available virtually round the clock, from pre-dawn breakfasts to post-theatre and post-drinking sandwiches and oysters.\n\nThose selling cooked shellfish on the streets started early, to buy their stocks and prepare them. Hot eels, which were cheap and, because of their gelatinous consistency, filling, were a favourite of labourers and those who worked outdoors. The sellers bought the eels at Billingsgate; then their wives cut them in small pieces and boiled them, thickening the cooking water with flour and flavouring it with parsley and spices. This stew was sold in halfpenny cupfuls, with a dash of vinegar and pepper, from about 10.30 in the morning to about ten at night. Boys were the hot-eel sellers' most regular customers, and so popular was the dish that most sellers did not even have to shout their wares; the ones who did called, 'Nice hot eels \u2013 nice hot eels!' or 'Warm your hands and fill your bellies for a halfpenny!' Whelk sellers also began their preparations early: the whelks were boiled, drained, then covered with more boiling water and stirred with a broom handle to clean out the mud and dirt, and also make it easier to 'worm' them \u2013 remove the digestive tract \u2013 without damaging the shell. Having been shaken up in cold water, they were ready to set out in little saucers, for between two and eight whelks for a penny. Children were also the main customers for crab claws, which the sellers bought at Billingsgate and boiled up in the yards of their lodgings.\n\nOysters were legendary as a poor man's food. In _The Pickwick Papers_ , Sam Weller says sagely, 'poverty and oysters always seem to go together...the poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters...Blessed if I don't think that ven a man's wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings, and eats oysters in reg'lar desperation.' Many costers did a daily round selling fruit and vegetables, later adding another round of oysters, purchasing a bushel at a time and going to poor neighbourhoods. After 6 p.m., when workers were walking home, the sellers shifted to the main streets to sell them a snack at the end of their workday. Alfred Bennett remembered many improvised corner stalls in his childhood, selling four oysters for a penny, 'opened, vinagared and peppered'. Monday was the best day, when workers still had their wages from Saturday; as the week progressed, business steadily declined.\n\nFrom March to October, wink men also purchased their stock at Billingsgate, where they could have their periwinkles prepared for them by the dealer for an extra 4d a week. Periwinkles were profitable, and wink men made up to 12s a week in summer, but in winter, when winkles were out of season and they switched to mussels and whelks, their income dropped to about 5s a week. The wink men had one of the most eccentric cries, calling, 'Winketty-winketty-wink-wink-wink \u2013 wink-wink \u2013 wicketty-wicketty-wink \u2013 fine fresh winketty-winks wink wink'. Servant girls were good customers, the wink men said: 'It's reckoned a nice present from a young man to his sweetheart.' Old people too 'that lives by themselves...and [have] nothing to do pertickler' also favoured winks, as extracting each one with a pin was 'a pleasant way of making time long over a meal'.\n\nAmong the most popular prepared-food sellers were the hot-potato men, who began to sell in the streets from the 1830s. The potatoes were cooked in bulk in cookshops (see p. 291), for a fee of 9d for a hundredweight (112 pounds), and were then transferred in smaller quantities to a portable tin box with legs, square or oval, and sometimes brightly polished, sometimes cheerfully painted. A few had brass ornaments, or were even solid brass, with patriotic names emblazoned on them as if they were steam engines: 'The Royal Union Jack', 'The Royal George' and 'The Prince of Wales'. They had a hinged lid and a charcoal fire at the bottom under the main compartment to keep the potatoes hot, with a small pipe for the escaping steam. A recess on one side held salt, one on the other butter. The hot-potato season was August to April, and the hours of darkness were the best selling-time: one vendor told Mayhew that at ten o'clock on any given night he could walk down any street in the Borough in south London, a notoriously impoverished district, and sell 3s worth \u2013 thirty-six potatoes \u2013 right away.\n\nHot-potato men sold their wares from tin containers, the potatoes being kept warm by the charcoal fire underneath. The men expected to sell several dozen a night, so it is unsurprising that this illustrator stressed how heavy the containers were.\n\nEqually popular were the muffin men, who patrolled the middle-class suburbs around teatime, ringing their small bells (except on Sundays: they still patrolled then but went bell-less on the Sabbath). They carried their goods in oilskin-covered baskets wrapped in flannel or green-baize lining to retain the heat, either over their arms or on their heads. Muffin men were young boys or old men \u2013 that is, those who could not earn a better living in some other trade \u2013 for the muffins generally came from one manufacturer, and his 'lads' had to pay for their own uniform of white sleeves and white apron, as well as the basket, blanket and bell. (Among the few sellers to carry goods on their heads, they wore caps rather than hats.) They received 3d for every 1s-worth of muffins they sold, and they could carry only a single shilling's-worth before the muffins got cold. Given those geographical and physical limitations, and the fact that most people bought muffins only at teatime, being a muffin man was not profitable.\n\nNeither was being a pieman. These men either had fixed pitches, or were flying piemen, walking the streets carrying a tray about three feet square, either on their heads or hanging from a strap around their necks. In the 1840s, the Corn Laws kept the price of flour high and, with it, the cost of pies. To maintain their price at the expected penny, the piemen were forced to scrimp: their pies were made with cheap shortening, or had less filling, or poor-quality meat. Many of the legends of cats'-meat, or worse, in pies spring from this period. In 1833, Sam Weller advises the horrified Mr Pickwick, 'Wery good thing is weal pie, when you...is quite sure it ain't kittens,' but in summer 'fruits is in, cats is out'. The legend of Sweeney Todd, the barber who murdered customers for his neighbour to bake into pies, was also created in the Hungry Forties. Even the repeal of the Corn Laws did not help, because once flour became cheaper, pie shops began to open, which damaged the street-trade of the piemen even further.\n\nTheir customer base became confined almost entirely to boys, who worked in the streets, eating coffee-stall breakfasts, shellfish at lunch, hot eels or pea soup for dinner, perhaps with a potato, and a pie to fill in the gaps when they could afford it. What the boys loved about piemen was their method of charging. A pie cost a penny, but all piemen were willing to toss a coin for one: if the customer won, he got the pie free; if the pieman won, the pieman kept both pie and penny. Tossing for a pie was part of the language. Dickens used it regularly: in _Pickwick Papers_ the stagecoach driver warns his passengers: 'Take care o' the archvay, gen'lm'n. \"Heads,\" as the pieman says'. In _David Copperfield_ , little Miss Mowcher is like 'a goblin pieman' as she tosses up the two half-crowns she is paid, as did Montague Tigg in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , spinning a coin 'in the air after the manner of a pieman'.\n\nPies were available all year round, but some foodstuffs were sold seasonally. Greenwich's Easter Fair saw the last of the men selling hot green peas, which they ladled out of a tin pot into basins in halfpenny servings, alongside other dishes that remained popular for longer: pickled salmon '(fennel included)', oysters, whelks and that fairground favourite, gingernuts. Fried fish, although becoming more popular in town, especially near pubs, was still mostly considered a racecourse delicacy. At Epsom in 1850 there were fifty fried-fish sellers, whose customers were mostly the boys who held the carriage-horses' heads and did odd jobs, or were themselves sellers of other goods. Fried-fish sellers charged a penny for a piece of fish and a slice of bread, sold from newspaper-lined trays that hung from straps around their necks.\n\nSome vendors set up on Sundays at working-class excursion spots, such as Hornsey Wood House, or on roads near pubs in the suburbs. Gooseberries or pottles of strawberries were popular on steamer excursions downriver to Greenwich on a summer Sunday too: 'the working-people's Sunday dessert', they were sometimes called. The seller's cry for strawberries was, mysteriously, 'Hoboys!' and was a sign summer had arrived.\n\nMany drinks, naturally, were seasonal. Hot elder wine was sold in the winter in penny and halfpenny measures, with a small piece of toast alongside, to dip into the wine. This, said one street seller, appealed to the working classes, 'but not the better order of them'. Peppermint water, too, was a winter drink: it was mint extract, purchased from a chemist, and diluted, sometimes with pepper added to give it more kick. Curds-and-whey sellers were occasionally still seen after the 1820s, although their drink was considered old-fashioned. There were also a few sellers of rice milk, which was four quarts of milk boiled to every pound of rice, sweetened and flavoured with allspice, and served hot, a cup for a penny. The customers for this were the very poor, who substituted it for a meal.\n\nThe weather had an effect on many other food and drink sellers' trades. Cold weather obviously improved the chances of selling warming items like pea soup or pease pudding. One freezing winter, the young George Sanger, living with his showman father in the off-season, bought sugar and oil of peppermint, borrowed some pans to boil it up in and made peppermint rock to sell to the skaters on Bow Common and Hackney Marshes at a penny a lump, making several shillings' profit in a few hours. Spring and summer brought the arrival of cooling drinks. Outside Rag Fair, in Houndsditch in the East End in the 1850s, a girl with 'a horse-pail full of ice' was selling something that looked like 'frozen soap-suds' in halfpenny eggcup sizes. In the same decade, ice cream first appeared, initially sold by Italian vendors, later by hokey-pokey men who were natives of Whitechapel and New Cut, with 'Neapolitan' ices that were rumoured to be frozen mashed turnip.\n\nMore commonly available, outdoors as well as in, were ale, porter and stout, all sold by potboys employed by pubs and taverns. They walked the streets, smartly dressed in white aprons and white sleeves, usually carrying wooden frames divided lengthways into two compartments, into which they slotted their foaming cans, with a measuring jug hooked on the side, although some preferred long sticks with up to twenty cans dangling by their wire handles. On weekday evenings these boys had set routes to supply local residents with their supper beer, but householders could also call to a potboy as he passed, as Dick Swiveller does in _The Old Curiosity Shop_. In the 1830s, Dickens wrote that at teatime householders opened their doors 'and screamed out \"Muffins\" with all their might', before retreating indoors until nine o'clock, when a potboy's passing produced a repeat performance.\n\nAfter the beer was finished, the pots, which were the property of the pub, were hung on the house-railings outside, to be collected by the potboys early the following morning, just as the milkmaids collected their jugs from the same place. In _Nicholas Nickleby_ , there is one square in Soho that is almost entirely let out in lodgings, in which 'every doorway [is] blocked up and rendered nearly impassable by a motley collection of children and porter pots of all sizes, from the baby in arms and the half-pint pot, to the full-grown girl and half-gallon can'. Even in the shabby-genteel, upper-middle-class neighbourhood of Miss Tox, in _Dombey and Son_ , somewhere in a backstreet in Mayfair, 'the top of every rail...[is] decorated with a pewter-pot'.\n\nTheatres were lucrative places for night-time food selling: many street sellers either specialized in ready-made food for theatregoers, or they doubled up, working one line during the day and another at night. The Britannia theatre in the East End, a working-class house that seated nearly 4,000 people, had 'no drink supplied, beyond the contents of the porter-can', observed Dickens. However, 'Huge ham sandwiches, piled on trays like deal in a timber-yard, were handed about for sale to the hungry, and there was no stint of oranges, cakes, brandy-balls, or other similar refreshments.' Ham-sandwich sellers, wearing white aprons and white sleeves, and carrying trays or flat baskets covered with white cloths, also stood outside the theatres, often selling until 4 a.m. to those out on the town.\n\nAfter the theatres closed in the West End, many of the audiences in the 1850s headed for the ham-and-beef shop at the corner of Bow Street, calling out for ham, beef or 'German sausage sandwiches', 'half a pound of \"cold round\", or three-pennyworth of \"brisket\"'. It was possible to eat at the shop, but most people took their orders away, 'neatly rolled up in paper', to eat on the street or at home, as Martin Chuzzlewit did when he 'bought some cold beef, and ham, and French bread, and butter', returning to his tavern room to eat it. These shops served sandwiches and cold meat all day, with hot meals at set hours. In the 1820s, according to the fictional _Real Life in London_ , there was a chain of 'fourteen to twenty' ham and beef shops, where hot boiled beef and ham were available 'at moderate prices', and the offcuts were served to the less prosperous for a penny. By the 1840s and 1850s, this type of shop had window displays to tempt the hungry: a 'long window-board lined with pewter, in which wells had been sunk like small baths to receive the puddles of gravy in which joints of meat were perpetually steaming...[together with] a pagoda of boiled beef...pegged into a pile with a metal skewer'. For 2d, a helping was put into a piece of newspaper, or customers brought their own dishes, 'and those who have basins take gravy away'.\n\nOysters were sold on the street during the day, but at night oyster houses came into their own, after the dancing saloons closed between two and four in the morning, opening when ordinary hard-working people were going to bed. (There were also oyster houses in the City, but these were closed in the evenings.) In the 1850s, the oyster houses in the West End were scattered around the Haymarket, the red-light district, as well as in the Strand and close to the theatres and other late-night locations: at the Opera Colonnade by the Haymarket, on the corner of Leicester Square, in Rupert Street and Coventry Street, and near the Argyle Rooms, the Haymarket theatre and the Opera House. More were on Holborn, such as the one described by Dickens in 1835 as being 'on a magnificent scale', with 'a little red box with a green curtain', behind which the customers could sit and eat.\n\nIn the 1820s, the oyster houses had been designed mostly as retail outlets, looking very much like fishmongers, with either plate-glass windows revealing trays of oysters, or with an open hatch to the street and a slab for displaying oysters and other food to passers-by. By the 1850s and 1860s, the 'best shell fish shop in the metropolis' was Scott's Oyster House, at the north end of the Haymarket, which had a counter at the front and behind it a range of shellfish: lobster, prawns, crabs, mussels and periwinkles. The owner, his wife and three men served the customers, who either took the oysters away to eat elsewhere, stood at the counter and ate them then and there, or went to the back room, where 'clerks, swells, men about town, Englishmen and foreigners' all mixed. Upstairs was 'more select', as well as the haunt of women supposedly of dubious reputation. Some oyster houses were simpler: 'lobsters, crabs, pickled and kippered salmon, bloaters, and dried sprats' were sold to customers who stood at the counter, eating and drinking and then 'contentedly wip[ing] their hands on the jack-towel on its roller afterwards'.\n\nIn the daytime, there was a wider range of choices. There were taverns, public houses, eating houses, chophouses, ham-and-beef shops, alamode beef houses, oyster rooms, soup houses, pastry-cooks, cookshops and coffee houses. Some of these places overlapped in terms of what, and whom, they served, but most had a distinct profile. What is perhaps noticeably absent from this list is the restaurant, which did not emerge on the London eating scene until the 1860s. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ lists several usages before this date, but they all refer either to restaurants in Europe or compare English establishments with their European counterparts. Sala, for example, mentions the Haymarket 'restaurants' only to dismiss them as places where they give you things 'with French names'. Although initially all of these eating places seem not to be part of street life, their separation from the street was far more ambiguous than their names suggest.\n\nMost closely linked to street life were the pastry-cooks and the cookshops. Pastry-cooks supplied not just pastry but a variety of cooked dishes. When David Copperfield gives his first dinner party, the roast chicken, stewed beef, vegetables, cooked kidneys, sweet tart and jelly all come from the pastry-cook. Twenty years later, Dickens listed a similar range of food in an essay on how the day visitor in London managed to feed himself. (If it was a 'herself' who needed feeding, it was even more difficult.) In a pastry-cook's window, Dickens' visitor sees two old turtle-shells with 'SOUPS' painted on them, a dried-up sample meal spread out for display, and a box of stale or damaged cut-price pastry on a stool by the door. The welcome, warned Dickens, would be as glum and dispiriting as the display: every pastry-cook employed 'a young lady...whose gloomy haughtiness...announced a deep-seated grievance against society'. A couple of years later a guidebook was more positive, recommending pastry-cooks for 'a good cup of tea and a chop', adding that 'for a light meal, when you have a lady with you, there are several admirably conducted houses'.\n\nCookshops, or bakeshops, although they often carried the same foodstuffs as the pastry-cooks, were regarded as places for the working classes, because earlier in the century they were where the working classes, without access to kitchen ranges or even kitchens, took their food to be cooked in a communal oven. For a Sunday dinner, the housewife had an earthenware dish divided into two unequal parts; on one side she piled potatoes, with 'the modest joint' on top; into the other she poured the pudding batter before carrying it all to the cookshop in the early morning and collecting it a few hours later. Thomas Wright, the working-class engineer, disapproved of cookshops: the 'meat [is] burnt to a cinder outside, and red raw inside; and pies [have] scorched crusts and uncooked insides', not to mention the fact that the joints were returned with 'the marks of slicing', as part of the meat had been shaved off by the cookshop owners, or 'the print of the knife that has been used in lifting the tops of the pies, in order to toll the inside'. Happy were the artisans' families who did not need to resort to the cookshop, but they were few and far between. Cookshops did their best business on Sundays, and on Christmas Day Dickens made a habit of going to the 'shabby genteel' neighbourhoods of Somers Town and Kentish Town at Christmas to 'watch...the dinners' coming and going.\n\nFor the rest of the week, and the rest of the year, cookshops sold ready-cooked food, either to be eaten on the premises, or to be taken home. In _Little Dorrit_ , there is 'a dirty shop window in a dirty street, which was made almost opaque by the steam of hot meats, vegetables, and puddings...Within, were a few wooden partitions, behind which [sat] such customers as found it more convenient to take away their dinners in stomachs than in their hands.' Beef, veal, ham, greens, potatoes and pudding were a typical menu. In Bethnal Green in the 1860s, offal was also available, with cows' heels and baked sheep's heads, which a family might eat on Saturday night, as well as food to supply 'the immediate wants' of passers-by: the same list of stodge-heavy offerings of puddings, pastry, pies and saveloys that David Copperfield had enumerated four decades earlier. For the main thing was to stave off the ever-present hunger. One street boy remembered a cookshop by Billingsgate market that specialized in pea soup, 'exposed most temptingly in a large tank in one of the windows'. The soup cost 3d a basin, or 1d for a half-basin, and the 'initiate' chose his day carefully: 'It was freshly made on Monday, and even then was good. On Tuesday, however, the thick residue at the bottom of the tank remaining unsold was left, and the usual ingredients...were added to it, making it much richer and more substantial. On Wednesday, this process was repeated, with the result that Wednesday's soup was a thick pure\u00e9 [sic] in which a spoon would stand erect.' Street boys ordering a pennyworth of the Wednesday soup and a halfpenny-worth of bread 'could go in the strength of that meal for twenty-four hours'.\n\nScharf sketched the streets at Sunday dinnertime: the people in the top row are collecting their dinner beer, and a potboy with a wooden frame makes deliveries; the other two rows show dinners being carried home from the cookshops. Note the enthusiasm of the boy, centre right, who is carrying a pie.\n\nCoffee shops were of two sorts: those for the working classes and those for City gents. Some working-class coffee shops had a temperance tinge to them; many were used by working men as a meeting place, where communal newspapers could be read and political discussions held. Many workers tried to find a congenial regular spot between their lodgings and work, stopping there every morning instead of going to a coffee stall. It was a little more expensive, but it was warm, and there was a newspaper to read. In the late 1810s, there was one in Bear Street, leading into Leicester Square, where for 6d a month subscribers even had access to magazines. One man set up a coffee house in Greville Street, near Hatton Garden, in 1834; having ambitions for it, he offered his customers in addition to newspapers and magazines 'several hundred volumes' and 'a _conversation room_ '. Unfortunately his morals got in the way: refusing to adulterate his tea and coffee to make them go further, which, he said, all coffee houses did, he went bankrupt. (The fact that he was a 'somewhat notorious' political radical didn't help him either.) Most coffee houses, however, did not aspire so high. Pierce Egan, in his novel _Life in London_ , described one coffee shop as a haunt of 'drunkenness, beggary, lewdness, and carelessness', although this is more likely to be the middle class's view of poverty than necessarily the prevailing state of affairs. The accompanying picture shows a small room with one candle, wooden tables and benches, and a few stools by the fire. Many people used the coffee shops as somewhere to stay warm. Thirty years after Egan, Sala visited an early-morning coffee shop that before dawn was giving shelter to 'half a dozen homeless wretches' who had paid for a single cup of coffee in order to be allowed to sit and doze indoors.\n\nThe coffee houses clearly filled a need: from only a few dozen catering to artisans in 1815, they had increased in numbers by 1840 to nearly 2,000; there a full breakfast could be purchased for 3d. A coffee house in one working-class district served up to 900 customers a day, who had a choice of three rooms: the cheapest was open from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m., where customers could enjoy a breakfast of coffee, bread and butter for 1\u00bdd; the second-grade room offered coffee, a penny loaf and a pennyworth of butter for 3d; or, in the most expensive room, customers could order a dinner where the coffee shop supplied the bread and the coffee but the diner brought his own cooked meat. The customer bringing cooked food, or a raw chop or a herring, which the waiter put on the gridiron over the fire, was a routine service. Dickens described one such coffee house near Covent Garden in 1860, watching, enchanted, as 'a man in a high and long snuff-coloured coat, and shoes, and, to the best of my belief, nothing else but a hat...took out of his hat a large cold meat pudding'. The man was clearly a regular, because as soon as he sat down the waiter brought him tea, bread, and a knife and fork.\n\nCity coffee houses were of a different order. Some were quasi-hotels, letting out rooms. The Bront\u00ebs on their first foray to London stayed at the Chapter Coffee-House in Paternoster Row, while the nearby London Coffee House, on the north side of Ludgate Hill, is where the fictional Arthur Clennam lodges in _Little Dorrit_. The mysterious Julius Handford, in _Our Mutual Friend_ , lodges at the Exchequer Coffee-House, Palace Yard, in Westminster. These establishments were the meeting places of businessmen, and their decor matched their customers' prosperity, with 'cosy mahogany boxes' (booths) and sanded floors in dark-panelled rooms always supplied with a vast range of newspapers: the New England Coffee-House had even the New York papers, 'dated only twenty-one days back: so rapidly had they been transported over 3000 miles of ocean, and 230 of land!' Specific trades patronized specific coffee houses. The Jerusalem Coffee House in Cowper's Court, Cornhill, was linked to the East Indies, China and Australia trades; Garraway's, in Exchange Alley, was linked to the Hudson Bay Company (and in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is called a 'business coffee-room'). Legal London had its own coffee houses around the Inns of Court and Holborn. George's was across from the new Royal Courts of Justice as well as near the solicitors clustered around Lincoln's Inn. John's Coffee-house, in a lane by the gatehouse of Gray's Inn, is where David Copperfield goes to look for his old friend Tommy Traddles. He gives the waiter Traddles' name and, because it is a legal haunt, the waiter knows off the top of his head which chambers Traddles is in, even though he is not particularly successful.\n\nFor the West End men, there were also cigar divans, usually behind or above a cigar shop. A 1s fee obtained a cigar and a cup of coffee, plus access to a comfortable room furnished like a drawing room, with magazines and books. Mr Simpson, before he opened a restaurant in the West End, owned a cigar divan on the Strand, considered 'one of the most attractive, and by far the most comfortable lounge in the metropolis'. By the 1850s, there was also Gliddon's Divan, next to Evans's Supper Rooms (see p. 358), which was 'conducted in the most gentlemanly style'; Follit's Old-Established Cigar Stores, near Portman Square; and the Argyle Divan, on Piccadilly. This last opened after the theatres closed, which gives a hint that the divans were not entirely respectable. In Trollope's 1855 novel, _The Warden_ , Mr Harding, a clergyman from the country, tries to avoid his acquaintances and ends up in a cigar divan; the reader is intended to relish the incongruity of an unworldly cleric in such a place.\n\nThe divans were financially well out of reach of most men. For those with less disposable income, particularly in the City, even lunch was a snatched meal. Edmund Yates said that in the 1840s he and his fellow junior clerks at the main post office were given a quarter of an hour to eat. In smaller offices the younger men 'merely skat[ed] out...for a few minutes...for a snack', while the married clerks brought bread and cheese from home or, as Reginald Wilfer does in _Our Mutual Friend_ , got in a penny loaf and milk from a dairy to eat in the counting house. The most junior employees 'eat whatever they can get, and wherever they can get it, very frequently getting nothing at all'.\n\nThe 'impecunious juniors' from the post office went to Ball's Alamode Beef House, in Butcher Hall Lane (demolished together with Newgate), which sold 'a most delicious \"portion\" of stewed beef done up in a sticky, coagulated, glutinous gravy of surpassing richness', the same dish David Copperfield had chosen for his treat. Other alamode houses offered boiled beef with carrots, suet dumplings and potatoes: more cheap fillers. For these clerks were not much different from David Copperfield and the small boys buying pea soup: they were all trying to stave off hunger as cheaply as possible, and the alamode and boiled-beef houses catered to this need. In the 1820s, the Boiled-Beef House by the Old Bailey was already famous (its owner, later a theatre leaseholder, has come down to history as 'Boiled-Beef Williams'). By the 1860s, it was almost the definition of an alamode house, being 'on a much larger scale' than any others, apart from one near the Haymarket, on Rupert Street. Choice was limited, the waiters asking, ' _Which_ would you please to have, gentleman, _buttock_ or _flank_ , or a plate of _both_?' At lesser houses, the question was even briefer: 'a sixpenny' or a 'fourpenny'?\n\nSoup houses were one step down the scale. In the window, basins, often blue-and-white, were displayed. Depending on the location of the soup house and the size of the portion, 2d or 3d would buy a bowl of soup, some potatoes and a slice of bread. Friedrich von Raumer strayed into a soup house in Drury Lane in 1835. The sign in the window said 'Soup', but he assumed that, while this was the speciality, other dishes would undoubtedly be served. He was rapidly disillusioned by both menu and decor: 'No table-cloth...[only] an oil-cloth; pewter spoons, and two-pronged forks; tin saltcellar and pepper-box'. For 3d he received a piece of bread, 'two gigantic potatoes' and 'a large portion of black Laconian broth' with some submerged items he dubiously identified as 'something like meat'.\n\nClerks who could afford it opted for a chophouse, as did their employers, who merely took care to frequent a superior one. In the 1830s and 1840s, chophouse food was 'principally chops, steaks, kidneys and sausages...leg of beef soup was a staple commodity, so were trotter, so was pease-pudding': again, meeting the main requirements of being filling and hot. As with the coffee houses, in some chophouses 'peculiar...to London', such as the Old Fleece and Sun Tavern, near the Stock Exchange, customers could bring their own meat. The Old Fleece was conveniently situated next door to a butcher's shop, from which the meat was purchased, to be handed in at the chophouse on the way to work, with information on the hour at which its owner planned to return. Patrons were charged 3d for 'bread, cooking and 'taters' any time between one and four, the remaining hours 'being devoted to serious drinking'. The Bay Tree, in St Swithin's Lane, also much patronized by clerks, was the only chophouse without seating, although in the 1840s 'a remarkably cheap and good lunch' could be bought and eaten standing at the counter: 'Huge joints of cold roast and boiled meats were cut up by two men...A medium-sized plate of meat, bread, and half a pint of porter or mild' was 6d, with vegetables, pickles, cheese and salad costing extra. There was a third room where 'hot joints, chops, and steaks' were available for those willing to pay more for the privilege of being able to sit down to eat.\n\nA City chophouse, fitted out with standard booth-style seating, or 'boxes', as they were known. The waiter looks anxious to serve: he was not an employee, but instead he paid the chophouse for his place, earning his living from tips.\n\nEach day 500 or 600 customers might pass through each of these chophouses. The waiters were not paid a salary by the owners; rather, they paid the owner for their places, besides usually providing glasses and table linen, which they had to keep clean. Their tips, a standard penny per customer per meal, regardless of its cost, had to cover their weekly payments to the owners, the laundry of the table linen, and still provide their own upkeep. According to Robert Seymour, the illustrator, successful waiters survived by making the customer feel special. If a customer ordered boiled beef, the waiter would say quietly, 'The beef won't do for _you_ , Sir...it's bin in cut a hour.' Most of the customers were repeat visitors, eating in the same chophouse every day, and they got to know 'their' waiter or, in some chophouses, waitress (called a lady waiter). In _Bleak House_ , young Smallweed, anxious to present himself as a man about town, makes sure to address the waitress by name. Calculating the price of the meal for himself and his two friends, he adds to the bill another 3d for Polly the waitress: 'Four veals and hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and six breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four half-pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums is eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six.' Chophouses that attracted less reputable customers may have demanded payment before the food was served, at least late at night: in 1842 a police court heard the case of two men who ordered soup at an eating house near St Andrews, Holborn, at 12.40 on a Sunday morning, and refused to pay when the waiter brought it to them. Respectable clerks on small budgets considered their menus carefully. Dickens describes the prototypical poor clerk in the 1830s at his 'usual dining-place': after enquiring 'What was up last?' \u2013 that is, what has been most recently cooked, so he doesn't get meat that has been sitting and steaming for hours \u2013 'he orders a small plate of roast beef, with greens, and half-a-pint of porter. He has a small plate to-day, because greens are a penny more than potatoes, and he had \"two breads\" yesterday, with the additional enormity of \"a cheese\" the day before.'\n\nGiven that the waiter paid for laundering the table linen, it is unsurprising that the reputation for cleanliness in chophouses was poor. Yates said that all 'quaint old City chop-houses' had 'sanded floors, hard seats, and mustard blotched tablecloths'. Dickens baptized them more memorably in _Great Expectations_ as 'geographical' chophouses, with their 'maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard of the tablecloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives'. As good a name as this is, the standard one for these poorer eating houses was even better: they were known as slap-bangs, for their method of serving and the speed with which the customers were in and out. Speed was a major selling point. An 1862 advertisement for George Reeves' City Luncheon Rooms in an alley between Cornhill and Lombard Street promised that, there, 'a Luncheon or Dinner can be procured of a _better quality_ and in _less time_ than at any other house', which was no doubt aimed at those workers with just a quarter-hour break.\n\nThe slap-bangs were almost all laid out in rows of wooden booths for four or six. On the wall by each booth was a rack, into which the men slotted their hats, hanging them upside down by the brim. (Although, in Guppy's slap-bang in _Bleak House_ , the men hang their hats on the corner of their box.) One of the most famous slap-bangs was Izant's, in Bucklersbury, a single large room with thirty boxes.\n\nFrom twelve noon when business begins, until seven evening when it finishes, the room is crammed, and one incessant clatter of knives and forks pervades the place...No sooner are you seated, than you are espied by the head-waiter; that functionary is down upon you in a moment, and in the most mellifluous of voices pours the bill of fare into your ear. 'Roase beef, roase lamb, shoulder o' mutton and onion soss, roase veal and bacon, ham an' peas, stooed steak, mutton cutlets and Tummarter soss, jugged 'are, 'arrico mutton, 'ashed duck, sammon and lobster soss, peas and newpotatoes, sir' in one long-sustained coo.\n\nBy 1840, a guidebook was explaining to its readers that some places provided 'a printed bill-of-fare', which it approved of as 'the most systematic method'. For those who had never seen such a thing, it elaborated: 'all the dishes customarily prepared at the house are printed in certain groups, and the prices are _written_ opposite those which are to be had hot on any particular day, so that a customer can at once see what provisions are ready, and how much he will have to pay.' The menu had just been invented. But most chophouses had no need for menus, priding themselves on serving one dish in particular: Dolly's 'has been distinguished for more than a century for its mutton-chops and beefsteaks...the Cock, near the Bank of England, for its ox-tail soup; and the Ship, in Leadenhall Street, for its turtle [soup]'.\n\nLike coffee houses, chophouses too provided newspapers for their customers. Smallweed, at his favourite slap-bang, is familiar: 'He has his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers, he is down upon bald patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes afterwards.' Dickens' readers would have smiled knowingly, for customers monopolizing the papers was a regular complaint. According to the unwritten code, customers should glance through each paper quickly and hand it on to the next customer, but the number of complaints and jokes suggest that many did no such thing. Sam Weller, two decades earlier, described a civil servant who was 'so uncommon grand' that he marched into his chophouse daily, demanding, 'Post arter the next gen'l'm'n' \u2013 that is, he was reserving the _Post_ as soon as the person currently reading it had finished with it, ignoring the possibility that others had been waiting before him. To add to his rude behaviour, he also hoarded all the papers, which 'vorked the other customers up to the wery confines o' desperation and insanity, 'specially one i-rascible old gen'l'm'n as the vaiter wos alvays obliged to keep a sharp eye on at sich times, 'fear he should be tempted to commit some rash act vith the carving-knife'.\n\nWhile the French restaurant was distrusted as a word, the French idea of the _table d'h\u00f4te_ , or fixed menu at a fixed hour, was enormously popular. Places that followed this system were called ordinaries, and the most famous, as well as the one that led the way to restaurants establishing themselves in London, was a fish ordinary near Billingsgate, down Bell Alley, a thoroughfare so narrow that two people could not pass. A guidebook claimed it was of 'world-wide repute' in 1840, so it had evidently been established some time before that. By 1850, Dickens was writing about it in _Household Words_ and calling it Simpson's, the name of its owner. Simpson served dinners at four o'clock, at one long table with a second smaller side-table for the overflow, and every seat was filled on a daily basis. After 'A hurried grace...the scramble began': 'Suddenly a fine salmon sparkled and twinkled like a silver harlequin before Mr. Simpson. A goodly dish of soles was set on lower down; then, in quick succession, appeared flounders, fried eels, stewed eels, cod fish, melted butter, lobster-sauce, potatoes', before 'Boiled beef, mutton, and a huge dish of steaks, were soon disposed of in like manner. Small glasses of brandy round, were gone...Cheese melted away. Crusts dissolved into air.' Then 'bunches of pipes were laid upon the table; and everybody ordered what he liked to drink, or went his way...Eighteen pence a-head had done it all \u2013 the drink, and smoke, and civil attendance [tip] excepted.' Dickens may perhaps have been recognized and therefore received better service, for another visitor warned that, to be served, 'Strangers had to look sharp, and, seizing a waiter by the tail of his once new swallow-tail coat, either implore or threaten.'\n\nWhen Billingsgate was renovated, Simpson shut his ordinary, intending to retire, but he soon moved to a tavern, the Queen's Head, near Bucklersbury, and renamed it Simpson's. At the same time, Simpson's brother opened both a supper house called the Albion, near Drury Lane, and, in 1862, a cigar divan in the Strand. The Albion was both 'a revolution and a revelation. Large tables and comfortable chairs in place of boxes and benches; abundance of clean linen tablecloths and napkins; plated forks and spoons; electroplated tankards instead of pewter pots; finger-glasses; the joint wheeled to your side...a choice of cheeses, pulled bread, and a properly made-out bill: all these were wondrous and acceptable innovations', as was the quality of the food and the fact that 'the rooms were large and well ventilated; the attendants were clean, civil and quick'.\n\nBut for all these institutions, eating on-site was only one option. Every eating place expected to deliver meals, complete with cutlery, dishes and even condiments, which were brought by waiters who then stayed on, if wanted, to serve. Endless processions of meals passed through the streets daily. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , a man living in chambers is waited on by the local coffee-house waiter, 'a being in a white waistcoat, carrying under his arm a napkin, and attended by another being with an oblong box upon his head, from which a banquet, piping hot, was taken out and set upon the table'. Each stage of the meal is brought over hot by a second waiter, while the man in the white waistcoat stays and serves, before packing up the empties and 'vanish[ing], box and all'.\n\nLarge sums of money were not necessary for this service, although, as with the eating houses who demanded payment up front in some neighbourhoods, they did tend to know their customers. In _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , the indigent Dick Swiveller sends an order to the nearest eating house, but this establishment '(having experience of its customer) declined to comply, churlishly sending back for answer that if Mr Swiveller stood in need of beef perhaps he would be so obliging as to come there and eat it, bringing with him...the amount of a certain small account which had long been outstanding'. Not at all dismayed, Dick reorders at another place where he is not known, and is soon rewarded with 'a small pewter pyramid' of meat and drink.\n\nWaiters also delivered to office workers. The post-office clerks were granted a cursory dinner break only because in the late 1840s the Postmaster General of the day was 'annoyed by encountering strange persons wandering through the lobbies, balancing tin-covered dishes and bearing foaming pewter-pots'. He banned this influx of food from the streets, but other offices were not so particular: George Reeves' City Luncheon Rooms advertised 'All Goods delivered free of charge within Ten Miles'. Thus nearly all food might end up being street food, for at least part of its time.\n\n#### 12.\n\n#### STREET THEATRE\n\nWhen he was twenty-three, Dickens wrote: 'We have a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about the streets. Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more...We revel in a crowd of any kind \u2013 a street \"row\" is our delight \u2013 even a woman in a fit is by no means to be despised, especially in a fourth-rate street, where all the female inhabitants run out of their houses and discharge large jugs of cold water over the patient, as if she were dying of spontaneous combustion, and wanted putting out. Then a drunken man \u2013 what can be more charming than a regular drunken man...?'\n\nIn this early piece Dickens used the editorial 'we' to signify the predilection of much of the populace. Even so, his own delight in a street row was considerable, and remained with him for ever. Twenty years later, when he was planning some private theatricals, he asked advice from Astley's, which staged theatrical extravaganzas with horses. The next thing he knew, 'an open phaeton drawn by two white ponies with black spots all over them (evidently stencilled)' rattled in at his gate at a great rate before circling 'round and round' the central flower bed, 'apparently looking for the clown'. This tickled the fancy of the established, middle-aged author as much as the drunken man had amused the hopeful young journalist. It was, he crowed, 'One of the finest things...I have ever seen in my life.'\n\nThe carriage had been followed by 'a multitude of boys', many of whom, Dickens thought, had run all the way from Astley's, south of the river, to his Marylebone house, nearly three miles in all. This was neither surprising nor unexpected. Amusement was found on the streets by rich and poor alike, and boys were at the forefront of what might be termed street theatre, creating drama, watching it and enhancing it. If they found nothing to entertain them, such as an artificially spotted pony, they were happy to manufacture their own amusement. When a tray of wedding rings was removed from a jewellery store window for customers' inspection, boys gathered outside and made ribald comments audible to the abashed couple inside. Men standing at oyster bars in the Haymarket and other nightspots were hardened to boys sharing their thoughts on their eating habits and manners: 'He don't take no winegar with his'n,' and, 'Look at that chap, he swallows 'em like soup!' Boys were not alone in openly showing curiosity. Adults of all sorts felt it entirely natural to take an interest in the goings-on in the streets. When a police van carrying prisoners became stuck in a traffic jam, the bus driver as a matter of course chaffed the van driver: 'What's yer fare...?' Meanwhile the cad added to the merriment by paraphrasing to the prisoners his standard request to his inside passengers: 'Won't any of your inside gents be so good as to ride outside to obleege a lady?' Prisoners being moved around the city were of abiding interest. A van daily transported prisoners from Bow Street magistrates court to the various gaols. Daily the street outside would be 'studded with a choice assemblage', just as the departure of the mailcoaches also summoned a throng.\n\nDickens might be thought to be indulging in novelistic fancy when in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ the nurse Betsey Prig buys salad from a street seller in High Holborn, 'on condition that the vendor could get it all into her pocket', which is 'accomplished...to the breathless interest' of an entire hackney-coach stand full of people. Yet the journalist James Ritchie noted the same universal interest in the mundane: 'Hail a cab in any part of London,' he wrote, and 'you will observe that several grown-up persons and a large number of boys will stop to see you get in the cab.' When the Serpentine in Hyde Park was drained of its stagnant, sewage-infected water in 1869, 'a small army' could not have kept bystanders from gathering to watch as the park's fish were scooped up and transferred temporarily to the Round Pond. Crowds also gathered outside houses where some disaster had occurred: murder, violence, death. In _Dombey and Son_ , when Walter miraculously returns long after being given up for dead in a shipwreck, 'groups of hungry gazers' could be found outside his uncle's house 'at any time between sunrise and sunset', staring at its closed shutters. This too echoed reality. In 1850, when riding along Constitution Hill, Sir Robert Peel was fatally injured after being thrown from his horse and then crushed by the falling animal. For the few days that he survived, a great mass of people 'thronged' the 'little garden' at Whitehall, and even as night fell, 'respectful groups' remained standing outside well after 10 p.m. Aside from miraculous returns from the dead and incidents involving famous statesmen, mundane events also drew huge gatherings. When in 1843 a family of ten was evicted from their room in Clerkenwell for non-payment of rent, 'an immense mob was forthwith attracted', numbering possibly a thousand people, to commiserate with the homeless and shout abuse at the landlord's men.\n\nStreet theatre might spring from the most unlikely events. When Sir Robert Peel was injured in a fall from his horse, crowds gathered daily outside his house until he died. Not only did these people find staring at a house interesting; journals like the middle-class _Illustrated London News_ thought that its readers would enjoy an engraving of it too.\n\nSometimes street events might be more extraordinary still, lasting days or even weeks. At the beginning of March 1842, the _Morning Post_ reported a 'Singular Delusion': 'for some weeks past...the lower classes of Irish residing in the metropolis' had believed that London was about to be hit by an earthquake 'which is to swallow up the capital' on the 16th. The other papers eagerly picked up the story, recounting how many of London's residents had left for the country, or gone to Ireland, or merely east of Stepney, 'on the supposition that the earthquake is not to extend beyond that'. A week later, 'popular credulity' suggested that 'St. Paul's Cathedral has already sunk five feet', prompting hundreds to turn out to see for themselves. The papers published over a hundred stories in the next four weeks, many running three or four of them a day. Some readers thought it a joke, some a Chartist plot (see pp. 375\u20136), but most took it as an opportunity to laugh at the credulity of the labouring Irish. Even so, by the 17th, the day after the earthquake had been scheduled to take place, it was clear that it was not only the poor who had been taken in. Certainly the slums were either unusually empty, or rang with 'frantic cries [and] the incessant appeals to Heaven'. However, the wharf for the Gravesend steamer at London Bridge was also 'thronged by crowds of decently-attired people', while Brighton experienced an influx of expensive carriages, and hordes gathered on the well-heeled heights of Hampstead, Highgate and Primrose Hill. When nothing happened, people sheepishly returned to their everyday lives, but took away no lasting lesson. In October, reports circulated that a ghost 'in snow-white apparel' was to walk through the churchyard of Whitechapel Church, and the surrounding streets became impassable for the best part of a week.\n\nThe middle classes enjoyed other types of one-off events in the streets, as when a crowd gathered in Hyde Park to watch the arrival of 'a huge truck drawn by forty of [brewer] Mr Goding's finest cream-coloured horses bedecked with green bays', co-opted to pull M. C. Wyatt's vast equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, which was to be placed on top of Decimus Burton's triumphal arch outside Apsley House. Even preparations for a public event drew multitudes. In 1863, two full days before the arrival of Princess Alexandra of Denmark for her wedding to the Prince of Wales, Arthur Munby went down to London Bridge to look at the decorations being erected: 'an huge [sic] mass of people of all kind [sic] was struggling to and fro'. The next day, 'The Strand was scarce passable', with 'Crowds all the way' from Inner Temple along Newgate and Cheapside to London Bridge, 'the crush increasing' with every step, 'till at the Monument I found I could get no further; being indeed borne backward by the mass of people coming the other way'. The attraction for these people was just the decorations and bunting, not even the arrival itself (see pp. 315\u201317).\n\nEvents of state, especially declarations of war and peace, produced more formal street ceremonies and celebrations. In 1853, at the start of the Crimean War, the City's mace bearer and the Lord Mayor's gate porter processed from the Mansion House to the Royal Exchange in their black robes of office, drawing a crowd of 300: 'The news spread in all directions, and a rush was made to the point of interest', to hear, and to cheer, as the queen's declaration of war with Russia was read aloud. Enthralled, spectators watched as the royal standard was raised and 'the sword of state belonging to the Corporation was unsheathed'. Over the next two years, battles were ceremonially marked: cannon were fired from the Tower and St James's Park throughout the day to celebrate the victory at Alma. In the City, the Lord Mayor carried the news first to the London Tavern, where 'the leading members of the Corporation' were to be found, and only then conveyed it to the Royal Exchange 'for the purpose of more publicly proclaiming the news. The civic trumpeter having sounded several times', he read the news of the victory to a crowd of 500.\n\nThe coming of peace had long been a street event. In 1814, the Peace of Paris had been marked by a festival, with all the central London parks decorated and lit up to resemble pleasure gardens, with mock battles enacted on the Serpentine, hot-air balloons and theatre booths at the fairs. After a 'Grand National Jubilee' on 1 August, however, the fairground people in Hyde Park refused to strike their very prosperous pitches and finally had to be evicted by soldiers. When the Crimean War ended in 1856, there were more fireworks in Hyde Park, but this time a stand was erected with seats costing 1s 6d apiece, to make the crowds easier to control.\n\nFar more moving, and more involving for the populace, was the return of the soldiers from the Crimea. Just over two years after the first troops had embarked, four brigades of 3,200 men emerged from Nine Elms station in formation, still wearing their weather-beaten, battle-damaged uniforms, to a band playing 'Hail the Conquering Hero Comes', 'amidst a tremendous burst of cheering'. They marched along below balconies and windows thick with spectators: 'Every point on the route was positively thronged,' with the crowds nearly a couple of hundred yards deep in places. At Whitehall and Old Palace Yard, every window in the Houses of Parliament was crammed with MPs, peers and their families. The bells of St Margaret's, Westminster's parish church, pealed and guns were fired in the park. From the windows of the houses that lined Parliament Street, flags hung and flowers rained down on men ravaged by battle injuries and disease.\n\nAs they neared Buckingham Palace, the queen appeared at a window \u2013 the sole window not bursting with cheering men and women. The troops assembled in the forecourt as the queen and Prince Albert emerged, Albert accompanying the men as they marched up to Hyde Park, while the queen rode in her carriage to meet them. Up to 100,000 people had been waiting in the park for hours. The soldiers arrived at 12.30, after which Queen Victoria and Albert inspected the troops, before taking the salute. The troops then cheered the royal family, placing their bearskins on the tips of their bayonets and waving them high overhead. Once the royal party had left, the people lining the streets were expected merely to cheer the guards as they marched to their barracks. Instead, tens of thousands broke through the barriers to where the soldiers were mustered. At first the soldiers closed ranks, but this onslaught was not one of aggression, but an expression of gratitude. The crowds washed around the troops, hurrahing, waving their hats and handkerchiefs, reaching to clasp the shoulders of men who had seen thousands of their brother soldiers die, shaking their hands over and over, walking alongside them and cheering them all the way to their quarters.\n\nLess emotional, but more frequent, was the Lord Mayor's Show, held every 9 November to celebrate the incoming Lord Mayor of the City of London. Throughout the City, shops either didn't open at all or closed early, while 'streamers are hung out from the houses...amiable street-boys at every corner' waved flags, and all was 'brass bands and confusion and endless cheers!' The new Lord Mayor swore his oath before the aldermen of the City, then set off on a quasi-coronation procession, accompanied by the previous mayor, the aldermen and other City and guild officials, preceded by 'the city heralds, trumpeters, men in brass armour'. By tradition, the route passed through the parish in which the mayor was himself an alderman, a mark of favour celebrated by exceptional street decorations. Officials then went upriver on the City barges to Westminster, where the Lord Mayor swore another oath of allegiance before the judges at the Court of Exchequer and then returned by barge once more, to Blackfriars Bridge. Once ashore, the procession 'increases in splendour and magnificence', as the wives of the mayor and officials joined them in the City's state coaches, followed by 'Princes, Ministers of State, the Judges of the land, and the Foreign Ambassadors', all taking the road to the Mansion House, for the day's highlight: the civic dinner.\n\nPrime ministers, Lord Mayors, even royalty were a regular sight in the streets, although the public response was not uniformly admiring. In his day the Prince Regent rarely showed himself to the unmediated populace, who had a nasty habit of shouting at him, 'You d\u2014d rascal, where's your wife?' Under Victoria, public response was more muted, to the point where the presence of royalty excited little notice, much less enthusiasm. Leonard Wyon noted in his diary, 'as we were in the Edgware Road in an omnibus we saw P. Albert P. of Wales and Col. Grey riding behind us,' adding immediately afterwards, 'dear Mary bought me a handsome walking stick.'\n\nFluctuating attitudes to royalty could partly be gauged by the crowds in the streets. Victoria's reign began with scant public interest. In 1837, after William IV's death, the new queen was driven from Kensington Palace to St James's, an event that prompted so feeble a public reaction that one observer commented, 'I was surprised to hear so little shouting, and to see so few hats off as she went by.' When she appeared at the palace window for the formal proclamation, 'the people...did not...hurrah' until they were urged on by a courtier. Six months later, on her way to the House of Commons, 'not a hat [was] raised' as the new queen passed, and at Ascot she was 'tolerably well received; some shouting, not a great deal, and a few hats taken off'. The political diarist Charles Greville was clearly not impressed.\n\nHer coronation got off to a bad start. The original date had been set for 20 June 1838, which was the first anniversary of the death of William IV. The opposition claimed that a cheeseparing government had done this deliberately, as a way of saving money by claiming it was a day of mourning. The date was therefore moved to 28 June, provoking the trade element to complain again: first, that they had not been given adequate time to produce souvenirs; then, that by the time the date had changed, they had already produced souvenirs, all of which carried the wrong date. Disraeli, a very new MP, was scarcely more enchanted even a week before the event. As MPs were obliged to wear formal court dress, he told his sister that he planned to save his money and stay away from the ceremony, sooner than attend 'dressed like a flunky'. However, a few days later he wrote wistfully, 'London is very gay,' with the processional route 'now nearly covered with galleries and raised seats', which he thought would look superb once they were decorated with 'carpets and colored hangings'. Diplomatic London, too, was seething with foreign dignitaries, 'visible every night with their brilliant uniforms and sparkling stars'. Unsurprisingly, Disraeli attended the ceremony 'after all', using it as an opportunity to store up droll episodes: Lord Melbourne 'looked very awkward and uncouth, with his coronet cocked over his nose', and clutching the sword of state 'like a butcher', while 'ribboned military officers and robed aldermen...were seen...wrestling like schoolboys...behind the Throne'. One elderly peer, Lord Rolle, having climbed the stairs to the throne to make his bow, caught his foot in his coronation robes and tumbled down them again. Wicked Disraeli solemnly told visitors that Lord Rolle's roll 'was a tenure by which he held his Barony'.\n\nWhile the crowd loved a parade, it was not yet committed to loving those who paraded. Two years later, Victoria's fianc\u00e9 was referred to in street songs as a 'German sausage' (lewd subtext intended). And while 'a countless multitude' stood in the driving rain to watch the royal bride pass by on her way to the wedding, they did so 'without any cheering'. Later, popular attitudes fluctuated with events. When a royal child was born (and there were nine of them), salutes were fired in the parks, while a greater or lesser number of private individuals and commercial premises marked the occasion with decorations. In 1842, few buildings bothered to display illuminations for the birth of the Prince of Wales (for more on illuminations, see pp. 363\u20139), and in 1848, after the queen gave birth to yet another child, when 'God Save the Queen' was played at the theatres, a number of 'ill-mannered' people refused to take off their hats. The 'sorry usage' shown by more fervent royalists was recorded by one journal as indicating 'loyal enthusiasm'. However, in the same magazine, when a miser named Neild died, leaving more than \u00a3250,000 to the queen, it was noted laconically that the will was most likely to be disputed 'on the ground of insanity'.\n\nIt was the seven attempts to assassinate the queen that drew the strongest public displays of admiration, and then affection, until in time the monarch's advanced age and longevity on the throne eventually prompted veneration. The first such attempt was in 1840; in 1842 two more followed within days of each other. After the first, which occurred while she was out driving, the queen quickly visited her mother, to reassure her, then returned to the park, where 'she was received with the utmost enthusiasm by the immense crowd'; all the men on horseback 'formed themselves into an escort and attended her back to the Palace, cheer[ing] vehemently'. This may be the first time Greville recorded seeing active cheering for Victoria, adding that the incident had 'elicited whatever there was of dormant loyalty'. After the first of the two 1842 attempts, the following morning 'numbers of respectable persons' stood outside Buckingham Palace for hours until the queen and her party drove out for her regular airing in the park. The queen, despite the attack, still used her open barouche, which elicited 'one long, loud, and continued shout of hurrahs, accompanied by the waving of handkerchiefs and hats'. The road from the palace to Hyde Park Corner was lined with people, and the park, too, was dense with spectators: when the queen arrived, 'not a head was covered', which was a big change in a few years. By the time of the fifth assassination attempt, in 1850, theatregoers had become accustomed to welcoming the queen after such an episode. The young Sophia Beale was at Covent Garden that evening to see Meyerbeer's _The Prophet_ :\n\nWe were in a small box up at the top of the theatre opposite the royal box and all of a sudden every one stood up and cheered and made a great noise. Then we saw the Queen and Prince Albert come into the box, and they came to the front and bowed and looked very pleased. And then Madame Grisi rushed on the stage in evening dress from her box, she was not acting, and all the singers sang _God save the Queen_... Papa went out and asked the box keeper what had happened, and he said a man had thrown a stick at the Queen when she was driving in the Park, but it did not hurt her. So after they had sung _God save the Queen_ , the opera went on.\n\nSuch imperturbability impressed everyone. Four years later, Dickens watched Louis Philippe, the king of France, driving out in Paris. He too had survived an assassination attempt, but, wrote Dickens contemptuously, 'His [carriage] was surrounded by horseguards. It went at a great pace, and he sat very far back in a corner of it, I promise you. It was strange to an Englishman to see the Prefect of Police riding on horseback some hundreds of yards in advance...turning his head incessantly from side to side...scrutinizing everybody and everything, as if he suspected all the twigs in all the trees.'\n\nBut the public's affection waned as rapidly as it had grown, again precipitated by the queen's behaviour. After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Victoria went into seclusion, observing a level of of widowly mourning considered extreme even by nineteenth-century standards. Although a year or even two of private grief would have been respected, the queen kept obstinately to Windsor and her two private homes, Osborne and Balmoral, year after year, refusing to live in London or to perform her ceremonial functions. Soon the public made it quite clear that they saw this as a dereliction of duty. In 1864, a notice was posted on the railings of Buckingham Palace: 'These commanding premises to be let or sold, in consequence of the late occupant's declining business.' Four years later, with no change in sight, less witty placards began to appear in the streets more generally:\n\nVICTORIA!\n\nModest lamentation is the right of the dead;\n\nExcessive grief is the enemy of the living.\n\n\u2014 Shakespeare\n\nThis quote was followed by a number of advertisements, which suggests a commercial source. Even later in the decade, when the queen did perform certain public duties, such as attending the opening of the great engineering project that was Holborn Viaduct in 1869, many thought she did so grudgingly. She arrived by train from Windsor and travelled in state to Blackfriars Bridge, which she formally opened, before moving in procession to the eastern end of Holborn Viaduct. Having opened this too, as the _Illustrated London News_ noted sharply, she then 'quit the City', scuttling back to Paddington to catch a train to Windsor a few hours after arriving in the capital.\n\nPerhaps it was this sense of London being abandoned by royalty that provoked the outpouring that greeted Princess Alexandra on her arrival in the city in 1863. All the way from the Bricklayers' Arms station in Camberwell, where the Danish party was scheduled to arrive, up to Paddington, where it was to re-embark for Windsor, 'every house has its balcony of red baize seats; wedding favours fill the shops, and flags of all sizes'. A week beforehand, banners were already flying. London Bridge was festooned in scarlet hangings, with a triumphal arch 'as big as Temple Bar', and, in the recesses of the bridge, 'massive draped pedestals, surmounted by Mediaeval Knightly figures: rows of tall Venetian standards with gilt Danish elephants atop', while between them were placed 'great tripods of seeming bronze, from which incense is to arise'. None of this was to celebrate the wedding itself, which was to be a gloomy private occasion in Windsor, with the queen still in deep mourning. Rather, these decorations were merely to greet the soon-to-be Princess of Wales as she drove across the city from one railway station to another.\n\nDespite the brevity of this visit, the day was a 'universal holiday', with crowds everywhere. Fleet Street and all the way along to Blackfriars Bridge 'was given up to Pedestrians, who filled the whole of it as far as one could see'. Steamers were unable to dock at London Bridge, so congested were the steps. 'Every avenue to [the bridge] was barricaded with vehicles full of sightseers...every visible window and housetop on every side was filled with gay people, wearing...wedding favours or Danish colours: a vast and compact multitude filled the streets: banners and illumination devices appeared everywhere: the triumphal arch on the Bridge, now finished, was glorious with white & gold and bright colours.'\n\nAfter the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's never-ending seclusion at Windsor made her increasingly unpopular. A quarter of a century later, cartoons like this one continued to appear. Queen: 'What is that large empty building there?' Footman: 'Please, Your Majesty, that's Buckingham Palace!'\n\nThe carriages took an hour to cover the half-mile between the Bricklayers' Arms and London Bridge, slowed to a crawl by the dense jam of spectators. The first coaches were cheered heartily by people pleased to be pleased. Then, 'when the last open carriage came in sight, the populace, who had been rapidly warming to tinder point, caught fire all at once. \"Hats off!\" shouted the men: \"Here she is!\" cried the women: and all...surging round the carriage, waving hats and kerchiefs, leaping up here and there and again to catch a sight of her...her carriage was imbedded in eager human faces, & not the scarlet outriders with all their appeals...could make way one inch.' On the day of the wedding itself, trains into London were 'decked with flowers and evergreens, and nearly all the passengers wore wedding favours...every station on the line was dressed with flags and flowers, and...there were sounds of guns and blazing of fireworks'. The crowds, estimated at 2.5 million people, were happy to enjoy the decorated streets even without the principal players.\n\nHowever, it wasn't necessary for a visitor to be royal to receive an eager and passionate popular reception. The year after Alexandra's marriage, as much uproar was generated by the hero of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was given a welcome every bit as tumultuous, with streets every bit as jam-packed, as were the houses overlooking the route. Garibaldi, too, arrived at the Bricklayers' Arms, where the band of the United Italians in London, all in red shirts, played on the platform, under banners reading: 'The Pure Patriot', 'The Hero of Italy' and 'The Man of the People'. Unlike Alexandra, Garibaldi was staying in London, travelling in over Westminster Bridge and up to the now symbolic centre of Trafalgar Square. Sophia Beale, who was in the throng at the bottom of the Haymarket, watched him, 'standing up in the carriage in his historic red shirt and grey cloak, bareheaded' as onlookers 'clambered on to the carriage, and would have liked to have taken the horses out to drag it'. When Garibaldi visited the Crystal Palace on the following Saturday, 'Some thirty thousand people were present,' with many women wearing dresses in red, white and green, the Italian colours; his visit to Anthony Panizzi, the Italian political exile turned British Museum librarian, drew huge numbers of spectators all along Great Russell Street. (More enduringly, it was this trip that decided one manufacturer to name its new raisin biscuit the Garibaldi.)\n\nYet all these celebrated folk were minor diversions in a street life that was constantly filled with theatre. As well as the many unscheduled events, there were a number of days every year that the people celebrated entirely or primarily on the street.\n\nUntil 1837, one of the highlights of street life was the procession of the mailcoaches on the king's birthday. (George III was born in June; both George IV and William IV in August.) As this was the 'royal' mail, for the birthday procession the coaches were freshly painted and varnished; the horses' manes decorated with flowers, their harnesses with rosettes. The coachmen and guards all received new livery, and wore flowers in their hats, whips and buttonholes. Their families, in their Sunday best, had places of honour inside the mailcoaches as the parade wound its way from St James's Palace to the main post office. Friedrich von Raumer, quietly reading in the Athenaeum, was roused by the club secretary to watch the coaches pass, such was the popularity of this annual event. In Victoria's reign, the parade changed its date and was then discontinued, most likely as in the 1830s the mail began to be carried by rail.\n\nOther events of greater or lesser formality, attracting popular attention in varying degrees, occurred throughout the year. On Ascension day (the fortieth day after Easter), 'the ceremony of beating the Parochial bounds' was enacted by the parish officials and churchwardens, to denote the limits of each district by walking along the boundary lines between parishes and, with staffs or tree branches, beating, or tapping, the markers that showed the boundaries. In the City, well-behaved charity-school children were rewarded by being chosen to beat the bounds, and in Holborn an elaborate ceremonial pantomime was played out annually. The Inns of Court, under ancient statutes that gave them civic rights over their own land, ceremonially closed their gates to the parish authorities, who annually requested \u2013 and were refused \u2013 permission to enter to enact this civic ritual.\n\nA more spontaneous festivity was the parading of the sweeps on May day. During the year, dirty-faced chimney sweeps were a necessary but not interesting part of London life. On May day, however, they cleaned themselves up and, with their wives and children dressed in their best, 'They go about [the streets] in parties of four or five.' Dickens recalled seeing them 'dancing...bedecked with pieces of foil, and with ribbons of all gay colours, flying like streamers in every direction...Their sooty faces were reddened with rose-pink, and in the middle of each cheek was a patch of gold-leaf, the hair was frizzed out, and as white as powder could make it, and they wore an old hat cocked for the occasion, and in like manner ornamented with ribbons, and foil, and flowers. In this array were they dancing through the streets, clapping a wooden plate...and soliciting money from all whom they met.' The women played tambourines or sang, and were traditionally accompanied by a Jack-in-the-Green, a man covered 'down to the boots with a circular wicker frame of bee-hive contour, carried on the shoulders, and terminating in a dome or pinnacle above his head. This frame was entirely concealed by green boughs and flowers, May blossoms preponderating', as he 'pranced, twirled, jumped and capered to the music, while the others danced round'.\n\nAs with so many folk customs, throughout the century people complained that the sweeps' celebration was no longer as it had been when they were children. Dickens in the mid-1830s was already recalling that the sweeps and their wives once used to dress as 'My Lord' and 'My Lady'. Although 'the \"greens\" are annually seen to roll along the streets...[and] youths in the garb of clowns, precede them', it seemed to him that these performers were no longer always sweeps, now being joined by brickmakers, costermongers and other labourers. And while everyone continued to lament the demise of the ritual they remembered, at the same time they reported its observance annually, right through to Dickens' death in 1870, with Munby that year seeing a 'May Day band of chimney sweepers' in Whitehall. Together with the traditional Jack-in-the-Green, there was a 'King in gilt cocked hat & gilt coat, and a Queen in a black velvet jacket with spangles...gay with ribbons, & pink stockings...All danced around the \"Green\", & the Queen...danced vigorously down the street by my side, till I gave her something.'\n\nDerby Day was less of a ritual, but every bit as much a participation event. For many if not most people, going to the races was not the point: watching those who were going was sport enough. By nine in the morning, 'Open carriages, with hampers lashed to the footboard, emerge from every turning...At the Regent-circus [now Piccadilly Circus], omnibuses and stage-coaches, \"Defiances\" and \"Resolutions\", \"Paddingtons\" and \"Royal Blues\", have clapped on four horses, and tout for passengers; men on the roofs play horns to attract notice.' Once on the road and into suburban London, residents could be seen 'seated on the tidy lawns, or leaning over the garden-walls, watching the mob of vehicles dart past. in front of all these...dwellings were seated mammas and daughters, and at the upper windows the servant-girls were leaning over the sills.' One journal even memorialized the outing in verse:\n\nWith lots of prog and lots of grog\n\nAway some thousands scampered,\n\nI cannot tell how much with wine\n\nTheir carriages were _hampered_.\n\nThey went in gigs, they went in carts,\n\nIn coaches and in chaises;\n\nAnd some in vans adorned by hands\n\nWith buttercups and daisies...\n\nOyster day came later in the year, to mark the start of the oyster season (then on 'Old St James's Day', 25 July, because a shell was the emblem of St James). On the day, boys and girls collected empty oyster shells and built them into little heaps on street corners, or in doorways, setting a candle or a reed light inside to illuminate it. Some children 'made windows with bits of coloured glass or tinsel' in their grottoes and stood beside them, soliciting the passers-by for halfpennies or farthings with, 'Please to remember the grotto.' (Plate 17 shows a grotto, bottom right.)\n\nSimilar solicitations came on 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, commemorating the unravelling of the 1605 plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament and assassinate James I in order to install a Catholic monarch on the throne. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, boys made 'guys' by stuffing suits of old clothes, which they carried about on chairs, calling out,\n\nPlease to remember,\n\nThe fifth of November,\n\nGunpowder, treason and plot.\n\nWith the proceeds they would buy fireworks. By the 1840s, Mayhew thought that 'the character of Guy Fawkes-day has entirely changed', with a festival, May-day-ish element creeping in. The guys had become much larger than life-sized and were paraded in barrows and carts by boys dressed as clowns, with musicians and dancers tagging along to serenade the guy.\n\nIn 1844, Mayhew saw his first 'celebrity' guy \u2013 that is, the first guy created as a caricature of a popular figure, rather than simply an upright ragbag. The evening had always had an element of anti-Catholic sentiment, owing to its origins, but in a renewed period of anti-Catholic unrest Cardinal Wiseman and the pope were both transformed into guys, with accompanying verses:\n\nA penn'orth of cheese to feed the pope,\n\nA twopenny loaf to choke him,\n\nA pint of beer to wash it down,\n\nAnd a good large fagot to smoke him\n\nIn the 1850s, during the Crimean War, a guy of Tsar Nicholas was also accompanied by a verse:\n\nPoke an ingun in his eye \u2013\n\nA squib shove up his nose, sirs;\n\nThen roast him till he's done quite brown,\n\nAnd Nick to old Nick [that is, the devil] goes, sirs.\n\nMany of the costermongers' barrows that were used to parade the guys were marked with the names of battles in these years: Inkerman, Balaclava, Sebastopol. In one Peckham neighbourhood in 1855, the locals subscribed \u00a3250 for fireworks, in a celebration involving a procession of carriages, bands and possibly 200 people carrying torches, with guys in uniform representing the Crimean generals, all surrounding a guy of the Tsar. After the Indian Mutiny, many bonfires consumed guys with blackened faces bearing signs identifying them as 'Nana Sa hib, the murderer of women and children in Cawnpore'. By the early 1860s, supporters of both sides of the American Civil War carried guys, 'the sympathisers with the North exhibiting various phases of slavery', while southern supporters 'paraded Mr. President Lincoln in all sorts of vicious shapes'.\n\nThe symbols of death when it occurred at home were just as visible to the public on the streets and were designed to elicit a response from strangers. Blinds were drawn in a house of mourning and, for those who could afford it, mutes, men 'habited from top to toe in suits of sables, their faces composed to decent sympathy', were stationed outside on the day of a funeral, holding wands, large staffs from which depended black crape drapery, known as weepers. Further public indications of family loss were swags of funeral drapery, 'black or white, as the sex and age of the defunct may be', hung across the ground-floor fa\u00e7ade of the house. For the more prosperous, the fabric might be velvet or embroidered with silver; for the less well off, plain wool. An aristocratic death was marked by a hatchment \u2013 a large diamond-shaped shield of canvas with the family's coat of arms painted on it \u2013 hung over the doorway of the house in mourning. A black funeral hearse and carriages, with coachmen and attendants in black and drawn by black-plumed black horses '(either by nature or dye-stuffs)', arrived to transport the coffin and the family. The only variant was when a young girl died, when by tradition the mourning accoutrements were all white, and the coffin was attended by her friends, also in white. For those for whom this level of expenditure was impossible, there were walking funerals, where the coffin was carried, followed by a train of mourners. Or, sadder still, 'the coffin of a child [was borne] aloft on the shoulders of a single bearer, and followed only by the sorrowing members of the family'.\n\nFor public figures in the first half of the nineteenth century, the ceremonial of death was a street event in which outsiders and passers-by were expected to take part. In 1831, an American tourist noticed a funeral procession in the yard of Westminster Abbey. There were just seven official mourners, but, he was happy to see, they were trailed by 'a respectful multitude' of strangers. in 1847, the 3rd Duke of Northumberland died. He had attempted to wreck the Slave Trade Abolition Bill, was vehemently anti-Catholic and anti-working-class, as well as being considered rather stupid and extremely arrogant by the public and his peers alike. Yet 'crowds of persons' lined the streets to watch his funeral procession travel from Northumberland House to Westminster Abbey.\n\nIt was after the mass orgy of ostentatious ceremonial that was the Duke of Wellington's funeral in 1852 (see pp. 335\u201346) that funerals of the great, the good and the not-so-good became for the most part quieter events, with less public participation. Less, that is, not none. When Prince Albert died in 1861 he had requested that his funeral be 'of the plainest and most private character' and was accordingly buried in a private ceremony at Windsor. Even so, the general public saw themselves as participants in the ritual. On the streets of London, 'Every one [is] in mourning; all shops boarded across with black; even brass door plates covered with crape'. Cab and bus drivers attached crape rosettes to their whips. Everyone, down to 'the very poorest and meanest...had put on \"decent mourning\", were it only in the shape of a ribbon or a crape bow', which custom dictated should be worn for two months. Palmerston's funeral in 1865 marked a brief return to the old style of bigger and more ostentatious funerals than had been seen for years on the streets of London: for him, White's, Boodle's and Brooks's clubs in St James's all covered their fa\u00e7ades in black drapery. The Reform club topped that with 'a sable curtain, bearing a viscount's coronet and the letter \"P\", with yellow wreaths of immortelles tastefully festooned...and the pillars and balustrades dressed in black and white'.\n\nThis is so foreign to us today that Dickens' distaste for these elaborate ceremonies seems normal. At the time, however, it was the author's views that were unusual. Most people thought that outward show conveyed inward respect, even as they also recognized the mercenary spirit behind this trade in the artefacts of death. Mr Mould, the undertaker in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , is thrilled to discover that for one funeral 'there is positively NO limitation...in point of expense!' and he can 'to put on my whole establishment of mutes; and mutes come very dear', as well as 'any number of walking attendants, dressed in the first style of funeral fashion'. In his will, written the year before his death, Dickens rejected these attitudes once more: 'I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious and strictly private manner...that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hatband, or any other such revolting absurdity.'\n\nThese were symbols of death rather than death itself, but the actuality was also often seen on the street. The starving poor died publicly where they fell; transportation accidents were common; even more routine was violent death from natural, or man-made, disasters.\n\nIn 1857, Dickens was accused of basing his depiction of the collapse of Mrs Clennam's house in _Little Dorrit_ on the recent fall of four houses that made up Maple's shop on Tottenham Court Road. Stung, he replied that that instalment of the novel had gone to press before the buildings fell, adding that he had foreshadowed precisely this collapse at the very beginning of the novel, which had begun serialization eighteen months earlier. He need hardly have protested, nor was the Maple's collapse a one-off. In 1826, a German nobleman, Prince P\u00fcckler-Muskau, had written home: 'A house, by no means old, fell last night in St. James's-street, close by me, just like a house of cards.' In 1840, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , Sampson Brass says: 'I am a falling house, and the rats...fly from me,' as we might say, 'Rats leave a sinking ship.' Dickens might equally have pointed to newspaper reports of the buildings that had fallen in St Paul's Churchyard in July 1852, or to the two in Seven Dials three months later, or to the 'great portion' of the Excise Office that collapsed in Old Broad Street, killing two, in 1854. Vast numbers of houses, in an arrested state of half falling and being shored up by timber struts, can be seen in almost any contemporary picture of the London streets.\n\nThe buildings collapsed because they were old, but modernity brought its own dangers. As gasworks grew ever bigger to supply more and more households, the perils increased too. In 1865, the meter house of the London Gasworks Company exploded at Nine Elms, in Battersea, killing several and injuring many more, even before two nearby gasometers were engulfed, one of which also exploded, killing another nine people. Newspapers began printing the locations of gasometers and fretting that the Houses of Parliament, or St Paul's, or other heritage sites, might be at risk. What was surprising was not the explosion, but the general response: there had been numerous gas-related explosions ever since gas arrived and, on the whole, they were thought of as a routine hazard.\n\nEven more common, in the days of lighting with candles, oil and gas, where naked flames were used for heating and cooking, were house fires, a well-loved element of popular street entertainment. Fires in private houses \u2013 particularly chimney fires, when the old soot and chimney detritus ignited \u2013 accounted for nearly half of all such incidents in the city, with candles causing another 30 per cent. In 1848, one newspaper reported that in London's 644 fires (a much lower figure than in most years, which averaged around 1,000), 239 members of the public had been killed. However, this apparently did not include the children who had died when their clothes caught fire \u2013 evidently too common an event to warrant counting. Theatres, too, were always at risk, given the gas lighting, the female performers in gauzy dresses moving near stage lights and the crowded conditions. In the quarter-century between 1841 and 1867, nine major theatres burnt down.\n\nTechnology having made such conflagrations more rather than less likely, the focus was on controlling them, rather than preventing them. From 1774, each parish vestry was obliged to have ready two engines, leather 'pipes' (hoses), and ladders. Initially these engines were not for the most part horse-drawn but were literally manned, pulled by local street boys or 'by poor decrepit old men from the workhouse', under the supervision of the parish beadle. Dickens, who all his life hated men in petty authority with all the hatred of a formerly lower-middle-class child harassed by these minor tyrants, contemptuously satirized a parish response to a chimney fire: its engine 'came up in gallant style \u2013 three miles and a half an hour, at least'. Then 'Bang went the pumps...the beadle perspired profusely; but it was unfortunately discovered, just as they were going to put the fire out, that nobody understood the process by which the engine was filled with water; and that eighteen boys, and a man, had exhausted themselves in pumping for twenty minutes, without producing the slightest effect!' A quarter of a century later, the parish was no more efficient, their engine responding to a fire at the offices of _All the Year Round_ 'like a drivelling Perambulator'. Dickens cheered up when the crowd, discovering that the fire had already been extinguished, 'Snowballed the Beadle'.\n\nMore usefully, and professionally, the city's insurance companies had their own fire brigades, and the fa\u00e7ades of many buildings carried small metal tags to identify the company with which they were insured. This was an incomplete solution, leading to instances when a brigade failed to deal with a burning building because it was not insured with their company, only for the fire to spread to neighbouring ones that were their responsibility. Between the parish and the insurance companies, far too many buildings that could have been salvaged burnt down, and so in 1833 a single London Fire Engine Establishment was established by the ten largest insurance companies. (Another five joined soon after, and by 1846 just two did not belong.)\n\nIn its first year the Fire Engine Establishment employed seventy-seven men, with fourteen horse-drawn engines in thirteen stations, all under the superintendence of James Braidwood, aged thirty-three, who had already served as Edinburgh's Master of Fire Engines for nearly a decade. He divided the city into five districts; by 1846, the most easterly station was at the Ratcliffe Highway, the most westerly by Portman Square, with thirty-five engines controlled by ninety men in dark-grey uniforms trimmed with red and black leather helmets. (The glamour days of uniforms were behind them: the Sun Insurance company firemen had worn blue coats with metal buttons, double-breasted waistcoats, breeches, striped stockings and boots; the Hope Insurance company dressed its men in red short-skirted frock coats and waistcoats, blue breeches and top-boots.) Two years after the devastating Tooley Street fire (see pp.111\u2013121), a Parliamentary Select Committee recommended that a new brigade supersede both the parishes and the insurance companies, to be paid for by taxation as a public good. In 1865, the old Fire Engine Establishment was put under the authority of the Metropolitan Board of Works. By 1869, this Metropolitan Fire Brigade had forty-four stations, three floating engines and 314 men.\n\nAs early as 1830, steam engines had been available: a 10-horsepower engine with high-pressure hoses spraying out nearly 170 gallons a minute, to a height of three yards \u2013 vastly more than the old manual engines had been able to produce. However, these inefficient predecessors were preferred, partly through innate conservatism, but more so because the general populace could make money from assisting. For seventy-seven \u2013 or even 314 \u2013 men were not going to extinguish London's fires all on their own, and volunteers played a major part. When a station was alerted to a major fire, all the men and engines from that district set off immediately, as did two-thirds of the men and engines from the districts on either side and one-third from districts further afield. Fires were eagerly announced: a notification from a policeman earned him 10s; a member of the public received a smaller sum. At the first cry of fire, 'away scamper the policemen to the nearest stations of the Fire Brigade, passing the word to other policemen as they run, till all the police force in the neighbourhood are clattering along the pavements...either towards an engine-station...or to pass the word to the policeman whose duty it will be to run to the engine-station next beyond. By this means of passing the word, somebody arrives at the gates of the Chief Office of the Fire Brigade, in Watling Street, and, seizing the handle of the night-bell, pulls away at it with vigour.' The fireman on duty took the immediate details \u2013 location and size \u2013 before ringing the 'singleman's bell', which rang in 'the division where the four unmarried men sleep', and heading for the stables to start harnessing the horses. By the time the engines were ready, Braidwood, if the fire was sufficient to warrant it, had mounted beside the driver, with the engineer, the foreman and firemen on board behind. Then they were off. If the fire was only a mile or two away, then the horses were set at full gallop, aiming for ten miles an hour, or 'the best royal mail pace'. If it was further, they could not go flat out, 'for fear of breaking down the horses', tiring them before they reached their destination. In the early part of the century, before gas lighting had become prevalent, men with lit torches ran alongside the horses, calling encouragement to the animals and shouting warnings to everyone else on the street by wild cries of 'Hi! yi! hi! yi!' After gas lighting became more common, the torches were dispensed with, but two men on board the engine continued to stand by the driver and 'roar incessantly' to warn oncoming traffic.\n\nThis undated photograph (probably after 1866 from the uniforms) shows Willesden Fire Brigade with two engines and 'fire-escapes', extendable wheeled ladders used to rescue people from upper storeys.\n\nAs the horses were always at risk of slipping on their mad careen to the fire, the men were also there to help them up if it were possible or cut them out of their traces if not. A problem of a different kind was posed by the number of private streets in the capital, especially in Bloomsbury on the Bedford Estate, and in Mayfair, where the Westminster Estate ruled. These neighbourhoods marked their exclusivity by barriers at the ends of the roads, but they also prevented the entry of fire engines, increasing the danger to these neighbourhoods. Even with the risks to the horses and the detours, by the late 1840s Braidwood expected a response time of twenty-eight minutes for a fire within a half-mile of any station, from first receiving the report of a fire to the water being pumped. (In 2006, the average response time to fires in England was just under seven minutes.)\n\nMetal plaques were affixed to buildings across London: 'W.M. 16 feet', for example, indicating the distance to the nearest water mains. As part of their charter, all water companies were obliged to give free access to their pumps in case of fire. Immediately the engine arrived, crowds collected and volunteers stepped forward to help hook up the pipes and especially to man the pumps, six or eight men per pump handle. (The two floating river engines required 100 men each.) The work was exhausting: every five minutes a fresh relay of pumpers was needed. The excitement of the fire made people want to join in; an added incentive was that those who pumped were paid 1s for the first hour of their labour and 6d for each additional hour, as well as being supplied with bread, cheese and beer. A foreman for each engine chose from among the volunteers (while the hungry masses might want to work for the money, they weren't necessarily physically capable). Such was the enthusiasm that, 'if necessary [he] fought off the surplus with the aid of his crew', before acting as a coxswain, setting the tempo for pumping. 'Down with her,' he cried, 'down with the pump,' as the men worked to the chant of 'Beer-oh! Beer-oh!' Sometimes armbands were used to identify the volunteers, which they handed over in return for their 'creature comforts' of beer and food. Sometimes, if the fire were big enough to make it pay, nearby pubs opened up again, 'doing a roaring trade in beer, which is distributed to the volunteers at the pumps in sufficiently liberal quantities, a check being kept upon the amount consumed by means of tickets'. So that a pay office didn't have to be established with every fire, the volunteers were given metal tokens, to be exchanged for cash at the station the next day. While the volunteers were pumping, the Fire Engine Establishment employees, known as the 'brigade men', did the dangerous work, first clearing a working area for themselves by a fast squirt from their hoses to move the crowds back.\n\nFor those not actively assisting, fires were street theatre for all, from high to low. In 1830, a fire broke out at 2 a.m. at the English Opera House, in Covent Garden. Charles Greville, the political diarist, 'was playing at whist at the \"Travellers\" [club, a few hundred yards away]...when we saw the whole sky illuminated and a volume of fire rising in the air. We thought it was Covent Garden, and [he and two peers] set off to the spot...though it was three in the morning the streets filled with an immense multitude...All the gentility of London was there from Princess Esterhazy's ball and all the clubs; gentlemen in their fur cloaks, pumps, and velvet waistcoats mixed with...men and women half-dressed, covered with rags and dirt.' This was not at all unusual: when the Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire in 1834, everyone who was anyone turned out to watch. The fire was probably caused by the overheating of flues from the furnace under the House of Lords, where the exchequer tally-sticks were burnt. The old, in many places medieval, wooden structure went up quickly, aided by a lack of fire-stops or party walls, as well as by the fact that Braidwood and his men, when they arrived, had no idea of the layout of the building. In private houses or warehouses, a basic floor-plan could be assumed, but faced with such a rabbit warren at no time did the firemen have any sense of where they were, or where the fire might break out next. The Fire Engine Establishment supplied twelve engines and sixty-four men, even though, technically, the Houses of Parliament were outside its remit, being uninsured government property. From the first they saw that they were too late to save Westminster Palace and St Stephen's Chapel; instead they concentrated on Westminster Hall, dragging their engines inside the walls and cutting away the roof where it adjoined the Speaker's house, which was already well alight.\n\nLord Melbourne, the prime minister, and other members of the government gathered to watch throughout the night. The philosopher Thomas Carlyle, also present, described the crowd as more gratified than awed or frightened: they ' _whew'd_ and whistled when the breeze came as if to encourage it: \"there's a _flare-up_...A judgement for the Poor-Law Bill\"...A man _sorry_ I did not anywhere see.' The artist Benjamin Robert Haydon and his wife arrived by cab specifically to see the spectacle, sitting with 'the people', who were full of 'jokes and radicalism universal'. When Covent Garden theatre burnt down in 1856, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal visited the smouldering site the next day, as did Dickens three days later, 'the moment' he returned to London from a trip. In adult life, the Prince of Wales did not wait until the flames were out to put in an appearance. He and his friends enjoyed attending fires, like the rest of the populace, and they even had replica fire-brigade uniforms made up, in which they bustled about at fire scenes, playing at firemen and getting in the way. (While volunteers were still needed, it is hard to imagine the already portly Prince of Wales taking his five-minute turn at the pumps.)\n\nFor those without titles and replica uniforms, it was the event itself that made good street theatre. In 1829, the young H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan Bey, studying in England, heard 'sudden cries of \"fire\" and the noise of running footsteps'. Looking out, he saw a fire apparently a few hundred yards from the house. Despite the heavy rain, 'the street was crowded with people of both sexes hastening to the conflagration', and without any hesitation he too rushed out to join them. Sala, two decades later, would have understood this perfectly: at the call of 'Fire! fire!' he wrote, 'It matters not how late the hour be, how important the avocations of the moment, that magic cry sets all legs...in motion...A minute past, I was at Evans's [Supper Rooms], tranquilly conversing...now I find myself racing like mad up St. Martin's Lane, towards St. Giles's...running after that hoarse cry, and towards that awful Redness in the sky.' This particular fire was at an oil shop, which went up like a rocket, with 'columns of flame, and...billows upon billows of crimson smoke, the whole encircled by myriads of fiery sparks that fall upon the gaping crowd and make them dance and yell with terror and excitement.' Sometimes viewers set up to watch these blazes at a distance: in 1847, a fire in Battersea drew busloads of spectators who stood all along the north side of the river and on the bridges, even venturing out in small boats.\n\nIt is unsurprising, therefore, to find that in Dickens' day journalists 'prowl continually about London...in search of fires, fallings in and down of houses, runnings away of vicious horses, breakings down of cabs, carriages, and omnibuses; and, in fact, accidents and casualties of every description. But especially fires. Fatal accidents are not unnaturally preferred...and in the case of a fire a slight loss of life is not objected to.' Street theatre was, after all, discerning in its disasters.\nPART FOUR\n\nSleeping and Awake\n\n_1852: The Funeral of the Duke of Wellington_\n\nThe great duke was dying. In a way, the great duke had been dying for so long that no one believed he would actually die. He had had a stroke in 1839, which had been fairly successfully hidden from the public, and well into his seventies he continued to ride out, unaccompanied, in his quaintly old-fashioned clothes. Another stroke followed on one of these rides. Then another, in the House of Lords. These were harder to hide, and the end was coming.\n\nThe vanquisher of Napoleon was the man people remembered. Forgotten was the execrated politician, the public face of anti-Reform sentiment of the 1820s and 1830s. Forgotten was the man who was known to have long been on intimate terms with a married woman who was not his wife. In the late 1820s, one American tourist had seen him in the street, a man, he commented, 'who might have rendered himself the idol of the nation', but whose name, instead, was 'scarcely ever mentioned' except accompanied by 'some epithet of reproach', even his ' _military_ talents' being condemned, 'so strong is the dislike he has incurred' by his 'domestic habits'. At that time, there had been no admiration, much less veneration. In 1830, on the way to the Abbey for the coronation of William IV, his carriage 'rolled on in solemn silence, as if to a funeral', while that of Lord Brougham, the populist reforming chancellor, was 'hailed by the shouts and acclamation of all'.\n\nBy 1852, this had been forgotten and the old duke was once more part of the city's landscape. Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner, his home since 1817, was known as 'Number 1, London', and by now people assumed that it was so-called because of its famous owner. (More prosaically, it had simply been the first house on the very western edge of the city in the eighteenth century.) Long forgotten too, or at least regarded as a foible of age, was the reason why the windows of Apsley House had been covered with sheets of iron since 1831. In that year the government's rejection of Reform had seen a mob surge down Piccadilly, breaking windows. Stones had been thrown at the windows of Apsley House, too, until the butler came out to remonstrate: the Duchess of Wellington had just died, and her body still lay inside, awaiting burial. The mob passed on, but the bitter, furious duke \u2013 who had been famously unpleasant to his wife throughout their marriage ('I was not the least in love with her. I married her because they asked me to do it') \u2013 ostentatiously had great iron shutters nailed over the windows and left them there for the remainder of his life. In 1852, many full-grown adults could not remember Apsley House with open windows, but they were seeing him now not as a statesman of disastrous political ineptitude but as the soldier, the hero of Salamanca and of Vittoria, of Badajoz and, of course, of Waterloo.\n\nYet, when the end finally came, on 14 September, at the duke's home at Walmer Castle, near Deal, in Kent, the public response was initially muted. Lord Stanley, parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote to Disraeli that the duke's death had not produced 'the slightest impression out-of-doors...no crowd of enquirers round Apsley House...We telegraphed down to Balmoral without delay: but I don't imagine the Chief [the Earl of Derby: both prime minister and also Stanley's father] will find it worth his while to come up [to London].' It was another week before it was announced that a state funeral would take place, but that the date was to be decided by Parliament, which was in recess and would not reconvene until 11 November.\n\nWhile the public initially displayed an interest that was devoid of emotion or excitement, the newspapers viewed it as a bigger event. The day after it was decided to hold a state funeral, the _Illustrated London News_ was already advertising that its 'Regular Subscribers will receive GRATIS splendid large ENGRAVINGS of the PROCESSION and PUBLIC FUNERAL of the DUKE OF WELLINGTON, a lasting memorial of the national mourning'. Other papers were more ambivalent, at least at first. The _Daily News_ noted that before Nelson's funeral in 1805 the vergers of St Paul's were said to have made over \u00a31,000 by taking payments to let people in to see the preparations. And, it reminded its readers, that funeral had cost the country \u00a314,698. It added, without comment, that the duke was earning nearly \u00a310,000 a year. (This was made up of his salary as commander-in-chief, an allowance as colonel of the Grenadier Guards, a salary as colonel-in-chief, Rifle Brigade, a salary as Lord Warden, Cinque Ports, a salary as Constable of the Tower, and a 'Forage Allowance' of \u00a3700 a year. The article left unmentioned the fact that more than \u00a3400,000 had been voted him by Parliament as reward for his role in the Napoleonic wars, or the quarter of a million pounds paid by the nation for his country estate.) Instead, the newspaper stressed that the funeral should be in keeping with 'the simple, the severe spirit of the man', although, it added hastily, it didn't 'grudge' a 'penny'. Not that anyone knew how much anything would cost, because it was nearly two months before the Earl Marshal announced even the date of the funeral or its route.\n\nPerhaps those intervening two months of uncertainty were what drove the public into such a frenzy. About ten days after the duke's death, advertisements began to be placed for Wellington-related entertainment: the Gallery of Illustration (a quasi-theatre, for people whose religious scruples did not permit them to attend real theatres) mounted 'The Diorama of Wellington's Campaigns', showing twice daily. Portraits and engravings, biographies and histories of his battles went on sale, together with a 'N A T I O N A L S O N G' dedicated to his memory, and a copy of an equestrian sculpture (in plaster for five guineas, or bronze at fifty guineas), a Minton bust and likenesses in gold or silver, suitable for mounting in mourning rings and other jewellery.\n\nBy the middle of October, newspapers were running advertisements for seats along what was expected to be the procession's route. 'FUNERAL of the GREAT DUKE . \u2013 The Nobility and Gentry are informed that any number of SEATS or FLOORS, to view the Procession, may be obtained of MR. THEARLE, the masonic jeweller, 198, Fleet-street, near Temple-bar' was a fairly representative example. By the end of October, a single room in the Strand was offered for an astonishing 100 guineas, while a grocer in St Paul's Churchyard was reputed to have rented out the upper storeys of his house for \u00a3500. Most papers were carrying two or three of these advertisements daily; by early November, this had risen to half a dozen or so, and the tourist market was not overlooked: 'Sitze f\u00fcr die Beerdigung des Herzog von Wellington'. A lack of solemnity was apparent: those taking rooms, advertised Messrs Purssell of Cornhill, 'can be supplied with REFRESHMENTS of any kind, including wines, and the use of china, glass, cutlery, &c.'\n\nThe churches were determined not to be left behind. St Mary-le-Strand advertised one-guinea seats in a gallery to be erected in front of the church. St Clement Danes joined in in early November, its seats 'exclusively [for] ratepayers of the parish' for the first week, then available to the public at large. (At the end of the year St Clement's divided its takings of \u00a3223 among seven charities and made donations of 'many other...smaller amounts', all from this sale of seats for the funeral.)\n\nAn advertisement in the _Morning Post_ warned, 'It has been computed that one million of individuals will visit London to witness the melancholy procession of departed greatness, and at this inclement season of the year ... it is most important that the feet should be kept free from damp', for which, happily, it provided the solution: 'AMERICAN OVER-SHOES should be worn, both by those attending the funeral and those waiting, perhaps for hours, to see the procession pass.' Glenny's Irish Hand-knit Stockings and Socks reminded readers that 'THE FUNERAL of the DUKE OF YORK was attended with loss of life to several illustrious Statesmen, in consequence of taking cold in the feet.' Other establishments attempted to appear less openly commercial: Moses and Son, a well-known City firm selling ready-made, inexpensive men's clothing, produced a rare black-bordered notice: 'E. Moses and Son are no way desirous of making this a business affair, but, prompted by a disposition to offer every accommodation to their patrons...they have prepared for this occasion a Stock of Mourning Habiliments.'\n\nIt was becoming clear that this was an occasion that hundreds of thousands did not want to miss. Train schedules were revised to depart from towns and cities in the middle of the night, to get spectators to London first thing on the morning of the funeral. Even shipping was affected. The Mount Alexandra line announced that its packet ships, due to sail to Australia that week, would 'In consequence of the request of many of the passenger ... not leave the East India Docks until after the day of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington'.\n\nFor by now the funeral was turning into an extravaganza. On 10 November the embalmed body of the duke was conveyed to London by special train from Kent. It arrived at the Bricklayers' Arms after midnight, a time when no spectators might have been expected. Nevertheless, 'a very considerable number of persons' waited there for hours, as they did all along the route, even though the train made only two stops, chugging without pause through the other stations. Even those platforms were 'lined with railway officials holding lamps in their hands, which served to show further back groups of spectators...every one...in mourning'.\n\nThe duke's body was taken, with military escort, to the Great Hall of Chelsea Hospital, where the hall was hung with his 'trophies of great military achievements ... from the banners of the \"Mysore Tiger\" to the Eagles of the \"Grand Army\"'. The staging was dramatic: a vestibule was draped in black, with 'an enormous plume of black feathers, descending in the form of a chandelier', while the inner hall was lit by eighty-three candelabras displaying sable hangings that entirely covered the walls and ceiling. The niches were lined with soldiers from the duke's regiment in pairs, their arms reversed. A passageway led to a dais covered with cloth of gold under a canopy of black velvet, spangled with silver stars and a silver fringe, with, at the front, a heraldic mantle, the arms in gold, lined with black-spangled silver fabric, all looped up in festoons. The coffin itself was placed on a raised platform with 'an ornamental fence, massively silvered' around it, with lions rampant carrying shields on pedestals. Ten hollow columns, made to resemble bundles of spears bound with laurels, marched down the hall, containing reflectors to light the bier, on which stood another dozen smaller silver candelabra. Behind hung the flags of the conquered from all Wellington's battles; in front were displayed his military insignia and decorations, including the ones given by foreign governments, his marshal's batons and Waterloo sword. At the head of the coffin chairs were placed for the chief mourner and two 'assistant mourners', who changed by rota, the places being filled by 'some of the most distinguished personages in the kingdom'.\n\nThe first day of the lying-in-state was quiet, probably because potential visitors feared massive crowds; when none manifested, _everyone_ came the following day. By seven in the morning, it was estimated that there were 100,000 people waiting. The actor Fred Belton commented, 'Barriers had been erected, and as soon as the first barrier was withdrawn another mob were [sic] admitted; then the shrieks, cries, and yells, were terrific. I felt that to stumble or fall would be death...When we entered by the hall ... my wife's dress [was] in ribbons.' Even as this crowd was funnelled through the single narrow exit, packed steamers continued to drop off more and more passengers at Cadogan Pier, pressing the growing multitudes into the railings. Some people were saved only by being lifted over the high wrought-iron railings by Life Guards; two died.\n\nThose who were to take part in the actual funeral procession were instructed on appropriate dress: 'in mourning, without weepers, but with mourning swords'. Those who had seats in St Paul's were to wear 'mourning frock dress', while their 'Servants (not in mourning) attending the carriages' should still have silk or crape hatbands and black gloves. Even those watching were advised as to appropriate dress: according to the _Post_ , there had been 'considerable doubt' whether women were expected to continue to wear general mourning in the street after the funeral (it went without saying that mourning was expected on the day itself ). Now, the editorial went on, 'we are in a position to state, upon the highest authority', that mourning should be worn for the single day, while 'The introduction of crape as a prominent feature of dress' could be 'left to the discretion' of each wearer, while 'velvet, we are informed, may be worn in cloaks'.\n\nThe buildings along the funeral route were equally carefully adorned for the occasion, with banners appearing, embroidered with ' _Non sibi, sed Patriae_ ' ('Not for himself, but for his country'). Along Pall Mall and St James's, clubs draped their fa\u00e7ades in black cloth and other appropriate decorations: the Oxford and Cambridge Club's balconies were 'tastefully hung with black cloth, festooned with silver lace, the letter \"W.\" enclosed in laurel wreaths, being inserted in temporary hatchments'. Other clubs, as well as some of the mansions of the rich in this area, did not meet public expectations, with only a 'few mean and scanty black cloths...shabbily decorated'. That could not be said of Temple Bar: both sides of the stone gateway were 'covered with black cotton velvet, which was decorated with appropriate fringes. Each side was arranged with Roman cornices and frieze, in imitation of silver. On the summit was an immense funeral urn (of silver gilt), surrounded with 12 flambeaux of funeral torches. At each corner...was a funeral urn...somewhat smaller than ... the central one...O n the drapery were several monograms, with the initials \"W.A.\",' for Arthur Wellesley, together with shields and flags of the countries that had made the duke an honorary officer, with orders suspended from them. The whole was lit from 6 a.m. on the morning of the funeral by gas lighting that had been specially piped in.\n\nAt St Paul's, the great building contractor William Cubitt had been commissioned to build an interior grandstand to seat the thousands of mourners, as well as hanging the galleries and walls with mourning draperies. The City Corporation had laid down three large gas mains to ensure that the nave, the cornice and the Whispering Gallery above would be suitably lit: nearly 7,000 lamps were installed. St Paul's \u2013 as it had with Nelson, and as the newspapers had warned \u2013 had become a tourist site: Greville went to take a look two days before the funeral. He judged that the effect of the lights was very good 'but it was like a great rout [ball]; all London was there strolling and staring about in the midst of a thousand workmen going on with their business ... all the fine ladies [were] scrambling over vast masses of timber, or ducking to avoid the great beams that were constantly sweeping along'.\n\nOn 17 November, the duke's remains were taken from Chelsea Hospital to the Audience Room at Horse Guards, the starting place for the funeral procession. The police had barred all traffic from the parade ground, and on the 18th the roads around St James's and Green Park were closed from 7 a.m. Those with tickets for St Paul's were permitted to drive through until fixed times, graded by their proximity to the cathedral. Everyone else in London had to walk that day. Sophia Beale and her family in central London ate breakfast at five to be in their places at Ludgate Hill before the barriers came down at eight.\n\nAt seven o'clock on the morning of the funeral, the ceremonial gilded coach of the Speaker of the House of Commons, together with six carriages of state each pulled by five horses, drew into Horse Guards to represent the royal family. At 7.45, 'the seventeen minute guns, which were the military salute due to the remains of the Duke of Wellington from his rank as a fieldmarshal, began to be fired'. Church bells throughout the city started to toll, as they would once every minute for the rest of the morning. The funeral car was uncovered, and its twelve horses harnessed three abreast. The catafalque itself was astonishing. Of solid bronze, it measured twenty-seven feet long and ten feet wide, with a carved and gilded canopy seventeen feet high, the sides of which carried the names of Wellington's victories, with replicas of some of his battle trophies and his coronet. On the car itself rested the bier, covered by a 'magnificent pall, with a silver fringe, six inches deep, and powdered with ornaments in the same metal', on which had been placed the coffin, covered with scarlet velvet, on which lay the duke's sword and cap. A silver and gold cloth formed a canopy above, supported by halberds. In even the most laudatory images, the car looks like a mobile shop window, gaudy and overstuffed, with the coffin diminished by the size of the car into a tiny little bump on the top of an excess of plush. One foreign correspondent merely wrote, 'I will not speak of it out of respect for him it carried.'\n\nAs the sides of the catafalque were drawn up to show the bier, the soldiers presented and then reversed their arms to a roll of muffled drums. Finally, at eight o'clock the procession began to move. The band of the Rifle Brigade, playing the 'Dead March' from Handel's _Saul_ , went first, with troops following in sections eight deep with their arms reversed, followed in turn by '13 trumpets and kettle drums, two pursuivants-at-arms in a mourning coach', then by the long line of mourning coaches of the public bodies, ambassadors and state officials. The procession was so extensive that it was nearly an hour and a half before the funeral car itself moved out of Horse Guards, followed by the new Duke of Wellington and other family members, as well as Wellington's own horse, led riderless, saddled and with the duke's boots reversed in the stirrups. As more soldiers fell in behind, the procession moved slowly and steadily until it reached the Mall, where the funeral car became bogged down in a rut in the street. (It took ten minutes of the 'active exertions' by the police and soldiers on duty to extricate it and get on the move again.)\n\nThe nearby parks \u2013 St James's and Green Park \u2013 were relatively empty, having been kept locked, reserved for the use of grandees. In the grounds of St James's Palace, scaffolding had been erected to create seating for the families and friends of the royal family, while the grounds of Marlborough House were filled with 'rows of seats...extending from the gate to Pallmall back to the Chapel Royal'. At Stafford House, the family and friends of the Duke of Sutherland, 'dressed in deep mourning, watched...from an enclosed building raised at the bottom of the garden'. Before eight o'clock, Queen Victoria, in deep mourning, had emerged onto the central balcony of Buckingham Palace to stand with Prince Albert, their children and other foreign royals. She remained there as the procession passed \u2013 nearly two hours from start to finish \u2013 but after the mourning coaches had passed the Prince Consort and some of the other men in the party left to join in the procession themselves. After it had continued into Green Park, the queen and her family went to St James's Palace, to take up a new viewing position.\n\nAt Constitution Hill, the hordes of onlookers watched the procession appear just as the sun came out. At the Wellington Arch, the cavalcade paused; then, as the funeral car moved past Apsley House, someone in the throng shouted, 'Hats off!' and all the men in the vast crowd removed their hats, 'except in cases where the pressure [of people] did not permit the spectators to use their hands'. After another pause, soon after ten, the cort\u00e8ge moved slowly down Piccadilly, where possibly as many as 30,000 people had crammed themselves, having waited all night despite torrential rain and icy winds. In several of the mansions the blinds were drawn out of respect, but for the most part the windows and rooftops all along the route swarmed with spectators; many of the great mansions had built in extra viewing space. The many clubs in St James's and Pall Mall had placed tiers of seats in the windows, and some had even built platforms on their roofs, providing viewing spaces for their members, their families and friends: some clubs offered seating for 2,000 people. Only the Carlton had made no special provision: the duke had been a founder member, and it felt that strict mourning precluded spectators.\n\nBy the time the head of the procession reached Trafalgar Square, it was estimated that 10,000 people had squeezed into the space, filling the windows of all the surrounding buildings with crowds on the roof of the National Gallery and even St Martin-in-the-Fields. ('One poor fellow, clinging to a chimney-pot, fell from a terrific height.') As the cort\u00e8ge neared, then passed interminably, 'whispered murmurs of \"here comes the Duke!\" met our ear', but 'no emotion was shown' until 'his favourite horse, led by his favourite groom, appeared, with the heads both of horse and men bent as if in deep grief, and the saddle to which were appended his boots ... Then sobs, sighs, silent tears.' Here eighty-three Chelsea Pensioners, one for each year of the duke's life, were drawn up in formation between Nelson's Column and the statue of Charles I. As the long cavalcade marched by, the Pensioners fell in, joining their more active colleagues for the rest of the route.\n\nWith the exception of the house windows, the Strand was, curiously, the least crowded section, with people lining the pavements no more than two or three deep, although most of the buildings had additional seating on scaffolding. The procession slowed once more as the head of it reached Temple Bar: the soldiers, who had been marching six abreast, had to re-form into a double file to fit through the gateway; the canopy of the catafalque, too, had to be lowered to pass under the arch. (The week before, the car, suitably weighted to represent the real thing, had been taken on a trial run.) As the procession crossed the boundary into the City, the Lord Mayor joined it, together with members of the Common Council. At Ludgate Hill there was an involuntary pause once more: the steepness of the hill slowed the horses pulling the carriages and the catafalque, while the dense crowds, too, spilt over into the road, slowing things further. Nevertheless, the funeral car arrived at St Paul's exactly at noon and was immediately moved into a temporary shed 'where means had been supplied to move the ponderous bier into the body of the cathedral'. Meanwhile a blue light was flashed out from the dome of the cathedral, 'for the purpose of informing the Tower authorities when to begin the firing of the minute guns'.\n\nThe congregation had been instructed to arrive at St Paul's at 6 a.m., but the builders were then still frantically finishing, and it was eight o'clock before the doors opened; many people had been waiting outside for more than two hours in the rain. Once inside, the temporary tiers provided seats for 6,000, with another 7,000 squeezed in under the dome and more spaces found in the transepts and galleries \u2013 altogether, room for about 17,000 had been created.\n\nAround the coffin stood Prince Albert, bearing the duke's field marshal's baton; the Marquess of Anglesey, who had lost his leg at Waterloo and was himself eighty-four, carrying his marshal's baton; and the pall-bearers, all officers who had served under Wellington. Apart from Austria, every country for which the duke had held a marshal's baton had sent a representative: thirty-seven years after Waterloo the allies against Napoleon were reunited. After the funeral service, the coffin was lowered into its tomb beneath the cathedral floor, forty trumpeters sounded a dirge at the west entrance to the cathedral, and the troops began to disperse, followed by the funeral car, Prince Albert, the foreign dignitaries and then the crowds. By five o'clock, the hundreds of thousands of spectators had vanished and only the black fabric remained, hanging damply across the buildings.\n\nSoon, all trace of the spectacle was gone, but the man himself would continue to be remembered:\n\nLet the sound of those he wrought for,\n\nAnd the feet of those he fought for,\n\nEcho round his bones for evermore.\n\nThere, in St Paul's, instead of Westminster Abbey, usually the home of dead heroes, Wellington was placed for ever at the heart of the city, belonging to the people rather than the government, perhaps a suitable end for the man who rejected both Reform and the common people, but always did his duty for them nonetheless.\n\n#### 13.\n\n#### NIGHT ENTERTAINMENT\n\nThere were thousands of places to go and be amused, on and off the street, in early- and mid-Victorian London \u2013 thousands of places, that is, if one happened to be a man. Public places for women's amusement were less easy to find and, for middle- and upper-class women, they verged on the non-existent. Clubs were, of course, entirely male. So were the coffee shops, chophouses and other public eating spaces; low-cost cookshops did a busy trade with working-class women, coming and going with their families' dinners, but eating there, although possible, was less common. Many West End theatres seated women in the boxes as well as in what later became known as the dress circle (for the prosperous) and the gallery (for the poor), but the pit and other low-priced areas were for men. Theatres in the East End and south of the river confined working-class women to the galleries and middle-class women to the boxes, although Astley's Amphitheatre, where hippodramas were staged, was an entirely family entertainment. Any woman anywhere in the Alhambra Music Hall, apart from working-class women in the gallery, was automatically assumed to have a dubious reputation, or none. The same went for most other nightspots of the city.\n\nPerhaps the most masculine of all entertainment arenas was to be found in the variety of places where animal baiting occurred throughout the century. In theory, this was a Regency hangover that faded away with Victorian respectability. In reality, there are mentions of various types of baiting throughout the period, both in fixed venues and more loosely organized by individuals. One early memoirist recalled places for bull-baiting, badgerbaiting, dogfighting 'and such like \"manly sports\"'. Lying between Parliament and Millbank was a house owned by William Aberfield, better known as 'Slender Billy', where bear-baiting and dogfighting were conducted, while the similarly characterfully named 'Harlequin Billy' presided over bear- and badger-baiting in a cellar in Whitechapel every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at eight o'clock, all year round. The compiler of a notebook in the possession of the magistrate John Silvester recorded that Mrs Cummings, a fence, may have owned the cockpit in Bambridge Street, which had twiceweekly fights. It also stated that Mrs Smith, near Blackfriars, 'has a Bear Bait twice a week, Mondays & Thursdays, in a Shed at the back part of the House'. Both places charged 6d admission. So although women could not attend, at least a few ran these activities.\n\nA fictional bear-baiting was described in _Real Life in London_ in 1821, where the two men on the razzle remind themselves to button their jackets tightly and 'be awake' for pickpockets in the audience they mix with, who 'bore the appearance of Butchers, Dog-fanciers and Ruffians, intermingled here and there with a few _Sprigs of Fashion_... _Coster-mongers_ , Coal-heavers, Watermen, Soldiers, and Livery-servants'. The bear stands on his hind legs, chained to a wall by its neck. Dogs are loosed on him and bets laid as to 'how long the bow-wow would bother the ragged Russian'. (See Plate 18.) Each time a dog retreats wounded, a new dog is brought out, until at last the bear is taken away to be bandaged until he had healed enough to fight again. Pierce Egan's novel, _Life in London_ , in the same year describes a monkey fighting dogs at Westminster Pit, near Tothill Fields, a famous location for all types of animal baiting.\n\nBoth these instances are fiction, but the Westminster Pit was a real place, and newspapers routinely carried advertisements for fights throughout the 1820s. In 1822, _The Times_ ran an advertisement for 'A grand MAIN [match] of COCKS to be FOUGHT at the Cockpit Royal, Westminster', over three days, 'for 5 guineas a battle, and 100 the odds', with two fights scheduled daily, at two and five o'clock. As late as 1865, there were reports of cockfighting, although by that time they were balanced by reports of police-court appearances of men arrested in raids on illegal fighting dens. (Fights were legal as long as the premises were licensed.) Dogfighting also continued throughout the century, together with ratting. In the late 1840s, handbills were distributed announcing a 'great hundred rat match' in a pub in Graham Street, off the City Road, for an audience of the familiar mix of sporting types, costers, soldiers and tradesmen. The 1s entry fee gave visitors access to an upstairs room, where wooden boards created a small ring six feet in diameter, 'about as large as the centre flower-bed', lit by a large gaslight and surrounded by benches and tables. A dozen or so rats were loosed and the dogs set on them. As the rats were killed, their bodies were flung into a corner, the little arena swept clean, and the process began again. Dogs also fought each other, generally on the sly, in the backyards of beer shops, or on Sundays in the fields and waste ground surrounding the city.\n\nThe purpose of animal baiting was gambling. There was a middle-class sense that London was full of gamblers, card-sharpers, extortionists and other conmen, all waiting to leap upon the young na\u00eff up from the country. In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , Dickens mocked this foreboding when the rather simple Tom Pinch arrives in London for the first time and finds, to his surprise, that he was not once 'the prey of ring-droppers, pea and thimble- riggers, duffers, touters, or any of those bloodless sharpers ... H e fell into conversation with no gentleman who took him into a public-house, where there happened to be another gentleman who swore he had more money than any gentleman, and very soon proved he had more money than one gentleman by taking his away from him; neither did he fall into any other of the numerous man-traps which are set up without notice, in the public grounds of this city.' Despite these generalized fears for country bumpkins, some of the worst mantraps were designed for the upper classes. The fanciest gambling den in London in the first half of the century was Crockford's in St James's Street, founded in 1826 by a retired fishmonger. Crockford ensured that his club, apart from being a place where the rich could lose their shirts in decent privacy, in all other respects resembled the best gentlemen's club: it was exclusive and had a good chef. Indeed, it even laid on special late supper hours during the parliamentary season, when an exhausted legislator could stagger up the road from the Houses of Parliament and be refreshed at any hour from midnight to five in the morning.\n\nThere were thousands more clubs and drinking places to suit every socioeconomic level and every purpose. The attitude to drinking was almost entirely class based. _Hints to Men About Town_ , published in 1840, warned that 'as every Man about Town is liable to be placed in situations where it is almost impossible to escape perfectly sober', such a young man needed to learn how 'to take his glass ... without making a fool of himself '. The author, who called himself 'The Old Medical Student', advised young men to eat as well as drink, to stick to one type of wine, not to get rowdy and, above all, 'Do not be prevailed upon to sing' (which is surely good advice today too). This was followed by a section on what to do when a friend passed out from drink and how to cure a hangover. It was all very matter-of-fact.\n\n_The Servant Girl in London: Showing the Dangers to which Young Country Girls are Exposed_ was published in the same year, but could not be further away in tone, even though its author had similarly pragmatic views. Readers were instructed that many pubs were entirely respectable, having been established by servants of gentry, and in them one could expect to meet 'some of the most pleasant company...The conversation is often very instructive, and well expressed...about politics, the news of the day, parish intelligence, and the like.' It was the taproom that was the danger: 'Here collect the working men, male servants in and out of place, hackney-coachmen, omnibus cads, &c.', who 'drink far more in proportion than those in the parlour...and frequently insult most grossly' the servant girls from local houses, the 'wives of mechanics [artisans], poor tradesmen, and the brokendown gentlewoman who keeps a school'. These blameless females, while waiting to collect the supper beer, were obliged meanwhile to mingle with 'the washerwoman, the market-woman, the basket-woman, the gaudilyattired courtesan, the sad street-walker'. This mixing, warned the author, was 'highly dangerous', but it was the mixing he was warning about, not the drinking.\n\nFrom the mid-eighteenth century, there had been a shift from gin, the historic drink of the people, to beer. Bad harvests and the 1751 Gin Act had made the spirit much more expensive, while the licensing laws for beer were being gradually loosened. Pubs were also changing. Previously, a pub had been a terraced house like any other, its ground-floor front room the public area, laid out and decorated like any front room, where people who knew each other sat together, as if they were at home. With increasing urbanization came a greater anonymity; a counter was installed so that the pub workers had access to the drink, while the customers (who were strangers, after all) no longer did. As early as the 1830s, this homely space was becoming more formal, more businesslike. A plan for a model pub showed a 'shop', that is, the bar, with an area for customers to stand on one side. A counter divided it from the bar-parlour, which was still considered a private part of the house and was decorated as a private sitting room 'for the master and mistress', where customers ventured only by invitation. A 'company parlour' led off to the right; and behind the shop was the taproom, the largest of them all. Later on, pubs also had jug-and-bottle departments, where householders would go with their own jugs to collect beer for home consumption, instead of using the shop, which was given over to drinking on the premises. The rooms were socially graded by their furnishings: taprooms had cheap wooden tables and benches; furniture in the parlour was mahogany, perhaps with upholstered chairs; while the barparlour retained its domestic furnishings.\n\nOn Sundays, pubs were legally required to close during the hours of church services. It was not only drinkers who waited for opening hours: the child on the left in this 1850 illustration holds a jug to carry home the dinner beer.\n\nWith different rooms serving different types of customers, most pubs also expected to attract a number of regular clients. In _Sketches by Boz_ , two pubs, one in Henrietta Street, and one in Fleet Street, draw a group of 'steady old boys' who are 'always to be seen in the same taverns, at the same hours every evening', where they sit and smoke and drink and tell stories; or they meet there, go half-price to the theatre, and then return after the show, for steak and oysters. These were central London pubs. Some were attached to coaching inns, both for passengers and for those meeting them, later providing the same function at railway stations. Some served those regular commuters walking past, who made up a substantial market. Pubs were therefore to be found on all the major arteries in and out of London, where possible on a corner site, to catch two streams of pedestrians. So essential were they to daily life that when speculative builders began to develop any area, a pub was routinely the first building to be erected, with the builder as licensee. The pub gave his workmen a place to eat and drink (as well as a place for their wages to be directed back into the contractor's own pocket); then, when a few houses had been built, the pub lease was sold off to provide more capital for further building. Augustus Mayhew's _Paved with Gold_ described a new suburb in the mid-1850s: 'Of the residences already erected, the large majority were still unfinished [but]...D otted all about was a thick sprinkling of public-houses.'\n\nIn the 1830s, pubs especially relied on a variety of customers when they began to face direct competition from a new type of drinking establishment, the gin palace. In 1834, a Select Committee on the Prevailing Vice of Drunkenness heard from a grocer in Tothill Street, near the Houses of Parliament, that a pub 'nearly opposite to my residence, where the consumption of spirits was very trifling' had been converted into a gin palace. From being 'a low dirty public-house, with only one doorway', it was transformed into 'a splendid edifice, the front ornamented with pilasters, supporting a handsome cornice and entablature, and balustrades, and the whole elevation remarkably striking and handsome; the doorways were increased in number from one, and that a small one...to three, and each of those eight to ten feet wide; the...doors and windows glazed with very large single squares of plate glass, and the gas fittings of the most costly description...when the doors were opened, the rush was tremendous; it was instantly filled with customers, and continued so till midnight.'\n\nGin palaces flourished with the arrival of gas lighting and plate-glass windows, making them a thing of wonder, places of light and warmth for those whose lives held little of either: undoubtedly, as Dickens observed, the poorer the neighbourhood, 'the more splendid do these places become'. In 1835, amid the filth and despair of St Giles, he recognized that the gin palaces were 'All...light and brilliancy...the gay building with the fantastically ornamented parapet, the illuminated clock, the plate-glass windows surrounded by stucco rosettes, and its profusion of gas-lights in richly-gilt burners, is perfectly dazzling when contrasted with the darkness and dirt we have just left.' Soon the enormous gaslights outside became the distinctive marker of a gin palace. One such place in the Ratcliffe Highway, in the East End, had 'a revolving light with many burners playing most beautifully' over one door; over a second, 'about fifty or sixty jets, in one lantern, were throwing out...brilliant gleams, as if from the branches of a shrub'; while a third had 'no less than THREE enormous lamps, with corresponding lights'. The man describing them was a temperance campaigner, so he might have been somewhat carried away by the enticements on offer, but not by much.\n\nThe decor, it seemed to Dickens, was, if possible, 'even gayer than the exterior'. 'A bar of French-polished mahogany, elegantly carved, extends the whole width of the place; and...Beyond the bar is a lofty and spacious saloon...with a gallery running round it, equally well furnished.' This luxury contrasted sharply with the gin palace's customers: two washerwomen; two old men who had 'finished their third quartern' \u2013 their third quarter of a pint \u2013 of gin and are 'crying drunk'; and some 'fat comfortable-looking elderly women' drinking rum shrub (rum with lemon and sugar). 'A throng of men, women, and children...have been constantly going in and out, [but late in the day this] dwindles down to two or three occasional stragglers \u2013 cold, wretched-looking creatures, in the last stage of emaciation and disease.' Dickens is both realistic and sympathetic here, ending by commenting that if temperance societies could provide against hunger and want, the gin palaces would vanish; since they could not, who could blame the drinkers for gravitating to the warmest, most attractive place available? (It is also worth considering that people who rarely had enough to eat would easily become drunk on very little alcohol.)\n\nBy the late 1840s, these drinking saloons were glamorous yet had no seating at all: 'every exertion is used to make the place as uncomfortable to the consumers as possible, so that they shall only stop in to drink, and pay; step out, and return to drink and pay again'. In the 1850s, Sala described one busy gin palace, with about fifty customers at two in the afternoon. Drinkers were invited to state their business by being separated into distinct sections, the 'Jug and Bottle Entrance', the 'Wholesale Bar' and the 'Retail Bar', while barrels lined the walls emblazoned with enticing slogans and brand names encouraging them with visions of delight: 'Choice Compounds', 'Cream of the Valley', or 'The Dew off Ben Nevis'. An advertisement for the 'Celebrated Balmoral Mixture, patronised by his Royal Highness Prince Albert' was accompanied by 'the illustrious personage, clad in full Highland costume...represented taking a glass of the \"Mixture\" with great apparent gusto'. And all to serve gin at a penny a glass, to people who were deciding between food and another tumbler of oblivion.\n\nFrom the eighteenth century, pubs had been the natural home of all types of clubs and special-interest groups, and as gin palaces became more elaborate, these were increasingly encouraged. Mr Pickwick's journeys start at, and the novel is predicated on, the Pickwick Club, which holds its meetings in a pub. Its club room was the epitome of many an upstairs club room, containing little more than a long wooden table and Windsor chairs, with prints on the walls. Pubs found numerous ways of attracting regulars: in the 1860s, several along Fleet Street were known as sporting taverns, stocking sporting newspapers, posting up telegrams announcing race results and otherwise ensuring they were the meeting places for like-minded people. The actor Charles Macready and John Forster were members of a Shakespeare club in the 1830s that met at the Piazza Coffee House in Covent Garden to read and discuss literature; Dickens soon enrolled.\n\nPubs and clubs were also venues for people at times of distress, as well as at times of jollity. In Shoreditch in the 1860s, a pub sold black-bordered 'tickets' for 3d, to help the family of the recently deceased 'Jemmy Baldwin [who] had died sudden, leaving nothing to bury him ... a few friends would meet that night at the Tinkers' Arms, Spicer Street, for the benefit of the widow and orphans'. On happier occasions, many of these pubs also held 'twopenny hops', or costermongers' dances, where anything up to a hundred men and women congregated to drink and dance to the music of a fiddle, 'sometimes with the addition of a harp and cornopean' (a cornet: a brass instrument that sounded like a trumpet). By the 1850s, many pubs had widened the scope of their club meetings, holding weekly discussion groups that were open to casual visitors, with a variety of subjects and different customer profiles being known and understood. The Cogers, in Bride Lane, Fleet Street, was a political forum; the Green Dragon, also in Fleet Street, held discussions on Tuesdays for 'Literary Loungers'; on Mondays and Thursdays for other 'popular subjects'. At the Blue Posts, in Shoe Lane, the Ruminators met on Wednesdays, with more miscellaneous discussions on Tuesdays and Fridays, while Mondays and Saturdays were given over to Harmonics.\n\nHarmonic meetings, also known as free-and-easies, covered the social spectrum: men meeting for the purpose of drinking and singing, sometimes as a club or a group of friends, sometimes a group of strangers. When a free-and-easy was held in a pub, there were usually some professional performers, but all present were expected to contribute. In _Sketches by Boz_ , Dickens described a late-night harmonic meeting, where as many as a hundred men sit at tables, listening to three 'professional gentlemen' sing a glee (a part-song for three or more voices), after which they drink and smoke, and listen once more to 'our friend, Mr Smuggins', who 'after a considerable quantity of coughing' sings a comic song, 'received with unbounded applause', followed by a recitation, before the group joins in another glee.\n\nIf the harmonic meeting was open to the public, the landlord of a pub frequently acted as the chairman, as is the case in _Oliver Twist_ at the Three Cripples, the rogues' pub in Saffron Hill, where the landlord seemed 'to give himself up to joviality', but 'had an eye for everything that was done, and an ear for everything that was said'. _Bleak House_ , too, includes a harmonic meeting at the Sol's Arms, with the professional Little Swills, the comic vocalist. But it was group singing that was the _raison d'\u00eatre_ of these evenings: 'it is only when one of the amateurs presently consents to oblige amidst a great rattling of glasses and thumping of pint pots, that the chorus develops its full perfections...with the united strength of some forty pairs of lungs.' So ubiquitous was the free-and-easy that in _Little Dorrit_ even in the Marshalsea the prisoners hold a regular club night in their 'Snuggery', complete with 'presidential tribute...beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipelights, [and] spittoons'.\n\nSometimes the meetings were more select, involving a group of friends or colleagues, as in _The Pickwick Papers_ , when the legal clerks gather at the Magpie and Stump pub in Clare market: 'There's Samkin and Green's managing-clerk, and Smithers and Price's chancery, and Pimkin and Thomas's out o' doors \u2013 sings a capital song, he does.' Sometimes harmonic meetings were held to celebrate specific events. In _Nicholas Nickleby_ , when the strolling players, the Crummles family, plan to go abroad, a supper is given in their honour at a local pub, 'at which Mr Snittle Timberry would preside, while the honours of the vice chair would be sustained by the African Swallower'. A shoemaker attended a similar dinner that his employer held for his workers: the master 'occupied the chair himself, and requested that I would act as vice', as after the meal, 'we indulged in mirth and song'. In the early 1830s, John Barrow, the editor of the _Mirror of Parliament_ , was trying to find work for his nephew, a young man named Charles Dickens, and asked the journalist John Payne Collier whether he might recommend him to the owners of the _Morning Chronicle_. Berrow 'also informing me that [Dickens] was cheerful company and a good singer of a comic song', Collier 'agreed to meet Dickens at dinner'; Dickens was so young 'that he had no vestige of beard or whiskers' and had needed a 'good deal of pressing' before he sang 'The Dandy's Dog's-meat Man', as well as a song he had written himself, 'Sweet Betsy Ogle'.\n\nMore common were regular club nights, whose exclusivity was an indicator of their desirability. In _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , Dick Swiveller belongs to 'a select convivial circle called the Glorious Apollers' [sic], of which he had 'the honour to be Perpetual Grand'. This was a lower-middleclass version of Pip's club in _Great Expectations_ , the Finches of the Grove: 'the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were not that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause six waiters to get drunk on the stairs'.\n\nThese young men met regularly in Covent Garden, in the heart of the song-and-supper-club neighbourhood. From the earliest part of the century, 'Supper Rooms' were places men went to in the evening after dinner, and among the most famous were Evans's, Offley's, the Garrick, the Coal Hole and the Cider (sometimes Cyder) Cellars, all in Covent Garden or near the Strand. Singing was automatically part of the evening. An 1839 guidebook, in its listing of supper clubs, observes, in its entirety: 'At most of these houses some good singing is to be heard, they being attended by professional men': the quality of the song was more important than the food or the ambience, neither of which was mentioned. These clubs served breakfast fare, alcohol and cigars. In the intervals between the songs, the waiters rushed round, crying, 'Gentlemen, give your orders; give your orders, gentlemen; whiskey, brandy, gin, and rum \u2013 rum, gin, brandy, whiskey,' and taking orders for food: 'Fried-'am-an'-eggs for you, sir? Sassages, did that gentleman say? Sassages is all gone, sir...Tripe, sir? Yessir.' Then, when they heard 'Order, order! Silence, waiters. Gentlemen, if you please, I'll sing a song,' they vanished until it was finished, when it would be, 'Now, then, Waiter, bring that gentleman's kidneys. Chop and shallots for the man oppo-site. Look alive there \u2013 be brisk! Kidneys for you, sir? Copy of the song just sung, gentlemen \u2013 copy of the song; celebrated song, sir \u2013 thanky, sir. Song, gentlemen, song; orders, gentlemen, orders \u2013 gentlemen, give your orders!'\n\nEvans's was one of the longest surviving and most famous of the supper rooms. Originally established in an old house overlooking Covent Garden piazza, it was a hotel until W. C. Evans became the landlord in the 1820s and turned it into a supper room. In 1844, Evans retired, and Paddy Green later built a much more elegant galleried room, with gas lighting and a stage at the far end. Evans's had been known for singing 'erotic and bacchanalian' songs, but under Green it was said to have become much more respectable. The Cider Cellars, on Maiden Lane, was the supper room that Thackeray fictionalized as the Fielding's Head in _Pendennis_ with a landlord who took the chair and sang 'profusely'. In the 1840s, one performer was known in particular for a song entitled 'Sam Hall', about a condemned man awaiting execution, with the refrain 'damn your eyes'. Late at night, the Cellar's tone changed, when 'the songs became decidedly equivocal in character' and not for ' _virginibus puerisque_ ' \u2013 for girls and boys.\n\nThe Coal Hole, a supper and singing club, opened first as a working-class pub in 1817, and this drawing probably dates from those early days. The men on the left, however, appear to have a punch bowl on the table, and they may well be a social group gathered to sing.\n\nEven with that warning, the memoirists and novel writers apparently toned down their descriptions, if books like _The Nobby Songster_ , _The Flash Chaunter_ and _The Flash Songster_ are to be believed. These claim to contain songs 'now singing' at Offley's, the Cider Cellar and the Coal Hole (see below), and most of the songs are headed, 'to be sung to the tune of \u2014', which suggests group singing, or at the very least joining in the choruses. One volume gives a list of toasts 'as given at the Cider Cellar', which includes:\n\n'Here's to the maid, who will take that in her hand which she longs for in her heart.'\n\n'A clear house, good lodging, and in a hairy situation.'\n\n'The bird in the hand and then in the bush.'\n\n'A fine maid, a good plaice, and a large pair of cods.' [a 'good place' in the nineteenth century was a good job; cods were testicles, hence the fish pun]\n\n'May we always be able to insert a long article in the Ladies Magazine.'\n\n'The Sea (c\u2014) for ever; and he who would be afraid to dive into it, may he be jammed and d\u2014d for ever.'\n\n'Here's what every woman's got, what every man has not got, what we all get out of, and what we all like to get into.'\n\nEven today, these do not fall into the 'respectable' category, and many of the songs were even smuttier. Others are outright obscene:\n\nTHE SWELL COVES [fashionable gent's] ALPHABET\n\nA. stands for actresses who'll work as well as play.\n\nB. for bilking bulleys [cheating the pimps], and old bawds [madams of brothels] of their pay,\n\nC. for c\u2014t, and crim. con. deny it, ye who can.\n\nD. for ladies dil\u2014s when they cannot get a man. So do not think me foolish, or think a flat [dupe] you see, I 've learnt the swell coves alphabet, just hear my A.B.C.\n\nE. stands for Emmerson of bawds she is the queen\n\nF. for fancy [sporting] fellows \u2013 did you ever see one green [inexperienced]\n\nG, you know, is Goodereds in famous Piccadilly\n\nH is mother H's where I've covered many a filly.\n\nChorus &c.\n\nI. next for Ives of St. Giles's petts the first\n\nJ. for _Joe_ the Stunner, whose _Banks_ may never burst\n\nK. stands for Kinchins, and kifer hung with hair,\n\nL. for lush [alcohol] and lechery, as well as Leicester Square.\n\nChorus &c.\n\nM. stands for maidenhead, I often have drove through,\n\nN, stands, for Nicholson, of 'Town' chaps few so true,\n\nO. you know is opera, where swells must keep a box,\n\nP. stands for patent pills, Phoenix Alley and the P\u2014 [pox],\n\nChorus &c.\n\nQ. is Q\u2014m and Queen's-Bench, queer places to be in,\n\nR. Rhodes rogering hole, where you'll always go again,\n\nS. is sponging houses, Shire-lane, saloons, and s\u2014ing.\n\nT. you know is thimble-rigs, and Tattersalls [horse-auction rooms]\n\nlow-cunning.\n\nChorus &c.\n\nU is an uprighter or hunt with hasty dressing,\n\nV. is the venereal that follows as a blessing,\n\nW. stands for Waterford, of spreeing he's the king,\n\nX. is a _cross_ [double-cross] so you must _square_ it while I sing.\n\nChorus &c.\n\nY. you know are yokels, but if now there's any here, as\n\nZ. is my last letter, why he must be a Zany.\n\nMy song now is ended, I hope you'll have not cause,\n\nTo say I am not wide awake, or grudge me your applause.\n\nSo do not think me foolish, or think a flat you see,\n\nI know the swell coves alphabet, and say the A B C.\n\nBy comparison, some songs had only mildly bawdy elements: 'The Bill Sticker' describes how the bill-sticker of the title, 'Holloway's ointment and Paris pills, the last a great reformer, \/ I plaster'd to Miss Kembles tail the first night she play'd Normer'. Or, to the tune of 'God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen', lyrics concerning\n\nsome queer old gentlemen\n\nThat nothing can dismay;\n\nWho crawl about the city,\n\nAlmost every day;\n\nAnd look for game \u2013 I mean young girls,\n\nTo lead them all astray,\n\nAnd rob them of comfort and joy.\n\nSeveral were far less respectful about authority figures than we might assume today. _The Cockchafer_ presented 'A Celebrated Parody on The King, God Bless Him', while a song about the burning of the Houses of Parliament told the story of Bill, a hackney coachman, who fell down the House of Commons privy: 'they said, Bill, are you dead, no I'm only _inturd_.'\n\nThe songbooks claim that all these songs were sung in many supper clubs, of which the Coal Hole had the worst reputation, while still being a place where a respectable man could be seen. The Coal Hole began life as the Wolf Club in 1817, a working-class pub down 'a dingy-looking alley' at the bottom of Southampton Street, near where it met the Strand, before moving to the Strand proper, where Simpson's restaurant is now. It was only when it began its harmonic meetings that it became fashionable. Thackeray depicted it as the Cave of Harmony in _The Newcomes_ , where it is run 'by the celebrated Hoskins', a place where men go late at night when they want 'welsh-rabbits and a good old glee'. However, by the time _The Newcomes_ appeared in the 1850s, it had changed radically. In 1841, at the Garrick pub, in Bow Street, Renton Nicholson had set up what came to be known as 'Judge and Jury' evenings, appointing himself 'the Lord Chief Baron' and presiding over mock trials, with audience members acting as the jury. Favourite subjects were current crim. con. cases, or trials for alienation of affection, adultery and divorce. Since the entertainment, like all of these supper rooms, was confined to men, there was also a certain amount of cross-dressing as the parts were acted out. The 1s fee bought entry, 'a glass of grog and a bad cigar'. 'Men about town, city clerks ... betting men, and provincials ambitious of initiation into the shady side of London life' made up the audience. Three years later, Nicholson moved these Judge and Jury evenings to the Coal Hole, where they, and he, flourished until 1846, when they returned to the Garrick. The Coal Hole settled down to being a regular supper room, but kept up its risqu\u00e9 reputation, with _poses plastiques_ : semidraped women in tableaux recycling episodes from history and literature, while providing soft-core leering opportunities.\n\nThese evenings were all for men, and even the cheapest of them involved some cost. One amusement that was available to both men and women, city-wide and without charge, was to be found throughout the streets: illuminations. Long before Paris, London was known as the city of lights. In 1805, when Frederick Winsor began his experiment of lighting the streets by gas at Carlton House, he began not with the functional but with the decorative, erecting thirty-two gas burners, including a four-branched one shaped like the Prince of Wales feathers. Over the gateway he set up a transparency, a painting on a semi-opaque fabric, lit from behind to display the initials 'G R' and a crown, with, on the other side, an illuminated address beginning 'Rejoice, rejoice, 'tis George's natal day'.\n\nGas illuminations in the early days were a novelty strictly for free-spending princes, but they built on a popular tradition. For state celebrations and public events, illuminations were a regular part of London's night-time celebrations via hundreds and thousands of small oil lamps hung from windows and along the fa\u00e7ades of buildings, with glass of different colours, to build up images and even words. These lamps appeared not only on government buildings and on shops, but also on private houses, offering an indicator \u2013 in the mind of one tourist, at least \u2013 of an individual's loyalty 'by the quantity of oil consumed'. Even he, cynic that he was, admitted that the 'effect on the whole was very pretty', even 'brilliant'.\n\nAs the long French wars drew to a close and Wellington roared across Europe, the two technologies for a time coexisted. In 1813, the victory at the battle of Vittoria was celebrated over three nights: 'The fronts of Carltonhouse and Somerset-house, exhibited...a blaze of light, with the name of Wellington formed with [oil]-lamps, and allusions to the hero's exploits', while other oil lights spelt out 'The Grand Alliance'. In 1814, for the Grand National Jubilee marking the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, an illuminated Temple of Concord was set up on a revolving platform in Green Park, while St James's Park was lit by large paper lanterns hung from the trees, their painted paper shades illustrating battles, heroes 'and every variety of subject'. So bright were the illuminations, or so dark were cities more usually at the time, that their light was visible nearly fifteen miles away, in Bromley, Kent.\n\nHowever great these celebrations were, they were surpassed when London became 'one continual scene of uproar and joy in consequence of the total defeat of Bonaparte at Waterloo by Lord Wellington...Friday and Saturday night all the public buildings and many private ones were illuminated. Many fanciful and beautiful devices were exhibited.' One house in St James's mounted a replica 'fortress with cannon, flags, etc...A publican who keeps a tavern with the sign of a cock, had a large transparency representing a game cock strutting over his fallen combatant with the inscription, \"England, the cock of the walk!\"'\n\nBy the coronation of William IV, in 1830, street illuminations had become even more elaborate, with 'various, most ingenious, and fantastic devices \u2013 always, however, representing in some form the initials or full names, of the king and queen \u2013 the principal centre of which ordinarily would be a crown'. Sometimes these would be created by the new technology, for private houses as well as palaces: 'Here and there a temporary gas machinery had been erected, on which the slightest breeze would occasion a sportful dance of lights and shadows by blowing out some portions, and lighting others, in rapid succession \u2013 at one moment showing the whole tracery in full blaze, and then only parts.' Seven years later, when Princess Victoria, heir to the throne, attained her majority, the streets, according to the footman William Tayler, were decorated by a 'grand ilumination'. Six months later the princess had become a queen and on the occasion of the Lord Mayor's installation made her first formal visit to the City as monarch. 'The sitisens are making great preperations to receve her. All the streets ... will be very briliantly eluminated. It is said it will cost eight hundred pound to eluminate Temple Bar alone, and many thousands to eluminate the Citty.'\n\nThe illuminations varied in quantity and quality with the event being celebrated, and to a degree it is possible to trace popular enthusiasm for royalty, or lack thereof, through the reports. When the Prince of Wales was born in 1842, 'The illuminations on Wednesday night were few, and many of the club-houses were not illuminated at all. Pall-mall contained but one illumination.' The United Services Club in Trafalgar Square, however, was 'beautifully illuminated', complete with an illuminated 'Ich Dien' and a set of Prince of Wales feathers. Unfortunately, 'the night being wet the streets were nearly deserted'. In 1847, when Prince Albert had still not achieved the popularity that came in the last decade of his short life, his birthday was 'observed in the metropolis with the usual rejoicings. In the evening the Royal tradesmen illuminated their houses', making a business proposition of this supposed happy day. Attitudes were very similar in 1859 when the Prince of Wales turned eighteen: 'in the evening the theatres Royal and the houses of the purveyors to the Royal household were illuminated.' And the ho-hum air continued even with the queen herself. For her fifty-first birthday in 1870, nearly a decade after Albert's death, at a time when her subjects were heartily tired of a seclusion that seemed to mean she could attend only the events she enjoyed, 'The various clubhouses, theatres, and residences of the members of the Ministry were illuminated, as were also the establishments of the Royal tradesmen', but evidently there was nothing further.\n\nIt had not always been like this. In 1853, riding a wave of emotion after the success of the Great Exhibition, which Albert was seen to have steered so successfully, the illuminations on the queen's birthday were 'more than usually brilliant and the various devices in gas and coloured lamps [were]...worthy of the occasion...O n no former anniversary of her Majesty's birthday has the illumination been so good.' Particularly worthy of mention were the illuminations at the Junior United Services Club, in Waterloo Place, which included 'A large bulging-crown' with a 'V' inside the order of the garter, and the motto _Honi soit qui mal y pense_ , together with 'two irradiated stars of Brunswick, military flags and ensigns, wreaths of laurel, scrolls'.\n\nA grand effort was made for the wedding of Princess Alexandra to the Prince of Wales. For the previous week the gas companies had been 'economising gas, and the street lamps were not lighted till long after the usual time...Circulars...were sent round...asking that the inhabitants would burn as little gas as possible inside, in order that there might be enough to supply the innumerable jets which were to blaze on the outside of their houses.' The results amply justified the scrimping. The dome of St Paul's was given 'a fiery coronet', while its base was surrounded by a ring of yellow lamps, with the supporting pillars having 'a ring of red lamps'. In addition to these gas illuminations, limelight was projected onto the dome, so that 'from a distance, the high fires darted out rays...and the streams of light thrown upon the building looked like the water forced from a fire-engine'. The most spectacular displays in the City were at the Mansion House, the Bank and the Royal Exchange buildings. The Mansion House had strung lamps along all its cornices and pediments, as well as five large gas stars, and its columns were covered with crimson cloth, with illuminated swags of flowers hanging between the columns. At the Royal Exchange a row of lights ran along the pediments, 'and its columns [were] twined by thousands of small oil lamps of various colours'. The effect was enhanced by oil lamps spelling out: 'The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof ' in coloured lights. The West End did not lag behind. The National Gallery began with Prince of Wales feathers, moving on to a more ambitious transparency of two medallion portraits, with 'two guardian angels crowning them with wreaths' and a star of St George made of crystal, surmounted by a series of mottoes: 'Long Life to the Prince and Princess of Wales!' and 'England's Hope!' in 'amber-coloured crystal glass'. In addition the fountains in Trafalgar Square were lit by that dazzling new technology, 'the electric light, which was also at intervals directed upon the Nelson Monument'. That night the streets were so densely crowded by people out to see the illuminations that it was almost impossible to walk through them, and Hungerford Bridge was closed at six that evening, for fear it would collapse. All night there were 'dead locks' of pedestrians, 'during which no one progressed more than a dozen yards in an hour'.\n\nPublic events were celebrated by massive illuminations on public buildings and private houses alike. Here the Ordnance Office in Pall Mall marks the end of the Crimean War in 1856 with flags, an illuminated Order of the Garter and a giant VR, for Victoria Regina.\n\nThis physical impasse was not unprecedented. When Leonard Wyon set off with his wife from their house in St John's Wood to see the illuminations in the West End that marked the end of the Crimean War, they too had difficulty walking: 'the crowd was so great, and the carriages so thickly packed in Oxford Street that we could not cross the road without going a good deal out of the way.' They were deeply impressed by the illuminations on public buildings and on the mansions that lined Park Lane, including one that required 2,000 feet of gas a minute to light the coat of arms encircled with gas jets and the fa\u00e7ade's eighteen pillars 'decorated with spiral twists and flags of all nations'. Even the railway stations were decorated, one having 'a beading of gas running along the top and sides of the principal face of the [station], with a monster reflecting star in the centre'. In Lincoln's Inn Fields, three large transparencies showed the Allies attacking Sebastopol, with the word 'Peace' next to the coats of arms of England and the Allies. A shopkeeper in the Strand proudly boasted a transparency that read:\n\nMAY THE\n\nDESTROYERS OF PEACE\n\nBE DESTROYED BY US.\n\nTIFFIN & SON,\n\nBUG-DESTROYERS TO HER MAJESTY.\n\nWhile individual choices were made by each resident or shopkeeper, the decision to illuminate at all came from the top. The end of the siege of Sebastopol in 1855 had led to many houses being decorated, but, admonished the _Illustrated London News_ severely, 'this was not by any means general; no intimation having been given that any external marks of rejoicing on the part of the people would at present be expected'. Later in the week, the French ambassador's residence 'was splendidly illuminated' with 10,000 lamps, even though 'the order for illumination was not given until half-past six in the evening'.\n\nWhen they first heard about the illuminations, Wyon and his wife had bought 'half a dozen French Lanterns' to tie to their balcony before they realized that only 'people of note' were obliged to join in. The danger must have been one factor \u2013 those vast quanitites of gas in temporary pipes cannot have been entirely safe; the cost another; and, finally, a heartfelt cry in _The Times_ suggested that many people did not want to participate. 'Mr. (with the consent and approbation of Mrs.) GLASS' wrote in to say:\n\nI have not met with a single person in society who has not spoken of the illumination of private houses as a nuisance, which no one would incur if it were not for the fear of a stone through his drawing-room window...I rest my appeal on the absolute nastiness of smoke, grease, and gas...I agree most willingly to my share in the cost...of the public illuminations. I am perfectly willing, if any public or parochial boards will undertake to exhibit supplementary fireworks or transparencies in the open spaces of each quarter of the town, to be rated or to subscribe for that purpose; but I object, with all my heart, to be coerced into a piece of domestic dirt and discomfort.\n\nOn the one hand were the people in the street, public entertainment and street theatre; on the other, 'domestic dirt and discomfort'. In nineteenthcentury London, there was no competition: the street won every time.\n\n#### 14.\n\n#### STREET VIOLENCE\n\nEntertainment and street theatre often met and, when they did, the result could be violent. Not all violence was condemned and suppressed by the state and its authorities. In fact, some violence was state-sanctioned; nor was it even seen as violence, but as the individual's just deserts. Some cruelties only gradually came to be seen as such: as the norms of behaviour and personal interaction changed, so what had been acceptable at one end of the century appeared shocking at the other.\n\nIn 1836, Dickens wrote 'The Great Winglebury Duel', presenting duelling as a relic from the past, a matter for farcical treatment \u2013 mistaken identities, runaway marriages and all. But even as he wrote, newspapers from time to time reported on duels still occurring. In 1842, two men from genteel St John's Wood trekked out to Putney Heath for a duel over a political disagreement. Both were wounded, but there was no hint of censure in the report of the incident, one magazine even calling it an 'affair of honour'. In the following year, an Anti-Duelling Association was formed, aiming to see 'the disgraceful practice' 'speedily exploded', but six weeks later two officers fought a duel in Camden Town and one died. The ensuing investigation produced an interesting set of mixed signals. The inquest found that the duellist had been murdered by his opponent; the seconds and the attending doctor were charged with murder in the second degree. Yet after a series of trials, only the duellist was convicted, with the jury giving a strong recommendation for mercy. This was endorsed by the judge, who even as he passed the death sentence assured the prisoner that it would not be carried out.\n\nAs late as 1869, what was in effect an upper-class brawl was treated as another affair of honour. Lord Carrington 'horsewhipped, or something like it', a man for writing a scurrilous article about Carrington's father. Carrington was charged with both common assault and for challenging the writer to a duel. Despite this, public opinion was obviously with him, and while he was found guilty of the assault, it was 'under circumstances of the greatest provocation'. He was merely bound over to keep the peace for a year, on his own recognizance. Four months after the conviction, in a sign of how the establishment regarded the incident, the Prince of Wales made a highly public visit to Carrington's country house. Yet at the same time, the lower orders found that their violent behaviour was seen as less acceptable. A few months before Carrington carried out his horsewhipping, a licensed victualler was charged with assaulting a policeman who had stopped him for furious driving. He was given two weeks' imprisonment, with hard labour, although the newspaper noted that, not that long before, he would have been let off with a minimal fine. This type of force, except for grandees, was now harshly punished.\n\nThis was a great change from the early years of the century, when mob rule was far more visible in the streets, beginning with the literally theatrical, and mostly non-violent, protests, the Old Price Riots. Covent Garden theatre had burnt down in 1808; when the new theatre opened in 1809, it was discovered that the galleries and pit \u2013 the lower-priced areas \u2013 had been reduced in extent to create more seating for the prosperous, while ticket prices had been raised throughout. On the first night, the noise from the pit and galleries was so loud that nothing at all could be heard of the performance above drumming feet and voices shouting, 'Old prices!' On subsequent nights, the demonstrations, both inside and outside the theatre, became more vehement, more focused and more purely theatrical, as the participants began to sing Old Price songs and dance the Old Price dance, stamping their feet and banging their sticks in tempo. A coffin bearing the epitaph 'Here lies the body of the New Price' was paraded through the streets and into the theatre. The manager, John Philip Kemble, hired Daniel Mendoza, the retired pugilist, to restore order. This was a major error, raising the emotional temperature and pushing the previously good-tempered crowds towards mayhem. After more than a month of performances where all the theatre took place in the auditorium, Kemble had the Riot Act read one night to disperse the audience. This was another misjudgement, producing even greater fury as well as even less likelihood that the demonstrators would permit performances to proceed. It was another month before Kemble admitted defeat and returned to the old prices, whereupon the crowds held up a gracious banner: 'We are Satisfied.'\n\nThe Old Price riots, taking place at one of London's two patent theatres, attracted attention, but riotous assembly was not uncommon. What were called riots by those in authority were often just street brawls, sometimes organized as an accepted form of channelling popular aggression. In 1821, in St Giles, about 200 people assembled, 'armed with sticks and other weapons...each party being decorated with distinguishing colours'. They set on each other with a will; one side was gradually pushed back towards High Holborn before regrouping and in turn forcing its opponents back into St Giles. The two groups then made an unspoken alliance and turned on the parish watchmen who, with twenty flurried assistants, had been sent to deal with the problem. It took the Bow Street patrol \u2013 the precursors to the police \u2013 to charge with swords drawn, taking thirteen into custody, before the crowd dispersed, clearly feeling a good day had been had by all \u2013 or by all but the four dead and the twenty wounded badly enough to require hospitalization.\n\nSome gangs were more permanently constituted and more focused on gain. In 1826, a gang of marauders gathered (and possibly lived) near a brickfield in Spitalfields, preying on the drovers on the road to Smithfield and Barnet markets, singling out and stealing prize cattle. Their looting was serious enough to be discussed in Parliament, with the Secretary of State questioning whether the men were 'distressed weavers' \u2013 the highly skilled silk weavers who had inhabited Bethnal Green for centuries who had recently been reduced to poverty by the lifting of import bans on luxury goods at the end of the French wars. The Spitalfields gangs were not weavers, although violence from them was not unusual either. In 1829, two men who had been hired to repossess some silk from a weaver felt it necessary to ask the patrol to accompany them. They were right to be afraid: they were followed by over 500 men, and when they repossessed the goods, 'bricks, stones, and whatever came to hand, were showered' on them. Even though they were greatly outnumbered by the outraged mob, which extended halfway down Bethnal Green Road, the patrol foolishly drew their weapons. They were immediately surrounded and themselves had to be rescued from the crowd of angry, semi-starving men.\n\nIn the late 1820s and early 1830s, riots became less random outbreaks of unfocused rage and more, as with the weavers, a desire to express a political and social point. Their being linked with these earlier outbreaks, however, permitted the perception that all political gatherings of the working classes were potential riots. Even so, the formation of Robert Peel's Metropolitan Police force in 1829 improved matters: no longer were armed soldiers brought out at the first intimation of danger. In November 1830, a political rally was held in Blackfriars Road. After the speeches, the crowd raised a flag with 'Reform' painted on it. To the cry of 'Now for the West End!' a thousand men, shouting 'Reform', 'Down with the police', 'No Peel' and 'No Wellington', crossed Blackfriars Bridge and surged down Fleet Street and the Strand, heading for Parliament. As they reached Downing Street, the New Police caught up with the action, forming a line at the end of King Street, to prevent the men reaching the Houses of Parliament. The novelty lay in the fact that this force, armed only with truncheons, could disperse crowds without resorting to killing.\n\nFour months later, public expressions of anger were refocused. As cholera ravaged the city, the government nominated 21 March 1831 as a national Day of Fasting and Humiliation, when prayers would be offered and a twenty-four-hour fast observed as a sign of submission to divine will, in the hope that this would lift the epidemic. The Political Union of the Working Classes, representing the economic group that was bearing the brunt of the epidemic, issued a counter-proclamation, announcing 'their intention to distinguish that day by the distribution of bread and meat amongst the lower orders': as they so sharply pointed out, fasting was something they did all too routinely. By 11 a.m., nearly 15,000 workers, 'many of whom appeared to be in the greatest possible distress', had gathered in Finsbury Square, and three hours later the number had grown to 25,000. The plan had been to 'perambulate in procession into different parts of the metropolis', but the very fact of the gathering was considered dangerous, and the police were out in force, determined to clear the square and prevent the march, even though there had been few signs of incipient trouble.\n\nThis political response to the epidemic was unusual. Far more common were outbursts, even violent ones, aimed at medical personnel, for the epidemic had produced a strong link in the public mind between doctors and what were known as resurrection men. Over the previous decades, medical schools had expanded, while the supply of cadavers for study remained finite. Only the corpses of executed criminals were legally available for dissection, leaving most medical schools unable to teach anatomy or surgery. Resurrection men had therefore prospered by digging up freshly buried bodies to sell to the schools. In the first decade of the century, Joseph Naples, an ex-gravedigger and a member of a south London gang of resurrectionists, most unusually kept a diary, which showed how profitable the trade was. On 14 January 1812, he wrote: 'went to St Luke's [church graveyard and disinterred] 2 adults...1 large and 1 small, took them to barthow [St Bartholomew's Hospital]. Came home and went to St Thomas' [Hospital], afterwards went to the other end of town for orders.' The gang then met 'at the Hartichoak' pub, to divide their takings: \u00a38 4s 7\u00bdd to each gang member, or about four months' income for a street seller. In 1831, two men who were tried for the murder of an Italian street boy admitted that they had sold more than 500 bodies to the London hospitals in the previous decade.\n\nThe 1832 Anatomy Act was passed in order to shut down this thriving business. Now medical schools were entitled to claim for dissection any bodies that were to be buried at the parish expense \u2013 in effect, the bodies of paupers, or the working poor whose families could not afford a funeral. By this Act, many thought, anatomization had been transformed from being a punishment for capital crime into being a punishment for poverty. When the first wave of cholera arrived simultaneously with the change in the law, some believed that this new disease was a pretext to lure the unwary poor to hospital, where they would be killed as a precursor to being anatomized. In June 1832, a hospital porter was attacked in Oxford Street as he carried a man dying of cholera to hospital; police were needed to disperse the crowd. On the same day, a woman was assaulted when bringing a patient to the Lime Street cholera hospital, the infuriated mob baying 'Burker!' at her. Later a surgeon making a house call in Vauxhall was attacked; when the parish surgeon arrived after the patient's death, he found that the body had been hidden, for fear it would be taken for anatomization. Those gathered outside whispered that he and his colleagues 'merely wanted to get the poor into their clutches to burke them', and once more the police were called. Sala remembered as a child watching a similar incident from his nursery window in North Audley Street. One of the Earl of Clarendon's servants had died of cholera and 'a great crowd' had gathered before the earl's door, all 'violent and clamorous...My nurse says that they will have to send for the \"padroll\" with \"cutlashes\".'\n\nThese small, irregular outbreaks were dealt with as isolated episodes, just as earlier street violence had been, but political protest continued to alarm the authorities. In April 1848, the Chartist Convention organized a mass meeting on Kennington Common, where the workers were to congregate before marching on Parliament to present a petition of nearly 2 million signatures from supporters of political reform. Even children were aware of the middle-class fear of popular disorder. Sophia Beale, aged about seven, recorded two days before the meeting: 'There is to be a great meeting of Chartists the day after tomorrow on Kenington Common. every one is very excited and peple are being made into speshal cunstabels...not papa because he is a docter and...if any one is shot he will have to bind them up. Papa is going to take me to see the cannons tomorrow so good bye.' The next day, 'We went to the Common this morning but there was nothing to see. Papa talked to a polliceman and he said there were some big guns in some of the back yards and garden so we came home to tea and ever body thinks they will fight tomorrow out there on the Common.' In the event, while 100,000 'speshal cunstabels' were sworn in to prevent the protestors crossing the river, the 150,000 or so who gathered held a peaceful meeting on the Common, with the leadership taking the petition separately after the event.\n\nIt is noticeable in retrospect that, by the late 1840s and 1850s, what were termed 'riots' were generally nothing of the kind and were more likely merely large crowds with something on their minds. The earlier violence had to a great extent vanished. The Hyde Park riots over the ultra-Sabbatarian legislation were a prime example, only seven years after the Great Chartist meeting. In 1855, Lord Robert Grosvenor and others attempted to push a bill through the House of Commons to ban the Sunday selling of refreshments in places of amusement. This was widely seen as one law for the rich (whose servants worked on Sundays and whose clubs were open on Sundays) and another for the poor (whose single day of leisure was to be curbed). A demonstration was organized in Hyde Park. On the first Sunday the protestors stood along Rotten Row, waiting for the carriages of the fashionable and greeting them with 'loud hissing and groaning, accompanied by deafening cries of \"Go to church!\" \"Why do you allow your servants to work on Sunday?\" \"Shame on you!\" \"Down with the Sabbatarians!\"' One woman stood up in her carriage, holding her prayer book aloft to indicate her church-going, but its sole effect was to make the protestors shout, 'Walk, walk, and let your horses rest, and your coachman go to church!' Several people were forced out of their carriages and had to walk home, but there was nothing worse. As with Sophia Beale and her father on Kennington Common, many perfectly respectable middle-class people found the mass protest a matter of almost touristic interest. Leonard Wyon noted in his journal that 'a disturbance was expected...[so] May [his wife] and I walked to Hyde Park in the evening, but everything seemed quite quiet.' The Wyons were an intensely respectable pair \u2013 they were sober, industrious, went to church twice every Sunday and then discussed the sermons afterwards. Furthermore, May was prone to panic attacks. Nonetheless they visited Hyde Park specifically to see a 'disturbance'.\n\nEven _The Times_ , that establishment paper, was with the workers, calling the proposed law 'unequal and onesided' and claiming that it 'interfered with the comforts and recreations of the working classes' while leaving the wealthy to do as they liked. The single episode of violence came the following week, when crowds once more assembled to hoot and jeer. Immediately they did so, 'the police rushed out from their ambuscades, and made unsparing use of their truncheons on every persons within their reach'. Even when the protestors scattered, the police continued to chase them, driving them into the Serpentine and indiscriminately sweeping up many unrelated passers-by out for their Sunday walks. This description of a police-sanctioned assault was unusual only in that it was a newspaper report, not fiction. Dickens had for some time expressed his ambivalence about unruly mobs and authority's response. In the late 1830s, in _Nicholas Nickleby_ , he portrayed a meeting in the City, where 'the sterner spirits' barracked the speaker, stamping on the floor and shouting. A policeman 'immediately began to drag forth...all the quiet people...at the same time dealing out various smart and tingling blows with their truncheons, after the manner of that ingenious actor, Mr Punch: whose brilliant example, both in the fashion of his weapons and their use, this branch of the executive occasionally follows'.\n\nThis was only a decade after the old system of parish watchmen \u2013 which Dickens had grown up with \u2013 had been replaced by the police. Dickens soon became their ardent supporter, but his own background on the fringes of the lower middle classes meant that he always had a corner, sometimes quite a large corner, of distrust for petty authority. This was not unreasonable. The pre-1829 system had been notably corrupt. The notebook owned by the (also notably corrupt) magistrate Sir John Silvester contained a list of receivers of stolen goods. Several entries say a receiver 'is or lately was' an officer, while a 'well known Fence' is listed as having lived for fifteen years as the tenant of a 'Sheriffs Officer'. A second list suggests that receivers were a fact of life across the city and across social classes, including as it does goldsmiths, weavers, the widow of a Newgate turnkey and the 'watchman [at] the corner of Cow Lane'. A separate page, which may (or may not) be a continuation of that list, includes a law stationer, two attorneys, a lieutenant in the East India Company, his servant, a lottery-office keeper, 'Smith [who] belongs to Chancery [court or bar]', a baronet, and 'Sir Brook Boothby memb. for Co. Stafford'.\n\nIn 1837\u20139, Dickens immortalized his distrust of officialdom in _Oliver Twist_ , with his depiction of Fang, the magistrate, who was easily recognized by contemporaries as a portrait of Allan Stewart Laing, a Hatton Garden police magistrate notorious both for the savagery of his sentencing and for his intemperate outbursts. In the novel Fang has one street beggar arrested 'for playing the flute', just as Laing once had a muffin man arrested for ringing his bell. In 1838, a doctor accidentally bumped into Laing in the street and the magistrate assaulted him before having him arrested. Arresting doctors was a very different matter from arresting muffin men, so Laing's services were dispensed with. Two decades on, Fang had another real-life double, when in the Sabbatarian riots an ecclesiastical agent was caught up in the arrests. When he came up before the magistrate he was refused a hearing, as was his character witness, a barrister and the editor of the _Civil Service Gazette_.\n\nFor there was a curious attitude to petty crime. It was generally believed in middle-class society that crime was a constant, bubbling under, always waiting to erupt; at the same time, the pettiness of petty crime was visible to all, as was the fact that most thefts were undertaken purely for survival. A Select Committee on the Police heard testimony in 1816 that there were 'above two hundred regular flash-houses in the metropolis' \u2013 places where stolen goods were received and where the residents divided 'the plunder of the day', before 'sally[ing] forth from these houses to rob in the streets'. Yet the detail of the same report suggests nothing of the sort. One of these master criminals was a coster-woman who sold goods from a basket on the street, paying children a penny or two for stolen handkerchiefs, which she then pawned to buy stock for her basket. Another was a woman near Wigmore Street who 'buys chiefly Brushes, Pails, Coal-skuttles [sic], &c., which little Boys sneak from Gentlemen's Houses, down the areas and at the doors'.\n\nSimilarly, dog theft was spoken of as a highly lucrative criminal industry. In the late 1810s, one memoirist said that men 'leading poodles fantastically trimmed' haunted the Queen's Head pub in Chiswell Street (as Beech Street this is now the fluorescent-lit tunnel beside the Barbican Centre). The pub was said to be the nexus of a nationwide dog-theft underworld, where dogs that had been stolen in the countryside were brought to be sold, while dogs stolen in London were shipped from there to the country, so that no stolen dog was ever again seen near its home. This may have been the case, but if Jane Carlyle's experiences were anything to go by, things had changed radically in the intervening decades. Jane and Thomas Carlyle lived in Chelsea, by the river, and Jane's dog Nero was stolen twice in 1851: 'mercifully it was near home that he was twitched up...and the lads who are all _in my pay_ for odd jobs \u2013 rushed out to look for him and stopt the man who had him till I came up and put my thumb firmly inside his collar...he said [he] had _found_ the dog...and...I would surely \"give him a trifle for his _trouble_ \"!! and I was cowardly enough to give him _twopence_ to rid Nero and myself of his dangerous proximity.' Even after this, her husband believed that 'There is a large Fraternity...who live by stealing Dogs, chiefly women's, and selling them back at a ransom. I have heard some big sum, \u00a310,000 I think, mentioned as their annual income from this fine act.' A lot of dogs, surely, would have to be 'twitched up' at 2d per dog to reach an income of \u00a310,000.\n\nLow-level crime remained a reality for much of the first half of the century, with the same causes, and the same perpetrators \u2013 the hungry poor, often children. Nightly in Covent Garden, as Little Dorritt crossed the piazza, she saw 'the miserable children in rags ... [who] like young rats, slunk and hid, fed on offal [refuse, or market waste], huddled together for warmth, and were hunted about'. These youngsters were little different from the sixteen-year-old prostitute interviewed by Mayhew, who had been on her own from the age of ten and had stolen 'cats' and 'kittens' \u2013 the pint and half-pint pots that were left on house-railings for the pubs \u2013 to survive. In another interview a pickpocket told Mayhew how well he had done in a crowd at a double execution: he took, he said, a purse with 2s in it, and two handkerchiefs; at a fire he had stolen handkerchiefs worth 2s 3d and three pairs of gloves, worth 4d. Fires and executions were known to be particularly good spots for thieving, although this apparently noteworthy haul of, at most, a few shillings' worth of goods in a prime location puts into perspective the type of journalism that assured its readers that petty thieves were making over \u00a3100 a year, the wages of a well-employed clerk. John Silvester's notebooks instead make clear how little was earned from thieving, at least early in the century: Mr Baker, of One Tun Court, off the Strand, 'Keeps a Drag [a wheel-less cart] & lets it out to Thieves to convey Stolen Property'; Mr Garratt of Moor Street, Soho Square, rented out housebreaking tools; while Mr Zachariah Philips in White Hart Yard, Drury Lane, 'Lends out Pistols ... by the Night at so much for their use'. There were criminals who earned so little they could not afford their own tools of their trades.\n\nThe police were not, however, misled by media sensationalism, concentrating doggedly on routine policing. One tourist heard a policeman say to a boy in the street: 'My lad, you have been here five minutes, looking at those goods, it is time you were off.' As Dickens went out on the beat with them, he saw how they spent much of their time 'push[ing] at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles' \u2013 the daily minutiae of low-level pilfering. River crime, which sounded so exciting, was equally trifling. The Thames River Police had ninety-eight men patrolling from Battersea to Barking Creek as 'a police of prevention', against tier-rangers, who crept onto boats at night and 'groped for the skippers' inexpressibles' [trousers], taking their 'watch, money, braces, boots and all'; lumpers, or unskilled labourers, who unloaded the ships and smuggled ashore small items, usually tobacco, for the crews; dredgermen, employed to unload barges, who threw stolen items overboard, dredging them up later while pretending to search for dropped bits of coal. These were the major thefts; the minor ones were of stolen 'copper nails, sheathing, hardwood, &c.', carried away by workmen to sell to marine-store dealers.\n\nPunishment for these crimes was visible in the street too. The centre of London itself, the point that marked the separation of the City and the West End, was Temple Bar. By the nineteenth century this was the one surviving gate marking the old City boundaries, the other seven \u2013 Aldgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Ludgate, Moorgate and Newgate \u2013 having been demolished long before. It had also been the final destination for the heads of traitors, impaled on spikes and left to rot in full sight of the populace as a warning. Those who had been found guilty of involvement in the Jacobite uprising of 1745 were the last to be impaled, remnants of their heads surviving for decades, well within living memory at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Dickens, in _A Tale of Two Cities_ , called the display one of 'an insensate brutality and ferocity'. These were, he wrote bitterly, 'those good old customs of the good old times which made England, even so recently as in the reign of the Third King George, in respect of her criminal code and prison regulations, one of the most bloody-minded and barbarous countries on the earth'.\n\nWhile heads were no longer displayed for public amusement and edification, other forms of state-endorsed violence survived the arrival of the new century and were visible on the streets. One was the public pillorying of criminals. The pillory was an upright pole raised on a platform, having a cross-piece with holes in it for the victim's arms and head. 'The board moved on a pivot, and...the poor terrified delinquent...was required to perambulate round and round.' Today the perception of the pillory is that it was punishment by public humiliation. In fact, it was a punishment of both mental degradation and acute physical danger.\n\nIn 1810, the occupants of the White Swan, a gay brothel or molly-house, in Vere Street, Clare market, were arrested. At the subsequent trial, six men were found guilty of attempted sodomy and sentenced to the pillory, followed by penal servitude. On the day, 'All the windows and even the very roofs of the houses were crowded with persons.' Boys lined the route with cartloads of dung and supplies from the local slaughterhouses; 'a number of fishwomen attended with stinking flounders and the entrails of other fish'. At 12.30 the sheriff and City marshals appeared at the head of 100 mounted constables and 100 foot patrol. The men were taken in an open cart from Old Bailey Yard, beside Newgate, and swiftly received 'The first salute', 'a volley of mud, and a serenade of hisses, hooting, and execration', so that after a few yards they 'resembled bears dipped in a stagnant pool'. All the way along Fleet Street and the Strand, 'Dead cats and dogs, offal, potatoes, turnips, &c.' were flung at them with force.\n\nAt one o'clock the procession reached the Haymarket, where the men were placed in the pillory as the howling mob circled and bayed, continuing to pelt the prisoners with ordure. After an hour four of the men were removed to Coldbath Fields prison; the other two had been sentenced to an additional hour because of previous convictions. They were both barely conscious when they came to be released. This was not unusual, and they might even be said to have been fortunate. Some of those pilloried were blinded by flying stones, while in 1815 a man died in the pillory, causing MPs to call for its abolition. (However, this was not because of, or not entirely because of, the fatality. What shocked them was the uncertainty of the punishment: when a publisher was sent to the pillory for publishing Thomas Paine's banned work, _The Age of Reason_ , the crowd cheered him wildly, offering him food and drink.)\n\nAlthough the pillory wasn't immediately abolished, after 1816 the punishment was confined to perjurers, and the violence subsided, perhaps because this crime aroused fewer passions. The journalist Henry Vizetelly remembered seeing someone in the pillory in front of Newgate one evening when he was young. Although the crowd seemed to him as big as for any execution, the people were for the most part 'more curious than vindictive', and they obeyed the ban on 'missiles being thrown'. The last man to be pilloried in Britain was a fishmonger who fell into debt and perjured himself during his trial. When he stood in the pillory in June 1830, _The Times_ noted that it had been twelve years since the pillory had last been used.\n\nThe pillory was a temporary wooden erection in the street. Far more formidable was the seemingly eternal great stone wall of Newgate, next to the Old Bailey, the Central Court of Criminal Justice. Given the looming presence of the prisons in the city, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the prisons had nicknames that were recognized by much of the population, for they were part of everyone's daily life. Pentonville, built along new lines, to reform rather than punish, was ridiculed as 'the Model'; Millbank was the Tench, from 'Penitentiary'; Horsemonger Lane gaol was either the Lane or, more poetically, the Old Horse; Tothill Fields was, for some inscrutable reason, the Tea Garden; Clerkenwell was the Wells; and Coldbath Fields was the Steel, short for 'Bastille'. Newgate was known, from the eighteenth century, as the Stone Jug. And stone was the predominating element, its fa\u00e7ade unpierced by any windows, with one 'small, black, iron-studded door...low and narrow as the entrance to a vaulted grave'. It was, said one twentieth-century architectural historian, 'an extraordinary building...a great Palace of Retribution'.\n\nThis was the place where the ultimate public state-sanctioned violence occurred: execution. Prisons and death were firmly linked. In the 1840s, one journalist wrote that the current slang word for 'prison' was 'sturbon', from ' _gestorben_ ', German for dead, hence a place of execution. (A more likely derivation is from the Romany ' _stariben_ '; whichever the origin, 'sturbon' is the source of the word 'stir' for prison.) From 1784, London executions were held either outside Newgate, in the City of London, or in front of Horsemonger Lane gaol in Southwark (Horsemonger Lane is now Harper Road): in both cases, in the middle of densely populated neighbourhoods. Among connoisseurs of executions, it was considered that the crowds at Horsemonger Lane had the better view, as the prison had a specially built gallows on the roof. The scaffold at Newgate was not as easily viewed from the small clearing in front of the gaol, but viewers felt closer to events.\n\nNewgate was just yards from Smithfield and not much further from St Paul's. 'There, at the very core of London, in the heart of its business and animation...upon the very spot on which the vendors of soup and fish and damaged fruit are now plying their trades \u2013 scores of human beings...have been hurried violently and swiftly from the world.' This was Dickens writing in the late 1830s, although he never became more used to either the idea or the actuality of public executions. In 1840, he attended an execution for the first time, when a valet, Benjamin-Fran\u00e7ois Courvoisier, was hanged for the murder of his master. Dickens, who watched, sickened, among the crowd, thought he had spent 'a ghastly night in Hades with the demons'.\n\nDickens, like many middle-class commentators, often wrote of the crowds who witnessed the executions as though they were all criminals and vagrants, but that does not appear to have been the case. Nearly half a century earlier, in 1807, thirty people were killed in a crush at one execution, and the inquest listed their occupations. They included 'a respectable gentleman' (that is, a middle-class man of means), an apprentice piano manufacturer, a wine merchant's son and a shoemaker's child. Among the wounded were a tavern keeper, a pieman, a porter, a weaver, a brush maker, a carpenter's apprentice and a butcher's child \u2013 a good cross-section of the London streets. In the 1840s, Thackeray also attended an execution, writing later that the bystanders came from 'all ranks and degrees \u2013 mechanics, gentlemen, pickpockets, members of both Houses of Parliament, streetwalkers, newspaper-writers...dandies, with mustachios and cigars...family parties of simple honest tradesmen and their wives'.\n\nExecution days at Newgate brought crowds so vast to the narrow City streets that for many the scaffold dwindled to a small element in the distance.\n\nUntil 1836, the condemned were executed forty-eight hours after their conviction, unless a Sunday intervened, in which case the hanging was seventy-two hours later. After this date, more time was allowed for legal arguments to be heard if there was a liklihood of clemency, or there were petitions for mercy, or, later, if appeals were planned. Executions were traditionally held outside Newgate or Horsemonger Lane gaol on Monday mornings at eight. For crimes that had captured the public imagination, preparation might begin days before the execution. For the double execution of Maria and Frederick Manning in November 1849, convicted of the murder of her lover, landlords near Horsemonger Lane gaol erected scaffolding on their buildings overlooking the gallows to create additional seating. The police cleared the area in front of the gaol three full days before the hanging, putting up barricades and blocking off streets to prevent a repeat of those deaths by overcrowding.\n\nThe gallows was traditionally erected during the night before the execution, and crowds milled around, shouting encouragement or derision, depending on the attitude towards the convicted, while street sellers and pubs supplied their wants. In 1836, before the execution of James Greenacre, convicted of killing and dismembering his washerwoman fianc\u00e9e, and scattering her in sections across London, the appearance of the scaffold 'was hailed with three cheers of deafening applause'. This was repeated when the great transverse beam was raised and yet again when the noose was put up. Throughout the night before each Newgate execution, the bell of St Sepulchre tolled for the dead man before he had died. Fagin listens to it from the condemned cell with 'despair. The boom of every iron bell came laden with the one deep hollow sound \u2013 Death.' By six o'clock on an execution morning, the open space in front of the prison was thronged with bystanders, as were the surrounding streets, every window and every rooftop having been hired out long before. For the execution of the Mannings, Dickens and his friends paid ten guineas ('extremely moderate', in Dickens' view) for a rooftop vantage point.\n\nAfter the French Revolution, the number of crimes punishable by death, and the consequent number of executions, had risen sharply. Prompted by fear of the mob, of the returning, now unemployed, soldiers, and of the unruly working classes, the number of people hanged in the thirty years between 1800 and 1830 was double the figure for those executed in the previous half-century. In 1837, the year of _Oliver Twist_ , as well as the year Victoria came to the throne, 438 death sentences were passed in Britain. And in that novel, just as in that year, it seemed to be a subliminal idea in the minds of many of the middle-class upholders of the Poor Law that hanging was the natural fate of the poor. When Oliver asks for 'more', the Poor Law Guardian says, 'That boy will be hung...I know that boy will be hung'; and when Oliver is apprenticed, his master 'felt a strange presentiment from the very first, that that audacious young savage would come to be hung!'\n\nHowever, 1837 was the peak, and a greatly exaggerated peak. Two years later the number of death sentences passed in Britain had declined by nearly 90 per cent, to just fifty-six. This was not because of establishment repugnance for the death penalty, but rather because those at risk of being victims of property crime \u2013 the rich and the business classes \u2013 realized that juries were refusing to convict because of the harshness of the penalties. The number of crimes punishable by death was reduced, with transportation or penal servitude being imposed instead, in order to increase the number of guilty verdicts. From that time, the number of executions steadily decreased. Attending them, however, reached the height of its popularity from the late 1840s to the early 1860s: scarcity drove demand. As the century progressed, this was compounded by the railways, which enabled more people, from a wider area, to travel to see the fun; and by the spread of cheap newspapers, attracting more readers by drumming up interest in each crime. When the crowds were mixed and the events popular, their festival air disturbed many. A snippet of dialogue from Punch and Judy captures well the grisly good temper of many execution assemblies with its cheerful disregard for authority:\n\nLORD CHIEF JUSTICE: Hollo! Punch, my boy!\n\nPUNCH: Hollo! Who are you with your head like a cauliflower?...\n\nLORD CHIEF JUSTICE: You're a murderer, and you must come and be hanged.\n\nPUNCH: I'll be hanged if I do. [ _Knocks down the Chief Justice and dances and sings._ ]\n\nAllowing for the exaggeration of a puppet show, it was demonstrably the case that this tone sometimes mirrored reality. In 1820, ten men were charged with conspiracy to assassinate the prime minister and his entire cabinet. It was said that the Cato Street conspirators, named for the street in Marylebone where they had met, had hoped to establish a 'Committee of Public Safety' modelled on the bloody French Revolutionary group that had sent so many to the guillotine less than three decades earlier. Ten men were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, drawn (that is, eviscerated while still partially alive) and quartered (cut in four), as the statute book demanded for high treason. Five had their sentences commuted to transportation for life, but the other five were executed, their sentences being moderated to hanging and the beheading of their corpses. This was carried out, on 1 May of that same year, in front of Newgate. Twenty years later Thackeray claimed that when the heads were held up to the huge gathering to show the fate that awaited all traitors, the executioner, his hands slippery with gore, fumbled the final head, at which a comedian in the crowd yelled, 'Butter-fingers!' \u2013 to the vast amusement of all. Indeed, the execution was a subject for jokes even before the event. When the fashionable fencing master Henry Angelo was in search of a window overlooking the scaffold, one landlord demanded a fee of one guinea. Angelo exclaimed: 'What! to see four men have their heads cut off? I'll give you half a crown a head.'\n\nIn 1820, a plot to assassinate the entire cabinet was uncovered. When the conspirators were surprised in the loft where they met, a policeman was stabbed and killed. The day five of the men were executed \u2013 and subsequently beheaded \u2013 was one of Newgate's bloodiest.\n\nMore than anything else, it was jokes of this type that troubled many. Dickens was not against the death penalty, merely against the public levity that accompanied its enactment. After Courvoisier's execution, he wrote in the _Daily News_ , 'From the moment of my arrival...down to the time when I saw the body with its dangling head, being carried on a wooden bier into the gaol \u2013 I did not see one token in all the immense crowd...of any one emotion suitable to the occasion...nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice.' This was not always the case: a great deal depended on who was being executed, and why. When the servant Eliza Fenning was hanged for attempted murder in 1815, the miscarriage of justice was so blatant that the working-class spectators, perhaps as many as 50,000 strong, stood, it was reported, in total silence as the victim in white appeared on the scaffold. But when the ex-lady's maid, Maria Manning, and her husband were executed at in 1849, greeted her with a raucous rendition of 'Oh Mrs Manning, don't you cry for me', sung to the tune of 'Oh Susannah'.\n\nThackeray, who had attended Courvoisier's execution too, wrote that 'I came away...that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for _the murder I saw done_.' Two weeks later he still felt 'degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight'. It is simplistic to present a picture of the savage unfeeling workers enjoying the sight of death, while the fastidious bourgeoisie recoiled. One upper-class man happily recalled an outing he and his friends had planned to the gallows as late as 1864, when they rented a window across from Newgate to watch the hangings of five men known as the 'Flowery Land pirates' (they had attacked a ship named the _Flowery Land_ ). These spectators were West End types, soldiers in fashionable regiments. On the day of the execution, they woke to morning-after-the-night-before headaches, grey skies and rain. Despite having paid possibly as much as fifty guineas for their window, they contemplated not going, until 'the sight of three or four cabs, a couple of servants, and a plentiful supply of provender decided the question, and the procession started'. Food, drink, transport: their requirements were no different from those of the working-class onlookers.\n\nAs the century progressed, many of the middle and upper classes were likely to evince distaste, or shame, at least in public, at the mere notion of executions, pillories and heads on spikes, which gradually ceased to be considered an acceptable part of city life. In 1819, a guidebook had highlighted Temple Bar as a place 'particularly _distinguished_ ' (my italics) by the 'exhibition of the heads of those who have been executed for treason'. By the 1839 edition, this was reduced to half a sentence in passing \u2013 'The heads of persons executed for high treason were formerly exhibited on this gate' \u2013 before the authors hastened to focus on Temple Bar as the place where the City Corporation received the royal family on its visits to the City. Public displays of body parts were no longer something to promote to visitors.\n\nThe final public execution in Britain was not the fiesta that Courvoisier's or Mrs Manning's had been. The death of Michael Barrett took place against a background of the independence struggle in Ireland by the Fenians (named for the legendary Irish army, the Fianna). Richard O'Sullivan Burke, the Irish Republican Brotherhood's arms' agent in Britain, was arrested late in 1867. An escape plan was hatched to blast a hole in the wall of the Clerkenwell House of Correction, where Burke was being held; in the confusion, Burke was to make his escape. But the Home Office was tipped off by an informer and Burke was moved to a different part of the prison. Even now, the Fenians still had a chance, as the police had failed to act quickly enough to prevent their laying explosives. The rebels miscalculated the amount of gunpowder, however, and instead of a hole being neatly blown in one section of the wall, the whole thing was lifted from its foundations, while the fa\u00e7ades of the entire row of houses across the road were ripped away like peel from an orange. And when the dazed conspirators peered through the gaping hole, they were confronted with armed guards taking up positions to defend the gaol. The Fenians scrambled away from the site of this humiliating debacle just as 3,000 Metropolitan police constables descended on the scene.\n\nSix people had been killed by the blast, another six later died of their wounds, while 120 were seriously injured, with fifteen left permanently crippled. The bomb had plunged the streets into total darkness, and before any rescue attempts could begin, the paving had to be lifted to gain access to the gas mains. Fifty firemen and a regiment of the Household Guards, later joined by the Scots Fusiliers, worked all night, first putting out the blazes caused by burst gas mains and destroyed chimneys, then searching through the rubble for the dead and the injured, slightly hampered by sightseers. For as always, 'The streams of visitors, in spite of mud, and rain, and barriers, and walls of impassable police, have continued unabated...Corporationlane was closed...although last night announcements were posted outside the end houses that the public would be admitted to them to view the ruins for sums varying from sixpence to a penny.' A greengrocer even set up a ladder so that people could peer over the hoardings to the destroyed prison wall: 'numbers of persons paid their money for the view'. Meanwhile, 'Photographers and artists were taking pictures and making sketches throughout the morning' for their newspapers and journals.\n\nMichael Barrett was arrested in January 1868, along with five others. The Crown's case wasn't merely poor: it barely existed. One of the accused turned informer; another admitted on the witness stand that he was being paid by the police; against one of the accused, the Crown offered no evidence; against another, there was only the word of the informer. A single witness, the police informer, said he had seen Barrett in London on the day of the explosion, while several disinterested witnesses placed him in Glasgow at the relevant time. In the end, the jury found five not guilty, and Barrett guilty.\n\nFearing another Fenian rescue attempt at his execution, the police were armed with revolvers and cutlasses, rather than just truncheons, but, in the event, 'They never had easier work.' Surprisingly few turned out on 26 May 1868 to see what everyone knew would be the last public execution in Britain. Popular antipathy to such things was stronger than anti-Fenian outrage: one shopkeeper with premises overlooking the scaffold said 'he had not [fallen] so low as to let his windows to see a fellow creature strangled'. Some claimed that only 2,000 people were waiting at Newgate at dawn, in a gathering that was 'one of the smallest...that has for a long time assembled in front of the Old Bailey'. Most of the onlookers appeared to be respectable working men and tradesmen who had come because it was to be the last public execution, not for political reasons. So sparse was the assembly that some of the police, who had regularly done duty at Newgate and knew the '\"hanging\" crowds...as familiar acquaintances, were puzzled, and almost grieved'.\n\nYet the memory of Newgate as a place of violent public death lingered. The year after Barrett's execution, Dickens could still write that it was a setting of 'fire and fagot, condemned Hold, public hanging, whipping through the city at the cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful ancestral landmarks'.\n\n#### 15.\n\n#### THE RED-LIT STREETS TO DEATH\n\nWhat struck most people on seeing London for the first \u2013 or the thousandth \u2013 time was its vastness, its unknowability, not merely in terms of its streets and buildings, but in terms of its people. Dickens referred to one of his characters in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ as belonging to 'a race peculiar to the City; who are secrets as profound to one another, as they are to the rest of mankind'. Visitors from more sparsely populated nations felt this the most. Even if they lived in capital cities themselves, none was the size of London. One American wrote: 'How utterly lost a stranger feels in London. In the midst of that great mass of human life and activity, a stranger is perfectly alone', yet at the same time, 'No matter...how far he walks, he cannot get beyond the crowd.' In _A Tale of Two Cities_ , the narrator, on entering 'a great city by night', considers how 'every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret...[and] every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts...is...a secret to the heart nearest'. Moreover, each stranger on the street was a secret, and London was filled with millions of strangers. Many of these strangers were women, going about lives that seemed incomprehensible to their fellow men. These women aroused fears by their number, as well as by their unknowability.\n\nIt cannot be stated too emphatically that we have _no_ firm knowledge of the number of prostitutes on the streets of London for most of the nineteenth century. First, there is the question: what is a prostitute? Apart from a woman actively soliciting on the streets, does the term include a woman living with a man to whom she is not married, on a long-term, monogamous basis, who does not work and is supported by that man? Does it encompass a woman in employment, who intermittently or regularly is given additional cash by a long-term, or short-term, partner? Does it take into account a woman whose wages do not entirely support her, or who is temporarily out of work, who receives financial help from one or more men? The rigid separation of 'good' and 'bad' women did not hold even according to Victorian morality. There were women who enjoyed a nightlife that was not acceptable to moralists, but who pursued it for pleasure rather than money; equally, there were women in long-term relationships living in communities that traditionally did not resort to the church for sanctification. Many in the nineteenth century regarded any and all of these women as prostitutes. In _London Labour_ , the widespread nature of this term could not be plainer: ballet girls, it was said, were 'in the habit of prostituting themselves when the occasion offers, either for money, or more frequently for their own gratification' \u2013 that is, they had sex outside marriage, which is not our definition of prostitution at all.\n\nNone of this stopped experts from attempting to enumerate the prostitutes of London as though they were a single, countable class. In 1791, the police magistrate Patrick Colquhoun had estimated (and it should be noted that he used the word 'estimate', as well as 'conjecture', although this element of doubt was later ignored) that there were 50,000 prostitutes in London. He then separated this figure into two groups, allowing that at least half were not what he called 'common prostitutes', by which he meant those who walked the streets soliciting. More than 25,000, he believed, were kept women, by which he meant those who fitted the commercial definition of this term, as well as those who lived with long-term partners outside wedlock. The remaining figure of 25,000 is still much higher than the police and court reports of the period indicate, yet by 1817, this was supposed to have soared to 80,000, although no source for it was ever given. It might be an extrapolation of Colquhoun's figure of 50,000, taking into account the rising population.\n\nBy 1851, William Acton, a surgeon specializing in genito-urinary disorders and one of the main contributors to the debate on prostitution, published statistics showing that there were 210,000 prostitutes in London, calculating this by taking as his starting point the 42,000 live births to unwed mothers recorded that year. These women had 'taken the first step in prostitution'. From that, he went on to posit that each one would go on to work as a prostitute for an average of five years, giving a total, over the five years, of 210,000 women, or one in every twelve unmarried females in Britain.\n\nSimilar claims were made by Michael Ryan, who wrote _Prostitution in London_ (1839). Even with his background as the editor of the _London Medical and Surgical Journal_ and a lecturer on midwifery and medical jurisprudence, he appeared even more credulous and every bit as innumerate. 'Every [fallen] girl, or woman, has her fancy man, or bully,' he wrote, 'who lives upon her prostitution, and seldom confines himself to one female.' Despite making their livings from these women, such men were 'thieves, pickpockets, and often murderers...Bullies spend the day in public-houses, and the night in brothels, in which they always assist in robbing, and often in murdering their victims.' He could make these assertions despite the fact that, a few pages earlier, he had discussed the police reports on brothels, in only one of which was anyone robbed and no one murdered.\n\nRyan then moved on from what these women did to how many there were: 'suppose that the number of prostitutes be 80,000, as already concluded, and that _each_ has a bully [my italics: this despite writing a few lines earlier that a bully 'seldom confines himself to one female'], then there would be this great number of thieves and vagabonds let loose on the community.' As if that weren't enough, 'an enlightened medical gentleman' had told him that, near the Fleet Ditch, 'There is an aqueduct of large dimensions, into which murdered bodies are precipitated by bullies, and discharged at a considerable distance in to the Thames, without the slightest chance of discovery.'\n\nActon was more realistic: incidents of 'robbery and violence in brothels' were 'rare and scattered', he wrote, and the murderous aqueducts 'extraordinary inventions'. Mayhew's _London Labour_ repeated the aqueduct story in order to reject it, but that didn't prevent the same volume citing Ryan as an authority elsewhere. On the streets, the police reported substantially lower numbers of streetwalkers and, what is more, Acton at least knew it. In 1838, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police believed that there were fewer than 7,000 prostitutes in London (excluding the City). On the page before Acton came up with his figure of 210,000, he noted that in 1841 the police had estimated that there were 9,409 prostitutes throughout the city (although that does seem an implausibly precise figure).\n\nPreconceptions clouded the causes of prostitution, too. The Edinburgh surgeon William Tait, in his book _Magdalenism: An inquiry into the extent, causes and consequence of prostitution in Edinburgh_ (1840), divided prostitutes into two groups: those 'naturally' inclined to a life of vice from 'Licentious Inclination \u2013 Irritability of Temper \u2013 Pride and Love of Dress \u2013 Dishonesty and Desire of Property \u2013 Indolence', and those who became prostitutes because of their personal circumstances, that is, poverty, lack of skills, abandonment by or the death of their parents. Yet once he had developed his theme, he concluded that all the middle-class women, such as governesses, were apparently led into prostitution by such life events \u2013 by being seduced and abandoned, for example \u2013 while all the workingclass women ended up as prostitutes because they had 'a looseness in their characters'.\n\nIt is Mayhew's encyclopaedic work that ultimately reveals the real problem in discussing nineteenth-century prostitution. Although Mayhew relied on collaborators to produce many of the reports on street workers that he crafted into the first three volumes of _London Labour and the London Poor_ , he interviewed many himself and wrote those volumes on his own. The fourth volume, on 'Those That Will Not Work, comprising Prostitutes, Thieves, Swindlers and Beggars', was different. (It is surely telling, too, that in his view, as is clear from the title alone, prostitutes did 'Not Work'.) This volume was the work of several contributors, about whom little is known. John Binny, probably a journalist, wrote the 'Thieves and Swindlers' section and later produced another volume with Mayhew. The Revd William Tuckniss, who wrote the section the charitable rescue societies, was chaplain to the Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children and editor of _The Magdalen's Friend and Female Homes' Intelligencer_. Andrew Halliday, the author of the section on 'Beggars', who became a minor novelist and theatrical farceur, was the son of a Scottish minister; at the time of publication he was a journalist of just twenty, two years out of an Aberdeen school. Bracebridge Hemyng, who had recently left Eton, was reading for the bar. He later practised as a barrister of the Middle Temple and had a second career as the author of the _Jack Harkaway_ Boys of England series. It is not clear what qualified Hemyng, who must have been barely nineteen when he was writing, as an expert on prostitution, but whatever it was, he was entirely responsible for that section in Mayhew's fourth volume.\n\nWhile the subject was presented as magisterially as the style of the earlier volumes, only sixty of its 230-odd pages are actually about women on the London streets. The remainder contain either stories of prostitution as it was currently practised in Afghanistan, or Iceland, or other countries the contributors undoubtedly knew nothing about, or it was a historical retrospective of prostitution in Britain. In the London section, the information 'for certain facts, statistics, &c.' was derived from material published by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the police, the Society for the Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution and other formal bodies whose aim was to eradicate the trade. This was in direct contrast to the other three volumes, which drew on direct interviews with the participants, reproducing their life stories and experiences in their own words. One of the sources for this section was even _The Life and Adventures of Col. George Hanger_ , an 'autobiography' of the 4th Baron Coleraine, who wrote his highly coloured memoir in order to stave off his return to debtors' prison. He was satirically portrayed in caricatures of the day as pimping for the Prince of Wales, but, that apart, his only apparent experience of prostitution may have been in purchasing their services. The real problem for us today is that the writings of these self-styled experts are all that we have.\n\nWomen were regularly mistaken for prostitutes merely because they were out on the streets. There were, however, ways of identifying 'unfortunates'. Location was one element, and here the Haymarket, the centre of the red-light district, is shown. Another marker was dress, and the illustrator has gone to town on hiked-up skirts; men, too, were not expected to smoke in front of 'respectable' women, so the inclusion of so many cigars sends a clear signal.\n\nOne of their standard methods of assessing the number of prostitutes was purely visual. Acton wrote that he and a friend had 'counted 185 [prostitutes] in the course of a walk home from the Opera to Portland-place'. From Covent Garden, Acton most likely walked along to the top of the Haymarket, in the centre of the red-light district and London's most famous cruising ground, then continued up Regent Street, also known for its prostitutes; Portland Place itself was the site of several accommodation houses (see pp. 411\u20132) and lodgings for prostitutes. So Acton may have passed many working women, possibly even 185 of them. But short of his accosting each one, it is hard to judge how he _knew_ the 185 he counted were sex-workers. Some, perhaps many, of the women may have spoken to him, offering their services. It is just as likely, though, that Acton made his assessments based on the women's clothes and manner: women who dressed or behaved in a way that he and other men considered inappropriate were seen as whores. This was standard. Dickens, too, wrote as if prostitutes were immediately recognizable. In 'The Pawnbroker's Shop' in _Sketches by Boz_ , he describes the customers: first are a mother and daughter, respectable but fallen on hard times; then comes 'a young female', by whose dress the reader is to understand she is a prostitute: her clothing, 'miserably poor, but extremely gaudy, wretchedly cold, but extravagantly fine, too plainly bespeaks her station. The rich satin gown with its faded trimmings, the worn-out thin shoes, and pink silk stockings, the summer bonnet in winter...a daub of rouge...cannot be mistaken.'\n\nIt appears from the scant information we have that the majority of women who earned their living from selling sex were for the most part working-class women, many of whom had been servants or street sellers. Many more of them than the average population \u2013 perhaps as many as 70 per cent \u2013 had lost one or both parents. The average age for becoming sexually active was probably about sixteen, and most of the girls first took up with men of their own class, going out on the streets a couple of years later.\n\nDespite many reports at the time and after, child prostitution may have been relatively rare. To stress that it was endemic, Ryan reproduced fourteen case studies from the London Society for the Protection of Young Females and Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution. Of those, one girl was twelve, one thirteen, another five were fifteen years old, and the remaining seven were older, including one woman whose age was not given but who had been married for six years. These girls may have been inveigled into prostitution, or become prostitutes for other reasons, and they had applied to the society for help \u2013 their suffering is undoubted \u2013 but none was at the time legally considered to be a child. Judicial statistics collected by modern scholars suggest that, between 1849 and 1865, 6.5 per cent of female admissions to a venereal hospital were girls under sixteen.\n\nMuch more typical was the story a sixteen-year-old girl who had worked as a servant from the age of ten; when she was eleven or twelve, she moved to a post where her mistress beat her, and she ran away. She had nowhere to go, her mother being dead (she doesn't mention a father: perhaps he had died, disappeared or remarried, and she was no longer wanted). She met a fifteen-year-old boy, with whom she lived in a lodging house until he was arrested for pickpocketing. He had infected her with venereal disease, and so she broke a window in order to be sent to prison where a doctor would treat her. When she was released, having no possibility of returning to service because of her prison record, she became a streetwalker, living in a lodging house with others her age, up to fifty a room. 'Many a girl \u2013 nearly all of them \u2013 goes out into the streets...to get money for their favourite boys...I f the girl cannot get money she must steal something, or will be beaten by her \"chap\" when she comes home.'\n\nThe older, more fortunate women, usually in the West End and the prosperous suburbs, worked as prostitutes for a few years, saving their money and then getting married \u2013 much the way the servant market operated, where service for many girls was a stage rather than a lifetime career. One day in Regent Street, Arthur Munby encountered a woman he had known when she was in service in a house in Oxford Street. Now she was 'arrayed in gorgeous apparel. How is this? said I. Why, she had got tired of service, wanted to see life and be independent; & so she had become a prostitute, of her own accord & without being seduced. She...enjoyed it very much, thought it might raise her & perhaps be profitable. She had taken it up as a profession...she had read books, and was taking lessons in writing and other accomplishments, in order to fit herself to be a companion of gentlemen.' After this, he saw her a few times on the street, finding that 'she continued to like it \u2013 she had some good friends, & was getting on nicely'. A few years later, when he encountered her again, she was dressed 'quietly & well, like a respectable upper servant'. She told him that after three years as a prostitute she had saved up \u2013 'I told you I should get on, you know' \u2013 and was the landlady of a coffee house on the south side of Waterloo Bridge.\n\nNow here is a handsome young woman of twentysix, who, having begun life as a servant of all work, and then spent three years in _voluntary_ prostitution...invests the earnings of her infamous trade in a respectable coffeehouse, where she settles down in homely usefulness and virtuous comfort! That the coffeehouse _is_ respectable, is clear I think from her manner: that she _did_ invest her earnings...I believe, because she was not fashionable enough to be pensioned, & if she were, men do not pension off their whores in that way.\n\nMunby noticed the changes in this woman's dress, from servant, to prostitute, to landlady of a respectable coffee house, and clothing played a great part in how prostitutes were recognized. Many walked the streets without a bonnet or shawl, a great breach of the dress code in displaying their hair and their figures as well as giving off indoor signals out of doors. The only description I have found of prostitutes overtly attempting to attract men in the street comes from 1870, in the notorious Boulton and Park case, when two men were arrested for dressing as women (see below, pp. 416\u201318). At their trial, the superintendent of the Alhambra theatre testified that they had been ejected from the theatre because they had been 'walking about as women looking over their shoulders as if enticing men' and had made 'noises with their lips, the same that I have heard made by females when passing gentlemen on the street'. The street keeper at the Burlington Arcade had also seen Boulton 'turn his head to two gentlemen who passed them, smile at them, and make a noise with his lips, the same as a woman would for inducement'. But apart from this one piece of evidence, and in unusual circumstances, it appears that streetwalkers rarely did even this, being content, as the Alhambra manager said, with looking over their shoulders.\n\nWalter \u2013 who should have known a prostitute when he saw one, having, according to his own account at least, slept with eleven volumes'-worth of them (see note on p. 55 for my attitude to his evidence) \u2013 made it clear that identification was not straightforward. Walking one day down a muddy Regent Street, he watched a woman 'holding her petticoats well up out of the dirt, the common habit of even respectable women...With gay ladies the habit was to hold them up just a little higher.' ('Gay' at the time meant a prostitute, probably from the connection with their wearing brightly \u2013 gaily \u2013 coloured clothes; it did not gain our current meaning until the 1920s, and then originally in the USA.) But how high was 'a little higher'? Walter was not sure. He walked ahead of her and 'turned round, and met her eye. She looked at me, but the look was so steady, indifferent, and with so little of the gay woman in her expression, that I could not make up my mind as to whether she was accessible or not.' He continued to follow her, and when she held up her skirts again, knowing he was behind her, he moved in, 'saying as I came close, \"Will you come with me?\"' It was only then, when she agreed, that he could be certain. The quality of women's clothes, too, was no indicator. 'Dress prostitutes' were lent clothes that they could otherwise not afford, usually by brothel madams. The _Yokel's Preceptor_ , presented as a guidebook to young men fresh from the country, separated 'blowens' (prostitutes) from 'private blowens': respectably married women who 'are in the habit of walking out, neatly and modestly attired'. According to the author, 'should they be accosted by a gentleman', the private blowens might agree to go with him to an accommodation house to make a little spare cash. It is clear that those writers who thought they saw streets full of prostitutes really just saw streets full of women.\n\nIf prostitutes could be identified only when they were approached, then it becomes clear that women were indiscriminately importuned in the streets. That this was indeed the case emerged in a debate that played out in the pages of _The Times_ in 1862. A gentleman calling himself 'Paterfamilias' wrote to the editor (letters from members of the public were often signed with a sobriquet, frequently in Latin, such as 'Pro Bono Publico') to complain that on a trip to London his daughters had been followed down Oxford Street by 'scoundrels' who stared at them and made remarks. 'Puella' ('Girl') replied two days later, saying that she frequented the same street and was never accosted; perhaps it was the girls' fault \u2013 had their country dress or outgoing rural manners encouraged these men? 'Paterfamilias', by return, was indignant: his daughters were wearing mourning following the death of Prince Albert. He was backed up by 'M', a day-governess (one who went from one pupil's house to another), who said she too had been accosted by 'middle-aged and older men'. Readers joined in, on both sides of the question. The following month the _Saturday Review_ finally suggested that if women dressed attractively, they must expect to be looked at, but added this rider: 'the remedy is in their own hands...I f they will be seen in the well-preserved coverts, it is for them to be careful that they do not look like game...Let them dress thoroughly unbecomingly. Let them procure poke bonnets, stint their skirts to a moderate circumference, and cultivate sad-looking underclothing. Any woman thus armed, and walking on without sauntering or looking about her, is perfectly safe even from amorous glances.' (Note that even badly dressed women still needed to keep their eyes down and walk briskly.) This was partly a satirical response, but the controversy made it clear that no one could tell a respectable woman from a prostitute by appearance alone, and barely by behaviour. The supposed signals that indicated a gay woman \u2013 slow walking, looking around, fashionable dress \u2013 were also natural behaviour on a shopping street. A lithograph of 1865, 'Scene in Regent Street', concurred: in it a 'Philanthropic Divine' attempts to hand an improving tract to a fashionably dressed woman. Perhaps she had been approached before, for in this parody she sounds remarkably tolerant as she replies, 'Bless me, Sir...I am not a social evil, I'm only waiting for a bus.'\n\nThe places where women were seen defined them: if women passed through certain places, they were automatically prostitutes, no matter how they behaved or dressed. It has been suggested that in _Great Expectations_ , when Pip says the Finches of the Grove club meet at a hotel in Covent Garden, the mere words 'hotel' and 'Covent Garden' together suggested to contemporary readers that the young men were picking up women. Two decades later, when _All the Year Round_ described a hotel down a side street between the Houses of Parliament and the Pye Street slum, where 'pretty girls' were 'always to be seen', readers would have known exactly what kind of pretty girls were meant.\n\nAbove all, from the beginning of the century a woman signalled her status by her mere presence in a place of public entertainment. _Life in London_ was completely matter-of-fact about this. In this Regency romp there is no hesitation in calling prostitution by its name. The men go to Covent Garden, where they retire to the Saloon, colloquially known as the 'Mutton Walk', and are immediately surrounded 'by number of the gay _Cyprians_ , who nightly visit this place'. They have calling cards, which they hand to the visitor from the country, before 'The regular _covies_ paired off with their _covesses_.' This fictional description was a reflection of the real world: a few years later H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan Bey noticed that, in the theatre, 'Common strumpets sat near the respectable wives and daughters of the citizens of London.' In the 1830s, a visiting American added that streetwalkers got preferential treatment, being admitted 'at an inferior charge with season tickets'.\n\nIn the late 1830s or early 1840s, a series of small books was published to guide the 'swell' to various places where prostitutes were to be found, listing brothels and accommodation houses, as well as places of public amusement. The eighteenth century developed a tradition of such catalogues: Ned Ward's _The Secret History of London Clubs_ (1709) listed a 'Bawds' Initiating Club', while the more notorious Harris's _List of Covent Garden Ladies_ was published for at least three decades between 1764 and 1788, giving names, addresses, price and description of prostitutes. There appear to have been far fewer in the nineteenth century. _The Swell's Night Guides_ were probably published in the 1840s; _The Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851_ may have been aimed at the (male) visitors in London for the Great Exhibition, but it was, at least in part, a reprint of the _Swell's_ guides. Later in the 1850s, the _Yokel's Preceptor: or, More Sprees in London! Being a ...Show-up of All the Rigs and Doings of the Flash Cribs in This Great Metropolis_ delivered rather less than it promised. In its 'Roll Call of Some Celebrated Mots [prostitutes]', of the seven listed, two were dead, one had retired, one had the pox and another was 'as regular a fireship as ever sailed the coast. Take care' \u2013 which suggests she too was infected, so in reality only two women were available. Perhaps this volume was more for the young man who wanted to think himself a bit of a dog, but who had no intention of doing anything more than buying a dirty book.\n\nThe _Swell's Night Guides_ , however, do seem to have contained solid information. One lists a number of theatres, presenting their advantages and their drawbacks for a man of pleasure. At Her Majesty's, on the Haymarket, 'An occasional trifle to the hall-keeper will get a gentleman behind the scenes.' In the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, run by Mme Vestris (who later went on to run the Olympic as the first entirely respectable theatre), 'The private boxes...have snug and secret retiring anti-rooms [sic], with voluptuous couches, and all things requisite for the comfort and convenience of the _debauch\u00e9e_.' The same could be said of Drury Lane, which boasted excellent arrangements in the rooms beside the boxes: 'The doors fastening on the inside, the visitors are not so liable to be intruded on.' (At almost the same date Dickens wrote that Drury Lane was no longer the 'temple of obscenity' it had once been, having banned prostitutes from its Grand Saloon.) The Haymarket possessed no retiring rooms, although the quality of female attractions in the Saloon was commended, while the English Opera House in the Strand was dismissed for its inferior girls. The Adelphi 'always contrives to have the prettiest women...There are more kept women, and open trading women of pleasure, in the female _corps dramatique_ of the Adelphi...than in any other', yet 'the private boxes are ill-conditioned and enormously dear'. The Pavilion, in the East End, was 'well conducted', and the manager 'is not very particular as to his privacy behind the scenes. The entr\u00e9e is to be obtained on very moderate terms'. There was little change more than a decade later, when a Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Houses heard that at the Eagle Tavern's theatrical performances, 'No gentleman, well dressed, can promenade there without being solicited by a female to go to houses of accommodation.' In the late 1860s, at the Alhambra theatre in Leicester Square, there were bars that charged special admission to men who wanted to mingle with the unaccompanied women who were regulars. There was another, private bar under the stage, where patrons could mix with the ballet girls from backstage.\n\n_The Swell's Night Guide_ also listed eighteen actresses, with notes on where they performed, where they lived and under whose protection (that is, the identity of their lover). It included the wife of the playwright Edward Stirling, who was supposedly under the protection of a doctor in Pall Mall; and the actor John Saville Faucit's wife, Elizabeth, who was living with the actor William Farren in Brompton. The book gave advice too on how to approach an actress. It warned the interested party not to offer her money directly, but to say he wanted to engage her as he was staging private theatricals. This throws some light on how Dickens' friends might have viewed his relationship with Nelly Ternan, for whom Dickens left his wife in 1858: Dickens, aged forty-five, had hired the eighteen-year-old actress to perform in some private theatricals. Soon after, he encouraged one theatre manager to give her work, sending a cheque for \u00a350, either intended for her, or to pay the manager for taking her on. It was not long, however, before she retired from the stage, unlike the 'many' actresses who, said _The Swell's Night Guide_ , 'frequent some of the French Introducing Houses' (see p.412\u201313); in those cases, it added, they could be dealt with on a commercial basis.\n\nAccording to Dickens, when theatres became more respectable they were replaced by the 'Dancing Establishment'. He admitted that 'Great order is observed' in most of these venues, but few men resorted to them for anything other than what he referred to as 'allurement'. Although he didn't name it, the establishment he had in mind was most probably the Argyle (sometimes Argyll) Assembly Rooms in Windmill Street, near Regent Street and the Haymarket. Originally housed in a Nash-designed building that opened in the early 1820s, the Argyle was for many the epitome of a place of loose morals. In _London by Night_ , by 'Anonyma', a risqu\u00e9 novel about a barmaid who becomes a prostitute, an illustration entitled 'Lost' shows her in front of the Argyle. The 1s admission charge gave entry to a dance floor downstairs; an additional 1s fee brought access to the upstairs galleries, which had private seating in alcoves. By the late 1860s, the upstairs was notable for its bright lighting and its fifty-piece band; by the bar hung panels depicting Europa and the bull, Leda and the Swan, and Bacchus and Silenus. Here the women met and sat drinking with their admirers until the Rooms closed at one.\n\nSimilar to the Argyle, but not as exclusive, was the Casino de Venise, more commonly referred to as the Holborn Casino, or even just the Holborn. It too charged 1s, and was 'gorgeously fitted up with immense mirrors, and velvet covered sofas and seats, handsome carpets, gilding'; it too had a separate 'wine room'. A City clerk in _London by Night_ lives in chambers at Furnival's Inn, as Dickens had in the early days of his marriage, but since the clerk is unmarried, he is freer to indulge himself: 'I call the Holborn my drawing-room. I believe I come here pretty well every night.' Dancing saloons could be found right across the city, each attuned to its particular audience. The Ratcliffe Highway one had a single long room with a bar, offering entertainment as well as dancing: 'a young lady in short muslin petticoats performs a ballet by herself, or with a little girl of some seven years old, dressed like a marine-store fairy'. In the intervals the child sold biscuits and cakes to the audience, before she was replaced by her father, who sang sentimental ballads.\n\nThere also existed public places for dancing that were respectable: Caldwell's, in Dean Street in Soho, was fequented by 'Lots of young men, clerks & apprentices, dancing with...shopgirls & milliners \u2013 also respectable'. These ' _soir\u00e9es dansantes_ ' were generally run by a dancing master, admission 6d; lists were readily available of the teachers and the evenings when they held assemblies. But dancing itself could make a place of doubtful propriety unless care was taken. Caldwell's also had a reputation as an establishment where middle- and upper-class men brought working-class women they had designs on: even if the women concerned were not already on the road to ruin, just being there could all too easily set them on that path.\n\nAfter the dancing saloons closed (at 3 or 4 a.m. until mid-century; then at 1 a.m. later on), the dancers moved on to eating establishments such as the oyster houses and pastry-cooks that lined the night districts, or to the finishes, 'low taverns or large and luxurious public houses where people go to finish off the night'. Their exterior appearance could be deceptive. In the 1830s, one finish had a dingy little entrance; inside, however, 'the brilliance of hundreds of gas lights' revealed a large room divided lengthways, with booths, as in an eating house, down on one side; opposite was a raised area where prostitutes sat 'in their finest attire'. In the mid-1840s, a coffee house called the Finish, in James Street, Covent Garden, attracted a mixture of late-night revellers and early-morning market people. Many more finishes resembled Barnes's night house, 'an ordinary drinking-saloon' that also sold pastries, and steak and oysters.\n\nMost prostitutes, however, did not while away their time rolling from the Argyle via the finishes to bijou villas paid for by their lovers. Most were streetwalkers, spending long hours in the wet and the cold. The areas in the West End where prostitutes were mostly to be found varied over the decades. In 1818, according to one guide, prostitutes could be seen walking from Aldgate Pump to St James's Street, that is, a two-and-a-half-mile stretch from where the Bank tube station is now, along Fleet Street, the Strand and Pall Mall to St James's. 'Another line extends along Newgate Street, into Lincoln's Inn-fields, across Covent Garden', and then to Piccadilly. The Strand, Holborn and Fleet Street were popular venues for streetwalkers in the 1820s, as were Leicester Square and Regent Street in the 1830s, and the Haymarket at almost all dates. Mayfair was another favourite haunt; in _Dombey and Son_ (written in the 1840s, set in the 1830s) Edith Dombey sees 'faded' women 'wander...past' outside the upper-class house in Brook Street, by Grosvenor Square.\n\nMany streetwalkers, however, stayed in their own neighbourhoods, servicing the men who lived and worked near by. The areas by the dockyards supported a large population of prostitutes, and Granby Street, parallel to Lower Marsh Street, beside Waterloo station, was notorious. When Flora Tristan saw it in 1839, she found 'women were looking out of windows or seated on their doorsteps...half-dressed; several were bare to the waist'. Walter agreed: on a Saturday night, the street was 'full of women who used to sit at the windows half naked', with more soliciting in the doorways. In the 1841 census, twenty-four houses on this street were occupied by fifty-seven young single women running their own households; their age and the absence of men suggests that prostitution may have been their primary source of income. Twenty years later nearly two-thirds of the single women were in their twenties, and a dozen in their teens. (The street was purchased in its entirety by the railway at the end of the 1860s, for company housing; when Waterloo station was extended it was built over, and no longer exists.)\n\nMany of these women serviced clients at home, but just as many walked over the bridge to the West End each evening at about nine o'clock, reversing the trend of commuting, before heading back south over the river at eight the next morning. Haymarket prostitutes generally walked the streets from eleven at night until one in the morning: in other words, from the time the theatres closed to the opening of the finishes. According to Walter, in the daytime, 'Exceedingly nice women were...to be met...from eleven to one in the morning, and three till five in the afternoon' in Regent Street. The pattern varied from district to district. In the late 1830s, out at the western edge of suburban London \u2013 where the new, unlit roads were extending for the first time into what had recently been country and market gardens \u2013 'Gay women of a poor class were then...about the darkest parts, or they used to walk there with those who met them where the roads were lighter.'\n\nFor the most part, notions of upper-class cads twiddling their moustaches and seducing working girls were fiction, not fact. Police returns suggest that 'a substantial majority' of working women serviced men of their own class and economic background, and their lives were far from novelistically glamorous. When Walter went looking for women towards the end of the 1840s, he 'began to walk through streets inhabited by very poor gay women', who stood at their doors from about two o'clock 'to catch passers by'. One of them, Mary, lived in a room, 'about twelve feet square', with a bed taking up a third of the space, a table, two chairs, a cupboard, a chest of drawers, a looking-glass, a coal cuttle and a slop pail. It was fairly well furnished by the standards of impoverished districts, yet so cold that Walter kept all of his clothes on (this was unusual for him, and he mentions it specifically). This despite the fact that Mary did relatively well for herself. Walter began to visit her regularly, paying her \u00a32 a week, although sometimes 'I left off for a while, and gave Mary a chance of keeping her other friends...mostly poor clerks...and married men better off, who gave her a pound.' If Walter's figures are accurate, Mary earned approximately \u00a380 or \u00a3100 a year, the income of a minor clerk.\n\nEvidence confirms that this was the way of things in the poorer areas. In Whitechapel there was little work available for women apart from domestic service or the local gin shops and coffee houses; in the aptly named Angel Alley, the best-paid work was providing sex for the men who brought hay and straw to Whitechapel market twice a week. Around the docks, many women had intermittent but long-term arrangements with sailors, living with them for the duration of their shore leave. One woman said she had 'six, eight, ten, oh! more...husbands. I am not married, of course not, but they think me their wife while they are on shore.' This was an entirely accepted way of life, barely regarded as prostitution by the women or their communities.\n\nNot everyone could aspire even to Mary's existence. Most of the women around Granby Street were 'to be had for a few shillings' in the 1840s. Walter laid out the economics of streetwalking. Women of a 'superior class' charged a sovereign, but half that sum would pay for 'as nice a one as you needed'. 'Two good furnished rooms near the Clubs could be had by women for from fifteen to twenty shillings per week, a handsome silk dress for five or ten pounds'. Even if they couldn't afford the pleasant room, as long as they had the handsome dress, they could charge 'from five to ten shillings a poke' in an accommodation house.\n\nAccommodation houses were places to take a woman for a brief period of time, or overnight. These might be rooms over coffee houses, or might even resemble private houses, the only difference being that the door to the street was left open, and inside there was a 'red or blue transparent blind' illuminated from behind by a gaslight. The quality of the houses varied according to price and location. Walter's first suburban accommodation house cost him 5s for a visit of 'some hours'; and the room was well furnished, with 'red curtains, looking-glasses, wax lights, clean linen, a huge chair, a large bed, and a cheval-glass'. The Cross Keys coaching inn in Gracechurch Street cost 4s a night, or, for 'a short visit the mere calling for wine is deemed sufficient' \u2013 that is, the mark-up on the wine covered the cost of the room. But a short visit meant short: Walter and his friend had just fallen asleep at one house when there was a knocking at the door and a voice called, 'Shall you be long, sir, we want the room.' As Walter, said, 'I was having too much accommodation for my money.'\n\nIf the guides and Walter are to be relied on, it might be swifter to demarcate the places where there were no such houses than to list where they might be found. At the beginning of the century, according to the tailor Francis Place, there were three or four brothels around Charing Cross Road, in addition to two nearby courts almost entirely populated by prostitutes; by 1815, the courts had been cleaned up; by 1824, this 'improvement' had spread to the entire neighbourhood, probably owing to the Strand Western Improvements. Some districts were notorious throughout the century: this was particularly true of the area between Leicester Square and the H aymarket, north of the Strand around Panton Street; and around Exeter Street, off the Strand. In fact so disreputable was this area that when Walter took a girl there, 'the cabman insolently demanded about five times his fare' and added, 'Think yourself lucky a peeler don't drop on you for taking a young gal like that' to such an address. Up around Portland Place was another well-known red-light district: Walter used a neighbourhood house in James Street, as well as another on Titchfield Street, the 'quietest house in London', known for having two entrances, so an ideal place to meet a married woman. In the 1840s, _The Swell's Night Guides_ list a number of places, many of which were free-and-easies and supper rooms such as the Cider Cellars and Evans's. The guidebooks make little distinction between places where prostitutes might be found and those where they were the _raison d'\u00eatre_. Undoubtedly some of the named houses were brothels: Mother H's was one. It was, the guide enthuses, 'the multibona casey for the swell donnas', and Mother H herself 'was complete mistress of her functions'. (She is named in the drinking song on p. 360.)\n\nThere were probably far more accommodation houses, catering to women who worked independently, than there were brothels, where women worked for an employer, were given a share of the fee or a salary, and were fed and lodged at the proprietor's expense. The number of accommodation houses is entirely unknown; we have a better sense of how many brothels existed, because the authorities attempted to keep track of them. In 1841, the police were aware of 933, and in 1857, 410. Even so, some of these may not have been brothels but places where a few women had chosen to lodge together, sometimes pooling their income, sometimes operating independently and sharing living expenses.\n\nA secondary type of brothel, probably more common, was the introducing house. This did not employ resident prostitutes, but was where the women came to work. Pubs operated as introducing houses, with the women using the rooms upstairs, and _The New Swell's Night Guide_ listed some of the 'ladies who are generally to be found' at specific addresses. More introducing houses masqueraded as respectable businesses, with a brass plaque \u2013 the sign of tradesmen and the professional middle classes \u2013 on the doors, claiming the premises to be a doctor's, or a male midwife's, or, if entirely run by women, a milliner's, or a stay- or corset-maker's. An introducing house in the Wandsworth Road announced itself as 'A Seminary for Young Ladies', while another in Villiers Street, run by the same woman, claimed to house a 'Professor of Pianoforte and Guitar'. Many were set up 'in the most stylish streets': St James's Place, Piccadilly, Jermyn Street, around Portman Square. At Mme Matileau's establishments for young ladies, in Dean Street and the Old Brompton Road, 'nothing is allowed to get stale...you may have your meat dressed to your own liking...if it suit your taste, you may kill your own lamb or mutton, for her flock is in prime condition, and always ready for sticking; when any of them are fried, they are turned out to grass, and sent to the hammer or disposed of by private contract...consequently the rot, bots, glanders, and other diseases incidental to cattle, are not generally known here.'\n\nSome women worked on their own, and the guides printed long lists of such prostitutes, with their addresses. Sometimes these women were kept by men, named by the guides, although they also continued to be available to other male clients. _The Bachelor's Pocket Book_ gave detailed directions to the house with 'Two Birds hanging in a Parlour Window', or the one with 'Amber Curtains to Windows'. It also listed the speciality of the women in detail: Jane Fowler, in Church Street, Soho, 'has a peculiar method of disrobing...for the purpose of enhancing the enjoyment', while Miss Alice Grey, New Street, Portland Road, 'frequently performs the rites...according to the _equestrian_ order'. Miss Walbeck, of William Street, King's Cross, takes ' _male parts_ ' on stage, and in the book is shown in her chemise, wearing a top hat and trousers and holding a whip: 'she has a piece of the termagant about her.' Such women could be found in every part of the city. Renton Nicholson, in his autobiography, remembered that in the early 1830s many 'dashing beaut[ies], gaily dressed' took lodgings in the district north of Oxford Street, and 'loud knockings late at night were frequently heard'. In general, the streets mentioned most often are around the Adelphi, south of the Strand, north of Oxford Street and south of the New Road, in most of Soho, and around Edgware Road at Marble Arch.\n\nThese guides to the night dealt entirely with heterosexual commercial sex. That there was a homosexual commercial world is known, but the surviving details are even scantier, and even less certain, than the unreliable information we have for the heterosexual world, and much of it comes from evidence given in court. Of the cases that ended publicly, in the press and in court, a large proportion of offences through the century were enacted in public places: of a sample 105 cases, 22 per cent occurred in the street, 20 per cent in parks, 8 per cent in public urinals (which started to appear mid-century), 14 per cent in pubs or shops and only 3 per cent in theatres.\n\nIn 1806, David Robertson was arrested for sodomy; he had kept what may have been a gay brothel, or perhaps an accommodation house, in Charles Street, Covent Garden, although few details survive. More information can be gleaned from details of the arrest in 1810 of James Cook and his partner Yardley (whose first name does not appear to be known), the owners of the White Swan public house in Vere Street, Clare market. According to the single contemporaneous publication about the case, the pub was in part an accommodation house and in part what was described as a brothel, where 'The upper part of the house was appropriated to youths who were constantly in waiting for casual customers'. However, it seems more likely that this was an introducing house (that is, the men probably did not live on the premises). Whatever it was, within six months of opening it was raided and the owners arrested. (For their fates, see pp. 381\u20132.)\n\nPubs, despite the low number of arrests mentioned above, were an obvious place for like-minded men to meet. In 1825, the Barley Mow pub in the Strand was raided after information was received that it held gay free-and-easies twice weekly. The parks and the streets were also favoured gay cruising areas, particularly those near barracks. An 1813 publication reported that the author had attended a court case where a soldier on duty in the park 'under the wall of Marlborough-gardens' was approached by a man who, after speaking to him briefly, 'put his hand in his breeches'. And according to _The Times_ in 1825, 'scarcely a week passes' without magistrates courts hearing cases of 'indecent assaults on the sentries in the park'. These men were generally arrested under the Vagrancy Act (1822), which required people to give 'a satisfactory account of themselves' and their reason for being in the street, making it a useful catch-all way to remove both beggars and sex-workers.\n\nThere are a few transient glimpses, however, of happy relationships formed from encounters in the streets that did not come within the purview of the magistrates. Edward Leeves was an Englishman living in Venice, who returned for a time to London in the late 1840s, socializing with the upper classes and cruising, from what we can tell from his heavily redacted diary: 'Fine. Tried my luck once more. I sat in the Park; but so shy that I cd make [illegible] nothing.' A few weeks later, 'Fun & Folly seems the order there for those who have money. Saw J.B. We went up to Albany St.' Later Leeves filled in the scanty details of his first meeting with a trooper named Jack Brand: 'This day year, Dear Boy, about this hour, I saw you in all your beauty, smiling as your gallant charger reared & pranced...And then in the [sentry] Box I spoke to you, & after Parade we met for five minutes, & you told me your name.' That evening, 'at the Arch at Hyde Park Corner met my poor Boy. We went together in a cab to Albany St, or one just by', presumably to an accommodation house, since the address was far from Leeves's own lodgings. The brief and sad story then continued:\n\nI saw J.B. on 3rd & 5th August, & on the 9th & 10th I think but not sure.\n\n12 AUGUST: 'J.B. Gravesend.'\n\n14 AUGUST: 'D[itt]o. and back to Town. [Inserted later: '& now on the 6th Septr what regrets & what recollections!!!', for on 5 September, Jack Brand died of cholera, aged twenty-two.]\n\n18 DECEMBER: 'About this hour [fifteen weeks ago] I was arriving in London and anticipating our meeting...And I am alive \u2013 & He is gone & forgotten save by me \u2013 and nothing remains to tell of him save the cold stone which I have had placed by his Grave!'\n\n28 DECEMBER: 'If it were not [for] the intense cold I think that I should make an escapade, & try to drown thought & grief...There would be found scope enough for even my appetite, I believe.'\n\n26 JANUARY 1850: 'Twenty six weeks...since I first saw you in Hyde Park!'\n\n6 FEBRUARY: 'Had a pleasant half hour after [military] parade & made some new, rollicking acquaintance.'\n\n7 FEBRUARY: 'Rather a pleasant evening with my yesterday lads \u2013 or rather with two of them \u2013 rare boys, by God! & no mistake; but for gentleness & _simpatia_ nothing like my own poor boy, who has no equal left.'\n\n8 FEBRUARY: 'Repetition of evening party: two prime swells in their way; but the fun is expensive, & yet there is no grudging the blunt [cash] to such roaring boys.'\n\nIn the 1850s, the _Yokel's Preceptor_ claimed that male prostitutes could be found on Regent Street, Fleet Street, Holborn and the Strand, looking into shop windows to give cover to their slow strolls, and also in coffee houses, dancing saloons and theatres \u2013 in effect, in the same places where women carried out the same business. But it is a matter of debate as to how reliable the book is: it speaks of 'the beasts...commonly designated _Margeries_ , _Pooffs_ , &c.' and appears to define male prostitutes exactly as Acton and his colleagues defined female ones \u2013 by assessing whether or not they visually conformed to the author's preconceptions.\n\nIn 1864, Arthur Munby had attended a commercial dance in Camberwell, ostensibly like those run by dancing masters, but one where the women dressed as men, and the men as women. Munby \u2013 who was sexually excited by masculine-looking, working-class women, especially dirty ones \u2013 found this 'simply disgusting'. But the event was not secret and, he admitted, 'only a lark'. Indeed, ten years earlier, at the Druid's Hall, Turnagain Lane, off Fleet Street, dances attended by cross-dressers were held over an eighteen-month period at least, untroubled by the police or anyone else.\n\nThe Boulton and Park case, in 1870, was an extension of this cross-dressing and was also a case of non-commercial sex, yet the stage it was performed on was still the street. That spring, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park \u2013 the sons of, respectively, a wine merchant and a judge \u2013 were arrested as they left the Strand theatre dressed as women. It soon emerged that over the previous three years they had regularly appeared dressed as women, in the streets as well as at theatres, restaurants, even at the Oxford\u2013Cambridge Boat Race. It seemed to have been fairly clear to everyone who saw them that Boulton and Park were male, yet their ejections from various places of entertainment were rare.\n\nErnest Boulton and Frederick Park were arrested in 1870 for appearing in public dressed as women. 'Stella' and 'Fanny' even made their first court appearance in female dress, to the great amusement of the crowds who waited to see them.\n\nThe two men initially seemed not to take the prosecution seriously. On his first court appearance Boulton wore 'a cherry-coloured evening dress rimmed with white lace' together with a wig giving him a demure chignon, while Park's gown was 'dark green satin...low-necked, trimmed in black lace', and covered by a shawl; he wore his hair in flaxen curls. (Both disappointed their followers by afterwards dressing as men and, apparently on legal advice, sporting moustaches and whiskers.) There was no public outrage: the crowds waiting by the police vans waved their hats and shouted encouragement; when the men's letters were read out in court, 'the audience in the body of the court appeared to be exceedingly amused'. There was little sense that Boulton and Park were in any way a public danger or disgrace: this was just one more instance of street theatre. It shows a substantial shift in attitudes from 1835, when in his 'Visit to Newgate' in _Sketches by Boz_ , Dickens reported on seeing the last two men to be executed for 'unnatural acts', or homosexual, consensual sex. They were unnamed by Dickens but have since been identified as John Smith and John Pratt. At the time, 'the nature of [their] offence rendered it necessary to separate them' from the prison's other convicted men.\n\nThe assumption in literature, and in all good books, was that women who transgressed the moral code by becoming sex-workers were sure to meet an untimely death. Flora Tristan was certain that 'Many die in hospitals from shameful diseases', or in neglect and poverty 'in their frightful hovels'. Dr Ryan wrote that up to 10 per cent of these women killed themselves, 'or become insane, or idiotic' through moral turpitude. William Tait agreed that prostitutes fell into a decline and rapidly died: this was a 'general law'. Acton, in contradiction, compiled figures to show that prostitutes did not commit suicide more often than any other group, but fiction supported the views of his colleagues. In _London by Night_ , the barmaid Louisa, who was 'Lost' on entering the Argyle Rooms, was 'Found' at the end of the story, when her body was pulled from the river, where she had ended her life.\n\nThe Romantic notion of suicide was that it respresented the act of a rash and impetuous free (male) spirit. While few young men may have killed themselves for love, as Romantic literature had it, it was the case then, as now, that far more men than women committed suicide \u2013 up to four times as many. Despite these statistics, between the end of the eighteenth century and the coming of Victoria, there was a perceptual shift. From the late 1830s it was thought that it was women who killed themselves more frequently, and that they did so for love. This change is illustrated in the series of engravings of an eighteenth-century pond, known as Rosamond's Pond, in St James's Park, which was filled in in 1770. In 1780, an etching of it in its former state was captioned: 'This spot was often the receptacle of many unhappy Persons, who in the stillness of an Evening Plung'd themselves into Eternity.' In 1825, the etching was reissued and the caption altered: 'The South West corner of St. James's Park was enriched with this romantic scene... _its melancholy situation seems to have tempted more persons, (especially young women) to suicide by drowning than any other place about town._ ' In 1859, Sala claimed that Rosamond's Pond had been the Waterloo Bridge of its day, for it was there that 'forsaken women' went to drown themselves.\n\nFor, a mere dozen years after Waterloo Bridge opened, it had become a byword for suicides. A political essay as early as 1829 used the bridge as an obvious synonym for suicide without feeling the need for any explanation: 'The man who loves his country with a sincere affection, unwilling to witness the decline of her prosperity and glory, already hesitates only between pistols and prussic acid, Waterloo-bridge and a running noose.' In a short story in the late 1830s, Dickens had a drunkard end his life on the bridge. By then, however, it was generally women abandoned by their lovers who were said to kill themselves there: the bridge was known as 'the English \"Bridge of Sighs\"...\"Lover's Leap\", the \"Arch of Suicide\"...a favourite spot for love assignations; and a still more favourite spot for the worn and the weary, who long to cast off the load of existence...To many a poor girl the assignation over one arch...is but a prelude to a fatal leap from another.'\n\nThomas Hood added a link to prostitution in his poem, 'The Bridge of Sighs' (1844), basing his story on a real incident, when Mary Furley, an impoverished seamstress faced with the workhouse, threw herself into the Regent's Canal, taking one of her two small children with her. Hood's poem altered the location to Waterloo and removed all the identifying details. Much later, Dickens described the death of a woman in the Regent's Canal that was probably much closer to reality. Walking at dusk through Regent's Park 'one day in the hard winter of 1861', he saw a cab driver speaking to the park keeper with 'great agitation', before rushing off, followed by the novelist. 'When I came to the right-hand Canal Bridge, near the cross-path to Chalk Farm, the Hansom was stationary, the horse was smoking hot', and, lying 'on the towing-path with her face turned up towards us, [was] a woman, dead a day or two, and under thirty, as I guessed, poorly dressed in black. The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the dark hair, all pushed back from the face, as though that had been the last action of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground.'\n\nThat was journalism. In fiction it was the river rather than the canal that called to Dickens in his depictions of desperate prostitutes. In _Oliver Twist_ , Nancy gestures to the Thames: 'How many times do you read of such as me who spring into the tide...It may be years hence, or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at last.' (Although compared to the end Dickens gave her, bludgeoned to death by Sikes, drowning might have been more merciful.) In _David Copperfield_ , Martha, who had grown up in the small town of Great Yarmouth, flees to London to hide her shame after she 'falls'. David comes across her at Blackfriars Bridge and follows her along the river, past Waterloo Bridge, past Westminster Abbey, to Millbank \u2013 that is, along the streets frequented by prostitutes, through the slum around Westminster, and then back to the river, where she cries: 'I know I belong to it. I know that it's the natural company of such as I am!' These prostitutes flit across London's bridges like the ghosts they would soon become. In _Little Dorrit_ , begun five years later, in 1855, Little Dorrit and Maggie, her simple-minded companion, walk across London Bridge at night, where they meet a prostitute walking east, in the direction of Granby Street and Waterloo Road. Maggie asks her, 'What are you doing with yourself?' and the answer is stark: 'Killing myself.' This may be metaphorical, a conventional view of the natural destination of one who leads her life, or it may be literal. We don't know, as she vanishes into the morning mist.\n\nHood's poem, 'The Bridge of Sighs', fixed Waterloo Bridge in the public mind as the place where women, especially prostitutes, committed suicide. This illustration by Gustave Dor\u00e9 reinforced the location, with its view of St Paul's looming in the background.\n\nOther locations for suicide were equally symbolic. A particular magnet for the desperate was the Monument to the Great Fire of London, a stone column 202 feet high topped by an urn in the shape of flames, standing 202 feet from the spot where the fire that devastated the City in 1666 first broke out. In low-rise, nineteenth-century London, the Monument was far more visible than it is today and was one of the most important sights of the City; many visitors climbed its 300-plus stairs for the view of London spreading beneath them. Yet negative connotations were ever-present. In _Barnaby Rudge_ , set in the 1780s, a young man is sent off for a day in London with 6d to spend on 'diversions', and his father recommends passing the entire day at the top of the Monument: 'There's no temptation there, sir \u2013 no drink \u2013 no young women \u2013 no bad characters.' By the time Dickens wrote this, in 1841, the main temptation that people associated with the Monument was jumping over the edge, and this father, who is not a loving one, may be telling his son that he might kill himself for all he cared.\n\nEven so, few chose it for this purpose. In 1788, a baker jumped off, followed in 1810 by a diamond merchant and, shortly afterwards, another baker. In 1839, a fifteen-year-old boy, thought to have lost his job, leapt from the platform, as did a baker's daughter. As a result, a guard was stationed at the top, but he failed to prevent Jane Cooper, a servant, throwing herself over. After her death a cage was placed around the platform, to prevent any others from following suit. Six people had plunged to their deaths here in forty-four years, four of whom were men, but it was still said that suicide by women crossed in love was 'a tradition of the Monument'.\n\nBut it was the river, always the river, to which Dickens returned. In 1860, his journalistic narrator stood at the riverside at Wapping, 'looking down at some dark locks in some dirty water', said to be the local 'Bridge of Sighs'. He comments to an 'apparition' that materializes beside him, 'A common place for suicide,' and the chilling answer is: 'Sue...And Poll. Likewise Emily. And Nancy. And Jane...Ketches off their bonnets or shorls, takes a run, and headers down here, they doos. Always a headerin' down here, they is. Like one o'clock.' The journalist conscientiously asks, 'And at about that hour of the morning, I suppose?' The apparition rejects this: 'They an't partickler. Two 'ull do for them. Three. All times o' night.' The poor, the hungry, the desperate: none was particular, just looking for an end.\n\nAt the beginning of the century, in 1801, the essayist Charles Lamb refused an invitation to the Lake District, unable to bear leaving behind 'all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles, \u2013 life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt & mud, the Sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old book stalls...coffee houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade, \u2013 all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me...I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life.' Yet many others saw not life but death in what Arthur Clennam in _Little Dorrit_ described as London's 'streets, streets, streets'. In Henry Wallis's _The Death of Chatterton_ (1859), one of the most famous paintings of the nineteenth century, the main area of the picture is given to the image of the young poet who has committed suicide. Behind him, through the window, can be seen the dome of St Paul's, the symbol of the indifferent, anonymous city that has crushed him, and continues on, uncaring. This is what Dickens meant when he wrote, 'with how little notice, good, bad, or indifferent, a man may live and die in London...his existence...[is] a matter of interest to no one save himself; he cannot be said to be forgotten when he dies, for no one remembered him when he was alive.'\n\nYet in the same year that Dickens stood by that Wapping bridge, looking down into the water where so many women had met their end, he also created a fictional barrister who had chambers in Gray's Inn Square, precisely where the young Dickens himself had begun his writing life. The barrister, a dried-up man of fifty-five, fretted: 'What is a man to do? London is so small!...Then, the monotony of all the streets, streets, streets \u2013 and of all the roads, roads, roads \u2013 and the dust, dust, dust!' He gives his watch to a man who has chambers near by, asking him to look after it while he is out of town. And that is the last anyone sees of him until, after 'his letter-box became choked', the porter enters his rooms to find that he had hanged himself. Leaving London and leaving life were one and the same.\n\nThis was the refrain of Dickens' novels and journalism for thirty years. It was only with his very last work that there is any indication of a different view, perhaps a hint of how worn-out this dynamo of a man had become. In his twenties, Dickens had found happiness \u2013 as well as his career, and fame, and fortune \u2013 in the streets. By the mid-1860s, when Dickens was in his fifties, in _Our Mutual Friend_ the 'great black river' is now seen to be 'stretching away to the great ocean, Death'; in the penultimate chapter of _Edwin Drood_ , left on his desk unfinished at his demise in 1870, it comes even closer. Mr Tartar takes pretty Rosa Bud for a day out on the Thames: 'The tide bore them on in the gayest and most sparkling manner, until they stopped to dine in some everlastingly green garden.' Then, 'all too soon', they must head back, and once more 'the great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark bridges spanned them as death spans life'. The river had been at the heart of London and the heart of Dickens' work. As early as _Oliver Twist_ his writing had been compared to 'The surface of the stream [that] seems bright, and cheerfully bubbling as it rushes on \u2013 but in its windings you come ever and anon upon some place of death'. In his final novel, only the river represents life, while London \u2013 that never-equalled city, the city that was the motivating force behind one of the greatest novelists of all time \u2013 is shadowy and dark with death.\n\nIt is not possible, however, to leave Dickens there. He himself would not have done so voluntarily. Instead, let us leave him with Arthur Clennam and Little Dorrit, when they marry in the old church beside the Marshalsea, the scene of the Dickens family's terrible humiliation. After the ceremony the couple stand together on the church steps, looking down at the busy street below them. Then: 'They went quietly down in to the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward, and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.'\n\n#### DICKENS' PUBLICATIONS | _Publication date_\n\n---|---\n\n_Sketches by Boz_ | Newspaper sketches: November 1837\u2013June 1839; in book form, 1836\u20137; in 1 vol., 1839\n\n_Pickwick Papers_ | Serial: April 1836\u2013November 1837; book, 1837\n\n_Oliver Twist_ | Serial: February 1837\u2013April 1839; book, 1838\n\n_Nicholas Nickleby_ | Serial: April 1838\u2013October 1839; book, 1839\n\n_Old Curiosity Shop_ | Serial: April 1840\u2013November 1841; book, 1841\n\n_Barnaby Rudge_ | Serial: February 1841\u2013November 1841; book, 1841\n\n_American Notes_ | Book: 1842\n\n_A Christmas Carol_ | Book: December 1843\n\n_Martin Chuzzlewit_ | Serial: January 1843\u2013July 1844; book, 1844\n\n_The Chimes_ | Book: December 1844\n\n_The Cricket on the Hearth_ | Book: December 1845\n\n_Dombey and Son_ | Serial: October 1846\u2013April 1848; book, 1848\n\n_The Battle of Life_ | Book: December 1846\n\n_The Haunted Man_ | Book: December\n\n_David Copperfield_ | Serial: May 1849\u2013November 1850; book, 1850\n\n_Bleak House_ | Serial: March 1852\u2013September 1853; book, 1853\n\n_Hard Times_ | Serial: April\u2013August 1854; book, 1854\n\n_Little Dorrit_ | Serial: December 1855\u2013June 1857; book, 1857\n\n_A Tale of Two Cities_ | Serial: April 1859\u2013November 1859; book, 1859\n\n_Great Expectations_ | Serial: December 1860\u2013August 1861; book, 1861\n\n_Our Mutual Friend_ | Serial: May 1864\u2013November 1865; book, 1865\n\n_Edwin Drood_ | Serial: April 1870\u2013September 1870\n\n[left incomplete]\n\n#### NOTES\n\nINTRODUCTION\n\n'merely life': Dickens, _The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club_ , ed. Mark Wormald (first published 1836\u20137; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999), p. 752; early citations of use of the term 'Dickensian': _Glasgow Herald_ , 20 December 1859, _Hampshire Advertiser_ , 31 December 1870, _Liverpool Mercury_ , 23 November 1888.\n\n'on Dickens himself': 'packed, like game': Dickens, 'Dullborough Town', in _All the Year Round_ , 30 June 1860, _The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, _The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Papers_ , ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (London, J. M. Dent, 2000), p. 140; John Forster, _The Life of Charles Dickens_ , 3 vols (London, Chapman and Hall, 1872\u20134), vol. 1, p. 16; rent: Peter Ackroyd, _Dickens_ (London, Vintage, 1999), p. 61.\n\n'and kitchen ranges': Dickens, _David Copperfield_ , ed. Jeremy Tambling (first published 1849\u201350; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996), p. 170.\n\n'labouring hind': _David Copperfield_ , p. 150; the chronology for Dickens' time in the blacking factory is uncertain. Dickens' friend and biographer John Forster says Dickens started work there around December 1823, while other writers believe that it was more likely to be January or February 1824. The date he left is equally uncertain, with one scholar, Michael Allen, _Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory_ (St Leonards, Oxford-Stockley Publications, 2011), pp. 92\u20134, suggesting it was as much as a year later. Most biographers think six months is more likely. It was certainly early 1825 before the boy returned to school. In his single known comment on the episode, Dickens himself claimed not to be able to remember; 'labouring hind': my thanks to Leslie Katz, Suzanne Daly, Susan Dean, Charles Hatten and Karla Waters for their help in tracking down the use of this phrase in the nineteenth century.\n\n'far he had come': Forster, _Life_ , vol. 1, pp. 47\u20138.\n\n'shortened it to Boz': 'I walked down', Forster, _Life_ , vol. 1, p. 76.\n\n'find himself famous': sales figures for _Pickwick_ are variously cited, ranging from 400\u2013500 copies at the start, to 40,000\u201350,000 or even 60,000 by the end; I have followed the middle course of Michael Slater, _Charles Dickens_ (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009), p. 215. For the chronology of Dickens' childhood and adolescence in the previous paragraphs, I have followed Michael Allen, _Charles Dickens' Childhood_ (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1988), passim, and Duane DeVries, _Dickens's Apprentice Years: The Making of a Novelist_ (Hassocks, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1976), passim.\n\n'Vauxhall-bridge-road': 'Gone Astray', in _Household Words_ , 13 August 1853, _The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3: _'Gone Astray' and Other Papers_ , ed. Michael Slater (London, J. M. Dent, 1998), pp. 155\u201365; Sala, cited in Forster, _Life_ , vol. 3, p. 476; footnote on Dickens' walking pace: George Dolby, _Charles Dickens as I Knew Him: The Story of the Reading Tours in Great Britain and America, 1866\u20131870_ (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1885), p. 255.\n\n'his final years': all but one of these descriptions of Dickens were compiled by Frederic G. Kitton, _Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil_ , and _A Supplement_ (London, Frank T. Sabin, 1890); Sala's contribution appears on p. 93; the 'whipper-snapper' and the 'pretty-boy' are Thomas Trollope, p. 53; the light step and jaunty air, Arthur Locker, p. 173; the 'man of sanguine complexion' is from Derek Hudson, ed., _Munby_ , _Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby_ , 1828\u20131910 (London, John Murray, 1972), p. 191.\n\n'in the daylight': Forster, _Life_ , vol. 2, p. 256; Dickens, _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , ed. Angus Easson (first published 1840\u201341; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 43.\n\n'accuracy of a cabman': 'Whenever we have an hour': this was the original opening for 'The Prisoner's Van', as printed in the newspaper _Bell's Life_ , 29 November 1835, but it was replaced when it was collected into _Sketches by Boz_. Cited in John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, _Dickens at Work_ (London, Methuen, 1957), p. 44; the solicitor's clerk: Kitton, _Charles Dickens, by Pen and Pencil_ , pp. 130\u201331; 'accuracy of a cabman': _Fraser's Magazine_ , 21 (April 1840), p. 400.\n\n'may interest others': 'lounging one evening': Dickens, 'The Parlour Orator', _Sketches by Boz_ , ed. Dennis Walder (first published 1836\u20139; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995), p. 272; 'Suggest to him': Dickens to W. H. Wills, 27 September 1851, _The Letters of Charles Dickens: The Pilgrim Edition_ , ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, Clarendon, 1965\u2013 ), vol. 6, p. 497; 'The Uncommercial Traveller: His General Line of Business', _All the Year Round_ , 28 January 1860, _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 28.\n\n'on the London streets': the charity children appear in _Illustrated London News_ (hereafter cited as _ILN_ ), 28 May 1842, pp. 44\u20135; _Our Mutual Friend_ , originals in Mayhew, noted in Harland S. Nelson, 'Dickens's _Our Mutual Friend_ and Henry Mayhew's _London Labour and the London Poor_ ', _Nineteenth-Century Fiction_ , 20: 3 (December 1965), pp. 207\u201322; Harvey Peter Sucksmith, 'Dickens and Mayhew: A Further Note', _Nineteenth-Century Fiction_ , 24: 3 (December 1969), pp. 345\u20139, and Richard J. Dunn, 'Dickens and Mayhew Once More', _Nineteenth-Century Fiction_ , 25: 3 (December 1970), pp. 348\u201353; the woman in white: Dickens, 'Where We Stopped Growing', _Household Words_ , 1 January 1853, _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, p. 111.\n\n'been in 1800': size of London, numbers of inhabitants and houses: Jeremy Tambling, _Going Astray: Dickens and London_ (Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2009), p. 18, and Jerry White, _London in the Nineteenth Century: 'A Human Awful Wonder of God'_ (London, Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 77.\n\n'impression so nicely': Walter Bagehot, 'Charles Dickens', in _The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot_ , ed. Mrs Russell Barrington (London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1915), vol. 3, pp. 84\u20135; 'fanciful photograph': Dickens to W. H. Wills, 24 September 1858, _Letters_ , vol. 8, p. 669; footnote: I owe this idea to Tambling, _Going Astray_ , pp. 21\u20132.\n\n'he marvelled': Henry James, 'The Art of Fiction', 1884, cited in F. O. Matthiesson, _The James Family_ (New York, Knopf, 1947), p. 360; 'English Traits', in Emerson, _The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870), vol. 2, p. 278; Parkman, _The Journals of Francis Parkman_ , ed. Mason Wade (London, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1949), vol. 1, p. 221.\n\n'created Dickens': J.-K. Huysmans, _Against Nature_ , trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1959), p. 138; Walter Benjamin citing G. K. Chesterton, _Dickens_ , in _The Arcades Project_ , trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 438.\n\n'the nearest way': _David Copperfield_ , p. 153.\n\n1810: THE BERNERS STREET HOAX\n\n'aged family retainer': 'piano-fortes by dozens': [Theodore Hook], _Gilbert Gurney_ (London, Whittaker & Co., 1836), vol. 1, pp. 298\u20139.\n\n'left in peace': verse: 'The Hoax: An Epistle from Solomon Sappy, Esquire, in London, to his brother Simon at Liverpool', _Satirist, or, Monthly Meteor_ , 1 January 1811, pp. 59\u201361.\n\n'the fun in comfort': the details of the episode are given by Hook's biographer, Bill Newton Dunn, _The Man Who Was John Bull: The Biography of Theodore Edward Hook, 1778\u20131841_ (London, Allendale, 1996), p. 12, citing an article from the _Morning Post_ , which he does not date and I have been unable to trace. However, the _Examiner_ , 2 December 1810, p. 768, 'Principal Occurrences in the Year 1810', in the _New Annual Register_ [January 1811?] and 'Principal Occurrences in the Year 1810', in the _Edinburgh Annual Register_ [January 1811?], all seem to be reprints, with some additional information.\n\n'of Bedford Street': this and the next two paragraphs: Mrs [Nancy] Mathews, _Tea-Table Talk, Ennobled Actresses, and Other Miscellanies_ (London, Thomas Cautley Newby, 1857), pp. 158\u201362.\n\n'those in the street': epilogue to _Lost and Found_ : cited in _Literary Panorama_ , February 1811, pp. 379\u201390; the _European Magazine, and London Review_ , January 1811, p. 46, names the play and authors.\n\n1. EARLY TO RISE\n\n'are rapidly filling': [William Moy Thomas], 'Covent Garden Market', _Household Words_ , 175, 30 July 1853, pp. 505\u201311.\n\n'side of the river': long lines of men and women: Charles Dickens, 'The Streets \u2013 Morning', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 70.\n\n'leathern leggings': Augustus Mayhew, _Paved with Gold, or, The Romance and Reality of the London Streets_ (London, Chapman and Hall, 1858), p. 75. This is a novel, but Augustus Mayhew acted as one of his brother Henry's primary researchers on _London Labour and the London Poor_ , and not only does he use here the material he gathered for background, but some of it shows up in the same words in both works. I have therefore, with caution, treated some descriptive passages in the novel as non-fiction.\n\n'from nightwork': Dickens, _Bleak House_ , ed. Norman Page (first published 1852\u20133; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 96.\n\n'ready for customers': [Thomas Wright], _The Great Unwashed_ , 'by a Journeyman Engineer', p. 185; footnote on Wright: Alastair J. Reid, 'Wright, Thomas', _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford University Press, October 2006 [http:\/\/www.\u00adoxforddnb.com.\u00adezproxy.londonlibrary.\u00adco.uk\/view\/article\u00ad\/47426, accessed 7 January 2011]; Camberwell: Alfred Rosling Bennett, _London and Londoners in the Eighteen-fifties and Sixties_ (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), p. 54; Covent Garden: George Augustus Sala, _Gaslight and Daylight, with Some London Scenes They Shine Upon_ (London, Chapman & Hall, 1859), p. 13; footnote: biographical information on G. A. Sala: P. D. Edwards, 'Sala, George Augustus', _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2005 [http:\/\/www.\u00adoxforddnb.\u00adcom.ezproxy.\u00adlondonlibrary.co\u00ad.uk\/view\/article\u00ad\/24526, accessed 17 June 2011]; Islington: James Greenwood, _Unsentimental Journeys: or, Byways of the Modern Babylon_ (London, Ward, Lock, & Tyler, 1867), pp. 32\u20133.\n\n'worse off than themselves': [Thomas Wright], _Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes_ , 'by a Journeyman Engineer' (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1867), p. 255.\n\n'for a street seller': Greenwood, _Unsentimental Journeys_ , pp. 34ff.\n\n'journalist Charles Dickens': 'The Streets \u2013 Morning', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 73.\n\n'his little finger': middle-aged clerks: Leman Rede, 'The Lawyer's Clerk', in Kenny Meadows [illus.], _Heads of the People: or, Portraits of the English_ , 'with original essays by distinguished writers' (London, Willoughby & Co., [1840]), vol. 1, pp. 28ff; younger clerks: George Augustus Sala, _Twice Round the Clock: or, The Hours of the Day and Night in London_ (London, Houlston and Wright [1859]), p. 83; _Bleak House_ , p. 173.\n\n'to the City': Anon., _The London Conductor_ (London, John Cassell, 1851), p. 1; 'reduced to a system': _The London Guide, and Stranger's Safeguard ..._ 'by a Gentleman' (London, Bumpus, 1818), p. 27; newspaper reader: W. E. Adams, _Memoirs of a Social Atom_ (London, Hutchinson, 1903), vol. 2, p. 313.\n\n'one shop alone': 1850 figures: Parliamentary Select Committee report, cited in John R. Kellett, _The Impact of the Railways on Victorian Cities_ (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 45\u20136; 1866 figures: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , p. 42; Robert Southey, cited in David Barnett, _London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution: A Revisionary History, 1775\u20131825_ (London, Tauris, 1998), p. 1.\n\n'four and a half miles': musician's children: Rosamund Gotch Brunel (ed.), _Mendelssohn and his Friends in Kensington: Letters ... 1833\u201336_ (London, Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 24\u20135; Leonard Wyon: Journal, BL Add MS 59,617, 21 January 1854; Maria Cust, cited in Heather Creaton (ed.), _Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women_ (London, Mitchell Beazley, 2001), p. 39; Dickens to the Hon. Mrs Richard Watson, 11 July 1851, _Letters_ , vol. 6, p. 429.\n\n'was the norm': Peepy: _Bleak House_ , p. 109; the page references for the rest of the walks in this paragraph are respectively: pp. 224, 260, 921, 750, 375, 718, 867, 247, 356; Dickens, _Our Mutual Friend,_ ed. Adrian Poole (first published 1864\u20135; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997), pp. 446, 452; Dickens, _Little Dorrit,_ ed. John Holloway (first published 1855\u20137; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 830.\n\n'at the termini': Mayhew on working hours: Henry Mayhew, _London Labour and the London Poor_ (New York, Dover, 1968; facsimile of Griffin, Bohn edn, 1861\u20132), vol. 2, p. 174; the cab and bus employees: John Garwood, _The Million Peopled City, or, One-half of the People of London Made Known to the Other Half_ (London, Wertheim and Macintosh, 1853), pp. 177\u20139, 220\u201324; the cab horses: William John Gordon, _The Horse-World of London_ (London, Leisure Hour Library, 1893), p. 36.\n\n'employment practices': the draper: _ILN_ , 12 October 1844, p. 230; Henry Vizetelly, _Glances Back through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences_ (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr\u00fcbner & Co., 1893), vol. 1, p. 116; Dickens, _Nicholas Nickleby_ , ed. Michael Slater (first published 1838\u20139; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978), p. 539; footnote on Foreign Post nights: the days are taken in this instance from _Leigh's New Picture of London ..._ (London, Leigh and Co., 1839 edn), but other handbooks carry the same information.\n\n2. ON THE ROAD\n\n'running along': Dickens, _Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy's Progress_ , ed. Philip Horne (first published 1837\u20138; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2002), p. 330.\n\n'crashing roar': Max Schlesinger, _Saunterings in and about London_ , trans. Otto Wenckstern (first published 1852; London, Nathaniel Cooke, 1853), p. 70; Mrs Gaskell, _The Life of Charlotte Bront\u00eb_ (London, Smith, Elder & Co., 1870), pp. 270\u201371; Henry Mayhew and John Binny, _The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life_ (London, Charles Griffin [1862]), p. 53; 'crashing roar': Charles Manby Smith, _The Little World of London_ (London, Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co., 1857), p. 395.\n\n'hear each other': American clergyman: Nathaniel S. Wheaton, _A Journal of a Residence during Several Months in London ... in the Years 1823 and 1824_ (Hartford, CT, H. & F. J. Huntington, 1830), p. 41; Jane Carlyle to Eliza Stodart, 1 August 1834, _The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle_ (hereafter referred to as _Carlyle Letters_ ), ed. Charles Richard Sanders, Kenneth J. Fielding, et al. (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1977), vol. 7, pp. 250\u201354. The complete letters are available online, at http:\/\/carlyleletters.dukejournals.org; _Bleak House_ , p. 823.\n\n'in Holborn today': footnote: the location of Ellis and Blackmore is slightly opaque, as Dickens, in _Sketches by Boz_ , claimed that the solicitors' offices were at 1 Raymond Buildings, 'originally off Gray's Inn Square'. However, Geoffrey Fletcher, _The London Dickens Knew_ (London, Hutchinson, 1970), p. 48, states that Ellis and Blackmore was definitely at Holborn Court, now South Square, and the company moved to Raymond Buildings later; survival of Number 1: Andrew Goodman, _The Walking Guide to Lawyers' London_ (London, Blackstone, 2000), p. 205; Dickens, _David Copperfield_ , p. 754.\n\n'on his boots': Doctors' Commons: _David Copperfield_ , p. 327; Dickens, _The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit_ , ed. P. N. Furbank (first published 1843\u20134; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), p. 693; _Our Mutual Friend_ , pp. 99\u2013100; Dickens, _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ , ed. Arthur Cox (first published 1870; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1993), p. 133.\n\n'day nor night': Robert Southey, _Letters from England_ , ed. Jack Simmons (first published 1807; Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1984), p. 46; footnote on the Temple watchman: Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 191\u20132; church bells: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , pp. 23, 32; dockyards: James Freeman Clarke, _Eleven Weeks in Europe; and, What May be Seen in that Time_ (Boston, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), p. 59.\n\n'poorly or not at all': [Louis Simond], 'A Day in London', in _The National Register_ , vol. 2, no. 4, 21 September 1816, p. 59; footnote on Louis Simond: the contemporary academic's work from whom Simond's biographical information also derives is Xavier Baron (ed.), _London 1066\u20131914: Literary Sources and Documents_ , vol. 2: _Regency and Early Victorian London, 1800\u20131870_ (Robertsbridge, Helm Information, 1997), p. 143; reasons for street noise: Ralph Turvey, 'Street Mud, Dust and Noise', _London Journal_ , 21: 2 (1996), pp. 131\u201348.\n\n'fall in unison': this and the following two paragraphs come from Turvey, 'Street Mud', unless otherwise stated; 'iron or stone cylinders': Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 90; sticky streets: Parliamentary Papers, 1868, XII, Select Committee on Metropolitan Local Government Q1866\u201372; 'quagmires': [Alexander MacKenzie], _The American in England_ (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1835), p. 103; adhesive qualities: cited in James Winter, _London's Teeming Streets, 1830\u20131914_ (London, Routledge, 1993), p. 119; the mob and the roads: _ILN_ , 7 July 1855, p. 7.\n\n'with the granite': London Bridge navvies: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 98; footnote on Alfred Rosling Bennett: Ronald M. Birse, 'Bennett, Alfred Rosling', rev. Brian Bowers, _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford University Press, 2004 [http:\/\/www.\u00adoxforddnb.com.\u00adezproxy.londonlibrary.\u00adco.uk\/view\/\u00adarticle\/37181, accessed 17 June 2011]; horses' hooves: _ILN_ , 7 January 1854, pp. 7, 10; Wilkie Collins, _Basil_ (London, Richard Bentley, 1852), vol. 2, pp. 155, 194.\n\n'windows were open': _Journal of the Society of Arts_ , cited in Turvey, 'Street Mud', p. 139.\n\n'into the twentieth century': Cheapside petition: _ILN_ , 29 October 1842, p. 391; wood in the City: _ILN_ , 28 January 1843, p. 59, but this story runs and runs: see also 4 and 18 February, 2 September, 7 October and 18 November 1843, 7 December 1844, p. 359; locations retaining use of wood: _ILN_ , 20 June 1846, p. 398, lists the Old Bailey, and it was still wood paved when Mayhew was writing _London Labour_ , in which he also notes 'some churches and other public buildings', but does not itemize them, vol. 2, p. 181; post-1870s wooden paving: Walter Besant, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ (London, Adam & Charles Black, 1909), p. 344.\n\n'paved at all': New Yorker: Fanny W. Hall, _Rambles in Europe ..._ (New York, E. French, 1839), vol. 2, p. 143; the date of her trip is not stated, but appears from the context to be before 1837, possibly as early as the late 1820s; _Leigh's New Picture_ (1839 edn), p. 29, although this quote and some of the accompanying text in fact repeat almost verbatim C. F. Partington, _National History and Views of London ... from Original Drawings ..._ (London, Allan Bell and Co., 1834), p. 4.\n\n'in every suburb': Hector Gavin, _Sanitary Ramblings: Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green_ (London, John Churchill, 1848), pp. 14\u201317; western suburbs: 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ (5 vols., first published 1888\u201394; Ware, Herts, Wordsworth, 1995), vol. 2, p. 241; Anthony Trollope, _Castle Richmond_ (London, Chapman & Hall, 1860), vol. 3, p. 196.\n\n'throughout his life': the memoirist: S. and E.-A. Whyte, _Miscellanea Nova_ (Dublin, Edward-Athenry Whyte, 1800), p. 49; [Louis Simond], _Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain during the Years 1810 and 1811 ..._ (Edinburgh, Archibald Constable and Company, 1815), vol. 1, p. 18; Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 191; 1835 guidebook: Partington, _National History and Views of London_ , p. 4; macadamization and pavements: Winter, _London's Teeming Streets, 1830\u20131914_ , p. 37.\n\n'and certain progress': traffic islands: Andrew Dickinson, _My First Visit to Europe ..._ (New York, George P. Putnam, 1851), p. 119; Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 16; the view from the bus: Henry Colman, _European Life and Manners; or, Familiar Letters to Friends_ (Boston, Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850), vol. 1, p. 163.\n\n'but still faster': Fordyce: cited in Dana Arnold, _Re-Presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience and Social Life in London, 1800\u20131940_ (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000), p. 38; _Little Dorrit_ , p. 690.\n\n'Kennington Gate': factor in traffic problems: T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins, _A History of London Transport ..._ , vol. 1: _The Nineteenth Century_ (London, George Allen & Unwin, 1975), p. 64; turnpike locations: Arthur Hayward, _The Days of Dickens: A Glance at Some Aspects of Early Victorian Life in London_ (London, George Routledge and Sons, 1926), p. 84. This book appears to be in many places an unacknowledged compilation of contemporary accounts, occasionally conflating information from more than one account. I therefore cite Hayward only when I have been unable to identify an original.\n\n'one for tickets': Old Brompton toll gate: S. C. Hall, _Retrospect of a Long Life, 1815\u201383_ (London, Bentley and Son, 1883), vol. 1, p. 68; Oxford Street gates: Thomas Adolphus Trollope, _What I Remember_ (London, Richard Bentley, 1887), p. 31; footnote on pockets: Phillis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas, _Occupational Costume in England, from the Eleventh Century to 1914_ (London, Adam & Charles Black, 1967), p. 353.\n\n'returned the money': keeping travellers waiting: Hall, _Retrospect of a Long Life_ , vol. 1, pp. 68\u20139.\n\n'the rest themselves': clockwork mechanism: MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , vol. 1, p. 217; Dickens on its inventor: Dickens, 'Down with the Tide', in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, p. 115; taking goods instead of money: ibid., p. 117.\n\n'of verisimilitude': number of tickets: Revd R. H. Dalton Barham, _The Life and Remains of Theodore Edward Hook_ (London, Richard Bentley, 1849), vol. 1, pp. 61\u20132; _Oliver Twist_ , p. 365.\n\n'river were abolished': 1830 toll removal: Barker and Robbins, _A History of London Transport_ , vol. 1, p. 13; the 178 toll bars: Bennett: _London and Londoners_ , p. 90; Vauxhall: Edmund Yates, _Edmund Yates: His Recollections and Experiences_ (London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1885), p. 96; the campaign to lift the tolls: _ILN_ , 23 March 1857, 6 June 1857, 15 August 1857, 8 and 29 May 1858; 'Great Open-Air Demonstration': _ILN_ , 27 July 1857, p. 632; abolition of tolls: G. A. Sekon, _Locomotion in Victorian London_ (London, Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 40.\n\n'defied the night': Southwark Bridge: _ILN_ , 19 November 1864, p. 513; _Little Dorrit_ , pp. 135, 260, 305; Waterloo Bridge: 'Night Walks', in _All the Year Round_ , 21 July 1860, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 151.\n\n'private matter': straps on buses: Barker and Robbins: _A History of London Transport_ , vol. 1, p. 32; Magazine Day: Smith, _Little World of London_ , p. 47; police notice: _ILN_ , 31 July 1852, p. 71.\n\n'given to the police': Westminster Bridge: _ILN_ , 10 March 1860, p. 235; traffic light: cited in William Kent, _London for Dickens Lovers_ (London, Methuen, 1935), p. 48; 1871 treatise: Henry Carr, _Metropolitan Street Traffic: Suggested Improvements_ (London, R. J. Mitchell and Sons, 1871), p. 3.\n\n'weighing machine': weights of horses and carts, lack of turning space: Gordon, _The Horse-World of London_ , pp. 54, 84, 127, 77; brewers' dray horses: J. E. Bradfield, _The Public Carriages of Great Britain: A Glance at their Rise, Progress, Struggles and Burthens_ (London, Piper, Stephenson & Spence, 1855), p. 69; six horses harnessed in line: David W. Bartlett, _What I saw in London, or, Men and Things in the Great Metropolis_ (Auburn [CT?], Derby and Miller, 1852), p. 69; Nelson's Column: _ILN_ , 2 July 1842, p. 121; carters lending horses: Albert Smith (ed.), _Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character_ (London, David Bogue, 1849), p. 39.\n\n'twenty-five yards': Half-way House: plans for destruction in _ILN_ , 16 July 1842, p. 150; Middle Row: Percy Edwards, _History of London Street Improvements, 1855\u20131897_ (London, London County Council, 1898), facing p. 35, and map, Yates, _Recollections_ , p. 35, Edward Callow, _Old London Taverns: Historical, descriptive and Reminiscent ..._ (London, Downey & Co., 1899), p. 224, Walter Thornbury, _Old and New London_ , 6 vols (London, Cassell, Petter, & Galpin [?1887\u201393]), vol. 1, pp. 51ff.\n\n'pornography industry': this paragraph and the next draw on Barker and Robbins, _A History of London Transport_ , vol. 1, pp. 10\u201311, 64ff.\n\n'blocked by traffic': Park Lane widening: _ILN_ , 10 December 1864, p. 591, 17 December 1864, p. 603; footnote: _ILN_ , 11 August 1866, p. 127.\n\n'several hours' duration': Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , pp. 243\u20134.\n\n'into shop-windows': tourist: MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , pp. 73\u20134; 'Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 511.\n\n'the crossing-sweepers': Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ (and at the end of the paragraph), pp. 231\u20132; licensed horse-killing: Gordon, _The Horse-Sense of London_ , p. 184ff.; road deaths: _ILN_ , 4 January 1868, p. 7, gives a figure of 170 deaths in 1867.\n\n'and umbrellas': Tambling, _Going Astray_ , p. 264, identifies the church and therefore suggests that Holborn is the site of Tom-all-Alone's, but I am not persuaded that the description is not a composite: the routine of Jo's day suggests a location closer to Drury Lane. It is also Tambling who identifies the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; Dickens, _Bleak House_ , pp. 274\u20135.\n\n'for their customers': Venice: Smith (ed.), _Gavarni in London_ , p. 36; footnote on crossing-sweepers: Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 143; _Bleak House_ , p. 200; different types of sweeps: Charles Manby Smith, _Curiosities of London Life: or, Phases, Physiological and Social, of the Great Metropolis_ (London, William and Frederick G. Cash, 1853), pp. 44\u20139, and Smith, _Little World of London_ , p. 84; police and companies: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, pp. 465.\n\n'are all shown': the Select Committee, undated, is cited in Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, pp. 193; ingredients of street dirt, and scavengers: ibid., vol. 2, pp. 185, 193, 196\u20137, 217, and Turvey, 'Street Mud, Dust and Noise', p. 134; dustmen's clothes: Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , p. 277, and _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 770.\n\n'scuttle or trough': William Tayler, _The Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837_ , ed. Dorothy Wise (London, Westminster City Archives, 1998), p. 17; sweeping by machine: Dickinson, _My First Visit to Europe_ , p. 119.\n\n'private households': _David Copperfield_ , p. 183; Derby wear: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , pp. 218\u201319; effect of dust on shops and houses: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, p. 213.\n\n'a dusty roadway': tank-like carts: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 173; mechanics of pumps, and footnote: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 46\u20137.\n\n'indicative of light': tallow lights: William T. O'Dea, _The Social History of Lighting_ (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 96; John Gay, 'Of Walking the Streets by Night', in _A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain_ (London, John and Arthur Arch [1792\u20135]), vol. 8, p. 293, ll. 139\u201343; City oil lamps: O'Dea, ibid.; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 50; Simond, _Journal of a Tour and Residence_ , vol. 1, pp. 26\u20137.\n\n'shares her concern': Carlton House illuminations: Hugh Barty-King, _New Flame: How Gas Changed the Commercial, Domestic and Industrial Life of Britain ..._ (Tavistock, Graphmitre, 1984), p. 28; visitors to Pall Mall: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, _Disenchanted Night: The Industrialisation of Light in the Nineteenth Century_ , trans. Angela Davies (Oxford, Berg, 1988), p. 115; Rowlandson: Arnold, _Re-Presenting the Metropolis_ , p. 33, but note that she has confused the 1805 and 1807 displays, thinking the latter three-month display was the temporary display for the birthday of George III (she says it is the Regent's).\n\n'could be accessed': lights spanning the lane: _Athenaeum_ , cited in O'Dea, _Social History of Lighting_ , pp. 29ff.; lamp-posts and pavements: David Hughson, _Walks through London ..._ (London, Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1817), p. 396.\n\n'their own lamp': dress: Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , p. 286.\n\n'roads were lighter': Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 38; 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ , vol. 1, p. 143.\n\n'they had finished': Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 43; Parliament Square: O'Dea, _Social History of Lighting_ , pp. 29ff.; Camberwell: H. J. Dyos, _Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell_ (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1973), p. 147; closure of Fleet Street: _ILN_ , 15 August 1846, p. 99; Strand closure: _ILN_ , 7 August 1858, p. 128.\n\n'end of the street': _ILN_ , 23 November 1850, p. 403.\n\n'for the upkeep': demolitions: Peter Jackson, _George Scharf's London: Sketches and Watercolours of a Changing City, 1820\u201350_ (London, John Murray, 1987), pp. 110\u201311; Upper Thames Street: _ILN_ , 28 May 1842, p. 42; Piccadilly: ibid., and 20 July 1844.\n\n'if generally adopted': 'The Wants of London': _ILN_ , 30 September 1854, p. 291; descriptive addresses: Silvester notebooks, British Library, Egerton 3710; Dickens autobiographical fragment in Forster, _Life of Charles Dickens_ , vol. 1, p. 41; lack of signage: _ILN_ , 5 March 1853, p. 183.\n\n'also took place': repeated street names: [W. H. Wills], 'Streetography', _Household Words_ , 38, 14 December 1850, pp. 275\u20136; synonyms for slum streets: John Hollingshead, _Ragged London in 1861_ (London, Smith, Elder, 1861), p. 96; George Streets: _ILN_ , 1 February 1868, p. 103; street renaming: _ILN_ , 25 July 1846, p. 54, and reprinted Metropolitan Board of Works announcements, 13 August 1864, p. 163, 25 February 1865, p. 175, 1 July 1865, p. 627, 11 November 1865, 16 February 1867, 20 February 1869, p. 175, among many others.\n\n'mammoth unknowability': Ordnance Survey: _ILN_ , 29 January 1848, p. 53; 1850 publication: Ackroyd, _London_ , p. 117.\n\n'Fyodor Dostoyevsky': Byron, _Don Juan_ , ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1958), Canto 10, v. 82; Philadelphia visitor: Orville Horwitz, _Brushwood Picked Up on the Continent: or, Last Summer's Trip to the Old World_ (Philadelphia, Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1855), pp. 21\u20132; Dostoevsky: _Winter Notes on Summer Impressions_ , trans. David Patterson (Evanston, IL, Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 37.\n\n'pageant of phantoms': Heine: cited in Hugh and Pauline Massingham, _The London Anthology_ (London, Spring Books [n.d.]), pp. 474\u20135; de Quincey: _De Quincey's Writings_ , fol. 23, 'Life and Manners' (Boston, Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1851), p. 53.\n\n'the prime minister': Bagehot: 'Charles Dickens', vol. 3, pp. 82\u20135; number of new roads: _ILN_ , 2 January 1869, p. 3, 15 September 1849, p. 186; Downing Street and environs: John Thomas Smith, _An Antiquarian Ramble in the Streets of London_ , ed. Charles Mackay (London, Richard Bentley, 1846), vol. 1, pp. 180\u201381.\n\n'the building trade': development of Euston, and footnote: Alan A. Jackson, _London's Termini_ (London, Pan, 1969), pp. 18\u201320; Wellington House Academy: 'Our School', _Household Words_ , 11 October 1851, _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, p. 35; Dickens, _Dombey and Son_ , ed. Peter Fairclough, intro. Raymond Williams (first published 1846\u201348; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), pp. 120\u201321; building trade: John Summerson, _The London Building World of the Eighteen-Sixties_ (London, Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 9.\n\n'Grosvenor Estate': hill at Piccadilly: _ILN_ , 19 September 1846, p. 182; Oxford Street: _ILN_ , 5 October 1850, p. 273; Grosvenor Basin: _ILN_ , 7 July 1860, p. 13.\n\n'frames of timber': Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 175; _Daily News_ , cited in Richard Altick, _The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel_ (Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press, 1991), pp. 414\u201315; description of Viaduct site: _ILN_ , 30 March 1867, p. 303.\n\n3. TRAVELLING (MOSTLY) HOPEFULLY\n\n'City by boat': _Dombey and Son_ , pp. 362 and 725 for example; Yates, _Recollections_ , p. 63.\n\n'of the river': number of boats: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , pp. 14\u201315; 'Sculls, sir!': MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , vol. 2, p. 56; 'The Steam Excursion', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 447; _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , p. 86.\n\n'in the east': the development of steamers in this and the next five paragraphs, unless otherwise noted, is from: Frank L. Dix, _Royal River Highway: A History of the Passenger Boats and Services on the River Thames_ (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1985), pp. 51\u201384 and passim, Sekon, _Locomotion in Victorian London_ , pp. 56\u201364 and passim, and Barker and Robbins, _A History of London Transport_ , vol. 1, pp. 43ff.; _Leigh's New Picture of London ..._ (London, Leigh and Co, 1819 edn), pp. 420\u201322, and the 1839 edition, p. 350; river stairs: David Paroissien, _The Companion to Great Expectations_ (Robertsbridge, Helm Information, 2000), p. 217.\n\n'boat to another': _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 539; 'half a dozen': Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , pp. 31\u20132.\n\n'people took boat': Hungerford Stairs: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 233\u20134; _David Copperfield_ , pp. 150\u201351.\n\n'man at the wheel': the dimensions are taken from Allison Lockwood, _Passionate Pilgrims: The American Traveller in Great Britain, 1800\u20131914_ (NY, Cornwall Books, 1981), p. 175; operating procedure: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 113\u201314; call boy, John Forney, _Letters from Europe_ (Philadelphia, T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1867), p. 362.\n\n'filthy to a degree': schedules: George Frederick Pardon, _Routledge's Popular Guide to London and its Suburbs_ (London, Routledge Warne & Routledge, 1862), pp. 44\u20135; onboard conditions: Revd A. Cleveland Coxe, _Impressions of England; or, Sketches of English Scenery and Society_ (New York, Dana & Co., 1856), p. 37, _ILN_ , 23 May 1846, p. 339, [Elias Derby], _Two Months Abroad: or, A Trip to England, France, Baden, Prussia, and Belgium, in August and September, 1843_ , 'by a Rail-road Director of Massachusetts' (Boston, Redding & Co., 1844); Henry Morford, _Over-Sea, or, England, France and Scotland, as Seen by a Live American_ (NY, Hilton and Co., 1867), p. 76, and Forney, _Letters from Europe_ , pp. 360\u201361.\n\n'Ramsgate on Fridays': names: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 108\u2013110.\n\n'of manslaughter': shoe-leather: Smith, _Curiosities_ ; the _Cricket_ : _ILN_ , 27 July 1844, p. 51.\n\n'may have died': number of accidents: Barker and Robbins, _A History of London Transport_ , vol. 1, pp. 41; _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 436.\n\n'by the City short-stage': Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 161; short-stage in 1825: Michael Freeman and Derek H. Aldcroft (eds), _Transport in Victorian Britain_ (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 139; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 615; _David Copperfield_ , pp. 563, 565; _Great Expectations_ , ed. Charlotte Mitchell, intro. David Trotter (first published 1860\u201361; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996), pp. 186, 269.\n\n'seven or eight miles': 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk' was retitled 'Mr Minns and His Cousin' when it was collected into _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 367; Simond, _Journal of a Tour and Residence_ , vol. 1, p. 17.\n\n'costing 2s': personal service: Bradfield, _Public Carriages_ , p. 38; Mr Minns: 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 372; cost: G. A. Thrupp, _The History of Coaches_ (London, Kerby & Endean, 1877), p. 121.\n\n'Bardell omnibus company': bus speed and width of three-horse buses: Bradfield, _Public Carriages_ , pp. 35, 37; seating capacity and number of horses, John Gloag, _Victorian Comfort: A Social History of Design from 1830\u20131900_ (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1973), p. 128; footnote on library of books: Gordon, _The Horse-World of London_ , p. 11; names of buses: Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 161; the Bardell omnibus company: William F. Long, 'Mr Pickwick Lucky to Find a Cab?', _Dickensian_ , Autumn 1991, pp. 167\u201370.\n\n'as they left': number of box seats: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 82; the author also notes their popularity, as do other writers of the period (Thrupp, _The History of Coaches_ , p. 122, is the only one to describe them as 'unpopular', and he seems to be outnumbered in this); how to mount: Sekon, _Locomotion in Victorian London_ , p. 33; the width: Garwood, _The Million Peopled City_ , p. 204.\n\n'to the top': the interior height: _ILN_ , 12 August 1854, p. 130, but this may have been journalistic exaggeration. Certainly the height was limited, but no other source claims that those seated had to stoop. According to an earlier paragraph in the _ILN_ , 1 May 1847, p. 288, a new design was being promoted, whereby passengers would be able to enter and exit 'without stooping': however, this doesn't suggest that, once inside, tall men still needed to stoop; the Frenchman: Francis Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London in the 'Fifties_ , 'adapted from the French' by Valerie Pirie (London, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1935), pp. 69\u201370.\n\n'own umbrellas': drivers' dress and manner, and leather covering: Schlesinger: _Saunterings_ , pp. 163\u20134, 168; Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 81.\n\n'to the suburbs': decline of the short-stagecoach: Barker and Robbins, _A History of London Transport_ , vol 1, p. 26; incomes: _Penny Magazine_ , 31 March 1837, cited in Freeman and Aldcroft (eds), _Transport in Victorian Britain_ ; suburban routes: Dyos, _Victorian Suburb_ , p. 67; the 37.5 million passengers: _ILN_ , 19 September 1857, p. 287.\n\n'along their routes': dress: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 81\u20132, and Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 164; cad's step and behaviour, Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 82; the height of the step, Sekon, _Locomotion in Victorian London_ , p. 33.\n\n'up to 9d': 'Omnibuses', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 169; S. Sophia Beale, _Recollections of a Spinster Aunt_ (London, William Heinemann, 1908), p. 20; impact of snow: Wyon, Journal, BL Add MS 59,617, f.29; increased costs: _ILN_ , 7 January 1854, p. 3.\n\n'the increased work': 'Omnibuses', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 169; driving on the pavement: _ILN_ , 7 September 1844, p. 155; ignoring passengers: Watts Phillips, _The Wild Tribes of London_ (London, Ward and Lock, 1855), p. 17.\n\n'emptied roads': use of skids: Yates, _Recollections_ , p. 35, and Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 58\u20139; drivers strapped in: Sekon, _Locomotion in Victorian London_ , p. 33; falling horses: Phillips, _Wild Tribes_ , p. 17; boys skating: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 98.\n\n'their own doors': _Nicholas Nickleby_ , p. 673; Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 337\u20138.\n\n'begin in 1859': this outline is drawn from Freeman and Aldcroft (eds), _Transport in Victorian Britain_ , p. 145, and Alan A. Jackson, _London's Metropolitan Railway_ (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1986), pp. 14ff.\n\n'natural disaster': _Daily News_ , 23 June 1862, p. 5.\n\n'regained control': locomotive explosion: Anthony Clayton, _Subterranean City: Beneath the Streets of London_ (London, Historical Publications, 2000), p. 99; landslide: Jackson, _London's Metropolitan Railway_ , p. 23; Fleet Ditch disaster: _Daily News_ , 19 and 20 June, 18 July 1862, _Standard_ , 19, 20, 25 and 26 June 1862, _ILN_ , 28 June 1862.\n\n'ventured underground': VIP trip and photograph: ChristianWolmar, _The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was Built, and How it Changed the City Forever_ (London, Atlantic, 2004), pp. 37\u20138, 41; layout and lighting: Mayhew, _The Shops and Companies of London_ , p. 150; fares and numbers of passengers: _ILN_ , 27 December 1862, p. 687, 17 and 24 January 1863, pp. 57, 91.\n\n'passengers annually': Kensington Canal: Hugh Meller, _London Cemeteries: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer_ (2nd edn, Godstone, Surrey, Gregg, 1985), p. 75; otherwise, this paragraph: Christian Wolmar, _The Subterranean Railway_ , pp. 66, 71, 81.\n\n'at King's Cross': John H. B. Latrobe, _Hints for Six Months in Europe ..._ (Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott, & Co., 1869); Anthony Trollope, _The Way We Live Now_ , ed. Frank Kermode (first published 1875; Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1994), p. 696.\n\n'you are reduced': _ILN_ , 13 February 1869, p. 155.\n\n'besides six persons': number of coaches: Long, 'Was Mr Pickwick Lucky ... ?', p. 167; broughams: Thrupp, _History of Coaches_ , p. 118.\n\n'temper of the drivers': American tourist: Charles Stewart _, Sketches of Society in Great Britain and Ireland_ (2nd edn, Philadelphia, Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1835), vol. 1, pp. 93\u20134; 'The Last Cab-driver, and the First Omnibus Cad', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 171\u20132; the driver's breath: Fred Belton, _Random Recollections of an Old Actor_ (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1880), p. 4.\n\n'in a hurry': Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 158; 'Coach!': 'Hackney-coach Stands', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 107; footnote: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 353; 'I'm in a hurry': Bradfield, _Public Carriages_ , p. 49, is one example of this joke among many.\n\n'1 per 300 residents': numbers and fares, 1830: Thrupp, _History of Coaches_ , p. 118; hansom design, ibid.; Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 147; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 290; _ILN_ , 29 January 1864, p. 83; cab numbers: F. M. L. Thompson, 'Nineteenth-century Horse Sense', _Economic History Review_ , 29: 1 (February 1976), p. 65; the number of black cabs today is given as 25,000 on the government's official Transport for London website: http:\/\/\u00adwww.tfl.gov\u00ad.uk.\/businessand\u00adpartners\/taxis\u00adandprivatehire\u00ad\/1364.aspx, accessed on 29 July 2011.\n\n'noise and dirt': description of stands: [Dickens, W. H. Wills and E. C. Grenville-Murray], 'Common-Sense on Wheels', _Household Words_ , 12 April 1851, in Harry Stone (ed.), _Charles Dickens' Uncollected Writings from Household Words, 1850\u201359_ , 2 vols (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1968), vol. 1, pp. 243\u20134, Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 103, 105, and Phillips, _Wild Tribes of London_ , p. 17; horse manure: Smith, _Curiosities_ , p. 66.\n\n'checked outfits': watermen's dress: _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 21, _Sketches by Boz_ , 'The Last Cab-Driver', p. 178, and Diana de Marly, _Working Dress: A History of Occupational Clothing_ (London, B. T. Batsford, 1986), p. 88; coachman's dress: Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Dress_ , p. 226, and Gloag, _Victorian Comfort_ , p. 136.\n\n'to the pubs': reputations of cabstands, and railway approach: Garwood, _The Million Peopled City_ , pp. 180\u201381; watermen: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 353.\n\n'\u00a346 a year': economics of cabs: Garwood, _The Million Peopled City_ , pp. 175\u20136, and James Greenwood, _The Wilds of London_ (London, Chatto and Windus, 1874), p. 113.\n\n'between specific points': bucks extorting fares: Garwood, _The Million Peopled City_ , p. 176; Dickens, Wills, Grenville-Murray, 'Common-Sense on Wheels', p. 242; 1853 legislation: Sekon, _Locomotion in Victorian London_ , pp. 76\u20139.\n\n'is a magistrate': in snow: Wyon, Journal, BL Add MS 59,617, f. 29; Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 159; _Dombey and Son_ , p. 107.\n\n'Mayfair and Belgravia': Trollope, _Phineas Redux_ , ed. John C. Whale (first published 1873\u20134; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 184, 212\u201313.\n\n'to need stables': _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 249; 'Anonyma', _London by Night_ , 'by the author of 'Skittles' (London, William Oliver [?1862]), p. 52. The British Library catalogue suggests that 'Anonyma' may be the journalist W. S. Hayward; 10,000 carriages: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 55; builders and mews in 1860s: Freeman and Aldcroft (eds), _Transport in Victorian Britain_ , p. 142.\n\n'treated as mendicants': footnote: William Kitchiner, _The Traveller's Oracle; or, Maxims for Locomotion: Containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures ... of Travellers_ (London, Henry Colburn, 1828), vol. 2, pp. 78\u20139; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 637; Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 5.\n\n'cockade in your hat': livery: Zachariah Allen, _The Practical Tourist ..._ (Providence, RI, A. S. Beckwith, 1832), vol. 2, pp. 250\u201351, Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , pp. 182\u20135; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 487.\n\n'control the horse': descriptions, benefits and drawbacks of carriages and cabs: Thrupp, _History of Coaches_ , pp. 82\u20133, 118, William Bridges Adams, _English Pleasure Carriages; Their Origin, History, Varieties ..._ (London, Charles Knight, 1837), pp. 240\u201343, Ross Murray, _The Modern Householder: A Manual of Domestic Economy in all its Branches_ (London, Frederick Warne and Co., [1872]), pp. 456ff.\n\n'of the hood': lack of noise: Adams, _English Pleasure Carriages_ , p. 241; number of street lights: John Hollingshead, _Underground London_ (London, Groombridge, 1862), p. 199; mailcoaches' lighting: Edward Corbett, 'Colonel late Shropshire Militia', _An Old Coachman's Chatter, with some Practical Remarks on Driving_ , 'by a semi-professional' (facsimile of 2nd edn [first published ?1894], Wakefield, EP Publishing, 1974), pp. 46\u20137; hansom's light: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 110.\n\n'one with a light': carriage lamps: Kitchiner, _Traveller's Oracle_ , vol. 2, p. 100, and O'Dea, _Social History of Lighting_ , pp. 76\u20137, which also contains the 'harvest moon' quote; Queen Victoria in Paris: _ILN_ , 8 September 1855, pp. 308\u20139.\n\n'something altogether different': Corbett, _Old Coachman's Chatter_ , pp. 46\u20137.\n\n4. IN AND OUT OF LONDON\n\n'glared away': _Nicholas Nickleby_ , pp. 89\u201390.\n\n'hours straight': Dickens' trip to Yorkshire: Ackroyd, _Dickens_ , p. 265.\n\n'o'clock at night': post-chaises and system: Hayward, _Days of Dickens_ , p. 84; guidebook: _Leigh's New Picture of London_ (1819 edition), pp. 419\u201320; _Pickwick Papers_ , pp. 122\u20135.\n\n'the mail moving': decoration and running of mailcoaches: Hayward, _Days of Dickens_ , pp. 76\u201380; dress: Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , pp. 239\u201340.\n\n'at a gallop': MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , vol. 1, p. 118, 128\u20139.\n\n'per mile inside': _Little Dorrit_ , pp. 203\u20134; fares: Hayward, _The Days of Dickens_ , p. 80.\n\n'of burning joy': this paragraph and the next: Thomas de Quincey, _The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays_ (London, J. M. Dent, 1961), pp. 17\u201318.\n\n'coaches were late': _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 306; twelve miles an hour: Calvin Colton, _Four Years in Great Britain, 1831\u20135_ (2nd edn, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1836), pp. 54\u20135; coach names: Thomas Burke, _Travel in England, from Pilgrim and Pack-Horse to Light Car and Plane_ (London, T. Batsford, 1942), p. 92; brass clock: Lockwood, _Passionate Pilgrims_ , pp. 45\u20136; London\u2013Brighton refund: Burke, _Travel in England_ , p. 100.\n\n'called the Flyer': _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , pp. 141, 174; _David Copperfield_ , p. 123.\n\n'and to locals': Trollope, _What I Remember_ , p. 5; _Bleak House_ , p. 74.\n\n'fire being stirred': mouldy-looking room: 'Early Coaches', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 161; _Pickwick Papers_ , pp. 432, 469.\n\n'only bare boards': booking procedure: Hayward, _The Days of Dickens_ , pp. 76\u201380; tipping: Colman, _European Life and Manners_ , vol. 1, p. 142; 1837 capacity: Bradfield, _Public Carriages_ , p. 30; mailbags and benches: Trollope, _What I Remember_ , p. 34.\n\n'of your Ride': Kitchiner, _Traveller's Oracle_ , vol. 1, pp. 162\u20133.\n\n'at the same time': coachmen's salutations: Heman D. D. Humphrey, _Great Britain, France and Belgium: A Short Tour in 1835_ (NY, Harper & Brothers, 1838), vol. 1, p. 24; _Pickwick Papers_ , p 570.\n\n'course of a day': _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 362\u20134.\n\n'his own nephew': greatcoats and Brighton coach: Yates, _Recollections_ , pp. 32\u20134.\n\n'to the reader': the 'Taglioni': Corbett, _Old Coachman's Chatter_ , pp. 75\u20136; [Jonathan Badcock and Thomas Rowlandson], _Real Life in London, or, The Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho..._ , 2 vols (London, Jones & Co., 1821), vol. 1, p. 12.\n\n'mitigate the cold': Constable: cited in Burke, _Travel in England_ , p. 95; forward versus backward seating, and 'calefacient': Kitchiner, _Traveller's Oracle_ , pp. 164\u20135, 167; open window: _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 674.\n\n'prepared oilskin': [Thomas Hughes], _Tom Brown School Days_ , 'by an Old Boy', (Cambridge [?MA], Macmillan & Co., 1857), pp. 82\u20133; Frederick von Raumer, _England in 1835: Being a Series of letters Written to Friends in Germany ...,_ trans. Sarah Austin (London, John Murray, 1836), vol. 2, p. 94; Xavier Baron (ed.), _London 1066\u20131914_ , p. 235, suggests that these are not in fact letters at all, but were written by von Raumer for publication; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 676.\n\n'appearance dead': _Nicholas Nickleby_ , p. 116; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , pp. 723\u20134.\n\n'left off raining': Dickens travelling for the _Morning Chronicle_ : Forster, _Life_ , vol. 1, p. 247.\n\n'with some difficulty': W. Outram Tristram, _Coaching Days and Coaching Ways_ (London, Macmillan and Co., 1888), p. 13.\n\n'positively understated': possible accidents: Corbett, _Old Coachman's Chatter_ , pp. 48ff.; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 725; 'I do verily': Forster, _Life_ , vol. 1, p. 79.\n\n'passing, or past': 'Dullborough Town', in _All the Year Round_ , 30 June 1860, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 140. The SER was the South-Eastern Railway, which ran from Folkestone to Dover from 1844, and to London from 1850.\n\n'is secure': Thackeray, 'De Juventute', _Roundabout Papers_ (London, Smith, Elder and Co., 1869), pp. 73\u20134; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 107; _Dombey and Son_ , pp. 289\u201390.\n\n'over twelve miles': Dickens, Preface to 1847 Cheap Edition of _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 762; exasperated commuter: Barker and Robbins, _History of London Transport_ , vol. 1, p. 66; Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , pp. 169\u201370; 160 million rail journeys: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , p. 79; railway to Sydenham: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 181; afternoon concert trains: ibid., p. 187.\n\n'Victoria at six': Railway Regulation Act: H. J. Dyos, _Exploring the Urban Past: Essays in Urban History_ , ed. David Cannadine and David Reeder (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 89; shunted trains: Justin McCarthy, _Reminiscences_ (London, Chatto & Windus, 1899), vol. 1, p. 1; Ludgate Hill to Victoria: Dyos, ibid., p. 89.\n\n'later with gas': second- and third-class carriage descriptions: Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London_ , pp. 278\u20139, Burke, _Travel in England_ , p. 117, and John Hollingshead, _My Lifetime,_ 2 vols (London, Sampson Low, Marston, 1895), vol. 1, p. 50; Beale, _Recollections_ , p. 10; second-class carriage description: Daniel C. Eddy, _Europa, or, Scenes and Society in England, France, Italy and Switzerland_ (Boston, N. L. Dayton, Higgins & Bradley, 1856), pp. 42\u20133; accommodation train price: Revd John E. Edwards, _Random Sketches and Notes of European Travel in 1856_ (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1857), p. 35; Harriet Beecher Stowe, _Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands_ (London, George Routledge & Co., 1854), p. 21; lamps: Gloag, _Victorian Comfort_ , pp. 161ff.; seats and light: James M. Hoppin, _Old England: Its Scenery, Art, and People_ (New York, Hurd and Houghton, 1867), pp. 2\u20133.\n\n'were City commuters': range of commuting: Freeman and Aldcroft (eds), _Transport in Victorian Britain_ , p. 144.\n\n'to this loop': the development of railway stations in London and the ideas in this paragraph: Susan Ryley Hoyle, _London Journal_ , 'The First Battle for London: A Case Study of the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Termini 1846', 8: 2 (1982), pp. 140\u201341.\n\n'a mean structure': Euston: Jackson, _London's Termini_ , pp. 20\u201324; King's Cross: Jackson, ibid., p. 67; London Bridge: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 97.\n\n'parcels office': Euston: Jackson, ibid., pp. 26\u20137; Bibles: Hippolyte Taine, _Notes on England,_ trans. W. F. Rae (London, Strahan, 1872), p. 15; booking tickets: Forney, _Letters from Europe_ , p. 38.\n\n'brick wall': reserving seats, place for luggage: [R. S. Surtees], _Hints to Railway Travellers and Country Visitors to London_ , 'by an Old Stager' (London, Bradbury and Evans, 1851), pp. 7\u20138; luggage vans: Fitzroy Gardner, _Days and Ways of an Old Bohemian_ (London, John Murray, 1921), p. 15; checking tickets: at Waterloo: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 21; at Euston: ibid.; at London Bridge: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 139; Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London_ , p. 279.\n\n'speeding up': Dickens, _Bleak House_ , p. 211; Wyon, Journal, BL Add MS 59,617, 16 November 1853.\n\n1861: THE TOOLEY STREET FIRE\n\nThe main narrative of the fire has been drawn from newspaper reports, in particular _Birmingham Daily Post_ (which reprinted the _Observer_ 's eyewitness accounts), 24 June 1861, _Daily News_ , 24 and 25 June, 1 July 1861, _Lloyd's_ , 7 July 1861, _Morning Chronicle_ , 24, 25, 26, 27 and 28 June, 2 July 1861, _Morning Post_ , 27 and 29 June, 9 July 1861, and _Standard_ , 26 June 1861. The only exceptions are: Munby quotations: Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 100\u2013101, except the people salvaging fat, which is cited in Rick Allen, 'Observing London Street-Life: G. A. Sala and A. J. Munby', in Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (eds), _The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink_ (London, Rivers Oram Press, 2003), p. 208; the fat on the river as far as Erith: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 85; funeral of Braidwood: _Morning Chronicle_ , 1 July 1861, _The Times_ , 1 July 1861.\n\n5. THE WORLD'S MARKET\n\n'cabbages and turnips': Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 81.\n\n'Borough market': Bedford Estate development: W. J. Passingham, _London's Markets: Their Origin and History_ (London, Sampson Low, Marston [1935]), p. 63; the market's appearance in 1829: Celina Fox (ed), _London \u2013 World City, 1800\u20131840_ (London, Yale University Press, 1992), p. 296; Piazza Hotel and Floral Hall: _ILN_ , 10 April 1858, p. 367, 15 May 1858, p. 483.\n\n'cart in front of them': waggoners' dress: Christobel Williams-Mitchell, _Dressed for the Job: The Story of Occupational Costume_ (Poole, Blandford Press, 1982), p. 66; Bob: Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 112ff.\n\n'with a breastwork': 'crowd, bustle, hum': [William Moy Thomas], 'Covent Garden Market', _Household Words_ , 175, 30 July 1853, pp. 505\u201311; dress: Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , p. 148; divisions of produce sellers: Charles Knight (ed.), _London_ , 6 vols (London, Charles Knight, 1841\u20134), vol. 5, p. 141; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 696.\n\n'around their necks': subsidiary sellers: Thomas, 'Covent Garden Market'; basket sellers, and perambulating sellers in the next paragraph: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 82\u20133; dress: Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , p. 148.\n\n'and dust protection': porters' knots: Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , pp. 367\u20138, De Marly, _Working Dress_ , p. 88.\n\n'indoors only in 1849': [Dickens and W. H. Willis], 'A Popular Delusion', _Household Words_ , 1 June 1850, in Stone, _Uncollected Writings_ , vol. 1, pp. 113\u201322.\n\n'hours of being caught': destruction of Thames fisheries: Parliamentary Select Committee report, 1810, in Passingham, _London's Markets_ , p. 46; deliveries: Dickens and Willis, 'A Popular Delusion'.\n\n'switched to oilskin': Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , pp. 148, 328ff.; 'almost fashionable': Dickens and Willis, 'A Popular Delusion'; _Our Mutual Friend_ , pp. 208\u20139.\n\n'or to costermongers': drinks, 'swallow you up else', and bummarees: Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , pp. 12\u201313, 16, 19\u201323; auction: Dickens and Willis, 'A Popular Delusion'.\n\n'confounded the senses': _Oliver Twist_ , p. 171.\n\n'jolt of the vehicle': numbers of animals: Alec Forshaw and Theo Bergstr\u00f6m, _Smithfield Past and Present_ (London, Heinemann, 1980), p. 54; access roads: Greenwood, _Unsentimental Journeys_ , p. 18; Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , pp. 285\u20136.\n\n'or sieves': size of Smithfield: Passingham, _London's Markets_ , p. 8; Carlyle's estimate: Thomas Carlyle to Alexander Carlyle, 14 December 1824, _Carlyle Letters_ , vol 3, pp. 217\u201322; [Charles Dickens and W. H. Wills], 'The Heart of Mid-London', _Household Words_ , in Stone (ed.), _Dickens' Uncollected Writings_ , vol. 1, pp. 101\u201311.\n\n'long as possible': [Dickens], 'A Monument of French Folly', _Household Words_ , 8 March 1851, in _The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 2: _The Amusements of the People and Other Papers_ , ed. Michael Slater (London, J. M. Dent, 1996), p. 328.\n\n'amok regularly': 'A Monument of French Folly', p. 330.\n\n'in the journals': _Dombey and Son_ , p. 128; 'The Heart of Mid-London', p. 110.\n\n'with wet dirt': Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 27\u20138.\n\n'hides or meat': new Smithfield: Passingham, _London's Markets_ , pp. 10\u201312, and Daniel Joseph Kirwan, _Palace and Hovel: or, Phases of London Life ..._ , ed. A. Allan (first published 1870; London, Abelard-Schuman, 1963), p. 128; Leadenhall: ibid., p. 78; _Dombey and Son_ , p. 778.\n\n'be a nuisance': John Weale, _London Exhibited in 1852 ..._ (London, John Weale, 1852), pp. 610ff.\n\n'as the child': ice cream and poultry at Hungerford: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , pp. 232\u20133; reconstruction: Thomas Allen, _The History and Antiquities of London, Westminster and Southwark, and Parts Adjacent_ (London, Cowie & Strange, vols 1\u20134, 1827, vol. 5, 1837), vol. 5, pp. 286\u20137; Dickens and the cherries: John Payne Collier, _An Old Man's Diary, Forty Years Ago_ , 'for strictly private circulation', in 2 vols (London, Thomas Richards, 1871\u20132), p. 15.\n\n'gory to the elbows': Lumber Court and Newport markets: Weale, _London Exhibited_ , pp. 610ff.; number of barrels: John Hogg, _London as it is, Being a Series of Observations on the Health, Habits, and Amusements of the People_ (London, John Macrone, 1837), p. 222; Greenwood, _Unsentimental Journeys_ , p. 23.\n\n'to six people': Clare market: Phillips, _Wild Tribes_ , p. 78; street with tripe boiler: George Godwin, _London Shadows: A Glance at the 'Homes' of the Thousands_ (London, George Routledge, 1854), p. 62.\n\n'from birth to death': William Waight: Health of Towns Association, _The Sanitary Condition of the City of London ... with the Sub-Committee's Reply ..._ (London, W. Clowes, 1848), p. 16; St Giles slaughterhouses: [Henry Morley], 'Life and Death in St Giles', _Household Words_ , 13 and 18 November 1858, p. 526; 'cattle-driving, cattle-slaughtering': 'A Monument to French Folly', p. 331.\n\n'sold it wholesale': [R. H. Horne], 'The Cattle Road to Ruin', _Household Words_ , 14 and 29 June 1850, pp. 325\u201330.\n\n'and fire-wood': types of lighting: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 9. 'great jets': Phillips, _Wild Tribes_ , p. 78; 'primitive tubes': Sala, _Gaslight and Daylight_ , pp. 260\u20132.\n\n' _Here's_ your turnips': St Luke's: Greenwood, _Unsentimental Journeys_ , p. 10; Bethnal Green: Greenwood, _Wilds of London_ , p. 32; New Cut: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 9\u201310.\n\n'trailing behind': Wright, _The Great Unwashed_ , pp. 208\u201315.\n\n'meagre and unwashed': the women without bags: 'Rough Sketches of London Life', 'II: The Brill', _Church of England Temperance Magazine_ , 2 April 1866, p. 102; church bells: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 11\u201312; Whitecross market: Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 250ff.\n\n'Saturday-night heads': barbers: Wright, _Some Habits and Customs of the Working Class_ , pp. 219\u201323; _Nicholas Nickleby_ , pp. 780\u201381, 784.\n\n'to paper mills': the Exchange: Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 250\u201356; breaking and turning: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 368\u20139, vol. 2, pp. 26\u20137; wholesale market: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 40.\n\n'military suppliers': admission, and subsidiary markets: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 368\u20139, vol. 2, pp. 26\u20137.\n\n'the cheapest shops': Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 369, vol. 2, p. 35.\n\n'horses and manure': smell of Rag Fair: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 39; quantities that horses eat: Asa Briggs, _Victorian Things_ (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1990), p. 415; Pickford's, coal deliveries, and lack of quantifiable data: Thompson, 'Nineteenth-century Horse Sense', pp. 60\u201381; footnote on pub names: from 'The Signs of the Times', in Smith, _Little World of London_ , pp. 129ff., although it is troubling that there is no information about how, or when, or why, this list was compiled.\n\n'at a great rate': this paragraph and the next: Diana Donald, '\"Beastly Sights\": The Treatment of Animals as a Moral Theme in Representations of London, c.1820\u20131850', in Dana Arnold (ed.), _The Metropolis and its Image: Constructing Identities for London, c.1750\u20131950_ (Oxford, Blackwell, 1999), pp. 60\u201362, Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 181, Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 20, Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 128.\n\n6. SELLING THE STREETS\n\n'something outdoors': number of street sellers: the discrepancy is noted in White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , p. 198. It is to be expected that this trade, carried out by the very poor, would be difficult for the authorities to quantify, and in any case Mayhew's statistics are notoriously unreliable (see, among others, Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'Mayhew's Poor: A Problem of Identity', _Victorian Studies_ , 14 (March 1971), pp. 307\u201320); one out of every 150: the census gives a population of 2,363,341 in London in 1851.\n\n'Humrellars to mend': income: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 54\u20135; housewives in the rain: Smith, _The Little World of London_ , p. 90.; umbrella sellers and repairers: Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 68\u201371.\n\n'4d a day': 'a full market hand': A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 73; Hackney markets: Greenwood, _Wilds of London_ , p. 183; general details of trade, and next paragraph: Greenwood, _Unsentimental Journeys_ , pp. 118ff.\n\n'lettuces and onions': number of stalls: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 6; costers' carts: ibid., vol. 1, pp. 26\u20137; Lamb's Conduit Street: Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 227.\n\n'o'clock at night': costers' boys: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 33\u20134; their schedule: ibid., vol. 1, p. 36.\n\n'without some result': Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 346.\n\n'fronds in their carts': draught excluders and fly-catchers: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 52; flowers in spring: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , pp. 172\u20133; gravellers: Smith, _Curiosities_ , p. 339; ice sellers: _ILN_ , 5 January 1850, p. 2; other seasonal greenery: Charles Hindley, _History of the Cries of London, Ancient and Modern_ (London, Reeves and Turner, 1881), p. 221.\n\n'regarded as his': Hyde Park: Amy Grinnell Smith and Mary Ermina Smith, 'Letters from Europe, 1865\u20136', ed. David Sanders Clark (Washington, DC, 1948; typescript in British Library), p. 24; _Our Mutual Friend_ , pp. 52\u20133.\n\n'as fertilizer': Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, pp. 343, 357, 360.\n\n'and her meals': Welsh dress: John Leighton, _London Cries & Public Edifices from Sketches on the Spot_ (London, Grant and Griffith [1847]), p. 19; dress otherwise: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 40, and Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 72; cans, yokes, lowering milk, working hours and pay: Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 167, 99, 178\u20139.\n\n'all wearing caps': costers: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 51ff.; butchers' boys: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 41.\n\n'for resale': footnote on clothing: _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 72, _Bleak House_ , p. 180.\n\n'miles a day': Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 367.\n\n'respectable householders': hats: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 39; secrecy: Phillips, _Wild Tribes_ , p. 58.\n\n'lately swept up': _Great Expectations_ , p. 196; wash men: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, p. 132; hare skin sellers: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 39; tea leaves: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, p. 133. Mayhew claims this trade is 'extensive', yet his is the only mention of it I have found.\n\n'1d a door': chairs to mend: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 52; prices for grinders: Jackson, _George Scharf's London_ , p. 53; sharpening penknives for office workers etc.: Leighton, _London Cries_ , p. 21; knife-cleaning machine: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 27; step washing: Garwood, _Million Peopled City_ , p. 80.\n\n'GOES MAD': _Punch_ , 'The Demons of Pimlico', 21 November 1857, p. 215.\n\n'from the damp': Thomas Rowlandson, _Rowlandson's Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders_ (London, Samuel Leigh, 1820), no page; carrying methods: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 26\u201350, 367; delivery boys' containers: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 2.\n\n'penny a bit': Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 23.\n\n'Underground for it': three o'clock: Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , pp. 160\u201363; Shepherdess Walk seller: _ILN_ , 18 January 1845, pp. 34\u20135, and a similar case in the Queen Street police office, ibid.; underground: _Punch_ , 'Metropolitan Improvements', 17 January 1885, p. 34.\n\n'the public streets': Drury Lane: MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , vol. 1, p. 207; rhubarb seller: Phillips, _Wild Tribes_ , p. 80. Phillips states the man was not a Turk, but an East End cadger. I can find no evidence either way, but throughout his book Phillips finds all the poor he writes about distasteful: the Irish, the Jews, or the plain poverty-stricken are all dubious at best, or thieves most likely.\n\n'an oil-painting': stagecoach offices: 'The Streets \u2013 Morning', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 72; railway stations and penknives: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 149; _Dombey and Son_ , p. 237.\n\n'or a bird-warbler': jewellery: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 346, 348; _Oliver Twist_ , p. 400; malacca canes etc.: Andrew Tuer, _Old London Street Cries_ (London, Field & Tuer, 1885), p. 50\u201351.\n\n'scraped them in return': water pistol: Tuer, _Old London Street Cries_ , p. 44; 'All the Fun of the Fair' is frequently reported: Tuer, ibid., p. 50; 'a mischievous little': David Masson, _Memories of London in the 'Forties,_ ed. Flora Masson (Edinburgh, William Blackwood & Sons, 1908), p. 145, 'These are for sale': Colman, _European Life and Manners_ , vol. 2, pp. 73\u20134, also reported by Nathaniel Hawthorne in _Hawthorne in England: Selections from Our Old Home and The English Note-books_ , ed. Cushing Strout (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1965), p. 172.\n\n'on their earnings': 'Japan your shoes': Tuer, _Old London Street Cries_ , p. 44; footnote on the two Warrens: Altick, _Presence of the Present_ , p. 232; Shoeblack Society: Garwood, _Million Peopled City_ , pp. 74\u20139.\n\n'on their rounds': two currents: J. MacGregor, 'Ragamuffins', _Leisure Hour_ , 15 (1856), pp. 455\u201360; number of London papers: Richard Altick, _The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800\u20131900_ (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 329; newsboys' day, in this paragraph and the next two: Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 90ff.; rental prices: Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 213.\n\n'possibility of truth': _Old Curiosity Shop_ , pp. 162, 594; _Dombey and Son_ , p. 383; Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 1, p. 522.\n\n'householders' buckets': the chemist's shopboy: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 85; Haymarket boys: ibid., p. 108; the crippled knife cleaner: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 171; water boys: Smith, _Little World of London_ , p. 66.\n\n'y'r honor pleases': G. A. Sekon, _Locomotion in Victorian London_ , pp. 90\u201391, which reflects the attitude that the boys were aggressive bullies; the American tourist: Joshua White, _Letters on England, Comprising Descriptive Scenes_ (Philadelphia, privately printed, 1816), vol. 1, p. 5.\n\n'tear on his boots': Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 138\u20139.\n\n'state of exhaustion': porters: Freeman and Aldcroft (eds), _Transport in Victorian Britain_ , p. 136, and Walter M. Stern, _The Porters of London_ (London, Longmans, Green, 1960), pp. 181ff.; Dickens, 'The Chimes', in _The Christmas Books_ , vol. 1: 'A Christmas Carol' and 'The Chimes', ed. Michael Slater (first published 1843, 1844; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985); _David Copperfield_ , p. 340.\n\n'out the rags': the history of the development of the match in this and the next paragraph: Hall, _Retrospect of a Long Life_ , vol. 1, p. 2, Hayward, _Days of Dickens_ , p. 14, _ILN_ , 13 October 1860, p. 352, [Charles Knight], 'Illustrations of Cheapness: The Lucifer Match', _Household Words_ , 13 April 1850, pp. 54\u20136, and Trey Philpotts, _The Companion to Little Dorrit_ (Robertsbridge, Helm Information, 2003), p. 306.\n\n'with magical rapidity': lament for tinderbox: Sala, _Gaslight and Daylight_ , p. 61.\n\n'the caf\u00e9 door': Rosamond Street explosion: _ILN_ , 12 August 1843, p. 103; Haymarket street children: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 108.\n\n'but as beggars': cost of matches: Knight, 'Illustrations of Cheapness'.\n\n'lucifers and onions': outside the gin palace: John Fisher Murray, 'Physiology of London Life', _London Journal_ , 16 October 1847, p. 103; Godwin, _London Shadows_ , p. 22.\n\n'a living unviable': John Thomas Smith, _Vagabondiana; or, Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, Itinerant Traders and other Persons ... in London and its Environs_ (London, no publisher, 1817), pp. 41\u20133, and Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, pp. 136\u201340.\n\n'to the cold: _ILN_ , 14 December 1844, p. 371.\n\n'for their donkeys': the Watford labourers: Smith, _Vagabondiana_ , p. 32; groundsel, chickweed and duckweed sellers: Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 20\u201322; groundsel sellers also appear in Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 53; rheumatic chickweed seller: Smith, _Cries of London_ , pp. 73\u20134; simplers: ibid., pp. 77\u20138; reeds for donkeys: Smith, _Curiosities_ , p. 142.\n\n'a bare living': pins and ink: Hindley, _History of the Cries of London_ , p. 101; the idea of modernism pushing street sellers aside is elaborated in Richard Maxwell, 'Henry Mayhew and the Life of the Streets', _Journal of British Studies_ , 17: 2 (spring 1978), pp. 87\u2013105.\n\n'the financial system': Weale, _London Exhibited in 1852_ , p. 107.\n\n'Road among others': skilled-labour clubs: [T. Carter], _Memoirs of a Working Man_ (London, Charles Knight, 1845), p. 122; hiring stands: Smith, _Vagabondiana_ , p. 46.\n\n'4d an hour': dockyards: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 35.\n\n'to the post': W. Warrell, _Scribes Ancient and Modern (Otherwise Law Writers and Scriveners),_ (1880), cited in Michael Paterson, _Voices from Dickens' London_ (Cincinnati, OH, David and Charles, 2006), p. 93; the night officer: Dickens, 'A Sleep to Startle Us', _Household Words_ , 13 March 1852, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, pp. 55\u20136.\n\n'more in demand': pea-picking: Raphael Samuel, 'Comers and Goers', in H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), _The Victorian City: Images and Realities_ (London, Routledge, 1973), vol. 1, p. 135.\n\n'the fair season': the trampers' life here and in the next two paragraphs: Samuel, 'Comers and Goers', vol. 1, pp. 123\u201360 unless otherwise stated; footnote on brickmaking pubs: Smith, _Little World of London_ , pp. 129ff.\n\n'twopence for it': occasioning: John Brown, _Sixty Years' Gleanings from Life's Harvest: A Genuine Autobiography_ (Cambridge, J. Palmer, 1858), p. 31; William Lovett, _The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, in His Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom ..._ (London, Tr\u00fcbner & Co., 1876), pp. 24\u20135; sackmakers: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 3, p. 31; 'she can't carry': 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ , vol. 2, p. 33.\n\n7. SLUMMING\n\n'of slums themselves': word derivations and citation from _Oxford English Dictionary_ , with interdating from the British Library's Nineteenth-Century Newspaper database.\n\n'capital every day': population figures and percentages in urban and rural districts: F. S. Schwarzbach, _Dickens and the City_ (London, Athlone Press, 1979), pp. 7\u20139.\n\n'author and his readers': Rowlandson, in R. Ackermann, _Microcosm of London_ , 3 vols. (London, Ackermann's Repository of Arts [1808\u201310]), vol. 3, p. 240; _Oliver Twist_ , p. 14; Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 338; the ideas in this paragraph and the next two draw heavily on Lynn Hollen Lees, 'Poverty and Pauperism in Nineteenth-century London', The H. J. Dyos Memorial Lecture, May 1988 (Leicester, University of Leicester, 1988), pp. 2\u20139, 13, 37\u201352.\n\n'into the workhouse': this paragraph and the next draw on Stephen Halliday, _The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of Victorian London_ (Stroud, Sutton, 1999), pp. 128\u20139; _Oliver Twist_ , p. 59.\n\n'with a Pauper': Dickens, _Little Dorrit_ , pp. 416, 418.\n\n'off to the workhouse': responsibilities and payment of workhouse masters: Lees, 'Poverty and Pauperism', pp. 115ff.; _A Christmas Carol_ , pp. 50\u201351.\n\n'friendless and unprotected': Dickens' Norfolk Street lodgings and the Cleveland Street Workhouse: Ruth Richardson, _Dickens and the Workhouse:_ Oliver Twist _and the London Poor_ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012), _passim_. The workhouse, until the 2005 closure of the Middlesex Hospital, was the hospital's Outpatients' Department. There is an account of its rescue at http:\/\/clevelandstreetworkhouse. org. Although the workhouse in _Oliver Twist_ is outside London, it seems difficult to believe that the one in Cleveland Street could not have been, at least in part, in Dickens' mind as he wrote; _Our Mutual Friend_ , pp. 199\u2013200, 498; _The Times_ , 6 December 1836, p. 4.\n\n'these slum dwellings': Pierce Egan [and George and Robert Cruikshank], _Life in London, or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his ElegantFriend Corinthian Tom ... _(London, Sherwood, Neely, & Jones, 1821), pp. 344\u20135; Bermondsey slum: 'Every Man's Poison', _All the Year Round_ , 13, 11 November 1865, pp. 372\u20136.\n\n'would give him': pub saveall: J. C. Loudon, _An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture ..._ (London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1833), p. 689; Henry Dupuis: _ILN_ , 21 August 1852, p. 135, and many cases of child stealing, e.g., _ILN_ , 27 November 1869, p. 535; workhouse clothes: _ILN_ , 9 September 1843, p. 167; sheets: Dickens, 'On Duty with Inspector Field', in _Household Words_ , 14 June 1851, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 2, p. 365 and vol. 2, p. 369; breaking street lights: _ILN_ , 21 March 1868, p. 271.\n\n'small air-hole': Geo. Alfd Walker, _The First of a Series of Lectures ... on the Actual condition of the Metropolitan Grave-Yards_ (2nd edn, London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849), p. 30.\n\n'be none the wiser': views of Tothill prison: Hepworth Dixon, _The London Prisons_ (London, Jackson and Walford, 1850), p. 248; 9 Fleet Market: J. F. C. Phillips, _Shepherd's London_ (London, Cassell, 1976), p. 18.\n\n'benefits of modernity': _Great Expectations_ , p. 165; Thurlow Weed, _Letters from Europe and the West Indies, 1843\u20131862_ (Albany, NY, Weed, Parsons and Co., 1866), p. 82; Pardon, _Routledge's Popular Guide_ , p. 50; Sun Fire-Office and Pentonville: _ILN_ , 18 August 1842, p. 217.\n\n'to have money': verse: [Frederic William Naylor Bayley], ' _Scenes and Stories by a Clergyman in Debt_ ... (London, A. H. Baily and Co., 1835); costs: Brothers Mayhew, _Living for Appearances_ (London, James Blackwood, 1855), pp. 181\u20132, Dickens, 'Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle', in _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 519, and [Anna Atkins], _The Colonel_ 'by the author of \"The perils of fashion\"' (London, Hurst and Blackett, 1853), p. 68.\n\n'in _Bleak House_ ': Benjamin Disraeli, _Henrietta Temple: A Love Story_ (Leipzig, Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1859), p. 376; Thackeray, _Vanity Fair_ , ed. J. I. M. Stewart (first published in 1848; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 614.\n\n'most of London's debtors': White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , p. 219.\n\n'in his pocket': Dickens, _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 565; footing and chummage: James Grant, _Sketches in London_ (London, W. S. Orr, 1838), p. 52; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 563; _Oliver Twist_ , p. 363.\n\n'and a pie seller': _Great Expectations_ , p. 260; _Nicholas Nickleby_ , pp. 695\u20136; deputy coachman: Revd J. Richardson, _Recollections ... of the Last Half-century_ (London, Savill & Edwards, 1855), p. 22; Lovett, _Life and Struggles_ , pp. 28\u20139; Queen's Bench shops: Grant, _Sketches in London_ , pp. 54\u20136.\n\n'carried to the kitchen': 'oblong pile': _Little Dorrit_ , p. 97; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 279; description of the Marshalsea and its rules in this paragraph and the next: Trey Philpotts, 'The Real Marshalsea', _Dickensian_ , Autumn 1991, pp. 133\u201346. Ackroyd, _Dickens_ , p. 76, gives a slightly smaller size of rooms: eight by twelve feet; this may well be correct, but as Ackroyd lists no sources, it cannot be verified; Philpotts uses the Select Committee Report on the State and Management of Prisons in London and Elsewhere, which covers the Marshalsea in 1815\u201318.\n\n'those of any slum': the extent of the rules, and liberty tickets: Dixon, _London Prisons_ , pp. 114\u201315.\n\n'the whole place': Pentonville: Dixon, _London Prisons_ , pp. 150\u201356; Millbank, ibid., pp. 132ff.; _David Copperfield_ , pp. 625ff.\n\n'with paid workers': Dixon, _The London Prisons_ , p. 127.\n\n'of homelessness': 'thrown away': Forster, _Life_ , vol. 1, p. 49; 'but for the mercy of God', ibid., vol. 1, p. 2; _David Copperfield_ , p. 192.\n\n'let us go': 'A Nightly Scene in London', _Household Words_ , 26 January 1856, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, pp. 346\u201351.\n\n'been one of them': 'On an Amateur Beat', 27 February 1869, _All the Year Round_ , in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p.318; the source of Dickens' identification with the beggars I owe to Michael Slater, _Intelligent Person's Guide to Dickens_ (London, Duckworth, 1999), p. 103.\n\n'the new suburbs': destruction of houses: Lees, 'Poverty and Pauperism', p. 9.\n\n'an alien race': population density: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 15.\n\n'rogues and thieves': _Oliver Twist_ , pp. 63, 153, 417; Hockley-in-the-Hole: ibid., p. 63; link to _Beggar's Opera_ : Tambling, _Going Astray_ , p. 64.\n\n'knight errant style': 'Seven Dials', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 92; [G. A. Sala], 'Bright Chanticleer', in _Household Words_ , 11, 31 March 1855, p. 204; [Donald Shaw], _London in the Sixties (With a Few Digressions)_ 'by one of the Old Brigade' (London, Everett and Co., 1908), pp. 92\u20134. I have approached these memoirs with more than usual caution. While there is little that can be verifiably checked in them, what there is tends to be misremembered. For example, Shaw writes of Valentine Baker, who was discharged from the British army after a scandal; he joined the Ottoman army, before becoming head of the Egyptian police. Shaw claimed to have seen him in Egypt in 1894 and, seemingly unaware of his post-British career, described his friend as 'a broken man', as well he might have been, for when Shaw supposedly saw him Baker had been dead for seven years. I have therefore relied on Shaw not for facts, but simply for how people remembered, or wanted to remember, people or events; Dickens to Daniel Maclise, 20 November 1840, _Letters_ , vol. 2, p. 152.\n\n'believed such stories': Field Lane: Trollope, _What I Remember_ , p. 11; Dickens, 'On an Amateur Beat', in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, pp. 380\u201381.\n\n'the blacking factory': _Bleak House_ , pp. 683\u20134; St Giles: Dickens, 'On Duty with Inspector Field', in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 2, pp. 356\u201369; _Nicholas Nickleby_ , p. 228.\n\n'desperately overcrowded': _Pickwick Papers_ , pp. 212\u201313.\n\n'and a sink': small terraced houses: Thomas Beames, _The Rookeries of London: Past, Present, and Prospective_ (London, Thomas Bosworth, 1850), p. 79; Holborn lodging house: Thomas Archer, _The Pauper, the Thief, and the Convict: Sketches of Some of their Homes, Haunts, and Habits_ (London, Groombridge and Sons, 1865), pp. 140\u201341.\n\n'without a parent': Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 248; Flower and Dean Streets: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , pp. 236, 324.\n\n'working people's lodgings': 'a covered alley': Archer, _The Pauper, the Thief, and the Convict_ , p. 11; Field Lane: Smith, _Little World of London_ , p. 135 (Smith calls it Lagmansbury, but it is clearly Field Lane); Frying-pan Alley: Godwin, _London Shadows_ , p. 13; _Bleak House_ , p. 263.\n\n'off Holborn': footnote: _Bleak House_ , p. 215; it is Tambling, _Going Astray_ , pp. 136ff., who suggests Forster's house; E. Beresford Chancellor, _London's Old Latin Quarter, Beingan Account of Tottenham Court Road and its Immediate Surroundings_ (London, Jonathan Cape [1930]), p. 206, suggests the Inigo Jones house next door.\n\n'misery to misery': James Elmes, _Metropolitan Improvements; or, London in the Nineteenth Century ..._ (London, Jones & Co., 1829), pp. 1\u20133; _The Times_ , 2 March 1861, p. 8.\n\n'the Devil's Acre': Select Committee: cited in Donald J. Olsen, 'Victorian London: Specialization, Segregation and Privacy', _Victorian Studies_ , 17: 3 (March 1974), pp. 265\u201378.\n\n'order, very like': 'their bread': Hollingshead, _Ragged London_ , p. 118; Westminster: Anthony S. Wohl, _The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London_ (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 2002), p. 30; Church Lane: Roy Porter, _London: A Social History_ (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1994), p. 268; 1838\u201356 figures: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , pp. 32\u20134; 'Life and Death in St Giles's', in _Household Words_ , 18, 13 November 1858, pp. 524\u20138; _Bleak House_ , pp. 319\u201320; footnote: an earlier mention of 'gonoph' that Dickens may have seen occurs in W. A. Miles, _Poverty, Mendicity and Crime_ , Report, 1839, p. 168: 'Cocum gonnofs flash by night the cooters in the boozing kens, and send their lushy shicksters out to bring the ruin in', cited in Jonathon Green, _Green's Dictionary of Slang_ (London, Chambers, 2010); New Oxford Street: Dickens, 'On Duty with Inspector Field', in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 2, p. 363; _Bleak House_ , p. 275.\n\n'to all parties': _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 143.\n\n'smell of a graveyard': Sir Peter Laurie: Simon Joyce, _Capital Offenses: Geographies of Class and Crime in Victorian London_ (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 102; Dickens, _Oliver Twist_ , pp. 416\u201317; Henry Mayhew, 'Home is Home, be it never so Homely', in [Lord Shrewsbury], _Meliora: or, Better Times to Come_ (1852), pp. 276\u20137.\n\n'the sixteenth century': extent of St Giles: Lynn Hollen Lees, _Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London_ (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1979), p. 84.\n\n'drunkards and thieves': 'Seven Dials', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 94\u20135; Flora Tristan, _Flora Tristan's London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the 1830s_ , trans. Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl (London, George Prior, 1980), p. 135.\n\n'to journalists': Jennings' Buildings: 'Jennings' Buildings and the Royal Borough: The Construction of the Underclass in Mid-Victorian England', in David Feldman and Gareth Stedman-Jones (eds), _Metropolis: London Histories and Representations since 1800_ (London, Routledge, 1989), pp. 11\u201339.\n\n'enough to work': Bemerton Street: George Godwin, _Another Blow for Life_ (London, Wm H. Allen, 1864), pp. 36\u20137; Nichol Street: ibid., pp. 12\u201313; Covent Garden porter: ibid., p. 22.\n\n'obviously to mind': _Oliver Twist_ , p. 69; cleaning the privy: James Greenwood, _Wilds of London_ , p. 75; letter to _The Times_ : _The Times_ , 5 July 1849, p. 5, follow-up, 9 July, p. 3; footnote: the contemporary historian is James Winter, _London's Teeming Streets_ , pp. 130\u201331.\n\n'about to begin': _ILN_ , 13 and 27 February 1847, pp. 103, 144.\n\n'there's nowhere else': House of Commons Select Committee, Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, 1846, cited in Kellett, _Impact of the Railways on Victorian Cities_ , p. 36; Farringdon Street alley: Greenwood, _Wilds of London_ , p. 72.\n\n'to walk down': clearance for Royal Courts of Justice: _ILN_ , 18 August 1866, p. 155, and 15 December 1866, p. 575\u20137.\n\n'very worst conditions': this paragraph and the next: starvation, private charity and Poor Law statistics: Hollingshead, _Ragged London_ , pp. 3\u20134, and Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 44.\n\n'one for life': Ragged School: Garwood, _Million Peopled City_ , p. 61; dormitory: Dickens, 'A Sleep to Startle Us', in _Household Words_ , 15 March 1852, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, pp. 54\u20136; 'a large crowd': Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 31.\n\n'casual hiring stands': Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 44; Greenwood: 'A Night in a Workhouse', reprinted in pamphlet form from the _Pall Mall Gazette_ (first published 1866; London, F. Bowering [n.d.]), passim. Greenwood based his pamphlet on trips he and another man made to the workhouse, but Greenwood's is the narrative voice.\n\n'and were fed': Some of the shocked response to Greenwood's depiction appeared the next day: Frederick Greenwood, 'Casual Wards', _Pall Mall Gazette_ , 16 January 1866, p. 1. I am grateful to Matthew Rubery for this reference, and to Patrick Leary and Clare Clarke for other information.\n\n'around us every day': influence on _Our Mutual Friend_ : Seth Koven, _Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London_ (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 35; inquests: _ILN_ , 19 December 1846, pp. 390\u201391, among many; incidence of rickets: Stephen Halliday, _The Great Filth: The War Against Disease in Victorian England_ (Stroud, Sutton, 2007), p. 43; Ragged School deaths: 'A Sleep to Startle Us', in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, p. 56; _Bleak House_ , p. 705.\n\n8. THE WATERS OF DEATH\n\n'on the river': Carter, _Memoirs of a Working Man_ , pp. 125, 128.\n\n'Muswell Hill': I am grateful to Ravi Mirchandani and Frank Wynne, who helped me come up with this well of place names.\n\n'inlet at Blackfriars': I owe much of my description of the underground rivers in this and the next two paragraphs to N. J. Barton, _The Lost Rivers of London_ (London, Phoenix House, 1962), pp. 26\u20137, 30ff., 37ff., and to Halliday, _Great Stink_ , pp. 26\u20137.\n\n'Westminster Abbey': the Serpentine: Edward John Tilt, _The Serpentine 'as it is' and 'as it ought to be' ..._ (London, John Churchill, 1848), pp. 4\u20138.\n\n'new phenomenon': outline of creation of fogs: Dale H. Porter, _The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian England_ (Akron, OH, University of Akron Press, 1998), p. 57, and Peter Brimblecombe, _The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London Since Medieval Times_ (London, Methuen, 1987), pp. 109ff.\n\n'as usual': Benjamin Robert Haydon, _Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon ... from his Autobiography and Journals ..._ , ed. Tom Taylor, 3 vols (New York, Harper and Bros, 1853), vol. 1, p. 52; Byron, _Don Juan_ , ed. Leslie A. Marchand (first published 1823\u20134, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1958), Canto 10, v. 82; Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 117.\n\n'London particular': _A Christmas Carol_ , pp. 47, 52; _Bleak House_ , pp. 75\u20136.\n\n'of the sun': St Paul's: Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , pp. 40\u20131; _Bleak House_ , p. 49.\n\n'any circumstances': bottle-green: Hogg, _London as it is_ , pp. 186\u20137; yellow: Thomas Miller, _Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present_ (London, National Illustrated Library, [?1851]), p. 243; _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 417; Hawthorne, _English Note-Books_ , vol. 2, p. 381; Italian friend: Dickens to Angela Burdett-Coutts, 13 December 1858, _Letters_ , vol. 8, p. 718.\n\n'Cayenne pepper': sulky gas: Miller, _Picturesque Sketches_ , p. 243; effect on candles: _Bleak House_ , p. 76; haggard light: _Bleak House_ , p. 50; _Edwin Drood_ , p. 136.\n\n'be run over': 'Implacable November': _Bleak House_ , p. 49; 'You step gingerly': Miller, _Picturesque Sketches_ , pp. 244\u20137.\n\n'lasted four minutes': Allen, _History and Antiquities of London_ , vol. 5, pp. 60\u201361, vol. 4, p. 102.\n\n'was raw sewage': Porter, _London_ , p. 56, except for the 150 sewers: Anne Hardy, 'Parish Pump to Private Pipes: London's Water Supply in the Nineteenth Century', in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, _Living and Dying in London, Medical History_ , Supplement No. 11 (London, Wellcome Institute, 1991), p. 82.\n\n'sold as fertilizer': Bill of Sewers: Halliday, _Great Filth_ , p. 27; night-men's operations: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, pp. 450\u201351, 446.\n\n'nearly six inches': West End: Michael Durey, _The Return of the Plague: British Society and the Cholera, 1831\u20132_ (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1979), p. 56; St Giles: Halliday, _Great Filth_ , pp. 133\u20134.\n\n'zincing establishment': H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan Bey, Journal, British Library Add MS 37,448; 10,000 cows: Hogg, _London as it is_ , pp. 224\u20135; 1850 figures: [Richard H. Horne], 'The Cow with the Iron Tail', _Household Words_ , 33, 9 November 1850, p. 147; St James's cowsheds: Beames, _Rookeries_ , pp. 166\u20137.\n\n'local hackney stands': Millbank: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 235; parks and Westminster Abbey: Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London_ , p. 166; grazing rights: Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 181; Old Bailey: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 26; Carlyle: the references in his letters abound: among others, Carlyle to George Remington, 12 November 1852, _Carlyle Letters_ , vol. 27, pp. 356\u20137; _Nicholas Nickleby_ , pp. 227\u20138; _David Copperfield_ , p. 324.\n\n'worth the expenditure': Mayhew, 'Home is Home', pp. 278\u201380.\n\n'at all to take it': Halliday, _Great Filth_ , pp. 132\u20133, 202, 203, except for the farmers taking the soil for free: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, p. 446.\n\n'per cent was reached': 270,000 houses: John Liddle, _On the Moral and Physical Evils Resulting from the Neglect of Sanitary Measures ..._ (London, Health of Towns Association Depot, 1847), pp. 16\u201318; Fulham and water supply by neighbourhood: Anne Hardy, 'Parish Pump to Private Pipes', pp. 79\u201382.\n\n'so little water': Savile Row: Dickens, 'Arcadian London', _All the Year Round_ , 29 September 1860, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 188; thieving shopkeeper: [Henry Morley], 'Death's Doors', _Household Words_ , 9, 10 June 1854, pp. 398\u2013402.\n\n'the waste back out': East London Water Co., and frequency of standpipes: Gavin, _Sanitary Ramblings_ , p. 88, 92.\n\n'get some water': communal casks: Godwin, _London Shadows_ , p. 62; Rose Street: ibid., p. 42; footnote on contemporary water consumption: by data360.org; water for fires: Morley, 'Death's Doors'.\n\n'cup of coffee': baths for the prosperous: _Leigh's New Picture of London_ (1839 edn), p. 350, and Pardon, _Routledge's Popular Guide to London_ , p. 45; Jermyn Street Baths: Henry Mayhew, _The Shops and Companies of London, and the Grades and Manufactories of Great Britain_ (London, The Second Printing and Publishing Co., 1865), p. 62.\n\n'hour of the night': _Great Expectations_ , p. 366.\n\n'of the Epidemic': bathhouses: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , p. 457; Goulston Square Bath and free entry during epidemics: Beames, _Rookeries_ , pp. 56\u20137; footnote: Halliday, _Great Filth_ , p. 49.\n\n'of old age': life expectancy: Andrew Sanders, _Charles Dickens, Resurrectionist_ (London, Macmillan, 1982), p. 4; 1869 deaths: _ILN_ , 30 January 1869, p. 128.\n\n'the killing ennui': _ILN_ , 13 February 1858, p. 159.\n\n'relation to it': Sir John Simon: Halliday, _Great Filth_ , p. 119.\n\n'health was established': this and the next paragraph: Edwin Chadwick, _Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain_ , ed. M. W. Flinn (first published 1842; Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1965), passim, Anthony Brundage, _England's 'Prussian Minister': Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832\u20131854_ (University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), passim, and Halliday, _Great Filth_ , passim.\n\n'250 Acts': Parliament: _ILN_ , 21 October 1848, p. 247; Christchurch rector: Halliday, _Great Filth_ , p. 28; governmental multiplicity: Francis Sheppard, _London: A History_ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 280.\n\n'typhus and typhoid': epidemic figures: Charles Creighton, _A History of Epidemics in Britain_ , vol. 2, _From the Extinction of the Plague to the Present Time_ (first published 1891\u20134; London, Frank Cass, 1965), pp. 793\u20134; Tayler, _Diary_ , pp. 19, 22; Prince Albert in footnote: Stanley Weintraub, 'Albert [Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha]', _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2010 [http:\u00ad\/\/www.oxforddnb\u00ad.com.ezproxy.\u00adlondonlibrary.co.\u00aduk\/view\/\u00adarticle\/274, accessed 7 May 2011].\n\n'cannot smell': City sewers: Health of Towns Association, _The Sanitary Condition_ , passim.\n\n'people died there': Spitalfields Workhouse: Lovett, _Life and Struggles_ , pp. 70\u201371; Minories death: Health of Towns Association, _The Sanitary Condition_ , p. 12.\n\n'were worst affected': the information in this paragraph: Creighton, _A History of Epidemics_ , vol. 2, pp. 793\u20134, apart from the list of parishes, Durey, _Return of the Plague_ , p. 28; footnote on mortality rate: Durey, _Return of the Plague_ , p. 125; cholera south of the river: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , pp. 50\u201351.\n\n'his handkerchief': Coldbath Field: George Laval Chesterton, _Revelations of Prison Life_ (3rd edn, London, Hurst and Blackett, 1857), p. 116; the hulks: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , pp. 199\u2013200.\n\n'sound of voices': the description is of Golden Square, Soho: Hollingshead, _My Lifetime_ , vol. 1, pp. 190\u201391.\n\n'first-floor windows': 'a solemn consideration': 'Night Walks', in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 154; _Oliver Twist_ , p. 43, and the information on Chatham: ibid., p. 493n.; _Nicholas Nickleby_ , p. 898; Drury Lane graveyards: Geo. Alfd Walker, _Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly those of London ..._ (London, Longman, 1839), p. 162.\n\n'bones for fertilizer': St Ann's: Walker, _The First of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards_ , pp. 14\u201316; sale of bones: ibid., pp. 16\u201317.\n\n'dead citizens': St Clement Danes: Walker, _Gatherings_ , pp. 158\u20139; 'rot and mildew': 'City of London Churches', in _All the Year Round_ , 5 May 1860, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 115.\n\n'or even weeks': Bunhill Fields: Geo. Alfd Walker: _The Second of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards_ (London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), p. 9; St Martin's and Mr Foster: Walker, _The First of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards_ , pp. 26\u20138.\n\n'a reeking fluid': Portugal Street ground: Walker, _The Second of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards_ , p. 6; _A Christmas Carol_ , p. 124.\n\n'for the privilege': protesting undertaker: Walker, _The First of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards_ , p. 19; Enon chapel: Walker, _Gatherings_ , pp. 154\u20135 and _The Second of a Series ... Metropolitan Grave-Yards_ , pp. 15\u201316, and David L. Pike, _Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800\u20131945_ (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 221; advertisement for dancing: 'Lord' George Sanger, _Seventy Years a Showman: My Life and Adventures ..._ (London, C. Arthur Pearson [1908]), p. 79; viewings: _ILN_ , 27 November 1847, p. 343.\n\n'using the grounds': _ILN_ , 1 March 1845, p. 131.\n\n'were the dead': 'Address': [Percival Leigh], 'Address from an Undertaker to the Trade', _Household Words_ , 13, 22 June 1850, pp. 301\u20134; poem: [John Delaware Lewis], 'City Graves', _Household Words_ , 38, 14 December 1850, p. 277; Nemo's burial spot: _Bleak House_ , pp. 202, 276. The location is debated. Tambling, _Going Astray_ , p. 139, says it is in the churchyard of St Mary-le-Strand, while the editors of Dickens' _Letters_ suggest St Martin-in-the-Fields. I am with Tambling in this matter; _Our Mutual Friend_ , pp. 386\u20137.\n\n'water-borne coffins': Hugh Meller, _London Cemeteries: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer_ (2nd edn, Godstone, Surrey, Gregg, 1985) lists all the new cemeteries, and their most famous residents. Mary Hogarth's burial site and footnote: Tambling, _Going Astray_ , p. 292.\n\n'fine, and river': [Richard H. Horne], 'Father Thames', _Household Words_ , 45, 1 February 1851, pp. 446\u20137; _Little Dorrit_ , p. 68.\n\n'it won't do': 'head-and-stomach': Dickens to W. W. F. de Cerjat, 7 July 1858, _Letters_ , vol. 8, p. 599; 'smell rushes up': _ILN_ : 19 June 1858, p. 603, and 26 June, p. 631; Dickens: to de Cerjat, 7 July 1858, ibid.\n\n'of sheer stench': Disraeli: _The Times_ , 3 July 1858, p. 9; 'compelled to legislate': ibid., 18 June 1858, p. 9.\n\n'makes us clean': Hollingshead, _Underground London_ , pp. 58, 68, which is a collection of pieces from _All the Year Round_ ; Anon., _The Wild Boys of London, or, Children of the Night. A Story of the Present Day_ (London, no publisher, [1866?]), p. 8.\n\n'doing properly': Duke of Buccleuch's house: _ILN_ : 6 September 1862, p. 265, 30 May 1868, p. 535, 28 May 1870, p. 554. The embanking of the Thames in this and the next paragraph: Porter, _The Thames Embankment_ , passim.\n\n'stage of transition': military campaign: _ILN_ , 30 July 1864, p. 114; Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 175, 191, 203, 221; Dickens to W. W. F. de Cerjat, 1 February 1861, _Letters_ , vol. 9, p. 383.\n\n'form and colour': Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 265; the historian: Porter, _The Thames Embankment_ , p. 34.\n\n1867: THE REGENT'S PARK SKATING DISASTER\n\n'off a cold': _Pickwick Papers_ , pp. 396ff.\n\n'end of the water': numbers and Humane Society: _ILN_ : 14 December 1844, pp. 375\u20136.\n\n'tunnel as usual': Express Train: _ILN_ , 17 February 1855, p. 151; skating in the tunnel: ibid., 3 March 1855, p. 197.\n\n'of a serious nature': the paragraphs that follow have been compiled from newspaper reports. The eyewitness evidence is from the inquest transcripts, reprinted in _The Times_ over the next two weeks of January, with further information from the _Daily News_ , 16 and 17 January 1867, and the _Morning Post_ , 16 January 1867. One of the most complete reports appears in the _Standard_ , 22 January 1867. The number of icemen on duty is taken from these reports; however, according to Wendy Neal, _With Disastrous Consequences: London Disasters 1830\u20131917_ (Enfield Lock, Hisarlik Press, 1992), p. 111, there were nineteen.\n\n'to us, are _dead_ ': The diary of Shirley Brooks is in the British Library; I am grateful to Patrick Leary for this transcript, and for pointing me to the skating disaster in the first instance.\n\n9. STREET PERFORMANCE\n\n'occupy his day': Pantheon description: Allen, _History and Antiquities of London,_ vol. 5, pp. 281\u20133; footnote on the Pantheon: Alison Adburgham, _Shops and Shopping, 1800\u20131914: Where, and in What Manner the Well-dressed Englishwoman Bought her Clothes_ (London, Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 22; Thackeray, 'De Juventute', 'Roundabout Papers from the _Cornhill Magazine_ ', in _The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray_ (London, Smith Elder & Co., 1887), vol. 22, p. 73.\n\n'confectioners and milliners': fashionable hours: Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 1, p. 104; carriages: Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London_ , p. 72; 'sparkling jewellery': _Nicholas Nickleby_ , pp. 488\u20139; Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , pp. 132\u20133, 157.\n\n'clients also vanished': Dickens to Catherine Dickens, 7 September 1853, _Letters_ , vol. 7, p. 138; shop assistants and milkmaids: Dickens, 'Arcadian London', in _All the Year Round_ , 29 September 1860, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 183, 185; prostitutes: Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 69.\n\n'they had been given': Dickens, 'Arcadian London', _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 189.\n\n'Rag Fair market': marine stores and rag-and-bottle shops: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, p. 108, _Bleak House_ , pp. 98\u20139, _David Copperfield_ , p. 177; Susan Shatto, _The Companion to Bleak House_ (London, Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 59\u201364, on reselling.\n\n'sort: see below': _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 280; West End: Greenwood, _Unsentimental Journeys_ , p. 14; St Giles: Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , pp. 264ff.; carpenter's tools, and outline of pawning: Dickens with W. H. Willis, 'My Uncle', in _Household Words_ , 6 December 1851, in Stone (ed.), _Uncollected Writings_ , vol. 2, pp. 367\u201378.\n\n'for a consideration': trickery and sympathy: Renton Nicholson, _Autobiography of a Fast Man_ (London, published 'for the Proprietors', 1863), pp. 11, 97.\n\n'a broken plate': dolly shops: Dickens, 'Brokers' and 'Marine-store Shops', in _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 211\u201313, A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 10; leaving shops: Greenwood, _Unsentimental Journeys_ , p. 15; _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 346; Southwark shop: Anon., 'Turpin's Corner', _Household Words_ , 17, 8 May 1858, pp. 493\u20136.\n\n'5 shillings': Cranbourne Alley: Sala, _Gaslight and Daylight_ , p. 60, Smith, _An Antiquarian Ramble_ , vol. 1, pp. 124\u20135; Beale, _Recollections_ , p. 20.\n\n'massive pie sign': shop signs: Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 1, p. 170; _Little Dorrit_ , p. 258; _Dombey and Son_ , p. 88; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 377.\n\n'nibbling the cheese': pub signs: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 96; all others: Smith, _Little World of London_ , pp. 233ff.\n\n'on the pavements': Warren's Blacking: Colton, _Four Years in Great Britain_ , p. 63; 'Try Warren's': R. S. Surtees, _Ask Mamma, or, The Richest Commoner in England_ (London, Bradbury and Evans, 1858), p. 18; use of pavements: Altick, _Presence of the Present_ , p. 232.\n\n'at any height': Regency bills: John Thomas Smith, _Ancient Topography of London ..._ (London [no publisher], 1815), facing p. 32, Smith, _Vagabondiana_ , final plate, Leighton, _London Cries_ , facing p. 2, and Thomas H. Shepherd [and James Elmes], London and its Environs in the Nineteenth Century, Illustrated by a Series of Views _from the Original Drawings by Thomas H. Shepherd, with ... Notes_ [by James Elmes], (London, Jones & Co., 1829), facing p. 114, are only a few examples; 'a fresh supply': Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 5, pp. 33\u20134; dress: ibid., p. 36.\n\n'excursion advertisements': Dickens, 'Bill-Sticking', _Household Words_ , 22 March 1851, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 2, pp. 339\u201350; Mr Guppy: _Bleak House_ , p. 175; Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 24.\n\n'any other way': Southey, _Letters from England_ , p. 51; Egan, _Life in London_ , 158; _Old Curiosity Shop_ , p. 282; 'seedy personages': Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 55.\n\n'a bigger impression': Regent Street: MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , vol. 1, p. 172; 'animated sandwich': 'The Dancing Academy', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 299; 'piece of human flesh': Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 5, p. 37; _ILN_ : _ILN_ , 14 May 1842, p. 16.\n\n'and even weeks': the itch: MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , vol. 1, pp. 172\u20133; bootmaker: Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London_ , p. 207; Mr Falcon: Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , p. 15.\n\n'gilding and pictures': Boz ads: Mark Wormald, introduction to _Pickwick Papers_ , p. xiii; Bardell bus company: Long, 'Mr Pickwick Lucky to Find a Cab?'; wellington boot: engraving in the _Weekly Chronicle_ , reproduced in Jackson, _George Scharf's London_ , p. 36; models of houses and steamboats: MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , pp. 73\u20134; hat, obelisk and gothic windows: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 5, p. 38; Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , pp. 15, 18\u201319.\n\n'whiskers with him afterwards': auctions: Greenwood, _Wilds of London_ , pp. 152\u20133; bear grease: Lockwood, _Passionate Pilgrims_ , p. 129, Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 100\u2013101; _Nicholas Nickleby_ , p. 131.\n\n'his wet things': shop bells: Phillips, _Wild Tribes_ , p. 97; tailors: Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 1, pp. 530\u201331; _Pickwick Papers_ , pp. 431\u20132; coffee rooms: Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 85; _Great Expectations_ , p. 446.\n\n'early dinner-beer': delivery boy's dress: Frank Bullen, _Confessions of a Tradesman_ (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), p. 22; _Pickwick Papers_ , pp. 417\u201318, 424; Kentish Town newspaper: Yates, _Recollections_ , p. 28.\n\n'in St Martin's Lane': _ILN_ , 2 June 1854, pp. 562, 564.\n\n'spoil \u2013 spile': _Pickwick Papers_ , pp. 131, 163; _Bleak House_ , pp. 278, 422\u20133.\n\n'Menshun Ouse': Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 1, p. 457; Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 140\u201341, and Hollingshead, _My Lifetime_ , vol. 1, p. 49, agrees with him here; location names: Tuer, _Old London Street Cries_ , pp. 70, 73.\n\n'had all vanished': _Edwin Drood_ , pp. 254\u20135; 'Metropolitan Miss' and upper-class gent: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 5; Trollope, _What I Remember_ , p. 49.\n\n'clothes get tight': the Stilton: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 5; costers' backslang: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 23, and Mayhew and Binny, ibid.\n\n'Oliver Twist (fist)': rhyming slang: Mayhew and Binny, ibid., Hayward, _Days of Dickens_ , pp. 16\u201317; novel: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 70.\n\n'Romany for speak': Mayhew and foreign languages: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 6; Dickens, _Oliver Twist_ , pp. 79, 29; Romany: Mayhew and Binny, ibid.\n\n'your poor feet': 1830s catchphrases: Hayward, _Days of Dickens_ , p. 17 and Vizetelly, _Glances Back_ : vol. 1, p. 103; 1860s catchphrases: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 41\u20132.\n\n'Hookey estates from': 'Do you see any green': Hayward, _Days of Dickens_ , p. 17; _A Christmas Carol_ , p. 129; _David Copperfield_ , p. 307.\n\n'cocking a snook': _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 405; _Old Curiosity Shop_ , p. 365.\n\n'a dancing girl': bands: Mayhew: _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 159; types of organists in the following three paragraphs: Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 2\u201315.\n\n'extremely unusual': Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 276; Stabbers's Band: 'An Unsettled Neighbourhood', _Household Words_ , 11 November 1854, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, p. 243.\n\n'in such circumstances': 'The Streets \u2013 Night', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 77; Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 157\u20138; Joseph Johnson: Smith, _Vagabondiana_ , facing p. 33; sailor with child: Jackson, _Scharf's London_ , p. 56; sailors: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 53.\n\n'brazen instruments': Robert Seymour, _Seymour's Humorous Sketches..._ , with text by Alfred Crowquill (2nd edn, London, Henry G. Bohn, 1866), sketch 22; Leech and Dickens, cited by John M. Picker, _Victorian Soundscapes_ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 42.\n\n'with the quality': Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 44; 'An Unsettled Neighbourhood', _Household Words_ , 11 November 1854, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, p.243; _Punch_ 's summer holiday: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, pp. 45\u20137.\n\n'and Christmas pantomimes': puppets: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 61; Sanger, _Seventy Years_ , pp. 12\u201313, 18, 50; subjects for peep-shows: Sanger, and Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, pp. 88\u20139.\n\n'to Queen Victoria': bear: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 72; Sanger, _Seventy Years_ , p. 54; Happy Families: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 179, Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 67; exhibitor to Queen Victoria: _ILN_ , 29 August 1842, p. 237.\n\n'a funny dance': 'Hal. Lewis, Student at Law, 'The Street-Conjuror', in Meadows, _Heads of the People_ , vol. 1, p. 275, Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, pp. 90ff., 98, 104, 107, 110, 117, Smith, _Little World of London_ , pp. 6\u20137.\n\n'day-trippers obeyed': Cackler Dance: Sanger, _Seventy Years_ , p. 60; the 'it forms' man: Sala, _Gaslight and Daylight_ , p. 62; profile cutters: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 210; pavement chalkers: ibid., vol. 3, p. 214; street boys tumbling: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 92; riverside boys: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 233; Greenwich children: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 139.\n\n10. LEISURE FOR ALL\n\n'the masses out': Anthony Trollope, _The Warden_ , ed. David Skilton (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter 16, pp. 210ff., itemizes Mr Harding's dispiriting day; St James's and Green Parks: Susan Lasdun, _The English Park: Royal, Public and Private_ (London, Andr\u00e9 Deutsch, 1991), pp. 126, 129.\n\n'risen to 461': fifty squares: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 6, p. 194; 200 squares: _Leigh's New Picture_ (1839 edn), p. 221; 461 squares: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , p. 71.\n\n'centuries of growth': _Leigh's New Picture_ (1819 edn): p. 259, 1839 edition, p. 221; greenery visible: Henry W. Lawrence, _City Trees: A Historical Geography from the Renaissance through the Nineteenth Century_ (Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 2006), p. 179.\n\n'and middle class': Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 6, p. 199.\n\n'around central London': Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , pp. 59\u201360.\n\n'over his horse': 'Leicester-square adventurer': _ILN_ , 7 January 1860, p. 3; _Bleak House_ , p. 356; Reynolds and Hogarth: _ILN_ , 11 January 1868, p. 42; Savile House: E. Beresford Chancellor, _The Squares of London, Topographical and Historical_ (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr\u00fcbner & Co., 1907), pp. 167ff.; foreignness of Leicester Square: Smith, _Antiquarian Ramble_ , vol. 1, pp. 119\u201320; gas explosion: Halliday, _Great Stink_ , p. 175; George I: Beale, _Recollections_ , pp. 41\u20132.\n\n'their great trays': Belgrave Square villas: Charles Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 6, p. 194; Pantechnicon: _Leigh's New Picture_ (1839 edition), p. 222; Berkeley Square occupants: Chancellor, _The Squares of London_ , p. 20; Pardon, _Routledge's Popular Guide_ , lists Thomas's Hotel as still there in 1862, p. 46; 'clatterings': Mrs Gore, _Cecil, or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb_ (London, Richard Bentley, 1841), vol. 3, p. 214.\n\n'landowner's revenue': Nash, cited in Dyos, _Exploring the Urban Past_ , p. 82.\n\n' _rus in urbe_ setting': the three paragraphs on the development of Regent's Park: Arnold, _Re-Presenting the Metropolis_ , p. 39, J. Mordaunt Crook, _London's Arcadia: John Nash and the Planning of Regent's Park_ , Fifth Annual Soane Lecture ([n.p., no publisher] 2000), pp. 4\u201314, J. Mordaunt Crook, 'Metropolitan Improvements: John Nash and the Picturesque', in Fox (ed.), _London \u2013 World City_ , pp. 77\u201396, Terence Davis, _The Architecture of John Nash_ (London, Studio, 1960), pp. 9\u201316, Anne Saunders, _Regent's Park: A Study of its Development of the Area from 1086 to the Present Day_ (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1969), passim, Anne Saunders, _The Regent's Park Villas_ (London, Bedford College, 1981), passim, and White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , pp. 23\u20136, 73\u20134.\n\n'of great magnificence': Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 222; Henry Vizetelly, _Glances Back_ , vol. 1, p. 27; MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , pp. 169\u201371, 176\u20137.\n\n'until 1857': Lasdun, _The English Park_ , pp. 124\u20135, 128\u20139, 149\u201365. The purchase of Primrose Hill: Lasdun says the land (fifty-eight acres) was bought for \u00a3300; according to Saunders, it was a land swap with the owners of the land, Eton College, in which the college acquired more land in Windsor.\n\n'to have attended': Victoria Park: Winter, _London's Teeming Streets_ , p. 164; carriage driving: Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London_ , pp. 162, 165; Wyon, Journal, BL Add MS 59,617; _ILN_ , 8 September 1855, p. 287, 17 May 1856, pp. 527, 615, 13 September 1856, p. 265.\n\n'street from Westminster': Nash, cited in Rodney Mace, _Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire_ (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), pp. 23\u20139, 31\u201346, and Tambling, _Going Astray_ , p. 31.\n\n'the front lawn': lion: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 6, p. 207; description from text and images in E. Beresford Chancellor, _Lost London: Being a description of Landmarks which have disappeared pictured by J. Crowther circa 1879\u201387 ..._ (London, Constable, 1926), pp. 30ff.\n\n'an open piazza': except where noted, this and the next eight paragraphs are derived from: Allen, _History and Antiquities of London_ , vol. 5, pp. 291\u20132, Fox (ed.), _London \u2013 World City_ , pp. 94ff., Mace, _Trafalgar Square_ , pp. 126ff.\n\n'a cold plunge': Ely Place and its jurisdiction: my thanks to Lee Jackson for pointing this out; 'Roman' pool: Clayton, _Subterranean City_ , p. 21.\n\n'of his scheme': footnote: the architectural historian is John Summerson. I thank Jonathan Foyle for alerting me to this, and for his views of the project.\n\n'bare-headed': the Nelson monument: Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde, _London as it Might Have Been_ (London, John Murray, 1982), pp. 65\u201370 (it is they who thought that the mermaids were playing water-polo), Mace, _Trafalgar Square_ , p. 65; Nelson's hat: Smith, _An Antiquarian Ramble_ , vol. 1, p. 135; footnote on statues apart from the empty plinth: Mace, ibid., p. 111.\n\n'a clean one': Sala, _The Hats of Humanity, Historically, Humorously and Aesthetically Considered ..._ (Manchester, James Gee, 'Hatter', [?1880]), pp. 16\u201317; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 796; doctors' boys: Sala, _Hats of Humanity_ , pp. 15\u201316; man leaving prison: J. Ewing Ritchie, _Days and Nights in London; or, Studies in Black and Gray_ (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1880), p. 267; paper caps: Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , pp. 86\u20137; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 225.\n\n'Landseer was about': artesian wells: _ILN_ , 24 August 1844, p. 119; 29 March 1845, p. 199, and 14 March 1846, p. 174; bathing in the fountains: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 85; Nelson's column and granite arrival: _ILN_ , 2 July 1842, p. 121; arrival of statue: ibid., 4 November 1843, p. 288; reliefs, and non-completion: ibid., 23 October 1858, p. 380, 17 March 1860, p. 251.\n\n'that was that': unveiling: Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 236\u20137; lack of ceremony: _ILN_ , 2 February 1867, pp. 111\u201312.\n\n'outdoor sitting room': Boucicault: _Illustrated Times_ , cited in Lynda Nead, _Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London_ (London, Yale University Press, 2000), p. 99.\n\n'by the waiter': Dickens, 'London Recreations', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 120; the Eagle: 'Miss Evans and the Eagle', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 269; Highbury Barn: 'Anonyma', _London by Night_ , pp. 77ff.; _Little Dorrit_ , p. 417.\n\n'main attraction': _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 614; Hornsey and Epping: Archer, _The Pauper, the Thief, and the Convict_ , p. 22; vans: Colman, _European Life and Manners_ , vol. 2, p. 78; vehicles and types: Sala, _Looking at Life; or, Thoughts and Things_ (London, Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860), pp. 189\u201390; the Welsh Harp: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , pp. 266\u20137.\n\n'river excursion': tea gardens south of the river: [G. A. Sala], 'Sunday Tea-Gardens', _Household Words_ , 10, 30 September 1854, p. 147.\n\n'by the tide': Dolphin and Swan taverns: Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 233; swimming match: _ILN_ , 14 July 1849, p. 23; cholera deaths: ibid., 28 July 1849, p. 55; rowing matches: ibid., 24 July 1852, p. 62, for the Thames Watermen's Royal Regatta; others reported: ibid., 2 July 1842, p. 115, 8 July 1843, pp. 27\u20138, 4 July 1846, p. 9, and passim; championship of the Thames, ibid., 22 September 1860, p. 269; Astley's clown: ibid., 28 September 1844, p. 193.\n\n'financial resources': Yates, _His Recollections_ , pp. 106\u20137.\n\n'dinner at Greenwich': Barry dinner: _ILN_ , 6 July 1850, p. 3; Crimea dinner: _ILN_ , 12 August 1854, p. 131.\n\n'wedding breakfast': Dickens dinner: Michael N. Stanton, 'Dickens' Return from America; A Ghost at the Feast', _Dickensian_ , Autumn 1991, p. 148; _Our Mutual Friend_ , pp. 313, 649.\n\n'day on the river': _Princess Alice_ excursion and footnote: Ritchie, _Days and Nights in London_ , pp. 197ff.; Dickens' excursion: Claire Tomalin, _Charles Dickens: A Life_ (Harmondsworth, Viking, 2010), p. 316.\n\n'flagrant evils': number of fairs and fair-days: _Leigh's New Picture_ (1819 edn), pp. 176\u20138; (1839 edn), p. 120.\n\n'and nothing else': Bartholomew Fair: Thomas Frost, _The Old Showmen, and the Old London Fairs_ (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1874), pp. 214ff., Henry Morley, _Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair_ (London, Frederick Warne & Co., [n.d.]), pp. 375ff., Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 1, pp. 528\u20139, Grant, _Sketches in London_ , pp. 289ff.; last days in 1848: _ILN_ , 9 September 1848, p. 150.\n\n'draw the crowds': Greenwich Fair in this and the next two paragraphs from: Masson, _Memories_ , pp. 145\u20137, Smith (ed.), _Gavarni in London_ , pp. 76\u201380, Grant, _Sketches in London_ , pp. 289\u2013317, Hawthorne, _Hawthorne in England_ , pp. 172\u20135; footnote on roundabouts: Sanger, _Seventy Years_ , p. 16.\n\n11. FEEDING THE STREETS\n\n'or a tea': _David Copperfield_ , p. 153.\n\n'of their lodgings': hot-eel sellers: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 160\u20132; whelk sellers: ibid., vol. 1, p. 164, and their calls, vol. 1, p. 76.\n\n'steadily declined': _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 294; Mayhew on oyster selling and in footnote: _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 75\u20136; Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 71.\n\n'over a meal': wink men: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 76; footnote on American tourist: James N. Matthews, _My Holiday: How I Spent it ... in the Summer of 1866_ (Buffalo, Martin Taylor, 1867), p. 197; cabbage plants, chickweed and cresses: Smith, _Cries of London_ , pp. 7\u20138.\n\n'potatoes \u2013 right away': Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, pp. 173\u20135.\n\n'was not profitable': economics of muffin men: Greenwood, _Wilds of London_ , p. 184; caps: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , p. 44.\n\n'piemen even further': description of piemen, and economic reasons for decline: Smith, _Curiosities_ , pp. 202\u20135; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 252.\n\n'manner of a pieman': _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 294, _David Copperfield_ , p. 314, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 284.\n\n'around their necks': Greenwich Fair: _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 140, and Smith (ed.), _Gavarni in London_ , pp. 78\u20139; fried-fish sellers at Epsom: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 166.\n\n'had arrived': Smith, _Little World of London_ , pp. 51\u20132; hoboys: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 85;\n\n'for a meal': Sunday excursionists: elder wine: ibid., vol. 1, p. 189; peppermint water: ibid., vol. 1, p. 191, and Sanger, _Seventy Years_ , p. 57; curds-and-whey and rice milk: Mayhew, ibid., vol. 1, pp. 192\u20133.\n\n'mashed turnip': Sanger, _Seventy Years_ , p. 57; 'coolers': Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 41; hokey-pokey men and ingredients: Tuer, _Old London Street Cries_ , pp. 58\u201360.\n\n'repeat performance': dress and wooden frames: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 43\u20134; sticks: Sekon, _Locomotion in Victorian Britain_ , p. 18; _Old Curiosity Shop_ , p. 331; 'The Streets \u2013 Night', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 75.\n\n'with a pewter-pot': _Nicholas Nickleby_ , p. 228; _Dombey and Son_ , p. 143; Miss Tox's location is not pinpointed, but on p. 144 it is in the West End, although not a good house \u2013 'think of the situation!' says Miss Tox, surely implying it lies in Mayfair.\n\n'on the town': 'The Amusements of the People (II)', _Household Words_ , 13 April 1850, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 2, pp. 195\u20136.\n\n'take gravy away': ham-and-beef shop: Sala, _Gaslight and Daylight_ , p. 5; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 288; Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 1, p. 388; window display: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , pp. 81\u20132; newspaper and dishes: Callow, _Old London Taverns_ , pp. 82, 292\u20133.\n\n'sit and eat': hours: Yates, _Recollections_ , p. 107; locations, Yates, ibid., and _London by Night, or, The Bachelor's Facetious Guide to All the Ins and Outs and the Nightly Doings of the Metropolis ..._ (London, William Ward [?1857]), pp. 44\u20136; Holborn oyster house: 'Misplaced Attachment of Mr John Dounce', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 286\u20137.\n\n'its roller afterwards': Scott's: 'Anonyma', _London by Night_ , p. 82, and Kirwan, _Palace and Hovel_ , pp. 181\u20132; 'lobsters, crabs': Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 324.\n\n'their names suggest': Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 147.\n\n'conducted houses': _David Copperfield_ , p. 335; 'Refreshments for Travellers', 24 March 1860, _All the Year Round_ , in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 78; Pardon, _Routledge's Popular Guide to London_ , p. 48.\n\n'coming and going': earthenware dishes: Smith, _Curiosities_ , p. 255; thieving cookshops: Wright, _Habits and Customs_ , pp. 216\u201317; Christmas Day: Forster, _Life_ , vol. 3, p. 477.\n\n'twenty-four hours': _Little Dorrit_ , p. 283; Bethnal Green: Archer: _The Pauper, the Thief_ , p. 17; pea soup: Bullen, _Confessions of a Tradesman_ , pp. 40\u201341.\n\n'and doze indoors': workers, newspapers: Carter, _Memoirs of a Working Man_ , p. 186; Greville Street: Lovett, _Life and Struggles_ , p. 88; Egan, _Life in London_ , p. 181; Sala, _Gaslight and Daylight_ , p. 15.\n\n'knife and fork': number of coffee shops: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 1, p. 317, vol. 1, p. 140; working-class coffee house: ibid., vol. 4, pp. 317\u201318; customers bringing food: Hugh Miller, _First Impressions of England and its People_ (London, John Johnstone, 1847), p. 354; 'Night Walks', in _All the Year Round_ , 21 July 1860, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, pp. 155\u20136; footnote on hats: these references are in: _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 397; _Oliver Twist_ , pp. 30, 69, 202; _Nicholas Nickleby_ , pp. 482, 672, 809; _Old CuriosityShop_, p. 544; _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , pp. 98, 630; _Little Dorrit_ , pp. 321, 833; and _David Copperfield_ , p. 455; the Sherlock Holmes story is 'A Scandal in Bohemia' (1891).\n\n'particularly successful': Bront\u00ebs: Mrs Gaskell, _Life of Charlotte Bront\u00eb_ , pp. 270\u201371; _Little Dorrit_ , p. 68, _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 35; American newspapers: Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 120; business connections: Tambling, _Going Astray_ , pp. 283\u20134; Garraway's and coffee-house boxes: Callow, _Old London Taverns_ , p. 6; footnote on boxes: Dickens, 'A Sleep to Startle Us', _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, p. 52; _David Copperfield_ , p. 754.\n\n'in such a place': cigar divans: Masson, _Memories_ , p. 124, and _London by Night: The Bachelor's..._ , pp. 50\u201352; Trollope, _The Warden_ , pp. 226\u20137.\n\n'nothing at all: post-office clerk: Yates, _Recollections_ , p. 80; _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 590; speed, and bread and cheese lunches: Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 140.\n\n'a fourpenny': Yates, _Recollections_ , pp. 80\u201381; beef with carrots: Callow, _Old London Taverns_ , p. 84; Boiled-Beef House: Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 2, p. 158; 'Which would you please': ibid., vol. 1, p. 388; lesser houses: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 4, p. 314.\n\n'something like meat': display and prices: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 4, p. 314; Raumer, _England in 1835_ , vol. 2, p. 113.\n\n'down to eat': menu: Hollingshead, _My Lifetime_ , vol. 1, pp. 57\u20138; Old Fleece and Sun, and the Bay Tree: Callow, _Old London Taverns_ , pp. 2\u20133, 29\u201330, and John Murray Fisher, _The World of London,_ 2 vols. (Edinburgh, William Blackwood, 1843), vol. 2, pp. 4\u20135.\n\n'the day before': system of waiting staff: Seymour, 'The Eating House', in _Seymour's Humorous Sketches_ , [no page]; footnote on income and outgoings: _The Servant Girl in London: Showing the Dangers to which Young Country Girls are Exposed ..._ (London, R. Hastings, 1840), pp. 34\u20136; _Bleak House_ , p. 337; police-court report: _ILN_ , 25 June 1842; Dickens, 'Thoughts about People', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 252.\n\n'quarter-hour break': Edmund Yates, _After Office-Hours_ (London, W. Kent and Co., 1861), p. 251; _Great Expectations_ , p. 383; Reeves' Luncheon Rooms: Pardon, _Routledge's Popular Guide to London_ , prelims.\n\n'sustained coo': Yates, _After Office-Hours_ , pp. 246\u20137.\n\n'its turtle soup': menu: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 4, p. 313; specialities: Forney, _Letter from Europe_ , p. 345.\n\n'the carving-knife': _Bleak House_ , p. 337; _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 584.\n\n'implore or threaten': location, description of Bell Alley, reputation: Callow, _Old London Taverns_ , pp. 120\u201321; guidebook: Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 4, p. 314; description: [Dickens with W. H. Willis], 'A Popular Delusion', _Household Words_ , 1 June 1850, in Stone (ed.), _Uncollected Writings_ , vol. 1, p. 120 and Callow, ibid., pp. 120\u201322.\n\n'civil and quick': new Simpson's: Callow, ibid., pp. 125\u20136, and Yates, _After Office-Hours_ , p. 243; the Albion: Yates, ibid., p. 105.\n\n'box and all': _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 767.\n\n'meat and drink': _Old Curiosity Shop_ , pp. 108\u20139.\n\n'of its time': Postmaster General: Yates, _Recollections_ , pp. 80\u201381; Reeves' Luncheon Rooms: Pardon, _Routledge's Popular Guide to London_ , prelims.\n\n12. STREET THEATRE\n\n'a drunken man': original opening for 'The Prisoner's Van', in Butt and Tillotson, _Dickens at Work_ , p. 44.\n\n'in my life': Forster, _Life_ , vol. 3, p. 141.\n\n'summoned a throng': boys' comments: A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , pp. 333, 109; prisoners' van jokes: ibid., p. 1; Bow Street prisoners: Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 215, also mentioned by Kirwan, _Palace and Hovel_ , p. 175; mailcoaches, Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 400, and Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , pp. 19\u201320.\n\n'landlord's men': _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 829; Ritchie, _Days and Nights in London_ , p. 257; Serpentine: _ILN_ , 16 October 1869, pp. 379, 392; _Dombey and Son_ , p. 790; Peel: Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London_ , pp. 263\u20134; Clerkenwell eviction: _ILN_ , 11 January 1843, p. 19.\n\n'part of a week': the earthquake: from the _Era_ , _Examiner_ , _Morning Post_ , _Observer_ , _Standard_ and _Morning Chronicle_ , as well as some local papers: _Aberdeen Journal_ , _Belfast News-Courant_ , _Berrow's Worcester Journal_ , _Bradford Observer_ , _Bristol Mercury_ , _Caledonian Mercury_ , _Cornwall Royal Gazette_ , _Derby Mercury_ , _Freeman's Journal_ , _Hampshire Advertiser and Salisbury Guardian_ , _Hull Packet_ , _Ipswich Journal_ , _Jackson's Oxford Journal_ , _Liverpool Mercury_ , _Manchester Times and Gazette_ , _Newcastle Courant_ , _Preston Chronicle_ , _Sheffield and Rotherham Independent_ between 2 March and 8 April 1842; Whitechapel Church ghost: _ILN_ , 15 October 1842, p. 359.\n\n'the arrival itself': Wyatt's sculpture: Mrs E. M. Ward, _Mrs. E. M. Ward's Reminiscences_ , ed. Elliott O'Donnell (London, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1911), pp. 65\u20136; Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 150.\n\n'crowd of 500': _ILN_ , 8 April 1854, p. 329, 7 October 1854, pp. 340\u201341.\n\n'easier to control': 1814: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , p. 261; Crimean War: Creaton (ed.), _Victorian Diaries_ , p. 39.\n\n'injuries and disease': this paragraph and the next: _ILN_ , 12 July 1856, p. 31. I am grateful to Michael Hargreave Mawson for attempting to instil in me some rudimentary knowledge of military terminology.\n\n'the civic dinner': Schlesinger, _Saunterings_ , pp. 90\u201392.\n\n'handsome walking stick': Prince Regent: Joseph Ballard, _England in 1815: A Critical Edition of The Journal of Joseph Ballard_ , ed. Alan Rauch (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 54; Prince Albert: Wyon, Journal, BL Add MS 59,617, 27 April 1855.\n\n'not impressed': Charles Greville, _The Greville Diary_..., ed. Philip Whitwell Wilson (London, William Heinemann, 1927), vol. 2, pp. 14\u201315, 28, 41; footnote on Greville: Christopher Hibbert (ed.), _Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals: A Selection_ (London, John Murray, 1984), pp. 237\u20138.\n\n'held his Barony': Disraeli, _Benjamin Disraeli, Letters_ , ed. M. G. Wiebe et al. (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1987, 1997), vol. 3, _1838\u20131841_ , pp. 54\u20135, 67, 69, 70, 72.\n\n'ground of insanity': German sausage: there are a number of broadsides with these songs. An example, 'The Queen's Marriage', can be seen in Charles Hindley, _The Life and Times of James Catnach, Ballad Monger_ (London, Reeves and Turner, 1878), p. 326, while James Hepburn, _A Book of Scattered Leaves: Poetry and Poverty in Broadside Ballads of Nineteenth-Century England_ (London, Associated University Presses, 2001), vol. 2, p. 453, contains more. I am grateful to Suzanne Daly and Inktwala Meredith for pointing me in the direction of these volumes; Victoria's wedding day: Greville, _Diary_ , vol. 2, pp. 130\u201331; birth of Prince of Wales: _ILN_ , 12 November 1842 _,_ p. 423; refusal to remove hats, and miser Neild: _ILN_ , 25 March 1848, p. 201, and 18 September 1852, p. 222; amount of bequest: Stanley Weintraub, _Victoria, Biography of a Queen_ (London, Unwin Hyman, 1987), p. 201.\n\n'opera went on': 1840 assassination attempt: Greville, _Diary_ , vol. 2, pp. 203\u20134; first 1842 attempt: _ILN_ , 4 June 1842, pp. 49\u201350; fifth attempt: Beale, _Recollections_ , p. 13.\n\n'all the trees': Dickens to John Forster, ?30 November 1846, _Letters_ , vol. 4, p. 669.\n\n'arriving in the capital': Buckingham Palace notice: Elizabeth Longford, _Victoria R.I._ (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), p. 321; Shakespeare notice: in Agnes E. Claflin, _From Shore to Shore: A Journey of Nineteen Years_ (Cambridge, MA, Riverside Press, 1873), p. 154. My thanks to Abigail Burnham Bloom for copying the pages of this book for me; Holborn Viaduct opening: _ILN_ , 6 November 1869, p. 451.\n\n'station to another': this paragraph and the next two: Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 149\u201352.\n\n'biscuit the Garibaldi': Beale, _Recollections_ , pp. 118\u201319; Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 186\u20139; McCarthy, _Reminiscences_ , vol. 1, p. 133; footnote on Garibaldi: _ILN_ , 16 April 1864, p. 374.\n\n'carried by rail': the mailcoaches on the king's birthday: Bradfield, _Public Carriages_ , p. 21, Corbett, _Old Coachman's Chatter_ , pp. 43\u20134, Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , pp. 19\u201320, Raumer, _England in 1835_ , vol. 2, p. 52 and Thrupp, _History of Coaches_ , p. 113.\n\n'this civic ritual': Smith, _Little World of London_ , p. 109; Holborn: _ILN_ , 23 May 1857, p. 493.\n\n'danced round': 'They go about': Southey, _Letters from England_ , p. 78; 'The First of May', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 205\u20138.\n\n'gave her something': Dickens, 'The First of May', ibid.; Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 285.\n\n'and daisies': 'open carriages': A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , pp. 217\u201318; verse: _ILN_ , 28 May 1842, p. 41.\n\n'remember the grotto': Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 70\u201371; _ILN_ , 10 August 1850, p. 115.\n\n'serenade the guy': this paragraph and the next from: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 126, 166, _ILN_ , 10 November 1855, p. 547, 7 November 1857, p. 458, 7 November 1863, p. 462, Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, pp. 64\u20138.\n\n'of the family': mutes: Hall, _Retrospect of a Long Life_ , vol. 1, pp. 70\u201371, Mrs Gore in Meadows, _Heads of the People_ , vol. 2, p. 38, Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 58\u20139; funeral drapery: Mrs Gore, ibid.; hatchments: Smith, _Little World of London_ , p. 59; footnote on hatchments: Wey, _A Frenchman Sees London_ , p. 50, and Smith, _Letters from Europe_ , p. 34; funeral carriages and horses: Hall, ibid.; walking funerals: Smith, _Little World of London_ , p. 59.\n\n'Westminster Abbey': 1831 funeral: McLelland, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 229; Duke of Northumberland's funeral: _ILN_ , 27 February 1847, p. 137.\n\n'black and white': mourning for Prince Albert: Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 111, _ILN_ , 4 January 1862, p. 7; Palmerston: _ILN_ , 4 November 1865, p. 447.\n\n'revolting absurdity': _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , pp. 380, 386\u20137; Dickens' will: cited in Ackroyd, _Dickens_ , p. xiii.\n\n'of the London streets': Maple's: _ILN_ , 8 August 1857, p. 150; Prince P\u00fcckler-Muskau, _A Regency Visitor: The English Tour of Prince P\u00fcckler-Muskau, described in his letters, 1826\u20131828_ , trans. Sarah Austin, ed. E. M. Butler (London, Collins, 1957), p. 87; _Old Curiosity Shop_ , p. 606; St Paul's Churchyard: _ILN_ , 17 July 1852, p. 44; Seven Dials, ibid., 2 October 1852, p. 279; Old Broad Street: ibid., 21 January 1854, p. 63.\n\n'a routine hazard': Nead, _Victorian Babylon_ , pp. 93\u20134.\n\n'theatres burnt down': types of fires: Timbs, _Curiosities_ , vol. 1, p. 299; 1848 figures: _ILN_ , 6 January 1849, p. 7; the nine theatres are: 1841, Astley's; 1846, Garrick, Leman Street; 1849, Olympic; 1853, Islington Circus; 1846, Pavilion, Whitechapel, and Covent Garden; 1865, Surrey; 1866, Standard; 1867, Haymarket.\n\n'Snowballed the Beadle': workhouse men: G. V. Blackstone, _A History of the British Fire Service_ (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 106; Dickens, 'The Beadle \u2013 The Parish Engine ... ', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 20. The history of the Fire Engine Establishment that follows in the next four paragraphs, unless otherwise noted, is drawn from: Blackstone, ibid.; P. G. M. Dickson, _The Sun Insurance Office, 1710\u20131960: The History of Two and a Half Centuries of British Insurance_ (London, Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 129\u201330, and Knight (ed.), _London_ , vol. 4, pp. 178\u201388; Dickens to Miss Mary Boyle, 28 December 1860, _Letters_ , vol. 9, p. 354.\n\n'and 314 men': insurance company uniforms: Cunnington and Lucas, _Occupational Costume_ , p. 260.\n\n'warn oncoming traffic': Northern Lights footnote: this was claimed by Bartlett, _What I Saw in London_ , pp. 50\u201351; 'away scamper the policemen': [Richard H. Horne], 'The Fire Brigade of London', _Household Words_ , 7, 11 May 1850, pp. 145\u20137; horses' speed: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, p. 381; 'hi! yi!' and footnote: Massingham, _London Anthology_ , p. 170; speed modified by horses' capacity, and standing by driver: R. M. Ballantyne, _Fighting the Flames: A Tale of the London Fire Brigade_ (London, James Nisbet, 1868), pp. 30\u201331.\n\n'seven minutes': private roads: Hogg, _London as it is_ , p. 216; nineteenth-century speed of response: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 2, p. 381. 2006 response times: CLG, 'Review of Fire and Rescue Service response times' \u2013 Fire Research Series 1\/2009, www.communities.\u00adgov.uk\/documents\/\u00adfire\/pdf\/frsresponse\u00adtimes.pdf, accessed 16 February 2012.\n\n'the crowds back': metal signs: Weale, _London Exhibited in 1852_ , p. 112; volunteers and wages: Bartlett, _What I Saw in London_ , pp. 47\u20138; Bartlett translates the pay into US dollars, but many other sources bear him out; number per pump on land: Bennett, _London and Londoners_ , pp. 84\u20135, and Blackstone, _British Fire Service_ , p. 114; river engines: Bartlett, ibid., pp. 47\u20138; payment methods: Bartlett, ibid., p. 114, and Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 355.\n\n'well alight': Greville, _Diary_ , vol. 1, pp. 307\u20138; Houses of Parliament fire: Blackstone, _British Fire Service_ , pp. 118\u201319.\n\n'turn at the pumps': Carlyle: _Carlyle Letters_ , vol. 7, pp. 318\u201319; Haydon, _Memoirs_ , cited in Massingham, _London Anthology_ , p. 167; visitors to Covent Garden ruins: _ILN_ , 15 March 1856, p. 275; Dickens, to W. C. Macready, 22 March 1856, _Letters_ , vol. 8, p. 75; Prince of Wales: John A. Walker, 'The People's Hero: Millais's _The Rescue_ and the Image of the Fireman in Nineteenth-century Art and Media', _Apollo,_ December 2004, p. 59.\n\n'in small boats': H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan Bey, Journal, British Library, Add MS 37,448; Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 348; Battersea: _ILN_ , 20 March 1847, pp. 177\u20138.\n\n'in its disasters': journalists on the prowl: Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 353.\n\n1852: THE FUNERAL OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON\n\n'acclamation of all': the American tourist: Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 161; the coronation crowd: Colton, _Four Years in Great Britain_ , p. 71.\n\n'of Waterloo': shutters: Stewart, _Sketches of Society_ , vol. 1, p. 170; butler: Haydon, _Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon..._ , vol. 2, p. 275; attitude to his wife: Francis Bamford and the Duke of Wellington (eds), _Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, 1820\u20131832_ (London, Macmillan & Co., 1950), vol. 1, p. 169.\n\n'until 11 November': Disraeli, _Letters_ , vol. 6, p. 148, and I am grateful to Mary Millar for identifying the dramatis personae of this letter; the death, the lying-in-state and the preparations for the funeral that follow are all described from newspaper reports, especially the _Daily News_ , _Morning Chronicle_ , _Morning Post_ and _The Times_.\n\n'or its route': advertisement for _Illustrated London News_ supplement in _Morning Post_ , 23 September 1852; vergers of St Paul's and income of Wellington: _Daily News_ , 27 September 1852.\n\n'and other jewellery': these advertisements, among many others, can be found in _Morning Post_ , 23 and 25 September, _Morning Chronicle_ , 25 September and 16 October 1852.\n\n'glass, cutlery, &c.': Mr Thearle: _Morning Post_ , 16 October 1852; grocer: _Era_ , 24 October 1852; German advertisement: _Morning Post_ , 5 November 1852; Messrs Purssell: _Morning Chronicle_ , 10 November 1852.\n\n'for the funeral': St-Mary-le-Strand: _Daily News_ , 23 October 1852, and on many other days; St Clement Danes: _Era_ , 3 November 1852; charitable giving: _Illustrated London News_ , 25 December 1852, p. 555.\n\n'Mourning Habiliments': American overshoes: _Morning Post_ , 20 October 1852; Glenny's Irish stockings: _Morning Post_ , 10 November 1852; Moses and Son: _Examiner_ , 13 November 1852.\n\n'Duke of Wellington': special trains: _Daily News_ , 10 November 1852; _Era_ , 14 November 1852; Mount Alexandra: _Daily News_ , 13 November 1852.\n\n'one ... in mourning': _Morning Chronicle_ , 11 November 1852.\n\n'in the kingdom': 'Official Programme of the Public Funeral of the late Field-Marshal, Arthur Duke of Wellington, K. G., as Issued by the Authority of the Earl-Marshal (London, N. Pearce [1852], BL shelfmark 812.e.2).\n\n'two died': Belton, _Random Recollections_ , pp. 146\u20137; crush outside: _Morning Chronicle_ , 15 November 1852; _Daily News_ , 16 November.\n\n'worn in cloaks': mourning wear at St Paul's: 'Official Programme', and _Morning Post_ , 30 October 1852; mourning wear for observers: _Morning Post_ , 9 November 1852.\n\n'specially piped in': ' _Non sibi_ ': _ILN_ , 27 November 1852, p. 467; clubs and Temple Bar: _The Wellington News_ (London, E. Appleyard [1852], BL shelfmark 1764 E8).\n\n'constantly sweeping along': Cubitt: _Morning Post_ , 19 October 1852; lighting: _Standard_ , 27 October 1852; Greville, _Diary_ , 16 November 1852, vol. 2, p. 346.\n\n'barriers came down at eight': general organization: 'Police Regulations. Funeral of the late Field Marshal, Arthur Duke of Wellington, K. G., November 18, 1852' (London, Metropolitan Police Office, 1852, BL shelfmark 1309 l.14, f.117); Beale, _Recollections_ , p. 26.\n\n'for him it carried': from this paragraph, unless otherwise noted, the details come from _The Wellington News_ ; description of catafalque: 'Official Programme' with additions from printed images; the foreign correspondent: in the _Independence Belge_ , reprinted in the _Illustrated London News_ , 27 November 1852, p. 467.\n\n'rest of the route': falling man: Belton, _Random Recollections_ , p. 147; Chelsea Pensioners: 'The Order of Proceeding in the Public Funeral of the Late Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington ... ' ([n.p.] 1852, BL shelfmark 813.cc44).\n\n'the minute guns': testing the catafalque: _Illustrated London News_ , 13 November 1852, p. 399.\n\n'Haynau was assaulted': footnote on assault: _The Times_ , 5 September 1850, p. 4; Garibaldi and the Barclay's brewers: _The Times_ , 2 June 1932, p. 15.\n\n'bones for evermore': 'Ode on the Duke of Wellington', Alfred, Lord Tennyson, _The Poems of Tennyson_ , ed. Christopher Ricks (London, Longman, 1969), pp. 1007\u201317.\n\n13. NIGHT ENTERTAINMENT\n\n'ran these activities': animal baiting in Westminster: Richardson, _Recollections_ , vol. 1, pp. 6, 9. The flyleaf of the copy in the British Library is inscribed 'Son of the great [illegible] actor' and then 'Eton school list'. The Eton School Lists show a John Richardson attending _c_.1805\u20138, describing him as the 'son of the great Lottery contractor'. If they are the same person, this dates the baiting arenas to _c._ 1810s. The biographical information of the book's inscription and the Eton School List otherwise seem incompatible. The 'great' showman John Richardson had no known children; the keeper of the lottery office in the eighteenth century was at one point a man named Richardson. (If this Revd John Richardson is his son, he was also a cousin of Beau Brummel.) I am grateful to Penny Hatfield, Eton College Archivist, for her help; Notebook of Sir John Silvester, British Library, Egerton 3710, ff. 3\u20134, 9, 29.\n\n'of animal baiting': Badcock and Rowlandson, _Real Life in London_ , vol. 1, pp. 596\u20137; monkey fight: Egan, _Life in London_ , p. 222.\n\n'surrounding the city': _The Times_ , 28 March 1822, p. 1; police court: _ILN_ , 29 April 1865, p. 391, is one account among many; ratting: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 7; the report is used almost verbatim by A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , pp. 149ff., which I have cited here; dogfights: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 15, Smith, _Little World of London_ , p. 52.\n\n'in the morning': _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 651; Crockford's: Donald A. Low, _The Regency Underworld_ (Stroud, Sutton, 1999), pp. 145\u20136, and Anita McConnell, 'Crockford, William', _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008 [http:\u00ad\/\/www.oxforddnb.\u00adcom.ezproxy.london\u00adlibrary.co.uk\/\u00adview\/article\u00ad\/6713, accessed 16 May 2011].\n\n'matter-of-fact': _Hints to Men about Town_ , by 'The Old Medical Student' (Liverpool, George Davis, 1840), pp. 35, 42.\n\n'not the drinking': _The Servant Girl in London_ , pp. 14\u201317.\n\n'domestic furnishings': model pub: Loudon, _An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture_ , pp. 686\u20137.\n\n'of public-houses': 'Misplaced Attachment of Mr John Dounce', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 284\u20136; suburban building and pubs: Mark Girouard, _Victorian Pubs_ (London, Studio Vista, 1975), p. 38; A. Mayhew, _Paved with Gold_ , p. 41.\n\n'so till midnight': Select Committee: Parliamentary Papers, 1834, pp. 8, 121.\n\n'not by much': 'Gin-shops', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 217\u201318; temperance reformer in East End: cited in Brian Harrison, 'Pubs', in Dyos and Wolff, _Victorian City_ , vol. 1, p. 170.\n\n'very little alcohol': 'Gin-shops', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 217\u201318.\n\n'of oblivion': discomfort of gin palaces: John Fisher Murray, 'Physiology of London Life', _London Journal_ , 16 October 1847, p. 103; Sala, _Gaslight and Daylight_ , p. 72.\n\n'soon enrolled': sporting pubs: Archer, _The Pauper, the Thief_ , p. 64; Shakespeare club: Tomalin, _Charles Dickens_ , p. 90.\n\n'to Harmonics': Tinkers' Arms: Greenwood, _Wilds of London_ , pp. 25\u20136; costermongers' dances: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 12; discussion groups: Adams, _Memoirs of a Social Atom_ , vol. 2, p. 315 and _London by Night, or, The Bachelor's..._ , pp. 42\u20133.\n\n'another glee': _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 78\u20139.\n\n'and spittoons': _Oliver Twist_ , p. 207; _Bleak House_ , p. 196; 'forty pairs of lungs': Archer, _The Pauper, the Thief_ , p. 101; _Little Dorrit_ , p. 128; footnote: Girouard, _Victorian Pubs_ , p. 43.\n\n'Sweet Betsy Ogle': _Pickwick Papers_ , p. 272; _Nicholas Nickleby_ , p. 724; shoemaker: Brown, _Sixty Years' Gleanings_ , p. 233; Collier, _An Old Man's Diary_ , vol. 2, pp. 12\u201314.\n\n'drunk on the stairs': _Old Curiosity Shop_ , p. 159; _Great Expectations_ , p. 273.\n\n'give your orders': 'some good singing': _Leigh's New Picture_ (1839 edn), p. 348; waiters: Paul Prendergast, 'The Waiter', in Meadows, _Heads of the People_ , vol. 2, p. 223.\n\n'girls and boys': Evans's: Hollingshead, _My Lifetime_ , vol. 1, pp. 154\u20135, Masson, _Memories_ , p. 149, Girouard, _Victorian Pubs_ , p. 46, and Hayward, _Days of Dickens_ , p. 112; footnote on Hogarth: Hollingshead, ibid.; Thackeray, _The History of Pendennis_ (Leipzig, Bernh. Tauchnitz, 1849), vol. 2, p. 136; Sam Hall: Masson, _Memories_ , p. 153; 'equivocal': Vizetelly, _Glances Back_ , vol. 1, p. 171; _virginibus puerisque_ : Masson, _Memories_ , p. 153.\n\n'they include': the toasts and songs come from the following, all anonymous: _The Cockchafer. A Choice Selection of Flash, Frisky, and Funny Songs ... Adapted for Gentlemen Only ..._ (London, W. West [?1865]), _The Cuckold's Nest, of Choice, Flash, Smutty and Delicious Songs ... Adapted for Gentlemen Only_ (London, W. West [?1865]), _The Flash Chaunter ... now singing at Offley's, Cider Cellers_ [sic] _, Coal Hole, &c ... ._ (London, W. West [?1865]), _The Nobby Songster, A Prime Selection as now Singing at Offleys Cider Cellar: Coal Hole &c ... _ (London, W. West [?1842]), _The Rambler's Flash Songster ... now singing at Offley's, Cider Cellars, Coal Hole, &c ... ._ (London, W. West [?1865]). The publication dates are those suggested by the British Library catalogue. However, the publisher William West died in 1854, by which time he was eighty-four, and had been retired for some years. These British Library copies may be reprints, or the dates may be incorrect. Edward Cray, Patrick Spedding and Paul Watt, editors of the _Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period_ (London, Pickering and Chatto, 2011), have dated _The Cockchafer_ to _c._ 1836, _The Cuckold's Nest_ to _c._ 1837, _The Flash Chaunter_ to _c._ 1834, _The Nobby Songster_ to _c._ 1842, and _The Rambler's Flash Songster_ to _c._ 1838. I am grateful to them for their generosity in offering advice on these songbooks, and to Patrick Spedding and Edward Cray for allowing me to read their introductions and notes in manuscript; D. E. Latan\u00e9 identified John Rhodes for me, and Mary Millar Joe the Stunner. I am grateful to them both; footnote on Waterford: K. D. Reynolds, 'Beresford, Henry de la Poer, third marquess of Waterford', _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford University Press, 2004 [http:\/\/www\u00ad.oxforddnb.com.\u00adezproxy.london\u00adlibrary.co.uk\u00ad\/view\/article\/\u00ad56726, accessed 17 May 2011].\n\n'leering opportunities': Coal Hole address: _Every Night Book; or, Life After Dark_ , 'by the author of \"The Cigar\"' (London, T. Richardson, 1828), p. 55; Thackeray: _The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family_ (London, Bradbury and Evans, 1854), p. 6; admission and programme: Vizetelly, _Glances Back_ , vol. 1, p. 169; _poses plastiques_ : _London by Night: The Bachelor's..._ , p. 121, and Greenwood, _Wilds of London_ , p. 105.\n\n'natal day': Barty-King, _New Flame_ , p. 28.\n\n'even brilliant': Wheaton, _Journal of a Residence_ , p. 222.\n\n'Bromley, Kent': Vittoria: Allen, _History and Antiquities of London_ , vol. 2, p. 187; 1814 celebrations: Pardon, _Routledge's Popular Guide_ , pp. 106\u20137, O'Dea, _Social History of Lighting_ , p. 47; Bromley: _ILN_ , 4 August 1865, p. 142.\n\n'cock of the walk': Joseph Ballard, _England in 1815, as seen by a Young Boston Merchant..._ , ed. J. G. Crocker (Cambridge, MA, Riverside, 1913), pp. 115\u201317.\n\n'the Citty': William IV: Colton, _Four Years in Great Britain_ , p. 77; Tayler, _Diary of William Tayler_ , pp. 48, 71.\n\n'nothing further': Prince of Wales's birth: _ILN_ , 12 November 1842, p. 423; Prince Albert's birthday: ibid., 18 August 1847, p. 139; Prince of Wales' eighteenth birthday: ibid., 12 November 1849, p. 464; footnote: Dickens to de Cerjat, 16 March 1862, _Letters_ , vol. 10, pp. 64\u20135; the queen: _ILN_ , 4 June 1870, p. 571.\n\n'of laurel, scrolls': _ILN_ , 28 May 1853, p. 415.\n\n'coloured lights': this paragraph and the next: _ILN_ , 14 May 1863, p. 263, 4 April 1863, p. 374.\n\n'TO HER MAJESTY': Wyon, Journal, British Library Add MS 59,617; _ILN_ , 31 May 1856, p. 579; bug-destroyers: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 3, p. 37.\n\n'six in the evening': _ILN_ , 15 September 1855, p. 323.\n\n'dirt and discomfort': 'The Horrors of Peace', _The Times_ , 21 May 1856, p. 5.\n\n14. STREET VIOLENCE\n\n'be carried out': 'The Great Winglebury Duel', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 463\u201382; Putney Heath duel: _ILN_ , 23 July 1842; Camden Town duel: ibid., 8 July 1843, p. 30, 22 July 1843, p. 55, 21 July 1847, p. 114.\n\n'harshly punished': _ILN_ , 10 July 1869, p. 27; 31 July 1869, p. 103, 6 November 1869, p. 451; victualler: _ILN_ , 9 January 1869, p. 27.\n\n'are Satisfied': footnote: the Riot Act is, formally, 1 Geo. I St.2. c.5.\n\n'require hospitalization': there are few reports on these street brawls, which are mentioned in the newspapers only in passing, if at all. A good modern study is Rob Sindall, _Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century: Media Panic or Real Danger?_ (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1990); this account draws from Allen, _History and Antiquities of London_ , vol. 5, p. 59.\n\n'semi-starving men': Spitalfields gang: Allen, ibid., vol. 5, p. 90, weavers: ibid. vol. 4, pp. 111\u201312.\n\n'resorting to killing': Allen, ibid., vol. 4, pp. 129\u201330, reports the incident, but the interpretation of it, as well as the role of police, is my own.\n\n'incipient trouble': Allen, ibid., vol. 5, pp. 129\u201330.\n\n'the previous decade': Naples' diary: cited in Durey, _Return of the Plague_ , pp. 172\u20133.\n\n'padroll with cutlashes': assaults on medical personnel: Durey, ibid., pp. 162\u20133; Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 146; footnote with the biographical information on Sala's mother: P. D. Edwards, 'Sala, George Augustus', _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2005 [http:\/\/\u00adwww.oxforddnb\u00ad.com.ezproxy.london\u00adlibrary.co.uk\/\u00adview\/article\/\u00ad24526, accessed 28 February 2011].\n\n'after the event': Beale, _Recollections_ , pp. 9\u201310; the number of Chartists on Kennington Common is disputed. I have followed David Goodway, _London Chartism, 1838\u20131840_ (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 76.\n\n'see a disturbance': the Sabbatarian riots in this and the next paragraph: _ILN_ , 30 June 1855, pp. 646\u20137, and then passim, to 27 July 1855; Wyon, Journal, British Library, Add MS 59,617.\n\n'executive occasionally follows': _The Times_ , 27 June 1855, p. 8, 2 July 1855, p. 8; Dickens, _Nicholas Nickleby_ , p. 71.\n\n'for Co. Stafford': Notebooks of John Silvester, British Library, Add MSS 47,466 and Egerton MS 3710, passim.\n\n' _Civil Service Gazette_ ': Dickens, _Oliver Twist_ , pp. 79\u201380, 102\u20133; biographical information on Laing: _Oliver Twist_ , p. 499n.; arrest of ecclesiastical agent: _ILN_ , 28 July 1855, p. 99.\n\n'at the doors': Select Committee on the Police, 1816, in Low, _Regency Underworld_ , p. 67.\n\n'income of \u00a310,000': 1810s: Brown, _Sixty Years Gleanings_ , pp. 248\u20139; Jane Welsh Carlyle to John Carlyle, 31 January 1850, _Carlyle Letters_ , vol. 25, pp. 15\u201317; Thomas Carlyle to Jean Carlyle Aitken, 23 January 1851, ibid., vol. 26, p. 2204.\n\n'tools of their trades': Dickens, _Little Dorrit_ , p. 208; the sixteen-year-old: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 413; pickpocket: Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 1, p. 411; \u00a3100 a year: _Leigh's New Picture_ (1839 edn), p. 81; Notebook of John Silvester: British Library, Egerton MS 3710.\n\n'marine-store dealers': 'My lad': Derby, _Two Months Abroad_ , p. 12; pushing at doors: _Bleak House_ , p. 499; river thefts: 'Down with the Tide', _Household Words_ , 5 February 1853, _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3, pp. 119\u201321.\n\n'countries on the earth': Dickens, _A Tale of Two Cities_ , ed. George Woodcock (first published 1859; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985), p. 84; 'those good old customs': Dickens, _American Notes_ (New York, Modern Library, 1996), p. 68.\n\n'physical danger: Vizetelly, _Glances Back_ , vol. 1, pp. 9\u201310.\n\n'them with force': the summary and quotations from the White Swan case in this paragraph and the next are from Rictor Norton, _Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700\u20131830_ (London, GMP Publishers, 1992), pp. 187\u201390; footnote on other locations of molly-houses: [Robert Holloway], _The Phoenixof Sodom ... the Gambols Practised by the Ancient Letchers of ... The Vere St Coterie_ (London, J. Cook [1813]), p. 14.\n\n'food and drink': the shocked MPs: _The Times_ , 7 April 1815, p. 3; Paine's publisher: V. A. C. Gatrell, _The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770\u20131868_ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 89n.\n\n'had last been used': the forger: Vizetelly, _Glances Back_ , vol. 1, p. 10; the fishmonger: _The Times_ , 5 June 1830, p. 6.\n\n'of Retribution': prison nicknames appear in both Chesterton, _Revelations of Prison Life_ , p. 13, and Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 82. Where they differ, I have relied on Chesterton, who was a prison governor, rather than Mayhew and Binny, who were journalists; the wall and door: Archer, _The Pauper, the Thief_ , p. 173; the architectural historian is John Summerson, _The Microcosm of London_ : [reproductions of pictures] by T. Rowlandson and A. C. Pugin (London, Penguin, 1943), p. 12.\n\n'closer to events': ' _gestorben_ ': Mayhew and Binny, _The Criminal Prisons_ , p. 82, while Partridge, _A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English_ (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961) suggests the Romany source. The OED is unhelpful: 'origins unknown'.\n\n'with the demons': executions at Newgate: Dickens, _Nicholas Nickleby_ , pp. 89\u201390; Dickens at Courvoisier's execution: cited in Philip Collins, _Dickens and Crime_ (3rd edn, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1994), pp. 224\u20135.\n\n'and their wives': Cited in Gatrell, _The Hanging Tree_ , pp. 62\u20134.\n\n'deaths by overcrowding': time between conviction and execution: Martin J. Wiener, 'Judges v. Jurors: Courtroom Tensions in Murder Trials and the Law of Criminal Responsibility in Nineteenth-century England', _Law and History Review_ , 17: 3 (1999), pp. 467\u2013506.\n\n'rooftop vantage point': Greenacre: Camden Pelham [pseud.], _The_ New _Chronicles of Crimes, or, The Newgate Calendar_ (London, Reeves & Turner, 1886), vol. 2, p. 446; Fagin in the condemned cell: _Oliver Twist_ , p. 445; footnote on capital crimes: 'unnatural offences', incorporating both sodomy and bestiality, was regulated by the Buggery Act of 1533 until 1861, when it was replaced by the Offences against the Person Act of 1861. The Act did not include incest, which was dealt with by the ecclesiastical rather than the criminal courts until 1908. As late as 1908 there was some discussion about the undesirability of criminalizing such acts on the interesting grounds that doing so might give people ideas. My thanks to Dr Sharon Bickle for this helpful summary; Dickens' Jewish relatives: Michael Allen, _Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory_ , p. 36; Dickens' rooftop: Dickens to John Leech, 12 November 1849, _Letters_ , vol. 5, p. 643.\n\n'come to be hung': _Oliver Twist_ , pp. 15, 52.\n\n'crown a head': rates of executions, Philip Horne, _Oliver Twist_ , pp. xv\u2013xvi; analysis of reduction in numbers hanged: Collins, _Dickens and Crime_ , p. 4; rarity increasing audiences: Thomas W. Laqueur, 'Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions, 1604\u20131868', in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James M. Rosenheim (eds), _The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone_ (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 308; Punch and Judy: cited in Gatrell, _The Hanging Tree_ , p. 121; William Thackeray, 'Going to See a Man Hanged', _Fraser's Magazine_ , 22: 128 (August 1840), pp. 150\u201358; Henry Angelo, _Reminiscences of Henry Angelo ..._ (London, Kegan, Paul & Co., 1904), vol. 2, p. 139.\n\n'Oh Susannah': Dickens, letter to the editor, _Daily News_ , 28 February 1846, p. 6.\n\n'working-class onlookers': Thackeray, 'Going to See a Man Hanged'; _Flowery Land_ pirates: Shaw, _London in the Sixties_ , p. 130.\n\n'promote to visitors': _Leigh's New Picture_ (1819 edn), p. 252, (1839 edn), p. 209.\n\n'descended on the scene': The details of the Clerkenwell bombing, and the execution of Michael Barrett in this paragraph and the next two: Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, _The Fenians in England, 1865\u20131872: A Sense of Insecurity_ (London, John Calder, 1982), K. R. M. Short, _The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain_ (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1979), _Daily News_ , 14, 16 and 25 December 1867, 27 May 1868; _Morning Post_ , 16 December 1867; special constables: _Daily News_ , 25 December 1867; _Era_ , 29 December 1867.\n\n'ancestral landmarks': 'On an Amateur Beat', _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 382.\n\n15. THE RED-LIT STREETS TO DEATH\n\n'their unknowability': _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , p. 517; 'How utterly lost': Horwitz, _Brushwood Picked_ , pp. 21\u20132; _A Tale of Two Cities_ , p. 44.\n\n'prostitution at all': the modern historian in the footnote is Judith R. Walkowitz, _Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State_ (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 14; Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 4, p. 255. Although the author here is Hemyng, see p. 397, I will continue to refer to 'Mayhew' in these notes, for bibliographical clarity.\n\n'the rising population': from 50,000 to 80,000: Michael Mason, _The Making of Victorian Sexuality_ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 76\u20138, although the suggestion as to how the 80,000 figure was achieved is my own.\n\n'females in Britain': this and the next three paragraphs: William Acton, _Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social, & Sanitary Aspects_ (London, John Churchill, 1857), p. 18; Michael Ryan, _Prostitution in London, with a comparative View of that of Paris and New York ..._ (London, H. Bailliere, 1839), pp. 176\u20137.\n\n'precise figure': 'robbery and violence': Acton, _Prostitution_ , p. 95; Mayhew, _London Labour_ , vol. 4, p. 224; Metropolitan police commissioner: Philpotts, _Companion to Little Dorrit_ , p. 200; 1841 figures: Acton, p. 17.\n\n'in their characters': Lynda Nead, _Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain_ (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp. 103\u20134.\n\n'Mayhew's fourth volume': I am grateful to Eileen Curran, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Priti Joshi and Scott Rogers for their help in piecing together the few scraps of evidence that remain relating to these men, and to Penny Hatfield, Eton College Archivist, for confirming Bracebridge Hemyng's time at Eton (which he attended as the less exotically named Samuel Bracebridge Heming).\n\n'all that we have': Hanger: Stuart Reid, 'Hanger, George, fourth Baron Coleraine', _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008 [http:\/\/\u00adwww.oxforddnb.\u00adcom.ezproxy.london\u00adlibrary.co.\u00aduk\/view\/\u00adarticle\/12195, accessed 18 May 2011]; caricatures of Hanger pimping for the Prince of Wales: Elizabeth Cooke, _The Damnation of John Donellan: A Mysterious Case ofDeath_ (London, Profile, 2011), p. 64; the citation in Mayhew, _London Labour_ , is at vol. 4, p. 215.\n\n'cannot be mistaken': Acton, _Prostitution_ , p. 18; 'The Pawnbroker's Shop', _Sketches by Boz_ , pp. 228\u20139.\n\n'of years later': Walkowitz, _Prostitution_ , pp. 15\u201319.\n\n'girls under sixteen': Ryan _, Prostitution in London_ , pp. 119, 125\u20139, 139\u201341; footnote on the felony\/misdemeanour distinction: Sindall, _Street Violence,_ p. 21; venereal hospital figures: Walkowitz _, Prostitution_ , p. 17.\n\n'she comes home': sixteen-year-old _: Mayhew, London Labour,_ vol. 1, p. 413 _._\n\n'whores in that way': Hudson, _Munby_ , pp. 40\u201341.\n\n'over their shoulders': bonnets and shawls: Walkowitz, _Prostitution_ , p. 26; Boulton and Park: Morris B. Kaplan, '\"Men in Petticoats\": Border Crossings in the Queer Case of Mr. Boulton and Mr. Park', in Pamela Gilbert (ed.), _Imagined London_ (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 53\u20134.\n\n'full of women': 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ , vol. 2, p. 94; _Yokel's Preceptor: or, More Sprees in London! Being a ... Show-up of All the Rigs and Doings of the Flash Cribs in This Great Metropolis ..._ (London, H. Smith [?1855]), p. 3.\n\n'for a bus': Paterfamilias' letter: _The Times_ , 7 January 1862; responses on subsequent days; 'Rape of the Glances', _Saturday Review_ , 1 February 1862, pp. 124\u20135; lithograph: [C. J. Culliford], 'Scene in Regent Street', _c._ 1865, in Nead, _Victorian Babylon_ , p. 63.\n\n'girls these were': _Great Expectations_ , p. 273; the historian who makes the suggestion is Michael Slater, 'The Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851', in Don Richard Cox (ed.), _Sexuality and Victorian Literature_ (Knoxville, TN, University of Tennessee Press, 1984), p. 139; pretty girls: 'Home Sweet Home', _All the Year Round_ , 15, 7 April 1866, p. 303.\n\n'with season tickets': Egan, _Life in London_ , pp. 173, 211, 214; H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan Bey, Journal, British Library, Add MSS 37,448; MacKenzie, _The American in England_ , vol. 1, p. 211.\n\n'dirty book': The three British Library volumes are: _The New Swell's Night Guide to the Bowers of Venus ..._ (London, J. Paul [?1840]), _The Swell's Night Guide Through the Metropolis_ , 'by the Hon. F. L. G.' (London, 'printed for the author, for private circulation, by Roger Funnyman', [?1841]), and _The Swell's Night Guide Through the Metropolis, or, A Peep through the Great Metropolis..._ , 'by Thelord [sic] Chief Baron' [which suggests Renton Nicholson] ([place and publisher cut away], [?1846]). The dates of the first two are the suggestions of the British Library catalogue; the last has '1846' written on its flyleaf. Neither Copac nor WorldCat lists a copy of _The Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851_ ; my information and citations come from Slater, 'The Bachelor's Pocket Book for 1851'. In this essay Slater does not appear to be aware of the _Swell's Guides_ , so it is only from the material that he cites that I can see the overlap\/copying of material. There may of course be much more, or none apart from the few citations; _Yokel's Preceptor_ , pp. 7\u20139.\n\n'from backstage': _The New Swell's Night Guide_ , 'Saloons of the Theatres' [no page]; 'Theatrical Examiner', _Examiner_ , 26 July 1840, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 2, p. 42; Eagle Tavern: in Tracy C. Davis, _Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture_ (London, Routledge, 1991), p. 81; Alhambra: Kirwan, _Palace and Hovel_ , pp. 138\u20139, 143.\n\n'commercial basis': Dickens writing a cheque for \u00a350: Tomalin, _Charles Dickens_ , p. 293, although she has no doubt that the cheque is for Nelly, while it seems to me just as likely to have been for the manager, to subsidize her salary; _The New Swell's Night Guide_.\n\n'closed at one': Dickens to Lord Lyttelton, 16 August 1855, _Letters_ , vol. 7, p. 691; Argyle Rooms: Henry H. Wellbeloved, _London Lions, for Country Cousins and Friends about Town ..._ (London, William Charlton Wright, 1827), p. 31; 'Anonyma', _London by Night_ (1862), pp. 34, 37, 40, 42; decor: Kirwan, _Palace and Hovel_ , pp. 147\u20139.\n\n'sentimental ballads': Holborn Casino: _London by Night_ , pp. 56, 59; Ratcliffe Highway saloon: Archer, _The Pauper, the Thief_ , p. 117.\n\n'on that path': Caldwell's: Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 22; dancing master's assemblies: _London by Night, the Bachelor's..._ , pp. 1\u20135, gives one such list; Caldwell's reputation: Hayward, _Days of Dickens_ , pp. 122\u20133.\n\n'steak and oysters': 1830s' finish: Tristan, _London Journal_ , pp. 75\u20137; the Finish, James Street: Vizetelly, _Glances Back_ , vol. 1, p. 170; Barnes's: Kirwan, _Palace and Hovel_ , p. 150.\n\n'Grosvenor Square': streetwalking locations: in 1818, _The London Guide, and Stranger's Safeguard..._ , 'by a Gentleman' (London, Bumpus, 1818), p. 134; other locations: Mason, _The Making of Victorian Sexuality_ , p. 89; footnote on the Haymarket: Trollope, _What I Remember_ , p. 55; _Dombey and Son_ , p. 514.\n\n'no longer exists': Tristan, _London Journal_ , pp. 74\u20135; footnote: Flora Tristan uses Ryan, p. 91, and Colquhoun's statistics, p. 79; 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ , vol. 1, p. 146; 1841 and 1861 censuses: White, _London in the Nineteenth Century_ , pp. 295ff.\n\n'roads were lighter': walking to the West End: Tristan, _London Journal_ , p. 75; Haymarket hours: Davis, _Actresses as Working Women_ , pp. 144\u20135; Regent Street hours: 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ , vol. 1, p. 345; western suburbs: ibid., vol. 1, p. 143.\n\n'a minor clerk': police returns: Walkowitz, _Prostitution_ , p. 23; Mary: 'Walter', ibid., vol. 1, pp. 369, 372.\n\n'or their communities': Whitechapel: Hollingshead, _Ragged London_ , p. 49; sailors' wives: Walkowitz, ibid., p. 29.\n\n'accommodation house': 'a few shillings': 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ , vol. 1, p. 173; economics: ibid., vol. 1, p. 145; footnote on streetwalkers' income: the room and dress are costed by Walter, but the remaining figures are my own, based on the working-class budgets outlined in my _The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed_ (London, HarperCollins, 2003), passim.\n\n'for my money': light: 'F. L. G.', _The Swell's Night Guide_ , 'Accommodation Houses' [no page]; Walter's first accommodation house: _My Secret Life_ , vol. 1, p. 72; footnote: ibid., vol. 2, p. 124; Gracechurch Street: Slater, 'The Bachelor's Pocket Book', p. 131; short visit: 'Walter', ibid., vol. 1, p. 75.\n\n'on p. 360': Francis Place and reasons for improvement: Mason, _Making of Victorian Sexuality_ , p. 28; cabman: 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ , vol. 2, p. 56; Titchfield Street: 'Walter', _My Secret Life_ , vol. 1, p. 263 and passim; Mother H: 'The Lord Chief Baron' _, The Swell's Night Guide_ , p. 33.\n\n'sharing living expenses': Walkowitz, _Prostitution_ , p. 24.\n\n'generally known here': 'F. L. G.', _The Swell's Night Guide_ , pp. 42\u20133, NB, these passages, and the names and addresses of several introducing houses, reappear verbatim in 'The Bachelor's Pocket Book', cited by Michael Slater, p. 137.\n\n'at Marble Arch': Slater, 'The Bachelor's Pocket Book', p. 133.\n\n'frequently heard': Nicholson, _Autobiography of a Fast Man_ , p. 96.\n\n'per cent in theatres': location and percentage of offences: H. G. Cocks, _Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century_ (London, I. B. Tauris, 2003), p. 29. For this section I am indebted to Dr Alison Hannegan for providing me with many helpful references, and to Peter Parker for guiding me to Dr Hannegan in the first instance.\n\n'the owners arrested': Rictor Norton is the acknowledged expert in this area. David Robertson: Rictor Norton, 'The Vere Street Coterie', The Gay Subculture in Georgian England. Updated 7 August 2009 , accessed 21 May 2011; the White Hart: Norton, _Mother Clap's Molly House_ , pp. 187\u201390, [Anon.], _Religion and Morality Vindicated ... or, an Account of the Life and Character of John Church, the Obelisk Preacher, who was formerly a frequenter of Vere-street_ (second edn, London R. Bell, [?1813]), and Holloway, _The Phoenix of Sodom_ , passim.\n\n'and sex-workers': Cocks, _Nameless Offences_ , p. 68; soldier in court: Holloway, _The Phoenix of Sodom_ , p. 29; _The Times_ , 16 August 1825, p. 3; Vagrancy Act: Cocks, _Nameless Offences_ , p. 56.\n\n'such roaring boys': Edward Leeves, _Leaves from a Victorian Diary_ , intro. by John Sparrow (London, Secker & Warburg, 1985), passim.\n\n'author's preconceptions': _Yokel's Preceptor_ , pp. 5\u20137.\n\n'or anyone else': Hudson, _Munby_ , p. 188; Druid's Hall dances: Charles Upchurch, _Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform_ (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009), p. 75.\n\n'were rare': Boulton and Park in this paragraph and the next: Kaplan, '\"Men in Petticoats\"', pp. 45\u201368, and Cocks, _Nameless Offences_ , pp. 105ff. The fashion information is from _The Times_ , 30 April 1870, p. 11; 'A Visit to Newgate', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 244.\n\n'ended her life': Tristan, _London Journal_ , p. 79; Ryan and Tait: Nead, _Myths of Sexuality_ , pp. 145ff.; Acton, _Prostitution_ , p. 38; 'Anonyma', _London by Night_ , p. 176.\n\n'drown themselves': incidence of suicide and gender, and engraving: L. J. Nicoletti, 'Morbid Topographies: Placing Suicide in Victorian London', in Lawrence Phillips, (ed.), _A Mighty Mass of Brick and Smoke: Victorian and Edwardian Representations of London_ (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2007), pp. 10\u201312; Sala, _Twice Round the Clock_ , p. 70.\n\n'leap from another': 'The man who loves': 'The Millennium', _Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine_ , 153: 25 (June 1829), p. 703; Dickens, 'The Drunkard's Death', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 565; 'English Bridge of Sighs': Charles Mackay, 'Rambles Among the Rivers, no. 1: The Thames and its Tributaries', _Bentley's Miscellany_ , April 1839, p. 378.\n\n'over the ground': Hood: 'The Bridge of Sighs', _The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood_ (NY, James Miller, 1867), vol. 1, pp. 151\u20134; details of Mary Furley: _The Times_ , 1 April 1844, p. 7; 'Some Recollections of Mortality', _All the Year Round_ , 16 May 1863, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 224.\n\n'the morning mist': _Oliver Twist_ , p. 389; _David Copperfield_ , pp. 317, 625ff.; _Little Dorrit_ , p. 217.\n\n'all he cared': Dickens, _Barnaby Rudge_ , ed. Gordon Spence (first published 1841; Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986), p. 153.\n\n'of the Monument': suicides from the Monument: Nicoletti, 'Morbid Topographies', pp. 13\u201314; Bartlett, _What I Saw in London_ , pp. 182\u20133.\n\n'for an end': 'Wapping Workhouse', _All the Year Round_ , 18 February 1860, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 44.\n\n'he was alive': Charles Lamb, cited in Baron (ed.), _London 1066\u20131914_ , p. 25; _Little Dorrit_ , p. 67; Henry Wallis, _Death of Chatterton_ , is in the Tate; 'Thoughts about People', _Sketches by Boz_ , p. 251.\n\n'one and the same': 'Chambers', _All the Year Round_ , 18 August 1860, in _Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4, p. 164.\n\n'dark with death': _Our Mutual Friend_ , p. 77; _Edwin Drood_ , p. 258; 'The surface': _Carlton Chronicle_ , 40, 8 April 1837, p. 635.\n\n'their usual uproar: _Little Dorrit_ , p. 895.\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nWorks by Dickens\n\nFICTION\n\n_Barnaby Rudge,_ ed. Gordon Spence (first published 1841; Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1986)\n\n_Bleak House_ , ed. Norman Page (first published 1852\u20133; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985)\n\n_The Christmas Books_ , vol. 1: 'A Christmas Carol' and 'The Chimes', ed. Michael Slater (first published 1843, 1844; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985)\n\n_David Copperfield_ , ed. Jeremy Tambling (first published 1849\u201350; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996)\n\n_Dombey and Son_ , ed. Peter Fairclough, intro. Raymond Williams (first published 1846\u20138; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985)\n\n_Great Expectations_ , ed. Charlotte Mitchell, intro. David Trotter (first published 1860\u201361; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996)\n\n_The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit_ , ed. P. N. Furbank (first published 1843\u20134; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986)\n\n_Little Dorrit_ , ed. John Holloway (first published 1855\u20137; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985)\n\n_The Mystery of Edwin Drood_ , ed. Arthur Cox (first published 1870; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1993)\n\n_Nicholas Nickleby_ , ed. Michael Slater (first published 1838\u20139; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1978)\n\n_The Old Curiosity Shop_ , ed. Angus Easson (first published 1840\u201341; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985)\n\n_Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy's Progress_ , ed. Philip Horne (first published 1837\u20138; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2002)\n\n_Our Mutual Friend_ , ed. Adrian Poole (first published 1864\u20135; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997)\n\n_The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club_ , ed. Mark Wormald (first published 1836\u20137; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1999)\n\n_A Tale of Two Cities_ , ed. George Woodcock (first published 1859; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985)\n\nNON-FICTION\n\n_American Notes_ (first published 1842; New York, Modern Library, 1996)\n\n_Charles Dickens' Uncollected Writings from Household Words, 1850\u201359_ , ed. Harry Stone, 2 vols (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1968)\n\n_The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 2: _The Amusements of the People and Other Papers_ , ed. Michael Slater (London, J. M. Dent, 1996)\n\n_The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 3: _'Gone Astray' and Other Papers_ , ed. Michael Slater (London, J. M. Dent, 1998)\n\n_The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism_ , vol. 4: _The Uncommercial Traveller and Other Papers_ , ed. Michael Slater and John Drew (London, J. M. Dent, 2000)\n\n_The Letters of Charles Dickens. The Pilgrim Edition_ , ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford, Clarendon, 1965\u2013 )\n\n_Sketches by Boz_ , ed. Dennis Walder (first published 1836\u20139; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995)\n\nPrimary Sources\n\nAckermann, R., _Microcosm of London_ , 3 vols (London, Ackermann's Repository of Arts [1808\u201310])\n\nActon, William, _Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social, & Sanitary Aspects_ (London, John Churchill, 1857)\n\nAdams, W. 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Beckwith, 1832)\n\n'Anonyma', _London by Night,_ 'by the author of 'Skittles' [BL suggests W. S. Hayward] (London, William Oliver [?1862])\n\n'Anonyma, Companion to', _Skittles: A Biography of a Fascinating Woman_ (London, George Vickers, 1864)\n\nApperson, G. L., _Bygone London Life_ (London, Elliot Stock, 1903)\n\nArcher, Thomas, _The Pauper, the Thief, and the Convict: Sketches of Some of their Homes, Haunts, and Habits_ (London, Groombridge and Sons, 1865)\n\n[Badcock, Jonathan, and Thomas Rowlandson], _Real Life in London, or, The Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho...,_ 2 vols (London, Jones & Co., 1821)\n\nBagehot, Walter, 'Charles Dickens', in _The Works and Life of Walter Bagehot_ , ed. Mrs Russell Barrington, vol. 3 (London, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1915)\n\nBallantyne, Michael, _Fighting the Flames: A Tale of the London Fire Brigade_ (London, James Nisbet, 1868)\n\nBamberger, Louis, _Bow Bell Memories_ (London, Sampson Low, Marston, 1931)\n\nBarham, R. 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Dayton, Higgins & Bradley, 1856)\n\nEdwards, Percy, _History of London Street Improvements, 1855\u20131897_ (London, London County Council, 1898)\n\nEdwards, Revd John E., _Random Sketches and Notes of European Travel in 1856_ (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1857)\n\nEgan, Pierce, _Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_ (London, 'printed for the editor', 1823)\n\n\u2014, [and George and Robert Cruikshank], _Life in London, or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and his Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom ..._ (London, Sherwood, Neely, & Jones, 1821)\n\nElmes, James, _Metropolitan Improvements; or, London in the Nineteenth Century ..._ (London, Jones & Co., 1829)\n\nElson, George, _The Last of the Climbing Boys: An Autobiography_ (London, John Long, 1900)\n\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo, 'English Traits', in _The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 1870)\n\n_Every Night Book; or, Life After Dark_ , 'by the author of \"The Cigar\"' (London, T. Richardson, 1828)\n\n_The Flash Chaunter ... now singing at Offley's, Cider Cellers_ [sic] _, Coal Hole, &c ... ._ (first published _c_.1834; London, W. West [?1865])\n\nFletcher, Hanslip, _London Passed and Passing: A Pictorial Record of Destroyed and Threatened Buildings_ (London, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1908)\n\nForbes, Mrs E. A., _A Woman's First Impressions of Europe ..._ (New York, Derby & Miller, 1865)\n\nForney, John, _Letters from Europe_ (Philadelphia, T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1867)\n\nForster, John, _The Life of Charles Dickens_ , 3 vols (London, Chapman and Hall, 1872\u20134)\n\nFrost, Thomas, _The Old Showmen, and the Old London Fairs_ (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1874)\n\nGardner, Fitzroy, _Days and Ways of an Old Bohemian_ (London, John Murray, 1921)\n\nGarwood, John, _The Million Peopled City, or, One-half of the People of London Made Known to the Other Half_ (London, Wertheim and Macintosh, 1853)\n\nGavin, Hector, _Sanitary Ramblings: Being Sketches and Illustrations of Bethnal Green_ (London, John Churchill, 1848)\n\nGodwin, George, _London Shadows: A Glance at the 'Homes' of the Thousands_ (London, George Routledge, 1854)\n\n\u2014, _Another Blow for Life_ (London, Wm H. Allen, 1864)\n\nGotch, Rosamund Brunel (ed.), _Mendelssohn and his Friends in Kensington: Letters ... 1833\u201336_ (London, Oxford University Press, 1934)\n\nGrant, James, _Sketches in London_ (London, W. S. Orr, 1838)\n\nGreenwood, James, _Unsentimental Journeys: or, Byways of the Modern Babylon_ (London, Ward, Lock, & Tyler, 1867)\n\n\u2014, _The Seven Curses of London_ (London, Stanley Rivers [1869])\n\n\u2014, _In Strange Company: Being the Experience of a Roving Correspondent_ (Edinburgh, Henry S. King & Co., 1873)\n\n\u2014, _The Wilds of London_ (London, Chatto and Windus, 1874)\n\n\u2014, _Low-Life Deeps: An Account of the Strange Fish to be Found There_ (London, Chatto and Windus, 1876)\n\n[\u2014], 'A Night in a Workhouse', reprinted in pamphlet form from the _Pall Mall Gazette_ (London, F. Bowering [n.d.])\n\nGreville, Charles, _The Greville Diary..._ , ed. Philip Whitwell Wilson (London, William Heinemann, 1927)\n\nGronow, Captain, _Reminiscences of Captain Gronow ..._ (London, Smith, Elder, 1862)\n\nHall, Fanny W., _Rambles in Europe ..._ (New York, E. French, 1839)\n\nHall, S. C., _Retrospect of a Long Life, 1815\u201383_ (London, Bentley and Son, 1883)\n\nHarben, Henry, _A Dictionary of London: Being Notes Topographical and Historical Relating to the Streets ... in the City of London_ (London, Herbert Jenkins, 1918)\n\nHare, Augustus, _Walks in London_ (London, Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1878)\n\nHarling, Robert (ed.), _The London Miscellany: A Nineteenth Century Scrapbook_ (London, William Heinemann, 1937)\n\n[Harvey, William], _London Scenes and London People..._ , 'by Aleph' (London, W. H. Collingridge, 1863)\n\nHawthorne, Nathaniel, _Hawthorne in England: Selections from Our Old Home and The English Note-books_ , ed. Cushing Strout (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1965)\n\nHaydon, Benjamin Robert, _Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon ... from his Autobiography and Journals_ , ed. Tom Taylor, 3 vols (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1853)\n\nHayward, Arthur, _The Days of Dickens: A Glance at Some Aspects of Early Victorian Life in London_ (London, George Routledge and Sons, 1926)\n\nHeadley, Joel, _Rambles and Sketches_ (New York, Baker and Scribner, 1850)\n\nHealth of Towns Association, _The Sanitary Condition of the City of London ... with the Sub-Committee's Reply ..._ (London, W. Clowes, 1848)\n\n[Heath, Henry], _The Caricaturist's Scrap Book: Omnium Gatherum_ ([London], no publisher [1840])\n\nH\u00e9k\u00e9kyan, Joseph, Journal, 1829\u201330, British Library, Add MSS 37,448\n\nHindley, Charles, _History of the Cries of London, Ancient and Modern_ (London, Reeves and Turner, 1881)\n\n\u2014, (ed.), _The Life and Adventures of a Cheap Jack, by One of the Fraternity_ (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1876)\n\n_Hints to Men about Town,_ 'by The Old Medical Student' (Liverpool, George Davis, 1840)\n\nHogg, John, _London as it is, Being a Series of Observations on the Health, Habits, and Amusements of the People_ (London, John Macrone, 1837)\n\nHollingshead, John, _Underground London_ (London, Groombridge, 1862)\n\n\u2014, _My Lifetime_ , 2 vols (London, Sampson Low, Marston, 1895)\n\n[Holloway, Robert], _The Phoenix of Sodom ... the Gambols Practised by the Ancient Letchers of ... The Vere St Coterie_ (London, J. Cook [1813])\n\nHook, Theodore Edward, _Gilbert Gurney_ (London, Whittaker & Co., 1836))\n\nHoppin, James M., _Old England: Its Scenery, Art, and People_ (New York, Hurd and Houghton, 1867)\n\n[Horne, Richard H.], 'The Fire Brigade of London', _Household Words_ , 7, 11 May 1850, pp. 145\u201351\n\n[\u2014], 'Address from an Undertaker to the Trade', _Household Words_ , 13, 22 June 1850, pp. 301\u20134\n\n[\u2014], 'Dust, or Ugliness Redeemed', _Household Words_ , 16, 13 July 1850, pp. 379\u201384\n\n[\u2014], 'The Cow with the Iron Tail', _Household Words_ , 33, 9 November 1850, pp. 145\u201351\n\n[\u2014], 'Father Thames', _Household Words_ , 45, 1 February 1851, pp. 445\u20139\n\nHorwitz, Orville, _Brushwood Picked Up on the Continent: or, Last Summer's Trip to the Old World_ (Philadelphia, Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1855)\n\n_Household Words_ , 'Heathen and Christian Burial', 1, 6 April 1850, pp. 43\u20138\n\n\u2014, 'Penny Wisdom', 6, 16 October 1852, pp. 97\u2013101\n\n\u2014, 'Piping Days', 10, 14 October 1854, pp. 196\u20139\n\n\u2014, 'Important Rubbish', 11, 19 May 1855, pp. 376\u20139\n\n\u2014, 'Wild Court Tamed', 12, 25 August 1855, pp. 85\u20137\n\n\u2014, 'Turpin's Corner', 17, 8 May 1858, pp. 493\u20136\n\n\u2014, 'Dirty Cleanliness', 18, 24 July 1858, pp. 121\u20133\n\n\u2014, 'Life and Death in St Giles's', 18, 13 November 1858, pp. 524\u20138\n\nHughes, William R., _A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land: Together with Personal Reminiscences of the 'Inimitable Boz'_ (London, Chapman & Hall, 1891)\n\nHughson, David [pseud. of David Pugh], _Circuit of London_ , in 6 vols (London, James Robins [?1825])\n\nHumphrey, Heman D. D., _Great Britain, France and Belgium: A Short Tour in 1835_ (NY, Harper & Brothers, 1838)\n\nHunt, Leigh, _Leigh Hunt's London Journal_ , vol. 1 (London, Charles Knight, 1834)\n\nJerrold, Blanchard, and Gustave Dor\u00e9, _London: A Pilgrimage_ , intro. by Peter Ackroyd (first published 1872; London, Anthem Press, 2005)\n\nKirkland, Mrs [Caroline], _Holidays Abroad; or, Europe from the West_ (New York, Baker and Scribner, 1849)\n\nKirwan, Daniel Joseph, _Palace and Hovel: or, Phases of London Life..._ , ed. A. Allan (first published 1870; London, Abelard-Schuman, 1963)\n\nKitchiner, William, _The Traveller's Oracle; or, Maxims for Locomotion: Containing Precepts for Promoting the Pleasures ... of Travellers_ (London, Henry Colburn, 1828)\n\nKitton, Frederic G., _Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil_ , and _A Supplement_ (London, Frank T. Sabin, 1890)\n\nKnight, Charles (ed.), _London_ , 6 vols (London, Charles Knight, 1841\u20134)\n\n[\u2014], 'Illustrations of Cheapness: The Lucifer Match', _Household Words_ , 3, 13 April, pp. 54\u20136\n\nLamb, Charles, _The Essays of Elia_ (London, Edward Moxon, 1849)\n\nLatrobe, John H. B., _Hints for Six Months in Europe ..._ (Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott, & Co., 1869)\n\nLeeves, Edward, _Leaves from a Victorian Diary_ , intro. by John Sparrow (London, Secker & Warburg, 1985)\n\n_Leigh's New Picture of London ..._ (London, Leigh and Co., 1818 and 1839)\n\nLeighton, John, _London Cries & Public Edifices from Sketches on the Spot_ (London, Grant and Griffith [1847])\n\n[Lewis, John Delaware], 'A Voice from a 'Quiet' Street', _Household Words_ , 31, 26 October 1850, pp. 143\u20134\n\n[\u2014], 'City Graves', _Household Words_ , 38, 14 December 1850, p. 277\n\nLiddle, John, _On the Moral and Physical Evils Resulting from the Neglect of Sanitary Measures ..._ (London, Health of Towns Association Depot, 1847)\n\nLillywhite, Bryant, _London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries_ (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1963)\n\n_London by Night, or, The Bachelor's Facetious Guide to All the Ins and Outs and the Nightly Doings of the Metropolis ..._ (London, William Ward [?1857])\n\n_The London Guide, and Stranger's Safeguard..._ , 'by a Gentleman' (London, Bumpus, 1818), in J. Marriott (ed.), _Unknown London_\n\nLoudon, J. C., _An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture ..._ (London, Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1833)\n\nLovett, William, _The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, in His Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom ..._ (London, Tr\u00fcbner & Co., 1876)\n\nMcCarthy, Justin, _Reminiscences_ (London, Chatto & Windus, 1899)\n\n[MacKenzie, Alexander], _The American in England_ (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1835)\n\nMcLelland, Henry B., _Journal of a Residence in Scotland and Tour through England ..._ (Boston, Allen and Ticknor, 1834)\n\nMarriott, John (ed.), _Unknown London: Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815\u201345,_ 6 vols (London, Pickering and Chatto, 2000)\n\nMarriott, John, and Masaie Matsumura (eds), _The Metropolitan Poor: Semi-factual Accounts, 1795\u20131910_ (London, Pickering and Chatto, 1999)\n\nMasson, David, _Memories of London in the 'Forties_ , ed. Flora Masson (Edinburgh, William Blackwood & Sons, 1908)\n\nMathews, Mrs [Nancy], _Tea-Table Talk, Ennobled Actresses, and Other Miscellanies_ (London, Thomas Cautley Newby, 1857)\n\nMatthews, James N., _My Holiday: How I Spent it ... in the Summer of 1866_ (Buffalo, Martin Taylor, 1867)\n\nMayhew, Augustus, _Paved with Gold, or, The Romance and Reality of the London Streets_ (London, Chapman and Hall, 1858)\n\nMayhew, Henry, _London Labour and the London Poor_ (New York, Dover, 1968; facsimile of Griffin, Bohn edition, 1861\u20132)\n\n\u2014, _The Shops and Companies of London, and the Grades and Manufactories of Great Britain_ (London, The Second Printing and Publishing Co., 1865)\n\n\u2014, _The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle, 1849\u201350,_ ed. E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973)\n\n\u2014, 'Home is Home, be it never so Homely', in [Lord Shrewsbury], _Meliora: or, Better Times to Come_ ([?London], no publisher [?1852])]\n\n\u2014 and John Binny, _The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life_ (London, Charles Griffin [1862])\n\nMeadows, Kenny [illus.], _Heads of the People: or, Portraits of the English_ , 'with original essays by distinguished writers' (London, Willoughby & Co. [1840])\n\nMelville, Herman, _Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent, 1849\u20131850_ , ed. Eleanor Melville Metcalf (London, Cohen & West, 1949)\n\nMiller, David Prince, _The Life of a Showman ..._ (London, Lacy, 1849)\n\nMiller, Hugh, _First Impressions of England and its People_ (London, John Johnstone, 1847)\n\nMiller, Thomas, _Picturesque Sketches of London, Past and Present_ (London, National Illustrated Library [?1851])\n\nMorley, Henry, _Early Papers and Some Memories_ (London, George Routledge, 1891)\n\n\u2014, _Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair_ (London, Frederick Warne & Co. [n.d.])\n\n[\u2014], 'Death's Doors', _Household Words_ , 9, 10 June 1854, pp. 398\u2013402\n\nMunby, Arthur, _Munby, Man of Two Worlds: The Life and Diaries of Arthur J. Munby, 1828\u20131910_ , ed. Derek Hudson (London, John Murray, 1972)\n\nMurray, John Fisher, _The World of London_ , 2 vols (Edinburgh, William Blackwood, 1843)\n\n\u2014, 'Physiology of London Life', _London Journal_ , 16 October 1847, p. 103\n\nMurray, Ross, _The Modern Householder: A Manual of Domestic Economy in all its Branches_ (London, Frederick Warne and Co. [1872])\n\n[Nash, John, and John White], _Some Account of the Proposed Improvements of the Western Part of London ..._ (London, W. & P. Reynolds, 1814)\n\n_The New Swell's Night Guide to the Bowers of Venus ..._ (London, J. Paul [?1840])\n\nNicholson, Renton, _Cockney Adventures, and Tales of London Life_ (London, W. M. Clark, 1838)\n\n\u2014, _Autobiography of a Fast Man_ (London, published 'for the Proprietors', 1863)\n\n_The Nobby Songster, A Prime Selection as now Singing at Offleys Cider Cellar: Coal Hole &c ... _ (London, W. West 1842)\n\n'Official Programme of the Public Funeral of the late Field-Marshal, Arthur Duke of Wellington, K. G., as Issued by the Authority of the Earl-Marshal (London, N. Pearce [1852]; British Library shelfmark 812.e.2)\n\n'The Order of Proceeding in the Public Funeral of the Late Field-Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington ... ' ([n.p., no publisher], 1852; British Library shelfmark 813.cc44)\n\nPardon, George Frederick, _Routledge's Popular Guide to London and its Suburbs_ (London, Routledge Warne & Routledge, 1862)\n\nPartington, C. F., _National History and Views of London ... from Original Drawings ..._ (London, Allan Bell and Co., 1834)\n\nPhillips, Watts, _The Wild Tribes of London_ (London, Ward and Lock, 1855)\n\n'Police Regulations. Funeral of the late Field Marshal, Arthur Duke of Wellington, K.G., November 18, 1852' (London, Metropolitan Police Office, 1852; British Library shelfmark 1309 l.14, f. 117)\n\nPoyntz, Albany, 'The Physiology of London Life: The London Hotel-Keeper', _Bentley's Miscellany_ , 15, 1844, pp. 52\u20137\n\nPratt, A. T. Camden, _Unknown London: Its Romance and Tragedy_ (London, Neville Beeman [1897])\n\nPrime, Samuel Iren\u00e6us, _Travels in Europe and the East ..._ (London, Sampson Low, Son, & Co., 1855)\n\n_The Rambler's Flash Songster ... now singing at Offley's, Cider Cellars, Coal Hole, &c ... ._ (first published _c_.1838; London, W. West [?1865])\n\n_Remarks on the Buildings and Improvements in London, and Elsewhere_ (Bath, Richard Cruttwell, 1816)\n\nRaumer, Frederick von, _England in 1835: Being a Series of Letters Written to Friends in Germany...,_ trans. Sarah Austin (London, John Murray, 1836)\n\nRichardson, Revd J., _Recollections ... of the Last Half-century_ (London, Savill & Edwards, 1855)\n\nRitchie, J. Ewing, _Days and Nights in London: or, Studies in Black and Gray_ (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1880)\n\nRowlandson, Thomas, _Rowlandson's Characteristic Sketches of the Lower Orders_ (London, Samuel Leigh, 1820)\n\nRyan, Michael, _Prostitution in London, with a comparative View of that of Paris and New York ..._ (London, H. Bailliere, 1839)\n\nSala, George Augustus, _Gaslight and Daylight, with Some London Scenes They Shine Upon_ (London, Chapman & Hall, 1859)\n\n\u2014, _Twice Round the Clock: or, The Hours of the Day and Night in London_ (London, Houlston and Wright [1859])\n\n\u2014, _Looking at Life; or, Thoughts and Things_ (London, Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860)\n\n\u2014, _The Hats of Humanity, Historically, Humorously and Aesthetically Considered ..._ (Manchester, James Gee, 'Hatter' [?1880])\n\n[\u2014], 'Sunday Tea-Gardens', _Household Words_ , 10, 30 September 1854, pp. 145\u20138\n\n[\u2014], 'Bright Chanticleer' _Household Words_ , 11, 31 March 1855, pp. 204\u20139\n\nSanger, 'Lord' George, _Seventy Years a Showman: My Life and Adventures ..._ (London, C. Arthur Pearson [1908])\n\n_Saturday Review_ , 'The Rape of the Glances', 1 February 1862, pp. 124\u20135\n\nSchlesinger, Max, _Saunterings in and about London_ , trans. Otto Wenckstern (first published 1852; London, Nathaniel Cooke, 1853)\n\n_The Servant Girl in London: Showing the Dangers to which Young Country Girls are Exposed ..._ (London, R. Hastings, 1840)\n\nSeymour, Robert, _Seymour's Humorous Sketches..._ , with text by Alfred Crowquill (2nd edn, London, Henry G. Bohn, 1866)\n\n[Shaw, Donald], _London in the Sixties (With a Few Digressions),_ 'by one of the Old Brigade' (London, Everett and Co., 1908)\n\nShepherd, Thomas H. [and James Elmes], _London and its Environs in the Nineteenth Century, Illustrated by a Series of Views from the Original Drawings by Thomas H. Shepherd, with ... Notes_ [by James Elmes] (London, Jones & Co., 1829)\n\n\u2014, [and James Elmes], _The World's Metropolis, or, Mighty London ..._ (London, published 'for the Proprietors' [?1855])\n\n'Silvester, Sir John (d. 1822), Notebook of, containing notes on London criminals; _circ_. 1812 _._ ' (1) 'A List of Houses of resort for Footpads & Housebreakers' ... (2) 'Numbers of Hackney Coaches' ... (3) 'Coach-Masters' ... (4) 'Names & Places of Abode of Receivers of Stolen Goods' ... (5) 'Men or _(sic)_ Town who have been Transported, Jany. 1812' ... (6) 'Short accounts of the careers of Aaron Barrow, receiver ... and Benjamin Farmer al. Solomon ... ' (British Library, Add MS 47,466)\n\n'Silvester, Sir John (d. 1822), Notebook of, containing notes on the London criminal underworld ... ' (1) 'Receivers of Stolen Property' ... (2) 'List of Receivers' ... (3) 'A List of Houses of resort for Thieves' ... (4) 'A List of Cant Words ... with their Meaning' ... (British Library MS, Egerton 3710)\n\n[Simond, Louis], _Journal of a Tour and Residence in Great Britain during the Years 1810 and 1811 ..._ (Edinburgh, Archibald Constable and Company, 1815)\n\n_Sinks of London Laid Open: A Pocket Companion for the Uninitiated, to which is added, A Modern Flash Dictionary ..._ (London, J. Duncombe, 1848)\n\nSmeeton, George, _Doings in London, or, Day and Night Scenes of the Frauds, Frolics, Manners, and Depravities of the Metropolis_ (Southwark, G. Smeeton [1828])\n\nSmith, Albert (ed.), _Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character_ (London, David Bogue, 1849)\n\nSmith, Amy Grinnell, and Mary Ermina Smith, 'Letters from Europe, 1865\u20136', ed. David Sanders Clark (Washington, DC, 1948; typescript in British Library)\n\nSmith, Charles Manby, _Curiosities of London Life: or, Phases, Physiological and Social, of the Great Metropolis_ (London, William and Frederick G. Cash, 1853)\n\n\u2014, _The Working Man's Way in the World_ , 'Being the Autobiography of a Journeyman Printer' (London, William and Frederick G. Cash [1853])\n\n\u2014, _The Little World of London_ (London, Arthur Hall, Virtue and Co., 1857)\n\nSmith, John Thomas, _Ancient Topography of London ..._ (London, no publisher, 1815)\n\n\u2014, _Vagabondiana; or, Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, Itinerant Traders and other Persons ... in London and its Environs_ (London, no publisher, 1817)\n\n\u2014, _The Cries of London ... Itinerant Traders of Antient and Modern Times_ (London, John Bowyer Nichols, 1839)\n\n\u2014, _An Antiquarian Ramble in the Streets of London_ , ed. Charles Mackay (London, Richard Bentley, 1846)\n\n_Some Olde London Cries & Street Noises of the XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII and XIXth Centuries_ (London, privately printed, 1908)\n\nSouthey, Robert, _Letters from England_ , ed. Jack Simmons (first published 1807; Gloucester, Alan Sutton, 1984)\n\nStewart, Charles, _Sketches of Society in Great Britain and Ireland_ (2nd edn, Philadelphia, Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1835)\n\n[Surtees, R. S.], _Hints to Railway Travellers and Country Visitors to London_ , 'by an Old Stager' (London, Bradbury and Evans, 1851)\n\n_The Swell's Night Guide Through the Metropolis_ , 'by the Hon F. L. G.' (London, 'printed for the author, for private circulation, by Roger Funnyman' [?1841])\n\n_The Swell's Night Guide Through the Metropolis, or, A Peep through the Great Metropolis...,_ 'by Thelord [sic] Chief Baron' ([place and publisher cut away], 1846)\n\nTaine, Hippolyte, _Notes on England_ , trans. W. F. Rae (London, Strahan, 1872)\n\n_Tait's Edinburgh Magazine_ , untitled review (anon.) of Herbert Spencer, _Railway Morals and Railway Policy_ , November 1855, pp. 695\u20136\n\nTayler, William, _The Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837,_ ed. 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Outram, _Coaching Days and Coaching Ways_ (London, Macmillan and Co., 1888)\n\nTrollope, Thomas Adolphus, _What I Remember_ (London, Richard Bentley, 1887)\n\nTuer, Andrew, _Old London Street Cries_ (London, Field & Tuer, 1885)\n\nVizetelly, Henry, _Glances Back through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences_ (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Tr\u00fcbner & Co., 1893)\n\nWalker, Geo. Alfd, _Gatherings from Graveyards, Particularly those of London ..._ (London, Longman, 1839)\n\n\u2014, _The First of a Series of Lectures ... on the Actual condition of the Metropolitan Grave-Yards_ (London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847); also the _Second_ , _Third_ and _Fourth Series_ (London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847\u20139)\n\n\u2014, _The First of a Series ..._ (2nd edn, London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans [sic], 1849)\n\n'Walter', _My Secret Life_ (first published 1888\u201394; Ware, Herts, Wordsworth, 1995)\n\nWard, Mrs. E. M. 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The first citation given in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ is from 1881, eleven years after Dickens' death. But newspapers were using the term 'Dickensian' in 1842, when the author was just thirty years old and had yet to publish his greatest works.\n\n. I will use City with a capital 'C' to mean that area of London that is more or less confined geographically within the old medieval walls governed by the Corporation of the City of London, which now represents the financial district of London; 'the city', in lower case, refers to London more generally.\n\n. For an explanation of pre-decimal currency, see p. xiii.\n\n. Hind was an obsolete word for a servant by the time Dickens was writing, but 'labouring hind' was a phrase regularly used in poetry and translations, and would have been recognized as such.\n\n. Income and class, inextricably linked, are difficult to compare directly with modern income and social status. However, as a rule of thumb, between \u00a3100 and \u00a3150 was considered the entry-level income for the lower middle classes for most of the nineteenth century, and \u00a3500 was at the upper end of the middle-class scale. Although professional men who earned more (sometimes as much as \u00a31,000) were still considered middle class, they emulated the lifestyles of the upper classes. In turn, the lower echelons of the upper classes, the gentry, often got by on \u00a3500 or even less.\n\n. A list of Dickens' major works, with the dates of serial and one-volume first publications, appears on page 425.\n\n. It is for this reason that I have cheated slightly, using 'Victorian' in my title, even though Dickens' dates, and the period I cover, begin earlier, and finish earlier, than the period when Victoria reigned (1837\u20131901.)\n\n. Temple Bar, which narrowed one of London's busiest roads to a mere twenty feet, was dismantled in 1878 after nearly a century as a traffic menace, and was purchased by a brewer to create the entrance to the grounds of his house near Enfield. In 2004, the house having long since become a conference centre, Temple Bar was returned to the City and inserted into the new development at Paternoster Square, beside St Paul's.\n\n. Dickens prided himself on keeping up a regular pace of four and a half miles per hour. Over a mere five miles, this was a 'breather'; friends learnt to be wary of his 'busters', which lasted up to thirty miles.\n\n. It is worth remembering that the great illustrator of Dickens' work named himself 'Phiz', which was slang for face, from 'physiognomy'; the two men together captured the faces that passed them daily, giving the anonymous crowds characters.\n\n. It was for this reason that street clocks were common. The lack of timepieces generally was the source of the running joke, renewed by Dickens in _Bleak House_ , where 'we met the cook round the corner coming out of a public-house, wiping her mouth. She mentioned, as she passed us, that she had been to see what o'clock it was.'\n\n. Thomas Wright (1839\u20131909) was the son of a blacksmith who became a tramping worker (see pp. 164\u20135), before finding employment as a manual labourer in an engineering firm. He studied on his own, and in 1872 became one of the first national school-board visitors, a huge step up in status, if not in pay. He wrote widely on the world of the working man into which he had been born.\n\n. G. A. Sala (1828\u201395) was ostensibly the child of a dancing master who died soon after his birth, although it is likely that his real father was an army officer. Sala was raised by his mother, a singer and teacher, and first became an artist providing illustrations for pennydreadfuls. It was in 1851, with the essay 'A Key to the Street', published in Dickens' journal _Household Words_ , that he came to prominence as one of 'Dickens' Young Men', before later becoming a well-known foreign correspondent.\n\n. James Greenwood (early 1830s\u20131927) was a successful children's author before he turned to investigative journalism in the 1860s. He was one of, if not the, first to dress to blend in with those on whom he was reporting, most famously for a stay in a workhouse's casual ward, for which he became known as the 'Amateur Casual' (see pp. 198\u20139).\n\n. Henry Mayhew (1812\u201387) was a journalist and social reformer. As well as being one of the founders of the comic magazine _Punch_ , he compiled a monumental study of street workers, _London Labour and the London Poor_ (1851, with additions until the early 1860s), based on hundreds of interviews initially conducted for a series of essays he wrote for the _Morning Chronicle_ between 1849 and 1850. Scholars have since discussed methodological flaws in this work, but no study of nineteenth-century working-class street life could manage without it.\n\n. By mid-century, every night was a foreign post night, but in 1839, when _Nicholas Nickleby_ was appearing, the post office sent out post to different countries on set days to coincide with ships' sailing dates: France daily, Belgium four times a week, Holland and northern Europe twice a week, but southern Europe and Malta only once a fortnight. Post to the United States went once a month, to the Caribbean twice a month. So 'Foreign Post nights' varied from office to office, depending on where they did business abroad.\n\n. Dickens' employers in 1827, Ellis and Blackmore, were located in Holborn Court (now South Square), Gray's Inn, later also the address of Tommy Traddles, David Copperfield's struggling attorney friend. The square having been heavily damaged in the Blitz, today almost all the buildings are reconstructions. The single original building is, happily, number 1, once the offices of Ellis and Blackmore.\n\n. Doctors' Commons, between Knightrider Street and Upper Thames Street (a plaque on Faraday Building on the north side of Queen Victoria Street now marks the site) was not an Inn of Court but the location of various arcane areas of law, including the ecclesiastical courts of appeal, the offices that provided marriage licences and the places where wills were probated. The lawyers here were also in charge of divorce, which until 1857 required an Act of Parliament to dissolve each marriage individually. After 1857, when divorce became part of common law, Doctors' Commons ceased to function, and in 1867 the secluded courtyard was demolished.\n\n. Despite being replaced by the Metropolitan Police in 1829, a few of the old watch hung on in unexpected places: the Temple, private land owned and run by the Inns of Court, had a watchman calling the hours until 1864.\n\n. Louis Simond (1767\u20131831), a shop owner, had emigrated to the USA before the French Revolution, where he married an Englishwoman, before visiting England in 1809 and remaining for nearly two years. One contemporary historian has described his journal as 'cranky and hostile'.\n\n. Nineteenth-century macadam bears only an ancestral relationship to twentieth-century 'tar-macadam', or tarmac, which incorporates tar and creosote to bind together the surface.\n\n. Alfred Rosling Bennett (1850\u20131928) worked on the first Indian government telegraph, and then in electrical engineering, establishing the first experimental overhead telephone line. He was noted for his great personal charm, which is amply borne out in his delightful memoir of his childhood.\n\n. At one time the spot, on a traffic island in the centre of Oxford Street, where it nears the Edgware Road, was indicated by three brass markers, but at some point in the recent past they seem to have disappeared.\n\n. 'Pockets' were not what we mean by pockets, which were surprisingly late to develop. In the eighteenth century, pockets in clothes were still mostly decorative, and working men had a pocket only in their aprons. Women's pockets tied on with strings around their waists, like market sellers' or waiters' money pouches today. In the nineteenth century, pockets were made in coats and waistcoats more generally, but tie-on pockets remained commonplace.\n\n. In 1866, a political group was refused permission to hold a rally in Hyde Park, and the infuriated crowd tore down the park railings. The newspapers tsk-tsk-ed about the 'mob', but, added the _Illustrated London News_ cheerfully, 'One useful result' of the civic unrest was that Park Lane had been involuntarily widened.\n\n. This is a private joke of Dickens, who does not name the building, but for those who recognized it, he silently contrasted the Society's zeal for exporting religious education abroad while ignoring the illiterate crossing-sweeper on its doorstep.\n\n. I use the word 'him' because most sweepers were male, although the wives of regular sweepers frequently stood in for their husbands when they ran errands, or were ill. In the 1860s, the diarist Arthur Munby noted a fourteen-year-old girl working as a sweeper in Charing Cross, dodging deftly between the horses and the wheels. He evidently spoke to her, as he noted that she wanted to be an orange-woman when she grew up; the very fact that he noted this, however, suggests the rarity of girl sweepers.\n\n. Dustmen strictly removed only 'dust', the remains from coal fires. However, the word was frequently used more elastically, and many called the men whose job it was to remove human waste 'dustmen'.\n\n. The pumping was very hard work, said Alfred Bennett. His childhood home was directly across the road from a pump, and to this proximity he and the neighbouring children 'owed our first introduction to swear words'. Note in the drawing above that the man pumping has taken off his hat and coat, which hang on the railings. He seems to have replaced his colleague, who sits on the kerb, mopping his forehead.\n\n. Frederick Winsor (1763\u20131830) was born Friedrich Winzer in Brunswick. He was an entrepreneur rather than an engineer or inventor, bringing to the home of the Industrial Revolution discoveries that were not much regarded in France. Like many entrepreneurs, his promotional skills were better than his managerial ones, and more pragmatic men soon forced him out of the company he formed.\n\n. 'Walter' is a conundrum. He is the pseudonymous author of the eleven-volume _My Secret Life_ (published 1888\u201394), a supposedly autobiographical account of his, shall we say, ebullient erotic life. The book is pornography, and those sections have, no doubt, all the verisimilitude of that genre, but there follow three possibilities: (1) that Walter was indeed a man with an exhausting private life, and the autobiographical elements he includes are true, or nearly so; (2) that Walter imagined his private life, but that he did indeed live the life of the middle-class professional man he claimed to be; or (3) the entire book is a work of fiction. If (1) or (2) are the case, then _My Secret Life_ is useful for the light Walter throws on many aspects of the London sex trade (for more on this subject, see pp. 393\u2013424), and equally so for his passing descriptions of daily life; if (3), the former becomes less reliable, but there is still no reason to believe that the author did not describe daily life as he knew it. If we take Walter's biographical hints at face value, he was born in the 1820s and died after 1894. I have based my reading of his book on this chronology. Walter does, unusually for an unknown person, have an entry in the _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , which offers suggestions as to who the real Walter may have been.\n\n. Because the gradient was nearly 1 in 77, until 1844 the trains to and from Euston were pulled up or winched down by a cable to and from the engine house in Camden.\n\n. Arthur Munby (1828\u20131910) was a civil servant in the ecclesiastical commission, but he is know today for the diaries he kept between 1859 and 1898, in which he recounted in detail his long relationship with (and ultimately marriage to) Hannah Cullwick, a servant, as well as wonderfully detailed descriptions of a fast-changing London.\n\n. An 1893 book claims that Shillibeer's buses each contained 'a library' of books to entertain the passengers. I would like to believe that this were the case, but the many reports on the darkness of the early buses make it seem implausible.\n\n. Some tube stations today \u2013 the Angel, Royal Oak and Swiss Cottage \u2013 are still named for pubs, just as London buses continue to move between fare _stages_.\n\n. These watermen were not the same as those who earned a living on the river. The waterman on a cabstand was so-called for the water he used to wash down the cabs, rather than for the more obvious watering of the horses, although this was also one of his duties: the watermen kept order generally, ensuring there was no ill-usage of the horses, feeding, watering and attempting to keep them warm. He also helped passengers and their baggage in and out of the cabs. For this he was paid 1d by each driver as he joined the rank, and another \u00bdd from the driver when he was hired by a fare. (He also stood hopefully by, expecting to be tipped another 1d by the passenger.)\n\n. Hansom (1803\u201382) spent a lifetime producing innovative work that he could somehow never make pay: he and his architectural partner built the Town Hall in Birmingham, but went bankrupt by underestimating costs; he founded _The Builder_ magazine, but was forced to give it up, again through underestimation of costs; and although he patented his enormously successful safety cab, he never received the many thousands of pounds the rights were ostensibly sold for.\n\n. The original version had the driver on a perch on the right of the cab, as can be seen in an illustration in Chapter 2 of _Pickwick Papers_.\n\n. According to _The Traveller's Oracle_ of 1828, those households that did not keep a footman would be wise to fit their carriages with a set of spikes at the rear: ' _Do not permit Strangers to place themselves behind your Carriage_ at any time, or under any pretence whatever,' as they will either rob you or steal bits off the carriage, including the 'Check Braces, and Footmen's Holders' (the lead-strings by which passengers notified the driver they wanted to stop, and the leather straps that the footmen on the steps at the rear held on to) 'in half the time that your Coachman can put them on'. Therefore, 'unless you think that two or three outside passengers are ornamental or convenient, or you like to have your Carriage continually surrounded by Crowds of Children, incessantly screaming, \"Cut! Cut behind!\"', the 'Spikes are indispensable'. This may have been no exaggeration: the illustration on p. 384 shows children clambering unmolested across the top of a coach.\n\n. The word 'shay', often heard on the street and sometimes used in literature, was a back-formation from chaise, created under the impression that 'chaise' was plural: one shay, two chaise. A chaise was an all-purpose word to describe many types of carriage: it could have two or four wheels, was generally open (although it might have the folding hood known as a calash), and often simply meant a light carriage or cart used for pleasure rather than work.\n\n. The dancer Marie Taglioni (1804\u201384) was in the 1830s at the height of her fame, having starred in Paris in Meyerbeer's ground-breaking opera, _Robert le Diable_ , leading the famed 'dance of the nuns', and dancing ballet's first Sylphide in her father's _La Sylphide_ in 1832. In London she dazzled audiences, with Princess Victoria an ardent fan.\n\n. Two picaresque novels of London life fought it out in 1821: Pierce Egan's _Life in London, or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, esq., and his elegant friend, Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in their rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis_ , with illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank, and Jonathan Badcock's _Real Life in London, or, The Rambles and Adventures of Bob Tallyho, Esq., and His Cousin, the Hon. Tom Dashall, Through the Metropolis; Exhibiting a Living Picture of Fashionable Characters, Manners, and Amusements in High and Low Life_ , with illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson. Egan's won, but both stories of young rich men out on the razzle are useful guides, if not to authentic London life, at least to how most readers _wanted_ to see the city.\n\n. The passenger, Friedrich von Raumer (1781\u20131873), was a professor of both history and political science, at the universities of Breslau and then Berlin. He travelled widely in Europe between 1816 and 1855.\n\n. The old Palace of Westminster, consisting of the medieval buildings where Parliament sat, together with the Royal Courts of Justice, burnt down in 1834. (For more on the fire, see p. 331.) The only surviving buildings were Westminster Hall, the Cloisters of St Stephen's, St Mary Undercroft Chapel and the Jewel Tower. The new Palace of Westminster, today's Parliament buildings, was designed by Charles Barry with Augustus Pugin, after Barry won the competition for the design. Building began in 1840, and in 1847 the new House of Lords was used for the first time, although further building work continued for decades.\n\n. The remaining Victorian stations built after the 1848 fiat were: King's Cross (1852), the Brunel station at Paddington (1854), Victoria (1860), Broad Street (1865), Cannon Street (1866) and St Pancras (1868), Holborn Viaduct (1874, becoming Thameslink in 1990), St Paul's (1886, becoming Blackfriars in 1937) and, just at the close of the century, Marylebone (1899).\n\n. Costermongers, or costers, sold fruit, vegetables and fish from carts on the streets. For more on street sellers, see pp. 140\u201362.\n\n. One small indication of their importance is seen in the number of pubs that have 'horse' in their name. In one 1851 list, there were twenty-one pubs named for Queen Victoria, but twenty-five named the Black Horse, twenty-seven named the Horse and Groom, fifty-four named the White Horse, plus additional ones with names like the Horseshoe, or the King on Horseback. There were also fifteen Watermen's Arms.\n\n. One report of these ice suppliers came at the height of London's worst cholera epidemic, although the water-borne nature of transmission was not yet recognized.\n\n. Men rarely if ever wore short sleeves, no matter how dirty their work. Some indoor jobs allowed for rolled-up shirtsleeves (in _Our Mutual Friend_ the potboy of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters has 'his shirt-sleeves arranged in a tight roll on each bare shoulder'), or men sometimes held their sleeves up with a band. Copying clerks and those in inky trades, as well as those doing outdoor work, where men wore jackets, all wore calico oversleeves, almost always just called 'sleeves'. (Plate 17 shows a pair.) In _Bleak House_ , Mr Snagsby, the well-to-do law-stationer, wore a grey shop-coat with black sleeves over it. Sleeves were tied on at the upper arm, with strings until the arrival of 'gutta-percha', or elastic. Most were black, although bakers and muffin men, among certain other trades, wore white sleeves as a badge of their 'clean' calling.\n\n. Warren's Blacking was the original company, based at 30 Strand, but Warren's brother set up in competition, advertising as ' **Warren's Blacking, 30** Hungerford Stairs, **Strand** '. This latter was the company that employed the young Charles.\n\n. In the ever-growing city, brickmaking should be understood for the huge industry it was. Like the 'horse' names for pubs, there were fifteen Bricklayers' Arms in London in the early 1850s.\n\n. This usage is not recorded in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ , but the shoemaker used it as if the term were common enough; certainly his meaning is not in doubt.\n\n. A search was instituted for the child's family, but without success. Henry was raised by the workhouse surgeon, with contributions made from 'private individuals' towards his education. In 1852, he appeared again before magistrates to get permission to join the surgeon, who had emigrated to Melbourne.\n\n. Contrast that to the British Museum at the time, which permitted visitors to see the exhibitions only if they had a letter of introduction signed by a trustee.\n\n. The Fleet was shut down preparatory to a planned rebuilding, but Holloway prison was built instead, the beginning of the movement of prisons to the suburbs. In 1846, the Fleet was demolished and the site left derelict for over twenty years, before the land was sold to the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.\n\n. The list of those without homes in Dickens' fiction includes: Oliver Twist's mother, who ends in the workhouse, as well as the children who work for Fagin; Nicholas and Smike after they run away from Dotheboys Hall in _Nicholas Nickleby_ ; Nell and her grandfather in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ ; the prostitutes Martha and Little Em'ly in _David Copperfield_ , and David himself on his way to find Betsey Trotwood; Jo the crossing-sweeper, a nameless woman passed by Esther and Inspector Bucket, and even Lady Dedlock on her final flight, in _Bleak House_ ; both Stephen Blackwood and his wife, and Tom Gradgrind in _Hard Times_ ; nameless homeless people 'coiled up in nooks' in _Little Dorrit_ ;Magwitch in his youth in _Great Expectations_ ; Betty Higden, and the 'half-dozen' who die of starvation in the street that Mr Podsnap dismisses as 'not British' in _Our Mutual Friend_.\n\n. 'Naked' in the nineteenth century generally meant wearing only underclothes, but it also had a less formal secondary use: to describe people in the street as 'naked' appears to have meant that they were not wearing outdoor clothes \u2013 no hats, and the men might have had no jackets. It seems likely that here 'naked' means that in mixed company the men were in shirtsleeves and the women possibly were not wearing their neck handkerchiefs, leaving their _d\u00e9colletage_ uncovered bare over low-cut dresses.\n\n. Mr Tulkinghorn's address was also a private joke: Dickens' friend Forster lived at 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields, and it is either his house, or the one next door (designed by Inigo Jones), that Dickens describes.\n\n. The OED's earliest usage of 'gonoph', to mean pickpocket, from the Yiddish 'thief ', is attributed to Dickens in this novel. But in the previous decade _The New Swell's Night Guide to the Bowers of Venus_ tells of 'having put the green culls fly to the fakements of the mots and the _gonnifs_ ' (that is, 'having made the innocent dupes aware of the trickery of the whores and thieves'). This book is a guide to brothels (see pp. 404\u20136), and I am not suggesting that this is where Dickens learnt the word, just noting that it was already current.\n\n. The French social critic and activist Flora Tristan (1803\u201344) made two stays in London, one in the 1820s, one the following decade, which together formed the basis for her _London Journal_. I use her reports with some caution: her material was chosen to heighten her political and socio-economic points; in some places it is demonstrably taken from other writers whose reliability I question. (See p. 408.)\n\n. In a middle-class home, the back kitchen was the scullery, most commonly where the pump was to be found; a front kitchen was where the range was, and the cooking was done. In the next sentence, the front one-pair is the front room on the first floor, that is, up one pair of stairs.\n\n. Jennings' Buildings was across the road from St Mary Abbotts, near where what used to be Barkers department store stood for a century, and is now the _haut-bourgeois_ Whole Foods market.\n\n. One contemporary historian has suggested that the publication of this letter was arranged \u2013 and possibly part written, or at least elaborated \u2013 by Charles Cochrane, a sanitary-health agitator. Perhaps, but it is no less heartrending.\n\n. Dorcas societies were named for the woman who 'was full of good works and almsdeeds' in Acts 9: 36; they were organizations of church ladies who met to make clothes for the poor.\n\n. This term, when applied to fog, was apparently invented by Dickens in this novel. Previously it had referred to a type of Madeira.\n\n. Joseph H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan, or H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan Bey, as he was known (1807\u201375), an Armenian, was the son of a translator for the Khedive of Egypt, who paid for his education, first at Stonyhurst, then as an engineer. He returned to Egypt in 1830 and became president of the Board of Health, before becoming a pioneering archaeologist, most notably at Memphis.\n\n. In the UK in 2008, the average person used thirty-three gallons daily.\n\n. One of the baths built after this Act was passed, the Old Castle Street bathhouse, in Whitechapel, is today the Women's Library of London Metropolitan University.\n\n. Simon (1816\u20131904) was the descendant of French immigrants and gave his last name the French pronunciation.\n\n. Chadwick (1800-90) was one of the instigators of the idea that workhouses be made less 'eligible' than poverty (see p. 169): he was a dedicated social reformer, but one with a fairly robust distaste for the masses.\n\n. Typhus and typhoid were recognized as distinct diseases only in 1869. Typhus, or gaol fever, is transmitted by lice or fleas, and was therefore linked to poverty; typhoid is water-borne, transmitted by ingesting food or drink contaminated with faeces. It was the latter that was said to have killed Prince Albert in 1861, although stomach cancer is today suggested as the cause: there were no other reported cases of typhoid in the area, and he had suffered for four years from an undiagnosed stomach ailment.\n\n. In the nineteenth century, the terms English or summer cholera referred to symptoms that today are grouped together as gastroenteritis \u2013 fever accompanying gastric illness.\n\n. The nearly 50 per cent mortality rate was terrifying, but so too was the speed with which cholera killed. It was reported that one-third of deaths occurred less than a day after the symptoms first appeared, two-thirds within forty-eight hours.\n\n. This site had been burying Dissenters since _c._ 1665. Today it is famous as the last resting place of William Blake, Bunyan, William Defoe, Isaac Watts and George Fox, although one wonders how much of their remains in reality survived Victorian burial methods.\n\n. She was followed there by many others of the Dickenses' acquaintance: Thomas Hood, Leigh Hunt, Thackeray, John Leech, Anthony Trollope, Wilkie Collins and George Cruikshank.\n\n. The Temple gardens were much more than simply a nice square of green: they covered three acres in the middle of the busiest part of London.\n\n. The building later became the National Institute to Improve the Manufactures of the United Kingdom, then a wine shop, and today it is a Marks and Spencer, for many years known as their 'Pantheon' store.\n\n. Johann Rudolf Glauber was a seventeenth-century alchemist; Esculapius (now more commonly Asclepius) the Greek god of medicine. I am not aware of the former being as common a motif as the latter as this passage implies.\n\n. It is for this reason that soldiers are 'gazetted': that is, their promotion is announced in the _Gazette_.\n\n. Tipu Sultan (1750\u201399), ruler of Mysore, was a demon figure in nineteenth-century Britain. He had won a series of battles against the British, before being killed at the battle of Seringapatam. His attitude to the British can be seen in 'Tipu's Tiger', a half-life-sized clockwork tiger, which he commissioned. When wound up, the tiger savages a prostrate redcoat, to the accompaniment of growls from the tiger and squeaky wails from this prey. The piece was looted by the British after his defeat and is now in the V&A. It is too fragile to be played, but can be seen in action on vimeo.com\/8973957.\n\n. Although the parks continued to be closed for the occasional civic event throughout the nineteenth century \u2013 Green Park was closed for the day of the Duke of Wellington's funeral, for example, so the gentry could watch in comfort \u2013 the last long-term closure was under Queen Anne (reigned 1702\u201314), when the public was barred from much of St James's Park.\n\n. Little more than the ground-plan of Nash's great project survives. Every building Nash designed in Regent Street has long gone; the Quadrant lasted only decades, being demolished in 1848: it was 'both inconvenient and injurious to the inhabitants', as 'doubtful characters' lurked in its shelter; in the park itself, only the Holme, the house designed by Decimus Burton, even vaguely resembles its original construction, although substantial alterations and additions were made in the twentieth century; the other houses were razed or completely rebuilt. The terraces surrounding the park are in the style of Nash, in that they are white stucco, but few are actually to his designs. All Soul's Church, Langham Place, still valiantly hangs on. Up close it is dwarfed by the BBC's loomingly vast new Broadcasting House, but from Oxford Circus it appears to be gently encircled, echoing Nash's curves.\n\n. The statue still remains _in situ_ although now, dwarfed by Trafalgar Square and marooned on a traffic island, it has become so insignificant as to be virtually invisible. And it is worth noting here that the pretty story that Charing Cross was named for Edward I's _ch\u00e8re reine_ Eleanor of Castile is just that, a pretty story. More prosaically, the medieval village of Charing derived its name from the Anglo-Saxon _cerr_ , a turning, referring to the sweep of the Thames. The 'cross' outside Charing Cross station does stand on the spot where one of twelve markers indicated the resting places of Eleanor of Castile's coffin on its way to Westminster Abbey, but the original was demolished by the Puritans in 1647; today's cross is Victorian.\n\n. The office block behind South Africa House is still named Golden Cross House, although one doubts whether its occupants know why.\n\n. It is for this reason that the numbering of St Martin's Lane still today does not begin at '1': numbers 1 to 28 St Martin's Lane had stood in the section of the lane that was sacrificed to create the open area of Trafalgar Square.\n\n. This was not London's only geographico-legal anomaly. Ely Place, in Clerkenwell, and the surrounding land belonged to the Bishop of Ely, and the land was technically governed by Cambridgeshire. Other Alsatias were in Whitefriars, between Salisbury Square and Hanging Sword Alley in the City, once owned by the Carmelites and therefore a religious sanctuary, but by the nineteenth century merely a place where thieves felt secure, as they did in the Alsatia in the Mint, in Southwark.\n\n. It still survives, under the care of the National Trust, behind the closed Aldwych tube station (although at least one historian has suggested that it is eighteenth century rather than Roman).\n\n. A later architectural historian claimed that the domes are the problem, set out, he puts it, like pots on a mantelpiece.\n\n. And so it proved. Barry planned statues of William IV and George IV on the north side of the square, for the east and west corners, but the money was never forthcoming. George IV paid for his own, and the commission was eventually carried out. The north-western corner remains empty today, or, rather, a rotating series of contemporary pieces have been installed since 1998, most a useful means of uniting all passers-by in contempt. Much the same was felt at the time for the sculptures on the south side of the square: the statue of Sir Charles Napier, conqueror of Sindh in 1842 and later Commander-in-Chief of the army in India, was installed in 1856, and described by the _Art Union_ journal as 'perhaps the worst piece of sculpture in England'; Sir Henry Havelock, who recaptured Cawnpore after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, joined him in 1858. But good or bad makes no difference: in the vast wastes of Trafalgar Square they are all barely noticeable.\n\n. A dog cart was not drawn by dogs, but was a small open cart with a double bench running the length of the cart, with, underneath, space that was originally used in the country to transport hunting dogs. The carts therefore had a somewhat raffish, sporting air, hence these clerks hiring one. Because the carts were easy to drive, however, in the countryside upper- and middle-class women also frequently drove themselves in them.\n\n. The number of passengers does not appear to be an exaggeration. In 1878, the _Princess Alice_ foundered and sank on a similar excursion, killing 650, with nearly 200 more being rescued.\n\n. Roundabouts were powered either by the roundabout owners, or, when they could find them, by small boys: 'having no half-pennies of their own, [they] were always ready to push round their luckier companions for the reward of a ride later on'.\n\n. It has recently been suggested that it is a mistake of our day to assume that oysters were once food for the poor, and that Sam Weller is suggesting that the desperation indicates the poor man is eating above his station. But I think that the differentiation is between poor and destitute. Mayhew's oyster seller is clear: her customers include men who look like 'poor parsons down upon their luck' or 'The poor girls that walk the streets' but her 'heartiest customers...are working people, on a Saturday night...The _very_ poor never buy of me...A penny buys a loaf, you see, or a ha'porth of bread and a ha'porth of cheese...My customers are mostly working people and tradespeople': poor by middle-class standards, but not poverty-stricken.\n\n. Sellers' mysterious cries were a running joke among the middle classes. A visiting American claimed that one woman regularly called 'Stur-ur-ur!' outside his window, to sell her watercresses. Other cries were just baffling: a seller near Portland Place called 'cats'-meat', but in fact he was selling cabbage plants, while a man calling 'chickweed' had watercresses for sale. The tourist thought that the cry didn't matter, as the sellers had regular beats and were recognized by the cry, not the content, but some of these calls do seem counter-productive.\n\n. Nineteenth-century muffins were, of course, not American cake-like muffins. The modern 'English muffin' (an American anomaly too) is the descendant of what was being sold here. Made from a yeast batter, they were cooked on a griddle rather than baked, then cut in half, and served hot, spread with butter.\n\n. The Corn Laws were passed in 1815, as Britain moved to a peacetime economy after a quarter of a century of war. The import of grain (corn in this context generally meaning wheat, but legally all grain) from abroad was prohibited unless the home price rose above a certain \u2013 astronomical \u2013 level, to protect the home markets. Even though the laws brought immense hardship, repeal did not come until 1849, such was the hostility of the great landowners to competition from abroad.\n\n. The origin of the word 'hokey-pokey' is uncertain, but it is probably connected to the novelty of ice cream \u2013 milk (or turnip) is, 'hocus-pocus', magically turned into a delicious treat.\n\n. Working-class cookshops were also places where street sellers had their food cooked in bulk, as with the baked-potato sellers on pp. 283\u20134.\n\n. If Dickens is to be believed, men kept almost everything they owned in their hats. It is almost quicker to itemize those characters who did not use their hat as a handy man-bag. Those who did include: Mr Pickwick, who keeps his glove and handkerchief there when he goes skating; in _Oliver Twist_ a hat is home to Mr Bumble's handkerchief; the Dodger brings hot rolls and ham for breakfast in his; his pickpocket colleague Toby Crackit puts a shawl in 'my castor' ['castor' = beaver]; in _Nicholas Nickleby_ , Newman Noggs, flustered, tries to fit a parcel 'some two feet square' into his, as well as keeping at different times a letter there, 'some halfpence' and a handkerchief, while the moneylender Arthur Gride keeps large wedding favours (see p. 315) in his; in _The Old Curiosity Shop_ , Kit's handkerchief is in his hat; in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ , Montague Tigg keeps old letters, 'crumpled documents and small pieces of what may be called the bark of broken cigars' in his, while the stagecoachman uses his to store his parcels for delivery; in _Little Dorrit_ , Pancks, the moneylender's clerk, keeps his notebook and mathematical calculations there; and finally, in _David Copperfield_ , David puts a bouquet for Dora 'in my hat, to keep it fresh' \u2013 possibly the only fully middle-class person in Dickens' novels to use this caching spot. Much later in the century Sherlock Holmes notices a bulge in Watson's hat, which indicates he has stashed his stethoscope there, but there are few other mentions in fiction. I suspect it was a standard location for a man's handkerchief, and for all the other items Dickens merely thought it was funny.\n\n. Boxes appear to have been a recognized coffee-room feature. In an essay Dickens refers to the arrangements at a Ragged School, where 'each class was partitioned off by screens adjusted like the boxes in a coffee-room'.\n\n. If a waiter served a third of the average 600 customers each day, even deducting half his earnings for his place and for the laundry and supplies, he would earn about 8s a day, which was a good enough wage. One book published in 1840 claimed that waitresses paid as much as 20s a day for their places, although it also claimed that a 2d tip was average, double the sum quoted in every other source. The waitress would thus need to serve 125 customers before her fee was covered (and much more likely 250). This seems feasible, but I think it's likely that her tips, too, were usually 1d, and given that the average working day in a coffee house was fifteen hours, it would therefore have been possible for her to earn her fee plus another 7\u20138s a day.\n\n. For those with an interest in pre-decimal sums, or food prices, this translates as: four servings of veal-and-ham at 9d each (3s), four servings of potatoes at 1d each (running total now 3s 4d), one cabbage at 2d (total 3s 6d), three servings of marrow at 3d each (total 4s 6d), six servings of bread at 1d each (5s), three servings of cheese at 1d each (5s 3d), four half-pints of half and half (porter and ale mixed) at 3d each (6s 3d), four glasses of rum at 6d each (8s 3d), tip for three diners at 1d each (or 8s 6d for lunch for three).\n\n. By 1875, the Albion had taken over the cigar divan and become Simpson's Divan Tavern, at 103 the Strand, where it remains as a restaurant today, although the building is more recent, and its street number is now 100.\n\n. Peel lived in Whitehall Gardens, which was on the river before the Embankment pushed out the shoreline (see p. 225ff.), behind the Banqueting House and more or less where the Ministry of Defence is now.\n\n. The arch now faces Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner, but the statue was almost unanimously disliked from the outset, and by 1883, when the arch was moved to its current location, the statue was removed to Aldershot. The sculpture now on top of the arch is twentieth century, Adrian Jones' _The Angel of Peace Descending on the Chariot of War_.\n\n. From the sixteenth century, the Lord Mayor's Show had taken place on 29 October; with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1751, when eleven days were 'lost', it moved to 9 November. In 1959, the date became moveable, and the show is now held on the second Saturday in November. The only year the show has not been held was in 1852, when the Duke of Wellington's funeral prevented the event (see pp. 335\u201346). The Lord Mayor today has a mainly ceremonial role as mayor only of the Square Mile, and is not to be confused with the mayor of London.\n\n. The sorry saga of the marriage of Caroline and the Prince Regent, later George IV, is too long to rehearse here: it is enough to say that before their wedding in 1794, the Prince had already secretly morganatically married Maria Fitzherbert. The royal couple separated within a year, after the birth of their daughter, Charlotte. The Regent made three formal attempts to find evidence of his wife's adultery, to enable a divorce; when their daughter died, her mother was not notified but left to find out by chance. On the Regent's accession to the throne in 1820, Caroline, who was physically barred from his coronation, became a rallying point for opponents of the unpopular new king.\n\n. Greville (1794\u20131865) was a minor political figure and a diarist of genius. When his expurgated diaries were published after his death, in 1874, even in this form they offended the queen, who recorded that she was ' _horrified_ and _indignant_ at this dreadful and really scandalous book. Mr Greville's indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude, betrayal of confidence and shameful disloyalty towards his Sovereign make it _very important_ that the book should be severely censored and discredited.' It was those very qualities, of course, that made Greville great.\n\n. The queen did inherit the cash, using it to build Balmoral and buy extra land around Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.\n\n. Robert Pate had actually managed to strike the queen with his stick: this was the one incident in which the queen was injured.\n\n. Wedding favours were posies of flowers surrounded by leaves and ribbons for women; for men, silvered leaves and acorns, with more ribbons. They were worn pinned on the breast, usually by members of a wedding party and their households, although for royal weddings no family connection was required.\n\n. The Bricklayers' Arms, otherwise a station used by labourers as they travelled to Kent for the hop-picking, was more infrequently the place where grandees arrived by train from Dover, being convenient for Westminster Bridge, and then only a short ride up to Parliament or Buckingham Palace.\n\n. He lived up to this last slogan. At the station, as the crowd pressed forward, he reached over the barricades and shook hands indiscriminately, thanking members of the public for coming and calling workmen 'my brothers', before picking up and petting a child who offered him flowers. It is clear from the reports that this type of contact with people was unusual, possibly previously unknown.\n\n. A few City parishes continue this tradition, but on different days, and sometimes only once every few years.\n\n. Slang for food, particularly picnic food.\n\n. Cardinal Wiseman (1802\u201365) was made the first cardinal-archbishop of Westminster when Pius IX re-established the Catholic hierarchy in England, an action that provoked the hostility described above.\n\n. I suspect when sung on the streets another portion of his anatomy was substituted here. I have no evidence, but see the songs on pp. 360\u20132.\n\n. Crape was a silk that had been treated so that it had a wrinkled surface that absorbed rather than reflected the light, producing a dull, matte finish that was considered appropriate for mourning.\n\n. They remained there for the full year of mourning, and if, noted one bemused foreigner, the house was let during that year, 'the tenants take on' the hatchment together with the lease. The hatchment for the Duke of Wellington remained outside Apsley House more than a decade after his death.\n\n. This clause caused problems on his death, when public opinion demanded that he be buried in Westminster Abbey. A compromise was reached: he was buried in the Abbey, but in a private ceremony.\n\n. One particularly unfortunate display of the Northern Lights kept twelve engines and seventy-four men dashing about an entire night, attempting to locate the fire that kept being sighted over the horizon \u2013 a sobering indication of how street lights have altered our ideas of night.\n\n. In 1901, a journalist born in 1864 noted that the firemen still roared 'Hi! yi! hi! yi!' as they raced along. 'The suggestion so often made that the firemen should abandon their wild cries and substitute a gong is bitterly opposed' by the men: 'They have always yelled \"Hi! yi!\" and they will always do so.'\n\n. Conditions can be imagined when comparing it to the last great state occasion in the cathedral, the marriage of the Prince of Wales and Diana Spencer: a mere 3,500 were seated then.\n\n. The absence of Austria was in response to an ugly little episode. An Austrian general named Haynau had fought against Napoleon, but had later been involved in the atrocities against the revolutionaries of 1848 in Italy, stories of his vicious behaviour being widespread. In Belgium he had narrowly escaped attack in the street. In London in 1850 he was assaulted by some draymen working at the Barclays and Perkins brewery in Southwark, who shouted 'Down with the Austrian butcher!' threw mud and 'dirt' at him, threatened him with a beating and ultimately chased him down the Borough High Street until he hid in the George Inn. Austria was still smarting from this diplomatic humiliation two years later and refused to send a representative to the duke's funeral. On the other side, when Garibaldi visited London in 1864, he asked to be taken to see the brewery, so he could personally thank the draymen. The matter was a little delicate, as the men had committed criminal assault, although none had ever been identified. Finally it was suggested that if Garibaldi went to the brewery at a certain time, some men would be in the forecourt grooming the horses, and Garibaldi might wish to acknowledge, in particular, the man on the far right, which he did. Today a plaque marks the spot where Haynau was assaulted.\n\n. There are two small notebooks and they are a mystery. They contain a note dated 1952 (when they were acquired by the British Museum) stating that they previously belonged to the 1952 owner's father-in-law, who in turn had been Silvester's great-great-nephew; but while the notebooks may well have been in Silvester's possession, there is no knowing who compiled the information they contain, for what purpose, or how reliable it is.\n\n. Theatres had historically run long programmes, beginning with a five-act drama at 5 p.m., followed by an interlude of some sort, then an afterpiece \u2013 a farce or a comedy in one act. After the third act of the main play, entrance was reduced to half-price, and many people who worked long hours or had small incomes regularly attended only after the discounted prices came into effect.\n\n. Spittoons, although usually unmentioned, were an important part of club furnishings. One pub in 1847 had four spittoons in the bar-parlour \u2013 and twenty-nine in its club room, which held only twenty-one chairs.\n\n. 'Out o' doors' clerks are known as outside clerks today; they transport documents from legal chambers to court registry offices, serve papers and so on.\n\n. John Payne Collier's reputation today is primarily as a literary forger. However, at the time John Dickens approached him, he was an admired journalist, particularly for _The Times_ and the _Morning Chronicle_ , as well as the _Observer_ 's theatre critic.\n\n. Collier also wrote that Barrow had told him that the boy had 'assisted Warren...in the conduct of his extensive business', and 'referred...jocosely' to the rhyming advertisements, suggesting Dickens had written them. Biographers have wondered whether Barrow knew of Dickens' childhood disgrace, why he would hint at it. But Collier's diary was published the year after Forster's biography of Dickens revealed to the world the events of Dickens' childhood, and it seems more likely that Collier retrospectively 'remembered' something that Barrow, forty years earlier, had never told him, to embellish his diary now that the young Dickens was famous.\n\n. A memoirist records that the original building appears in Hogarth's _Morning_ engraving in his _Four Times of the Day_ series. Reading from right to left, Tom's Coffee-House, the entrance to St Paul's church, and then Evans's were depicted. But, he added, Hogarth had not reversed his original drawing to allow for the fact that the engraving would flip the image, so it appears backwards.\n\n. Crim. con. was an abbreviation for a legal term, 'criminal conversation'. As a wife was legally a man's property, if she committed adultery, her husband could sue her lover for damages, not for the adultery, but for reducing her 'value' by entering into 'criminal conversation' with her.\n\n. Goodered's Flash Saloon was a 'hotbed of vice', according to a guidebook.\n\n. Mother H. was a well-known madam; see p. 412.\n\n. I have not identified Ives of St Giles \u2013 a prostitute perhaps? Joe the Stunner was 'stunning Joe Banks' (fl. 1830\u201350), a well-known London publican and fence, whose pub was in St Giles.\n\n. 'Kinchen' were child thieves, more commonly boys, while 'kifer' was a woman as represented by her sex organs \u2013 'plenty of kifer in that house'; so the sentence praises both young girls and those who had reached puberty.\n\n. For more on 'Baron' Nicholson, see p. 363.\n\n. This is John Rhodes, the owner of the Coal Hole (his brother William managed the Cider Cellars). It is interesting that the place is referred to in such sexual terms; for more on the overlap of entertainment halls and prostitution, see pp. 405\u20136.\n\n. This is the 3rd Marquess of Waterford, whom the _Dictionary of National Biography_ describes as 'reprobate and landowner', itemizing some of his exploits: 'it amused him to challenge passers-by to fight him, to break windows, to upset (literally) applecarts. He painted the Melton Mowbray toll bar red; he fought a duel; he painted the heels of a parson's horse with aniseed and hunted him with bloodhounds.\n\n. This is Adelaide Kemble, the now less-remembered opera-singer sister of the actress Fanny Kemble, both daughters of Charles Kemble.\n\n. Dickens three years later echoed this lack of enthusiasm, calling him a 'poor dull idle fellow'.\n\n. Limelight was more commonly used in theatres for special effects. It was created by burning off the calcium in lime, which gave a red flame; when oxygen was mixed in, the gases together gave off an incandescent light.\n\n. Now only an idiom, the Riot Act of 1715 was a legal formula used to break up 'tumults and riotous assemblies'. A strict procedure had to be followed: the Act had to be read aloud to those whom the officials wished to disperse, using a set form of words. The crowd then had one hour to leave the area, and no force was permitted until that hour had elapsed.\n\n. 'Burker' had become a term of abuse for any resurrectionist, although Burke and his partner Hare, were murderers rather than resurrectionists. Between November 1827 and 31 October 1828 William Burke and William Hare murdered sixteen or seventeen people in Edinburgh before selling their bodies to Dr Robert Knox's anatomy school.\n\n. Sala very possibly did see this; it sounds as if he did. However, the 'nurse' and his 'nursery' appear to be adult inventions to make his background more middle-class: his mother was a singer and dancer and only just eked out a living.\n\n. As late as the 1850s the age of criminal responsibility was seven, compared to sixteen in France at the same time. Now ten in England and Wales, it remains among the lowest in Europe, where it ranges from fourteen to sixteen.\n\n. The White Swan is generally referred to as a brothel, that is, a place where a proprietor or hired supervisor controls resident prostitutes, collecting fees and paying the sex-workers either a percentage or a salary. But from the description that comes down to us it sounds as though it might have been an accommodation house, a place where rooms were rented for short periods of time to anyone who appeared: professional sex-workers or couples simply wanting a private space. For more on heterosexual accommodation houses, see pp. 411\u20132. Whatever type of house it was, a contemporary author claimed there were many similar houses in the Strand, in Blackman Street, in the Borough, near the Obelisk, at the intersection of Kennington Lane and Kennington Road, in the Inns of Court, and in Bishopsgate Street, in the City.\n\n. Dickens' depiction of Fagin in the condemned cell on the night before his execution was artistic licence. By 1837, the year _Oliver Twist_ began serialization, the only crimes punishable by death were high treason, murder, attempted murder, arson on inhabited premises, wrecking (causing a shipwreck), piracy, rape and 'unnatural offences', while Fagin was a receiver of stolen goods, for which the punishment was transportation. Isaac (Ikey) Solomon, on whom it has long been thought Dickens may have in part based Fagin, was found guilty of receiving at the Old Bailey in 1830, and transported to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). However, recently a more interesting possibility has emerged: Dickens may well have used someone even closer to home as his model for the Jewish fence. His maternal aunt had married into a Jewish family (it was her stepson who gave the young Charles work at the blacking factory), and in 1825 her husband's cousin-by-marriage, Henry Worms, was convicted of receiving stolen goods and transported, like Fagin and like Solomon, to Van Diemen's Land.\n\n. I can discover no reason for Angelo to refer to four men. Five were executed on 1 May 1820: Arthur Thistlewood, John Thomas Brunt, James Ings, William Davidson and Richard Tidd.\n\n. If he recalled the price accurately, the cost of a rooftop spot had increased by 400 per cent from Dickens' rental in 1849. This may indicate how rarity drove prices up, although it may also be the memoirist's faulty recollection, or a desire to appear a big spender.\n\n. The nineteenth-century view was that women in certain notoriously poorly-paid trades automatically became prostitutes, although modern historians have questioned this. Milliners, for example, routinely worked fourteen-hour days, and sixteen in the season. In view of the difficulties of life that we have seen \u2013 finding time to collect water and so on \u2013 it is worth questioning how much time, if not energy, they had for extra-curricular prostitution as well.\n\n. Mary Magdalene was, of course, the follower of Christ to whom he appeared after his resurrection (John 20:1\u201318); she is frequently linked with the sinner in Luke 7:37, and thus represents a repentant prostitute. Asylums for 'fallen women' were therefore often called Magdalen homes.\n\n. According to the _Dictionary of National Biography_ , Hanger was considered 'among the dregs of society' by his contemporaries.\n\n. The female age of consent had been twelve since the sixteenth century; in the nineteenth century, intercourse with a girl under the age of ten was a felony, with a girl aged between ten and twelve a misdemeanour. The age of consent was raised to thirteen in 1875, and to sixteen in 1885. Historically there has never been a male age of consent for heterosexual sex.\n\n. In Greek mythology, Cyprus was devoted to the worship of Aphrodite, and so a Cyprian was a prostitute. If one wants to carp, 'gay Cyprian' is the equivalent of saying a prostituted prostitute.\n\n. It is worth remembering, too, that at the beginning of this period, as well as being the main red-light district at night, the Haymarket was, in the daytime, just that: a market where hay was sold: 'The whole right hand side of the street going downwards, from the Piccadilly end to the Opera House, used to be lined with loads of hay', with the pavement 'crowded by salesmen and their customers'.\n\n. I suspect that 'bare to the waist' here means without the handkerchief that would normally have been worn at the neck of a low-cut dress, thus with the breasts partially exposed, which Walter's 'half naked' in the next sentence appears to back up. (See also note on p. 184.) Although this passage is corroborated by Walter, I have found Flora Tristan unreliable on the subject of prostitution more generally. She replicates whole passages from Ryan's _Prostitution in London_ , which cannot be taken at face value (see p. 395), and she doubles Colquhoun's estimate of the number of prostitutes in London, purely because, she writes, the population had doubled.\n\n. Walter seems overly optimistic about their income. If a woman paid 15s a week for her rooms, and once a year bought a dress for \u00a35, plus other items of clothing for another \u00a35, food (7s a week), fuel (3s), candles or other lighting (3s) and laundry (1s), at a minimum her outgoings would be nearly \u00a33, probably closer to \u00a34 to cover only the basic necessities of life and her trade. This would require eight clients a week paying the maximum to cover the basics, leaving no room for anything to go wrong, no seasonal fall in trade, as in August, and with no money going towards dependants. That some women in the West End or prosperous locations could indeed make a living this way and set money aside for the future can be seen in the stories of women like the coffee-house proprietor Munby knew (see p. 400); but it was just as obviously not possible for everyone.\n\n. Walter claimed in the 1850s that the overseer of a house in James Street, which had eight good rooms and two small, less desirable ones, took \u00a320 a day. Eliminating the two small rooms, if we assume that the eight rooms charged 5s per customer, then to make \u00a320 a day, each room would have to process ten customers a day, a hot-sheet hotel indeed. Even if the actual income were only half this, the house's turnover would be over \u00a32,500 a year for a forty-six-week year.\n\n. The cases relate entirely to male homosexual transactions; if there were female homosexual street encounters, we have no evidence: unlike male homosexual acts, which had been illegal from 1533, there have never been any legal constraints on female homosexual acts, and therefore the court records, which supply so much evidence for men, are of no assistance.\n\n. The man who was arrested with them swore in court that he had thought they were women, and that earlier, when he had seen them dressed as men, he had thought they were women in men's clothes. But as he was facing prosecution for intent to commit sodomy, to quote a more modern sex-trial witness, he would, wouldn't he?\nINDEX\n\nNOTE: Page numbers in _italic_ refer to illustrations and captions. Works by Charles Dickens (CD) appear directly under title; other works under author's name)\n\nAbbey Mills sewage station,\n\nAberfield, William ('Slender Billy'), 347\u20138\n\nAbney Park cemetery, Stoke Newington,\n\naccommodation houses, n, , 411\u201312\n\nActon, William, , 395\u20136, 398\u20139, ,\n\nAdelphi Terrace,\n\nadvertising, 241\u20136\n\nage of consent, n\n\nAix-la-Chapelle, Peace of (1814),\n\nAlbert Bridge,\n\nAlbert, Prince: birthday celebrations, ; cause of death, n; celebrates end of Crimean War, ; death, ; funeral, ; public attitude to, ; at theatre, ; visits burnt-out Covent Garden theatre, ; at Wellington's funeral, ,\n\nAlbion (supper house),\n\nale, porter and stout,\n\nAlexandra, Princess of Wales ( _later_ Queen of Edward VII): reception on arrival in London, , 315\u201317; wedding celebrations,\n\nAlhambra Music Hall,\n\nAll Soul's Church, Langham Place, n\n\n_All the Year Round_ (magazine), , , ,\n\nAlsatias, & n\n\nAmerican Civil War,\n\nAnatomy Act (1832),\n\nAngelo, Henry,\n\nAnglesey, Henry William Paget, 1st Marquess of,\n\nanimals: baiting, 347\u20139; street shows, ; waste, 207\u20138\n\nAnne, Queen, n\n\nAnti-Duelling Association,\n\nApsley House ('No. 1, London'), , 335\u20136\n\nArgyle Assembly Rooms, Windmill Street, ,\n\nartesian wells,\n\nArtful Dodger (character, _Oliver Twist_ ),\n\nAsclepius, n\n\nAstley's Amphitheatre (and Equestrian Show), , ,\n\nAsylums for the Houseless Poor (Refuges for the Destitute), 196\u20137\n\nAtkins (showman),\n\n_Bachelor's Pocket Book, The_ , ,\n\nbackslang, 249\u201350\n\nBadcock, Jonathan: _Real Life in London_ , & n, , , ,\n\nBagehot, Walter, ,\n\nBailey (character, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ),\n\nbakers,\n\nBaldwin, Jemmy,\n\nBallard's Menagerie,\n\nBall's Alamode Beef House, Butcher Hall Lane,\n\nBalmoral, n,\n\nbands (musical), ,\n\nBanks, Joe ('Joe the Stunner'), & n\n\nbarbers,\n\nBardell, Mrs (character, _Pickwick Papers_ ), ,\n\nBarham, Revd Richard,\n\nBarking Creek,\n\nBarley Mow public house, Strand,\n\n_Barnaby Rudge_ (CD),\n\nBarrett, Michael, 390\u20132\n\nBarrow, John,\n\nBarry, Sir Charles, n, , n,\n\nBartholomew Fair,\n\nbaths, 211\u201312\n\nBaths and Washhouses Act (1847),\n\nBathyani, Prince,\n\nBattersea: old wooden bridge,\n\nBattersea Fields,\n\nBattersea Park: free access,\n\nBay Tree, St Swithin's Lane (chophouse),\n\nBazalgette, Sir Joseph,\n\nBeale, Sophia, , , , , , , 375\u20136\n\nbear-baiting,\n\nbeating parish bounds,\n\nBedford, Dukes of, ,\n\nBedford Estate, Bloomsbury, 261\u20132,\n\nbeer, 287\u20138,\n\nBelgrave Square,\n\nBelgravia,\n\nBelton, Fred,\n\nBemerton Street, King's Cross,\n\nBenjamin, Walter,\n\nBennett, Alfred Rosling, & n, n, , , ,\n\nBentham, Jeremy,\n\nBerkeley Square, 263\u20134\n\nBerners Street: hoax, 17\u201320\n\nBethnal Green: market, ; sanitary conditions, ; slums,\n\nBeverley Brook,\n\nbill-stickers, 243\u20134\n\nBillingsgate fish market, 126\u20137\n\nBinny, John,\n\nBlack Ditch (river),\n\nBlackfriars Bridge, ,\n\nBlackfriars railway station, n\n\nBlackmore, Edward,\n\nBlake, William: burial place, n\n\n_Bleak House_ (CD): on clocks, n; describes Thames, ; on fog, 204\u20135; Tom-all-Alone's location in, ; walking in, 27\u20138,\n\nBloomsbury: squares, 261\u20132\n\nBoard of Health, ,\n\nBoffin, Mr (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nBoiled-Beef House, Old Bailey,\n\nboots: second-hand sale, 137\u20138\n\nBoucicault, Dion: _The Streets of London_ ,\n\nBoulton, Ernest and Frederick Park, , 416\u201318, __\n\nboys: street amusements and behaviour, 304\u20135; working in streets, 154\u20137; _see also_ children\n\nBraidwood, James: at Tooley Street fire, 112\u201313, 117\u201318; funeral, 118\u201321, __ ; heads Fire Engine Establishment, 327\u201398\n\nBrand, Jack,\n\nBrass, Sampson (character, _Old Curiosity Shop_ ),\n\nBricklayers' Arms (railway station), & n, ,\n\nbrickmaking, n,\n\nbridges: advertisements on, ; as river crossing points, 64\u20135; toll-free,\n\nBritannia theatre,\n\nBritish Museum: admission, n\n\nBroad St, Soho (now Broadwick Street),\n\nBroad Street railway station, n\n\nBroadcasting House, n\n\nBrompton Cemetery,\n\nBront\u00eb, Charlotte and Anne: visit London, ,\n\nBrooks, Shirley,\n\nbrothels, n, , 411\u201312; _see also_ accommodation houses; prostitutes\n\nBrougham, Henry Peter, Baron, ,\n\nBrowne, Hablot Knight ('Phiz'), n\n\nBuccleuch, Walter Francis Scott, 5th Duke of,\n\nBud, Rosa (character, _Edwin Drood_ ),\n\n_Builder, The_ (magazine), n\n\nBuilding Act (1844),\n\nbullies _see_ pimps\n\nBunyan, John, n\n\nburials, 219\u201322\n\nBurke, Richard O'Sullivan,\n\nBurke, William and William Hare, n\n\nBurton, Decimus, n,\n\nBurton, James,\n\nbuses _see_ omnibuses\n\nbutchers: and animal slaughter,\n\nByron, George Gordon, 6th Baron: _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ ,\n\ncabstands and ranks, 81\u20133, __\n\nCaithness, James Sinclair, 14th Earl of,\n\nCaldwell's dancing establishment, Dean Street,\n\nCamberwell Workhouse,\n\nCamden Town, ,\n\nCanning, Charles John, Earl,\n\nCannon Street: built,\n\nCannon Street railway station, n\n\nCarker, Mr (character, _Dombey and Son_ ), ,\n\nCarlton Gardens,\n\nCarlton House, , ,\n\nCarlton House Terrace,\n\nCarlyle, Jane Welsh, ,\n\nCarlyle, Thomas: disturbed by cock crowing, ; on dog theft, ; on Smithfield market, ; witnesses burning of Parliament,\n\nCarnaby market,\n\nCaroline, Queen of George IV, n\n\ncarriages: cost, 85\u20136; hackney, ; lamps and lighting, 88\u20139; numbers, , ; technological development and types, 87\u20138; _see also_ coaches; stagecoaches\n\nCarrington, Charles Robert Carington, 3rd Baron, 370\u20131\n\nCasino de Venise (the Holborn Casino),\n\nCasual Wards, 197\u20138\n\nCatholicism: hierarchy re-established in England, n\n\nCato Street conspiracy (1820), , __\n\ncattle-drovers,\n\ncemeteries _see_ graveyards\n\nceremonies and celebrations (public), 308\u201312, 315\u201317\n\ncesspools, 206\u20137\n\nChadwick, Edwin, ; _Report into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain_ (1842),\n\nchaises, n\n\nChamberlain's Wharf,\n\nChancery Lane,\n\nChapter Coffee-House, Paternoster Row,\n\nCharing Cross, 267\u20138 & n; railway station, ,\n\nCharles I, King: statue,\n\nCharley (character, _Bleak House_ ),\n\nCharlotte, Princess, n\n\nCharlotte, Queen of George III,\n\nChartist Convention (1848),\n\nChaucer, Geoffrey,\n\nChelsea, ; domestic water supply, ; Embankment, __\n\nChelsea Bridge,\n\nChesterfield, George Stanhope, 6th Earl of,\n\nchickens and fowl,\n\nchildren: and crime, & n; deaths in City of London, ; malnutrition, 198\u20139; stolen for clothes, 171\u20132; street-selling and services, 154\u20136; _see also_ boys\n\nchimney sweeps, 144\u20135; May day parade, 318\u201319\n\ncholera: epidemics, (1831), , , 373\u20135; (1846), ; (1849), , ; (1853\u20134), , ; and ice suppliers, n; ignorance of cause, ; mortality rate, & n; occurrence at Millbank, ; Snow diagnoses waterborne cause,\n\nchophouses, 297\u2013301, __\n\n_Christmas Carol, A_ (CD), ,\n\nChurch Lane, near Pye Street,\n\nchurchyards _se_ graveyards\n\nChuzzlewit, Jonas (character, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ),\n\nChuzzlewit, Martin (character, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ), ,\n\nCider (or Cyder) Cellars, Maiden Lane, , ,\n\ncigars and cigar divans, 295\u20136,\n\nCircle line (underground), ,\n\nCitizen Company (steam boats),\n\nCity of London: beating the bounds, ; definition, n; and house drainage, ; Lord Mayor's Show, ; noise, ; office workers, 25\u20136; responsibilities, ; Sewers Act (1848), ; squares,\n\nClare market, ,\n\nClark's Equestrian Show,\n\nClaypole, Noah (character, _Oliver Twist_ ),\n\nClennam, Arthur (character, _Little Dorrit_ ), , , 422\u20133\n\nClerkenwell Improvement Commission,\n\nClerkenwell prison, ; Fenian attack on, 390\u20131\n\nclocks,\n\nclothes: selling of old, , , 240\u20131\n\nclubs, , , 354\u20138\n\ncoaches: discomfort and danger, 98\u2013101; drivers, 97\u20138; fares and seating, ; glamour of, ; mailcoaches parade for monarchs' birthdays, ; types and operation, 90\u20136, __ ; _see also_ carriages; stagecoaches\n\nCoal Hole (supper and singing club), , __ , 362\u20133\n\nCochrane, Charles, n\n\nCock, the (chophouse),\n\n_Cockchafer, The_ (songbook),\n\ncockfighting and cockpits, 348\u20139\n\ncockneys: speech, 248\u20139\n\ncoffee houses, 293\u20135\n\ncoffee stalls, 23\u20135\n\nColdbath Fields prison, ,\n\nColeraine, George Hanger, 4th Baron: _The Life and Adventures of Col. George Hanger_ , , n\n\nCollier, John Payne, & n\n\nCollins, Wilkie: _Basil_ ,\n\nColquhoun, Patrick, , n\n\nCommercial Street,\n\nCommissioner for Woods and Forests,\n\nConstable, John,\n\nCook, James,\n\ncookshops (or bakeshops), 290\u20132, __\n\nCooper, Jane,\n\nCopenhagen Fields, Islington, ,\n\nCopperfield, David (character, _David Copperfield_ ): childhood, ; coach travel, ; fear of homelessness, ; follows Martha, ; food and eating, , , , ; on porters, ; uses Roman bath, ; walking, ,\n\nCorn Laws, 285\u20136 & n\n\ncostermongers: barrows on Guy Fawkes night given battle names, ; dress, 145\u20136; purchase equipment and ponies at Smithfield, ; sell goods from barrows, n, , ; slang, 249\u201350\n\nCotton's Warehouse,\n\nCounters Creek,\n\n'courts' _see_ 'rents'\n\nCourvoisier, Benjamin-Fran\u00e7ois, ,\n\nCovent Garden: character, ; Floral Hall, ; market, 123\u20136; morning activities, ; Piazza, 261\u20132; porters, 125\u20136\n\nCovent Garden theatre: fire (1856), ; Old Price Riots (1809), 371\u20132\n\ncows, 207\u20138\n\nCranbourne Alley,\n\n_Cricket_ (river steam boat): boiler explodes, 68\u20139\n\ncrime: attitudes to, ; low-level, 379\u201380; and poverty,\n\nCrimean War (1853\u20136): ends, __ ,\n\nCrockford's (gambling establishment),\n\ncross-dressers, ,\n\ncrossing-sweepers, 49\u201350; girls as, n\n\nCrown Estate: responsibilities,\n\nCruikshank, George, n,\n\nCruikshank, Robert, n\n\nCrummles family (characters, _Nicholas Nickleby_ ),\n\nCrystal Palace: relocated in Sydenham, , __\n\nCubitt, Thomas,\n\nCubitt, William,\n\nCuttle, Captain (character, _Dombey and Son_ ),\n\n_Daily News_ , , ,\n\n'dancing establishments', 406\u20137\n\n_David Copperfield_ (CD): child labour episode, ; on Hungerford Stairs, ; on Pimlico, ; on short-stagecoach,\n\ndead: disposal of, 219\u201322\n\ndeath: causes, , 324\u20136; from epidemics, 215\u201317; from starvation, , ; from water, ; sentences, 386\u20137; symbols and ceremonies of, 322\u20133; _see also_ mortality rates\n\ndebtors: in prison, 173\u20138, __\n\nDedlock, Sir Leicester and Lady (characters, _Bleak House_ ),\n\nDefoe, Daniel, n\n\nde Quincey, Thomas, ,\n\nDerby Day, 319\u201320\n\nDerby, Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, 14th Earl of,\n\nDevil's Acre, Tothill Fields, , ,\n\nDiamond Funnel Company (steam boats),\n\nDickens, Catherine ( _n\u00e9e_ Hogarth; CD's wife): and burial of Mary Hogarth, ; marriage,\n\nDickens, Charles: adopts pseudonym Boz, ; appearance and dress, ; attempts autobiography, ; on bill-stickers, ; birth and upbringing, 1\u20132, 5\u20136; on cabs and cabstands, 81\u20132, 84\u20135; on calling for muffins, ; on chimney sweeps' May day celebrations, ; on clerks eating out, ; on coach travel, ; on coaching inns, ; on coachmen's greetings, ; on coffee houses, ; conviviality, ; on death penalty, ; on debtors' prisons, 174\u20137; describes walk, ; disparages Prince of Wales, n; on disposal of dead, 219\u201320; distaste for funeral ceremonies, ; early writings, 4\u20135; earnings, & n; on effect of 'improvements' on poor housing, 189\u201390; on embankment of Thames, ; enjoys street crowds, ; on entering hackney coach, ; and fatal disasters, 324\u20135; feeds cherries to child, ; fictional characters, 11\u201312; on fog and effects, 203\u20134; on food at Britannia theatre, ; on food and eating places, ; on gin palaces, 353\u20134; given dinner at Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich, ; on Great Stink (1858), ; hatred of petty authority, ; on hats and caps, ; on homeless and destitute, 180\u20131; joins Shakespeare club, ; knowledge of London, 7\u201310; life expectancy, ; lives in Furnival's Inn, ; on living conditions of poor, ; on lost child at Great Exhibition, ; marriage, ; on men keeping possessions in hats, n; on mobs, ; on noise of London, 31\u20132; on office workers, ; on oyster house in Holborn, ; as parliamentary reporter, , ; on pavements, ; on pawnshops, ; pictured in advertisement, ; on police regulation of traffic, ; preoccupation with London, 422\u20133; and public executions, , , , ; on Punch and Judy, ; on railway development, ; on recognising prostitutes, ; relations with Nelly Ternan, ; revisits site of blacking factory, __ ; and rhyming slang, ; on sandwich-boards, 244\u20135; sculling, ; sees Louis Philippe in Paris, ; on shops and shopping, 238\u20139; on Simpson's eating house, 301\u20132; sings for John Barrow, ; on Smithfield market, , , ; and speech and pronunciation, 248\u20139, 251\u20132; on street musicians, 255\u20136; on suicides, 419\u201322; supports police, , ; on tea gardens, ; travels north by coach, , ; on turnstiles, ; on unknowability of London, ; view of railways, 101\u20132, ; visits burnt-out Covent Garden theatre, ; walking, 8\u20139, , ; walks in slum areas, , 192\u20133; on workhouses, ; works at _Morning Chronicle_ , ; works in Warren's Blacking Factory, , n,\n\nDickens, Elizabeth ( _n\u00e9e_ Barrow; CD's mother): plans to start school for young ladies,\n\nDickens, John (CD's father), 1\u20134, ,\n\nDickensian: as adjective,\n\n'Dinner at Poplar Walk, A' (CD; story), ,\n\ndisease _see_ illness and disease\n\nDiseases Prevention Act (1846),\n\nDisraeli, Benjamin, , , , 311\u201312; _Henrietta Temple_ ,\n\nDistrict line (underground), ,\n\nDistrict Railway,\n\ndockworkers, 163\u20134\n\nDoctor's Commons, & n\n\ndog carts, & n\n\ndog theft,\n\ndogfighting, 348\u20139\n\ndolly shops,\n\nDolly's (chophouse),\n\nDombey, Edith (character, _Dombey and Son_ ),\n\nDombey, Florence (character, _Dombey and Son_ ), ,\n\nDombey, Mr (character, _Dombey and Son_ ),\n\n_Dombey and Son_ (CD), , , , , ,\n\ndoor-knocks,\n\nDorcas societies, & n\n\nDor\u00e9, Gustave, __\n\nDorrit, Amy (character, _Little Dorrit_ ), , , , ,\n\nDorrit, William (character, _Little Dorrit_ ), ,\n\nd'Orsay, Alfred, Count,\n\nDostoyevsky, Fyodor,\n\nDowning Street,\n\ndrains _see_ sewers and drains\n\ndress: Billingsgate workers, 126\u20137; charity-school uniforms, ; Covent Garden traders, 124\u20136; milkmen and milkmaids, ; prostitutes, __ , 401\u20133; street sellers, 145\u20136; working-class, & n\n\ndrinks: attitude to, ; facilities, 350\u20134; seasonal,\n\ndrunkenness,\n\nDrury Lane: character, ; churchyard,\n\nduelling, 370\u20131\n\nDuncannon Street,\n\ndustmen, 50\u20131 & n,\n\nEagle pub, City Road, ,\n\nEarl's Sluice,\n\nearthquake: predicted (1842),\n\nEast London Water Company,\n\nEdinburgh: prostitutes in,\n\nEdward, Prince of Wales ( _later_ King Edward VII): birth, , ; eighteenth birthday celebrations, ; marriage, ; opens Crossness pumping station, ; visits Carrington, ; visits sites of fires,\n\n_Edwin Drood_ (CD) _see Mystery of Edwin Drood, The_\n\neels: as food,\n\nEffra, river,\n\nEgan, Pierce: _Life in London_ , n, 171\u20132, , , ,\n\nEgg, Augustus: _Past and Present_ (triptych),\n\nEleanor of Castile, Queen of Edward I, n\n\nEllis and Blackmore (firm), n,\n\nEly Place, Clerkenwell, n\n\nEmbankment, the, 226\u20138, __\n\nEmerson, Ralph Waldo,\n\nEnglish Opera House, Covent Garden: fire (1830),\n\nEnon Chapel scandal,\n\nentertainers, popular, 252\u20139\n\nepidemics, 215\u201316\n\nEpping,\n\nEsther (character) _see_ Summerson, Esther\n\nEuston railway station, , 106\u20137\n\nEvans, W.C.,\n\nEvans's (supper-singing room), 357\u20139,\n\nExchange, The, Houndsditch,\n\nExchequer Coffee-House, Palace Yard, Westminster,\n\nexecutions: crowd behaviour, 388\u20139; last public, 391\u20132; numbers, 386\u20138; as punishment, 383\u20136, __\n\nFagin (character, _Oliver Twist_ ), , , , , ,\n\nfairs, 278\u201380\n\nFalconbrook (river),\n\nFang (character, _Oliver Twist_ ),\n\nFarrell, William,\n\nFarringdon: Ragged School Dormitory,\n\nFarringdon Road, 76\u20137, ,\n\nFaucit, Elizabeth,\n\nFenchurch Street railway station,\n\nFenians, 390\u20131\n\nFenning, Eliza,\n\nField Lane _see_ Saffron Hill\n\nFinish coffee house, James Street,\n\nFinsbury Park,\n\nfire brigades: development and operation, , 326\u20139, __\n\nfires: attract crowds, 330\u20132; domestic and institutional, , 329\u201330; Houses of Parliament (1834), n, 330\u20131; Tooley Street (1861), 111\u201318, __\n\nfish: fried, ; marketing, 126\u20137\n\nfish dinners,\n\n_Flash Chaunter, The_ (songbook),\n\n_Flash Songster, The_ (songbook),\n\nflash-houses (for stolen goods),\n\nFleet Ditch: ruptures,\n\nFleet market, ; relocated,\n\nFleet prison, , __ , 175\u20136,\n\nFleet, river and valley, 200\u20132\n\nfog, 203\u20135\n\nFollit's Old Established Cigar Stores, near Portman Square,\n\nfood and cooking: eating houses, , 296\u2013303; and eating outdoors, 23\u20134, , 281\u20134; prices and payment, & n, ; seasonal, ; _see also_ coffee stalls\n\nfootmen,\n\nFordyce, John, ,\n\nForster, John: and CD in Switzerland, ; and CD's unfinished autobiography, ; home address, n; membership of Shakespeare club, ; portrayed as Podsnap,\n\nFoster, Mr (of Chapel-court, Long Acre),\n\nFowler, Jane,\n\nFox, George, n\n\nfree-and-easies _see_ harmonic meetings\n\nFrying-pan Alley, Field Lane,\n\nFulwood's Rents, Holborn,\n\nFurley, Mary,\n\nGallery of Illustrations,\n\ngambling dens,\n\ngangs,\n\nGaribaldi, Giuseppe, , n\n\nGarraway's Coffee-House, Exchange Alley,\n\nGarrick, the (pub), ,\n\ngas: companies, ; explosions, , ; street lighting, 53\u20136, ; _see also_ illuminations\n\nGavin, Hector,\n\nGay, John, ; _The Beggar's Opera_ ,\n\nGeneral Board of Health,\n\nGeneral Steam Navigation Company,\n\nGeorge I, King: statue,\n\nGeorge II, King,\n\nGeorge III, King, , ,\n\nGeorge IV, King ( _earlier_ Prince Regent), , , 264\u20136, n; unpopularity,\n\nGeorge, Mr (character, _Bleak House_ ),\n\nGeorge Reeves' City Luncheon Rooms, ,\n\nGeorge's Coffee-House,\n\ngestures,\n\ngin,\n\ngin palaces, 353\u20134\n\nGladstone, William Ewart: blackmail attempt on, ; in first underground journey,\n\nGlauber, Johann Rudolf, n\n\nGliddon's Divan,\n\nGoding, Mr (brewer),\n\nGodwin, George, ,\n\nGolden Cross House, n\n\nGolden Lane,\n\nGolden Square,\n\n'Gone Astray' (CD; article),\n\ngonoph: defined, n\n\nGoodered's Flash Saloon, & n\n\ngraveyards (cemeteries), ; new suburban, 222\u20133\n\nGreat Exhibition (1851), ,\n\n_Great Expectations_ (CD): on chophouses, ; club in, ; describes Thames, ; on hardships, ; pub services in, ; on short-stagecoach,\n\nGreat Northern Railway, ,\n\nGreat Ormond Street Hospital,\n\nGreat Stink (1858), 223\u20135\n\n'Great Winglebury Duel, The' (CD; story),\n\nGreen, Paddy,\n\nGreen Park: as Crown land,\n\nGreenacre, James,\n\nGreenwich: excursions to, , ; Fair, 278\u20139\n\nGreenwood, James, & n, ,\n\nGreville, Charles, & n, ,\n\nGrewgious, Mr (character, _Edwin Drood_ ),\n\nGrey, Alice,\n\nGrosvenor Estate,\n\nGrosvenor, Lord Robert,\n\nGrosvenor Square,\n\ngrubbers,\n\nGuppy, Mr (character, _Bleak House_ ), , ,\n\nGuy Fawkes Night (5 November), 320\u20132\n\nGyngell's theatre,\n\nH., Mother (madam), & n,\n\nHackney Brook,\n\nhackney coaches, , 79\u201380\n\nHackney Downs,\n\nham and beef shops,\n\nHammersmith Bridge,\n\nHammersmith and City line (underground),\n\nHampstead,\n\nHampstead Heath: ponds, 201\u20132; walking on,\n\nhandbills,\n\nHandford, Julius (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nhangings _see_ executions hansom cabs, 80\u20135\n\nHansom, Joseph, 80\u20131 & n\n\nharmonic meetings (free-and-easies), 355\u20136,\n\nHarris's _List of Covent Garden Ladies_ ,\n\nHastings, Henry Rawdon-Hastings, 4th Marquess of,\n\nhats and caps: as social markers, 272\u20133\n\nHavelock, Sir Henry, n\n\nHavisham, Miss (character, _Great Expectations_ ),\n\nHawthorne, Nathaniel, ,\n\nHaydon, Benjamin Robert, ,\n\nHaymarket, n,\n\nHaynau, General Julius Jacob von, n\n\nHay's Wharf, , __\n\nHeine, Heinrich,\n\nH\u00e9k\u00e9kyan, Joseph (H\u00e9k\u00e9kyan Bey), & n, ,\n\nHemyng, Bracebridge,\n\nHerbert, Sidney,\n\nHexam, Gaffer (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nHicks, George Elgar: _The General Post Office, One Minute to Six_ (painting),\n\nHigden, Betty (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nHighgate Cemetery,\n\n_Hints to Men About Town_ ,\n\nhoaxes: Berners Street, 17\u201320\n\nHodges (distillery owner), 112\u201313\n\nHogarth, Mary: burial,\n\nHogarth, William, ; _Morning_ (engraving), n\n\nhokey-pokey men, & n\n\nHolborn: noise, 31\u20132\n\nHolborn Casino _see_ Casino de Venise\n\nHolborn Hill,\n\nHolborn Viaduct: built, 62\u20133, __ ; and Fleet river, ; opening,\n\nHolborn Viaduct railway station, n\n\nholidays: and shop closures,\n\nHolloway prison, n\n\nhomosexuality: female, n; punished, ; secrecy, 413\u201314\n\nHood, Thomas: 'The Bridge of Sighs', , __\n\nHook, Theodore, 19\u201320\n\nHornsey Wood,\n\nHornsey Wood House,\n\nhorseback riding,\n\nHorsemonger Lane gaol, ,\n\nhorses: boys help with, ; and cabs, , ; manure, ; and road surfaces, 33\u20135; slaughtered and used, 138\u20139; traffic problems, 45\u20136, 48\u20139; ubiquity and numbers, , ; working hours, 28\u20139\n\n_Household Words_ (magazine), , , , , , , ,\n\nHouses of Parliament _see_ Parliament\n\nHughes, Thomas: _Tom Brown's Schooldays_ ,\n\nhulks (prison), ,\n\nHummums, The, Russell Street,\n\nHumphrey, Revd Heman,\n\nHungerford Bridge,\n\nHungerford market, 131\u20132, __\n\nHungerford Stairs, 66\u20137\n\nHungry Forties, , 195\u20136,\n\nHunt, Leigh,\n\nhurdy-gurdy players,\n\nHuysmans, J.-K.: _A Rebours_ ,\n\nHyde Park: grazing rights, ; rally forbidden (1866), n; riots (1855), 376\u20137\n\nhygiene, public, 213\u201315\n\nice sellers, 143\u20134\n\nice-cream,\n\nillness and disease: causes, , 215\u201316\n\nilluminations and lights, 363\u20139, __\n\n_Illustrated London News_ : advertises using sandwich-board men, ; approves of 'improvements', ; on celebrations for end of siege of Sebastopol, ; on charity-school uniforms, ; on crowd at house of dying Peel, __ ; on deaths in barracks, ; on falling cab horses, ; on lack of plan for London, , ; on political rally in Hyde Park, n; on Victoria's withdrawal, ; and Wellington's funeral, ; on widening of Park Lane, , n\n\nIndian Mutiny (1857\u20138),\n\ninfluenza: epidemics (1813\u20131833),\n\ninns, coaching, , __\n\nInns of Chancery,\n\nInns of Court, ,\n\ninsurance companies: and fire brigades,\n\nintroducing houses, ,\n\nIrish: believe in forthcoming earthquake, ; work as labourers,\n\nIron Boat Company (steam boats),\n\nIzant's (slap-bang), Bucklersbury,\n\nJack-in-the-Green,\n\nJacob's Island, Bermondsey, , 190\u20131, __ ,\n\nJames, Henry,\n\nJennings' Buildings, Kensington, & n\n\nJerdan, William,\n\nJermyn Street Baths,\n\nJerusalem Coffee-House, Cornhill,\n\nJews: as old clothes-sellers, ,\n\nJo the crossing-sweeper (character, _Bleak House_ ), 49\u201350, , , , ,\n\nJohn's Coffee-House,\n\nJohnson, Joseph, , __\n\nJohnson, Samuel,\n\nJones, Adrian: _The Angel of Peace Descending on the Chariot of War_ (sculpture), n\n\nJones, Inigo, n,\n\nKeane, Edmund,\n\nKemble, Adelaide, & n\n\nKemble, John Philip, 371\u20132\n\nKennington Common, ; Chartist meeting, 375\u20136\n\nKennington turnpike gate, __\n\nKensal Green cemetery,\n\nKensington, ; slum,\n\nKensington Common,\n\nKew: wooden bridge,\n\nKing's Bench prison, ,\n\nKing's Cross railway station, n,\n\nKing's Mews (Trafalgar Square), ,\n\nkiss in the ring (game),\n\nKrook (character, _Bleak House_ ), 239\u201340\n\nLa Creevy, Miss (character, _Nicholas Nickleby_ ),\n\nLaing, Allan Stewart,\n\nLamb, Charles, ,\n\nLambeth Bridge,\n\nlamplighters,\n\nLancaster, Duchy of,\n\n_Lancet, The_ (journal),\n\nLandseer, Sir Edwin,\n\nLaurie, Sir Peter, 190\u20131\n\nlavatories (flush), 208\u20139\n\nLea, river,\n\nLeadenhall market,\n\nleaving shops,\n\nLeeves, Edward,\n\nLeicester Square, 262\u20133\n\n_Leigh's New Picture of London_ , ,\n\nleisure: and days out, 274\u20135\n\nLever's Museum, Leicester Square,\n\nlicensing laws (alcoholic drinks), 350\u20131\n\nlife expectancy,\n\nLincoln, Abraham,\n\nlinkmen,\n\nLinwood, Miss: Gallery of Needlework Pictures,\n\n_Little Dorrit_ (CD): coach route, ; cookshop in, ; on hardships, ; on Marshalsea prison, 177\u20138, ; on Southwark Bridge, ; stagecoach accident, ; on Thames, ; tobacco shop Highlander, ; on workhouses,\n\nLiverpool Street railway station,\n\nloan societies,\n\nlodging houses, , 184\u20136, __\n\nLondon: CD moves to as child, ; CD's homes in, ; CD's interest in, 7\u201310, 422\u20133; as alienating city, 59\u201360; as city of lights, 363\u20134; first official map, ; improvements and rebuilding, ; improvements (rebuilding) and displacement, , ; levelling of hills, 61\u20132; main access roads, ; noise, 30\u20133; portrayed by CD, 12\u201313; rich and poor districts, 181\u20132, 187\u20138; size and population, 10\u201311, , , ; streets and layout, , 47\u20138; traffic problems, 39\u201340, 44\u20139; transport and navigating, 64\u201370; travel into and from, 90\u20131; walking and walkers in, 25\u20138\n\nLondon Bridge: as crossing point, ; hazards of navigating, 65\u20136; replaced and relocated (1831), , 65\u20136; road surface,\n\nLondon Bridge railway station, , 106\u20137\n\nLondon Bridge Steam Wharf,\n\n_London by Night_ (by 'Anonyma'), , 406\u20137,\n\nLondon Cemetery Company,\n\nLondon, Chatham and Dover Railway, n\n\nLondon Fire Engine Establishment, , 326\u20137, 330\u20131\n\nLondon Gasworks company, ,\n\n_London Gazette_ , 247\u20138\n\nLondon General Omnibus Company,\n\nLondon and Westminster Steam Boat Company, 67\u20138\n\nLord Mayor's Show,\n\nLouis Philippe, King of France,\n\nLovett, William, ,\n\nLowther Arcade,\n\nLumber Court market,\n\nmacadam (road surface), 33\u20136,\n\nMacKenzie, Alexander,\n\nMacready, Charles,\n\nMaggie (character, _Little Dorrit_ ),\n\nmagistrates: corrupt, 377\u20138\n\nMagwitch (character, _Great Expectations_ ), ,\n\nMaiden Lane (now York Way),\n\nManby, Charles,\n\nManners, Lord John,\n\nManning, Maria and Frederick, 385\u20136,\n\nMansion House: illuminated,\n\n_Margery_ (river steamer),\n\nmarine stores, 239\u201340\n\nmarkets: clothes, 137\u20138; food, 123\u201336\n\nMarochetti, Carlo, Baron,\n\nMarryat, Captain Frederick,\n\nMarshalsea prison: conditions, 177\u20138; Dickens portrays, , ; John Dickens in, ; social gatherings,\n\nMartha (character, _David Copperfield_ ),\n\n_Martin Chuzzlewit_ (CD), , , , ,\n\nMarylebone: housing, ; land ownership,\n\nMarylebone Gardens,\n\nMarylebone Lane,\n\nMarylebone railway station, n\n\nmatches: manufacture and selling, 158\u201360, __\n\nMathews, Nancy,\n\nMatileau, Mme: introducing house,\n\nMay day, 318\u201319\n\nMayfair: as prostitutes' venue,\n\nMayhew, Augustus: _Paved with Gold_ (novel),\n\nMayhew, Henry: on child prostitutes, ; on Guy Fawkes day, ; on hot-potato man, ; on low-level crime, 379\u201380; on oyster seller, n; on the poor, ; on prostitutes, 394\u20136; on Punch and Judy show, ; on second-hand boot sales, ; on slaughtered horses, ; on sound of City, ; on speech and pronunciation, 249\u201310; on street musicians, ; on street sellers, , 142\u20133, ; visits Jacob's Island, ; visits Night Refuge, ; on working hours, ; _London Labour and the London Poor_ , , n, , 394\u20136; vol. 4 by other hands, 396\u20137\n\nmedical schools: and dissection, 374\u20135\n\nMelbourne, William Lamb, nd Viscount,\n\nMendoza, Daniel,\n\nmenus: introduced, 300\u20131\n\nMetropolis Land Management Act (1854),\n\nMetropolis Local Management Act for the Purification of the Thames and the Main Drainage of the Metropolis (1858),\n\nMetropolitan Board of Works: approves new streets, ; authorized to undertake sewage building, 224\u20135; builds Holborn Viaduct, ; controls fire brigades, ; created, , ; and naming of streets,\n\nMetropolitan Buildings Act (1844),\n\nMetropolitan Commission of Sewers Act (1848),\n\nMetropolitan Fire Brigade,\n\n_Metropolitan Improvements_ ,\n\nMetropolitan Interments Act (1850),\n\nMetropolitan Police force: formed,\n\nMetropolitan Railway: opens, 77\u20138\n\nmiasma: as cause of disease, ,\n\nMicawber, Wilkins (character, _David Copperfield_ ), ,\n\nMiddle Row, Holborn, 46\u20137\n\nMidland Railway,\n\nmilkmen and milkmaids,\n\nMillbank prison, ,\n\nMinns, Mr (character, 'A Dinner at Poplar Walk'),\n\nMint, the (district), Southwark, n\n\n_Mirror of Parliament_ ,\n\nmobs, 371\u20134\n\nmoney: lending,\n\n_Monthly Magazine_ ,\n\nMonument, the: suicides,\n\n_Morning Chronicle_ , , , ,\n\n_Morning Post_ , ,\n\n_Morning Star_ ,\n\nmortality rates: adult, ; infant and child, ; _see also_ death\n\nMortimer market,\n\nMoses and Son (men's clothing supplier),\n\nMother H. _see_ H., Mother\n\nMould, Mr (character, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ),\n\nmourning, 322\u20133\n\nMowcher, Miss (character, _David Copperfield_ ), ,\n\nmuffin men,\n\nMunby, Arthur: on building of Embankment, 226\u20138; on building Holborn Viaduct, ; diary, n; on girl crossing-sweeper, n; on May day chimney sweeps, ; on milkmen, ; and prostitute, 400\u20131, n; sees cross-dressers, ; sees Landseer's Trafalgar Square lions, ; sees Tooley Street fire, , ; travels by train, , ; visits Thieves' Kitchen, ; watches Ethiopian singers, ; on wedding preparations for Princess Alexandra,\n\nmusic hall: and popular phrases,\n\nmusicians: street, 252\u20136, __\n\n_Mystery of Edwin Drood, The_ (CD), ,\n\nnaked: definition, n\n\nNancy (character, _Oliver Twist_ ), ,\n\nNandy, Old (character, _Little Dorrit_ ), ,\n\nNapier, Sir Charles, n\n\nNaples, Joseph,\n\nNash, John, 264\u20136, 268\u20139,\n\nNational Gallery, Trafalgar Square, ,\n\nNeckinger, river,\n\nNeild, John Camden: leaves money to Queen Victoria,\n\nNelson, Admiral Horatio, Viscount: funeral, ; Trafalgar Square monument, 271\u20134\n\nNelson's Column: transport of granite,\n\nNemo (character, _Bleak House_ ), 49\u201350, ,\n\nNew Bunhill Fields burial grounds,\n\nNew Cut market, Bermondsey,\n\nNew England Coffee-House,\n\nNew Oxford Street: built,\n\nNew Pye Street,\n\n_New Swell's Night Guide to the Bowers of Venus, The_ , n\n\nNewgate market,\n\nNewgate prison, 173\u20134, , , 383\u20135, __ , ,\n\nNewport market,\n\nnewsboys, 154\u20136,\n\nnewspapers: in chophouses, 300\u20131; sale and rental,\n\nNichol Street, Whitechapel,\n\nNicholas I, Tsar of Russia, 321\u20132n\n\n_Nicholas Nickleby_ (CD), , , , , , , , , ,\n\nNicholson, Renton ('the Lord Chief Baron'), & n,\n\nNickleby, Nicholas (character, _Nicholas Nickleby_ ),\n\nNickleby, Ralph (character, _Nicholas Nickleby_ ),\n\nnight life and entertainments,\n\nNight Refuges,\n\n'Nightly Scene in London, A' (CD; article),\n\nnightsoil,\n\nNine Elms: gas explosion (1865), ; railway station,\n\n_Nobby Songster, The_ (songbook),\n\nNoggs, Newman (character, _Nicholas Nickleby_ ), ,\n\nNorth London Railway,\n\nNorthumberland House, , __\n\nNorthumberland, Hugh Percy, 3rd Duke of: funeral,\n\nNotting Dale, ,\n\nNubbles, Kit (character, _Old Curiosity Shop_ ),\n\noffal: as food,\n\noffice workers: walk to and from work, 25\u20136\n\n_Old Coachman's Chatter, An_ ,\n\n_Old Curiosity Shop, The_ (CD), ,\n\nOld Fleece (chophouse),\n\nOld Mint, Bermondsey,\n\nOld Nichol, Shoreditch,\n\nOld Pye Street,\n\nOld Swan Stairs, , __\n\nOld Welsh Harp, Hendon,\n\n_Oliver Twist_ (CD): and death sentence, n; instalment delayed by death of Mary Hogarth, 222\u20133; on Jacob's Island, 190\u20131; officialdom satirized, ; on pauper burial, ; pedlar in, ; on Poor Laws, ; pub landlord in, ; slum districts in, ; writing,\n\nomnibuses: carry advertisements, ; design, 71\u20132; drivers and conductors, 72\u20133; employees' working hours, ; extra horses for, 74\u20135, __ ; introduced, 70\u20131; popularity, , ; service and operation, 72\u201365; stop on either side of road,\n\nopen spaces _see_ parks\n\nordinaries (eating houses),\n\nOrdnance Office, Pall Mall, __\n\norgan grinders, 253\u20134\n\nOsborne, Isle of Wight, n,\n\n_Our Mutual Friend_ (CD): on Billingsgate workers, ; on churchyard, ; on colour of fog, ; describes Thames, , , ; on men's dress, n; on steamer accident on Thames,\n\nout of doors clerks, & n\n\nOxford Circus,\n\n_Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_ , n\n\n_Oxford English Dictionary_ ,\n\nOxford market,\n\nOyster day,\n\noyster houses, 289\u201390\n\noysters: as poor man's food, & n\n\nPaddington railway station, & n\n\nPaine, Thomas: _The Age of Reason_ ,\n\nPall Mall East,\n\n_Pall Mall Gazette_ ,\n\nPalmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount, , , ; funeral,\n\nPanizzi, (Sir) Anthony,\n\nPantechnicon, Belgrave Square,\n\nPantheon, the (bazaar),\n\nPanton Square, 261\u20133\n\nParis, Peace of (1814),\n\nparishes: beating bounds, ; and fire control, ; given right to demolish insanitary buildings, ; responsibility for street maintenance, 56\u20138; and sewage,\n\nPark, Frederick _see_ Boulton, Ernest and Frederick Park\n\nPark Lane, , n\n\nParkman, Francis,\n\nparks and open spaces: designs and facilities, ; leisure walks, ; public access, 260\u20131, 266\u20137; _see also_ individual parks\n\nParliament: burnt down and rebuilt, n, 330\u20131; calendar, ; and Great Stink (1858), ; sewers, 214\u201315\n\nParliamentary Select Committees _see_ Select Committees\n\n'Passage in the Life of Mr Watkins Tottle, A' (CD; story),\n\npastry-cooks,\n\nPate, Robert, n\n\nPaternoster Row: as one-way street,\n\npaupers _see_ poor, the\n\npawnbrokers, , 239\u201342\n\n'Pawnbroker's Shop, The' (CD; article),\n\npea soup, 292\u20133\n\nPeck, river,\n\nPecksniff (character, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ),\n\nPeel, Sir Robert: on design of Nelson memorial, ; fatally injured in fall from horse, , __ ; forms Metropolitan Police,\n\npeep-shows _see_ raree- or peep-shows\n\nPenny Company (steam boats),\n\n_Penny Magazine_ ,\n\nPentonville prison, ,\n\nperiwinkles,\n\nPetticoat Lane,\n\n'Phiz' _see_ Browne, Hablot Knight\n\nPiccadilly: widening postponed,\n\nPiccadilly Circus ( _formerly_ Regent's Circus),\n\nPickford's Removals,\n\nPickwick, Mr (character, _Pickwick Papers_ ): falls through ice, ; in Fleet prison, 175\u20136; at the Golden Cross Hotel, , ; hand gesture in, ; journeys, ; takes chaise, ; travels by coach,\n\n_Pickwick Papers_ (CD): on coach passengers, ; on coaching inns, ; on London, 9\u201310; on piemen tossing coins, ; published, ; pubs in, , ; on short-stagecoach, ; on street lighting,\n\npiemen, 285\u20136\n\npillories, 381\u20133\n\nPimlico,\n\npimps (bullies),\n\nPinch, Tom (character, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ), , ,\n\nPip (character, _Great Expectations_ ), , , , , ,\n\nPius IX, Pope, n\n\nPlace, Francis,\n\nplaybills,\n\npockets, n\n\nPodsnap, Mr (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\npolice: and control of mob violence, 373\u20134, ; empowered to keep streets clear of goods, ; Peel introduces in London, ; routine methods, ; traffic regulation and control, 44\u20135, 48\u20139\n\nPolice Act (1839),\n\nPolitical Union of the Working Classes,\n\npoor laws and relief, 167\u20139, ; and sanitation measures,\n\npoor, the: and crime, ; disparaged and disdained, , , , ; displaced by 'improvements', , 188\u20139, ; economic fragility of, ; food and diet, 281\u20132, ; homeless, ; housing districts, 181\u20132, 187\u20138; hunger and starvation, 196\u20137; refuges and asylums, ; rents, ; work, 159\u201361; in workhouses, , ; _see also_ slums\n\nporters, 157\u20138\n\nPortland Place,\n\nPortland stone: blackens in London,\n\nPortland Town,\n\nPortman market,\n\nPortman Square,\n\nPortugal Street, 220\u20131\n\npost (mail): carried by coach, 91\u20132; foreign post, n; last delivery,\n\npost-chaises, 90\u20131\n\npotatoes: street sellers of, 283\u20134, __\n\nPratt, John,\n\nPrice's Candles (company),\n\nPrig, Betsey (character, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ),\n\nPrimrose Hill,\n\nPrince Regent _see_ George IV, King\n\n_Princess Alice_ (steamer), & n\n\nprisoners: transport,\n\nprisons: cholera epidemics, ; conditions, , 179\u201380; debtors', 173\u20136; nicknames, ; numbers, ; _see also_ individual prisons\n\npronunciation _see_ speech\n\nprostitutes: age, ; child, , ; definition, 393\u20134; deplore street lighting, ; dress, __ , 401\u20133; earnings, & n; generosity, ; guides and directories, 404\u20135, 412\u201313; numbers, 393\u20136, n; operate at home, 409\u201310; recruitment and backgrounds, 399\u2013400; street-walking, 408\u201310; suicides, ; supposed early deaths, ; venues and districts, 405\u20139, 411\u201313; visual identification of, 398\u2013404, __ ; _see also_ accommodation houses; brothels\n\npuberty,\n\npublic houses (pubs): clientele, ; design and character, 351\u20133; guides to, ; landlords, ; as meeting places for homosexual men, ; offer services, ; opening hours, __ ; as selling sites, , ; tea gardens, ; as venues for clubs and groups, 354\u20137\n\nP\u00fcckler-Muskau, Prince Herman von,\n\nPugin, Augustus, n\n\n_Punch_ (magazine), ,\n\nPunch and Judy shows, 256\u20137\n\npuppet shows,\n\nQueen Square,\n\nQueen Victoria Street,\n\nQueen's Bench prison, ,\n\nQuilp (character, _Old Curiosity Shop_ ),\n\nRag Fair, , ,\n\nRagged School: dormitories, , ; education, ; formed, 148\u20139; partitions, n; sets up Shoeblack Society,\n\nRailton, William,\n\nrailways: arches used as shelters, ; for commuters, 103\u20135; compared with coach travel, 101\u20132; and days out, __ ; development, , , 105\u20136; Dickens' view of, ; effect on housing of the poor, ; effect on London, 102\u20133, 105\u20137; fares, 103\u20134; passenger conditions, 104\u20135, __ , ; passenger conventions, ; as rival to river transport, ; stations,\n\nRanelagh sewer,\n\nraree- or peep-shows, 257\u20138\n\nRatcliffe Highway dancing establishment,\n\nRaumer, Friedrich von, n, ,\n\nRavensbourne (river),\n\nreceivers (of stolen goods), 377\u20138\n\nReed, German,\n\nReeves, George _see_ George Reeves' City Luncheon Rooms\n\nReform Bill (1831),\n\nrefuse-collection,\n\nregattas,\n\nRegent Street: construction and development, , , 264\u20136; shopping, 237\u20139,\n\nRegent's Circus _see_ Piccadilly Circus\n\nRegent's Park: access, ; concerts, ; development, 264\u20135; skating accident and deaths (1867), 232\u20136\n\n'rents' (or 'courts'), 186\u20137\n\nrestaurants, ,\n\nresurrection men (anatomists),\n\nReynolds, Sir Joshua,\n\nRhodes, John, & n\n\nRhodes, William, n\n\nrhubarb, 151\u20132\n\nRichardson's theatre,\n\nRiderhood, Pleasant (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nRiderhood, Rogue (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nRiot Act (1715), n\n\nriots and mass demonstrations, 371\u20137\n\nRitchie, James, ,\n\nrivers: and street names, ; underground,\n\nroads: cleaning, 50\u20132, __ ; excavated for utilities and repairs, , 55\u20136; main access routes to London, ; narrowness for traffic, ; rules of the road, 44\u20135; surfaces, 33\u20138, __ ; widening, ; _see also_ streets\n\nRobertson, David,\n\nRokesmith, John (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nRolle, John, Baron,\n\nrookeries _see_ slums\n\nRosamond's Pond, St James's Park, 418\u201319\n\nroundabouts (carousels), & n\n\n_Routledge's Popular Guide to London_ ,\n\nrowing competitions,\n\nRowlandson, Thomas, , n, ,\n\nRoyal Academy, ; summer exhibition,\n\nRoyal Commission on Metropolitan Termini (1848),\n\nRoyal Courts of Justice: built,\n\nRoyal Exchange: illuminated, 366\u20137\n\nRoyal Humane Society: and skating accidents, 231\u20133\n\nRoyal Society for the Protection of Life from Fire,\n\nroyalty: birthdays, ; public appearances, 310\u201311\n\nRussell, Lord John,\n\nRyan, Michael: _Prostitution in London_ , , n,\n\nSabbatarian riots (1855), 376\u20138\n\nSaffron Hill (or Field Lane), , , ,\n\nSt Ann's burial ground, Soho,\n\nSt Clement Danes: crypt, ; and Wellington's funeral,\n\nSt George's market,\n\nSt Giles: gin palaces, ; improvements lead to homelessness, , ; nightsoil, ; riot, ; slum, , , 191\u20133\n\nSt James's Park: as Crown land, ; skating, 231\u20132\n\nSt James's Square: macadamized, ; planted,\n\nSt John's Wood,\n\nSt Luke's market, Clerkenwell,\n\nSt Martin-in-the-Fields: church, 268\u20139; churchyard, 219\u201320; housing,\n\nSt Martin's Lane,\n\nSt Mary-le-Strand, churchyard, ,\n\nSt Pancras parish: paving Boards,\n\nSt Pancras railway station, n\n\nSt Paul's cathedral: Portland stone, ; and Wellington's funeral, , 344\u20136\n\nSala, George Augustus: on appeal of fires, 331\u20132; background and career, n; on coffee stalls, ; on complexity of Seven Dials, ; on gin palace, ; on Haymarket restaurants, ; on Regent Street shops, ; on road repairs, ; on Rosamond's Pond, ; on street entertainer, ; visits coffee shop, ; witnesses cholera death, & n\n\nsandwich-boards (advertising), 244\u20135\n\nSanger, 'Lord' George, 257\u20138,\n\nsanitation: improvements, ; _see also_ hygiene, public; sewers and drains\n\nSaracen's Head Inn,\n\n_Saturday Review_ ,\n\nSaunders, Abraham: theatre troupe,\n\nSawyer, Bob (character, _Pickwick Papers_ ), ,\n\nscavengers,\n\nScharf, George, __ , __ , __\n\nSchlesinger, Max: on advertising carts, ; and bill-posting on bridges, ; on busy streets, ; complains of cabs and cabbies, , ; on knocking at doors, ; on omnibuses, ; on pedestrian areas, ; praises suburban railway, ; sees fallen horse, ; on street dangers, ; on street sellers,\n\nScott's Oyster House,\n\nScovell's Warehouse, ,\n\nScowton's theatre,\n\nScrooge (character, _A Christmas Carol_ ), , ,\n\nseason (social),\n\nSebastopol:, siege ends (1855),\n\nSelect Committee on Metropolis Improvement (1840),\n\nSelect Committee on Open Spaces (1833),\n\nSelect Committee on the Police (1816),\n\nSelect Committee on the Prevailing Vice of Drunkenness (1834),\n\nSelect Committee on Public Houses,\n\nSerpentine (lake): drained, ; skating, 231\u20132; unhygienic condition, ; Westbourne feeds into,\n\n_Servant Girl in London, The_ ,\n\nservants, 86\u20137; sell to street traders, 147\u20138\n\nsewers and drains: discharge into Thames, ; disposal, 208\u20139; inadequacy, , , ; legislation for (1858), 224\u20135; public interest in, ; and rivers, 202\u20133, 208\u20139; _see also_ hygiene, public; sanitation\n\nSeymour, Robert, ,\n\nShaw, Donald,\n\nsheep,\n\nShepherd's market,\n\nShillibeer, George,\n\nShip, the (chophouse),\n\nShip Yard, off Strand,\n\nShoeblack Society, 153\u20134\n\nshoeblacks,\n\nshops and shopping: and haggling, ; holiday closing, ; in Regent Street, 237\u20139; services, 246\u20137; signs and advertising methods, 241\u20133; and street sellers, , ; types, 239\u201341\n\nshort-stagecoach, 69\u201370, 72\u20133\n\nSikes, Bill (character, _Oliver Twist_ ), , , , __ ,\n\nSilvester, Sir John, ,\n\nSimon, Sir John, ,\n\nSimond, Louis, & n, , ,\n\nsimplers,\n\nSimpson, John, , 301\u20132\n\nSimpson's Divan Tavern, Strand, n\n\nsinging and songs: in pubs and clubs, , 357\u201362\n\nskating: accidents and deaths, 231\u20136\n\n_Sketches by Boz_ (CD), , , , , , , ,\n\nslang, 249\u201351\n\nslap-bangs (eating houses), 299\u2013300\n\nslaughterhouses, 132\u20133\n\nSloman, Albert, 174\u20135\n\nSloppy (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nSlum, Mr (character, _Old Curiosity Shop_ ),\n\nslums ('rookeries'): clearance, ; demolished for improvements, , ; growth, , ; living conditions, 192\u20135; for the poor, ; 'rents' or 'courts', 186\u20137\n\nSmallweed (character, _Bleak House_ ), ,\n\nSmith, John,\n\nSmithfield: housing,\n\nSmithfield market: character, 127\u201330; moved to Islington, ; slaughterhouse,\n\nSmithfield Removal Bill (1852),\n\nSnagsby, Mr (character, _Bleak House_ ), n,\n\nSnow, Dr John,\n\nSociety for the Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution,\n\nSociety for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,\n\nSociety for the Rescue of Young Women and Children,\n\nSociety for the Suppression of Vice,\n\nSoho Square, 261\u20132\n\nSolomon, Isaac (Ikey), n\n\nSomerset House,\n\nsoup houses, 296\u20137\n\nSouth Metropolitan Cemetery, Norwood,\n\nSouthey, Robert, , ,\n\nSouthwark Bridge, ,\n\nSpa Road railway station,\n\nspeech: and pronunciation, 248\u20139; _see also_ slang\n\nSpitalfields: gang violence, ; housing,\n\nSpitalfields Workhouse,\n\nspittoons, & n\n\nsquares: built, 260\u20132; planted, ; purpose and use, 261\u20134\n\nstagecoaches: carry mail, 91\u20132; numbers, ; offices used by streetsellers, ; routes and schedules, ; _see also_ coaches; short-stagecoaches\n\nStamford Brook (river),\n\nStanley, Edward Henry, Lord ( _later_ 15th Earl of Derby), ,\n\nStaple's Inn,\n\nsteamers: on Thames, 65\u20139, 276\u20137\n\nStirling, Edward,\n\nStowe, Harriet Beecher,\n\nStrand: developed, 269\u201371; housing,\n\nstrawyards,\n\nstreet cries, 134\u20135, 149\u201350, & n\n\nstreet lighting, 53\u20135,\n\nstreet pumps and standpipes, 209\u201310, __\n\nstreet traders: buy from householders, 147\u20138; dress, 145\u20136; earnings, , ; equipment and transport, ; favoured selling locations, , 151\u20132; of matches, 159\u201360, __ ; and poverty, 160\u20132; of prepared food and drink, 281\u20138; seasonal, 142\u20133; services, ; and shopkeepers, 151\u201319; temporary, 161\u20132; transport methods, __ ; ubiquity,\n\nstreets: amusements and recreations, 304\u20137, ; building of, 60\u20131; names and numbering, 57\u20138, ; noise, ; parish maintenance, ; pavements (footpaths), 38\u20139; pedestrian areas, ; professional entertainers and musicians, 252\u20139, __ ; public ceremonies and celebrations, 308\u201312, 315\u201317; surfaces, 33\u20138; voices, 247\u20138, ; _see also_ roads\n\nsuicide, 418\u201322\n\nSummerson, Esther (character, _Bleak House_ ), , ,\n\nSun Fire-Office,\n\nSundays: legislation on, ; markets, 135\u20136\n\nSurbiton,\n\nSutherland, George Granville William Leveson-Gower, 3rd Duke of, ,\n\nsweeps _see_ chimney sweeps\n\n_Swell's Night Guides, The_ , 404\u20136,\n\nSwills, Little (character, _Bleak House_ ),\n\nSwiveller, Dick (character, _The Old Curiosity Shop_ ), , ,\n\nSyon House, Chiswick: lion from Northumberland House relocated to,\n\nTaglioni, Marie, n\n\nTait, William: _Magdalenism_ , ,\n\n_Tale of Two Cities, A_ (CD), ,\n\ntallymen,\n\nTartar, Mr (character, _Edwin Drood_ ),\n\ntaverns,\n\nTayler, William, , ,\n\ntea gardens, 274\u20135\n\nTemple Bar: heads of traitors displayed, , ; marks entrance to City, ; narrowness, 46\u20137; relocated, n\n\nTemple gardens, & n\n\nTernan, Ellen (Nelly), 6\u20137,\n\nThackeray, William Makepeace: attends public execution, , ; on coach and rail travel, ; and Great Stink (1858), 223\u20134; on lounging at the Pantheon, ; _The Newcomes_ , 362\u20133; _Pendennis_ , ; _Vanity Fair_ ,\n\nThames, river: Dickens's preoccupation with, ; embankment, 225\u20138, __ ; excursions and leisure trips, 276\u20137; fishing, ; as highway, 64\u20135, ; regattas and rowing competitions, 275\u20136; and sewage control legislation (1858), ; sewage disposal, , , ; stairs and landing places, 65\u20136; steamers, 65\u20139, 276\u20137; suicides, 421\u20132; tea gardens, ; water quality, ; watermen and ferries, ; _see also_ bridges\n\nThames watermen: Royal Regatta,\n\ntheatres: entrance charges, & n; fires, , 330\u20131; popular, ; as sites for food selling, ; women attend, , , 403\u20135\n\nTigg, Montague (character, _Martin Chuzzlewit_ ),\n\n_Times, The_ (newspaper): on Braidwood's funeral, ; on demolishing poor housing, ; on importuning women in street, 402\u20133; letter from slum-dwellers, 194\u20135; on pillory, ; price, ; reports indecent assaults on sentries, ; supports Hyde Park protestors, ; on treatment of the poor,\n\ntinderboxes, 158\u20139\n\ntinkers,\n\nTipu Sultan, & n\n\nTodd, Sweeney,\n\ntoll gates _see_ turnpikes\n\nTom-all-Alone's (slum area, _Bleak House_ ), , ,\n\nTom's Coffee-House, n\n\nTooley Street: fire (1861), 111\u201317, __ ,\n\nTothill Fields prison, ,\n\nTottenham, Mrs (of Berners Street), ,\n\nTower Bridge,\n\nTown Improvements Clauses Act (1847),\n\nTox, Miss (character, _Dombey and Son_ ), ,\n\ntoys, 152\u20133\n\nTozer, Fire Engineer,\n\nTraddles, Tommy (character, _David Copperfield_ ), n,\n\ntraditions and celebrations,\n\nTrafalgar Square: constructed, , 267\u201371, 273\u20134; statues, & n\n\nTrafalgar Tavern, Greenwich, 276\u20137\n\ntraffic lights,\n\ntrampers, 164\u20136\n\ntransportation (penal), , n\n\n_Traveller's Oracle, The_ , n\n\nTristan, Flora, & n, & n,\n\nTrollope, Anthony: _Castle Richmond_ , ; _Phineas Redux_ , ; _The Warden_ , , ; _The Way We Live Now_ ,\n\nTrollope, Thomas, ,\n\nTuckniss, Revd William,\n\nTulkinghorn, Mr (character, _Bleak House_ ),\n\nturnpikes and toll gates, 40\u20134, __\n\nTwist, Oliver (character, _Oliver Twist_ ), , , , , ,\n\nTyburn (place),\n\nTyburn (river), ,\n\ntyphus and typhoid, & n\n\numbrellas: selling, 140\u20131\n\nUnderground railway (the tube): beginnings, 76\u20139; station names, n\n\nundertakers, , 221\u20132\n\nVaccination Act (1840),\n\nVagrancy Acts: (1822), ; (1824),\n\nVauxhall Bridge,\n\nVauxhall pleasure gardens,\n\nVeck, Trotty (character, _The Chimes_ ), 157\u20138\n\nVeneering, Mr (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nvenereal diseases,\n\nVestris, Mme (Lucia Elizabeth Mathews),\n\nVictoria Park,\n\nVictoria, Queen: accession (1837), ; assassination attempts on, ; birthday celebrations, 365\u20136; celebrates end of Crimean War, ; changing public attitude to, 311\u201315, __ ; coronation, 311\u201312; criticises Greville's diary, n; inherits money from Neild, 312\u201313n; reaches majority, ; visits burntout Covent Garden theatre, ; at Wellington's funeral, ; withdraws after Albert's death, , __ ,\n\nVictoria railway station, n\n\nVictoria Street, Westminster: built, 188\u20139\n\nviolence, 370\u20131\n\n'Visit to Newgate' (CD; article),\n\nVittoria, battle of (1813): celebrated,\n\nVizetelly, Henry, , ,\n\nVolunteer Corps,\n\nWaight, William,\n\nwaiters: earnings, n,\n\nWalbeck, Miss (prostitute),\n\nWalbrook (river),\n\nWalker, Dr George, ,\n\nWallis, Henry: _The Death of Chatterton_ (painting),\n\nWalter (character, _Dombey and Son_ ),\n\n'Walter' (pornographer), & n, 401\u20132, n, 409\u201312\n\nWandle, river,\n\nWandsworth Bridge,\n\nWard, Ned: _The Secret History of London Clubs_ ,\n\nWarren's Blacking Factory, London, 3\u20134, ,\n\n_Warrior_ (ship),\n\nwatchmen: call time and weather, , n; and knocking-up, 22\u20133; replaced by police,\n\nwater: domestic supply, , 209\u201311, __ ; drinking dangers, ; quality deteriorates, ; for road cleaning, 51\u20132, __ ; _see also_ artesian wells\n\nwater pistols,\n\nwatercress sellers, 141\u20132,\n\nWaterford, Henry de la Poer Beresford, 3rd Marquess of, & n\n\nWaterloo, battle of (1815): celebrations,\n\nWaterloo Bridge, , , , __\n\nWaterloo railway station,\n\nWaterman Company,\n\nwatermen (cabstand), & n, 81\u20133\n\nwatermen (Thames), 65\u20136\n\nWaterworks Clauses Act (1846),\n\nWatts, Isaac, n\n\nweddings: favours (posies of flowers), n\n\nWeed, Thurlow,\n\nWegg, Silas (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ),\n\nWeller, Sam (character, _Pickwick Papers_ ), , , , , , , , ,\n\nWeller, Tony (character, _Pickwick Papers_ ), ,\n\nWellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of: decline and death, 335\u20136; and development of Trafalgar Square, ; finances, 336\u20137; funeral, n, n, , 336\u201346; memorial arch and equestrian statue, & n\n\nWellington, Kitty, Duchess of ( _n\u00e9e_ Pakenham),\n\nWestbourne (river), ,\n\nWestminster: housing, ; working poor, 188\u20139\n\nWestminster Bridge, ,\n\nWestminster Medical Society,\n\nWestminster Pit, near Tothill Fields,\n\nWestminster Workhouse,\n\nWey, Francis,\n\nWheaton, Revd Nathaniel, ,\n\nwhelks, 282\u20133\n\nWhitbread's brewery,\n\nWhite Horse Cellars, Piccadilly, 95\u20136,\n\nWhite Swan public house, Vere Street, & n,\n\nWhitechapel: slum area, ; Workhouse,\n\nWhitecross Street: housing, ; market, ; prison,\n\nWhitefriars, n\n\n_Wild Boys of London, The_ (serial),\n\nWilfer, Bella (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ), ,\n\nWilfer, Reginald (character, _Our Mutual Friend_ ), ,\n\nWilkins, William,\n\nWillesden Fire Brigade, __\n\nWilliam IV, King: anniversary of death, ; coronation, , ; reign, ; statue, n\n\nwindow-shopping,\n\nWinsor, Frederick (born Winzer), 53\u20134 & n,\n\nWiseman, Cardinal Nicholas Patrick Stephen, Archbishop of Westminster, & n\n\nWombwell's Wild Beast Show,\n\nwomen: entertainments and amusements for, ; importuned in street, ; in places of public entertainment, , , 403\u20134; and pubs, ; street musicians, ; and suicide, 418\u201319; walking, ; working, ; _see also_ prostitutes\n\nwood: as road surface, 36\u20137\n\nworkers: affected by weather, ; temporary and seasonal, 162\u20135; unskilled and skilled, ; _see also_ street traders\n\nworkhouses, , 169\u201372, 180\u20131 & n, n\n\nworking hours, 28\u20139\n\nworking men: lifestyle, 23\u20134\n\nWorms, Henry, n\n\nWright, Thomas, 23\u20134,\n\nWyatt, M.C.: statue of Wellington,\n\nWyon, Leonard, , , , ,\n\nWyon, May, 376\u20137\n\nYardley (partner of James Cook),\n\nYates, Edmund, , , ,\n\n_Yokel's Preceptor_ , , ,\n\n1. Benjamin Robert Haydon's _Punch, or May Day_ (1829) encompassed the entire world in a painting he originally intended simply to entitle _Life_. On a corner of the New Road (now the Euston Road) a Punch and Judy show, _left_ , amuses both rich (in the shape of the two horsemen behind) and poor (the crossing-sweeper, _centre_ , and the barefoot apple-woman on the pavement). _Right_ , chimney sweeps celebrate Mayday in traditional fashion, with their 'Queen' dressed in her best, and a Jack-in-the-Green wearing his wicker frame covered by greenery and May flowers. Haydon depicts every stage of life from cradle to grave: a baby is held up to watch Punch; a wedding party, identifiable by the favours in their hats, comes out of St Marylebone Parish Church; at the rear a funeral passes, identified by the 'weepers' the coachman wears around his hat. City and country folk are represented by the farmer, _centre_ , with his dog, and the police officer; the honest (the policeman, the sailor and the guardsman, whose uniform indicates he is a Waterloo veteran) and the dishonest (the boy picking the farmer's pocket) mingle on the canvas as in the streets.\n\n2. _Ludgate Circus_ , by Eug\u00e8ne Louis Lami (1850), _above_ , shows a traffic 'lock', or jam, when the mass of unregulated street transport was brought to a dead halt. To the left and right are omnibuses, with a costermonger's cart centre front. The conductor, or cad, stands on his step at the back of the bus on the left; his comparative height makes clear how low-ceilinged and cramped the bus interiors were.\n\n3. _Pool of London from London Bridge_ , by William Parrott (1841), shows how small the passenger steamers were that chugged up and down the river every dozen minutes or so, making the Thames a great commuter highway.\n\n4. George Scharf, a German lithographer who spent his entire working life in London, illustrated scientific journals by day. But street-life in London was his passion, and he walked the city by night and by day, sketching endlessly. _Betwen 6 and Seven O'Clock morning, Sumer_ (his English spelling remained erratic), shows, _top row, second from right_ and _bottom row, third from left_ , a milkman and a milkmaid, and _bottom row, right_ , a dustman with his cart. The small boy, _fourth left, top row_ , may be a muffin seller: his white clothes and flat cap suggest it, although he carries a deep basket rather than the more usual flat covered tray, and the object in his right hand does not appear to be the muffin-seller's bell.\n\n5. & 6. _A Peep at the Gas Lights in Pall Mall_ , Thomas Rowlandson, _above_. Awestruck Londoners come to gaze at the first gas streetlights, which appeared in 1807. Meanwhile coal fires, population growth and climate combined to create the legendary 'London particulars', or pea-soup fogs, _below_ , in George Cruikshank's _Foggy Weather_ (1819).\n\n7. Dozens of warehouses along the southern riverbank were destroyed in the Tooley Street fire of 1861. In the centre is the London Fire Engine Establishment's river-engine, while sightseers take up any available viewing station, whether along the north shore, in small boats or on London Bridge.\n\n8. _Covent Garden Market_ ( _c_.1829), by Frederick Christian Lewis. A market had been held on this site for two centuries, but only in the 1820s, when this was painted, were permanent structures built to house the sellers. Here the canopy is only half-built, and the central area remains open, with makeshift stalls on the right.\n\n9. _Hungerford Stairs_ , by George Shepherd (1810), shows the pre- Embankment shore, now covered by Charing Cross station. Fourteen years after this was painted, The Old Fox pub on the right had become Warren's Blacking Factory, where the child Charles Dickens laboured. On the left was the fictional location of the 'dirty, tumbledown public house' where the Micawbers lodged in _David Copperfield_ before they emigrated to Australia.\n\n10. The great dust-heaps that Dickens describes in _Our Mutual Friend_ were not the product of a novelist's imagination: here, at Battle Bridge (now King's Cross), in 1837, a single heap is painted, towering over the nearby houses and the district's market gardens. Although the artist only shows one, Battle Bridge was home to many rows of such heaps.\n\n11. The great projects of the industrial age were often built by low-tech means \u2013 manual labour. Here, in 1825, George Scharf sketched the workers building the new Fleet sewer. Vic\n\n12. One of the world's earliest photographs, _c_.1841, by Fox Talbot, captured the building of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. St Martin-in-the-Fields is to the left, with the new Morley's Hotel (where South Africa House now stands) behind the column. The statue of George IV, _left_ , is already in place, but the rest of the square is still a wasteland behind the advertisement-laden hoardings.\n\n13. & 14. Scharf carefully documented the many buildings that were about to be destroyed when, in 1830, the new London Bridge was re-erected 60 yards upriver from its old site. As well as memorializing the old, he also recorded the workers creating the new, giving singular view of their clothes and construction methods.\n\n15. Scharf also painted the chimney sweeps dancing on their Mayday holiday. Here he shows the 'Queen' with her attendants. She holds the spoon into which, traditionally, donations were dropped, while behind her the Jackin-the-Green in his beehive of foliage follows along.\n\n16. Scharf drew the northwest end of the Strand in 1824, shortly before it was razed to create an access road to the new Trafalgar Square. Before the London Fire Engine Establishment was formed in 1833, fires were the responsibility of individual insurance companies, and the Sun Fire Office's man, wearing the Sun's red-and-gold uniform, directs his men pumping away at the green engine behind him. The Strand was one of London's busiest streets, yet even here the paving was erratic, with a pile of loose paving-stones visible beside the lamppost.\n\n17. The funeral car of the Duke of Wellington. The carriage itself was bronze, and the canopy, seventeen feet high, had to be lowered en route, to allow it to pass under Temple Bar. (A trial run was carried out in the middle of the night to make sure the weight and height of the vehicle would not cause it to topple over, or stick in the mud \u2013 which it did, briefly, only once on the day.) On the carriage were the duke's many military honours, the collection dwarfing the red coffin at the top. This over-lavish display in 1852 was a turning point, and popular taste subsequently embraced less elaborate funerals. Vic\n\n18. _Greedy Old Nickford Eating Oysters_ , by William Heath (late 1820s), _left_ , caricatures the owner of Crockford's, an upper-class gambling-den, as the devil, swilling at a tub as rooks, symbolizing the young men being 'rooked', or cheated, fly towards him as he calls out to 'Brother Mace', mace being slang for a swindler. At _bottom right_ , the oyster shells have been arranged to form a grotto, of the type children built on the first day of the oyster season, when they called out, 'Please to remember the grotto' as passers-by gave them pennies.\n\n19. Upper-class men also amused themselves at animal-baiting. Here, in this 1821 watercolour, a tethered bear is set upon by terriers, and wagers are laid as to how long each one will last.\n\n20. The caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson depicted two men in the pillory at Charing Cross, in 1819, by the equestrian statue of Charles I, which still stands on the south side of what is now Trafalgar Square. The man under the statue appears to be about to throw something, while the woman, _centre front_ , in green, bends down to gather mud for the same purpose. Spectators watch from nearby windows, and also the rooftops. After 1816, the pillory was used only to punish perjurers, and the crowds \u2013 and violence \u2013 diminished. The punishment itself was discontinued after 1830.\n\n21. The Riot Act is read from the stage of Covent Garden in 1809 in an attempt to end the Old Price riots, sparked by increased ticket prices when the theatre was reopened after a fire. The actor-manager John Philip Kemble, dressed for _Macbeth_ , holds up his hands in supplication to the rioting audience, to no avail, as audiences singing Old Price songs, and dancing Old Price dances, made performances impossible for the next month.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}