London, September 1940
The German bombing has been continuous since September 7th. Last night the fires in the East End were visible from here, orange against low clouds, the kind of light that makes the city look like something from the industrial paintings that Dore made about hell. He was not wrong. He was simply premature.
I have been in wars. The Thirty Years War was worse in terms of the proportion of population killed, if you believe the estimates, which I do because I was there. What is different about this one is the efficiency. The deliberateness. The systematic quality of the targeting. I watched the apparatus in Berlin in the 1930s and recognized each component from earlier centuries. What I did not recognize was the scale at which those components could now operate.
I am doing what I have learned to do in these situations: moving where I can be useful without being visible. Moving people and documents across lines that are supposed to be impassable. I helped a family from the East End find temporary shelter tonight. I carried a box of medieval manuscripts from a library that took a hit last week. It is never enough and is never going to be enough, which is a knowledge I have carried since the 17th century without finding a way to set it down.
What survives fire is rarely what you expect. This city will survive. Cities are more durable than the regimes that attack them. I have seen enough of both to be confident of this. The fires are still burning as I write this. The sky is that terrible orange.