I remember an evening in April 1939. It was sunny and warm, and the men and women came out of their offices and relaxed in the sunlight. The Germans were on the move in Europe, but along the Mall there was nothing more disturbing than the honk of taxi horns. London lay prosperous and sleek, assured and confident. Six years later I came back from Germany. I had been in London much of the time during the war, but now I had been away for over a year, and I found the contrast between that September evening and the far-off evening in April impressive. It was not the bomb damage; there was more of that in Germany. But London and Londoners had broken their connection with the confident past. It was a shabbier, slower world, face to face with new realities. The impact of the war on the average Briton was greater than on the average American because for long periods the Briton lived with it on terms of frighteningly personal intimacy. Americans went to war. The war came to the British. In the process an ordered society was shaken to its foundations, personal and national savings were swept away, the physical industrial system of the country was subjected to prolonged attack and then to a fierce national drive for increased industrial production. For close to six years the country was a fortress and then a staging area for military operations. By the end of the war and the dawn of an austere peace the nation was prepared psychologically for the other changes introduced by a radical change in political direction. Mobilization of military and economic forces during the war was more complete in Britain than in any other combatant save possibly the Soviet Union. The result of immediate peril and the prospect of defeat, it began early in 1940. This mobilization was the start of the social changes that have been going on in Britain ever since. The mingling of classes began. Diana, the rector's daughter, and Nigel, the squire's son, found themselves serving in the ranks with Harriet from Notting Hill and Joe from Islington. In the end, of course, Diana was commissioned in the Wrens and Nigel was a captain in a county regiment, largely but not entirely because of their superior education; however, their contacts with Harriet and Joe gave them a glimpse of a Britain they had not known about before. Things changed at home, too. The rectory was loud with the voices of children evacuated from the slums of London or Coventry, and the squire spent his days farming as he never had before and his nights with the Home Guard. All over the country, men and women were giving up those jobs which were unnecessary in war and venturing into new fields. The assistant in the Mayfair dress shop found herself in a factory, the greens-keeper was in a shipyard.