These are terrifying words, and certainly gain the reader's attention. My epigraph is the opening of Woolf's 1940 essay, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, conveying the voice of a witness to these bombings. From Woolf's letters and diary entries, we know that she was a witness, and suffered as witnesses of atrocities suffer. The immediate focus is sound, for ‘it is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound – far more than prayers or anthems – that should compel one to think about peace’ (DM 243). It is always difficult to read Woolf's letters and diary entries from this period, for she talks of people who were killed by ‘bombs’ and ‘landmines’, and uses the word ‘terror’ in relation to the bombing; in relation to the war in Spain, she speaks of the ‘photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses’, the ones that she uses as a refrain (without photographs) in Three Guineas (1938). These words of war made up the lexicon of Woolf's life in the early twentieth century, but this war-time essay sends out a call for a different kind of language, some new ways of communicating or even negotiating – as words become the new weaponry.