Courage and Artlessness

Claire Harman, Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography (London: Penguin Books, 2015; 1989), p. 185:

The naval war of the winter of 1939 may not have seemed too threatening to the population of West Dorset, but the events of early 1940 did. Hitler overran Denmark and Norway in April with alarming ease, and the Royal Navy had difficulty holding the position won at Narvik. By the summer, the governments of Poland and Belgium, the King and Queen of Norway and the Queen of the Netherlands were all in exile in London; the British Expeditionary Force, once so sure of hanging out its washing on the Siegfried Line, had been caught in a pincer movement, and was trapped at Dunkirk. France was within weeks of capitulation to Germany. Early measures taken at home to provide some protection for civilians now lost their air of pointless routine and were undertaken in earnest, and in the wake of earnestness came a deal of inefficiency. Sylvia wrote wearily of an ARP air-raid rehearsal in Maiden Newton: ‘It is like a knock-about farce film done in slow motion, and at intervals some member of the local gentry pipes up to say, “Well, let’s hope it will never be needed”, or “We can’t really get on with it without Mr Thompson”, or “Has it started yet, do you know?” The most melancholy thought is, that if there is a real raid they will all dauntlessly turn up to mismanage it, for their courage is as unquestionable as their artlessness.’