VOX POP ULI
By DOROTHY L. SAYERS
ONE of the strangest campaigns of the war has been fought and won. In its active phase it was a Blitzkrieg, and the victory was with the defence.
The preliminary movements of troops took place on the wire- less, accompanied by a few skirmishing reconnaissances in print. Traitors and fools who talked too much were to be ruthlessly exterminated ; and it was somehow implied that a number of us were possibly traitors and that most of us were fools. A kind of Gestapo of Silent Columnists were to be re- cruited for the purpose of browbeating their neighbours and reporting them to the police. Abusive epithets were employed and horrible threats brandished. The launching of the attack was announced for the third week in July;. it would employ every known weapon of modern publicity.
I was out of town when the thing started. As it happened, I did have the opportunity of expressing my opinion, and took it ; but it was only a personal opinion—I had no means then of testing the reactions of the people. On the Monday I was in London and made enquiries of a friend, who said that "a lot of people were very angry about it." The first advertisements had then appeared ; another friend, whom I met on the Tues- day, had little to say about the Silence Campaign, though we agreed that the vagueness of the instructions about behaviour in case of air-raid or invasion was only thrown into relief by the intolerable archness of the phrasing employed. We refused to say to ourselves: "This is where I keep perfectly calm and cool "—language like that, we said, made us blush to the toes of our boots Apart from these encounters, I discussed the matter with nobody.
On the Thursday, my literary agent sounded me on the sub- ject. I replied cautiously that, if this campaign had been a new theatrical show, I could only have said, in the professional jargon, that I "did not like the feel of the house." It might have been difficult to give my reasons. The newspapers were lying low and saying nothing ; they could not very well say much, since they carried the advertising, and one does not openly quarrel with one's advertising appropriation. Besides, they were preoccupied with defending the freedom of the Press, which, as one organ rather naively admitted, meant in practice freedom of control by anybody except the advertisers. The British public paid singularly little heed to the complaints of the newspapers ; it had other fish to fry.
In the meantime, a number of drunks and persons of feeble intellect had been clapped into gaol and given savage sentences for incautious exclamations, and a patriotic person had been arrested for saying "to hell with Hitler "—the explanation being that another patriotic ass had mistaken " hell " for "hell "; thus, once again, as at Nicaea, the harmony of Christen- dom was split for an iota.
On Sunday there was a dramatic collapse: Mr. Harold Nicolson apologised at a public meeting, armil explained that nobody had ever meant to prevent the British people from talking as much as they chose. They had only been asked to be careful what they said. It was not explained why they could not have been asked with more politeness. , On Monday I rang up my agent and said: "This thing is dead." On the same day an evening newspaper, realising that the battle was over (perhaps the advertising contract had been cancelled?) came down heavily on the winning side.
On Tuesday, in reply to a question, the Prime Minister buried the corpse of the vanquished beneath the floor of the House.
Mr. Churchill, who is nothing if not generous, appeared to accept some measure of responsibility for the campaign. It did not, he said, look so attractive on paper as it had seemed in prospect. The House laughed, as well it might. Nobody said that if Mr. Churchill had put it on paper himself it would have looked very different. Mr. Churchill knows how to be more insolently offensive, if he chooses, than any man living, but he exercises his unique abilities in this direction against the enemy, not against his own people. He never suggests to us that we are a bunch of fools and cowards who need to be incessantly scolded into resolution. On the contrary, he blandly assumes that we are a wise and heroic nation, and, since men become what they believe themselves to be, we are happy to take his word for it, and are encouraged to pull our socks up and behave ourselves. But the campaign was not put on paper by Mr. Churchill, and, as he rightly says, it was not attractive. We did not like it at all.
What is more, we apparently said so. How? I do not know. Did we make a public uproar? If so, its echoes did not reach me. I do not think we wrote many letters to the papers, or, if we did, they were not printed. Perhaps we did, and they were privately conveyed to the spot where they could do most good. Did we hold meetings of protest? I was not invited to one, and I get invitations to quite a number of things. But there was little time to hold meetings ; the campaign was over almost before it began. Did the judicature speak its mind? It is not unlikely. Did we badger our M.P.s? Possibly. Did they themselves, unprompted, divine our unspoken wrath? If so, they were fulfilling their functions as M.P.s should. Or was it the Prime Minister himself who, not finding the thing attractive on paper, informed his colleagues that he, too, "did not like the feel of the house "? I do not know. The im- pressive thing is, precisely, that I, the common citizen, do not know how the battle was won. I only know that here was a thing which the people did not like, and that, mysteriously, with surprisingly little noise, the great, cumbersome machine of Government that conveys our wills and liberties went into action with the speed and force of an eighty-ton tank. The people were angry and the voice of their anger was heard in Parliament, breaking the cedar-trees of Malet Street and bringing the prisoners out of captivity.
We ought to be very much encouraged. Not encouraged to spread rumour in defiance of authority, for now that authority has eaten humble pie there is no temptation to such a super- fluity of naughtiness. But we should be encouraged by this proof that the will of people and Parliament is still a living and a potent thing.
And we have gained much. We have been shown a very faint glimpse of the thing that we are fighting against, and now that we have seen it, we know for certain that we hate it beyond all imagination. To distrust our fellows, to become spies upon them, to betray them to the law, to go in a continual dumb terror for fear they should spy upon us—that is the thing that Nazi government means, and it is a thing that we will not endure. We would rather, indeed, "see London laid in ruin and ashes." We will endure restrictions upon our movements and upon our pleasures, we will tighten our belts, we will hand over our goods, and give our bodies to be burned, but this inner corruption of our liberties we will not tolerate, either from Germany or from anybody else.
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