Where all the waking birds sing ‘Heil’—1

   They tell me—in Bavarian woods

Lifting their tiny claws meanwhile

   From underneath their leafy hoods

To greet the Leader as he toys

   With vegetarian repasts

And Nazi girls and Nazi boys

   In unison sing counterblasts.

What wings are these? What sound of Hope?

   A phoenix or a turtle dove—

A kingfisher—a phalarope—

   Dropping to earth from heaven above?

With Europe’s prayers to aid his flight,

   With all the people’s loud acclaim,

Having his luggage for the night,

   The Premier of England came …

           EVOE

‘Ich bin von Himmeln gefallen.’ (‘You could have knocked me down with a feather.’)—The Führer, on hearing that Mr. Chamberlain wished to come to meet him.

MUNICH remains a hideously incised political indictment for which, twenty-five years later, there still does not exist a Rosetta Stone. What did happen? Why did it happen? And, most baffling of all, how could it happen? It was a dark deed done in the limelight. No other great twentieth-century treaty-signing possesses such an unparalleled documentation. The men of Munich are, in most instances, conspicuously reasonable human beings and not all of a kind. For the most part they resolutely refuse to transform themselves into the least kind of monster and thus they regularly frustrate their biographers. Roy Jenkins, wearily but watchfully coming to the end of yet another fat book about them, finds himself little the wiser and confesses it. ‘The appeasers, whether diplomats or politicians, appear as a collection of neatly dressed men who rarely venture out without their overcoats in September….’

And this, shallow though it may sound, is honest in its way. Chamberlain, Halifax, Hoare, Simon, Runciman and Daladier, Geoffrey Dawson the editor of The Times and all their friends in places high and low—the ‘friends’ who shut their hearts against Chamberlain when, in extremis, he called on them to rescue him during the Norway Debate—these men are patently not vile. But what are they if they are not vile?—that is their enigma. They peer astutely from miles of film and Press photographs; they have offered up, not only their official papers but their diaries. Yet nothing jells. It is as if they were saying, ‘That is all you know, and all you need to know’.

Perhaps it is because of this that the eye turns from the baffling broad design and seeks relief and entertainment in the wealth of fascinating close detail. In the words of a contemporary song, it is, ‘How did he look?’ How did Jan Masaryk look, for example, when, sitting in the gallery of the House of Commons, he heard the packed chamber burst into tumultuous joy and throw its order papers into the air in ecstasy because a note had arrived from Hitler to say that with Britain and France’s help he was willing to carve up Czechoslovakia without a war? How did Hitler look, a monster from whose monstrousness the ordinary intelligence has been forced to shy away, with the result that this repellent creature is fast on the way to becoming a comic sideshow in the political chamber of horrors, the yelling carpet-biter instead of the thrifty Austrian dwarfed by a mountain of children’s shoes at Belsen? But, most of all, how did Neville Chamberlain, scapegoat extraordinary, look? Well, he looked good, as the Americans say.

By now, of course, the detail has got us and we succumb to some of the most evocative lumber known to history. Vaguely, as we turn it over for the thousandth time, we hope to find the solution. Umbrellas, jackboots, swastikas, Super Lockheed 14 aeroplanes, the nettle danger, the flower safety; Miss Unity Mitford bobby-soxing the Führer, defunct Heston, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Wagnerian eyries, Anderson shelters, the ironically named Coventry Climax fire trailers and Coventry Victor portable pumps, Siebe Gorman’s gas-masks, Bexhoid window adhesive, the black-out rehearsals, the building of the Maginot Line; all the trappings of prudence and the gear of shame. Munich, in fact, is so well furnished that it comes as something of a shock to find that it echoes so hollowly. Munichists—they are a special race of political historians who must eventually find themselves in the same predicament as the Schoolmen—argue round and down and for and against, but eventually they are brought to a halt by the inscrutable. Those who set out to bait the appeasers find that critical teeth can never get a firm grip on those excellent winged collars. Those who set out to explain them end up by having a sphinx on their hands.

‘One day,’ says Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘a good book will be written2  about them. It will examine the social and psychological springs of their action and success. Why, for instance, was its emotional content so different between England, where appeasement was a positive creed, and France, where it was a vulgar necessity? Which social group, in general, supported it? What part was played by “imperial interests”—“Milner’s Kindergarten”, the “Round Table” etc.—and why? How far was appeasement in Europe the continuation in a new form and in new circumstances, of an old mystique?’

Here there seems to be a finger pointing in a promising direction. Could it be possible that the men of Munich sensed that the only way out of the brutal impasse was for the Fascist mystique, at its zenith in the midsummer Germany of 1938, to be met by an opposing mystique? Or was Neville Chamberlain simply in full spiritual retreat from the loathsome twentieth century and was he privately determined to confront the sordid dictators with the whole armour of a nineteenth-century Christian liberal English gentleman? The pity, of course, was, it was not his own other cheek he turned for the blow.

On September 29th, 1938, the appeasers bought-off the criminal government of Germany by ‘giving’ it Czechoslovakia, a country of complete independence with an ancient history and a modern reputation for having made a success of democracy. The story is not at all brief in spite of the notoriously few hours it took to force the deal through. It is a story of great dramatic reliability from start to finish, it bristles with anecdote, it allows endless opportunity for every kind of philosophical aside and it lures the critic of politics on from article to chapter, from chapter to bloated volumes. The morality of the Dreyfus affair divided France for a decade but it is likely that the ‘morality’ of Munich must divide Europe for ever.

See then, not another theory, not the moment of truth or untruth, whichever it was, but the odd historic scene en passant. And remember that as the deed was done it was endorsed not only by the Conservative Party and The Times, but nearly all the civilized world, with Prague a notable exception.

First the German city, hurriedly be-flagged for the occasion with roof-to-pavement black sheets bellying in the wind and crooked crosses everywhere, the heraldry of the new knighthood. Munich is a holy place; it was here that the saviour was rejected. It cannot forgive itself. An item of its propitiation is the Führerhaus, a manic-Doric temple recently erected for the furious god. This is where Hitler waited for Mr. Chamberlain, this is where Ribbentrop brought the Prime Minister of England by the back streets from Munich aerodrome. It was all rather down to earth after the airy flights of Berchtesgaden or even of Godesberg, where the Führer had taken both Mr. Chamberlain’s hands in his to draw him affectionately up the steps of the Dreesen Hotel, the same steps down which he had hurtled four years ago to arrange the Night of the Long Knives. But the Prime Minister is sanguine.

There are two dictators, two appeasers and two foreign ministering disciples. They sit two and two, Chamberlain with Hitler, Mussolini with Ciano, Daladier with Ribbentrop. The four armchairs and the huge cane sofa make three sides of a square which is completed by a polished granite and steel fireplace in which two unlit logs cross each other. No Keitel this time, as at Godesberg, when he was seen shamelessly driving through the streets in an open coupé clutching a rolled map of Czechoslovakia as tall as himself. Only an interpreter. There are silk-shaded lamps. They make the great nude head of the Duce rosy. The Duce’s military peaked cap lies upside down on a cabinet behind him. A chaplet should warm those cranial canals revealed by his baldness and down which the thick Italian blood appears to rush into a pouchy chin held at an artificial angle for heroism’s sake. Mussolini has just conquered Abyssinia and the British Government has officially recognized the victory. He is Caesar. Hitler has, in March, joined Austria, his homeland, to the Fatherland. He is Siegfried. Mr. Chamberlain has two secret sheets of Downing Street writing-paper in his pocket. He is the Angel of Peace. M. Daladier has nothing beyond a frantic desire to get back to Paris as soon as possible. He is tepid. Ciano gleams. He is virile. Ribbentrop, panda-eyed, fidgets. He is sulking. It is not fair that Mr. Chamberlain should reap the thanks of the world for the Führer’s unprecedented magnanimity regarding the Sudetenland. This is why he brought him to the Führerhaus by the back streets.

Was Mr. Chamberlain charmed in some way by Hitler? It wasn’t as impossible as it sounds now—thousands of non-Germans were. Might that be the answer? No. Only three weeks previous to Munich Chamberlain had written, in a private letter, ‘Is it not positively horrible that the fate of hundreds of millions depends on one man, and he is half mad?’ So he knew. So he was, in fact, consciously placating a maniac. This is an important thing to remember when it comes to the two sheets of writing-paper and the millennial commotion they caused. They, however, were Mr. Chamberlain’s own staggering piece of abracadabra for both the short-lived brilliance and lasting ignominy of which he alone was culpable. The dismembering of Czechoslovakia was a very different matter. He had a mandate for this such as few politicians had enjoyed for any matter at any time. Only two men in the Commons the day before had shown real antagonism. Churchill had sat quiet and still and Eden had walked slowly out. Everybody else went wild—in spite of the presence of Queen Mary, who sat in the gallery looking down at the happy scene. The Prime Minister had been wafted to the German shore in his Super Lockheed 14 on gusts of unadulterated love and he was to land at Heston the following day in a climate of pretty near pure adoration. The King sent the Lord Chamberlain to bring him to the Palace, where he was the first commoner to receive balcony honours. The cheering crowds were greater than at any time since the Armistice. The sashes of Downing Street were thrown up to let in the bouquets, the presents, the ululating gratitude of the West End. It was, while it lasted, a vast triumph such as few men have ever experienced.

The good man and the bad man had come to terms. How? If the good man had not become bad, nor the bad man good, how could they come to terms? Justice is not elastic. The point is that it was made expedient at Munich, though nobody questioned such expediency for days afterwards. Relief ran ahead of logic. But when relief died its cowardly death and the country came to its senses, the earlier self-congratulation was only exceeded by the new self-disgust. What had the Prime Minister done? He had given Hitler what he had sternly refused him only seven days before at Godesberg—and for which refusal he had been cheered to the echo as a moral man. He had signed away a fat rind of provinces all round the edges of the Czech state and all that country’s chief defences. But worst of all he had established a terrible precedent. It would be Poland next. Again, where was the logic? The statesmanship? Never mind the charity. Where in all this lies the rational line? If any one of these things exists, it remains unearthed. The myriad lines of approach to the drama of Munich refuse to be synchronized. An essential fragment of the story is lost or cannot be identified. Hence, all that has so far been written about the Appeasers remains gnomic. Suspecting this, exhausted by it, perhaps, the Munich apologists sheer-off into absorbing relevancies of place, time, people and national and personal pathologies. The last two at least, from this safe distance, are good for a bitter laugh.

While Germany was giving itself to sunburnt Aryanism, to manly hymns and the blond view of life at the tenth Nazi Congress at Nuremberg, Britain, of all places, was going through a brief panic season brought about by the threat of aerial warfare. Even the experts quoted half a million casualties on the first day as the minimum carnage. The inexpert, who read H. G. Wells as a prophet and not as a proto-science-fictionist, were even wider of the mark and quite a large part of the explanation for the rapturous welcome which they gave to the Prime Minister at Heston on September 30th was due to the fact that hundreds of thousands believed he had personally stayed the rain of death from the skies. The country’s Henny-penny complex, from which it recovered completely by the time the bombs did fall, began to show itself round about the period of the Anschluss crisis. As the war clouds gathered, as August, the war-month, drew near, the fear of bombing worked itself up to an overwrought crescendo. Normal anti-raid preparations, instead of reassuring people, merely certified fear. The ruination of most of London’s parks and gardens, sacred places at the best of times, by slit-trenches was a distinct psychological shock. Children massing at stations with name labels and gas-masks round their necks left a taste of intense resentment in many minds still powerfully influenced by the concept of the League of Nations and the dream of pacifism. The disappearance of façades behind sandbags, and the first extensive black-out test, carried out over the Midlands and East Anglia, perturbed people deeply, as did the lists of reserved occupations, the twenty-five million handbooks on national service, the sudden intrusion by the state into private life and all the semi-amateur scuttling and burrowing by the authorities as they sought to put the country on a defensive footing, and was in general detested. In 1938 nobody wanted to go to war. In 1939 everybody did.

Chamberlain knew this. He was sure of it. It gave him the authority for his next action. At one o’clock in the morning, while the appeasers and the dictators waited on the draftsmen, who had taken away the map of Czechoslovakia to change it, the Prime Minister played his lone hand. Turning to the Führer, he suggested another little talk. Hitler ‘jumped at the idea’ and soon the two of them, plus an interpreter, were in Hitler’s private flat. They talked about Spain and South Eastern Europe, then the Führer grumbled about losing 50,000 men in Spain and then Mr. Chamberlain put his hand in his pocket and drew out his masterpiece, a typewritten Anglo-German truce in duplicate. Would Herr Hitler sign? Would he sign now? ‘Ja, ja,’ the Führer was muttering as the interpreter interpreted; he was obviously surprised to his wits’ end. They signed. Mr. Chamberlain kept one of the sheets of paper and gave the other to Hitler. A few hours later, the Prime Minister climbed out of his plane at Heston, transfigured with success, and holding something white aloft. He read it.

And from the window in Downing Street, he, the man who normally shunned the histrionic gesture, borrowed Dizzy’s words to enchant the delirious concourse yet further—‘This is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace in our time.’

This was the pinnacle of appeasement. From its unprecedented height the Prime Minister was to fall to a depth of abuse and opprobrium rarely known in public life, and all in a few months. His colleagues in appeasement drifted to their graves with ‘Munich’ stamped on them like a felon’s brand-mark. All except Lord Halifax, who lived long enough to write his own Munich apologia, and young Lord Dunglass, who grew up to be Lord Home and a foreign secretary among the nuclearists. The sensational backcloth remains. Benes calling down to the sea of faces in Wenceslas Square, ‘Have no fear….’ Yet a hundred thousand were to die. Hitler telling his massed followers in the Sports Palace, Berlin, ‘When this problem is solved, Germany has no more territorial problems in Europe.’ The Duce saluting the statue of Augustus. The flight of the Jews to Palestine….

In Germany the mood was very different. For those with a taste for bronze knees and the well-drilled bay, Sieg heil! Sieg heil! Sieg heil! it was intoxicating. The manhood of the Fatherland wheeled and counter-wheeled across the land. There were immense army manœuvres involving a million men which made all Europe tremble and there was the Nuremberg rally itself, and the Parteitag, when 40,000 youths, ‘sunbrowned and steeled’ in the Führer’s phrase, swept across the vast arena singing,

The Hitler Youth, even the cynical had to admit, presented a matchless picture. What was more to the point so far as Nazi mysticism was concerned, they also presented a lump in the sentimental German throat which throttled all criticism. When they wheeled by the box containing Göring, Goebels and Hitler, the Führer screamed, ‘Heil, mein Arbeitsdienst!’ and was answered with a sound like all the elect of Valhalla—‘Heil, mein Führer!’

There followed the barbaric chanting, regular as if it had been timed with a metronome, by the entire Nazi company. In the evening there was Wagner in the opera house with tiers of jewelled women and stout blond men rising with hypnotized precision as the costive little figure strutted into his box, then Tannhäuser … Siegfried, processions in Vienna to lay wreaths on the spot where the murderers of Dr. Dollfuss had been hanged, the review of the storm troopers in the Luitpold Arena, the bringing back to Nuremberg of the regalia of the Holy Roman Empire, the ecstasy and the sado-sexuality, the exaltation and the first all-out pogrom.

In Paris, in as subtle an affront to the raucous apotheosis of the new Germany as could be imagined, the French were entertaining King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during a state visit which was a marvel of beauty, civilized feeling and taste, and probably the most exquisite occasion of its kind in modern times. They were also racing to finish the Maginot Line, a string of 17,000 concrete forts behind which stood the entire German people in arms.

These preoccupations and diversions soothed some. ‘They have gone away. Some of them are on the grouse moors and some are visiting the continent … but as they are gone, nothing very serious is likely to happen…. So when I read that the Home Secretary, good man, is walking about on the beach at Southwold in canvas shoes and an open shirt, that Mr. Chamberlain has left for an unknown destination in Scotland … I rejoice,’ wrote Arthur Bryant on August 13th3. The very same month, Sir Ian Hamilton, lulled into euphoria by the views of Berchtesgaden, declared, ‘You cannot imagine anything warlike being planned here.’ And a whole month later, on September 10th, Arthur Bryant was still able to write in a typically ‘decent’ English way, ‘As quite a number of well-informed people seem to suppose—I hope and believe quite wrongly—that all mankind is shortly to commit suicide over the troubled affairs of Czechoslovakia,’ he wonders ‘if the Sudeten-German crisis of 1938 will mean as little to our descendants … as the many Danubian crises of the nineteenth century….’ This was published two days before Hitler’s final speech at Nuremberg on September 12th when Whitehall and Downing Street were jampacked with anxious people and crowds filled the churches to pray for peace, yet it contained the germ of sentiments which could have given the Prime Minister one of his most criticized lines.

‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing …’ he said in a broadcast to the nation. His detractors seize on this as an instance of his callousness but it is really an instance of his naïveté. It is the remark of an unsophisticated man for whom Czechoslovakia really was a far-away country. He was merely saying truthfully and personally what the average Englishman thought of Czechoslovakia—only, as Prime Minister, it was not his place to hold such unsophisticated views, any more than it was his place to believe that Hitler’s signature, extracted with all the guile of the autograph hunter when its giver was in a good mood and presumably worn out from the excitements of thirteen hours’ hard bargaining which had brought him the Czech nation, could assure ‘peace in our time’.

Notes

1 ‘Where all the waking birds sing Heil!’ by ‘Evoe’ (E. V. Knox), published in Punch, 21 September, 1938.

2 ‘One day a good book will be written …’ is from a review by Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Observer, 1963.

3 Quotations from articles by Arthur Bryant in the Illustrated London News, August-September, 1938.