DLS - 1941 - and I repeat there will be war and Dorothy Sayers understood this
Letter from DLS to Maurice Reckitt (an influential figure in the development of Anglican thought. He founded a group known as Christendom and edited the quarterly journal of that name from 1931-1950. In 1968 he founded the Christendom Trust which endowed the M B Reckitt research fellowship at the University of Sussex. He died in 1980)
"Have you noticed the curious way in which we have come to talk about "peace" as a normal condition - not in the same sense in which we speak of "normal eyesight" (a standard generally desirable but seldom met with, by which we measure our individual defects) or as we might speak of Christ as "the norm of humanity", but as though it were a usual condition, into which we may expect the world to relax automatically when some exceptional pressure is removed?
Historically, such a condition of world-wide peace has, I suppose, never been experienced; but because we are determined to look on war as an exception to the common run of things, we adjust ourselves badly to war conditions. Admittedly, this is a very large, alarming and unpleasant war, and it's difficult to "be ordinary" when one's liable to have bombs dropped on one at any moment, - nor, of course, do we want "Business as Usual"; but I can't help thinking that if we had faced the prospect of war as one of the things that do happen, instead of assuring each other that it was "unthinkable", we should have been more on the spot to prevent it from coming, or to grapple with it when it came.
When one looks at the flimsy houses and glass palaces that we built in the inter-war years, it seems as though our whole way of life has been deliberately out of touch with a reality that included the likelihood of aerial bombardment. But if one says that to people, they reply that to take precautions against war is to accept and acquiesce in the idea of war, and so encourage it - though I notice they don't think that the putting of locks on the doors and safes in banks is a wicked acquiescence in the idea of burglary.
I believe at the back of their minds they are superstitious about it - like the man who refuses to make his will because he doesn't like thinking about death and feels he may bring it on by taking notice of it. But there it is; to be as realistic as the people who peppered the country with border keeps is to "admit that war is normal". It seems to me just as normal as any other sin and wickedness. What's the good of saying "we ought to have progressed beyond the idea of the Middle Ages" when, as a matter of brutal fact, we have not done any such thing so far as war is concerned.
Progress (if there is such a thing) doesn't come all of a piece and all along the line - it happens in bursts, and sometimes we go back and have to start again. We wash more than the seventeenth century, but less than ancient Rome; we are kinder to some animals than we used to be, and the manners of village children have improved; but Spaniards are cruel to mules and Germans to Jews, and England is the only country that needs an NSPCC - so where are you?"
Excerpt Italics and bold type my emphasis
J
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