As the previous chapters have suggested, both war and its aftermath challenge conventions of representation. The new ‘peace’ that followed the conflict would prove similarly difficult to negotiate, as writers struggled to make sense both of past atrocity and a present that seemed, if anything, still more difficult to assimilate. Britain was exhausted and bankrupt, Europe was devastated, its infrastructure destroyed and its national and cultural legibility erased. Stephen Spender's European Witness (1946), an account of his travels through Germany in 1945, tries to convey this extraordinary erasure through a corporeal metaphoricity. The bombed cities of England are wounded, they are a ‘scar which will heal’ (22), Cologne by contrast is a ‘putrescent corpse-city’, its people ‘parasites sucking at a dead carcase’ (1946: 22).