September 18th 1939

Monday September 18th

Warsaw is still fighting, although it is now hopeless for the country which has not already been over-run with Germans, has been swamped by Russians.

Comment seems quite impossible – are there any words to describe the unwarranted destruction of a nation that has suffered as bitterly in the past as the Poles have? God knows now what will be the end of it.

Aircraft carrier “Courageous” sunk by a U boat. No estimate yet of losses.

What I find so terrible is that in wartime one’s sympathy grows more and more limited with the stultifying effect of daily calamities. At all this ghastliness one is able to feel no more than a conventional horror because it doesn’t touch one nearly. What will happen when it does?

And as for the future, I am haunted by T.S. Eliot’s terrible cry which he put into the mouth of the hero in The family reunion, a cry which sums up the fears of all humanity caught in the unbreakable web of cause and effect: “Oh God, man, the things that are going to happen have already happened”.