17
England at War
\z8tk February^ 1940}
Discipline
ENGLAND is a land of liberty: but the
English have long known that liberty cannot
exist without discipline. So it is with an
especial strictness that they observe their war-time
regulations. Their black-out, for example, amounts
to a total ban on any light being visible from the
outside after a certain hour. A stranger is almost
smothered by the darkness of English cities. In
London in the evenings, I felt as if I were in some
frightening, unintelligible world. The buses, gliding
away at unpredictable angles, seemed to swallow one
another up. And if I took a taxi I was unable to
escape a feeling that I was skirting a forest or driving
through some abandoned village, like the villages in
the front line in 1918. For with the houses utterly
invisible my imagination strove to reconstruct the
only setting that could explain such darkness as this.
On the country roads travelling becomes a night-
mare. Deprived of powerful headlights and without
lighting of any sort in the villages you are quickly
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