Obsessive Menace

London was 8,000,000 people obsessed. Their waking hours were haunted by one persistent, bedeviling fact: flying bombs. And the flying bombs were causing too many waking hours; there was little sound sleep in London, or near it.

Most Londoners knew that the Things were worse on nerves than the blitz at its worst. It was not so much that the Things killed, maimed, destroyed, disrupted. As they had before, they did all that in one awful peak of 14 consecutive hours one day last week. London could take all that again.

What had Londoners on edge was that the Things fell in no pattern at all. They were unpredictable; the Briton has never cared for that characteristic in anything.

The robombs made no military sense. One residential suburb, apparently on the beam of one distant launching site, suffered repeated blasts. Military damage: nil. The bombs fell, haphazard, all about London's vast sweep. Seven hospitals were hit in one day, three more the next day. In one, ten patients were killed. In one hut (next to a morgue that housed more dead) ten bomb-damage repairmen, just recruited in Scotland and Ireland, were killed.

Glass, Glass, Glass. London had developed a deep and understandable phobia: glass. It had felt the blast of high explosives before. Blast would, as it did, strip the clothing off a woman near a factory window, leave the factory and its machines virtually undamaged. It would, as it did, suck the beer out of a mug in a man's hand, leave the mug, the man and his hand unhurt. It would also kill without leaving a visible wound.

But the robombs' blast, for some strange reason, also shattered and scattered more glass--as sharp-piked shards and as fine-ground, bulletlike pellets. Far from a bomb's concussion center, well beyond the range of missiles caught up in its cyclonic force, Londoners found themselves caught in terrible gusts of shattered and pulverized glass. If the blast caught a man near a window, he could lose the skin and flesh of his face and eyelids. Often the glass would drive deep into eyes.

Thus the Londoner stayed off the streets as much as he could. He planned his day with the robomb uppermost in his mind. He stayed away from windows. On the streets he saw hurrying people, noticeably fewer than two months ago.

More than 1,000,000 Londoners had been evacuated (more thousands, who could afford it, had gone to the country on their own) and the second million of evacuees had begun to go. One result was a glut of food on shop counters. Another result: no more queues in front of shops. Food shopping, which could have been a pleasure at last, was now a danger.

Some of London's war annoyances had vanished. There was no longer a rush on restaurants: too much glass about. At the swank ones the well-heeled Londoner or American no longer needed a day-ahead reservation. If it was glass-fronted, tables were begging for diners.

There was an unspoken ritual in the pubs. When the buzz of a bomb or the repeated wail of an alarm as heard, the customers put down their drinks, walked out. whistling. Even the street was safer than a place of bottles and mirrors. The danger passed, they returned to their beer.

Bumped Heads. By night, the London householder was governed by the menace. Thousands went to the deep public shelters. In thousands of backyards the Anderson shelter, neglected since the bad days of the blitz, had been patched up, its water-soaked earthen floor resurfaced.

The flat-dweller wrestled with his Morrison shelter--a flat, tablelike, metal affair, raised from the floor to admit mattress and sleeper, its sides wire-meshed against flying furniture, bricks--and glass. The bumped head (from mismeasured diving under the Morrison) was no longer worth even a casual remark.

This time there were no bomb bores with a shopworn story of a lucky miss. This time the robomb itself was the bore. Almost all other topics had gone out of casual conversation. Even last week's good war news was merely a minor point in the business of getting through another day.

There was little jesting about the menace. Londoners took seriously the flip motto of one ack-ack crew: "If doodle dallies, don't dawdle. Dive!" Nicknames for the Things were short-lived. The latest: "bumblebees." Most Londoners, with prop er respect, called the Things by their formal name: flying bombs.

By last week nerve frazzle was noticeable, not yet serious, but there was increasing absence from factories and offices. No one was surprised at Winston Churchill's recital of casualties: 4,735 killed, 14,000 seriously hurt, 17,000 dwellings razed in the first six weeks of flying bombs. (Worst six weeks of the blitz, 10,122 killed, 14,969 seriously injured.)

The Londoner was heartened by a two-day lull after a moonlit night of good hunting in which fighter pilots knocked down the Things "like tenpins." He hoped for more such nights for proper sleeping.

But still over him was the constant menace of more terror, and perhaps worse.* He wished he could speed the clock's hand through the war's eleventh hour, but he knew the robombs had slowed his own hands somewhat. He could still take it, and did, but he was certain he had had about enough. He was thoroughly fed up.

* London's Tribune was moved to a Wellsian note by a rumor that a German super-rocket bomb, launched two weeks ago, had not yet been heard from. Said the Tribune, in interplanetary vein: "If that world [hit by the runaway rocket] happens to be inhabited by people who have reached our own level of 'civilization,' they may regard it as an act of hostility. . . .Are we on the eve of war between worlds before we have got ourselves tidied up on earth?"

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