In 1941 Hilde Marchant, a young English journalist, published an account of her experiences in the streets of London during the Battle of Britain the year before. Here she speaks of Mr. Smith, an air raid warden. Mr. Smith, she reported, was neither strong nor brave, but he nonetheless learned to effectively manage the destruction of the blitz.

But perhaps the greatest battle of all in those early days was a personal one. Smith had to adjust his warm, sentimental, domestic nature to the grim agonising sights of the night. He loves humanity, in all its virtue and vice, and it was a shock for him to see the pain and distortion of life around him. Yet he corseted his sentimentality with the months of training he had had and became the handyman of the blitz….

Smith began to tell me about that first night, the night he fell in the road and broke his glasses. A bomb just a few yards from him had hit a block of buildings, and there were eleven people trapped on the ground floor.

“It was a noisy night, but every time we bent low we could hear the groans of the people underneath. I thought I’d be sick. I held a man’s hand that was clear. It took us nine hours to get him out. An hour later we got a woman out. They were in a bad way. There was dirt and blood caked on the woman’s face. We wiped it off. She must have been about thirty. They both died. We were all a bit quiet. It was the first we’d seen. We couldn’t have got them out quicker — we’d torn our hands up dragging the stones away. But it was awful seeing them take the last gasps as they lifted them into the ambulance.”

Smith was quiet, even retelling the story, and one of the [other wardens] said:

“It was the first, you see.”

Then Smith told me about the next night — the night when he was really “blooded.” Incendiaries had started a fire in one of the smaller streets and high explosives began to fall into the fire. Smith approached the houses from the back and got through to the kitchen of one of the houses.

“I fell over something. I picked it up and it was a leg. I stood there with it in my hand wondering what I should do with it. I knew it was a woman’s leg. I put it down and went to look for the ambulance. They had got the fire out at the front. The ambulance men brought a stretcher and I showed them the leg. Then we looked farther in and there were pieces all over. All they said was they didn’t need a stretcher.”

As Smith sat thinking, his whole body seemed to pause….

“You see, how we look at things now is like this. If they’re alive you work like the devil to keep ’em alive and get ’em out…. If they’re dead there’s nothing we can do. Getting upset hampers your work.”

So Smith learned not to over-indulge his sensitivity on seeing death, or torn limb and flesh. His job was with the spark of life that survived.

Source: James M. Brophy et al., Perspectives from the Past: Primary Sources in Western Civilizations, 4th ed., vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), pp. 766–767.

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