Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid av Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf har upplevt båda världskrigen, hon hörde tyska plan flyga över Sussex, ett plan flög så nära att hon och Leonard tvingades ta skydd under ett träd i deras trädgård på Monk's House.

Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940) av Virginia Woolf.
'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 zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound - far more than prayers and anthems - 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 rattle overhead.'

"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 rattle overhead"

Some of Woolf’s words written 82 years ago in Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.  They recall the fear she experienced during the Second World War as she heard German planes fly over the Sussex countryside. One plane flew so close that she and Leonard were forced to shelter under a tree in their garden at Monk’s House. It was not Woolf’s first go-round at war. She had already lived through four years of the Great War, listening to bombing from across the English Channel and hiding under a basement kitchen table in Richmond during air raids. From 1939 until March 28, 1941, when she committed suicide by walking into the River Ouse, she lived through the trauma and deprivations of a second.