Rebecca West

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

1941. Macmillan, 1977.

While France was falling, and after she had fallen, my husband and I went every evening to walk for an hour in the rose-garden at Regent's Park. Under the unstained heaven of that perfect summer, curiously starred with the silver elephantines of the balloon barrage, the people sat on the seats among the roses, reading the papers or looking straight in front of them, their faces white. Some of them walked among the rose-beds, with a special earnestness looking down on the bright flowers and inhaling the scent, as if to say, "That is what roses are like, that is how they smell. We must remember that, down in the darkness"

Travels in Germany in the 1930's had alerted the author to the rise of fascism, and had inspired her to write an account of Yugoslav culture under threat of eradication by Nazi Germany. In 1939 Britain's refusal to countenance further aggression meant that war was inevitable, and in the book's final chapter she considers what this will mean.

There is a lake beside the rose garden, in which there is a little island, where dwarf and alpine plants are cultivated among rocks. Across the Chinese bridge that joins it to the mainland there slowly moved a procession, as grave in their intention to see the gay fragilities between the stones as if they were going to a lying-in-state...Most of the people believed, and rightly, that they were presently to be subjected to a form of attack more horrible than had ever before been directed against the common man. Let nobody belittle them by pretending they were fearless. Not being the ox and the ass, they were horribly afraid. But their pale lips did not part to say the words that would have given them security and dishonour