Tears, Idle Tears

At a pub in Windsor people hastily set down their drinks, burst into tears, got up and scrambled for the doors. Housewives in Richmond, shopping on busy George Street, suddenly scattered like scared hens, lost their shopping lists, staggered tearfully home with nothing for their families' dinners. Near London's Liverpool Street Station, in the rush hour, weeping barmaids tried to serve hundreds of customers who lurched in as though half-seas over. They weren't, but they were gassed up. The A.R.P. was teaching the public a lesson. They had not been carrying their gas masks, and now tear-gas bombs were bursting around them.

For once, a good part of the long-suffering British public stirred rebelliously. Shopkeepers complained of tear-gassed sales. London commuters called it ridiculous to hold a gas test at the height of the rush hour. The London Daily Mail, playing up the gassing under such headlines as Council Gassed on Orders of A.R.P. and Wedding Party Collapses in Gas Test, demanded: "Need this go on?"

The A.R.P., a little dashed by the public wrath, lay low. But that the A.R.P. was fingering fresh tear-gas bombs one of its press officers seemed to admit in a cheerful statement. People caught without gas masks, said he, "can act as casualties, which makes the exercises of the gas services much more realistic."

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