Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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Late autumn is the time for change and preparations and beginnings, so it was natural that we should have settled down at once to get ready in our own way for whatever might be coming.

The attendance at the A.R.P. Officer's introductory lecture was good and serious. I have never forgotten that lecture myself because it was only then that I personally suddenly saw how war in Europe could ever possibly happen again. I knew how it could happen, of course; that is to say I knew what ingredients, if put together, would produce the explosion; but until that evening I could not see what on earth we in Auburn could ever be doing while the world was going up like a fire-balloon. Because of this inability the whole question had appeared unreal to me and about as difficult and profitless to consider as, say, the inside details of a fit of mania I might get at some future date.

The A.R.P.O. came over from Fishling to give the general lecture which had been so abruptly postponed by the gas-mask distribution. He turned out to be a retired Colonel with all the neatness and severity we expect in Colonels and we grew to like him. It was his proving to be a familiar and comprehendable figure in spite of his fantastic job (and teaching people how best to minimise the risk of being burned, maimed or clubbed in their own homes did seem a fairly fantastic sort of occupation to us in Auburn then) which began to put the whole thing on a credible basis. The entire proceedings that night were conducted in Auburn's most formal and normal manner and it dawned on me that this war to end civilisation, this annihilating stroke, or whatever it was that was coming to us, would probably be received, at the outset at any rate, in exactly the same way. It was the first time I ever saw the real virtue of formality. One can even lose one's head for a minute or two behind it and no harm done.