Nearby at Claridge’s hotel, General Lee, the American military attaché, now back in London, went down to the first-floor room of a member of the U.S. embassy’s diplomatic staff, Herschel Johnson. As bombs fell and fires burned, they discussed literature, mainly the works of Thomas Wolfe and Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. The conversation shifted to Chinese art; Herschel brought out a collection of fine porcelain objects. “All this time,” Lee wrote, “I had the sickening feeling that hundreds of people were being murdered in a most savage way almost within a stone’s throw, and there was
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