Huge tracts of downland and urban public spaces were put down to corn and vegetables. Wiltshire farmer Arthur Street ploughed up his grassland as the government ordered, and sent away his beloved hunter to be trained for harness work. Many riding horses took badly to this humble duty, but Street’s ‘Jorrocks’ ‘trotted home like a gentleman’, in the farmer’s words, ‘and since that day he has hauled the milk, pulled the broadcast during wheat sowing, and done ploughing and all sorts of jobs with no mishap…What he thinks about it I don’t know. He has no notion of what it is that trundles and rattles behind him, and the position of his ears shows that he is somewhat worried about it. But as we have never let him down before, he reckons that we are not doing it now, and so does his war work like the gentleman he is.’ Farmers who had struggled to escape bankruptcy in the 1930s suddenly entered a new era of prosperity.
Seven hundred fascists were interned, though most of the aristocrats who had flirted with Hitler were spared. ‘It certainly is breath-taking how all these lords get away with their pre-war affiliations to the Nazi regime,’ complained British communist Elizabeth Belsey in a letter to her soldier husband. If the British had emulated French policy towards communists, thousands of trades unionists and a substantial part of the intellectual class would also have been incarcerated, but these too were left at liberty. There was still much silliness in the air: the Royal Victoria Hotel at St Leonardson-Sea, advertising its attractions in The Times, asserted that ‘The ballroom and adjacent toilets have been made gas-and splinter-proof.’ Published advertisements for domestic staff made few concessions to conscription: ‘Wanted: second housemaid of three; wages £42 per annum; two ladies in family; nine servants kept.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury declared that Christians were allowed to pray for victory, but the Archbishop of York disagreed. While the war was a righteous one, he said, it was not a holy one: ‘We must avoid praying each other down.’ Some clergymen urged their congregations to ask the Almighty’s help for charity: ‘Save me from bitterness and hatred towards the enemy.’ There was anger among British Christians, however, when in November the Pope sent a message of congratulation to Hitler on escaping an assassination attempt.
Hundreds of thousands of young men trained in England with inadequate equipment and uncertain expectations, though they assumed some of their number would die. Lt. Arthur Kellas of the Border Regiment took for granted his own survival, but speculated about the fates of his fellow officers: ‘I used to wonder which of them were for the killing. Would it be Ogilvy, such a nice little man, so worried about his mother in Dundee? Or Donald, so handsome, confident and pleased with himself? Or Hunt, newly married, prosperous in the City of London? Germain? Dunbar? Perkins, whom we ragged without pity? Or Bell, of whom we were jealous when he was posted off to glory with the first battalion in the line in France, first of us to be promoted to the First Fifteen, leaving behind such a pretty sister in Whitehaven? It had happened to our fathers after all. Presumably our War would be much the same as theirs.’
They were so young. As eighteen-year-old Territorial soldier Doug Arthur paraded with his unit outside a church in Liverpool shortly before embarking for overseas service, he was embarrassed to be picked out by one of an emotional crowd of watching housewives: ‘Look at ’im, girls,’ she said pityingly. ‘’E should be at ’ome wit’ ’is Mam. Never mind, son, yourse’ll be alrigh’. God Bless yer la’. He’ll look after yourtse, yer know, like. That bastard ’itler ’as gorra lot to answer for. I’d like to get me bleedin’ ’ands on ’im for five bleedin’ minutes, the swine.’
US president Franklin Roosevelt wrote to his London ambassador Joseph Kennedy on 30 October 1939: ‘While the [First] World War did not bring forth strong leadership in Great Britain, this war may do so, because I am inclined to think the British public has more humility than before and is slowly but surely getting rid of the “muddle through” attitude of the past.’ FDR’s optimism would ultimately prove justified, but only after many more months of ‘muddle through’.
The next act of the struggle increased the world’s bewilderment and confusion of loyalties, for it was undertaken not by Hitler, but by Stalin. Like all Europe’s tyrants, Russia’s leader assessed the evolving conflict in terms of the opportunities it offered him for aggrandisement. In the autumn of 1939, having secured eastern Poland, he sought further to enhance the Soviet Union’s strategic position by advancing into Finland. The country, a vast, sparsely inhabited wilderness of lakes and forests, was one among many whose frontier, indeed very existence, was of short duration, and thus vulnerable to challenge. Part of Sweden until the Napoleonic Wars, thereafter it was ruled by Russia until 1918, when Finnish anti-Bolsheviks triumphed in a civil war.
In October 1939, Stalin determined to strengthen the security of Leningrad, only thirty miles inside Soviet territory, by pushing back the nearby Finnish frontier across the Karelian isthmus, and occupying Finnish-held islands in the Baltic; he also coveted nickel mines on Finland’s north coast. A Finnish delegation, summoned to receive Moscow’s demands, prompted international amazement by rejecting them. The notion that a nation of 3.6 million people might resist the Red Army seemed fantastic, but the Finns, though poorly armed, were nationalistic to the point of folly. Arvo Tuominen, a prominent Finnish communist, declined Stalin’s invitation to form a shadow puppet government, and went into hiding. Tuominen said: ‘It would be wrong, it would be criminal, it was not a picture of the free rule of the people.’
At 0920 on 30 November, Russian aircraft launched the first of many bomber attacks on Helsinki, causing little damage save to the Soviet Legation and the nerves of the British ambassador, who asked to be relieved of his post. Russian forces advanced across the frontier in several places, and Finns joked: ‘They are so many and our country is so small, where shall we find room to bury them all?’ The nation’s defence was entrusted to seventy-two-year-old Marshal Carl Gustav Mannerheim, hero of many conflicts, most recently Finland’s civil war. As a Tsarist officer posted to Lhasa, Mannerheim had once taught the Dalai Lama pistol-shooting; he spoke seven languages, Finnish least fluently. His hauteur was comparable to that of Charles de Gaulle; his ruthlessness had been manifested in the 1919–20 purges of the defeated Finnish communists.
During the 1930s Mannerheim had constructed a fortified line across the Karelian isthmus, to which his name was given. He suffered no delusions about his country’s strategic weakness, and had urged conciliation of Stalin. But when his countrymen opted to fight, he set about managing the defence with cool professionalism. Before the Russians attacked, the Finns adopted a scorched-earth policy, evacuating from the forward areas 100,000 civilians, some of whom adopted an impressively stoical attitude to their sacrifice: border guards who warned an old woman to quit her home were amazed, on returning to burn it, to find that she had swept and cleaned the interior before leaving. On the table lay matches, kindling wood, and a note: ‘When one gives a gift to Finland, one desires that it should be like new.’ But it was a distressing business to destroy housing and installations around the Petsamo nickel-mining centre, which had been constructed with infinite labour and difficulty inside the Arctic Circle. The frontier zone was heavily booby-trapped: mines triggered by pull-ropes were laid, to smash the ice in front of invaders attacking across frozen lakes.
Stalin committed twelve divisions to assaults in a dozen sectors. Most of his soldiers were told that Finland had attacked the Soviet Union, but some were disbelieving and bewildered. Captain Ismael Akhmedov heard a Ukrainian peasant say, ‘Comrade Commander. Tell me, why do we fight this war? Did not Comrade Voroshilov declare at the Party Congress that we don’t want an inch of other people’s land and we will not surrender an inch of ours? Now we are going to fight? For what?’ An officer sought to explain the perils of acquiescing in a frontier so close to Leningrad, but Moscow’s strategic ambitions roused scant enthusiasm among those ordered to fulfil them, most of whom were hastily mobilised local reservists.
Stalin was untroubled. Confident that his attacking force of 120,000 men, six hundred tanks and a thousand guns could overwhelm the Mannerheim Line, he ignored his generals’ warnings about the restricted approaches to Finland. Tanks and vehicles were obliged to advance on narrow axes between lakes, forests and swamps. Though the Finns had little artillery and few anti-tank weapons, so inept were the Soviet assaults that