Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid ** Written in August 1940, for an American symposium¹ on current matters concerning women.

The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom² of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive³ thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound — far more than prayers and anthems⁴ — that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we —-not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born — will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle⁵ overhead. Let us think what we can do to create the only efficient air-raid shelter while the guns on the hill go pop pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds and now and then, sometimes close at hand, sometimes far away, a bomb drops.

Up there in the sky young Englishmen and young German men are fighting each other. The defenders⁶ are men, the attackers are men. Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy or to defend herself. She must lie weaponless to-night. Yet if she believes that the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the English to protect freedom, by the Germans to destroy freedom, she must fight, so far as she can, on the side of the English. How far can she fight for freedom without firearms? By making arms, or clothes or food. But there is another way of fighting for freedom without arms; we can fight with the mind. We can make ideas that will help the young Englishman who is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy.

But to make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action. And the hornet in the sky rouses another hornet in the mind. There was one zooming⁷ in THE TIMES this moming — a woman’s voice saying, “Women have not a word to say in politics.” There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any responsible post. All the idea

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