Saddest Hotel In London

Northern Advocate, 13 January 1941, Page 3

Saddest Hotel In London

This is the story of a hotel, and if it is not a good story the fault lies in the fact that I cannot tell it, writes W. L. White. Londoners call it an American hotel because it is new and a little flashly modernistic with a lot of gadgets in the rooms, all of which work.

A room costs three dollars a day, with bath and breakfast, and a 60cent lunch, which is very cheap for London. The hotel is seven or eight storeys high and is built of sweet, lovely concrete, with deliciously thick walls. But it is the saddest hotel in the world. You never would guess this in a quick glance at the coffee -saloon after dinner, because the chairs and tables are gay with uniforms. Here are Czech colonels and Norwegian professors, and Polish admirals, and Belgian and Dutch artillery officers, and Cabinet Ministers from the Baltic States now occupied by Russia. Here are “Free French,” who followed General Charles de Gaulle, and “Free Belgians,” who continued fighting after King Leopold surrendered.

Europe of Yesterday. Here is the Europe of yesterday, or at least that part of it which could' get across the English Channel to the only country still fighting for a free j Europe. i They are at this hotel because it is made of coiicrete and partly because it is the only place, at London where you can be respectable with bath and breakfast for three dollars a day For most people have little money left and not much chance to get any mores with the black hook-cross legions of Europe of today stretching from the Bay of Biscay up the Channel Coast through the North Sea to where the Arctic Ocean gnaws at the rocks j of Norway, and down the Rhine and J Danube valleys, meeting Asia on the coast of the Black Sea. But all the Polish admirals and the Free French and the Czechs are very sure it will not be long now, and because they are so sure and because no one can get out of doors in London after nightfall, they sit around their demitasse, busily planning the Free Europe of tomorrow. This they see very confidently and clearly and outline with their forefingers on the coffee table. Grinding Jar. Outside the big, naval-type antiaircraft guns have been booming all evening, but now there is a great, grinding jar and the hotel*shakes quite a little. The surface of a big mirror at the end of the saloon shivers like a pool into which a pebble has been tossed. Outside the dark Europe of today has struck London a mighty blow from the black skies, so everybody stops talking, and two or three men go to the door to see how close a certain bomb fell. They go only to the edge of the door, but the hotel’s doorman, whose duty it is to stand outside; tells them he does not know how close that one was —perhaps less than a quarter of a mile away. Now they all step back and clear the doorway so he may have a chance to jump back in if the next one should come closer. , , , So, the democratically - elected members of the Norwegian Riksdag and the Baltic Secretaries of the Interior and the Polish Admirals go back to their tables and continue planning confidentally for the Europe of tomorrow, while their wives knit and the big naval-type guns outside belching steel into the sky at Heinkel bombers, jiggle their coffee cups. Their sad-eyed women knit, and sometimes they listen, but the new free Europe of tomorrow does not seem very clear to them. They do not seem confident of anything except that what 'they are knitting will be badly needed somewhere.